Always (21 page)

“What?” Then he felt something in his gut again, only this time it felt more like a breath-stealing sucker punch to the solar plexus.

Probably because that was exactly what it was.

He released his hold on her to gape downward. Emily’s small fist was still clenched and drawing back for a second blow.

“Whoa!” He jumped back and threw out a hand to deflect a second attack. He jerked his head up just in time to catch the warning flash of hellfire in her eyes.

“Blast you, Ross! What are you doing, following me around like that? Who do you think you are? What business is it of yours who I choose to be friends with?”

This barrage of questions came in a flurry of flying fists, first from the left, coming up for his jaw, which he sidestepped neatly, then from the right, which he managed to duck before he would have gotten clipped in the ear.
Hell!
What was the matter with her?

“Do you enjoy embarrassing me?” She swung out again, wildly this time, missing him by a foot and nearly tossing herself off balance.

“Stop it!” Ross found his voice along with a fortifying shot of indignation. He’d rescued her. She should damned well be grateful for it. He caught her forearm on a new backswing. “Emily, stop this! You’re hysterical.”

“Hysterical? I’ll show you hysterical!”

Ross caught her other wrist before she could do any damage and ran her arms back up against the springhouse wall. “What’s the matter with you?”

 “What’s the matter with
me
?” She let out a yelp and tried to free herself. “Me?”

Realizing that she was capable of bringing a knee up to wreak havoc with his personals, Ross closed the slight distance between them, sandwiching her to the wall to hold her still. They were uncomfortably close.

“What’s the matter with
you
?” she demanded, pushing back with all her might.

Too damn close
, Ross thought, breaking into a sweat. He imagined that he could feel every distressing detail of her plump young breasts against his chest, yet he couldn’t think of any way to disengage from their indecent clinch without getting himself nailed silly.

“Why can’t you mind your own business?” she yelled.

“I saved you!” he shouted back. “What did you think you were doing, going off with a fella like Karl? You want to ruin your reputation?”

“My reputation is none of your business!”

“It sure as hell is my business! Where’s your common sense? You want to get yourself in trouble?”

“Trouble? Ha! You should talk! Where do you spend your Saturday nights, Ross? In the taverns with fancy women?”

“That’s different!”

“How?”

Ross opened his mouth, ready to give her an earful, then clamped it shut when an earful failed to occur to him. He still felt a little crazy with the anger and whatever else it was that had driven him to follow her and then flatten Karl with a vengeance that far outweighed the provocation. He knew this, and yet he was helpless to control it or identify it.

“How is it different?” Emily repeated, tilting her chin up so that her mouth came dangerously close to his own.

“It... it just is, that’s all! I’m a man, for one thing, and you’re a—” He shut his mouth again. Woman. He was going to say woman, but she wasn’t a woman. Not yet. Neither was she a child. This was a fact that was becoming impossible for Ross to ignore. As they pressed too close, Ross felt the heat of his own anger rapidly changing to something else.

He realized too late that his hot young blood cared not to differentiate between platonic female curves and those of a more available nature. The warm flush that spread from his loins to the singing nerves of his very fingertips was distracting enough to make him nearly forget the self-disgust he should have felt at his inappropriate reaction to a girl who had always been like a sister to him.

But not quite.

Releasing her, he backed away, putting distance between them. This was Emily, he reminded himself. Emily. His boss’s daughter and his closest friend. Who else could she trust with her virtue if not Ross? Even just thinking of her the wrong way made him want to burn in hell.

“I was just trying to help,” he said, trying to mask his own bewilderment and dismay at what had just happened.

“Then stop treating me like a child!”

He wondered for a panicked second if she had somehow sensed his thoughts. Breathless from her struggles and with her shining ebony hair streaming over her shoulders, she leaned back against the wall as if she needed it for support.

“I don’t treat you like a child,” he denied.

“If I want to take Karl as my beau, then I’ll damn well do it! There’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

 Ross could think of no coherent reply. Take Karl as her beau?
Karl?
Had she lost her senses?

