The Marriage Knot

Hannah stifled a little gasp. The gesture reminded her so much of Ezra. It was so... so... proprietary. No! Not proprietary, she corrected herself. It was presumptive. It was rude and arrogant. This wasn’t his home, after all.

Not yet.

Not ever!

“I was just having tea in the back parlor, Sheriff.” Hannah turned on her heel, abruptly walking away from him. If he wanted to converse, he could damn well follow her. If not, he could damn well leave.

With her stiff skirts swishing down the hallway, she couldn’t hear his footsteps behind her, but when she sat and rather imperiously picked up her cup of tea, Delaney was right there. Close by.

“Have a seat, Sheriff.” Hannah gestured rather grandly to a chair. She was, after all, the duchess of this domain, and she intended to remain so. “Would you care for some tea?”

He sat, said nothing. As before in the vestibule, his gaze slowly encompassed the room, and then it settled, frankly, perhaps even boldly, on Hannah.

Her heart quickened. Those eyes—Delaney’s eyes—were the most stunning shade of hazel she’d ever seen. An amazing blend of gold and brown and green. Like sunlight dappling elm trees in October. Like autumn itself. The essence of the season. Quite, quite beautiful.

She had to clear her throat before she was able to speak.

“Would you care for a cup of tea, Delaney? Or perhaps you’d prefer coffee? Lemonade?”

She sounded less like a duchess now than a dizzy dolt of a girl, Hannah thought. This wasn’t like her at all.

Then, when the sheriff replied, “No, thanks”, for a second Hannah wasn’t quite sure what it was that he was so politely declining. This was no time to get bumble-brained, for heaven’s sake. If there was ever an occasion when she needed to keep her wits—every blasted one of them—about her, it was now.

She remembered then it was tea or coffee or lemonade that Delaney didn’t want. Fine. Just what, then, did he want?

He leaned forward a little then, his elbows on his knees and a serious, quite sober expression on his face while a keen light played in his lovely, autumn-colored eyes.

“About the house, Mrs. Dancer...”

The house! Hannah stood—snapped to her feet, actually—and at the same time slapped her teacup onto its saucer so hard that the little plate broke in two. The halves landed at Delaney’s feet just as he was rising. He had barely stood straight before she lit into him.

“The house! It’s mine, Mr. Delaney. And I’ll thank you to get out of it. Now.”

“If you’ll just listen...”

“No. I won’t listen. Get out.”

“But...”

“Get. Out.”

He might as well have been trying to have a conversation with a hornet, Delaney thought. Hannah Dancer was stinging mad and too busy buzzing to listen to a word he had to say. How the hell was he supposed to resolve this business if she wouldn’t talk to him? But rather than shout her down, which he felt sorely tempted to do, he decided to take her advice and get out.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

Her reply was a very undignified snort, which Delaney took to mean that he’d be even less welcome then than he was right now.

In his house, goddammit.

Delaney didn’t go to the Longhorn that night after he’d made his evening rounds. A few beers and an hour or two with Ria Flowers held little appeal for him now when he needed a clear head to sort out this house business.

“Talk to her,” Abel Fairfax had said.

Talk to her. Good God, he’d have to rope her and gag her to do that, he supposed. He’d seen a lot of facets of Hannah Dancer since his arrival in Newton. He’d seen her friendly and polite. Cool and distant. He’d seen her shocked and baffled and sad. But this was the first time he’d seen her mad. What a sight that had been. There was fire in her eyes, a lively blue-green flame, and he swore her hair had turned a deeper, fiery shade of red.

But beautiful as Hannah had been, Delaney didn’t particularly want to see that colorful anger again. Not aimed in his direction, that was for sure. And especially when he hadn’t done a single thing to deserve it.

Not yet, anyway.

Chapter Five

For the next few days there was enough excitement in Newton that Delaney didn’t have time to think about the Dancer house, much less the angry, beautiful woman who resided there.

Seth Akins, who farmed a little piece of land just north of town, apparently dived headfirst into a bottle of whiskey and climbed out drunk as a skunk and meaner than sin. When Mrs. Akins protested, he blackened both of her eyes, then booted her out of their house, locked the doors and windows, and told her he’d shoot their two boys if she tried to get back in.

The woman limped into town, and once Delaney got her calmed down and settled in at Doc Soames’s, he headed out to the Akins place alone. Ordinarily he would’ve deputized a couple of men and broken into the Akins’ house in a matter of minutes, subdued the drunk, and been done with it. But with two innocent youngsters held hostage, Delaney decided to do this job alone. He didn’t want to chance the misguided heroics of any trigger-happy, grandstanding deputies.

It took him six hours of yelling, arguing, and cajoling through the bolted front door before he convinced Seth to let the little boys go. Then, after seeing that the children got back to their mother all right, it took Delaney an entire night of through-the-door arguing to keep Seth from taking his own life.

If his right hand had been in working order, he could easily have tapped out a window, taken a bead on Seth and shot his weapon out of his hand. But, relegated to his damn shotgun, all Delaney could do was wait the man out. He didn’t know which was worse—men trying to kill themselves or him.

Finally, not long after sunrise, the fool succumbed to the effects of too much liquor and too little sleep, and Delaney was able to break through a window and take away Seth’s Navy Colt, his old buffalo gun, and Bowie knife.

When he got back to town, with Seth passed out in the back of the Akins’ buckboard, Mrs. Akins came flying out of the doctor’s office. The woman took one look in the back of the wagon, then screamed at Delaney.

“You killed my Seth. You killed him.”

