Lessie_Bride of Utah Page 11

  “Business can wait. We’ve dealt with nothing but business for the past five days straight. Tonight, this is just about you and me.”

  Part of her wanted to laugh aloud, to boldly kiss him right here on the street where anyone and everyone could see.

  This beautiful man, whose heart was so much larger than even he understood, was hers.

  Would she be wiser to wait and address the proposed business changes until tomorrow? He might be far more willing to bend to her will, more eager to accommodate her wishes… or at least to listen.

  Wouldn’t he?

  If she insisted they speak of business first, she ran the risk of him assuming she’d lost interest in him… and if she wasn’t interested in being his loving wife, then he’d be less concerned about keeping her happy.

  No, this conversation needed to wait. But just until tomorrow.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When they finally arrived home, Richard wanted nothing more than to see his wife inside, but the horses needed to be dried, combed, their hooves cleaned, watered, fed.

  So he unlocked the house for her and urged her inside. “You go ahead, Sweetheart. Have a bath and make yourself comfortable. I’ll be along as quickly as I take care of the team.”

  If she felt the least bit nervous at all that would soon pass between them, she didn’t show it. In fact, she quickly kissed him on the mouth, stroked his cheek, and slipped inside.

  It took more self-mastery than he’d have thought to take the horses in and start the chores.

  Why had he ever thought he’d somehow found himself stuck with the less-sweet and pleasant of the identical sisters? He couldn’t say he knew Josie, his sister-in-law, at all, but he’d come to know much about Lessie, and the more he knew her, the more he loved her.

  Thoughts of his bride filled his mind as he rushed from chore to chore and when at last he’d completed all that must be done, he took the back stairs two at a time, slipped through the door, and locked it behind himself.

  The house was quiet. Lessie wasn’t anywhere downstairs, and he pictured her sitting at the dressing table in their bedroom, combing out her wet hair. He’d watched her brushing her hair in that very spot only once, as they’d spent more nights on the floor than in their bed.

  If he had his way, that would change.

  He didn’t care to spend more time in Big Ezra. He liked the comforts of home, and wanted to spoil Lessie with everything he could provide. Running water. Indoor plumbing. A coal furnace. Solid, sturdy furniture. A new gown, every day of the week. Soft, feminine, lacy undergarments.

  But the bathroom door was shut. No footfalls came from the second floor.

  He listened intently outside the bath. No sounds of water, no hint of movement. He knocked lightly. “Lessie?”

  Starkly reminded of the last time he’d stood outside this door, ready to eat his words… only to discover she’d relished a chance to soak in hot water, he wondered if he’d always find her baths took hours.

  He rapped again. “Lessie?” The door must not have been latched tightly because it slipped open. And there she was, lying in the tub, her head resting back against the edge upon a rolled towel.

  She must’ve fallen asleep before she’d washed her hair because her long, dark hair remained dry.

  Poor girl. Weariness from travel, from nights cut short by arising well before dawn and often retiring way too late, it all must have caught up with her. Not to mention the vigorous exercise of following miners all over camp and moving from building to building on her quest to help him.

  Love for his beautiful wife welled within him. Warm, precious, and new.

  He’d been falling in love with her nature, her strength, her resilience… so he really shouldn’t be surprised he found himself fully in love with her.

  Amazing, this chest-expanding sensation, so warm and unexpected.

  Is this what Aunt Anna-Lisa and Uncle Noah felt for one another? What his own parents had known?

  How much sweeter would it become, when fully reciprocated?

  To have Lessie look at him with unabashed affection, with her heart in her eyes… the blessed idea nearly knocked him to his knees.

  Just how would he ensure his bride fell in love with him, too?

  He hadn’t any idea. None at all.

  He really ought to wake her. Let her finish her bath and climb between the cool sheets and sleep. A more selfish man would wash her hair for her, hoping that highly intimate favor would naturally develop into much more.

