Love's First Bloom (12 page)

Caught off guard and unprepared, he gathered up a few of the newspapers lying on top of the stack on the floor near the hearth. He grabbed the single straight chair sitting by the front window and carried everything outside. He set the chair into place facing the river, exactly where he had planned to put it tomorrow morning, hung his cane on the back of the chair, and plopped down into the seat.

With his heart pounding with anticipation, he had a newspaper in his hands and had started reading just in time to hear her voice as she approached the bend in the path behind him.

“It’s not much farther. There. Now take my hand and hold tight. Once we get there, you’ll be able to play, just like I promised.”

Several moments later, he heard a flurry of small footsteps followed by heavier ones. “Come back here. Lily, no! You mustn’t run off. Lily!”

He nearly choked on the chuckle he was trying to swallow when a tiny pair of hands smashed the newspaper he was holding into his chest, and a pair of big blue eyes twinkling with a bushel of mischief stared up at him. Ribbons taut at the base of her throat kept the bonnet the little girl was wearing from falling to the ground, and late afternoon sun shined brightly on the mass of blond hair that curled around her face.

“Play,” she squealed and tore off a corner of the newspaper when he tried to keep her from grabbing the newspaper away from him. His cane slipped off the chair and fell to the ground without distracting her.

Engaged in a tug of war with the impulsive little girl, he decided she was definitely not as delicate or fragile as her name implied. He stiffened, waiting for her mother to intervene, but Lily proceeded to tug at his hands with impunity. “Play! Lily play!”

He snorted. “Have you no control over your child? Or did you bring her here to subject me to her tantrum?”

His question brought Ruth to the child’s side, but she made no effort to stop Lily or pull her away. “She’s not having a tantrum. She’s simply excited. I assure you, if you knew Lily as well as I do, you’d know the difference,” she explained. Her smile was as sweet as her voice, and she simply stood there as if she were completely oblivious to his distress or her child’s ill-behavior.

“I have no desire to know her at all, but I was hoping for a bit of peace this afternoon to enjoy my newspaper.”

“In the middle of my garden?” She turned a bit and waved her hand in frustration, which simmered in the depths of her eyes. “You haven’t got enough room outside? Or inside your cabin? You had to sit here?”

He glanced down at the ground, shrugged, and tried not to look smug. “This bit of ragged soil hardly constitutes a garden. You haven’t returned to work on it, which implied you’d given up on the idea of planting anything here at all, even though I carried away those rocks you dug out, exactly as I promised I’d do,” he argued, glancing down for a moment at the toddler, who was still tugging on his hands. He wondered how a child so small could be that strong.

He looked back up at the woman who claimed to be her mother, just in time to see the subtle curl of her lips. Clearly, she would have tossed one of the rocks at him if she’d had the chance. He lowered his hands, prepared to handle the child himself at this point, when a sharp pain in his thumb shot straight up his arm.

Instinctively, he dropped the newspaper, lowered his gaze, saw that Lily had her little mouth locked on his thumb, and pulled his throbbing hand away, all in the space of a single heartbeat. “Madam! Please! Now will you control this … this little—”

“Lily! No biting!” Ruth yanked Lily away and up into her arms while struggling to keep the screaming child from scrambling down again.

He did not think he had ever seen a woman’s face change from pure sweetness to absolute horror in a blink of an eye, but he was absolutely certain he had never heard a child’s scream as shrill as the one that exploded from that little girl’s mouth. “I’m fine. Just … just get her to be quiet. See? There’s no harm done,” he added.

When he lifted his hand up to get the child’s attention, he noted with surprise that her eyes were crystal clear. There was not a single tear on her face, not anywhere, but her cheeks were flaming red.

Lily, however, ignored him, and Ruth did the same, choosing instead to walk the child over to a small patch of grass several yards away where she sat her down. Kneeling beside her, she bent her face so low and so close to Lily’s, he was half afraid she was going to bite the child herself. She hesitated for a moment, then sat back on her haunches and waited until the child stopped screaming before saying a word. “You’re a good little girl, Lily, but you cannot ever, ever bite anyone. Ever.”

