Accidentally Amish (29 page)

“What in the world are you doing here?” she said.

“It’s good I came,
ya
?”

“
Ya
,” she answered then laughed at herself. “He wouldn’t have done anything. He just tries to throw me off balance.”

“He does a good job.” Rufus glanced in the direction the man had driven. “I assume he is what you mean when you say, ‘It’s complicated.’”

She nodded. “Part of it. Most of it.”

Rufus tipped his hat toward the garden behind the bank. “Let’s sit down and watch something grow.”

Annie let Rufus steer her to a bench positioned for admiring a bed of irises and daylilies. The irises had finished blooming weeks ago, but strong stalks almost as tall as Annie still foisted deep orange daylily blossoms upward. Annie thought absently that the flowers were the same kind her mother cultivated.

She sat next to Rufus on the bench, and though he kept a careful distance, his nearness overwhelmed her. If he held his arms open to her, she would fall into them gladly, hear his heart beating, savor the pressure of his embrace.

“Annalise, you’re in trouble.” Rufus planted his hands on his knees and leaned forward.

Annie shook her head. “No. Most of it is sorted out already. I have a lawyer. I just signed papers. That man is angry that he did not get his way.” Annie tried to restore order to the documents still sprouting from the envelope in several directions. She put the tidied papers on the bench between them. “How do you do it, Rufus? How do you keep from striking back? I’m not trying to take advantage of anyone. I’m just fighting to protect what’s mine.”

“What does fighting solve?” Rufus leaned back. “Is what you call your own any safer now?”

Annie sighed. “You make it sound so simple.”

“It is far from simple. But it is a choice to trust God’s will.”

He stretched one arm across the back of the bench, his fingertips now a mere inch from her shoulder. She ached for his hand to rest on there.

“I saved my company—for now—but I lost a friend in the process.” Annie picked up the envelope, put the prongs through the hole, and fastened it shut. “I really tried to be peaceable, but he left me no choice.”

“You always have a choice. The trouble comes when you judge the consequences and find some of them too high a price to pay.”

His fingertips found their way to her shoulder, brushing up and down once and settling. She shivered in the heat.

“You don’t even know what I chose, what I did.” How could she expect Rufus to understand?

“I can see that what you chose did not make you happy. Or safe.”

“Maybe you’re right.” The space between them called for closing. Annie inched over, laying the envelope on the other side of her. His hand rested firmly on her shoulder now. If he kissed her, she would let him. Even encourage him. “You know, in the
English
world, this is where you would kiss me.”

“But that is not my world.” Despite his words, he held his position.

He wasn’t going to. She would have to do it.

Annie leaned into Rufus, one hand on his chest, and still he did not move. She found his mouth, and he did not move. She pressed into the softness, and he did not move, except to press back against her lips. Or was that her imagination? Warmth oozed through her as she waited for him to break the kiss. But he did not.

Her phone rang, and she jumped back to snatch it out of her pocket. Lee Solano.

“Hi.” Intuitively, she strayed from the bench and turned her back to Rufus.

“Everything go okay?”

She ran her tongue over her lips, still tasting Rufus. “The papers are signed. It’s done.”

“No sign of Stebbins?”

“Well, he did show up, but I handled it.”

“Harassment. Find a witness,” Lee said. “We’ll get a restraining order.”

“Oh, I have a witness.” Annie turned back to the bench.

But Rufus was gone.

A horn honked, and Annie raised her eyes to the red truck in the bank parking lot. Rufus pulled open the passenger door and got in.

Tom would carry Rufus back to Westcliffe. She had not even mentioned seeing Ruth or thought to return Eli’s book. All she had wanted was that kiss, no matter what.

Annie sighed and pulled out her phone to look at her schedule. She was having dinner with her parents the next night and a meeting with Lee the day after that. Then came a day of client meetings. Something had to give.

Maybe Rufus would not even want to see her. Maybe he would not listen once she spoke Ruth’s name.

July 1738

E
lizabeth Kallen yanked on a crowbar to pry the crate open.

“And what did this week’s shipment bring us?” Rachel Treadway, whose husband owned the shop and provided Elizabeth with a small room at the back of his house as most of her compensation, barely lifted her head from her accounts.

Elizabeth grunted and wrenched on the crowbar one more time. The lid came free.

When Elizabeth moved in with the Treadways nine years ago, she did not expect to stay more than a few months. As the years passed, though, she thought less and less about living anywhere else.

Until recently.

Elizabeth reached into the crate and pulled out a tightly wrapped bundle of rose-colored paper in half-sheet size.

