The conniving little wench. He’d been so exhausted a herd of buffalo could have stampeded through the room and he wouldn’t have awakened that night. Since then, though, he slept with one eye open.
Lesson learned.
Throwing back the covers, Seth swung his legs over the edge of the bed. What could she possibly hope to gain by coming out here? Why hadn’t she just signed the divorce papers and put an end to this misery? He’d sent her five sets. One a year. Every time an army lawyer visited the post, he filed another petition, and not once had she sent them back—signed or unsigned.
He pushed off the bed and crossed the room, lifting his clothes from the chair and pulling them on with all the joy of a man heading to the gallows.
Marriage was the last thing he’d ever wanted, and he wanted this one dissolved. Had since the day it had happened.
She should, too. Her father, General St. Clair—a man Seth had held in high esteem—had passed away four years ago, so she had no reason to continue the pretense.
Dressed, Seth made his way to the ladder and climbed down the rungs. She wasn’t going to like the living quarters, that was for sure. Besides the simple accommodations, a rough-hewn three-room cabin with a loft, there was the desolation of the fort, the weather, the landscape. None of it was going to be to Rosemary’s liking. She’d lived in the general’s posh Richmond home her entire life.
“Morning, Major,” Corporal Russ Kemper said, carrying two cups of coffee through the open doorway.
“Morning.” Seth took a cup and went to lean against the doorjamb as the rising sun erased the darkness of the cabin. His office had a window, but neither this room—the kitchen, dining room and parlor all rolled into one—nor the bedroom behind it did.
The living quarters, or barracks, as the army called them, were two rows of cabins facing each other, with the large open courtyard of the fort between them. As a major, the man in charge, Seth was assigned officers’ quarters, one of the four houses flanking the fort’s headquarters building, and was entitled to move in there, especially now that his wife would be living with him. But hell would freeze over first. If Rosemary wanted to live here so bad, she’d have to do it right here, in this little cabin, with Russ Kemper snoring the roof off every night.
A shiver zipped up Seth’s back, so sharply he stiffened, and he had to step onto the covered wooden walkway running the length of the row of cabins to shake it off.
Russ slept in one bed, him in the other. Where would Rosemary sleep?
A smile formed, the first one he’d felt in days. The first one he’d felt since getting the telegram telling him to pick her up in Tulsa.
She’d have to figure out her own sleeping arrangements. His house was full.
Seth finished his coffee and walked back into the cabin. “Ready for some breakfast?”
A young man, barely eighteen, with big eyes and long legs, Russ nodded. “Always.”
Together they angled across the courtyard to a building along the back where all the single men ate. Which was most of the forty-five men at the fort. Only four had wives, not counting Seth, of course. Six more had Comanche wives, but they lived outside the compound. The only Indians allowed to reside inside the fort on a regular basis were the four Comanche maidens who assisted the cook, Briggs Ryan. That was four more than army rules allowed, but Seth liked to keep his men happy, and hungry men weren’t happy. And Briggs, a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Swede with hands that could wrap around a cannonball as if it was a marble, wasn’t happy without his maidens.
After breakfast, a hearty meal that sat in Seth’s stomach like lead with all the commotion going on inside him, he ordered the M troop to mount up for drills. It would suit him just fine to be gone when Rosemary arrived. It’d suit him fine to be gone the entire time she was here.
That wasn’t his luck. He’d barely arrived back at the fort, having spent three hours in the hot September sun—which in Indian Territory was as hot as the August sun most days—when the sentry in the guardhouse signaled a wagon was approaching.
With his jaw locked and his temples pounding, Seth turned his mount over to Russ, and after splashing water on his face, planted his hat on his head and made his way to his cabin. Meeting her in his office would be the best thing for everyone.
It was there, at his desk, that he got the first glimpse of her. Frowning, for it was a perplexing sight, he pushed his chair back and stood to get a better look out the window. Mirth was a good feeling, and when it bubbled up the back of his throat, he let it out. This he had to see in person.
Leaning in the open doorway, shadowed by the overhang, Seth watched the wagon roll to a stop several yards away. A chuckle still tickled his throat, and he covered it with a cough as people started gathering, catching their first glimpses of his wife.
She was holding a once-fancy umbrella the wind had reduced into a misshapen frame of sticks waving several haphazard miniature flags, and her hair was bushed out as if a porcupine sat on her head. The skirt flapping around her ankles sent up puffs of dust as she climbed down, aided by Ben Cutter, who gestured toward the cabins. Throwing her shoulders back, she started walking across the hard-packed ground.
Seth was biting the inside of his cheek, for she certainly looked the worse for wear, but then a frown formed, tugging hard on his brows. He didn’t remember her having a limp. Then again, they hadn’t spent more than a couple hours together, and most of that time had been used up with her father convincing Seth to say I do.
* * *
Millie’s backside was numb and her legs were stiff, to the point every step had her wondering if she’d become a walking pincushion. But head up, she started directly toward the man she knew to be Seth Parker.
He was the one smiling.
No, not smiling...smirking.
Holding in a great bout of laughter, she’d bet.
At her expense.
Frazzled, tired, weather-beaten and sore, she marched onward. Well, limped. The heel had broken off her boot back in Tulsa. Five days ago. On the other side of the world. For the first time in her life she felt as ornery as Rosemary.
A gust of wind caught her parasol, and this time Millie let it go. There was nothing left of it, anyway. People were gathering around, but she couldn’t care less. She needed a bath, a cup of tea and a bed. In that order.
Never in all her born days could she have imagined what it was like traveling in a buckboard wagon with no canopy, across land that was little more than a desert, with two men who ate beans for every meal.
Beans.
Beans with no ginger. Everyone knew ginger helped eliminate human gases produced when people ate a lot of beans.
She hobbled onto the boardwalk, and without a pause in the clip-thud of her uneven footwear, she pointed toward the door behind her supposed husband. “Is that our house?”
“Yes.”
The grin he held back made her jaw sting as her teeth clenched. She ignored it, and him, and crossed the threshold.
A rusted, mini parlor stove, a crude table with two chairs, a tall cupboard, two doors and a ladder leading to an open area overhead... The open door on the right showed a desk, so she went left.
“That’s Russ’s room.”
The stabbing sensation between her shoulder blades stopped her movements. With only one heel, standing straight was impossible, so, as crooked as a scrub oak, she spun around. “Who is Russ?”
“Corporal Kemper,”