“Lily play!” the little girl cried and tried to scamper back to her feet, but her mother gently forced her to sit back down again. “No. When you bite someone, you cannot play. You must sit here until I tell you to get up, and if you misbehave again, I’m going to take you straight home.”

Surprisingly, the little girl stayed put as her mother walked back to him, pulling out several blades of grass and playing with them. “I’m so sorry. She hasn’t bitten anyone for weeks, and I thought perhaps she’d gotten past that bad habit.”

“Obviously not.” He shook his hand, hoping he could shake away the throbbing pain in his thumb. He would have stood up to walk it off, but remaining seated gave him the advantage of being eye to eye with the petite woman.

Ruth cringed, but took his hand in hers to study the bite. “I know how much this hurts, but at least she didn’t break the skin.”

Unnerved by how soft her fingers felt against his own, he pulled his hand away. “I assume that’s an observation based on personal experience.”

She groaned. “I’m afraid it is,” she admitted as a blush stole across her face and accented the wisp of freckles resting on the crest of her cheeks. Bending down, she picked up the tattered newspaper, smoothed the pages, and handed them back to him. “I’m sorry your newspaper is so rumpled, although I doubt there’s much worth reading in the
Galaxy
. Or any of those other New York newspapers you’ve got lying there on the ground next to your chair.”

“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t read them yet,” he argued, excited at the prospect of discussing the latest news with her. Though he was anxious to see what her reaction would be when the topic of her father came up, for now he feigned indifference.

She glanced from the newspaper he was holding to the ones on the ground and shrugged. “They’re dated several days ago. I’ve read them. There isn’t more than an article in the whole lot of them that would constitute decent news.”

He cocked a brow. “You’re not fond of newspapers?”

Her gray eyes darkened. “I’m not fond of reading articles written by reporters who offer to unsuspecting readers whatever version of the truth will sell newspapers. Or whatever version will fill the coffers of editors who try to outdo one another by promoting scandals that show no regard for decency, let alone the truth.”

Stung by her attack on the very profession he was fighting so hard to reclaim as his own, he countered her argument without stopping to choose his words more carefully. “Reporters and their editors are motivated by a thirst for the truth that can’t be quenched by anything less, regardless of how the truth might impact the people involved. Truth also sells newspapers. That’s why people read them. They know they can rely on the newspapers to tell them the truth,” he asserted. Surprisingly, he found she was using the very same argument he had used in the past when arguing with his brother about the very same issues.

“Unfortunately, that’s not always true. In fact, I think it’s usually not true at all,” she insisted and glanced over at the toddler. “It’s a rare event when any of the newspapers or the reporters who work for them are called to task for the lies they perpetuate in the name of truth. Even then, it’s too late, especially for the people who’ve been falsely maligned, their reputations destroyed, their families devastated, and their fortunes gone.”

He squared his shoulders, captured her gaze, and held it. Surprised by the depth of emotion staring back at him, he pressed her, hoping to make her refer directly to Reverend Livingstone’s recent acquittal without bringing it up himself. “You obviously feel very strongly about the matter, yet I wonder if there’s a single example you might care to offer to prove—”

“I have any number of examples I could give you,” she quipped, then paused, as if sorting them in her mind. “Several years ago, there was a reporter for the
Galaxy
. I can’t say I quite remember his name, but he wrote a series of articles that inspired half the city to donate to a poor elderly widow who had been duped out of her inheritance by a passel of cunning thieves.”

Jake’s pulse thudded hard as he searched her gaze, but he saw no hint of guile or any sign she knew that he was the reporter she was talking about.

“Do you remember that?”

He shrugged. “Vaguely,” he replied, even though every word he had ever written about Victoria Carlington was indelibly printed on his conscience.

“By the time a more competent reporter for another newspaper had investigated the woman’s background,” she offered after taking another peek over at her daughter, “it was too late. The woman had left the city and disappeared with thousands of dollars, along with the alleged thieves who turned out to be her own nephews.”

