The Midnight Rider Takes A Bride

He was squinting at her a little, as if trying to figure her out. “Aw, come on. It can’t be that bad.”

“Sure, it can.” She turned and plunked the champagne bottle on the counter, then whirled back to face him. “I drive men away. I try too hard. Everybody in town knows it. No one’s ever going to marry me. I’m going to be single for the rest of my life.” She hadn’t set her glass down, so she gestured wildly with it. “All my sisters are married. My mother’s remarried. They’ve all moved away to other parts of California—or to Arizona, in my mother’s case. They’ve left me alone here in Red Dog City, with my beauty shop and my cute two-bedroom apartment and my simple little dreams of love and a family that are never going to come true. It’s pitiful. I’m pitiful.” She held out both arms then, and looked down at her body. “Just look at me.”

He said nothing, as usual. After a moment spent staring at her own pink blouse and flowered shorts, she raised her head and met those startling eyes that gleamed the same burnished silver as the cross around his neck. Something warm and sweet seemed to move inside her for a moment. But then, as swiftly as it had come, the sensation faded.

Adora gulped and told herself that it was nothing. Except possibly the effect of too much champagne.

The silence had gone on for way too long. She broke it. “Well, you had a nice, long look. Now tell me. What’s wrong with me?”

“There’s nothin’ wrong with you. You look fine.”

She glared at him, a glare that gradually turned to a glum frown as she realized that she was making a complete fool of herself. Again. She let her head fall back and stared at the ceiling with its darling little rim of marching fruits and vegetables. “Oh, what am I doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know.” She made herself lower her chin and look at him. “Dragging you in here. Making you drink champagne with me. Telling you things you don’t even want to know. I really do have ‘desperate woman’ written all over me.”

He looked uncomfortable. In a moment he’d be shuf fling those big, black boots. “Hey. It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not.” She leaned back against the counter and ran her finger around the rim of her glass. Then she looked up at him. “But you’re a gentleman to say so.”

He relaxed and chuckled for the second time, a low, purring growl of a sound.

She smiled in response. “Did I say something funny?”

“Not really. I just don’t get called a gentleman too often, that’s all.”

“Well, you should. ‘Cause you are.” She pushed away from the counter and stood up straight. “You said you can’t find Lola?”

“Yeah.”

“Tiff’s been with you?”

He nodded. “We went camping over the weekend.”

“That’s right, Lola said you two had taken off together. And we missed Tiff at the shop today.”

Tiff, who was eleven, liked to make herself at home in the shop downstairs, visiting with the customers, helping out with anything the adults would let her do. And some afternoons, when the workday was through, Tiff would come on upstairs. Adora always enjoyed those times. She had grown up with a houseful of sisters, after all. She liked having other females around. Tiff would help Adora with her various decorating projects. They’d drink lemonade. Sometimes Adora would do Tiff’s hair. And other days they’d just lie around watching “Oprah” in companionable silence.

Adora asked, “So is Tiff around the corner now?”

“Yeah.” Lola and Tiff lived in the small house Jed had bought for them, around the corner from Adora’s, on Church Street. “I left her snoozin’ on the couch. Poor kid’s beat. We hiked all the way to Crystal Falls yesterday and didn’t get back to my place until late. Then I had work to do this morning, so Tiff hung around the cabin until I could run her into town.” Jed owned a machine shop out on Jackson Pike Road and lived in a cabin right next to it. “Now I gotta get back to check on things at the shop. But I don’t want to leave Tiff alone without knowing where Ma’s off to.”

“You know, before she left today, Lola mentioned that the blackberries are ripe down by Trout Creek. She said that Tiff just loves blackberry pie.”

He lifted his shades from where they hung on his vest. “Thanks. I’ll check down by the creek next.”

Adora watched him as he hid those beautiful eyes once more, remembering all the old rumors about him. He had been a wild boy, in trouble all the time.

And, of course, there had been the rape scandal all those years ago, when he’d been caught by Charity Laidlaw in her daughter’s bed. That had been an ugly mess, complicated even more by the fact that it had been a family matter; Charity Laidlaw’s brother had been Lola’s second husband—and Jed’s stepfather.

Dangerous, most folks in town called Jed. Dangerous and bad.

But no matter what they all said, Jed Ryder was kind at heart to listen so patiently to her self-pitying babble the way he had. And he was so conscientious about his family....

