Duncan's Bride Read online

  With a triumphant look Floris sailed through the swinging door into the kitchen.

  “The waitress from hell,” Madelyn breathed in awe, watching the door swing gently back and forth.

  Reese choked and had to spit his coffee back into the cup. She didn’t want to look at him, but the urge was irresistible. Without turning her head she glanced toward him and found him watching her, his face unnaturally stiff. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and they began snickering. He tried to control it and quickly gulped his coffee, but Madelyn was still giggling as he grabbed for his wallet. He threw a dollar and change on the table, grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the entrance. The door had barely closed behind them when he released her and bent forward, bracing his hands on his knees as a great roar of laughter burst from him. Madelyn collapsed over his back, seeing again the helpless, stunned look on the cowboy’s face and the gleeful look on Floris’s, and went off into helpless gales.

  After her bad temper the laughter felt great. It was even more wonderful to hear Reese laughing, and a pang struck her as she realized that this was the first time she had heard him laugh. He rarely even smiled, but now he was hugging his ribs and wiping tears from his eyes, and still the deep sounds were booming up from his chest. She had an overwhelming urge to cry, but conquered it.

  A lot of the tension between them dissolved as they bought groceries. Reese had been right; the general store did carry mostly basics, but Madelyn had carefully studied the cookbooks and knew what she could do with what was available. Thank God Reese wasn’t a fussy eater.

  A cheerful woman with a truly awesome bosom checked them out while carrying on a casual conversation with Reese. She eyed Madelyn questioningly, then looked down at the ring on her left hand. Reese saw the look and braced himself for the curiosity he knew would come. “Glenna, this is my wife, Madelyn.”

  Glenna looked startled, and her glance flew down to his own left hand. The gold ring on his tanned finger clearly astounded her. Reese carried on with the introduction, hoping to bridge her reaction. “Maddie, this is Glenna Kinnaird. We went to school together.”

  Recovering herself, Glenna beamed and held out her hand. “I can’t believe it! Congratulations! You got married, after all this time. Why, just wait until I tell Boomer. We didn’t really go to school together,” she said chattily to Madelyn. “I’m ten years older than he is, so I graduated when he was in third grade, but I’ve known him all his life. How on earth did you catch him? I’d have sworn he’d never marry again— Uh, that is…” Her voice trailed off uneasily as she glanced at Reese.

  Madelyn smiled. “It’s okay. I know about April. As for how I caught him…well, I didn’t. He caught me.”

  Glenna’s face regained its cheerful expression. “Took one look and forgot about being a bachelor, huh?”

  “Something like that,” Reese said. He’d taken one look and gotten hard, but the end result had been the same: the leggy blonde with the lazy, seductive stroll was now his wife.

  As they left the store with Glenna waving at them, he realized something that had him frowning thoughtfully as they loaded the groceries into the station wagon: Glenna had disliked April on sight, but had been perfectly comfortable and friendly with Madelyn. Even though, in an indescribable way, Madelyn dressed more fashionably than April, she had an easy, friendly manner to which Glenna had responded. Madelyn didn’t dress as expensively as April, but what she wore had a certain style to it, as if she had practiced for hours to get her collar to stand up just so, or her sleeves to roll up that precise amount. She would always draw eyes, but she didn’t inspire the sort of hostility from her own sex that April had.

  Style. He looked at his wife and thought of how she’d looked the day before, with one kneepad slipping down her shin and her hair hanging in her face. He hadn’t dared laugh then, but in retrospect he couldn’t help himself and began to chuckle. Even when chasing chickens, Madelyn did it with style.

  MADELYN HAD BEEN outside all morning, scraping the peeling paint off the house. Having brought the interior up to snuff, she was working on the exterior, and it was such a beautiful morning that she’d been enjoying herself despite the hard work. It was getting close to noon, though, and the temperature was rising uncomfortably. Sweat was making her clothes stick to her. Deciding that she’d done enough for the day, she climbed down from the ladder and went inside to take a shower.

  When she came back downstairs, the first thing she saw was the bag containing Reese’s lunch sitting on the cabinet. He was out repairing fencing again and wouldn’t be back until dinnertime, but he’d forgotten his lunch and thermos of tea.

  She checked the clock. He had to be starving by now. Quickly she emptied the thermos and filled it with fresh ice cubes and tea, then got the keys to the station wagon and hurried outside with his lunch. By chance she knew where he was working, because in the past two weeks he’d shown her around the ranch a little, and he’d mentioned this morning where he’d be. It was actually a safety precaution for someone to know where he was, and she frowned as she thought of the years he’d worked alone, with no one at the house to know where he’d gone or how long he’d been out. If he’d gotten hurt, he could have lain there and died without anyone ever knowing he’d been hurt until it was too late.

  Her marriage wasn’t even three weeks old yet, and already she could barely remember her previous life. She’d never before been as busy as she was now, though she had to admit she would gladly forgo the housework to ride around the ranch with Reese, but he still refused to hear of it. She was certain that if anyone looked up the word “stubborn” in the dictionary, it would have Reese Duncan’s picture beside it. He’d decided where she would fit in his life, and he wouldn’t let her get outside that boundary.

  She could almost feel the hunger in him at night when he made love to her, but he never let himself go, never released the passion she sensed, and as a result she couldn’t let herself go, either. Sex was no longer uncomfortable, and she desperately wanted more from their lovemaking, but the intensity she needed wasn’t there. He held back, diminishing the pleasure they both could have had and thereby preserving that damned inner wall of his. She didn’t know how much longer she would be able to bear it, how much longer it would be before she began making excuses and turn away from him in the night. The situation was dire, she knew, when she was actually looking forward to having her period!

  She drove slowly, preoccupied with her thoughts and with watching for any sign of his truck out on the range somewhere. Like all ranchers, Reese paid no attention to roads; he simply drove across the land. The truck was a tool to him, not a prized and pampered status symbol. If it had been a Rolls he would have treated it the same, because it had no value beyond that of its worth as a working vehicle. So she knew the area where he was working, but that area covered a lot of ground and he could be anywhere in it. She didn’t see him anywhere, but fresh tire tracks scored the ground, and she simply followed them, carefully steering around the rougher ground that Reese had driven over without concern, because the station wagon was much lower than the truck and couldn’t negotiate such terrain.

  It took her almost forty-five minutes to find him. He’d parked the truck under a tree, partially shielding it from view. It was the chance glint off a strand of wire as he pulled it tight that caught her eye, and she eased the car across the range to him.

  He glanced up briefly as she approached but didn’t pause in his work. Her throat tightened. He’d removed his shirt and hung it over the side of the truck bed, and his muscled torso glistened with sweat. She’d known he was strong, realized from the first that his body made her mouth go dry with almost painful appreciation, but this was the first time she had seen those powerful muscles bunching and flexing like that. He moved with a fluid grace that made his strength that much more noticeable. His biceps and triceps bulged as he hammered a staple into the post, securing the new strand of wire.

  When he was finished he tossed the hammer