Wanted: Wife (35 page)

May 25th, 1924

I
met John Fant on the worst day of my life.

There he was, the most handsome man I’d ever seen, standing at the bottom of my daddy’s porch clutching a straw Panama hat in his hand, the mournful expression on his face belying the jauntiness of his double-breasted lightweight jacket and Oxford bags with sharp, smart creases running smoothly down the fronts of the legs. An intense, magnetic energy radiated from him, rolled toward me like heat waves off the Chihuahuan Desert. I felt an inexplicable tug square in the center of my belly.

His gaze settled heavily on my face. There were shadows under his eyes, as if he’d been up all night, and there was a tightness to his lips that troubled me. A snazzy red Nash Roadster sat on a patch of dirt just off the one-lane wagon road that ran in front of the house. It looked just as out of place as the magnificent man in my front yard.

My knees turned as watery as the mustang grape jelly I’d canned the summer before that hadn’t set up right, and suddenly I couldn’t catch my breath. I hung onto the screen door that I was half hiding behind.

“Is this Corliss Greenwood’s residence?” he asked.

“Yessir.” I raised my chin and stepped out onto the porch. The screen door wavered behind me, the snap stretched out of the spring from too many years of too many kids slamming it closed. Without looking around, I kicked the door shut with my bare heel.

He came up on the porch, the termite-weakened steps sagging and creaking underneath his weight.

Shame burned my cheeks.
Please, God, don’t let him put one of those two-tone wingtips right through a rotten board.

He was tall, with broad shoulders, and even though he was whip-lean, he looked as strong as a prizewinning Longhorn bull. A spot of freshly dried blood stained his right cheek where he must have cut himself shaving. He’d shaved in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week? His hair was the color of coal, and he wore it slicked back off his forehead. His teeth were straight and white as piano keys, and I imagined that when he smiled, it went all the way up to his chocolate brown eyes. But he wasn’t smiling now.

Mr. Fant had caught me indisposed. I must have looked frightful in the frayed gray dress I wore when cleaning. The material was way too tight around my chest because my breasts had blossomed along with the spring flowers. Strands of unruly hair were popping out of my sloppy braid and falling around my face. I pushed them back.

Another step closer and he was only an arm’s length away.

My heart started thudding. His masculine fragrance wafted over to me in the heat of the noonday sun, notes of leather, oranges, rosemary, cedar, clove, and moss. Perfume! He was wearing perfume. I’d never met a man who wore perfume before, but it smelled mighty good, fresh and clean and rich.

My daddy always said I would have made a keen bloodhound with the nose I had on me. A well-developed sense of smell can be good for some things, like telling when a loaf of warm yeast bread is ready to come out of the oven, and inhaling a snout full of sunshine while unpinning clothes from the line, but other times having a good sniffer can be downright unpleasant—for instance, when visiting the outhouse in August.

“Is Corliss your father?”

My throat had squeezed up, so I just nodded.

“I’m John Fant.”

I knew who he was, of course. The Fants were the wealthiest family in Jeff Davis County. Truth be told, they were the wealthiest family between the Pecos River and the New Mexico border. The Fants had founded the town of Cupid, which lay twenty-five miles due north in the Foothills of the Fort Davis Mountains, and they owned the Fant Silver Mine, where my father worked. Three years before, when John had returned home with a degree from Maryland State College, his father, Silas Fant, had turned the family business over to his only son.

The screen door drifted open against my calf, and I bumped it closed again.

He arched a dark eyebrow. “And you are . . . ?”

“Millie Greenwood.” I barely managed to push my name over my lips.

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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copyright © 2013 by Darlene Panzera.

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Excerpt from
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copyright © 2013 by Darlene Panzera.

Excerpt from
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copyright © 2013 by Laurie Vanzura.

WANTED: WIFE
. Copyright © 2013 by Gwen Jones. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition JUNE 2013 ISBN: 9780062268044

Print Edition ISBN: 9780062268051

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