Danielle could think of but one negative aspect to their pilgrimage. She had fallen hopelessly in love with Cody Walker, and there wasn't a single thing she could do to keep him from walking out of her life in less than five days. As impenetrable as the jail in which she had been so recently imprisoned, Danielle's heart was held captive in a cage of unalterable circumstance.
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The highlight of their visit to South Pass was the street dance to be held that night. Danielle chided herself for being more excited than she should be at the prospect of dancing beneath the stars with a man who was more committed to his old beat-up guitar than to her. Having agreed to meet him on the boardwalk in front of the general store after dinner, she hoped to avoid giving the girls any more ammunition with which to plot their parents' wedded bliss.
“You're not Hayley Mills, and this isn't
The Parent Trap
,” Danielle admonished her daughter as they both made preparation for the dance. “I suppose you thought it was funny to lock us in that jail cell, but it wasn't. It was just embarrassing. I felt like the last old maid on the face of the earth in desperate need of her daughter's help to catch a man.”
“No way, Mom,” Lynn countered with a frank appraisal. “You look better than I've ever seen you. Honest.”
Danielle was disarmed by the compliment. Without Scott's constant zingers about her fading looks and lack of marketable skills, she had in fact been feeling rather pretty lately. Something about a handsome man stealing kisses at every turn was doing wonders for her tenuous self-esteem.
Sternly she reminded herself that this was a fleeting thing. In less than a week Cody Walker and his lovable little girl were going to ride out of her life without so much as a backward glance. Danielle was determined not to let him, or anyone else for that matter, see a single tear from the buckets she was certain to shed. Refusing to let the thought ruin her night, Danielle told herself that there was sure to be time enough for heartache later. Tonight she was going to dance all night with the best-looking man in the country. And she was going to enjoy every second of it.
By the time Lynn and her mother arrived in front of the General Store, the boardwalk was lined with an eager array of young cowboys hoping to coax some pretty girl in an old-fashioned pinafore into a dance. A chubby fellow with a microphone and a ten-gallon hat advanced the cause by instructing everyone to find a partner, promising to walk them through the first square dance of the evening with minimal amount of embarrassment.
A lump lodged itself in Danielle's throat as she watched a strapping lad of fifteen shyly coax her daughter into the street. Watching the two awkwardly shuffling in the dust to the beat of the music, Danielle realized that her little girl was growing up. Soon Lynn would fly the nest, and where, Danielle wondered dismally, would that leave her?
Alone and miserable, she supposed, with a cheap bottle of henna as her only consolation.
Slipping silently beside her, Cody's very presence jolted her out of such dreary thoughts. “Would you do me the honor of this dance, Red?”
“When are you going to stop calling me that?” she chided with an exasperated sigh.
“Whenever it stops making you bristle.”
Cody's grin was so disarming it should have been registered as a lethal weapon.
“I've never square-danced in my life,” she warned him.
“It's easy,” Cody assured her. “Just do what the man calls out and follow my lead.”
Feeling as awkward as a schoolgirl herself, Danielle allowed Cody to guide her into the street among the younger crowd. Luckily square-dancing relied as much on active listening as it did on any previous experience, and soon Danielle was caught up in the merriment of the moment, kicking up her heels beside her daughter.
Cody had never seen Danielle look more beautiful. Like the shawl she had draped over the hitching rack, Danielle had shed her worries tonight to indulge in a rare bit of fun. He couldn't take his eyes off of her. The sparkle in her eyes rivaled the stars overhead, and had Cody believed himself a romantic, he would have said that the aura surrounding her was charged with diamonds. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement, her lips turned up in a tempting, sensual smile that drew his eyes like a magnet. Even with the distance between partners befitting an old-fashioned square dance, Cody could feel a fireball unfurling low in his gut.
Danielle wondered if the request he mouthed over his shoulder to the stout announcer had anything to do with the next selection, a slow waltz. The steady rhythm of Cody's heartbeat next to hers stirred her blood with scorching urgency. Her knees grew as wobbly as those of a newborn fawn. Beneath the star-studded sky, enveloped in the arms of a sexy, rugged man touched with the hint of mystery, Danielle admitted to herself that she was a goner. The protective shield behind which she had hid her heart for so very long lay in the dust, no more than a twisted piece of tin.
She was unaware the music had stopped until she realized Barbara Matson was tapping insistently on Cody's shoulder. To add insult to the fact that the woman was so brazenly cutting in, the other den mother had donned the absolute tightest pair of jeans Danielle had ever seen. It was a wonder she could move in them at all, let alone sashay a perfumed swatch through the next number.
With a heavy heart, Danielle retrieved her shawl and watched the other female chaperons line up for a dance with their dashing wagon master.
It was a scenario with which she was all too familiar. It had been the same with Scott. At company functions, it seemed other women simply couldn't keep their hands off her husband. Nor, unfortunately, he off them. All his rhetoric about how she shouldn't be so insecure had been nothing more than a convincing pack of lies.
Danielle wanted to believe that Cody Walker was different, that beneath all that fetching Western charm was a man as genuine as the land he loved so dearly. Still, there was no denying he was a hot-blooded man, and as such was not immune to the flirtations of women such as Barbara Matson, women blatantly eager to give a man whatever he wanted with no strings attached.
Glancing around, it seemed that everyone but herself had found a partner. Even Ray Anne Pettijohn, looking rather like a pinafored Cabbage Patch doll, was mincing her way through a complicated step. Danielle slipped around the corner of the mercantile and sought out a solitary sorry patch of grass graced by a single bench. Wrapping her shawl around her like a security blanket, she gazed into the legion of stars overhead, searching for answers.
