Liz Ireland (18 page)

He led her out to the dance floor and pulled her into his arms for a waltz. Surely his feet hadn’t moved in this pattern for over a decade, and yet it felt as though he’d been practicing all his life. Surely his hand hadn’t rested gently on a woman’s waist in years and years, and yet he was somehow able to hold Isabel with the assuredness of a regular man-about-town. In a moment, the shambling awkward shell he’d developed over the years seemed to fall away, and he felt twenty-five again, and handsome and vital because Isabel’s blue eyes were looking up at him.

“I’ve missed you, Izzy.” To his astonishment, the pet name he’d called her when they were young tumbled easily from his lips.

“Izzy.” She shook her head in amazement. “I haven’t heard or even thought of that name in years. In your letters you were always so formal.”

As was only proper. “You were always a married woman.”

She shook her head. “Oh, Ed. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Half our lives!”

“Not half of yours, Izzy. You’ll live forever.”

Sighing, she moved closer to him, making him feel like a king in a ballroom. They circled the dance floor once, twice, or maybe twenty times, unaware of anyone around them, and rightly so. What person watching them could have understood the miracle they were witnessing? It was as if autumn leaves had shaken off one of his beloved trees, giving way directly to apple blossoms. To Ed it seemed there wouldn’t be a winter this year, or perhaps ever in his life again.

Parker was right, Ellie noted. The stir she had created when she walked into the little schoolhouse
hadn’t lasted longer than a hiccup. Of course, Ed’s knocking over the lemonade had created a diversion, which had helped.

When Parker had danced with her, the only hostile glare she’d received came from Clara Trilby. After Parker, a man named Rory Jacobs asked to be her partner. After him, there was another man. At the end of a half hour, it seemed that everyone in the room had forgotten that she was the scandalous stranger they had been whispering about for weeks.

At least the men had…with the exception of one.

Roy was there. All the while she was dancing, she could feel those flinty eyes on her, burning into her accusingly, angry at her for appearing to have a good time. It certainly didn’t look as though
he
was enjoying himself. Roy hovered at the fringes of the crowd like a bird of prey, watching her so intently that she wondered if he’d come for the explicit purpose of making her uncomfortable.

If that was his aim, the evening could be considered a rousing success from his point of view. Her cheeks felt caught in a permanent flush—and it wasn’t from the dancing.

When one tune ended and she found herself without a partner, Ellie felt as anxious and exposed as a field mouse on the prairie with a hawk circling overhead. She made a beeline for the refreshment table, but halfway to her destination a strong hand clamped down on her arm. She twisted and found herself looking into Roy’s blue, blue eyes.

“May I have this dance?”

She glanced frantically about her for rescue, but Isabel was on the dance floor with Ed, and Parker was sipping punch and gazing longingly across the room at Clara, who was pointedly snubbing him.

With all the enthusiasm of a prisoner being marched to the gallows, she allowed Roy to take her arm and lead her onto the floor. When his hand clasped hers, she winced; having his arm about her waist was an agony. She could remember the last time he’d held her in a dance; how different that time had been!

His eyes glittered at her. “I’ve been watching you.”

“I’ve noticed.”

He grunted. “You’ve been popular. With the men, at least.”

She lifted her chin. “Does it bother you that people might actually want to be civil to me, Roy? I told you I was sorry for what I did. If I stay in Paradise for the rest of my life, will I spend all those years with you glowering at me?”

“Leave Paradise and you wouldn’t have to worry about that.”

In the next dance step, her foot came down in a stomp. Roy winced.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” she cried, biting back a laugh. “Was that—?”

His lips formed a grim line, though she could have sworn there was humor in his eyes. “Yes. I forgot I needed to be careful of my toe around you.”

“Perhaps you shouldn’t have insisted on dancing.”

“I needed to talk to you.”

“Oh dear,” she said wearily, feeling as if their conversation, like their dance, would always travel in the same unyielding circle. “So you could convince me to leave.”

“I’ll always be here,” Roy told her. “This is my home. Do you honestly want to go on having meetings like this?”

She laughed. “
You
were the one who asked me to
dance, remember? I was perfectly content avoiding you!”

His eyes narrowed on her. “You were content dancing with Parker.”

“Is there anything wrong with that?”

“Only if your designs on him are the same as they were on me.”

She wanted to scream, to shake him. “I’ve told you. I had no designs, Roy. It just happened.”

Did he think he was the only person who hurt? Couldn’t he tell that her heart felt broken into a million pieces?

“Nevertheless,” he went on relentlessly, not inclined to give an inch, “do you think your behavior around Parker is really ethical?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that two weeks ago you were on the verge of becoming my wife. I had the engagement ring in my pocket, for heaven’s sake,” he bit out.