  Either way, he couldn’t allow her to sleep in the tub in cooling water. She’d awake with a crick in her neck, pulled muscles, and a chill from sleeping in cold water.

  No. He certainly couldn’t allow her to sleep all night in the tub.

  So the only question remained: did he call to her to wake her, or did he approach the tub, perhaps kiss her awake?

  Which would his innocent bride find most appealing?

  Which might nudge her down the path of coming to love him in return?

  “Lessie.” Richard waited at the doorway, watching for any sign of her stirring. He’d wake her and allow her to finish her bath.

  Maybe, if he asked nicely, she’d allow him to wash her hair. If not… would she allow him to comb her hair?

  When she didn’t so much as stir, he knocked on the door frame. “Lessie, honey, wake up.”

  Even, slow, and deep breaths showed above the rim of the tub in the rise and fall of her shoulder. Her face, so relaxed in sleep, had become so very dear.

  Her features, so relaxed in sleep, had been one of his most highly focused points of study in the past many days. He found it difficult to believe so much fire and energy and passion hid behind such a childlike, gentle expression in sleep.

  “Lessie?” How much harder should he try? He shut the door, none too gently, then opened it right back up. Nothing. No response.

  Disappointment crowded in. So much for everything he had planned.

  Her need for rest trumped everything else.

  As his hopeful plans tiptoed out, he saw so clearly what he needed to do.

  He hurried to the bedroom, turned down the bed covers on her side, then back to the bathroom, to wake his bride, dry her off, see her dressed in a clean nightdress and into bed.

  How to do this? He couldn’t just pick her up out of the water. Nor could he hold a towel out to safeguard her sense of modesty, not both at the same time.

  Soapy water, barely transparent, covered her form. Tempting outlines showed in the waning daylight but not much else. But this was no longer a seduction, just the task of moving his bride into bed to sleep.

  He rolled up his sleeve, plunged a hand into the water and pulled the stopper from the drain. Water began swirling into the pipes.

  Lessie awoke suddenly, shrieked, and curled her arms and legs up as a screen.

  He wanted to laugh— or not. This woman was his wife. No harm in catching a glimpse of leg, bare knee… or more.

  “Richard!” Her eyes rounded with something far more aggressive than shock. “What are you doing?”

  “You fell asleep. I tried to wake you from the doorway, but you were too sound asleep.”

  “Did you knock?”

  “I did.”

  “Call my name?”

  “Five or six times. Loud, too. I even opened and shut the door, but you were out cold.”

  “Get me a towel.”

  He smiled, turning away. She’d warm up to him eventually, wouldn’t she? He opened a big, fresh towel, held it out like a sheet on the clothesline to block his view.

  Water splashed as she stood. It wasn’t too hard to imagine water sluicing off her form. He heard her step out on to the rug at the edge of the tub.

  “Any time now, Mr. Cannon.”

  He wrapped the toweling around her, finding his arms all twisted up in the cotton and sweet-smelling woman. He pressed a kiss to her cheek.

  Her posture slowly relaxed, and he could’ve sworn she nearly mel
ted against him. Might be weariness, but he hoped not.

  He needed a bath. Any husband with an ounce of decency wouldn’t press for affection his wife was too tired to give. Love for this little woman, his wife, seemed to overflow whatever container he had. It expanded, growing, made his heart feel like it’d grown two or three sizes in the past week.

  “Now what?” she whispered.

  “You take yourself off to bed, Mrs. Cannon.” More than he wanted— needed— physical affection from his wife, he needed her to fall in love with him. And somehow, he figured marital intimacy and love, to a female’s way of thinking, were not one in the same.

  He’d exercise patience. A whole darn lot of it. Because he anticipated the tender expressions of love within their marriage would be a whole lot sweeter, far more rewarding, once she’d come to love him, too.

  She sighed. “You’ll hurry?”

  His heart tripped, quick to find its rhythm once more. “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know if I can sleep without you.”