“How about a sarsaparilla, Red?”
Startled by intrusion of the deep voice she had come to know and secretly cherish, Danielle did not bristle at the questionable endearment this time.
“What's the matter, sweetheart?”
“Nothing,” she mumbled unconvincingly. They had mutually agreed that neither was looking for a long-term relationship, and the last thing Danielle wanted to admit to was feelings of jealousy. Cody had his own life and she a very different one waiting for her back in Denver. Still the dulcet sound of the word “sweetheart” had a soothing effect upon her bewildered state of mind. There was comfort, too, in the fact that Cody had left behind a bevy of attractive, available women to seek her out.
Taking a seat beside her, he handed her a dark-colored bottle. “Wanna tell me about it?”
“You wouldn't understand.”
“What makes you so sure?”
The note of defensiveness in the question did not escape Danielle's notice, but how could she ever explain to a man so obviously committed to the memory of his dead wife the guilt she felt about her inability to make her own marriage work? How could she ever hope to explain to a man so completely enamored by his daughter how a man like Scott considered parenting a duty to be bought off as cheaply as possible?
Instead Danielle answered Cody with a question born of bitter recall. “Did Rachael ever flaunt other men in front of you?”
“Of course not!”
It was a ridiculous thought. Even if she would have, Cody would have broken any sorry son of a gun's neck who tried to cozy up to his wife.
“Then you couldn't understand.”
But all of a sudden Cody found he did. Without meaning to, he had somehow caused the tears glistening in those big, beautiful eyes. He found it hard to believe that a woman as attractive and self-sufficient as Danielle could be made to feel insecure by the passing attention Barbara Matson had demanded, but it was the only explanation that made any kind of sense.
Damn it, just because Scott Herte was scum didn't mean that every relationship should be based on distrust. Didn't Danielle know that he had no more interest in Barbara Matson than he did in tying himself onto the back of a wild, bucking bronco? Thankfully those years of self-destruction were over. Women like Barbara, out to do no more than scratch an itch, were a dime a dozen in his business. Women like Danielle were as rare as the aquamarine jewels of the haunted eyes searching his for answers. As lovely on the inside as out, she was sweet, sincere, and sexy. How he had ever stumbled upon the genuine article along the Oregon Trail of all places was beyond him, but had he been particularly religious, he'd have to lay odds on his mother's prayers having a hand in it.
Cody realized that it must have taken a deliberate act of sabotage to leave such an innately strong woman so wounded and distrustful of the opposite sex. If he ever had the opportunity to lay his hands on Scott Herte's scrawny neck, he wouldn't hesitate to wring it like the miserable, little chicken he was.
Taking her into his arms, Cody encouraged Danielle to let the poison drain from her soul. A painful sob racked her body. She spared no quarter for herself in the retelling of those terrible years that had robbed her of her dignity and her faith in herself. Rationally, she may have known that she was not to blame for her ex-husband's infidelity, but that didn't keep the self-doubt from leaking into her voice as she shared the pain that. had been locked away for so very long. Just laying voice to Scott's exploits made Danielle feel totally undesirable all over again.
“You've been good for me,” Danielle murmured as Cody dabbed away her tears with his handkerchief. “Because of you, I no longer believe all men are liars.”
Danielle had no idea how her words twisted inside him like a double-edged blade. What would she think if she were to somehow discover he wasn't the man she thought him to be?
“Tell me about Rachael,” she entreated with a sniffle. Her voice was liquid balm, drawing the words from his inner depths of their own volition. Perhaps frightened that like his own daughter he would eventually lose his most cherished memories, Cody described the girl he had married in terms redolent of youthful ardor. His words carried a nostalgic sweetness that for the first time since her death was not choked out by the anguish of his loss.
“And the accident?”
The arms entwined around Danielle immediately turned to stone. As much as she wanted to save him from the agony that played across his chiseled features, she knew catharsis was necessary if there was ever to be any hope of a future for him with another woman.
In halting phrases, Cody relived the worst day in his life. “It was the final night of the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo. Rachael was in the running for state barrel racing champ. She was in the lead coming into the third barrel... The horse stumbled and tossed her...Snapped her neck...”
His fragmented thoughts ended with that gruesome image. What else was there to tell? Of the interminable days in the hospital waiting for news that if his wife pulled through, the best they could hope for was that she would live out the rest of her life as a paraplegic? Of the miracle that God failed to provide despite his attempt to storm the gates of heaven with his petitions?
What more was there to say but that his beloved was dead at the age of twenty and he had been left with but a miniature replica of her in the form of a motherless tot?
Danielle's voice was a whisper caught on the breeze like a dying leaf. “I'm sorry.”
Cody turned pain-filled eyes toward her.
“It was a long time ago. A man has to move on with his life.”
Only in that very moment was he truly able to weigh those simple words. It was true. He had grieved far too long.
The sweet sounds of a timeless country waltz floated down the street. Unremittingly sad, it was one of his favorites.
“The time to dance is when the music is playing,” Cody murmured, meaning so much more by the statement.
He opened his arms and his heart to Danielle. Glistening in her luminous eyes was an open invitation to make love to her. It was useless denying the fact that they both wanted each other so much that they ached every waking and sleeping moment. Cody knew that his love for his child-bride had been colored by the innocence of youth. Their lovemaking had been sweet and pure in its timidity. What he felt for Danielle was more mature and intense. He was certain that when he made love to this woman she would be anything but shy and bashful.