His words thrust into her like daggers. His wife?
An engagement ring?

She had been miserable enough before, just knowing that she had lost Roy’s love. Knowing now how close she’d been to forming a permanent bond with him, and seeing in his eyes how completely that bond had ruptured, was devastating.

“I didn’t know.”

He tossed his head. “Of course you knew. I showed the ring to Isabel. She was the one who told me about you.”

Isabel had admitted telling Roy the truth about her past, though Ellie had never felt any resentment about that. How could she? She had been in the wrong, and Isabel had every right to speak openly to her son. But somehow, when Isabel had been telling her about her
fateful conversation with Roy, she had omitted the detail that made the story so tragic in Ellie’s eyes.

“She never said anything about a ring.”

Roy frowned. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. Only I don’t relish the idea of your becoming my sister-in-law.”

Ellie felt as if she were in a daze. She looked across the room again at Parker, whose gaze was still fixed steadily on Clara, and at Clara, who was still glaring at her, and nearly laughed.

How had she gotten herself into this twisted mess?

“What’s so funny?” he asked, seeing her smile.

Her eyes flashed at him. “Nothing. Don’t ask me to leave again, Roy, because I won’t. Someday you’re going to realize how wrong you are about me and your brother and everyone, and I want to be around to see your face when you do!”

O
n Monday, at a gathering at the Widow Henry’s, a pot of steaming tea just happened to spill on Ellie’s lap. Tuesday, she was shunned at the mercantile. On Wednesday, Isabel overheard the dentist saying that the word around town was that Ellie was expecting a baby by a notorious outlaw who’d been shot in Kansas last month.

By Saturday, the day Parker had promised to visit her, she was a nervous wreck.

Also, by some odd coincidence, several women—among them Cora Trilby—had simultaneously pressed mending work on Isabel and asked for it to be done by Monday. When Ed had come by to take Isabel for what had become their customary afternoon buggy ride, Ellie had insisted that she could do the work herself. So when Parker arrived for his visit, she had to send him away again.

“Don’t you want to come out?” he asked in surprise. “It’s a beautiful day.”

She remained bent over her needlework. “I saw it through the window a few hours ago.”

Really, under Isabel’s tutelage, she was becoming a much better seamstress. Of course, she still heard
people snickering about Mrs. Crouch’s shirtwaist. She doubted she would ever live that down in Paradise.

But perhaps someday she would be good enough to go somewhere else and open her own shop. Maybe New York…

Her eyes began to sting. She didn’t want to go back there, but neither did she want to stay here. For a while she had thought that Roy might come around, but a week had passed since the dance, and she hadn’t seen him.

Parker stood in front of her, spinning his hat on his finger. “Sitting inside sewing is no way to spend a cool sunny day.”

The sun had been shining nonstop for a week, making their early snow of a few weeks ago seem like something that had happened in a dream.

She looked up at him. “The truth is, I’m not sure I should leave this house anymore, Parker. Every time I do lately, calamity strikes.” She told him of the weird occurrences of the past week, right down to her conceiving a child by the Dalton Gang. “Next thing you know, they’ll say I’m an escapee from Barnum and Bailey’s circus!”

He waggled a brow comically and inspected her cheek. “I heard they were missing a bearded lady.”

She shook her head, chuckling in spite of herself. “I thought I would stay in this town for the baby’s sake, to give it a nice town to be raised in, but I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll ever be accepted anywhere.”

“Anywhere Clara Trilby lives, you mean?”

She looked into his blue eyes, surprised. Parker had rarely spoken that name in her presence. And yet, all week, at the edge of her consciousness, she’d been fighting back the idea that the young blond woman was at the center of all her troubles. She had been at
Mrs. Henry’s tea party and in the mercantile while Ellie was there. Her family was close with the dentist.

Parker chuckled.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Ellie said peevishly.

He grinned. “I had an argument a year ago with a woman who flew off the handle so that she said she never wanted to speak to me again. So I haven’t spoken to her, except once. Now, instead of merely apologizing, she’s going through all sorts of contortions and making several people’s lives miserable—including her own—trying to bring me round.”

“So you do think Clara is at the bottom of this?”

He nodded. “A woman’s mind is a serpentine thing.”

Ellie bridled indignantly. “Now you sound like your brother! We aren’t all cut from the same cloth, you know.” She tapped her fingers impatiently. “If she’s angry at you, I wish she would stop taking it out on me.”

“She’s bound to stop soon. Probably very soon.”

Ellie grunted. “Maybe the day a piano lands on my head.”

