Authors: Maddy Barone
“I wonder.” Jasper cleared his throat, a flush staining his suntanned cheeks. “I wonder if you might like to join me for supper this Saturday?”
A low growl came from one of the men along the wall. Rose ignored it. “Yes, I would.”
Stone’s cold voice rose just loud enough for them to hear him. “You won’t be able to get a reservation for this Saturday. Make a reservation now and maybe you can get in around Christmas.”
“I’m sure Kathy will squeeze us in,” Rose said as pleasantly as possible through clenched teeth.
They ate in silence for a few minutes. When Jasper finished eating, he wiped his fingers with his napkin, and then looked at her with a shadow of uncertainty on his face. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask,” he said, seeming to choose his words with care. “But I can’t help but wonder why you’re here with me.” His voice went to the merest whisper of sound. “And why they—” He tipped his head at the men leaning against the wall. “—are allowing it.”
She hesitated, raising the last slice of fried potato to her mouth to give herself another moment to find words. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
She really did like that lopsided smile of his. It was wryly self-deprecating, and put a shallow crease in his lean cheek that was very attractive. “I mean everybody knows you are spoken for by one of the wolves. A man would have to be suicidal to court a woman who belongs to a wolf, and I’m not real anxious to die yet.”
Rose chose her own words with equal care. “It’s true that Sky claimed me for his mate many years ago, but he left to go to Omaha.” She didn’t mention how she had rebelled against him at the time, or her later vague regrets that Sky hadn’t returned to the Den so they could get to know one another better. If he had returned five or six years ago they might be mated. They would have children. “I waited eight years for him, but he hasn’t come back, so I’ve decided to move on.”
“Move on,” he echoed. “Like, look for a different husband?”
She hoped he couldn’t hear the almost sub-vocal growls from the men at the wall. She made herself look directly at him. “Yes.”
Color rose in his face, but he smiled that lopsided smile again. “And you’re looking at me?”
Good grief, now she was blushing too. Who knew this courting business would be so awkward? “Well.” She coughed to clear her throat. “I thought it might be nice to get to know you better.”
He ducked his head for a minute, before he looked up beaming. “I’m glad. Ready to go to the train station?”
Relief made her smile. “Sure. Let’s stop up front and make a reservation for Saturday.”
At the hostess booth, Jas gave her a frown of disapproval when Rose made her request. “Dees Saturday? Veet heem?” she asked, her Bosnian accent more pronounced than usual. “I don’t teenk Taye or Des veel like dat.”
Paint heaved a heavy sigh. “It’s okay, Mrs. O’Connor.”
Jas looked Jasper over. “Vell, okay, den. Ve bring out da leetle table for you. I mark you down for Saturday at seex o’clock.”
“Thanks, Jas. See you Saturday.”
As they left the restaurant, the open stares of the other customers irritated her. Couldn’t she have any privacy? Now everyone would know she was seeing Jasper. She quickly smoothed her irritation away. Stone and the others were already on edge. If they scented her annoyance, they might do something violent to a hapless diner. She hurried to distract them. The sight of her fingertips resting on Jasper’s elbow ought to do the trick. It did, so she gave in to their pointed stares and dropped her hand as soon as they were on the street walking toward the train station.
“Tell me about what stock you’re working with,” she encouraged Jasper. “I think you mentioned some fillies?”
Enthusiasm fired his eyes. “Lina and Lola. Twin sisters out of Beauty Queen by Black Devil. Those two are born to be racehorses. Fast as the wind in January, and as strong.”
At the end of the forty-five minute stroll to the train station, Rose knew every little thing about the two fillies Jasper was training, and her eyes threatened to glaze. He told her at length how many hands tall each parent was, the width of their withers and the length of their necks. She could recite their lineage back five generations, and knew exactly how they were related to her own mare. Carla would have loved this conversation. Rose understood barely half of it, and wondered if Jasper was really the right man for her. Did she want to spend the rest of her life talking about horses?
Some of her escort, walking in protective formation around her, seemed to know her thoughts. She caught the barest hint of a smirk on Stone’s stern face and shot him a quick glare. He let a yawn swallow the smirk.
“Look,” Jasper said in a pleased voice. “The three o’clock train is exactly on time. There it is, only a mile off.”
