Page 113 of Eclipse Bay

“Yeah. That stupid list. Worrying about it has been a real source of stress for me, Hannah.”

Her hand stilled on Winston’s head. “It has?”

“That damned list has driven me nuts. At any rate, this afternoon at the gas station when you started to tell everyone that the subject of marriage had never even come up between us, I guess I got a little irritated. Hell, I lost my temper.” He paused. “And whatever common sense I’ve got.”

She slowly lowered the glass. “Are you serious?”

He turned his head back to look at her. “Dead serious.”

“You’ve been thinking about marriage since I first got here?”

“Before that, if you want the truth.” He looked down at his loosely clasped hands for a moment. When he raised his head again his eyes were bleak. “Maybe since I got the news about Dreamscape from Isabel’s lawyer and realized that you were still single.”

“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “What put the notion of marriage into your head? Did you have some crazy idea that it would be the simplest way to deal with our inheritance?”

“Hell, no. Marriage is not a simple way of handling anything. I know that better than anyone.”

“Then why?” Her voice was rising again. She’d have to watch that. She was a Harte, after all.

Rafe’s jaw tightened. “It’s hard to explain. It just seemed right somehow. When I got the letter from the lawyer things started to fall into place. For the first time in my life I knew exactly what I wanted. It was as if I’d been groping my way through a fog bank for years and suddenly the fog evaporated.”

“What, precisely, do you want?”

He spread his hands. “Nothing too bizarre. You. The inn and the restaurant. A future.”

She waited for him to add undying love and mutual devotion to the list. But he didn’t. “I see. Some people would say that a marriage between a Harte and a Madison would definitely qualify as bizarre.”

He watched her intently. “Look, I don’t know what’s on this new list of yours, but I’ve done some changing during the past eight years. I still don’t meet all the requirements you gave me when you were nineteen—”

“I was twenty that night, not nineteen.”

“Whatever. The thing is, I do meet at least some of those specifications, and I’m willing to work on the rest.”

“Why?” she asked bluntly.

He leaned forward, intense and earnest. “You’re a Harte. You ought to see the logic in us getting married. Hey, we’d be going into this deal with our eyes wide open. We know a hell of a lot more about each other than most people know about their potential spouses. We’ve got some history together. Three generations of it. We’d have Dreamscape to work on together. Sharing a business enterprise is a very bonding experience.”

“You think so?”

“Sure.” He was warming to his theme now. “For my part, I can guarantee that this wouldn’t be another typical Madison marriage.”

She sipped her tea, reluctantly fascinated. “In what way?”

“I just told you.” He spread his hands in a gesture of exasperation. “It won’t be based on some wild, romantic fantasy of endless lust.”

“No lust at all?” she asked around the straw.

His jaw locked. “I’m not saying I don’t find you attractive. You know I do. We’re sexually compatible. That’s important in a marriage.”

“Sexual compatibility is nice,” she agreed.

“Right. Real important.”

“But what you’re proposing here is a marriage of convenience.”

“What I’m proposing,” he said, his voice tightening, “is a marriage based on the sort of things that are supposed to appeal to a Harte, the kind of crap that was on that original list of yours: Mutual goals. Shared interests, et cetera, et cetera.”

The edge in his voice made her look at him quickly, but his face was an unreadable mask.

---