The Bridegroom

Lydia flinched, her gaze rising to collide with Gideon’s now. “You mustn’t do that!” she cried, aghast at the prospect. “Gideon, you mustn’t! This house, my aunts—”

“Damn this house,” Gideon growled, backing up now, but just far enough to take hold of Lydia’s shoulders and pull her to her feet. “You are not marrying a man you don’t love!”

At last, Lydia dredged up some pride. Lies hadn’t worked. Neither had the truth. Bravado was all that was left to her. “You can’t stop me,” she said fiercely.

She saw his eyes narrow, and his jawline harden.

“Yes, I can,” he ground out.

“How?” Lydia challenged.

And that was when he did the unthinkable.

He kissed her, and not gently, the way a friend might do. No, Gideon Yarbro kissed her hard, as a lover would, slamming his mouth down on hers—and instinctively, she parted her lips. Felt the kiss deepen in ways she’d only been able to imagine before that moment.

That dreadful, wonderful, life-altering moment.

Gideon drew back too soon, and Lydia stood there trembling, as shaken as if he’d taken her, actually made her his own, right there in the parlor, both of them standing up and fully clothed.

“It won’t be like that when he kisses you,” Gideon said, after a very long time. Then he let go of her shoulders, he turned, and he walked away. He opened the parlor doors and strode through to the foyer, then banged out of the house.

Lydia couldn’t move, not to follow, not to sit down, not even to collapse. She simply could not move.

Damn Gideon Yarbro, she thought. Damn him to the depths of perdition. He’d ruined everything—by being right.

Jacob Fitch would never kiss her the way Gideon had, never send thrills of terrible, spectacular need jolting through her like stray shards of lightning. No, never again would she feel what she had before, during and after Gideon’s mouth landed on hers. In some inexplicable way, it was as though he’d claimed her, conquered her so completely and so thoroughly that she could never belong to Jacob, or any other man, as long as she lived.

Gideon had aroused a consuming desire within Lydia, simply by kissing her, and simultaneously satisfied that desire. But—and this was the cruelest part of all—that sweet, brief, soul-drenching satisfaction had shown her what a man’s attentions—one certain man’s attentions—could be like.

He’d left her wanting more of what she could never have—and for that, she very nearly hated him.

The aunts and Helga rushed into the room, like a talcum-scented wind, pressing in around Lydia, so close she nearly flailed her arms at them, the way she would at a flock of frenzied, pecking crows.

“You look ghastly!” one of the aunts cried, sounding delighted.

“Do sit down,” begged the other.

“Glory be,” Helga exalted, throwing up her hands like someone who’d just found religion. “That man kissed you like a woman ought to be kissed!”

Lydia recovered enough to sweep all three women up in one scathing glance. “Were you peeking through the keyhole?” she demanded. It was as if another, stronger self had surged to the fore, pushed aside the old, beleaguered Lydia, taken over.

That self was a wanton hussy, mad enough to spit fire.

And not about to sit down, whether she looked “ghastly” or not.

“Helga was,” Mittie said righteously. “Millie and I would never do any such thing. It wouldn’t be genteel.”

“To hell with ‘genteel,’” Helga said joyously. “He might as well have laid you down and had you good and proper as to kiss you like that!”

Mittie and Millie gasped and put their hands to their mouths.

Even the wanton hussy was a little shocked.

“Helga!” Lydia erupted, her face on fire.

“Such talk,” Mittie clucked, shaking her head.

“Major Bentley Alexander Willmington the Third used to whisper naughty things in my ear,” Millie confessed, succumbing to a dreamy reverie, “while we were rocking on the porch swing of an evening. Papa would have had him horsewhipped if he’d known.”

“Millicent!” Mittie scolded.

Helga laughed out loud. “Glory be,” she repeated, turning to leave the room. “Glory be!”

“You don’t understand,” Lydia said, for the second time that afternoon. The wanton hussy had suddenly vanished, leaving the fearful, reluctant bride in her place, virginal and wobbly lipped and tearful. “Gideon accused me of—he left here in a rage—” She began to cry. “He’s never coming back.”

“You’re a damn fool if you think that,” Helga answered, from the doorway. “He’ll be back here, all right, and in plenty of time to put a stop to this wedding foolishness, too.”