The platform outside the station was already crowded with spectators. There were a few benches lined up against the front of the station, and a few more on the edge of the platform, for passengers and those meeting them to sit while they waited. All were occupied until Stone stalked to the nearest one and growled, “Out!” The two men sitting there hurried to obey. Stone jerked a thumb at Rose. She sighed and sat, glancing around at the people lounging about.
“Oh, hey!” She waved at a couple across the platform. “It’s Eddie and Lisa Madison, and they have little Emily with them.”
The Madisons, a handsome blond couple in their thirties, walked over to Rose’s bench. Lisa held their ten-week-old daughter in a fabric sling over her chest, and Eddie herded two boys in front of him. The brown haired boy was Eddie’s seven-year-old brother, Marty, who was born just after the last Woman Killer Plague epidemic in Kearney. The blond boy was Eddie’s six-year-old son, Ray. Uncle and nephew were only thirteen months apart in age.
“Hi, Rose!” Ray said happily.
Rose smiled back. “Hi, Ray-Ray. How are you today? Hi, Marty. What are you doing here?”
“We came to help Dad load up the fabric Mom ordered,” said Ray excitedly.
The other boy chimed in. “It’ll be too heavy for Lisa to carry. We brought the wagon. I get to help pull it.” Marty puffed out his narrow chest to show how strong he was. “She can’t pull it ’cause she’s got that baby to carry.”
Lisa said, “That baby is your niece Emily.”
Marty looked as disgusted as a little boy could about a girl baby. “All she does is cry, sleep and shi—” He cut himself off with a guilty look at his much older brother. “Poop, I mean.”
Eddie arched a brow at Marty and turned to greet the men from the den. Lisa lifted the baby out of her sling and offered her to Rose to hold. She stood up to take Emily. The little body was warm, and smelled like powder and lavender lotion. Emily was a beautiful baby, the little face relaxed in sleep, framed by a frilly bonnet to keep the sun off. Rose cradled her close, the familiar longing for a child of her own so strong it nearly brought tears to her eyes. She blinked them back to smile at Lisa. Lisa was staring at Jasper with her brows lifted.
Jasper shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Hello, Mrs. Madison.”
Rose recalled that Jasper had had a big crush on Lisa years ago. Ray tugged on the hem of her shirt. “Emmy doesn’t have any hair,” he confided in what he must have thought was a whisper.
Rose hid a grin by looking down at the baby’s sleeping face, her lack of hair hidden by the bonnet. “Ray, when I first met you, you were as bald as an egg.”
Ray’s hand flew to his thick yellow mop. “I was not!”
Eddie dropped a hand on his son’s shoulder. “I’m afraid you were. And so were your brothers.” After giving the narrow shoulder an affectionate squeeze, he reached his hand to Jasper to shake. “How’s it going?” he asked with a tiny tip of his head toward Rose.
She didn’t miss it, and neither did Paint and Stone.
Jasper’s grin was big. “Pretty well, I think.”
Stone’s eyes narrowed dangerously. Rose quickly held out the baby for him to see. “Isn’t she darling?”
One thing none of the wolves could resist was a baby, especially a girl baby. They were in public, so his face and stance didn’t change, but Rose knew him well enough to see that he had inwardly melted. “Pretty baby,” he said, his voice softer and gentler than his usual grunt.
Rose returned Emily to her mother. Eddie slipped an arm around his wife and leaned down to kiss the baby’s forehead. “She’s so beautiful,” he murmured in a tone the precise equivalent of the one Taye used when speaking of his children. “And so are you, Lisa-love.”
The kiss he gave his wife was sweet and tender, not carnal, but Rose felt like a voyeur. Witnessing that sort of loving exchange always made her chest hurt. She wanted a man to hold her like Eddie held Lisa now. She wanted him to say he loved her. She took a deep breath to loosen the tightness in her chest and cast a glance at Jasper. Would he be the one to hold her and love her?
Jasper moved a few steps closer to Eddie, and they turned toward the other men to chat. Rose tried to listen to what they were saying, but the screech and hiss of the arriving train drowned their voices.
“Well,” Rose said to Lisa, raising her voice to be heard over the train. “Did you ever imagine, nine or ten years ago, that the most exciting thing to do would be watching a train come into town?”
Lisa laughed. “No. I’ve been to all kinds of social events, from the Grammys to the Cannes Film Festival. I’ve danced at a Presidential Inaugural Ball. I’ve met European royalty. I never thought that my most exciting social outing of the week would be to see crates and barrels unloaded from a train.” Her voice sobered. “Are you…Well, I’m not sure ‘dating’ is the right word to use. But are you?”
