The Invitation Read online

He picked up his whiskey glass, took a sip, and when he looked back at the two sisters, it seemed to him that Rowena wasn’t quite as beautiful as he’d thought at first. He was beginning to see her as a bit of a bully. And Miss Latham wasn’t quite as plain as he’d thought. She was smart and could be funny when she wanted to be. She deserved better than a short, bald man who’d dump three kids on her then go off and spend her money.

  Even as he opened his mouth, Cole couldn’t believe he was going to say what he did. All he knew was that he couldn’t let Miss Latham marry a man she didn’t want to marry. A thousand images of his parents screaming at each other ran through his mind. No one deserved a life like that—especially the children. “Will you tell her, dear, or shall I?”

  Miss Latham looked up at him, blinking in puzzlement, having no idea what he was talking about.

  “The world is going to know soon enough. You can’t keep it a secret forever,” he said to her, his voice full of coaxing softness, the voice of a lover. He looked back up at Rowena and gave her his own sweet smile, the one that had made more than a few women’s hearts flutter. “Your sister and I are engaged to be married.”

  Dorie sat up straighter on the sofa. “No, please, you don’t have to do this.”

  Rowena looked from one to the other, at Cole’s I-dare-you expression and at Dorie’s face, now red with embarrassment. Rowena’s lovely laugh filled the room. “Dorie darling, I’d been told he was a hero, but I had no idea how much of one. He is as chivalrous as a knight of old. He rescued you, and now he feels responsible for you.”

  She turned back to Cole. “But, really, Mr. Hunter, your concern for my sister need go no further. Just because you saved her life doesn’t mean you have to be responsible for her forever. Now Dorie is my responsibility, just as she was our father’s.”

  Maybe there was some chivalry in him because the hair on the back of his neck stood up at Rowena’s words. She made Miss Latham sound like a broken-down old pet, beloved but useless. The truth was that Miss Latham was far from useless. She was as smart as a college girl. There wasn’t a woman in a thousand who could have understood what he meant during that bank holdup when he used the word “roll.” She had not only understood but had kept her head and figured out a way to distract the man, then moved as quickly as a darter fish. Now here was her sister speaking as though Miss Latham were something useless that needed to be gotten rid of as fast as possible.

  “Please don’t do—” Dorie began, but stopped when Cole came to his feet and in an instant was across the room to stand beside her.

  He put his uninjured hand on her shoulder. “The truth is, Mrs. Westlake, your sister and I are in love, and we plan to get married. She’s marrying me and no one else.”

  Dorie looked up at him with pleading eyes. “No, you can’t do this. I was wrong to ask you.” She turned to her sister. “Rowena, he’s lying. Has any man ever fallen madly in love with me?”

  She turned back to look up at Cole. “You don’t have to do this. I shouldn’t have said what I did. It was something I should have known couldn’t have worked. Rowena, let me tell you what I did. I—”

  Cole didn’t know how to shut her up, but he had to make her stop talking. He couldn’t bear to see her humiliate herself in front of her beautiful sister, whose expression said that she didn’t believe for one minute that Cole had fallen for her plain little sister. Something about that look bothered Cole.

  “I asked Mr. Hunter to—” Dorie began, her voice heavy, like a child admitting a lie, knowing that punishment was going to follow.

  Without thought of what he was doing, Cole slipped his good arm under Miss Latham’s shoulders and pulled her up to him. She was a tiny thing, small and fragile, weighing nothing. His objective was to stop her words, and short of putting his hand over her mouth, he didn’t know how else to do that, so he kissed her. It wasn’t a kiss of passion, not even a kiss he wanted; it was a kiss of expediency: hard, closed-mouthed, without affection.

  Within seconds he broke from the kiss and turned to Rowena in defiance. “There, now, does that look like—”

  Suddenly his face filled with wonder, and he broke off and turned to look down at the woman pressed to his side. She was still pulled against him, her feet off the floor, her body as limp as a doll’s, and she was looking up at him, her huge eyes filled with surprise.

  For a moment time didn’t exist for Cole. He had no idea what had happened, but the kiss he had shared with this woman—if he could call that hard thing a kiss—was different from any other kiss he’d experienced. He had kissed hundreds of women in his life. In fact, he rather liked kissing and had never turned down an opportunity when offered to him, whether it was in a saloon or behind the church. But this kiss had been different.

  As though Rowena weren’t there, as though he and this woman he held were the only two people in the world, he turned back to her and kissed her for real.

  He pulled her close to him and instantly found that she wasn’t as scrawny as he’d thought, but nicely rounded, and he liked her small size. She was so tiny he thought he could wrap himself around her; she could dissolve inside him.

  He kissed her gently at first, just tasting of her, of her freshness, of the purity of her. There was no doubt in his mind that he was the first man who had ever touched her, ever held her, ever put his lips on hers. Some part of his brain remembered that when he first met her she had been hostile and prickly, but he couldn’t reconcile that woman with the soft one in his arms. She opened up to him in a way that no woman ever had before. And in her kiss was something he couldn’t identify, something that he had never tasted before. If he didn’t know better, he’d think it was love. But that wasn’t possible. There was nothing between them.

  There was pain in his arm in its sling, but he didn’t feel it when he wrapped both arms around her, then used his good left hand to turn her head so he could taste her lips more deeply. He sucked on her bottom lip, gently drawing it into his own mouth, and he was sure he’d never tasted anything sweeter.

  It was some minutes before he heard Rowena’s voice. Judging by her tone, she had been trying to get his attention for some time.

  Reluctantly, with difficulty, he turned to look at Rowena, seeing her in a haze, as though she were far away. He still held Dorie firmly in his arms, not willing to release her soft, pliant body. Besides, she was so limp she would have fallen if he’d released her.

  “My goodness gracious,” Rowena said, her voice full of astonishment. “I thought I was going to have to throw a bucket of cold water on you two.” She was trying to make a joke, but it fell flat because she was facing two very confused people.

  “Yes, well, I…” Cole began, stammering like a schoolboy. The body in his arms began to have some substance, and he knew he should release her, but he didn’t want to. It was some minutes before he realized that Miss Latham had her hands on his shoulders and was pushing against him rather hard.

  “Mr. Hunter,” she was saying, “please release me.”

  When Cole’s brain began to function again, all he could feel was embarrassment. “Yes, of course,” he said, then dropped Miss Latham as though she were forbidden, causing her to fall back against the sofa with a thud. But he didn’t reach down to help her. In fact he would have done most anything to keep from touching her again.

  “I see that you two are in love,” Rowena said. “I had no idea that was the case. Dorie, how could you keep such a thing from me? Why didn’t you tell me? You let me believe that Mr. Hunter had no reason to save you from the robbers except that he was a man of great conscience, a man who cared about others, a man who—”

  “A fool,” Cole said, beginning to recover himself. Running his hand over his eyes, he surreptitiously looked at Miss Latham and saw that she was as stunned as he was. If nothing like this had happened to a man of his experience, he was sure nothing like this had happened to her.

  “You know what I think you two should do?” Rowena said in the voice of one who