Eternity Read online

  Carrie blew her nose. “Oh, no, of course not. My parents and my brothers always give me what I want. Only ’Ring…” She started crying again.

  Josh took a few moments to digest this glimpse into her family. The spoiled baby, always given anything she wanted. If she wanted to travel alone across the country into the wilds of Colorado because she’d illegally obtained a signature on some papers so she could marry a man she’d never met, then that was all right with them. Whatever their darling wanted. And look at what had happened, Josh thought. Carrie had come out smelling like a rose. She had a man and two children who loved her as much as they loved sunshine and air.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “I think perhaps your brother ’Ring has the right idea about you.”

  “That’s a horrible thing to say! You sound like ’Ring. He’s always telling Father to send me to a nunnery, and we’re not even Catholic.”

  Josh coughed to cover a laugh, but Carrie wasn’t fooled. She started to get off the couch, vowing to never speak to him again.

  Pulling her onto his lap, he began to kiss her. She was rigid at first, but then relaxed against him. “All right, sweetheart, tell me what you’re afraid of.” When she didn’t answer right away, he paused in stroking her hair. “It’s me, isn’t it? You don’t want him to know your husband is a poor farmer who can’t even give you—”

  “Shut up!” she screamed in his face as she got off his lap. “I am sick unto death of hearing about money. This has nothing to do with money. I have lots of money.”

  “Your family’s money,” Josh said grimly.

  “For your information, I have money I have made.” She stopped shouting at his look of disbelief. “Did you by chance happen to notice any difference in this town since the last time you were here? And you don’t have to tell me you haven’t been here in weeks because I know. Everyone in town has told me how you and those poor, darling children—which I might add you don’t deserve—have become hermits. Tell me, did you?”

  “Which question am I to answer? About the town or the children?”

  She ground her teeth; he was teasing her. After turning her back to him, she looked back at him with a smug smile. “You’ve said that I’m useless. You said that because I can’t cook and have no ambition to learn to clean, but you know what I can do?”

  “Yes,” he said in a way that made Carrie blush and lose her train of thought.

  “I can…oh yes, I can make money.”

  “Out of tin? Or do you use a spell cast with frogs’ tongues and such?”

  “No, much simpler than that. I made it by working. If you laugh at me again, Joshua Greene, I swear on my family’s name that I’ll never go to bed with you again.”

  Josh didn’t laugh. In fact, with such a punishment facing him, he didn’t feel any inclination to laugh—none at all.

  Taking her seat again, Carrie told him about opening her store. She told of staying in Eternity’s nasty little hotel after he left her at the stage depot and how she’d spent two days doing nothing but writing letters. She wrote to the wife of every important man in Denver. The people of Eternity supplied her with the names and vague addresses of anyone they’d ever heard of in Denver who had any money.

  “What did you write to these women?” Josh asked, genuinely curious.

  Carrie told him that she’d written to the women that her brothers had recently returned from Paris and brought back far too many clothes for her to wear. And, furthermore, her brothers were such blockheads that they had brought her clothes that were in the very widest range of sizes imaginable, as well as in every color that could be found in Paris.

  “A cry of help if ever I heard one,” Josh said, but he was definitely not laughing at her.

  She told the rest of her story quickly, telling of her first customers, of hiring seamstresses, of not allowing the idiot women to wear what was unflattering to them. “You should have seen them. Two-hundred-pound women in white chiffon ruffles and thin, bosomless women in black. I began to supplement the fronts of the gowns with cotton. You know, ‘For what God has,’ etc., etc.”

  “No, I don’t think I do know.”

  “ ‘For what God has forgotten, He supplied cotton,’ ” Carrie quoted.

  Josh didn’t laugh, but he had to drink brandy to keep from doing so. “What is the name of this shop?”

  “Paris in the Desert.”

  Josh’s mouthful of brandy went spewing out across Carrie.

  After brushing the front of herself off, she narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you laughing at me?”

  “No, my love, not at all. Paris in the Desert is an excellent choice of name. It goes with Choo-choo very well.”

  She was looking at him hard, but she couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not. She finished her story by telling how the increasing business of her shop had helped the economy of the entire town.

  When she’d finished, she looked at Josh in triumph. She was expecting praise from him, but instead, he looked gloomy.

  “What is wrong now? Haven’t I proven to you that I’m not useless?”

  “You can even earn money,” he said miserably. “What’s your brother going to say to your being married to a man who can’t seem to earn a decent living? A man who can’t support his wife?”

  “My brother doesn’t expect me to marry for money. His wife had no great fortune when he met her so why does my husband have to be rich?” Carrie thought that sometimes talking to Josh was like talking to a block of wood.

  “You don’t understand. But I imagine your brother will. Isn’t that why you’re worried about his visit?”

  “No. ’Ring will have a great deal to say about my…well, he’ll see the way I got Father to sign the papers as dishonest. Then there’s the possibility that our marriage isn’t quite legal because Father didn’t know what he was signing and I’m not twenty-one yet. And ’Ring will be upset about you and me living together for a few days then my living in town all alone, unprotected, uncared for, while my husband stays at his farm. ’Ring is an old-fashioned man who believes that a man and wife should live together.”

  Josh smiled. He couldn’t make her understand what it meant to a man to not be able to support his wife, but at the same time he knew he was testing her. In three years he could leave the farm, and when he could get away from the farm, he could again earn his own living.

  He pulled Carrie back onto his lap. “If your brother is worried about our not being married properly, then we’ll just have to get married again. I’m sorry I missed the first one, but this time we can have a wedding night.” Holding her face in his hand, he kissed her. “I am beginning to think that you really do love me. If you can love me as I am now, perhaps you can love me later.”

  “What does that mean?” After one look at his face, she turned away in disgust. “Oh, yes, secrets again. When are you going to love me enough to tell me all about yourself?”

  “As a matter of fact, I already have,” Josh said as he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the letter he had spent the night writing. As he withdrew it, the letter that had come in the mail to him fell to the floor, and Carrie picked it up. “I spent all night last night writing this to you,” he said. “I was going to send it to Maine.”

  Carrie reached out to take it, but he pulled it back.

  “I can tell you everything in there now.”

  “I’d like to read it. Do you make undying declarations of love to me in the letter?”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes soft. “What is that?”

  Looking down at the letter she held, she saw that it had no return address. “It’s addressed to you.”

  Teasingly, Josh put the letter he’d written to her on a table out of her reach. “Perhaps I’d better read my own mail first. Maybe it’s from a female admirer.” Still smiling, he ran the letter under his nose.

  Josh had meant to tease Carrie, but as he smelled the letter, he turned pale.

  “J