Chapter 11 #2
“No harm done, Sherry.” He smiled. In the past, just last week in fact, his smile would have made her heart beat a little faster, but not now, not with the news she just read.
“Are you all right?” He picked up the letter and handed it to her, his fingers lingering on her hand longer than what was appropriate, but she didn’t snatch her hand away.
Not today. She needed the comfort and assurance his light touch brought her, especially in this moment.
“Yes, of course,” she lied until the heat of his gaze swept over her and the friendliness of his smile became her undoing.
She’d been holding on to her emotions by a thread from the moment she saw her name written in her aunt’s handwriting on the envelope, and that thread was quickly unraveling.
“No, I’m not all right, Wyatt. They’re coming. ”
“Who’s coming?” He gave her a quizzical look.
The letter in her hand shook just a bit before she folded it and stuffed it in her drawstring bag. “My grandmother and my aunt. They’re both coming to Serenity.” She glanced up at him, tears clogging her throat. “What am I going to do?”
“I don’t understand. Do about what?”
She didn’t quite know how to explain until she blurted out, “They don’t know.”
“We can’t talk here. Come with me.” And just like that, he grabbed her hand, led her across the street to the town square and gestured to the first bench they came to, warm in the bright light of the spring sun. “Tell me. Maybe I can help. ‘They’ don’t know what?”
Sheridan gratefully took a seat because her legs felt like stumps of wood.
Her eyes followed him as he sat beside her and turned all his attention on her, his gentle smile, the one she’d been seeing in her dreams more and more often.
“They don’t know the house I inherited is a brothel. I didn’t tell them.”
“What did you tell them?”
She drew in her breath and let it out slowly, as she’d been taught to calm herself.
“I told them I knew they’d lied to me. That I was learning all about my mother and she wasn’t what they said she was.
I told them that I didn’t want to see them for a long time, if ever, and that I’d forgive them for what they did.
Eventually.” She fished the letter out of her purse and opened it, her fingers shaking.
“Aunt Estelle ignored everything I said. She and my grandmother are coming to take me home, back to New Orleans. They expect me to be packed and ready when they get here.” She looked at the date of the letter then found the date they were expected to arrive.
It didn’t give her much time. Not much time at all.
“And you don’t want to go.”
She glanced at him, then at the letter, her aunt’s spidery penmanship becoming blurry. “No, I don’t want to go. I like Serenity.” She swiped at her eyes. “I feel like I’ve finally found a home.”
“There’s no reason to cry, Sherry.” Even as he said the words, he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, the cotton square pristine and pressed with sharp creases and placed it in her hand. “You’re a grown woman. They can’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
She shook her head. He’d never understand.
She barely understood herself. Too many years of being obedient, of following the rules, of being compliant had taken root in her heart, though she did try to fight it.
“I lied, too, Wyatt. I told them that I’d met someone, that I was engaged to be married.
I thought that would make a difference to them.
” She dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief.
“I see.” And then he laughed, a rumbling sound that came from deep in his chest, making his entire body shake.
Appalled that he could find this amusing, every muscle in her body tensed, prepared to flee just so she wouldn’t hear that laugh anymore. She didn’t run from him, however. For perhaps the second time in her life, she stood up for herself. “Don’t laugh at me, Wyatt. It isn’t funny.”
“Yes, it is.” His gaze roamed over her, and he quickly sobered. “Why did you tell them you’d found someone?”
How to explain? She studied the drawstring purse in her lap.
She fingered one of the paste jewels all in effort to not look at him.
“Truthfully, I don’t know. I thought, if they knew I had someone in my life, someone I loved, and that I was happy, they wouldn’t force me to leave here.
” She looked up at him then and admitted the rest of it.
“Something has changed in me since I came here. I am twenty-six years old, Wyatt, and for the first time in my life, I have tasted a freedom I’ve never known.
The ‘rules’ I had always obeyed, the ones imposed on me first by my grandmother and aunt, then by the school I attended and taught at just don’t seem important.
