The Invitation (Montgomery/Taggert 19)

Cole glanced at Miss Latham, but she had her head down and was studying something on her skirt. Suddenly Cole realized that there was a bond between him and Miss Latham. Maybe it was slight, but he was pretty sure that what she had told him—about her life, about her sister, about how she felt about this beautiful woman who wanted to manage her life—was something she had never told another human being. Miss Latham had said that Cole was a hero. He knew he was no such thing, but right now he did feel…well, that maybe he could act as her guardian. Maybe he could stop Rowena’s meddling, no matter that she had the best intentions in the world.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Cole said, “what’s this man you want her to marry like?”

“Alfred?” Rowena asked, her eyes sparkling. “He’s a lovely man, very sweet. He’s about five feet four. I know that’s short, but not for Dorie; she’s so little and petite herself, not a great cow

like me who has to have a man over six feet. Dorie is so lucky that she can have any man. Alfred is about forty-three and—”

“Fifty-one,” Miss Latham said, her voice flat, without emotion.

“Oh? Well, a few years won’t matter. It’s what’s inside that counts, and Alfred is a jewel. And, also, he’s already broken in, so to speak. He’s been married and widowed twice, the poor dear, and has three children. Dorie just loves children, and there’s certainly room for them in that big house Father left her. But more important than any of this is that Alfred is mad for her, follows her everywhere. They are so cute together.”

“Like salt and pepper shakers,” Miss Latham said with disgust.

“Dorie, really! Just because Alfred doesn’t have a great deal of hair and has a few birth marks on his scalp does not make him resemble a pepper shaker.”

Cole managed to hide his smile, but when he looked up at Miss Latham, he no longer felt like smiling. What to him was a joke was not a laughing matter to her. There was a reason he had never settled down, a reason he was unmarried at the age of thirty-eight. His own parents had hated each other. His mother had been in love with some dirt farmer, but her father had forced her to marry the man of his choice, and never had two people hated each other more than his parents did. He’d left home when he was twelve years old and never been back since. If his parents were still alive, he could bet they were still fighting with each other.

Now, looking at the luscious Rowena, he had no doubt that what Miss Latham had said was true, that she could charm any man into marrying a plain sister. If Rowena had this effect on Cole, he could imagine what effect she’d have on a short, bald man who had probably never had even a decent-looking woman look at him before. And no doubt this Rowena could make quiet little Miss Latham believe that she wanted to marry a man who reminded her of a pepper shaker.

He picked up his whiskey glass, took a sip, and when he looked back at the two sisters, it seemed to him that Rowena wasn’t quite as beautiful as he’d thought at first. He was beginning to see her as a bit of a bully. And Miss Latham wasn’t quite as plain as he’d thought. She was smart and could be funny when she wanted to be. She deserved better than a short, bald man who’d dump three kids on her then go off and spend her money.

Even as he opened his mouth, Cole couldn’t believe he was going to say what he did. All he knew was that he couldn’t let Miss Latham marry a man she didn’t want to marry. A thousand images of his parents screaming at each other ran through his mind. No one deserved a life like that—especially the children. “Will you tell her, dear, or shall I?”

Miss Latham looked up at him, blinking in puzzlement, having no idea what he was talking about.

“The world is going to know soon enough. You can’t keep it a secret forever,” he said to her, his voice full of coaxing softness, the voice of a lover. He looked back up at Rowena and gave her his own sweet smile, the one that had made more than a few women’s hearts flutter. “Your sister and I are engaged to be married.”

Dorie sat up straighter on the sofa. “No, please, you don’t have to do this.”

Rowena looked from one to the other, at Cole’s I-dare-you expression and at Dorie’s face, now red with embarrassment. Rowena’s lovely laugh filled the room. “Dorie darling, I’d been told he was a hero, but I had no idea how much of one. He is as chivalrous as a knight of old. He rescued you, and now he feels responsible for you.”

She turned back to Cole. “But, really, Mr. Hunter, your concern for my sister need go no further. Just because you saved her life doesn’t mean you have to be responsible for her forever. Now Dorie is my responsibility, just as she was our father’s.”

Maybe there was some chivalry in him because the hair on the back of his neck stood up at Rowena’s words. She made Miss Latham sound like a broken-down old pet, beloved but useless. The truth was that Miss Latham was far from useless. She was as smart as a college girl. There wasn’t a woman in a thousand who could have understood what he meant during that bank holdup when he used the word “roll.” She had not only understood but had kept her head and figured out a way to distract the man, then moved as quickly as a darter fish. Now here was her sister speaking as though Miss Latham were something useless that needed to be gotten rid of as fast as possible.

“Please don’t do—” Dorie began, but stopped when Cole came to his feet and in an instant was across the room to stand beside her.

He put his uninjured hand on her shoulder. “The truth is, Mrs. Westlake, your sister and I are in love, and we plan to get married. She’s marrying me and no one else.”

Dorie looked up at him with pleading eyes. “No, you can’t do this. I was wrong to ask you.” She turned to her sister. “Rowena, he’s lying. Has any man ever fallen madly in love with me?”

She turned back to look up at Cole. “You don’t have to do this. I shouldn’t have said what I did. It was something I should have known couldn’t have worked. Rowena, let me tell you what I did. I—”

Cole didn’t know how to shut her up, but he had to make her stop talking. He couldn’t bear to see her humiliate herself in front of her beautiful sister, whose expression said that she didn’t believe for one minute that Cole had fallen for her plain little sister. Something about that look bothered Cole.

“I asked Mr. Hunter to—” Dorie began, her voice heavy, like a child admitting a lie, knowing that punishment was going to follow.

Without thought of what he was doing, Cole slipped his good arm under Miss Latham’s shoulders and pulled her up to him. She was a tiny thing, small and fragile, weighing nothing. His objective was to stop her words, and short of putting his hand over her mouth, he didn’t know how else to do that, so he kissed her. It wasn’t a kiss of passion, not even a kiss he wanted; it was a kiss of expediency: hard, closed-mouthed, without affection.

Within seconds he broke from the kiss and turned to Rowena in defiance. “There, now, does that look like—”

Suddenly his face filled with wonder, and he broke off and turned to look down at the woman pressed to his side. She was still pulled against him, her feet off the floor, her body as limp as a doll’s, and she was looking up at him, her huge eyes filled with surprise.

For a moment time didn’t exist for Cole. He had no idea what had happened, but the kiss he had shared with this woman—if he could call that hard thing a kiss—was different from any other kiss he’d experienced. He had kissed hundreds of women in his life. In fact, he rather liked kissing and had never turned down an opportunity when offered to him, whether it was in a saloon or behind the church. But this kiss had been different.

As though Rowena weren’t there, as though he and this woman he held were the only two people in the world, he turned back to her and kissed her for real.

He pulled her close to him and instantly found that she wasn’t as scrawny as he’d thought, but nicely rounded, and he liked her small size. She was so tiny he thought he could wrap himself around her; she could dissolve inside him.