“It is a new color. There must be matching envelopes.” Elizabeth carefully laid the paper on the counter and turned back to the crate. “Yes, here they are. The usual yellow and blue are here as well.”

“Any ink?”

Elizabeth moved crumpled paper around the crate. “Blue and black.”

Rachel groaned. “The artist over in Elfreth’s Alley has been begging for purple and green for his drawings.”

Elizabeth shrugged. “Only ordinary paper and ink today.”

“We get more and more people asking us for books.” Rachel waved the feather of her pen against her chin. “I wonder if I should speak to Mr. Treadway about adding a few more racks.”

Elizabeth couldn’t imagine where more racks could go in the narrow space of the shop.

“I heard that the Helton girl is finally getting married.” Rachel spread several receipts on her desk. “She’s nearly thirty. I know for a fact her mother had given up hope she would ever marry.”

“Love has no timetable.” As Elizabeth turned away, a bead of perspiration formed at the back of her neck and began its slow descent between her shoulders. “I’m thirty-two.”

“Oh, but you’re different. You have spunk. You came from Switzerland all by yourself when you were twenty-three, and things have worked out well, haven’t they?”

Elizabeth nodded. “Well enough.”

“We think of you as our own, you know.”

“You’ve been very kind.”

Elizabeth had not sailed from Europe to be a shopgirl, however. She was supposed to marry Dirk, who had moved to the New World two years ahead of her. He died in a lumber accident the day her ship left Rotterdam. But how could she have known? She spent two months at sea dreaming of a life that would never be.

She could have married, she supposed. It was not as if she never had another opportunity. But the Treadways, friends of her parents, had sheltered her in the first raw weeks of grief, and Elizabeth had not felt any urgency to move past her lost love.

And then she approached thirty, and passed thirty. Wives her age had five or six children. She had become an old maid who worked in a stationer’s shop. After all these years, Robert Treadway trusted her to run the shop with Rachel while he devoted his own time to more lucrative business interests. She rather enjoyed chatting with customers, and she was free to spend her evenings quietly surrounded by books in her small room. On Sundays she went to church and dined with friends. It was not a bad life. If someone had asked, she would have said she was happy.

Until the day Lisbetli Byler reached across the counter and Elizabeth lifted her eyes to the face of the child’s father.

Jakob stopped just short of the shop’s door. The solid curve of the cobblestone beneath his feet reminded him he had come from a rough-hewn cabin to ask a woman he barely knew if she might leave the comforts of Philadelphia.

The letter had been delivered three weeks ago now. Had he allowed her enough time to consider?

With his eyes focused on where he was putting his feet, Jakob walked past the shop’s open door. He would go see the cooper first for two new barrels to keep their foodstuffs in. Then perhaps he would go to the dry goods.

He stopped once again and looked back at the shop, its door propped open in case a breeze might stir in the street. On the farm, he would remove his jacket and work in shirtsleeves. But he could not call upon Elizabeth Kallen in his shirtsleeves.

He did not even know where she lived to make a proper call. He knew her only from the shop. Though he did not marry Verona until he was thirty-five, Jakob had little experience with these matters. His parents had joined the Amish when Jakob was ten. Since that time, he had barely even spoken to a woman who was not part of the church except to make simple purchases of items the Amish did not provide among their own.

He took a deep breath and stepped into the shop, certain that if she were horrified at the sight of him, he would know immediately and retreat without speaking. He would never trouble her again.

“Mr. Byler!” Sitting on a stool behind the counter, her face brightened with welcome. “What a pleasant surprise.”

“I hope you are well, Miss Kallen.”

“I am quite well, thank you. How is our little Lisbetli?”

Our
little Lisbetli. Jakob couldn’t help a smile. “She carries the doll with her everywhere she goes.”

“I’m so glad. And Maria? And Christian?”

“Maria has learned to read quite a few words, and Christian is a great help with the work.” He had written these things in the letter, but he would gladly say them again.

“I suppose you have come to town for supplies.” Elizabeth stood. “What kind of paper and ink do you require?”

He had come all the way to Philadelphia to have this conversation, but this was not how he expected it to begin. Jakob’s mind spun, confused. Had his letter not made it clear that his interest went beyond paper and ink? He had chosen his words so carefully. How could she not know?

Sieber. His neighbor might well have changed his mind about delivering the letter.

He blinked his eyes rapidly, feeling light-headed.

“Mr. Byler?” Elizabeth leaned across the counter. “Are you all right?”