Rose hesitated, and then nodded. “It’s way past time for me to be married. I want a family of my own. I live in an old motel with dozens of other people around me all the time. They love me, but it’s not the same. Sometimes I feel so alone. Is it possible to be lonely when I’m never alone?”
“Yes.” Lisa set Emily into the sling that held her against her chest and gave Rose a quick hug. “Just be careful, okay? No need to rush into marriage. Take all the time you need to be sure the man you choose is the right one.” She gurgled with sudden laughter. “You’ll have plenty to choose from. By now everyone is gossiping about you and Jasper. Once the men in the area know that you’re husband shopping, they’ll be haunting the den.”
“Oh, crap.” Rose had a vision of men swarming outside the stone wall around the den, and the wolves’ probable reaction. “Oh, crappity crap.”
Lisa swayed from side to side to soothe the baby, who was awake and showing signs of displeasure. “I guess I shouldn’t laugh, but honestly, this is going to be a very entertaining winter.”
“Entertaining? That’s not the word I would use,” Rose replied glumly.
Eddie came to collect his wife. “They’re unloading the freight cars, Lisa-love. We should go claim your order. Bye, Rose. See you, Packard.”
Rose said good bye and turned her attention to the train. She saw the mail bag carried into the station and wondered if there would be a letter for her from Omaha. There were usually not many passengers to disembark at Kearney, and today was no different. Three men came off the train. Rose recognized one of them as a farmer from Odessa, a few miles south of Kearney.
“Look, there’s Gary Black,” she pointed out.
Jasper, standing again beside her, nodded. “I heard he had to go to Omaha. There’s Samuel Overby, too. Don’t know the third man.”
Neither did Rose, but he was the first one she’d noticed. He was tall and slender, with short dark hair, impeccably dressed in a tailored suit of silvery gray fabric that showed off a lean physique with wide shoulders and a narrow waist. The trousers were crisply pressed even after hours on the train. She’d never seen a suit like that in Kearney before. His hair was cut neatly at the nape, but an inch or so longer on top, artfully styled to look casually tumbled. If there were anything like a men’s fashion magazine these days, this man would be on the cover.
Rose despised him on sight even while she admired the lines of his body. Living with several dozen handsome men who wore as little clothing as Carla would let them get away with, Rose was very familiar with the male body. Under the expensive suit, this man’s body was probably exactly the type she liked best: lean, powerful, and graceful. Was his face as attractive? His head was turned away, looking at something to the side, so she could see only his profile. His nose was perhaps a tad large, but his jaw was well defined, running parallel to high cheekbones. A narrow tie was a black exclamation point over a shirt of vibrant blue. When he turned toward them, she saw the color of his eyes exactly matched the shirt. His face had nicely shaped eyebrows and a full, soft mouth…
She jerked in a sharp gasp. “Oh, no,” she moaned.
Jasper forgot himself and dared to grab her arm to steady her. “Rose, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”
Grabbing him back would probably get him killed. She was sure that buzzing in her ears would go away any second. It would. It had to. The man in the slick suit came their way, and she swayed, willing herself to be calm.
“Hello, Rose,” the man said to her with a cold smile. The hint of a dimple beside his mouth didn’t soften his expression. His head turned a fraction to stare at Jasper, and he continued in the same lazy, deadly tone, “I don’t know you.” The smile hardened to brittle ice. “If you want to live, you’ll
take your hand off my mate
.”
Chapter 3
The train ride from Omaha to Kearney took seven excruciatingly long hours. Sky spent the time alternating between his worry about the hearings in front of the city council and his fear that Rose might already be married by the time he arrived. Why did she have to do this now? Couldn’t she have waited another week? Just one lousy week? Her impatience might waste the years he’d spent finding out who in Omaha might be open to change, and then cajoling, sweet talking, and arguing to convince them to take action against the city’s policies concerning women.
He fingered the letter in his pocket, sighing. He couldn’t blame Rose. She had written him a few months ago telling him she was tired of waiting for him, but with the hearings coming up he hadn’t found time to write her back. Her timing was rotten, but she had been patient for years. He would talk to her and convince her to wait just another year or so. By that time, change would have come to Omaha. He could leave the city with a clear conscience and come home. Then he would give her all the time she wanted to court her properly.