Twin of Ice (Montgomery/Taggert 6)

She put her fingers to his lips. “This is the happiest night of my life, and I don’t want to be anywhere else or with anyone else. A cabin in the woods with the man I love. No woman in the world could ask for more than that.”

He was watching her with an odd intensity, a slight frown on his face. “We better go in before we freeze to death.”

Calmly, he started back to the cabin, Houston beside him, but suddenly he turned and grabbed her to him, their cold, wet skin sticking together as he kissed her.

Houston melted against him, letting him feel her joy and happiness.

With a smile, he lifted her into his arms and carried her into the cabin. Once inside, he grabbed a blanket, wrapped her in it, and began rubbing her cold body.

“Houston,” he said, “you’re not like any lady I ever met. I thought I had a pretty clear idea of what marriage to one of the Chandler princesses would be like, but you ’bout busted all my ideas.”

She turned around in his arms, her nude body wrapped in the blanket, his bare skin glowing in the firelight. “Am I different in a good way or a bad one? I know you wanted a lady; am I not being one?”

He took a while to answer, looking at her speculatively, as if judging what he should tell her. “Let’s just say that I’m learnin’

a lot.” He grinned. “I’ll bet Gould’s wife never followed him up the side of a mountain.” He began kissing her neck, but stopped abruptly. “Would it be too much to hope that you know how to cook?”

“I know the rudiments, enough to direct a cook, but I don’t know how to prepare a meal from scratch. You don’t like Mrs. Murchison?”

“I’m happy to say that she ain’t here at the moment. What I want to know is whether you can make somethin’ to eat out of those bags of food.”

She wiggled her arms out of the blanket and put them around his neck. “I believe I could arrange that. I never want this night to end. I was so afraid that you’d be angry with me for coming up here when I hadn’t been invited. But I’m glad that we’re here now and not in Chandler. This is so much more romantic.”

“Romantic or not, if we don’t eat soon, I’m gonna shrivel away to nothin’.”

“We can’t let that catastrophe happen,” Houston said quickly and rolled out from under him.

Kane thought for a moment that his bride had just made a bawdy joke, but he dismissed that as an impossibility.

With the blanket loosely wrapped around her, falling off one shoulder, Houston took the bags Kane handed her and began unpacking them. He’d once again wrapped the towel about his hips as he piled more wood on the fire. She saw right away that whoever had packed the food had done an excellent job. She withdrew lidded tins, tied porcelain boxes, and muslin-wrapped packages. A note fell out of the second bag.

My dear daughter,

I wish you all the happiness in the world in your marriage, and I think you’re perfectly right in following your husband. When you return, don’t be surprised to hear that Kane carried you away with him.

Very much love,

Opal Chandler Gates

Kane looked up from the fire to see Houston with tears in her eyes as she clutched a piece of paper. “Is somethin’ wrong?”

She handed him the note.

“What’s this mean, that I carried you away?”

Houston began unwrapping food. “It means that when we return to Chandler, your reputation as the most romantic man in town will be further enhanced.”

“My what?”

“Yes,” she said as she unwrapped a package of Vienna rolls. “It started when you carried me out of the Mankins’ garden party and was added to later when people began repeating the story of how you ran the cowboys who accosted me out of town. And then there was the romantic dinner party you gave at your house with the pillows and candles.”

“But it’s because I ain’t got any chairs, and I spilled food all over you, and was I supposed to stand around and let those cowboys bother you?”

Houston opened a can that contained creamed lobster soup. “Whatever the true reason, the result is the same. By the time we return, I expect adolescent girls to stare at you on the street, and to tell each other that they hope they marry a man who drags them away from their own weddings to a lonely mountain cabin.”

For a moment, Kane said nothing, but then he grinned and came to sit by her. “Romantic, am I?” he said, kissing her neck. “I don’t guess anyone’ll see that it’s the lady I married that’s keepin’ me from lookin’ like a fool in front of ever’body. What’s that gray stuff?”

“Pâté de foie gras,” she said, spreading some on a cracker with a little pearl-handled knife Opal’d included. She put it in his mouth for him.