Parker laughed.
Laughed!

She didn’t understand how he could be so calm when she felt as if there were a whirlwind churning inside her, that at any minute she just might fly apart at the seams. Especially one of her poorly sewn seams.

“Be patient, Ellie. If there’s one thing you learn living in a small town, it’s that people usually get things right in the end.”

“Are you sure about that, Parker?” She lifted a brow skeptically. “You’re talking to the bearded lady, remember?”

As Roy and Ike plowed up the sorghum rows on Sunday, Roy watched Parker return from town in the
wagon. A few minutes later, while he and Ike were taking a break by the water pump, Ed and Isabel waved as they drove past on the main road on their afternoon outing.

“Does it ever seem to you that we’re the only ones working around here anymore?” said Roy.

Ike chuckled. “Everybody else has other matters to attend to.” He waggled his brows. “Love matters.”

Roy grunted.

“It’s a funny thing, that story about your ma and Ed.” Ike shook his head. “Your uncle was tellin’ me about it at the dance the other night.”

“Why’s it funny?”

“’Cause it’s such a shut-and-dried case of missed opportunity, and people workin’ at cross-purposes, and yet everything finally working itself out. Say, if she hadn’t married your pa…why then, she might never’ve met Ed. But if Ed had spoken up sooner, maybe they wouldn’t have had to wait so long to realize they loved each other.”

Roy was still unused to the idea of Ed being in love with anybody. Especially his mother. But, grudgingly, he had to bow to the inevitable. “I guess the problem is, she married the wrong brother to begin with.”

“Yup.” Ike shrugged. “But how was she supposed to know that at the time?”

Roy hung the dipper back on its nail and leaned against the well. The uneasy feeling he’d had all week was creeping up on him again. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d had a truly restful moment since his dance with Ellie.
Someday you’re going to realize how wrong you are
…But he wasn’t wrong, was he?

Ike scratched his grizzled chin thoughtfully. “Now you take Ellie. Parker seems to be rushin’ her pretty
hard—leastways, he goes into town most days. But you’n’ I both know there’s something that draws that boy to the Trilby girl. Lord knows why—she’s thin as a rail. I’ll bet she doesn’t know how to make good butter!”

Roy sent his gaze heavenward, praying Ike wasn’t going to meander down the butter trail for too long. “You make it sound like Parker’s the instigator here.”

Ike’s brows rose high on his forehead. “I don’t see nobody holding a gun to his head, do you?”

“Women have other ways of luring men to their doom.”

Ike cackled. “Roy, you’re the hardest case I’ve ever run into—and I’ve run into plenty. You’re worse off than the man I knew in Dakota territory who froze to death in a whiteout blizzard when he was twenty feet away from his own house.”

Roy didn’t see the connection…exactly. Just enough to make him a little more uncomfortable. “I’m not freezing to death.”

“Oh no?” Ike chortled. “You’re a walking case of frostbite, in my opinion. Used to be you were cranky, but we had good times. And when Ellie was around you were actually decent company. But now you keep lookin’ at Parker as if he’s betraying you, and at the dance you glared at Ellie as if she’d wounded you, and you stomp around the farm as if you’d just lost your best friend.”

Roy’s breath caught in surprise. That’s how he felt!

Really, the source of his misery wasn’t that Ellie had lied to him anymore. Or that she’d had a man, not her husband, before him. The sting of those things had ebbed. It wasn’t even that she seemed to be encouraging Parker that stuck in his craw. It was that he had lost a friend.

He was shocked to think of her that way. But now that Ike had mentioned it, Roy realized he’d taken to Ellie like he’d made friends in school—instantly and deeply. He’d never laughed so hard or played in the woods since he was a boy. When Ellie was living with them, he’d gotten up in the morning looking forward to the day, to seeing her. Instead of being exhausted and beat at the end of the day, when Ellie was there he’d come back from working with a spring in his step. She’d dug up a piece of his personality that no longer felt comfortable buried—that couldn’t be buried. It was like trying to bury sunshine.

He sighed. But now there was Parker….

What was he going to do?

“Yessir,” Ike said as he turned back to the field they’d been working, “it’s a shame about your mother. If she’d just hitched herself to the right brother to begin with, think of all the heartache that would’ve been saved!”

Roy walked along more slowly. His problem was, how could anyone without a crystal ball for brains know who the right brother would be?

Ellie was just about to brave going out to enjoy the last of the afternoon when she heard a knock at the door. She opened it and found herself face-to-face with Roy for the first time since they’d danced together.

Her heart performed an uncomfortable flip. How could a man infuriate her and frustrate her past all bearing, and yet still command the power to attract her like no other?