“You didn’t see—he was furious—”

“I saw him,” Helga countered, more circumspectly now that the glory bes had subsided. “He nearly knocked me down, storming through this doorway like he did. No denying that he’s fighting mad, either. But he’ll be back just the same. You mark my words, Lydia Fairmont. He’ll be back.”

The prospect made Lydia feel both hope and fear, as hopelessly tangled as the mess of embroidery floss in the bottom of her sewing basket.

Mittie, now solicitous, patted her arm. “Has your headache returned, dear?” she asked. “You really do look dreadful. Perhaps you should lie down, and Helga will bring you your supper in bed—”

“I will not serve Miss Lydia’s supper in bed!” Helga shouted, already halfway to the kitchen, from the sound of her voice. “She’s not an invalid—so just forget that nonsense, all of you!”

Mittie, Millie and Lydia all looked at each other.

“I think Helga has grown a mite obstinate,” Mittie confided, wide-eyed.

“Papa would never have tolerated such insolence,” Millie observed, but her expression was fond as she gazed toward the space Helga had occupied in the parlor doorway.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Lydia snapped. “Have neither of you noticed, in all these years, that Helga not only manages the household, she manages us?”

“Perhaps we should send her packing,” Mittie said, tears forming in her eyes at the very idea.

“Show her the road,” Millie agreed, crying, too.

“She’s not going anywhere,” Lydia told her aunts, softening at their obvious dismay. “You’re not, either, and neither am I.”

Mittie sniffled. “We’re not?”

“No,” Lydia assured her, slipping an arm around each of her aunts’ shoulders.

No, echoed a voice deep within her heart, with sorrow and certainty. Because Gideon Yarbro or no Gideon Yarbro, tomorrow afternoon, at two o’clock sharp, you’re going to do your duty as a Fairmont and marry Jacob Fitch.

Lydia lifted her eyes to the Judge’s portrait, glaring down at her from above the fireplace.

Sure as sunrise, he was breathing.

THE FIRST THING GIDEON had to do was talk himself out of going back to the Golden Horseshoe Saloon and swilling whiskey—forget beer—until he stopped thinking about Lydia Fairmont.

The second thing was track down Jacob Fitch.

That was easier. He asked about Fitch on the street, and was directed to the First Territorial Bank, right on Main Street.

Still full of that strange fury Lydia had stirred in him, Gideon strode into that bank as though he meant to hold it up at gunpoint, and the few customers inside actually fled as he approached the counter.

The clerk, apparently alone in the place, looked as though he might drop right to the floor and cover his head with both hands.

Gideon slapped his palms down on the counter top. “I want to see Jacob Fitch,” he said. “Now.”

The clerk, a small man with a twitch under his right eye and a nose that wriggled like a rabbit’s, blinked behind his thick spectacles. “Well,” he said tremulously, “you can’t.”

“Why not?” Gideon demanded, not to be put off.

“Because he’s not here,” the clerk retorted, getting braver. “He’s at the tailor’s, being fitted for his wedding suit.”

“And which tailor would Mr. Jacob Fitch be patronizing?” Gideon asked.

“I don’t have to tell you that,” the clerk said.

Gideon reached over the counter, got the little man by his shirt front, and pulled him clear off his no doubt tiny feet. He didn’t normally handle people, at least not ones that were smaller than he was, but he was in a state and nothing would do him but finding Jacob Fitch. “Which tailor?” he repeated. Then, realizing the man couldn’t answer because he was being choked, Gideon slackened his grip just enough to allow the fellow to suck in some wind.

“Feinstein’s,” the clerk sputtered. “On Third Street.”

Gideon allowed the man to slide back to his feet. “Thank you,” he said moderately, and left the bank.

He found the tailoring establishment right where the clerk had said it would be. Mindful of the stir he’d caused in the bank—and regretting it a little—Gideon paused on the sidewalk out front to draw a deep, slow breath. He read and reread the golden script printed on the pristine display window—Arthur Feinstein, Purveyor of Fine Men’s Wear—even examined the three-piece suit gracing a faceless mannequin, as though he might be in the market for new duds.

When he thought he could behave himself, Gideon pushed open the door and went into the shop.

A little bell jingled overhead.

The place seemed deserted, a development that threatened Gideon’s carefully cultivated equanimity.

“Anybody home?” he called. You could take the boy out of Stone Creek, he reflected, but you couldn’t take Stone Creek out of the boy.