“Go back to your precious Johanna. That’s where you belong, isn’t it?”

Ross had just stared at her, trying to sort through his maddening confusion, then he’d turned away. He didn’t have an answer to her question. With his tumultuous emotions still running high, he’d left her behind at the springhouse.

After that, things had never quite returned to normal between them, even as they’d worked together at her father’s shop during the months that followed. They made up and became friends again, certainly, but something had changed.

Emily turned seventeen that year, and Ross became much too uncomfortably aware that she was now a young woman. He went out of his way to make sure that he didn’t touch her or end up alone with her for any length of time. Above all, he didn’t want to experience a repeat of the inappropriate emotions that had taken him by such bewildering surprise behind the springhouse.

It didn’t help, either, that Emily despised that Ross was still vying with John Butler for Johanna Davenport, or that Ross bristled whenever he thought of Emily continuing to be friends with Karl.

Then, of course, at the beginning of the summer, when Ross had quit the
Gazette
to go work for the
Herald
, Emily had considered his move nothing less than high treason. They’d stopped speaking altogether. That was, until one night in September, the night before Ross left for the war.

Now, as he leaned his head back against the pump shelter behind the Hockstetter’s farmhouse, Ross stared up at the cloudless summer sky and recalled Emily’s heated declaration the night of the chestnutting party:
If I want to take Karl as my beau, then I’ll dam well do it! There’s nothing you can do to stop me
.

No, there wasn’t anything he could have done to stop her. Not back then and not now. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it if Emily had, in fact, turned to Karl Becker for comfort after Ross left for the army. Simple arithmetic dictated that it was very possible that Karl could have fathered Emily’s child. But there was another possibility Ross was forced to consider, too, a possibility that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to believe until now because—

“She would have told me,” he said aloud, still contemplating the wide, empty sky overhead. They’d never lied to each other before.
Never.
Damn it, she would have told him.

Wouldn’t she?

Chapter Fifteen

Ross should have seen trouble coming, but he didn’t. It had been a long day at the newspaper, and he was too caught up in his own miseries to think much about the predatory glint in Oberholtzer’s wrinkled, beady eyes as he shuffled past Ross’s desk and disappeared into Malcolm’s office.

Two days had passed since Ross’s Whit Monday confrontation with Emily. Now, it was he who ignored her for a change. If they passed each other in the lobby or met in the corridor, he was the first to brush by and bid her a chilly “Good day, Miss Winters.”

More than once she tried to stop him to say something. He thought for a moment that he saw an apology in her eyes, but he ignored her anyway. He was through with shouldering more than his share of the burden for rebuilding their relationship, through with trying to help her when all he got in return were scathing rebukes and painful reminders of his own guilt.

All I want is for things to be like they used to be between us.

I don’t see how that’s possible.

Ross recalled those words with stinging clarity. An ironic role reversal had taken place. It was she who had finally forced him to face reality. To try to recreate the past was impossible. It seemed that his reckless, adoring childhood friend had been replaced by a proud and willful woman who would never accept him as he was now.

“Gallagher!”

Malcolm’s enraged bellow reverberated throughout the city newsroom, causing heads to jerk up and silence to descend like the abrupt snap of a guillotine. Ross hadn’t heard his name so sharply enunciated since those days when he’d worked here as a fledgling reporter.

Ross had changed since then, though, grown a lot and seen a lot, and so he didn’t rattle as easily. He raised his head very slowly to observe his managing editor’s broad figure framed in the open doorway to his office. Chewing on the remains of a smoldering Corona, Malcolm’s face was mottled pink with anger. His steel gray eyes were hot.

“In my office!” Without waiting for a response, Malcolm vanished in a swirl of cigar smoke back into the recesses of his holy den.

Ross didn’t acknowledge the raised eyebrows or curious stares that followed at his back. When he closed the office door behind him, his attention was drawn to Oberholtzer’s sly, gloating demeanor. The old man sat before Malcolm’s desk, his skinny elbows resting on the arms of his chair, his long, bony fingers steepled before him.