  She clung to the towel, wrapped about her more like a blanket than the sarong-style towel wrap he’d seen her in on their wedding night. She backed out of the bathroom, holding his gaze.

  It took far more strength than he thought he had on the tail end of a hard week to keep from reaching for her.

  “I’ll hurry.”

  Before he so much as heard her feet patter up the stairs to the second floor, he’d stopped the tub, turned the faucet to pour fresh, hot water, and had pulled off his boots.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Lessie sat at her dressing table, combing through her hair. She would have liked to have washed it. But part of her wasn’t ready to allow her husband the intimacy of seeing her fully.

  Thank goodness she’d worn a sunbonnet all week to keep the blowing dust and dirt off her hair. The last long rays of daylight streamed through the sheers at the windows, standing open several inches to allow the heat of the day out.

  In this light, her hair didn’t look so bad. Not as shiny, perhaps, as it would if freshly washed and dried, but… she lifted a lock to her nose. Did she smell of mining camp?

  Her cheeks flamed at the memory of waking to find him in the bathroom, hand inches from her floating bare toes. Her only thought had been that she was completely naked.

  And he’d no doubt glimpsed… everything.

  He had to be appalled at her reaction. What married woman flinched when her husband drew near? She supposed those who had good reason, but not she.

  He’d shown her time and again that every touch was gentle.

  The bedroom door opened and her husband came in, a towel slung low about his hips. He’d washed his hair, finger-combed it, but hadn’t taken time to shave.

  “I like your beard.” The words tumbled out before she realized she’d thought them.

  His quick smile assured her she hadn’t said the wrong thing. “I might keep it around a while, if you like it.”

  “I do.”

  He palmed his jaw, his cheek. “It’s long enough not to abrade your tender skin.”

  That sentiment gave rise to goose flesh along her arms. Suddenly, her worn, threadbare, yellowed night gown seemed impossibly thin.

  He must have sensed her discomfort with his gaze on her nightgown, though it came to neck and wrist and ankle, because he approached from behind and met her gaze in the oval glass. Two big, sturdy hands settled on her shoulders.

  “I want to brush your hair.”

  Simple enough request. This was easy to allow him. How many times had Josie brushed through Lessie’s hair, and she returned the favor for her sister?

  She reached for the intricately carved bone handle brush resting on the vanity— a gift, she assumed, from her husband. It’d been here the day he’d brought her home after the wedding. But his hand slid over hers, claiming the implement.

  His warm chest pressed against her back, more than he probably needed to, but she didn’t mind. All those nights sleeping curled up, her back pressed against his chest made incidental touches like this easy to manage. Familiar, even.

  Richard lifted the mass of her hair with his left hand and took the brush in his right. Slow, nearly reverent strokes as he started at the ends.

  “How do you know how to do this?” she asked, watching his expression in the mirror.

  “Brushing? It’s not hard.”

  “But you start at the ends. How do you know how to do this? If you grew up with only Adam, I don’t understand…”

  He smiled. White, even, strong teeth stood out in stark relief to his more heavily tanned face after days of sunshine outdoors. “I have an aunt. I remember my mother.”

  “You’re an observant man, Richard Cannon.”

  “Perhaps.” Apparently satisfied he’d untangled the ends of her hair, he let it fall, then worked the brush through from the midpoint near her shoulders. Every stroke of the brush down her back seemed to linger. Delicious sensations tickled along her scalp where the brush tugged.

  When Josie had brushed Lessie’s hair, it had never felt like this.

  Sitting on the low bench as she was, Richard bent at the waist with nearly every stroke of the brush, bringing his nose too near her hair. He paused, lingered, his nose above her ear.

  “I should have washed my hair.”

  “Nonsense. You smell like sunshine and wildflowers, like my wife.”

  He moved her hair aside from her neck, not unlike the way he might lift a velvet curtain back from a window. He pressed his lips to her nape.