A bald head appeared between two curtains at the back of the store. “I’ll be with you right away, sir,” the man said, speaking clearly despite the row of pins glimmering between his lips.

Mr. Feinstein, no doubt. Purveyor of fine men’s wear.

“I’m looking for Jacob Fitch,” Gideon said, raising his voice a little.

Another head appeared beside Feinstein’s, also balding. The face beneath the pate was sin-ugly, and none too pleased at having the fitting interrupted.

“I’m Fitch,” the second man said. “Who are you and what do you want?”

Lydia, Gideon answered silently. I want Lydia.

“My name is Gideon Yarbro,” he said aloud, nodding to the tailor. “And I think you’d prefer it if we had this discussion in private.”

“Feinstein has been my tailor for years,” Fitch said. “I’ve got no secrets from him.”

Gideon did not remark on the oddness of that statement. “All right, then,” he said. “I want to talk to you about Lydia Fairmont.”

Fitch’s face broke into a broad and somewhat lecherous smile, which did nothing to improve Gideon’s mood. “My little bride,” he said. “The wedding is tomorrow.”

“The wedding,” Gideon said, amazed at his own audacity even as he spoke, “is postponed. Maybe even cancelled.”

Fitch stared at him, finally came out from behind the curtains. He was wearing a fancy suit, with the cuffs of the trousers pinned up, but no shirt. Whorls of thick hair covered his chest. “Is Lydia sick?” he asked.

“No,” Gideon said. “She just needs a little time to think.”

What was he doing? Had he gone crazy?

Lydia had told him, straight-out, that she meant to go ahead with the marriage. He had no earthly right, interfering this way.

And yet, she’d sent that letter.

Kept it all those years, and then mailed it.

That, he couldn’t ignore.

Fitch reddened, clearly displeased. Mr. Feinstein ducked back behind the curtains, looking as though he might swallow the pins in the process.

“Time to think?” Fitch thundered. “What is there to think about?”

“Well, sir,” Gideon said diplomatically, “she’s not sure she loves you.”

“What?”

“Things like this happen. Women get the jitters. What with the wedding night and all—”

“Who the hell are you?” Fitch shouted, knotting his banker’s fists at his sides, but not advancing.

A prudent choice, Gideon thought.

“I told you. My name is Gideon Yarbro.”

Fitch, still seething, drew both eyebrows together into one long, bushy streak of hair. “And what have you to do with Lydia?”

“I’m an old friend,” Gideon said.

Fitch glowered. “Before Almighty God, if you’ve tampered with her—”

“‘Tampered’ with her?” Gideon asked.

“You know damn well what I mean!”

Gideon was prepared to go to almost any length to prevent this wedding, but not quite so far as besmirching Lydia’s reputation. “No,” he said. “But I did kiss her this afternoon.”

“You kissed my fiancée? And she allowed that?” Now, Fitch looked as though he might blow a vessel, which would be an unfortunate solution to the whole problem.

“I can’t say as I gave her much opportunity to decide whether to allow it or not,” Gideon admitted affably. He’d said too much already, he knew that. Adding that Lydia had responded to his kiss, nearly melted under it, would be over the line. “She needs time, that’s all I’m saying. A week. A month. A year?”

Fitch practically spat his answer. “Until two o’clock tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “That’s how much time I’ll give her.”

With that, Lydia’s unlikely intended disappeared behind the curtains again. Short of going back there and hauling the man out by the scruff—and then doing what?—Gideon was out of ideas.

Except one, that is.

And the contingency plan had to do with Lydia herself, not Jacob Fitch.

CHAPTER THREE

LYDIA DID NOT SLEEP A WINK that night, and little wonder, with her wedding scheduled for the very next day and the memory of Gideon’s unexpected visit to plague her thoughts.

At the first crow of the neighbor’s rooster, Lydia arose from her bed, washed and dressed and replaited her hair, pinning the braid into a heavy knot at her nape.

Just the way Jacob liked it. She was to wear it just so once they were married, he’d declared on more than one occasion. Modesty befitted a banker’s wife.

Lydia stared miserably at her own reflection, pale in the mirror above her vanity table. Her eyes were hollow, the color of bruises, not violets, and her mouth pinched.

Gideon, she thought, knowing she was torturing herself and unable to stop, would prefer her hair down, tumbling in curls to her waist.

Behind her, the bedroom door opened.