Ross shifted his attention to the furious figure who towered behind the desk. “You called?”

“Damn right I called! What do you know about this?” For the first time, Ross noticed the sheet of paper Malcolm had crumpled in one huge fist. It came at him in a wad, tossed across the desk.

Even before Ross reached down to smooth it out and pick it up, he knew what all this had to be about.

 “You recognize it?” Malcolm demanded.

It was a playbill for Fulton Hall. In one corner, Ross noted a whimsical woodcut illustration featuring a cello and a musical note that, to his practiced eye, had “Emily” written all over it. Keeping his expression neutral, Ross looked up. “I see that the Holman Opera Troupe is opening at the Fulton on Monday.”

The expression on Malcolm’s jowly, whiskered face brought to mind a snarling mastiff.  “
We
used to do the playbills for the Fulton. You know who’s printing them now?”

“Not us?”

“Damn right, not us! Your friend, Miss Winters, has been stealing our customers!”

Ross shot a measuring look at Oberholtzer to see that the man was practically preening. Emily’s secret was out, and the old geezer was all too happy to be the bearer of ill tidings.

“That’s absurd,” Ross replied. “Emily works for us.”

“She used to work for us.”

“She quit?”

“No,” Malcolm said, his voice lowering menacingly as he leaned forward over his desk. “
You
are going to fire her.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because you’re the one who recommended her in the first place.”

“You have any proof of these allegations?”

Oberholtzer interjected in a calm tone. “After this matter was brought to my attention early this afternoon, I took the liberty of investigating further. Miss Winters has been quite busy these past few weeks, severely undercutting our rates in order to lure our patrons away.”

Ross fought to quell his mounting annoyance. Annoyance with Oberholtzer for being such a persistent, nosy bastard and annoyance with Emily for landing him between this particular rock and hard place. “That’s the nature of healthy competition, isn’t it?”

“I knew I shouldn’t have hired a woman,” Malcolm growled, sending up sparks as he stabbed the butt of his cigar into a brass ashtray.

“I doubt her gender has a whole lot to do with this,” Ross reminded him. “She did a good job while she was here.”

“A good job of making fool jackasses out of us! Her daddy must be howling in his grave.”

“All right,” Ross said, wanting to end it. “I’ll talk to her.” He turned to leave.

“Wait.”

His hand on the doorknob, Ross silently cursed Malcolm, Emily, and Oberholtzer.

“I asked you what you knew about this. You didn’t answer me.”

Setting his teeth, Ross turned to face his managing editor. “What do you think? That I knew what she planned to do when I recommended her for the job?”

Malcolm’s gray eyes narrowed. “You’ve known her for a long time. You went to school with her. You worked with her when you were with the old
Gazette
.”

“Are you questioning my loyalty?”

Malcolm didn’t look away, but Ross noted that his assessing gaze cooled somewhat as he pondered whether or not to call his future son-in-law’s bluff. At this point, even Ross wasn’t sure if he would utter an outright lie to save his job as well as his impending nuptials.

“It wouldn’t be very smart to cross me now, Ross.”

“No one ever accused me of being stupid, Malcolm.”

At this, Oberholtzer moved for the first time, dropping his steepled fingers and shifting his weight in his seat with great dignity. “I am sure, Mr. Gallagher, that if you will see to ending the young lady’s employment, we may return to business as usual,
ja
?”

When the old man tilted his head to peer up at Ross, the light caught and flashed off his bifocals. The smug curve of his lips told Ross that he was well satisfied with the results of his good works for today, but that Ross should continue to watch his own back in the future.

“Fine,” Ross replied tightly, then looked back at Malcolm. “Is that all?”

Malcolm studied him for another moment before deciding to let the question of Ross’s loyalties drop. “Find out what we owe her for the week. Mr. Oberholtzer will draw up a check. I don’t want her to set foot in this building again, understood?”

“Understood.” Ross yanked open the door.