“Now just hold on, Mrs. Akins,” Delaney muttered as he climbed down from the driver’s seat. “Seth’s just—”

She didn’t let him finish. The woman called him a bastard, a son of a bitch, and half a dozen other names in a single breath, and then her hand flattened across his cheek with a resounding smack while her foot came down hard on his boot.

The wiry little woman probably would have done a considerable amount of damage if her husband hadn’t chosen that particular moment to sit up, inquire as to his whereabouts, and then throw up all over himself and the wagon bed.

“Now look what you’ve done, Sheriff,” the Akins woman snapped, glaring at Delaney before she hitched up her skirts and clambered up into the wagon bed.

“Yes, ma’am.” Delaney sighed. “Seth’ll be all right once the whiskey’s out of his system. If I were you, I’d keep him away from the stuff from now on.”

Mrs. Akins sniffed with wifely indignation, then turned her entire attention as well as her sharp tongue on her sick husband.

Delaney should’ve been used to being unappreciated by now after so many years in this thankless business, but the Akins woman had taken him completely by surprise. He cursed himself for feeling so churlishly disappointed. Then, just as he was turning away from the buckboard, he thought he caught a glimpse of black silk and bright red hair on the far side of the street. His heart seized up for a moment, then settled back with a distinct thump.

Just what he needed right now, Delaney told himself. One more angry female to give him a tonguelashing, a crack across the face and a kick in the shin, just for good measure.

Well, not today, by God.

He strode back to his office and slammed the door behind him. Hard.

Hannah shrank back against the clapboards of the emporium, trying her best to blend in with the shadows and the dark paint. She had ventured into town, believing Florence Green when the young woman informed her that the sheriff was away, occupied with a disturbance at the Akins farm.

“Imagine the awesome responsibility of talking a person out of committing suicide,” the schoolteacher had said before adding a long, warm, and perhaps even infatuated sigh.

Hannah had simply sniffed at that. Awesome responsibility, indeed. Just where was almighty Delaney when her Ezra was putting a pistol to his head? she wanted to ask. Indignant as she was, however, Hannah was happy to hear she would be able to go into town for some notions without having to walk past the steady gaze of those autumn-colored eyes or to chance a confrontation with the man who was trying to take her house away.

She had purchased black silk thread and four yards of black lace at the emporium. She hadn’t quite decided yet whether or not to continue wearing her mourning clothes, but if she did, she needed to mend her petticoat. A bolt of green-and-white gabardine caught her eye the minute she walked into the store, and she nearly passed over the black notions for the bright checked fabric.

It didn’t seem right, however, putting her mourning aside so soon even though she knew that Ezra wouldn’t disapprove. So Hannah paid for the black thread and lace, tucked them in her reticule, and walked outside in time to see Mrs. Akins strike Delaney a vicious blow across the cheek. The sound of the slap seemed to echo all along Main Street.

Hannah’s hand flew up to her own cheek as if the blow had landed there. She wanted to cry out or race to the sheriff’s aid, but instead she bit her lip and stepped back into the shadows from where she watched Delaney turn his back on the irate woman.

My God, Hannah thought. What man would dare to do what the Akins woman had just done, considering Delaney’s reputation? Why, the fool would be lying face down in the street in the blink of an eye, bleeding into the dust. And why the devil would Mrs. Akins strike the man who’d obviously just saved her husband’s sorry life?

She watched the tall man stiffen with suppressed anger and then stalk back to his office. She felt the concussion from the slamming door.

Hannah stood there, her breath shallow and her heart fluttering. Delaney was her enemy, wasn’t he? He was a threat to her very existence. It didn’t make any sense at all—what she was feeling right now—what she was fighting to keep from feeling. Sympathy welled up in her throat, nearly choking her, and it was all Hannah could do not to pick up her skirts, fly across the street, burst through that slammed door, and lay a cool, soft band to his hot, stinging cheek.

“You must be suffering a sunstroke, Hannah Dancer,” she muttered just under her breath, “to even consider setting foot inside the jailhouse. Good Lord! Just go on home. Home. Where you belong.”

At supper that evening, the conversation among her boarders kept coming back to the events of the day. Everyone, it seemed, had heard a different version of the Akins affair.

Abel Fairfax and Henry Allen hadn’t witnessed the confrontation, but both were certain they had heard that the sheriff had caught Mrs. Akins by the wrist before she delivered the alleged blow. Miss Green had been told by the librarian that the Akins woman had not only slapped Delaney across the face and stomped his foot, but had launched a knee into... well... the region wasn’t named, but merely alluded to with a brisk cluck of her tongue and a knowing loft of her eyes.

Hannah, who had witnessed the confrontation, kept silent, doing her best to concentrate on the roast chicken and buttered peas on her plate. But at every reference to that awful slap, she could feel a slight constriction in her throat that had nothing to do with Nancy’s overcooked fowl or undercooked vegetables.

It shouldn’t have bothered her the way it had—that shocking blow. Heaven knew she’d been tempted to slap Delaney herself that day he came to discuss the disposition of the house. And if he ever had nerve enough to return, she’d probably have to keep her hands tucked tightly in her pockets in restraint.

Today’s incident shouldn’t have affected her at all, but Hannah reminded herself she’d have felt the same sympathy for a stricken dog or cat. The tide of emotion that had swept through her meant nothing, really. It wasn’t personal. Not in the least. Why, if Delaney had been a lowly beast—and who was to say the man wasn’t?—she would have felt a similar, perhaps even a stronger, onrush of compassion.

All of a sudden Hannah realized her dining companions had fallen silent. She looked up from her plate to find them all staring at her rather expectantly.

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