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She was still staring at him. He could feel her eyes on him, huge and probing. “You’re out of your mind, Caleb. My God, I wouldn’t evenconsidermarrying you!”
The barb sank deep. He felt it clear to his bones. “Why not? I mean it’s not like I’m the flat-busted drifter you thought I was before. I could give you anything, Maya. Everything.”
Not one word came from her lips, and when he turned to ask why, the look in her eyes almost toasted him to a nice golden brown hue.
“How dare you?” she whispered.
He shrugged. “How dare I what?”
“Try to buy me! My God, do you really think I give a damn how much money you have or don’t have? I wouldn’t consider marrying you for one reason, and one reason only, Caleb Montgomery! I don’t love you. I don’t evenknow you.”
“And what if you did?”
Her brows bent low, and her eyes burned him. “What if I did what? Know you? Or love you?”
“Both. What then?”
She lowered her head, her cheeks burning red. “This is ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous conversation, Caleb. Because it’s irrelevant. But the fact of the matter is, if I was in love with a man—any man—it wouldn’t matter to me how much money he had, or what kind of truck he drove, or what he did for a living.”
He searched her face, looking for the lie, but seeing no sign of it.
“The only thing that would matter,” she went on, so earnestly it was difficult to imagine she might be making it up as she went along, “would be how he treated me and the babies, and whether he…felt the same way. I’ll never be one of those women tied to a man who doesn’t love her. I’ve seen them—the political wives, the trophy wives, the ones who married because they fit the profile their husbands were looking for, and vice-versa.”
He stared at her for so long he almost veered off the road. Then he looked straight ahead again. Snowflakes, huge and soft as balls of cotton fluff, came floating a few at a time from the sky. Snowflakes, in Oklahoma.
“You’re right,” he said finally.
“I know I am.”
He glanced sideways at her. “I had a profile, you know. Just before I left that night when we first met, my father and his advisers had been filling me in on the woman I was going to have to find and marry. Or should, if I wanted to win the senate race.”
Blinking slowly, she turned to look back at him. “And I’ll bet I missed on every point,” she said. “Go on, tell me the kind of woman you were looking for. Let’s see, I imagine she should have at least been college educated, which I’m not. Probably her mother should not own a saloon, and I daresay her father being a bigamist wasn’t on the list. I don’t imagine being pregnant and unmarried showed up anywhere, either.”
He tilted his head to one side. “I left that night because I didn’t want to be tied to the woman who would fit their profile. And you’re right—you would have missed it by a mile on one point in particular.”
“What’s that? ‘Must have class and breeding’?”
“No. It was item number seven, if I recall correctly. ‘She must be pretty, but not too pretty.’” He tried a charming smile on her. “You’re way too pretty.”
She averted her face quickly, stared outside, but her cheeks went pink. “I’d have missed on a dozen points,” Maya said softly, her voice raspy. Then she shrugged. “But you already know I’m not up to your family standards, don’t you? Isn’t that why you lied about your name to Dr. Stone?”
He stepped on the brake, stopping the van dead center in the middle of the deserted, snowy road. “Is that what you think?”
She didn’t look at him, so he gripped her shoulders and turned her until she did. “Maya, I lied about my name to protect you and the babies and the rest of your family.”
This time the message in her eyes was clear. Doubt. Skepticism. She didn’t believe a word he said. “Protect us from what?”
“From public humiliation. Scandal. The press. A story like this gets out, Maya, and this town will become a circus. You wouldn’t have a moment’s peace, and what’s left of your reputation would be in shambles.”
She tilted her head to one side. “And so would yours.”
With a sigh, he nodded. “Yes. So would mine. But that’s not what I was thinking about when I gave the doctor a false name.”
“And what about the last time—when you lied about your name to me? Was that to protect me, too?”
He swallowed hard, looking away. “I had reasons. They had nothing to do with you, Maya, I just…I was running away from who I was that night.”
“That’s convenient.”
