Page 25 of I Do, I Do, I Do
“It’s a new rule,” he interrupted, gazing down at her. “You sure do look fine this morning, Miss Klaus. Mighty, mighty fine.”
“Why, thank you, Mr. Barrett.” She dropped the five-dollar gold piece back into Zoe’s best purse.
He continued to stare at her with a flattering warmth of admiration. “You might be wondering why I haven’t spoken to you until yesterday.”
“Not at all,” she lied, hoping her tone conveyed surprise that he would think for an instant that she might welcome a word from someone to whom she had not been properly introduced. Well, they hadn’t been introduced now either, but still.
“Until someone told me your name yesterday, I assumed you were a married woman.”
“Really?” So that was the message he’d been giving her with the intense silent stares.I’d like to talk to you, but you’re married. Immediately her spirits soared.
“What I mean is, you’re obviously a respectable woman, and I didn’t see you talking to any men. You seemed unapproachable.”
Now she recognized the dilemma that Juliette had mentioned. She wasn’t actually married, but she wasn’t actually single either. She couldn’t encourage Mr. Barrett, and shouldn’t want to. If she did want to. She wasn’t sure. But regardless of her wishes in the matter, he now looked at her as a single woman. It hadn’t occurred to her or the others that placing a Miss before their names might create new difficulties.
“I don’t mean to say that looking like a married woman is a criticism,” Bear hastened to add. “I just mean that you didn’t seem open to…Oh hell, I don’t know what I mean.” He grinned down at her. “Are you ready for our match?”
“I believe so,ja,” she said, dropping her eyelashes and drawing off her gloves one finger at a time. The wedding ring she had once been so proud of didn’t impress her as unique anymore. Besides, wedding rings should be gold, not silver. This one was as much of a sham as her marriage.
Proving her thought, Bear noted the ring without a ripple crossing his brow. To his eye it was decorative, not evidence that she had a husband lurking somewhere in the background.
“Are you right-handed?” he asked, leading the way to a table where a crowd of men waited, eyes fixed on her approach.
“Ja, I am right-handed.”
Lordy, lordy. Walking beside him actually made her feel small. Even wearing dress shoes with an elevated heel brought the top of her fountain curls only a little above his shoulder. Never in her life had she met a man who made her feel almost little.
The audience for their match stared as Bear made a point of introducing her to Ben Dare, who would judge their contest.
“Miss Klaus and I have met,” Mr. Dare said, smiling beneath eyebrows that soared when he looked at her hairdo and the flash of brilliants in her curls and at her ears.
Juliette was going to be appalled when she heard that Ben Dare had been the judge for this match. Well, that wasn’t Clara’s fault. He held out a chair and she sat down, facing Bear across the corner edges of the table.
“Hey, Bear. You ain’t never going to live this down if she beats you,” someone said to a burst of laughter.
Bear grinned and winked at Clara. “I’m big enough to accept defeat with grace.”
His tone and the wink informed her that he didn’t believe for one minute that he could lose this match. Such a possibility had not entered his mind. And now she saw the concessions he was making for her. No one else’s entry fee had been waived. None of the other contestants were being introduced to their judge. No one explained any rules at the other table corners; the contestants just sat down and went at it.
“What rules?” she asked Benjamin Dare. “There aren’t any rules for arm wrestling.”
“You can place your elbow on that book,” he said, nodding to a thick dictionary. “That will raise your hand to the height of Bear’s. But you can’t lift or move your elbow once it’s set.”
Anyone who didn’t know that had never arm wrestled, Clara thought with disgust. But she said nothing. She crossed her legs, something else that would have appalled Juliette, and she let the movement hike up her skirt enough to expose a black-stockinged ankle. A very nice, comparatively slim ankle, if she did say so herself. That ankle and the shoe with the cloth rose looked positively dainty next to Bear’s massive leg.
He cast an involuntary glance at her ankle as she had known he would. Then he quickly raised his eyes to hers and she sawthatlook.Thatlook was the look men got when they had glimpsed a woman-part they were not supposed to see and the woman knew they had looked and knew they wanted to look again. It was a look of surprise and guilt and pleasure and discomfort overlaid by a flash of happy triumph that they had ogled a seldom-seen item of feminine pulchritude.
“All right, back up,” Benjamin Dare ordered the onlookers. “Give the contestants room to concentrate and breathe.” It was all for show. No one took this match seriously enough even to wager on it. Mr. Dare nodded at Bear and Clara. “Get set.”
She raised her arm up under the cape, leaned forward, and planted her elbow atop the dictionary. She’d feared her hand would disappear within Bear’s massive paw, but she had big hands, too, and the disparity wasn’t as great as she had imagined it might be. But her reaction to his touch was electric.
His hand was warm and solid, and she felt his quick pulse where their wrists touched. His sleeves were rolled up and the overhead light turned the mat of thick hair on his arms to a fascinating sheen of burnished gold. And she could smell him. The starchy scent of his shirt, a tweedy soap smell, a whiff of cigar smoke, and the pleasant fragrance of brilliantine, which she would have sworn he wasn’t wearing because his hair looked naturally shiny.
His eyes weren’t six inches from hers. “What is that perfume you’re wearing?” he asked in a growly voice.
“Hoyt’s Genuine German Cologne.” Her own, not borrowed. Jean Jacques had claimed the scent drove him mad with desire. Now, as she analyzed the heat in Bear Barrett’s stare, she decided the cologne affected other men as it had Jean Jacques. Excellent.
This close, she spotted gold flecks in his brown-bear eyes and admired a thick curve of gold lashes. Saw a light dew of perspiration collecting at his temples as he stared into her eyes and thought his thoughts and felt his impressions, which she hoped were concentrated on trim ankles, the pulse at her wrist, the flashing eardrops swinging toward her cheeks, and the scent of a cologne guaranteed by the maker to drive men wild.
