Eileen Wilks – Luke's Promise (страница 4)

“You have a flight to catch? I guess you could drop me at Linda’s—her place is on the way. Or I can call someone from the airport to come get me. But maybe we could talk about Fine Dandy first?”

“No, Maggie, I don’t have a flight to catch. We do. For Las Vegas.”

Her eyes went huge, and her mouth parted—but no words came out. Satisfied, he started the engine.

The driveway was a long, concrete yawn leading to an equally boring street. Expensive—but boring. The houses here had grounds, not yards, and they were cared for by professionals. A three-man crew was stringing Christmas lights in the naked branches of several live oaks at one home.

Automatically Luke’s gaze flickered and veered away.

He hated winter, hated the empty trees and sky, the creeping gray defeat of the season. Christmas was a hurdle to be leaped, the red-and-green mania that swept the world every December a trial to be endured before he could settle in to wait for the promise of spring.

“Okay, Luke,” Maggie said abruptly. “It was a good joke. But enough is enough. You don’t want to marry me.”

“I don’t?”

“I suppose I’m not the last woman you’d want to marry, but there must be a hundred or two you’d prefer. They can’t have all turned you down already.”

“I haven’t asked anyone else.”

Silence. They pulled to a stop at the light and waited for the light to change, and she didn’t say a word—but he could almost hear her scrambling to pull her scattered thoughts together. He decided to help her out. “You know why I have to marry someone, the quicker the better, don’t you? Jacob must have told you about Ada when he proposed.”

“Well—well, yes, he did.” She shook her head. “This is so weird. In twenty-seven years I’ve collected exactly zero proposals of marriage, then last week Jacob…and now you…and neither one of you—you’re both friends!” Her breath huffed out. “This is just so weird.”

That was one word for it. Luke did take some satisfaction from hearing that Maggie thought of Jacob as a friend. “This proposing business comes as a shock to me, too.”

Two weeks ago, if anyone had suggested to Luke that he would ever dabble in matrimony, he would have laughed. But two weeks ago, he hadn’t known about Ada.

People outside the family didn’t understand. To them, Ada was just a servant—first his father’s housekeeper, now Jacob’s. But to the West brothers, she was much more. She was the one woman they all loved, the one constant in their lives. No matter who else had come and gone—and there had been one hell of a lot of comings and goings—Ada had always been there for them.

And now she was dying. Or she would be, if she didn’t continue the experimental treatments Jacob had arranged—the incredibly expensive, near-miraculous treatments at a Swiss research center. The only way to save her was for the brothers to do what they’d each sworn never to do.

They each had to marry. And fast.

Luke had turned onto the ramp to the Interstate before Maggie spoke again. “Jacob did tell me about Ada’s illness. And I honor you and your brothers for wanting to take care of her. That’s wonderful. But I don’t understand why—”

“You know the way my father left his estate tied up.” He stamped on the gas harder than necessary. His father might be five years’ dead, but he still had the power to make Luke want to be somewhere, anywhere, other than where he was. “Everyone does. I’ve seen articles about the trust in the New York Times, for God’s sake.”

“Yes, I know about the trust. Your father had some very peculiar views about marriage, Luke.”

His grin flickered to life. “Tell me about it.” After seven marriages to six women—he’d married and divorced Luke’s mother twice—any other man might have been a little sour on the institution. Not Randolph West. He’d been enthusiastically planning his eighth wedding when a heart attack had ended his participation in the matrimonial sweepstakes.

“What I don’t understand is why you have to get married.”

“I hadn’t planned on it.” But life was forcing some changes in his plans. He’d sure as hell never intended to marry. He didn’t need his inheritance, didn’t want it. The ranch was his. He’d worked hard to build it and his reputation as a rider and a trainer. What he needed a lot more than money was a good rider, someone to handle some of the competitions where the horses gained both experience and the attention of potential buyers. He was getting stretched pretty thin.

