Chapter 11
The honorable thing to do would be to marry her. But in my case, it would be a damned dishonor to her. I should have told her to walk away.
—Austin Wilder’s journal, January 5, 1856
M illie was.... She felt like a cat that had run into an electric fence. She was angry, she was embarrassed, and she was outright refusing to show her reaction.
Because he didn’t get to win this particular battle.
And yes, it had been impetuous of her to think that maybe she ought to kiss him. It had been foolish. Ludicrous, even. But he hadn’t had to humiliate her in that way.
She felt so . . . small. So rebuffed. He had patronized her in a way that was just unforgivable.
It made her want to punch him in the gut. Because how dare he say what she could handle. How dare he?
Millie Talbot had never been a rebel—with or without a cause. She had never been one to make waves. What she did was dig into her principles and entrench. When she made up her mind about something, she didn’t change it. Her burden to bear was that she was a people pleaser. But she was absolutely incapable of violating her own code of conduct. When she had decided something, she didn’t change course.
And that stubbornness flowed through her veins now. That absolute unwillingness to move.
That trait, she thought, she had gotten from her mother.
The woman who had seen a waif the rest of the town had rejected and decided to make space for him.
Yes, that woman.
Her conviction galvanized her now. Of course, she doubted that her mother would approve of this particular conviction , since it was all about digging in to antagonize Austin now that he had woundedher.
She hadn’t been certain she had pride. But she’d discovered a rich vein of it.
The thing that irked her the most was that she had been.... She was going to kiss him.
She had wanted to.
She had thought that maybe he wanted to, also, but then he had moved her away from him.
And she had felt so stupid. Because never, not once in all her life had she thought that a man wanted to kiss her. Michael had taken her entirely by surprise the first time he’d done it. She hadn’t expected it at all. She had thought maybe they were friends, because most men saw her that way, and then he had utterly floored her by taking her hand and kissing her sweetly outside her dad’s house.
Her very first kiss at twenty-four years old.
But now, with Austin, she had thought.... She had been convinced that she wasn’t making the attraction up. There was heat arcing between them. She had thought about it all night last night. The way he had looked at her. Then when she had seen him today, it had been even more pronounced. Even more intense.
It hadn’t felt risky. But it turned out . . . it was.
She surprised herself by digging in. She supposed it shouldn’t have surprised her. Because she was the same girl who had lectured all her friends on their silliness regarding Austin. She was the same girl who had refused to skinny-dip in the creek, even though everyone had tried to convince her it would be fun.
When she dug in, she dug in hard.
And here she was, digging in, even though it was making her uncomfortable.
She was following Cassidy up to the house.
That very clean house she knew no one in town would imagine Austin living in. But she knew he did. Just as she knew the extensive list of all the things he’d read.
If only that had been more valuable ammunition.
Because apparently she had read the entire situation wrong.
Or maybe she hadn’t. He hadn’t said that he didn’t want to kiss her. He had just told her it was a bad idea. It made her so angry. Because other people got to execute their bad ideas. But she was eternally protected. Even from the baddest man in town.
How fair was that?
He should want to corrupt her just by virtue of the fact that he was a wicked outlaw. He should tie her to the railroad tracks. Or to his bed.
Just thinking that made her heart rate increase. She was ridiculous. Maybe he had a point. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to handle this. Whatever it was.
Nothing. Apparently, it was nothing.
She walked right into that well-ordered house, though, and then turned and said brightly to Cassidy, “What can I do to help?”
“Oh, you don’t need to do anything,” said Cassidy. “You want to be here?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Sure.”
She hadn’t planned to accept the dinner invitation, but she had found herself saying yes, simply because she wanted to surprise him. Maybe because she wanted to surprise everybody. Maybe she wanted to prove that nobody actually knew her. That they definitely couldn’t tell her what to do.
An ice-cold bottle of beer was placed in her hand, and she nodded in affirmation. “Thank you, Cassidy.”
“No problem.” She grinned.
Cassidy was five years younger than Millie. At least she was reasonably sure that was the age difference between them.
