“So how’s it going, Gwynnie?” he asked to taunt the woman who had just paled at his touch and to derail the sweet memories before that fateful wedding night.
She shivered with anger, her eyes biting at him. “If you bring a hussy into Anna’s house, I’ll be all over you.”
“My, my, my,” he drawled, and grinned at her, pleased that he could rev her so easily, this woman who had torn apart his young dreams. Young Gwyneth had been sweet and retiring and this one wasn’t. “You certainly have a high opinion of me.”
She impatiently ran her hand through her short hair, and he remembered his fingers wrapped deep in the silky sunlight of her long hair. Clearly trying to maintain control, Gwyneth slashed a dark look up at him. “I mean it, Tanner. You bring a woman into Anna’s house and she wouldn’t like that.”
“A woman? Like a woman in my bed? All hot and bothered and—” He couldn’t resist teasing Gwyneth, or was he? That night, long ago, had ripped away part of him. At first he’d tried to make love with other women, and he’d tried to make relationships work—but somehow he couldn’t forget that night.
“You know what I mean about women,” she shot back at him, narrowing her sight on the earring in his ear as though it marked him as “sinner” and “lech.” “You’ve probably… I’ve heard about sailors in port…how they—”
“Yes?” he drawled, really enjoying Gwyneth’s obvious impression of his years away from Freedom Valley.
The quick color moving up her cheeks pleased him. He lifted an eyebrow, fascinated with the woman scowling up at him. Years ago, Gwyneth was little more than a sweet shadow, a girl on the cusp of being a woman—fragile, quiet, uncertain and yet just as fascinating with her green-brown eyes, her cupid’s-bow mouth, those dimples in her cheeks. He ran his hand across her hair, riffling the short strands. “You look good with short hair.”
He took in the length of her fit, athletic body. Gwyneth worked hard and the muscles were smoothly defined on her arms and legs. She had the look of a strong earthy, sensual woman who could take as well as give…not the kind to lie quiet beneath a man. Tanner pushed down that bit of nudging lust for his ex-wife. “Goes with the rest of you.”
She flushed and looked away, and came back with a haughty “It’s practical. A gentleman would put on a shirt while holding a discussion with a lady.”
“Don’t count on manners from me, Gwyneth Bennett,” he said slowly, meaning it. Once again, he remembered her expression as he walked toward her on their wedding night—her eyes had skimmed his chest in that same fearful way…and she’d run away.
Gwyneth had taken his pride and his dreams that night, and now she deserved nothing.
Her indrawn breath hissed in the sweetly scented morning and she paled. “And don’t you dare turn this into a boy’s clubhouse with all your old buddies. They’re all here or come back periodically, all your old high school football and sports buddies—Gabriel Deerhorn, though he keeps to his mountains most of the time—Michael Cusack, York, Frazier, and the rest of your swaggering Bachelor Club! Any beer and babe parties in Anna’s house and I’ll call any wives attached to them. If they’re not married, I’ll call their mothers, and Kylie and Miranda, and I’ll bring you up before the Women’s Council as an undesirable influence on married and unmarried men. They still remember when you pierced your ear and the Bachelor Club, your swaggering boys’ club, followed suit—every last one… Just get out of town and make it easy on everyone.”
“I don’t like threats and I’ll decide when I’m leaving.” Tanner didn’t like the too-soft snarl to his tone, because that proved she was getting to him. He’d honored his mother his entire life, respected her home; Gwyneth’s low-dog opinion of him nettled.
“Good…decide to leave quick, and I don’t make threats. I make promises, and try not to embarrass your family when you go sniffing after women.” With that, Gwyneth lifted her chin and tromped back around Anna’s house. Gwyneth slammed the door of her van and it roared away. Tanner realized darkly that her threat was the first he’d ever heard from her. His shy, sweet bride of years ago was nothing like the fast-mouthed, hot-tempered woman this morning.
Did it really matter? Tanner wondered bleakly. Why should he care if Gwyneth had threatened him with the worst fate of an unmarried male in Freedom Valley?
He followed the van hurling down Anna’s dirt driveway and out onto the unpaved road leading to the Smith ranch. Across the green patchwork of fields, he turned to view Freedom, a quaint town with a tall white church steeple—where he’d married Gwyneth. Then his view swept the town with its neat, well-tended houses and stores, its town square, cherished by the community and where the spit-and-whittle “boys” of eighty or so, held their meetings.
He inhaled slowly; after eighteen years of intermittent visits, he’d come back to the valley’s traditions and an ex-wife’s threat—“I’ll bring you up before the Women’s Council as an undesirable influence on married and unmarried men…”
Freedom’s Women’s Council was powerful, a tradition established from the single women settlers looking for husbands. Women who would choose their own paths, they’d had to protect themselves from brutish men and had formed a family of women, sisters bonded together. Traditional approval of the council usually meant a smooth courtship, according to the women’s terms. The man seeking a bride had to conform to the various stages set forth by the Women’s Council, and a century and more later, this approval was held dear by families and prospective brides.
A man marked as a “Cull” or reject by the Women’s Council could court, but he’d have a difficult time, because his beloved would want the same courtly traditions as her friends. An unhappy prospective bride could make her lover quite uncomfortable.
And so it was that most men in and around Freedom Valley abided by the Women’s Council’s Rules for Bride Courting, an 1880s manual fiercely defended by all the women in the area—mothers, daughters, sisters and aunts. Life in Freedom Valley could become quite challenging for males not abiding by the Rules for Bride Courting.
Consequently the friends of a misbehaving “Cull” were likely to be in for trouble, too, outcasts in the dating game, and the wheels of romance could come to a frustrating, cold stop.
After his wedding night fiasco, Tanner knew about frustrating, cold stops. In his haste to claim Gwyneth, Tanner had shoved aside traditions—
He rubbed his callused hands over his face, pushing away memories and the unexpected, uncomfortable emotions circling him about Gwyneth. With a sigh, Tanner went into his mother’s house and sat in the neat, cheery kitchen. A cobweb she would have never allowed taunted him with memories.
Just finished with college and with a new teaching job far away, he’d wanted Gwyneth to marry him quickly—“A girl like Gwyneth has a lot to fight,” his mother had said all those years ago, standing up on a chair to dust away an encroaching cobweb. “Her mother died when she was two and Leather hasn’t made her life easy, treating her more like a possession than a daughter—a hardworking ranch hand was how he treated her. Now you’re pushing her. Give her more time…let her come to her own decisions, in her own time.”
But twelve years ago, time had run out, and so had his bride. Tanner slammed his palm down on the table, jarring the mug and coffee that had grown cold. He picked up the framed picture of a beaming, eager groom and a blushing bride on the church’s front steps, studied it for a heartbeat, then slammed it facedown on Anna’s practical tablecloth.
“Don’t worry, Mother,” he said grimly to the empty kitchen. “I’m not in the market for another bloodletting.”
Gwyneth