Wed By A Will

He’d seen right away the fear wasn’t caused by him, even if he had startled her. It was something she carried deep inside her.

He wondered what put that kind of fear into a person. She had denied the fear, but he knew what he had seen. He worked with fear all the time. Skittish two-year-olds, green colts, horses other people had given up on.

Back when he’d focused more on training than breeding, he used to specialize in horses like that. Maybe he was just irresistibly attracted to frightened things.

Sometimes those horses were just scared because they didn’t know what you expected from them. Sometimes they had nervous natures. But other times, the fear had been put there.

Those were the ones who broke your heart. The ones whose trust had been shattered.

Her mammoth jack being a prime example. The animal wasn’t mean. It was scared out of its wits. Matt felt sick with helpless fury when he remembered the condition that animal had been in. Still, an animal with that kind of fear was the most dangerous kind of all. It always felt it was fighting for its life, and it was a nearly impossible chore to convince it of anything differently.

He felt a strange little fissure of pain when he thought of her fear in that same light. He didn’t think Corrine Parsons was crabby by nature, like Mrs. Beatle here, who was on chapter two of her lecture on being responsible as an example to his nephew. He suspected, somehow and somewhere along the line, that Corrie Parsons had come to believe she was fighting for her life.

There was no meanness in her eyes. Her eyes had been soft and scared and pretty as those Striped Beauty crocuses his sister had planted along his front walk, along with a bunch of other flowers, about a million years ago.

“They’re signs of hope,” Marianne had said firmly, back when they all still had some of that.

Still, if that kind of fear was dangerous in an animal, it would be more so in a woman.

And if an animal could break his heart…

He reminded himself, firmly, that his heart was pretty much already in pieces. He wasn’t taking any more chances with it.

Nope, his complicated, beautiful neighbor would be a good woman to stay away from.

She was a city girl, anyway. It was written all over her—the milky skin on her face, the creamy softness of hands with no rings on them. It had been written all over her even before the donkey showed up.

She might be able to handle that cabin in the spring and summer, but in a few months the cold, wet weather would settle in and icy winds would begin to blow in off the ocean. Her driveway would turn to soup, and she would have to chop wood to keep warm. That would be it for her. Maybe even before that, if he had the good luck to have a skunk cozy up underneath the floorboards of the cabin. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Real estate had a tendency to lose value when strong scents attached themselves to it. He could probably get the land for a song.

Unfortunately, he had already registered the soft curves of a slender body, the plump swell of her lower lip. Unfortunately, he had already felt a little twinge of that something that could do in the strongest of men.

Desire.

It wouldn’t just be a good idea to stay away from her until she called it quits voluntarily. It was imperative.

Imperative, he repeated to a mind that wasn’t all together in agreement with him.

And unfortunately, he’d tangled himself with her for a little bit. He wondered if she’d consider castrating the donkey. It would save him one hell of a pile of work on those fences.

Of course, after her reaction to his perfectly reasonable suggestion they murder her donkey, she’d probably rather castrate Matt Donahue.

He heard Robbie coming before he saw him, small feet flying along tiled floors. And then Robbie rounded a corner and skidded to a halt, and Matt smiled.

His first smile since meeting the new neighbor. And her donkey.

Robbie was five. His nephew. He was as fair as Matt was dark, his blond hair the same color as corn tassels, his blue eyes huge, the exact color of sapphires. He looked so much like his mother had looked at that age, that Matt could rarely see him without feeling the catch in his throat.

His smile faded and he recognized the sadness that felt like it would never go away.

How could a woman of twenty-seven die of breast cancer? A woman who had been the sole parent to her child? His sister, Marianne, had had the laughter and life sucked out of her until she was wasted, so wracked with pain it had been a mercy when she died.

He shook his head, trying to be free of the anger and sadness and bewilderment that mingled in him, and that he saw mirrored in his tiny nephew.

Until he’d put his younger sister in the ground, Matt had had a faith of sorts. Not a church-going kind of faith, but a kind of simple reverence for the miracle of a new foal, an awe at the hardiness of spring flowers, a kind of unstated belief that in the end good generally won.

Now, he felt like a man who had been through a war, not at all certain what he believed about anything anymore.

He went down on his haunches and held open his arms. Robbie catapulted into him, and he pretended to be knocked over. Under Mrs. Beatle’s disapproving eye, he and his nephew wrestled across the floor. He didn’t stop until Robbie was shouting with laughter.

“Are we going to see Robbie tomorrow, Mr. Donahue?” Mrs. Beatle asked tightly, when they had both picked themselves up off the floor.

Robbie’s hand tightened on his, and Matt looked down into those imploring eyes. Everyone said day care was good for his nephew. They said it wasn’t good for him to trail his uncle around the horse operation like a tiny shadow. They said he needed to socialize with kids his own age, that he needed to learn to count, and that did not include measuring horse rations. They said he should be watching Sesame Street, not the stallion on the mares, or the mares having foals. They said Robbie’s life needed to have structure.

So he could learn to pick up his kid promptly at five someday, Matt thought testily.

Besides, how could you inflict Mrs. Beatle on someone you loved two days in a row?

And he loved Robbie. In fact, the boy’s presence in his life had Matt discovering the oddest tender regions in a heart he had always foolishly assumed was as tough as the rest of him. He had never felt anything like the feeling that boy put in his heart. And maybe that was a little something worth believing in, when he could find nothing else.

His sister had told him the love would survive.

He clung to that some days, that one truth.

“Uh, no, Mrs. Beatle, he won’t be coming tomorrow.”

“Ms. Bettle,” Robbie corrected him in a loud whisper, and then beamed at him.

Ms. Bettle—what kind of fool would marry her after all—made a sucking sound with her lips. Ignoring her, Matt hoisted his nephew onto his shoulders, ducked under the doorway and went out into the bright May sunshine.

“Auntie, I’m hungry.”

Auntie. No amount of begging or pleading or ordering or demanding could change it. Robbie’s first attempts at Matt, had come out Auntie, and he stubbornly refused to budge on this issue. His uncle was Auntie, period. In a small town, it was like being a boy named Sue, a cross Matt bore better on some days than others.

The kid was always hungry. Matt tried to think what he had for groceries in that lonely house he and Robbie now shared.

Macaroni and cheese, but they’d had that last night. Wieners and beans, but they’d had that the night before. Taco chips and Cheez Whiz spread, but that didn’t count as real food for some reason. Somewhere in his limited inventory of kid information he knew he was supposed to be feeding Robbie at least some stuff that was green.

“You want to go for a hamburger?” At least that would have Walt’s big, fat homemade pickle on the side. Green.

Robbie nodded happily.

Maybe if Matt ordered a salad, too, even though neither of them would eat it, he wouldn’t feel so bloody guilty about his absolute failure in the nutritional health department.

He wondered if she knew anything about nutritional health, and was annoyed with himself for wondering.

He didn’t have to wonder for long. After he and Robbie had eaten, he went home, fed his own horses, then loaded a few bales, and returned to her place. She was sitting on her front step eating a bag of potato chips. Her furniture, and boxes, were stacked on the porch all around her.