She didn’t know Cassidy personally at all. Austin’s sister had been too far behind her in school. And she had been the subject of a lot of gossip, which had made Millie feel bad for her, but as a result she had kind of avoided her. Not because she felt averse to the scandal, but because she didn’t want to make Cassidy feel uncomfortable. When she had been dropped off at Austin’s house, the rumors about the abandoned Wilder child had been sensational.
Looking at Cassidy now, you would never think that she had practically been a foundling. She was confident, pretty, in an entirely unadorned way. Her clothing was simple, her hair loose and long. Halfway between curls and waves. Not styled in any particular way, beyond whatever the wind had done.
Her eyes were the same color blue as Austin’s. It had to be said, all the Wilders were beautiful.
Austin was striding impatiently between the living room and the kitchen, seemingly doing nothing, but Millie would rather cut her own arm off than comment on him at this point.
And thankfully, she was saved when an entire cavalry arrived.
The door to the house burst open, and there was an immediate flood of loud conversation, laughter, and footsteps.
“And he was running like his boots were blazing and his ass was catching fire.” A round of laughter followed. She wasn’t sure who had delivered the punchline, until the troop rounded the corner.
Dalton Wade was the one talking, holding a large platter that was covered in tinfoil. She noticed how Cassidy’s head whipped around, then immediately back. As though she was avoiding looking at Dalton for too terribly long.
Millie felt a slight twinge of sympathy.
One she didn’t want to examine.
“I guess that’s the last time he’ll start a bar fight he can’t finish.” Millie was somewhat surprised to see that comment came from Perry Bramble. Her eyes met Perry’s, and the other woman smiled. “Hi, Millie. What an unexpected and delightful surprise.”
She was pretty sure Perry was being nice. She didn’t know Perry that well. She had been ahead of Millie in school, and while Millie wasn’t shy, she couldn’t claim to be adept socially. Perry had actually been shy, something she didn’t seem to be afflicted with anymore, given that she ran a shop on Main Street.
“Thank you,” Millie said. “You too.”
It was easy to just let the conversation wash around her. She noticed that Austin wasn’t participating. He was . . . pouting. And if she said that to him she had a feeling he would absolutely pitch a fit.
“So what are the plans for Gold Rush Days?” Perry asked as she began to uncover different bowls and place them at the center of the table.
“Oh, we’re still formulating them.”
“I’m going to drive the wagon,” Cassidy said, grinning.
“Off a cliff?” That question came from Dalton.
“Shut up, Dalton,” Cassidy said. “I could drive a wagon in circles around you.”
“I wouldn’t want you to, though, because you’d be likely to run over my foot.”
“On purpose,” Cassidy said, smiling.
But the smile was sharp.
“I’m going to turn the hose on you two,” Carson said.
“He’s probably serious,” Perry remarked.
“I have no doubt he is,” Dalton said. “And it would be worth it. To take this one down a peg or two.” He leaned over and messed up Cassidy’s hair, and the condescending gesture made Millie die inside for Cassidy.
She wasn’t an expert on the interplay between men and women, but she didn’t think she had to be to identify what was happening here.
“I need a beer,” said Flynn, jerking the fridge open. There was a round of requests, and he passed the bottles out.
And then it was time to serve up the venison burgers. It surprised Millie that there were so many chairs around the family table. It was crowded, in a way she had never quite expected the Wilder house to be.
How interesting that this family that was supposed to be comprised of misfits and outlaws gathered in a closer group than she everhad.
She thought of her own family table. Often stark and a little too quiet. Her mother, her father, and her. Back when she was little, her grandparents had joined them occasionally as well.
There had been love there. But it hadn’t been like this.
This was noisy. And sometimes even raucous, when Cassidy flicked a pat of butter at Dalton, who responded in kind. And they cleaned up the mess without anyone getting angry.
She supposed they weren’t children, so no one was going to scold them.
But at her house, behavior like that would’ve created a riot.
There was so much ease among all of them.
