done everything she could to help him, she told herself as she pulled on her pajamas and turned back the covers to her bed. If he insisted on going through this all alone, there was nothing she could do.
Resigned to the fact that she would, in all likelihood, watch him be escorted off to prison, she was about to crawl into bed when her doorbell rang. At nine-thirty at night she seldom had visitors. Unless it was someone who didn’t have a phone coming from the reservation with a medical emergency.
Concerned, she hurriedly pulled on a robe and rushed to the front of her small, two-bedroom house, flipping on lights as she went. She hoped it wasn’t Hannah Eagle. Six months’ pregnant, she’d had three other pregnancies that had ended in miscarriages. It would kill Hannah if this one did, too.
But when Summer quickly unlocked her front door and pulled it open, it wasn’t Hannah’s husband John standing on her porch. Instead, she found herself face-to-face with the last man she expected to seek her out at that hour of the night. Gavin Nighthawk.
“Gavin! What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” he said huskily. “I apologize for showing up without calling, but I was driving around and somehow just ended up here.” His eyes dropped to the thin material of her gown and robe. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
She was respectably covered—there was no reason for her to be embarrassed—but in the harsh glare of the porch light, she could feel a painful blush climb into her cheeks. Instinctively, before she realized just how telling the gesture was, she started to reach for the overlapping neckline of her robe to check to see how low it was. But his gaze followed the movement and with a silent curse, she dropped her hand and forced herself to not fidget.
“Actually, I was just going to read for a while before I went to bed,” she replied, standing stiffly in front of him. “If you’d like to come in, I’ll change into something more suitable and make some coffee—”
“I’m not staying that long,” he said quickly, stopping her before she could push the door wider. “I just wanted to let you know that I’ve been thinking about your proposal all evening, and I’ve decided to accept it.”
Stunned, Summer blinked, unable to believe she’d heard him correctly. “You have?”
Nodding grimly, Gavin could well understand her surprise. He hadn’t realized he’d made a decision until he’d found himself pulling up in front of her house. “I have to admit, I’ve had my suspicions of you. I don’t know why you offered to do this—or why you believe I’m innocent when no one else does. But I don’t have time to worry about whether you’ve got some kind of hidden agenda or not. My only concerns are clearing my name and getting my daughter back. I have a better chance of doing that with you as my wife than I do standing alone. So if your offer is still good, I’d like to accept.”
For a second, he thought she was going to say she’d changed her mind. She hesitated, and he couldn’t say he blamed her. Their arrangement—if she went through with it—was strictly a business one, but he was the one who stood to gain the most. If things worked out the way he hoped, he’d get not only his life, but his daughter back. All Summer was getting out of the deal was a hired hand at her clinic for a year.
“Summer? If you’ve changed your mind—”
“No,” she said quickly, silently cursing the betraying color in her cheeks. It wasn’t that she’d actually changed her mind—she’d just had her own share of self-doubts. But that wasn’t something she intended to share with him, not now that he’d decided to accept her offer. It would only cause misunderstandings and awkwardness, and there was enough of that already. “I’m just surprised, that’s all. When you said earlier that you needed some time to think about it, I really thought you were going to turn me down.”
“So did I,” he replied. “But to be perfectly honest, you’re the only chance I’ve got. And if we’re going to carry this off and convince people that you trust me enough to fall in love with me, we’ve got to get busy.”
“You mean, we’ve got to start dating.”
“Not just dating,” he corrected her. “If we’re going to get married before the trial starts, this has to be a whirlwind courtship. Fortunately, we’ve known each other all our lives, so there’s a history between us that should make it easier for people to believe we’ve suddenly found each other. Now we just have to give them some public displays of affection and every romantic in town will think we’ve really fallen in love.”
He made it sound so easy. They’d hold hands, gaze into each other’s eyes, and fool the world. For another woman that might have been a piece of cake, but Summer’s experience with men was practically nil. Oh, she’d dated some when she was in college and medical school, but she’d never met a man who made her heart turn over, so there’d been little hand holding, let alone romantic evenings where she gazed into someone’s eyes over a candlelit table for two. She didn’t have a clue how she was going to pull it off.
She didn’t, however, tell Gavin that. She was the one who had come up with this idea in a moment of madness, and she’d find a way to hold up her end of the bargain. After all, how difficult could it be? They had a world of things in common—medicine, their Native American heritage, hospital politics. They could spend hours talking about those things and anyone who saw them together would think they were totally wrapped up in each other.
Telling herself she could do this, she faced him squarely, all business. “Then I guess tomorrow night is as good a time as any to start. I’m usually home from the clinic by six unless I have an emergency. Just to be on the safe side, why don’t you pick me up at seven?”
As pragmatic as she, he nodded. “Wear something nice. We’ll go to the Wild Boar. We should cause quite a splash.”
They would do that just by walking in the door, Summer thought privately. The Wild Boar had just opened and was one of the nicest places in town. She hadn’t been there herself, but she’d heard the decor was rich, the wine list extensive, and the clientele the upper crust of Whitehorn society. The second they stepped foot inside the place, they’d set tongues wagging.
Which was exactly what they wanted, Summer reminded herself. The sooner people noticed they were dating and started talking, the quicker the locals would hopefully change their opinion of Gavin and look at him in a different light. “Then I guess I’ll see you at seven,” she said simply, and prayed she wasn’t getting into something she couldn’t handle.
When Gavin rang her doorbell promptly at seven the following evening, Summer thought she was prepared for their “date.” She’d spent most of the day psyching herself up for the part she had to play, and she was sure she could get through it without making a fool of herself. After all, how difficult could it be? They were just going to share a meal together in public, and they’d already done that at the Hip Hop.
But the man she opened her door to looked nothing like the one she’d approached that day in the diner. Dressed in a navy-blue suit that emphasized his broad shoulders, he was incredibly handsome. Caught off guard, Summer let her gaze slowly travel from his shoes to his freshly shaven square jaw to his neatly trimmed black hair, and felt her breath catch in her lungs. She’d never seen him in a suit before. She had to admit, he was something to see.
Standing in front of him in a dress that was at least three years out of date, she felt decidedly frumpy and old-fashioned. And she had no one to blame but herself. Her aunts had been telling her for months that there was more to life than medicine