Adora heard herself asking, “You know where the best berries are along Trout Creek?” He shook his head. She set down her empty champagne glass. “Come on, then. I’ll show you.”

That huge, gleaming chopper of his was waiting, right where she thought it would be, down in the small parking lot behind her shop.

Jed reached for his helmet when they stood beside the thing. “Get on.”

Adora took in a long breath. Yes, she knew for sure now that dangerous Jed Ryder was really a very nice man. But that didn’t mean she’d let herself be seen on the back of his Harley. In a small town, word got around. And she could do without rumors about the two of them.

“No. I, um, don’t have a helmet.” She could feel his eyes on her behind the shades and sensed that he knew the real reason she wouldn’t ride with him. But he didn’t say a word.

“We can walk,” she added hastily, not quite daring to look straight at him. “The creek isn’t far. And you couldn’t take the bike on the trail, anyway. Come on.” She started off, and felt a vague sense relief when he fell in step beside her.

They strolled between her building and the next one over, which housed Denita’s Donuts. When they reached the sidewalk, they headed north on Bridge Street, past Church Street and on up to River Street, where they turned right. Once around the corner, they left the shops and stores behind. Wood frame houses, most of them two stories high, lined either side of the street.

In the middle of the block they came to the one-lane bridge that crossed Trout Creek. Adora led the way down the bank to creekside.

The day was cool for August, and in the shade of all the close-growing trees, with the creek bubbling along nearby, it should have been cooler still. But to Adora, the water and all the greenery seemed to make the air uncomfortably moist. Her hair clung to her temples and felt clammy on the back of her neck. They hadn’t gone far along the trail when she stopped and began searching her pockets.

“Gotta do something about my hair,” she muttered apologetically. “Ah-ha.” She came up with a pink ribbon. Swiftly, she tied up her shoulder-length brown curls into a high ponytail. “There. That’s better.”

Jed Ryder said nothing, only waited patiently until she was ready to move on.

A few minutes later the trail cut up the hillside for quite a long stretch. Though it was rugged going, Adora remembered her manners and never let the branches of dogwood or mountain laurel snap back at the man behind her. Periodically they would stop and call Lola’s name. They got no answer.

At last the trail peaked and headed down once more. At the top, panting from the climb, Adora turned back to Jed with a smile. “It’s not far now.”

Unfortunately she started walking before she bothered to look ahead. On the first step she tripped on an exposed tree root. With a little squeal of alarm, she went flying. Seconds later she landed on her backside in the dirt.

Jed was there immediately, kneeling, taking off his shades and hooking them on his vest. “You okay?”

She groaned. “I’m going to be black-and-blue where the sun don’t shine. But I’ll survive.” She rolled to one side and rubbed the sore place gently. “Ouch. One of these days I’ll learn to pay more attention to where I...”

He was watching her, silent as ever, sort of half smiling. She breathed the end of her sentence, barely giving it sound. “...put my feet.”

And then words deserted her. And she could have cared less. There was too much going on for her to think about talking.

All at once the air had grown hotter, sweeter, closer. And Jed seemed to... fill up the world. She could smell leather and dust. And she couldn’t help noticing the sheen of sweat on his skin. She wanted to reach out her hand and feel his beard, to find out if it was as soft as it looked. To put out her tongue and taste his sweat...

Adora hitched in a tiny gasp. She couldn’t believe her own thoughts. Such thoughts weren’t like her at all. She’d never had any interest in that sort of thing. Oh, sure, she’d had a lot of boyfriends in all her years of trying to snare herself a husband. But she’d never gone to bed with any of them. Until Farley Underwood—the weasel. And Farley had made a special point of telling her before he left her what a big, fat zero she had been in that department.

And she supposed if she wanted to go ahead and be depressingly honest, that Farley had been right. She’d wanted to be good at sex. Because it seemed to be something that a well-rounded woman ought to be good at. And she’d tried her best to convince both Farley and herself that she’d enjoyed making love.

But she hadn’t. Not at all. There had just been too much sweating involved—not to mention those unpleasant noises that Farley would make. Yuck. Sometimes the only way to get through it had been to imagine the clever things she could do with window treatments once they were married and had their first house. Or to try to decide whether or not it would be pretentious to monogram their towels.