Carson was quieter than the rest, but that didn’t really surprise her. She noticed the way Perry looked at him, as if she was always checking in with him. There was no doubt that they were connected. But she couldn’t quite read the dynamic between them.
She wasn’t even going to try. She had no idea what her dynamic was with anyone here, least of all the person she knew best, who was Austin. Right now she was . . . playing chicken with him? She wasn’t sure if that was what you would call it. But she was absolutely certain it wasn’t smart.
“The burgers are delicious,” she said.
“Thanks,” said Carson.
“And everything else too. Thank you so much for inviting me,” she said, directing her words to Cassidy.
“I wasn’t born in a barn,” she said. “Just raised in one.”
“ Next to one,” Austin said.
It was the first thing he had said the entire dinner. She wondered if it was normal for him to be moody and quiet. Because nobody seemed to notice. They were all busy entertaining themselves.
“I brought a cake,” said Perry.
“Wow,” Dalton said, looking at Perry. “You really know how to spoil a man.”
And that earned sideways glances from both Cassidy and Carson. She filed away her observations in the memory bank where she was storing information about this family.
Perry returned a moment later with an absolutely beautiful cake, topped by fresh flowers set into buttercream frosting.
“I have to do something with the leftover flowers,” she said.
“Well, you did something pretty damn spectacular,” Carson said, shooting a look at Dalton.
Perry blushed prettily and cut the cake.
A plate was put into Millie’s hands, and she was suddenly hit with a strange wave of emotion. It had been a really long time since she had sat around the dinner table with a family.
She had been so busy comparing and contrasting the Wilders to her own family, she hadn’t really paused to think about how they were alike. How it felt. To be part of something like this again.
More often than not, she had dinner by herself. Most especially in the last couple of months. Michael had worked late a lot, which made perfect sense to her now, but hadn’t at the time, and so they had only had dinner together a few nights a week. Even though they lived together. Even though they were supposed to be getting married.
She had eaten dinner with her dad almost every night until he died.
But she had slid into a void in which she’d ended up eating alone most of the time.
Tonight was so different.
“Thank you for having me,” she said as she finished her last bite of cake. “I really mean it.”
Her eyes met Austin’s, and she looked away quickly.
“I have to go,” she said. “I still have some things I need to finish putting together tonight. But I really do appreciate the invite. Really.”
She was given an enthusiastic send-off, then was surprised when she heard footsteps behind her as she moved into the living room.
She turned and saw Austin.
“I’ll walk you to the car.”
“There’s no need to do that,” she said.
“I didn’t ask you if you’d like me to walk you to the car, Millie. I said that I would.”
“All right,” she said.
“There might be a cougar out there. God knows.”
She didn’t turn around—she just opened up the door and walked outside. She continued down the steps, and then stopped.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I wanted to have a chance to talk to you,” he said.
“Maybe I’m done talking to you.”
“I want to explain,” he said.
“You want to explain all the incredibly condescending things you said to me earlier?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Listen, if you don’t want to kiss me . . . that’s absolutely fine. Many, many men don’t want to kiss me. Most men don’t want to kiss me. Heck, Austin, the man I was supposed to marry didn’t even want to kiss me that much it turned out, so that’s not really what I’m mad about. The problem is that you’re not treating me with respect.”
“The hell I’m not,” he said. “Not kissing you is a big fucking sign of respect, actually.”
“It’s not. You’re protecting me. Because you think I’m not as strong as you are. I’m not as strong as other women.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I don’t think you’re a monk,” she said. “Have you taken a vow of celibacy?”
“You know good and well I haven’t.”
“So some women are fine for you to touch. And you’re not worried about protecting them from you. But not me. Not me. I’m not okay for you to touch. It has to be something about me. And like I said, if it’s just that you don’t want me, then just say that. But don’t you dare make it about—”
“It’s not that I don’t want you,” he said, his voice rough. “But the reasons I want you are not good.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. It froze her completely, rooted her feet to the spot. She thought she might be getting pulled down into the earth.
“You want me?”
