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Chapter 8
James tried to swallow, but he couldn’t get his dry mouth to provide enough spit to wet his throat.
Mabel, the woman that he’d been admiring for most of his life, had just...asked him to marry her.
Well, it was a weird marriage proposal as marriage proposals went, but still, it boiled down to the basics—she wanted to marry him.
He wanted to jump up and down, grab her and swing her around, and do the dancing that he had been joking about earlier.
Just in time, he remembered his foot. He couldn’t feel it, but he knew he had promised to stay off it.
“You want me to marry you?” he managed to say, and he thought his voice sounded almost normal.
“I did. It’s crazy. But Lark had mentioned a marriage of convenience. Basically, you would marry me, so that I could say I had a husband, so that the grandmother will let me have the girls. You don’t have to be a husband or a dad. You can stay in Chicago and never even notice that you have a wife and kids. I assume that you’re not interested in getting married since you’re so old and haven’t found anyone, and I didn’t have a chance to talk to Carol about it, but I was going to ask her and I thought that maybe this would all be just fine for you and I promise that I won’t be a clingy or nagging wife; in fact, you don’t even have to think of me as your wife, and if it’s necessary for you, we could actually have the marriage annulled, although I hate making vows that I have no intention of keeping, so that doesn’t sit very well with m—”
He put his hand up and said, “Hold on.”
Her mouth clamped closed immediately.
She had called him old. He was still trying to get past that. Is that what she thought of him?
He had never seen Mabel ramble on like that. Normally while she seemed happy and easygoing, she didn’t talk much at all. So that was new.
And now she had just said the very best and the very worst things that she could say to him.
How could she say both in one breath?
She’d asked him to marry her.
Then she told him that she didn’t want to have a real marriage and that she didn’t even want to see him. And that he was old.
Tempted to accept and give her any conditions she wanted—after all, marriage to Mabel had been his dream for as long as he could remember—he also knew that his dream had not included her sending him off to Chicago while she lived in North Dakota, and they never met again.
“I’m not against marrying you,” he said slowly. Her eyes brightened, but concern lay like a thundercloud over top of them.
“But?” she prompted him.
“But I don’t think marriage should be me living in Chicago and you living in North Dakota.”
He let his words lie there while she seemed to chew on them. She bit her lip and looked away, gazing out the other end of the porch, at the waving grasses and the waning afternoon sun.
“All right. What do you suggest?” she asked, sounding almost hesitant, like she was afraid he was going to say that marriage wasn’t a good idea after all.
