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CHAPTERFOUR
To MyLong-Lost Bride,
I dreamed of you last night. Three years have passed, and yet still, Idream of you. Your scent surrounded me, consumed me, made me believe for just one short instant that you lay beside me. Icould hear your voice, shy and yet edged with a woman’s passion. Icould see your eyes, as dark as the night sky, filled first with laughter and then with warmth and finally with a love I’ve never seen before... or since. Does it sound trite to say your skin was like satin? Your hair a silken waterfall that streamed over us like golden sunshine in a moonlitroom?
Have you any idea how you linger in my mind? How, until I hold you in my arms again, I’ll never know peace? Have you any idea how many nights I’ve awoken, desperate for one last touch, one final word? Desperate for the completion no other woman can provide? You haunt me, my love. You steal my soul and make me long for the impossible. Whenever I look at a woman, all I see are the ways she doesn’t compare toyou.
I love you, sweet wife. My Forever Love. There will never be anyone butyou.
Late afternoon sunshine slanted across the Colorado landscape and settled on a structure as hard and rough as the man besideher.
“This is your home?” Shayne asked.
“No,” Chaz corrected in a tone curiously void of expression. “This is my house. It’s your job to turn it into a home.”
Shayne studied the sweeping lines of the huge ranch house with ill-concealed apprehension. Structurally, it needed work. The porch steps sagged and the roof had been patched more than once. The clapboard siding hadn’t seen fresh paint in years and the overflowing gutters looked like they provided hearth and home for any number of woodland creatures. The grounds surrounding the house weren’t any better. The patch of earth that might have been a garden long ago was unkempt and gasping beneath dead weeds and thatch. But that particular project could wait until spring.
Assuming she was still here come spring.
She touched her belly with a tentative hand. Had Chaz’s child taken root from their one explosive encounter? In a few short weeks she’d know. In the meantime, she could onlyhope.
“Tell me what you’d like done.”
“Nothing out here. I’ll take care of that part. Your skills are needed inside.”
Shayne eyed the warped front door. If the inside was as bad as the exterior, she was in deep, deep trouble. She took a steadying breath. She could do this. If she wanted to build a life with Chaz, she would damn well find a way to whip this slapped-together concoction of wood and nails and pasteboard into ahome.
“Show me,” she replied.
He led the way, climbing the steps and forcing the door inward with his shoulder. Shayne followed. She hesitated on the threshold, then stepped boldly across, not held in her husband's arms as a newlywed might expect, but trailing behind, about as welcome as a barefoot guest arriving at a black-tie-and-tails dinner party.
Any bride-like feelings she might have harbored vanished with that single step. For the first time she wondered why creating a home was so important to Chaz. Why did he need a wife, when an interior decorator would have done just as well? She struggled to recall what he’d told her. Not much. And yet, it had seemed so important tohim.
Important enough to enter into a marriage he clearly didn’twant.
A short, grizzled cowpoke appeared from the bowels of the house. “Boss, we got trouble and more trouble.”
Chaz sighed. “Now why doesn’t that surprise me?” He inclined his head in her direction. “Shayne, this is my foreman, Penny. Penny, my wife.”
The foreman ran a hand over his stubbled jaw, studying her with open curiosity. “Maybe she oughta take door number one.”
“Door number? Aw, hell. What’s behind door number one, old man? Or should I say who?”
“The Donna woman’s in your office. Gave her that room since I figured she wouldn’t do too much poking around behind your back. Can’t see her riffling through your desk on the sly, can you?”
“Not really. And behind door number two?”
“Mojo.”
This time Chaz’s curse was a bit more virulent. “What’s his problem now?”
Penny drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t much. But what little he possessed was all attitude. “He heard you went and got yourself hitched.”
“Heard it from you, no doubt, since you’re the only one I told.”
“Be that as it may, he got hisself in a real snit over it. If you want, I’ll get Jumbo to deal with him. Jes’ don’t ask the boys to go up against the Donna woman. She scares ’em spitless.”
“But not you, right?”