“Do you have any idea how many dirty fantasies I had about you when you looked up at me like that? Do you have any idea how easy it is for me to imagine it? But it would be a fine fucking mess, Millie Talbot. Because I don’t have anything to offer you. Not the kind of thing you want.”
“There you go again, assuming what I want. I just broke up with my fiancé, Austin. I don’t want marriage again. I can’t even imagine it. I hate that. Because I am thirty years old. And I wasted way too many years on a man who wasn’t worth all that time. Someday, I need to find somebody else. I can’t wait too terribly long, because biological clocks are a thing. Not for you. Because you’re a man. Life isn’t fair. I have to . . . move on at some point. But I’m not there right now. Right now, I am standing here grappling with the truth that my family might not be who I thought they were. I am dealing with the fact that the superiority complex that was injected into me at birth, that often just made me feel inferior, is . . . likely a lie. But everything is. Everything. And I don’t want to be the person everyone thinks I am. Not anymore. Because what has it gotten me? Nothing. What am I protected from? Honestly, do you think the most dangerous thing in the world for me would be getting naked with you? My mother is dead. My father is dead. Someone that I trusted betrayed me. What I believed about my ancestry isn’t even true. I know that you’ve been through a lot. But is that not a lot?”
She was breathing hard, and she felt ridiculous. She felt she might be on the verge of begging, which was just sad. Because she didn’t want to be begging him for a kiss. And she definitely didn’t want him to kiss her because he felt sorry for her. But honestly. He was acting as if she was a nun. As if she was sheltered. A hothouse flower to be protected. But that was just because he thought being revered as a Talbot meant she was sheltered from things.
But she had lost so much.
How was that being sheltered? She was just starting to be angry about everything she’d lost.
Finally.
Finally she was starting to get angry.
“All right,” he said. “I can take some of that in. But you’re right that I haven’t taken a vow of celibacy. I have also never in my fucking life spent more than one night with a single woman. I don’t do relationships. You have an ex, you’ve been betrayed. At least you’ve been with somebody. Really been with them. I’ve never even almost thought I was in love. At thirty-five years old. How about that? That should scare you. That is the biggest red flag. I’ve never been in a relationship. I’ve never even tried to be. I certainly wouldn’t try with you. Because you might be grappling with what your family is, but I already know. And it would be a betrayal of my blood. . . .”
“But you invited me to dinner.”
“My sister did.”
His clarification stung.
“You didn’t kick me out.”
“I should have,” he said, getting closer to her. Close enough that she could smell him again. Close enough that her heart started to beat faster. Close enough that it reminded her of being in the library yesterday. When he had pinned the badge onto her. “We have to work together. We have to live in this town together. And I don’t want . . . I do not want to get involved. I don’t even know how to get involved. Someday . . . someday maybe I will. But not with you. Not ever with you, do you understand me?”
She nodded. “I don’t want to get involved with you like that either.” The words left her in a rush. She was angry. She didn’t mind that she was angry. It felt good.
There was something satisfying about it.
“Good,” he said. “So we’re in agreement on that.”
He stared her down, and she looked back at him.
A showdown, right there in his driveway.
Her finger on a trigger she wasn’t sure she had the guts to squeeze.
Maybe she was pushing him too far. Maybe she was miscalculating. She wanted to know what it would be like to kiss him because it would be something singular, different. Living out the bad-boy fantasy she’d never had. The one that was suddenly alive inside her, like a beast, something feral and wild that she didn’t even recognize.
Yes. She wanted to kiss him.
But what kind of fantasy could she possibly arouse in him?
The timid little mousy librarian was hardly a fantasy.
And he had just admitted to her that all he’d ever had was a series of one-night stands.
Sex must be so boring to him.
So mundane.
And she wasn’t even asking for sex.
She just wanted to kiss. She just wanted a window into something she hadn’t been able to imagine when she was young. Something she hadn’t ever allowed herself to want.
