The Invitation Read online

  And then, as if she didn’t have enough trouble, Rowena sent a telegram saying she was arriving in a matter of days. And Rowena, dear sweet Rowena who couldn’t keep her mouth shut about anything, had announced in her message that while she was there she intended to find a husband for her sister.

  Of course the man in the telegraph office had shared this information with all of Latham and at least half of the people who came through town on the train. Dorie wouldn’t be surprised if by now the entire population of San Francisco knew that her meddlesome sister planned to find her a husband.

  Dorie loved her sister, but sometimes Rowena had no common sense. Did she think that Dorie was going to be thrilled when she read the telegram and say, “Oh, wonderful, my sister is going to marry me off to a man I don’t even know”?

  While Dorie was recovering from this shock and daily listening to the snickers and laughter of her tenants, young and old alike, her well-meaning sister sent another telegram asking her to please not marry Alfred before she got there.

  So maybe her mention of Alfred was Dorie’s fault. About two years ago, before their father’s death, Rowena had written from her beautiful house in England that she was worried about her little sister, so she was going to return to America and find her a husband. This had horrified Dorie because she knew that if her father thought there was any possibility of losing his remaining daughter, he would make Dorie’s life even more difficult than it was. After Rowena’s defection—that was how Dorie thought of her marriage—their father had kept his younger daughter as nearly a prisoner as possible, but over the years his hold over her had lessened. Slowly Dorie had been allowed to walk in the fields behind the house and to sit by the river with a book in the afternoon. Her father had taken her along with him in his carriage when he went to collect the rent. In fact, with each month that passed after Rowena left, Dorie and her father had become more and more companionable. Not that they talked, but they were less like prisoner and guard than they had been.

  But if Rowena had her way and returned to try to force their father to allow Dorie to marry, she knew her life would become a living hell. If she’d thought Rowena could have pulled it off and found a wonderful man for her to marry, Dorie would have been happy to allow her to do so. But Rowena’s taste in men ran toward poets who wore ruffled shirts and said asinine things like “Life is a road few may travel.” Things that made no sense to Dorie but made Rowena weak-kneed. Dorie had pointed out to Rowena a thousand times that she didn’t have the wisdom to choose someone as strong and intelligent as Jonathan, that Jonathan had chosen her and then pursued her and followed her; in truth, he had besieged her until Rowena gave in to him out of weariness.

  To protect herself, to keep from finding herself married to a man who drank sherry and wore a pinky ring, Dorie had begun writing letters to her sister saying she was planning to marry a man in Latham. Unfortunately she hadn’t thought far enough ahead to make up a man. A fictional man could have been killed off in some romantic tragedy and Dorie could now be wearing black in mourning. Instead, she had written about a man she and Rowena had known all their lives: Alfred Smythe. At the time Dorie started the letters, Alfred’s second wife had just died and as she and her father had driven by in the carriage, Alfred—whom Dorie considered to be as old as her father—had looked up at Dorie as though wondering if she could be number three.

  Somehow everything had snowballed from there. To her great surprise, Dorie found that she had a talent for fiction, maybe because she wasn’t actually living in life, so she could live on paper. She began to formulate a grand romance with Alfred. And the more she wrote, the more enthusiastic Rowena’s responses became, so the more flamboyant Dorie’s descriptions became. She began to glorify Alfred, to talk of his swaggering walk, of the danger of him. She told Rowena that Alfred appeared to be a mere shopkeeper, but the truth was that he was involved in something hazardous and daring. Since Dorie’s knowledge of daring was limited to escaping her father’s eye for one whole hour, she never really explained what Alfred was doing. Besides, hints were so much more exciting than reality.

  But then Rowena got tired of waiting for a marriage announcement from Dorie, so she sent a letter saying she was coming to America to arrange the marriage. Dorie fired back a letter saying she and Alfred had parted company, so there was no need for Rowena to come. Rowena sent a telegram, which all of Latham saw, that said she was coming to find another husband for her brokenhearted sister.

  It was after Rowena’s second message that Dorie panicked. What was she going to do? In her own way, Rowena was as big a bully as their father. After all the letters of passion Dorie had sent to her sister, Rowena truly believed that Dorie actually loved that awful little Alfred Smythe, so Rowena had no guilty conscience for pushing Dorie into marriage.

  The only thing Dorie could think to do was to marry someone else. And it had to be someone who would satisfy Rowena’s romantic spirit and make her believe that Dorie had fallen for him so soon after her grand passion with Alfred.

  Dorie wasn’t her father’s daughter for nothing. When she set out to get a husband, her first thought was to buy one—rather like buying a new pair of shoes. After all, her father had bought his wife. He’d gone back east, read the notices of bankruptcy in the papers, and befriended the first man he found with a daughter who was unattractive enough to never make him worry about another man’s attentions. Then he paid off her father’s debts and married her.

  So Dorie thought she’d hire some man who was in need of money, but it had to be a man who was romantic enough to make her sister leave her alone. It had taken her days to come up with a list of appropriate men, and then by luck she had found that the blacksmith in Latham knew one of them, a man others thought of as a killer. But the blacksmith had told Dorie that Cole Hunter had the softest heart he’d ever seen. Cole didn’t know this, and he was such a fast draw that no man was about to tell him, but Cole’s soft heart was a big joke among real killers.

  “His blood’s too warm,” the blacksmith said. “He really hates killing anybody.”

  Since Dorie wanted to ask him to pretend to be married to her, this was good news.

  She’d found the man in Abilene, and he had not been what she had expected. What was worse, he seemed to dislike her rather heartily. But that didn’t surprise Dorie. She had never been successful with men. Not that she’d had any experience, but when Rowena still lived in Latham, Dorie had met a few of the boys-almost-men who came to visit her gorgeous sister. And each and every encounter had been a disaster.

  Rowena would say, “Dorie, you are not to tell Charles Pembroke that he has the intelligence of a carrot and the grace of an elephant in ballet slippers.”

  For a while Dorie had tried to keep her mouth shut and watch—and learn, but Rowena began to make her ill. Rowena oohed and aahed over each and every male creature she met, no matter how stupid or repulsive. It didn’t seem honest to Dorie, and above all, Dorie loved honesty.

  Eventually, of course, Rowena got married and had two beautiful children, and Dorie lived alone in a big, dark house and gave money to people. She still couldn’t understand why men liked lies better than the truth, but they seemed to.

  As for Mr. Hunter, she couldn’t figure him out at all. He had made sense to her when she first went to him and told him the truth. Like all the other men, he seemed to hate her honesty. Dorie knew that Rowena would have lied to him and flattered him and he would have been eating out of her hand. But Dorie had told him the truth and he’d made it clear that he couldn’t stand her.

  Unfortunately this hurt Dorie, because much to her disbelief, she rather liked him. She had no idea why she liked him, but she did. Maybe it was that heroic aspect of him. The truth was that when he saved her from the bank robbers, she had felt, well, rather like the heroine in the type of novel her father refused to allow in the house.

  But Mr. Hunter had not felt the same way she did. When she went to his room to apologize for whatever it was