In fact, they are stifling and no longer how I want to live. ”
She reached out and touched his hand, something she would never have allowed herself to do before coming to Serenity, then studied his face.
She could trust him. He’d shown her that in so many ways.
“Imagine having it drilled into your head that men—all men—were no good. Imagine being told, time after time, that you weren’t good enough, either, because of the sins of your mother. Now imagine all of that was a lie.”
She bit back the sob that threatened to suffocate her.
“I have friends now, which I never really had before. Oh, the other ladies at Bouchard’s School for Girls were nice enough, I suppose, but there was always the unspoken agreement that we were there to work, not form friendships.
I see now that kind of thinking was all wrong.
Lucy and Tresia, Mrs. Gallagher and the girls at the house, even Leslie Carmichael, have made me realize what I’ve been missing all these years.
I don’t want to go back to my old life and give any of that up. ”
“I’m sorry.” He entwined his fingers with hers and she studied the way her hand fit so perfectly with his.
There was strength in his hand, but also gentleness.
She glanced up at him and noticed the sympathy in his expression and something else, something she didn’t recognize.
“I don’t blame you for not wanting to go back. Not one bit.”
“What am I going to do? How am I supposed to find a fiancé in two days?” She bit back her disappointment as well as her fear. “One that will pass their inspection, because I know they’d try to force me to go back if he didn’t, regardless of whether we are engaged or not.”
“They couldn’t do that, could they?”
“Oh, you don’t know the imperious Odette DuBois, my grandmother, and her equally self-important daughter, my Aunt Estelle.
They would and have done the most diabolical things in order to get me to obey.
” She laughed softly, though there was nothing amusing about any of it.
Indeed, just the thought of going back to her old life was breaking her heart.
“Grand-mère even faked a heart attack when I dared to go against her wishes. In fact, it was while I was confronting them both about my mother, the inheritance, and my desire to collect it. She did it right in front of me. She clutched her chest, gasped, and wilted to the floor like she hadn’t a bone in her body.
Aunt Estelle and I helped her to her bed.
Dr. Fontaine was called—the only man she ever trusted as much as she could trust any man—and the guilt was heaped upon me for putting her there with my insolence.
But I had made up my mind. I wasn’t about to change it, especially after Dr. Fontaine assured me that Grand-mère was as healthy as a horse and would probably outlive us all.
“That, of course, was when I found out that my mother hadn’t died giving birth to me like I’d always been told, but rather that Grand-mère and Aunt Estelle disowned her, threw her out of the house and forbade her from seeing me.
” She drew in her breath, her pain real.
“If Odette could do that to her own daughter, what would prevent her from hauling me back to New Orleans, gagged and bound, if need be?”
He leaned back against the bench, and the smile he usually wore faded. “You really did get yourself into a pickle, didn’t you?”
She didn’t disagree with him. Her focus shifted from him to the fountain in the middle of the square, her heart heavy.
“There’s an easy solution, Sherry.”
“There’s no solution, Wyatt. They’re coming here to meet my fiancé. I don’t have one! They will force me to go back to New Orleans, even though I don’t want to. And they definitely can’t find out about the parlor house. That would make it all worse.”
“Well…” He shrugged, his broad shoulders rising and falling, drawing her attention. “I could be your fiancé. Hell, we can even pretend to be married.”
Stunned by his offer, she just stared at him. “What?”
“You could stay at the ranch, and we could pretend to be married,” he repeated himself, then smiled that devastating smile, “for as long as they are here. They’ll go back to New Orleans happy, none the wiser that it’s all a ruse. And you can stay here in Serenity if that’s what you want to do.”
Gratitude filled her and something more, something she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—define. “You would do that for me?”
“I would. In a heartbeat.” Then he turned serious. “When are they coming?”
She consulted the letter. “They’ll be here in two days.”
“Perfect. Just enough time to get everything set up. We can go over to your house right now and pack up your things.” He rose from his seat and held out his hand.
Still reeling from the fact that he would do this for her, Sheridan simply nodded, then took his hand and allowed him to help her rise.
“My wagon is just up over there.” He pointed toward the Marshal’s office.