She wanted to shed her skin. She wanted to break out of a cocoon. She wanted . . . a better metaphor for whatever this was. For this feeling that what was growing inside her was too big to be contained in her body anymore.
This metamorphosis that she had been forced into.
Because she hadn’t chosen to lose her mother. She hadn’t chosen to lose her father.
She hadn’t chosen to end up single and sad at thirty with a fiancé who had cheated on her. An infidelity that everyone in town knew about. That everyone whispered about. She hadn’t chosen those things.
She never would have.
But they had happened to her. They were forcing this change. And she was so desperate to get something out of it. Something that felt good.
Life was forcing her into a different shape than what she had chosen, so why couldn’t she be different? Just for a little bit.
She felt suffocated. By this prim dress, by her position as the librarian, by her last name.
By everything.
She took a step toward him, her breathing coming hard and fast. “I still want to kiss you, though. Just to see. Don’t you want to know?”
“Oh, honey. You’re going to wish you hadn’t said that.”
He grabbed her arm; he pulled her to him. He didn’t look at her with tenderness. He didn’t look at her at all. It wasn’t slow. It wasn’t a request.
It was an instant, immediate demand. When his mouth met hers, it was like a lit match had been struck between them, and they were both dry tinder.
He consumed her.
She had never been kissed like this. She had never known kisses like this existed outside of those books. The ones that she had flipped through sometimes before she shelved them. The ones she had just told Alice Adams were unrealistic.
This was one of those kisses. Deep and hard and bruising. Punishing the parts of herself that needed punishment. That had been demanding it, crying out for it. Because she needed instruction on how to change. Because she needed to learn how to be different.
He kissed her.
His mouth was a revelation.
A force.
And when his tongue swept across hers, she thought she was dying. The way her knees had gone weak yesterday had only been a taste of what was to come.
Had he not wrapped his arm around her waist as if he was anticipating how weak she would go with that slick glide of his tongue, she would’ve fallen to the gravel.
Austin Wilder was kissing her.
She couldn’t think. She couldn’t do anything but hang on to him.
“Kiss me back,” he said against her lips. “You silly little mouse.”
That was it. It galvanized her. She parted her lips, thrust her tongue against his, kissed him within inexpert rhythm, because even though she had been kissed, many times, it had never been this.
If this was a war, then she was going to fight it.
If it was a shootout, then she was going to take aim.
And maybe it would be wild and inexpert, but she would give everything she had.
Suddenly he released her, the rejection as brutal as the first, leaving her breathing hard, cold without his touch, and buzzing with sensation that she had never felt before. Her skin was alive.
She wanted . . . more. Everything. She had never felt like this before.
Hollow and aching and desperate for another person’s touch.
Her mouth felt swollen, hot.
She had thought she knew all about kissing.
She had thought the women who wrote romance novels were making things up. That they were somehow ignorant of the topics they wrote about.
Exaggerating them. Or just plain wrong.
She was the one who was wrong.
Michael wasn’t a romance hero.
That conviction echoed inside her. She looked up at Austin, full of questions.
“There,” he said. “You got your kiss.” His voice was like gravel.
“And that’s it?”
“It has to be.”
“But. . . .”
“No buts, Millie Mouse. It’s a bad idea. We have to deal with each other. You know that.”
“I didn’t say that I wanted. . . .”
“But you would. Eventually. Because you’re a nice girl. And that is what nice girls want. Even if they tell themselves it’s not. They don’t want a one-night stand, they want romance, and I can never give you that. I don’t want to.”
It wasn’t the last shot that got her. It was the way he called her a nice girl. The way that even though she had asked him to stop, he continued to tell her who she was. She’d had quite enough of that. She wasn’t going to be taking it from him too.
“Well,” she said. “Thanks for the kiss.” And she had no idea what possessed her. Except that she was furious. Except that she didn’t want him to win. “If I have trouble sleeping tonight and I need to use my vibrator, I know exactly who I’ll be thinking of. Just the lips, though. Not the personality.”
On shaking legs, she got into her car, started the engine, and drove away. She refused to look at him in her rearview mirror.