Helga, who never knocked, appeared in the gap, looking troubled. She’d been so sure Gideon would return—now, it seemed, reality was setting in. “Will you be coming down for breakfast?” she asked, keeping her voice low so she wouldn’t wake the aunts, who shared a room across the hall from Lydia’s.

Lydia shook her head. If she tried to swallow so much as a morsel, she would surely gag.

Helga hesitated, then stepped into the room. Crossed to stand behind Lydia and lay a hand on her shoulder. Her gaze strayed to Nell’s wedding dress, hanging like a burial shroud from a hook on the inside of the wardrobe door, came back to Lydia’s wan face, reflected in the vanity mirror. “You don’t have to do this,” the housekeeper said awkwardly. “You mustn’t do this. Lydia, please don’t sacrifice yourself to save a lot of musty old keepsakes and dented silver—”

“Are the aunts ‘musty old keepsakes,’ Helga?” Lydia retorted quietly. “They won’t survive without the roof and walls of this house to shelter them. It’s their entire world.”

Helga gave a disgusted little snort, but her eyes were sad, and her mouth drooped at the corners. “They survived a war, Lydia,” she insisted. “They survived seeing their first home ransacked and then burned to the ground, losing the men they loved, traveling all the way out here to Arizona with the Judge and starting over from scratch. Their father pampered them, treated them like a pair of china figurines that would break if anyone breathed on them. Then Nell did the same, God rest her generous soul, and now you’re carrying on the tradition. Don’t you see, Lydia? No one ever gave Miss Mittie and Miss Millie a chance to show how strong they really are.”

“They were young when all those things happened,” Lydia countered, very softly. “The war and the rest of it, I mean.” She’d tried to imagine what the raid on the plantation back in Virginia must have been like—flames everywhere, consuming all but a few portraits, some jewelry, a small sterling vase that had been a gift from George and Martha Washington, presented to a Fairmont ancestor in appreciation for flour and dried beans sent to Valley Forge during that desperate winter—but she knew such trauma was beyond imagining. Mittie had suffered severe burns, saving the letters Captain Stanhope had written her after accepting a commission in the Army of the Potomac, and Millie had nearly been raped by one of the raiders. A former slave called Old Billy had intervened, according to Nell’s rare and whispered accounts—shared with Helga, not Lydia—and died for his chivalry, shot through the throat.

“Give them a chance,” Helga pleaded. “You’ll see what those old aunts of yours are made of, if you’ll just ask them how they’d truly feel about leaving here.”

Lydia considered the idea, and then shook her head. Mittie and Millie were old now, too old to change. For her sake, they might try to make the best of things, but it was simply too much to ask of them, so late in life.

Swallowing, she made herself meet Helga’s gaze, there in the mirror glass. “There’s been no word from Gideon, then?” she asked, tentatively and at considerable cost to her pride.

“Not yet,” Helga answered solemnly, but there was a faint glint of hope in her pale blue eyes. “Not just yet.”

“He won’t come,” Lydia said, almost whispering.

But he had come when he’d received the letter, hadn’t he?

And he’d kissed her.

“I think you’re wrong about that,” Helga replied, turning, starting for the door. “I’ll bring you some coffee and a roll. You have to eat something, Lydia—whatever happens today, you’ll need your strength.”

There was no point in arguing. Helga would do what Helga would do.

And Lydia would do what Lydia would do: pour the coffee out the window, and leave the roll on the sill for the birds. Because unless a miracle happened, and Lydia had never personally encountered one of those, she would be Jacob’s wife in a few hours—with all the attendant responsibilities, including the conjugal ones.

With that prospect ahead of her, food was out of the question.

“Thank you,” she murmured. “But I’d rather come down to the kitchen to eat, like everyone else.”

Helga nodded, resigned, and remained her usual salty self. “Just don’t go getting the idea I’m going to be waiting on you hand and foot like some servant,” the other woman warned, “because I’m not.”

Lydia laughed, in spite of all she would have to endure in the coming hours, days, months and years. Helga kept that huge house clean, and prepared three meals a day, but she didn’t wait on anybody unless they were about to be buried—or married.

When Helga had gone, Lydia forced some starch into her spine, sat up straight, and regarded her image directly.

“You have got to marry Jacob Fitch,” she told herself, “whether you want to or not. So stop whining about it and carry on.”