He glanced at the woman beside him. Maggie was a damned fine rider. Maybe after their marriage ended…no, he thought, shaking off the thought. He was going to do his damnedest to make sure they came out of this friends. That was enough to hope for. “Even Jacob can’t pay for Ada’s treatments by himself,” he said.

“I know that. But…Luke, I know you don’t like talking about it, but you were married at one time. Doesn’t that fulfill the conditions of the will as far as you’re concerned? Or is there some stipulation about how long the marriage has to last?”

His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. “No.” Meaning no to both questions, no to the memories. No to the whole, sorry subject.

She didn’t say anything, but she watched him expectantly, her hazel eyes solemn.

Dammit. This was the reason—one of the reasons—he’d always kept things light with Maggie. Casual friends, some teasing, a little flirting. No touching, no dating, no real come-ons. Not many people even knew about Pam, but Maggie did. She was Pam’s cousin. They’d roomed together in college. She’d been at the hospital that night…

Only he hadn’t always kept things light, had he?

“My father might have been slightly nuts on the subject of marriage,” he said, “but he wasn’t a hypocrite. His will doesn’t stipulate how long our marriages have to last, but all three of us have to be married when we petition to have the trust dissolved and stay married until it is. Pam and I divorced nearly ten years ago. Our brief, unlamented union doesn’t count.”

“Oh.” The hand without the cast started pleating the fabric of her T-shirt. “I see why you have to marry, then. But…I’m sorry, but that isn’t a reason for me to get married. There must be a thousand women right here in Dallas who would gladly take you on. And if we include the rest of Texas, why, the number would get sky-high.” She smiled at him hopefully.

“Thanks,” he said dryly. “But there certainly aren’t a thousand women I’m willing to marry.”

“But why me?”

He glanced at her, surprised. “Because I know you. If we agree on terms, I won’t have to worry about you deciding you want more and stirring up trouble trying to get it. This marriage…” He laughed, short and hard. “God, my throat tries to close up when I say the word. You know that about me, know that there’s no point in expecting too much, and there’s another reason to ask you. I can’t think of much worse than to be legally tied to a woman who thinks she’s in love with me.”

“Your ego’s showing.”

He shrugged. He knew himself. And he knew women. “With you…we can make things come out even, you and me. I need to get the trust dissolved. You need Dandy. Besides…” He grinned. “I like you.”

“Luke.” She sighed. “I like you, too. That’s part of the problem. We’re friends. I don’t want to mess with that.”

“We already did.” He didn’t look at her. “About a week before Christmas last year, we messed things up pretty thoroughly.”

“Oh, that!” Her breezy voice dismissed it. “That was a mistake, of course. A mutual mistake. We were both a little tipsy, a little emotional. But we’re adults, so we admitted we’d been a pair of prize idiots and put it behind us.”

No, he thought. They hadn’t put it behind them. They’d pretended it never happened. That was how she’d wanted to play it—how she still wanted to play it, obviously, and if he had some ideas about changing that, they could wait. “You’re right,” he said mildly. “We’re friends. I don’t want to lose that.”

“Okay, then.” She beamed at him like a teacher whose slowest student has finally given the correct answer. “We don’t want to risk our friendship on something as—as uncertain as marriage. Even a businesslike marriage can get sticky.”

She said the right things, said them with such matter-of-fact good humor that he might have believed her…if her hands hadn’t stretched the hem of her T-shirt all out of shape with their nervous pleating and unpleating. Or if he hadn’t remembered all too well the look in her eyes when he’d climbed out of her bed, given her a kiss and walked out the door.

She would probably try to climb out of the truck right here on the Interstate if he let on that he knew he’d hurt her. “I can’t argue with you about marriage being an uncertain business.”

“Exactly.”

“But it’s uncertain because people go into it with a lot of unrealistic expectations. We’ll make sure we’re both clear on what we want and expect from our deal. No emotions, no complications.”

“Luke…I’m sorry, but I don’t want to marry you.”

“But you do want Fine Dandy. And you want to continue to compete. I know you’d rather have a marriage based on the good stuff,” he said gently. “You deserve it—flowers and pretty words, moonlight and promises. Romance.”