  The warm, intimate gesture brought a flush of heat straight from the vicinity of her middle, straight up to tinge her cheeks. The blush, visible in the beveled mirror, made her tummy tingle. The sight of her husband’s dark head, bent so near her own, his lips still pressed to her neck in a kiss did odd things to her composure.

  She shivered, though far from cold.

  As if he hadn’t noticed, he slowly straightened and turned his ministrations to brushing her hair from the root. He began in the center back with slow, even strokes clear to the tips. Each section of hair seemed to receive more than fifteen or twenty passes of the brush before he moved on to the next section.

  He lingered over the chore as if he found it pleasing. She watched his expression in the glass, marveling at how very relaxed he was. The tight lines crinkling about his eyes and mouth, ever-present at the mines, had disappeared.

  Muscles played beneath the comparatively pale skin of his chest and arms. She’d not seen him working outside without a shirt, so the difference in skin color shouldn’t surprise her, but it did. She’d expected him to be the same golden brown all over.

  She pulled her lower lip between her teeth to keep from laughing at her uninformed assumptions. He’d know just how innocent she was.

  By the time he worked his way around to her right shoulder, gently working the bristles through, over her ear and shoulder, she’d never felt so relaxed. Not even in the bathtub when she’d fallen asleep so easily.

  When he finished twenty lazy strokes on her right side, he hooked a finger in her hair and tucked it behind her ear. He bent and kissed her temple, then picked up at the back again, to slowly make his way toward her left ear.

  “You’re most accomplished at brushing a woman’s hair.” She couldn’t help but compliment him. Maybe he’d brush her hair again sometime.

  She liked it.

  A lot.

  “Not bad for a first try, then?”

  She heard the smile in his voice and that begged her to look up, watch him closely.

  “Not bad. Not at all.”

  Sounds from the outside world filtered in through the open window, riding the cooling evening breeze. Birdsong. The barking of a dog. A woman’s voice, apparently calling little ones in from play.

  Pedestrian, homey sounds. Music of her idyllic life.

  In time, Richard finished with her hair, the most lovely experience and one she hated to see come to an end.

  He gathered
the entirety of her hair in his hands, smoothed the length, and began braiding.

  “You know how to braid, too?” Had this man an unlimited store of surprises?

  “It’s not hard. I’ve watched a time or two, and braided ropes together for use when a stouter line is required.”

  “You continually amaze me.”

  He finished braiding, held the end and offered a palm, apparently seeking a ribbon.

  She didn’t have one.

  Not even a bit of twine.

  She searched the vanity top. Nothing.

  “It’ll stay in, mostly.” She turned on the stool, prepared to have him release her, but he didn’t. The heavy braid swept over her shoulder.

  To her surprise, he bent to one knee, opened one of the small drawers at her back, and came up with a length of ribbon. He wrapped the center of the sky blue satin around the end of her braid twice before securing it with a bow.

  But he didn’t release her hair. Instead, he brought the ends to his lips and teased them over his lips.

  She wanted to ask why the vanity was stocked with feminine frippery, but his gaze heated, locked on hers. She sucked in a deep breath and still dizziness threatened.

  Such intensity on Richard Cannon’s face was a thing of raw beauty. In this moment, he saw nothing but her, thought of nothing else, worried about nothing else.

  To be the sole focus of this man’s attention was quite possibly the most unnerving experience of her life. Far more than the jolt of nervous energy when fleeing a burning factory. Far more than the moment they met and she’d witnessed a sampling of his displeasure.

  Perhaps Richard brought this intensity with him into everything he did.

  She couldn’t help but revel in the heat of his attention.

  And remember what he’d said to her before they left camp. “Just fair warning, wife. When we return home to Ogden City, things between us will change. It’s time.”

  Whatever the mysteries that awaited her, she found she trusted her husband. Not sure exactly when that had occurred, or how, she lifted a finger and touched the beard on his jaw. She trailed a finger through the hair that had been bristly just days earlier but now had softened.