The short lecture strengthened Lydia; she rose from her seat in front of the vanity table, made up her bed as neatly as she would have done on any ordinary day, and approached Aunt Nell’s wedding dress, where it hung on her wardrobe door. Although yellowed in places, with brownish crinkles where it had been folded for so many years—said crinkles had thwarted even Helga’s efforts to press them away with an iron heated on the kitchen stove—the gown was still a confection of silk, hand-knotted German lace, seed pearls mellowed by age, and faded but intricately woven ivory ribbon in the bodice.

Regarding that remarkable dress, Lydia couldn’t help thinking about how different things had been the last time a bride donned it. Nell Fairmont had been even younger than Lydia was now—only sixteen—when she’d married Mr. Baker, a newspaper man twice her age, in a church ceremony with all the trimmings—flowers, a cake, an emerald-studded band for her finger. And on that sunlit day, so long ago, Nell had walked down the aisle on the Judge’s arm, wearing this very dress.

Nell had been a mere babe-in-arms, her one sibling, Lydia’s father, barely a year old, when the Judge had fled Virginia with his daughters and two orphaned grandchildren. Nell and Herbert’s mother, Louisa, had died only a few months after the war began; it was said she simply hadn’t been able to bear being separated from her husband, Andrew Fairmont, gone for a soldier. Andrew, Mittie and Millie’s younger brother, had been wounded early on, spent months in a Union hospital, and finally, after an exchange of prisoners, made his slow and painful way home, only to be told that Louisa had perished. He’d stood over her grave for hours, as Nell told the story, and then gone into an outbuilding and hanged himself from one of the rafters.

Nell had been raised in Phoenix, along with her brother, and she’d grown up strong and single-minded, a true child of the frontier. Herbert—nicknamed Johnny by his grandfather, aunts and sister—would one day become a doctor, marry, and sire Lydia. Johnny Fairmont, as the only male member of the family, other than the Judge of course, had been, in Helga’s readily offered opinion, “overindulged.”

Lydia did not recall her mother, who had died when she was very small.

Thinking of her aunt, missing her with an intensity that was almost physically painful, Lydia laid the fingertips of her right hand to the fragile lace of the skirt. “I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I, Aunt Nell?” she asked, very softly. “Making sure the aunts always have a home?”

There was, of course, no answer.

Nell Fairmont Baker had been a spirited woman, widowed young and childless, and bearing up admirably under her private disappointments. When she’d learned of Lydia’s father’s death, she’d traveled to Stone Creek immediately, and taken charge.

She’d always done whatever needed doing, Nell had. She’d prided herself on that. In the same circumstances, wouldn’t she have done her duty for the sake of the family and married Mr. Fitch, just as Lydia was about to do?

Or would she have cut her losses and run—loaded the aunts and Helga into a stagecoach or onto a train and found a place, found a way, to start over?

Lydia had been over this same ground so many times, she was weary of it. She turned from the dress and left her room, set on pretending to eat the roll and drink the coffee Helga was preparing, then gathering flowers from the garden. She would fill the parlor with colorful, fragrant blossoms, she decided, and wear Aunt Nell’s lovely dress, and play the part of a happy bride.

Even if it killed her.

GIDEON HAD PROWLED THE STREETS and alleys and saloons of that lively desert town for most of the night, asking questions about Jacob Fitch. And he liked what he’d heard in response even less than he’d liked the man himself.

Fitch was wealthy in the extreme—no surprise there—though his only evident extravagance was the automobile he’d special-ordered from Henry Ford’s factory. He lived in rooms above the bank with his elderly mother and had never, to anyone’s knowledge, been married or even kept public company with a woman, before Lydia.

Back in his room, watching the sun rise, Gideon went over the plan—the only one he’d been able to come up with—for the hundredth time. It was drastic, it was desperate, and if the rumors he’d gathered the night before had any validity at all, it was dangerous, too. Now that he knew Gideon intended to stop the ceremony any way he could, Fitch was allegedly trying to hire thugs to guard the doors at the Fairmont house.

Gideon had considered wiring Rowdy and Wyatt, asking for their help; he knew they’d ride hard for Phoenix if he did, without requiring an explanation beforehand. But they couldn’t possibly get there on time, not on horseback anyhow, and the train didn’t head south until 3:10 in the afternoon. The stagecoach routes had been cut to almost nothing, now that everybody traveled by rail, and it would be too slow anyhow.