He had to swallow twice to get rid of the rock of emotion lodged in his throat. “You seem to have quite a remarkable ability to recall something that happened so long ago.”

“I remember it well because I was one of the readers who had been moved to send a sizable contribution to her and encouraged others to do the same, although I’ve learned my lesson and won’t ever do something so foolish again. The only positive thing to come out of the entire affair is that the reporter ran off to a place where I can only hope he’s not trusted again to report on anything that ends up in print.” She then turned and ran after her daughter, who was toddling straight toward the river.

He gripped the side of his chair and forced himself to stay seated, until he saw the woman trip and fall to her knees. When he saw that Lily had already reached the water’s edge and showed no intention of stopping, he bolted from the chair and ran past Ruth into the river. By the time he got to the toddler, waves of cold river water were lapping at the middle of her tummy, and she was laughing and smacking the water with her hands.

When he swooped her up from behind and planted her safely on his shoulders, she squealed in protest and yanked on his hair. “Bath! Lily bath!”

Gritting his teeth, he clomped back to the shoreline and saw the expression of disbelief on Ruth’s face. He realized then he had moved far too quickly for a man recuperating from a broken back. Waves broke over the tops of his boots when he stopped abruptly and grimaced, hoping he conveyed a look of extreme pain.

Ruth rushed into the water and tried to get her daughter, but dropped her hands. “I can’t reach her. Could you please take her to shore and lift her down for me?”

He shook his head, which made Lily squeal again and tug another lock of his hair. “I can’t. My back … just locked up again. I can’t take another step or even lift my arms over my head. Try again.”

She glared at him and charged away, mumbling under her breath. “You didn’t seem to have any trouble walking back and forth into the village for the past few days, and you didn’t have any trouble making repairs for any number of other women, and now you can’t carry a little child a few more simple steps or lift her down from your shoulders?” She hoisted up the chair he had been sitting on, carried it back with her, and sat it into the water next to him.

“Th-that’s my only chair,” he argued.

“And that’s my only daughter,” she snapped and put her hand on his shoulder to keep her balance while she climbed onto the seat.

Lily let go of his hair and reached for Ruth, and he had to fight to keep his balance. “Bath?” Lily asked.

Ruth lifted her into her arms, leaned on him again to get down, and cuddled the little girl close. “Yes, you can have a bath, but not in the river. You can have a bath when we get home,” she crooned as she carried Lily back to shore. When she kept walking without so much as a backward glance, he saw the current slide the chair into the water and called, “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

She looked over her shoulder and smiled. “I’m quite sure you can get another chair. Now that I think of it, I’ve heard you’re probably talented enough to make one, but I can’t stop to help you because I have more important things to worry about than your chair.”

“What about me?” he argued.

When she turned about, he could see she was shivering just as much as Lily and even more than he was. He felt a tug of guilt he tried hard to ignore.

“What about you?” she asked.

“Don’t you have a bit of concern that you’re leaving me here, unable to move or reach my cane?”

She sighed. “Tell me why I should, and I’ll consider it.”

“In the first place,” he argued, “I was the one who saved your daughter. And in the second place, since you seem completely insensitive to the fact that I’m still recuperating and still suffering from back spasms that render me a cripple more days than not, perhaps you might want to talk to Mr. Garner when you get home. He’ll tell you it’s true. You might also ask him to send over another remedy since the one he gave me two days ago isn’t working anymore, although the fact that I just charged into the water before your daughter drowned because you were too busy spouting off about something you regret doing a number of years ago—”

“I’m coming. I’m coming,” she grumbled, “but don’t think for a moment that I won’t ask him, because I will.”

She was still mumbling something about how inconvenient it was to help him as she picked up his cane and made her way back to him. But he was so interested in how fascinating she was and how attractive she looked, despite the fact that her gown was soaked, her hair was windblown, and she had a whining toddler in her arms, he scarcely heard a word she said.

Thirteen