By contrast, he didn’t seem at all surprised to see her standing in front of him. Though why would he? She’d been burrowed in these few rooms for days
now, dreading the thought of leaving for fear some new calamity would befall her.

He gave her a brief, intense inspection from head to toe and her cheeks burned under his scrutiny. “You look terrible!”

She didn’t know whether to laugh or to be outraged. “Thank you very much.”

“Haven’t you been eating?”

She nodded, wanting nothing more than to get away from him. She might have taken his concerned questioning as sign for hope, but she didn’t trust herself enough to be optimistic. So much had gone wrong between them, his very presence made her feel feverish and unstable. She couldn’t look into those blue eyes of his without remembering other times…like the breathless moments they’d spent in Ed’s barn. Then, too, she’d been flush with hope—hope that Roy’s words of love meant that he really loved her.

Could she have been more wrong?

She turned quickly away so that he wouldn’t see the flush rise in her cheeks. “Eating enough for two,” she assured him.

Silence followed her indirect reference to her baby. She could feel his gaze on her back. Was he scowling at her, or smirking in that way he had? Curious, she spun quickly in hopes of catching his unguarded expression.

His face was unreadable.

“Your mother’s not here,” she told him.

“I didn’t come here to see my mother,” he said.

She knew in her heart that Roy hadn’t come to pay her a social call, except perhaps to tell her to go back to New York again. That’s as far as their conversations usually got these days.

Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “Then I
don’t know what you want here, Roy. I have apologized to you. I don’t know what more I can say to make up for the past.”

“You can’t say anything. You could do something.”

“I know, I know!” she cried in frustration. “I could stay away from your family or hightail it back to New York, or at least Omaha. But I’ve told you that I
can’t
do those things.”

“Actually…that’s not what I was going to suggest,” he said.

A blush rose in her cheeks. “Oh.”

He took her arm, smiling. “I was going to suggest a walk. It’s a nice day.”

Some reflex caused her to snatch her arm away, even while a part of her wanted to skip out onto the sidewalks with him. But how could she trust that smile of his? “I can’t walk with you, Roy.”

“Why not? You’re dressed for it.”

Because it would get my hopes up.

She swallowed and raised her head. Why was he here—and why was he being nice? It couldn’t be that he’d forgiven her. She doubted she’d hear absolution from his lips in her lifetime. Which could only mean that he wanted something from her.

Female companionship, perhaps. That’s what men generally wanted, in her experience.

She lifted her chin. “Why don’t you go down to the Lalapalooza and ask Flouncy to take a walk with you?”

He shook his head. “Can’t. She sleeps afternoons.”

Her exasperated sigh came out as a huff of fury, and she tugged off her hat and began unbuttoning her coat. Twirling on her heel, she stomped to the back of the store. She heard his footsteps follow, and then
he yanked her around to him. The force of his grip sent her smack into his chest, and the contact made her body tremble all over.

“Come on, Ellie. I’ve been thinking about us. Why don’t we bury the hatchet?” he said, pulling her closer.

She resisted. She’d worked hard to try to get Roy out of her thoughts. Ever since the dance, she’d tried not to think about the few days they had been so happy together, because doing so was just torture. But right now she saw the same warmth in those eyes that she’d seen in Ed’s apple orchard.

And in the barn.

“I know now that you still want me,” Roy said with a grin, “or you wouldn’t be so persnickety.”

She sucked in a breath, realizing his intent. Everyone knew that Isabel and Ed had been taking long afternoon picnics every day. Roy had come here to see her—probably to seduce her—because he needed to relieve an itch.

She squirmed in his grasp, feeling the maleness of him pressing into her, overpowering her.

“Damn it, do I have to spell it out for you?” he gritted out, holding her fast. “I’ve missed you!”

“Missed me,” she asked, “or missed cavorting on a corn-shuck mattress?”

His face reddened, and for a moment she thought the bells she heard were a prelude to Roy’s blowing his stack. But in the next second, they both turned and ran toward the window to see what was causing the commotion outside.

Ellie frowned as she peered past Isabel’s thick drapes. “What’s that?”

Roy looked alarmed. “Fire bell!” He flung the door open and ran out onto the sidewalk. Sure
enough, a small plume of smoke could be seen on the horizon west of town.

Toward the McMillan farm.

Ellie felt nausea rise in her. “Is it a prairie fire?”

Roy looked as white as a sheet. “After snow? Can’t be.”

“Then…?”

“House fire!” He took off running, and Ellie sprinted after him. He was moving so swiftly she barely had time to clamber onto the wagon in front of the mercantile.