Margaret Brownley - [Rocky Creek 02] (25 page)

She shook her head. She couldn’t go to him, see him. Not while his kiss still trembled on her lips. She had no choice but to go back to the train station, purchase her ticket and leave town tomorrow. Just as she planned.

She whirled around and almost ran headlong into Mr. Barrel.

“Miss Higgins,” he said with a polite nod of his head. “I wish to speak to you, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t have time right now.” She tried to step past him. She moved to the right, to the left, to the right again. Anticipating her every move, he effectively blocked her way no matter which way she turned.

Hands on her hips, her voice dripped with annoyance. “Mr. Barrel, I’m in a hurry. Now would you kindly step aside?”

“This won’t take long, ma’am, I promise.”

She sighed in resignation. Obviously he was determined to prevent her from going anywhere until she heard him out. “What is it you wish to say, Mr. Barrel?”

He cleared his throat. “It’s about Brenda.”

“As I already explained,” she said patiently, “I simply cannot permit my sister to associate with a man who has no concern for her reputation.”

“I’m concerned about her reputation, ma’am.” His face grew red, but he showed no signs of backing down. “I love her.”

“You hardly know her,” she said. The poor man was obviously not thinking straight. “One night is hardly enough time to fall in love.”

“Oh, I didn’t fall in love with her the night we spent together,” he said. “I fell in love with her the moment I found her outside the boardinghouse sniffing Ma’s pies.”

Aghast, Jenny stared at him. “You caught her sniffing your mother’s pies?”

“Oh, Ma’s not my mother. She’s the nice lady who runs the boardinghouse,” he explained as if this lack of kinship somehow excused Brenda’s unseemly behavior. “And don’t go blaming Brenda for doing what any sane person would do. No one can resist Ma’s pies.”

“This is all very interesting, but—”

“Wait, hear me out,” he pleaded, his eyes filled with determination.

He looked so desperate she simply didn’t have the heart to turn him away. “I’m listening,” she said and she meant it.

He cleared his throat. An alarming red color crept up his neck and worked its way up his face like a rising high tide. He took so long to speak she thought he’d changed his mind.

But then he surprised her by blurting out, “I want to marry your sister.”

Her mouth fell open. Did he say
marry
? Without her permission? And before a proper courting? She shook her head. Nothing about this town made sense. Men kissed women without invitation and proposed marriage with even less inducement. Obviously, the people in Rocky Creek had no knowledge of proper courting manners!

Of course, there was the very real possibility that things weren’t as innocent as Brenda insisted. It was preposterous to think that a man could spend a night with a woman and do nothing more than talk about opera.

Jenny studied him. “If you think that offering to do the honorable thing will excuse your wanton behavior, you are sadly mistaken.”

His eyes blazed with determination. “I’m not trying to be honorable, ma’am. I love her and she loves me. And that’s the God-honest truth. You’ve got to believe me.”

“Believe you, Mr. Barrel? After you insist that nothing happened the night you spent with my sister?” She watched for the slightest flicker of guilt but saw none. “Who, I might add, was dressed in her night attire.”

“Lots of things happened,” he said.

She knew it!

“But it all happened here.” He thumped his fist against his chest.

She opened her mouth to object, but the words wouldn’t come. He looked so earnest and sincere it was all she could do not to submit to his charms. Despite her best efforts she softened toward him.

“Mr. Barrel, I don’t doubt for a moment that you have feelings for my sister. But how can you presume to know how she feels about you?”

“He knows because I told him,” Brenda said.

Jenny whirled about to face her youngest sister. “I made it very clear that we’re leaving town.”

“I’m not leaving. I’m staying here with Kip.” Brenda sidled up to Barrel, and the two of them stood side by side. They made a formidable pair and looked ready to take on the world.

Momentarily speechless, Jenny stared at them. Barrel was nothing like the man she hoped to find for Brenda. Nothing! And yet . . .

The softness in his eyes when he looked at Brenda—the way she gazed back at him—could not be denied. Jenny had seen a similar expression on Reverend Wells’s face when he gazed at his wife, Sarah.

“It is not good that the man should be alone
.”

Surely God hadn’t intended to bring Brenda and Mr. Barrel together. What could she possibly have in common with an opera-singing barber?

How could two people so wrong for each other look so perfectly right together?

Still, long-held dreams refused to die an easy death. She wasn’t willing to let go of her aspirations for Brenda. Not yet.

“Brenda, there’s no future here,” she managed at last. “Look around you. This town . . . it doesn’t even have a proper school or a library. I was wrong to bring you here. It was all a terrible mistake. As I told you, we’re leaving.”

Brenda’s eyes blazed with determination. “I love this town. I love the people and the church and I hope they never get a proper school. At least not until they change the constitution.”

Jenny was unnerved by the change in Brenda. Never had she seen her youngest sister show so much passion. But the crazy talk worried her. “What’s the constitution—”

Brenda cut her off with a soft beseeching look. “Jenny, please . . . It wasn’t a mistake to come here. I think God brought us here for a reason.”

Jenny’s head pounded. Nothing made sense. “You can’t know that.”

“I
do
know it.” Brenda’s brows drew together. “And I thought you knew it too. Didn’t you talk to Marshal Armstrong?”

Jenny stiffened. He was the main reason she couldn’t stay. Not after today. “What has . . . the marshal got to do with this?”

Brenda bit her lip and glanced away.

“Brenda! Answer me.”

Brenda glanced at Barrel as if to brace herself. “Mary Lou and I . . . we told the marshal that you liked him. We hoped he would convince you to stay.”

Jenny’s mouth dropped open. “You did what?” she sputtered. His kiss had simply been a ploy to appease her sisters? Had he simply taken pity on the girls and agreed to do their bidding? Was that it?

“We didn’t mean any harm.” Brenda looked close to tears. She reached out her hand but Jenny pulled away.

The kiss meant nothing. Nothing! Everything now made sense. Everything, that is, but the yearning that burned inside her. Wanting to be alone, she turned to leave, but Brenda grabbed her arm.

“Jenny, all my life I’ve tried to be the daughter Mama and Papa wanted me to be. What
you
wanted me to be. I can’t be that person anymore. Now I’ve got to be what God wants me to be.”

Jenny blinked in an effort to both hold back tears and better observe the stranger before her. When did this happen? When did her baby sister turn into a confident young woman? A woman clearly in love?

“Ma’am, you don’t have to worry about Brenda’s future,” Barrel said. “I may not be a rich man, but I intend to spend the rest of my life making her happy.”

Brenda moved her hand away from Jenny’s arm. “I don’t care about money. Kip is the first person to love me for who I am. When I’m around him, I don’t feel fat or ugly.”

Barrel turned and took both of Brenda’s hands in his, his face dark with dismay. “Don’t say such things. Don’t even think it. You’re the most beautiful woman I ever knew.”

Brenda blushed. “And you’re the most handsome man,” she said.

The two gazed at each other with such adoration that Jenny could no longer fight them. She had battled poverty, illness, hopelessness, and despair, but the love that flowed between her sister and Kip Barrel was stronger than any of those.

Feeling like an intruder, she glanced down the street toward the marshal’s office. Rhett stood outside. He leaned against a post, watching her. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel the heat of his gaze.

He made no secret how much he liked Barrel and disapproved of Hampton. No doubt he would be happy at how things turned out. Certain he was enjoying himself at her expense, she started toward the hotel before anyone could see her tears.

“Jenny?” Brenda called after her. “Where are you going?’

“To the hotel,” Jenny called back, her voice muffled. “I’ve got a wedding to plan.”

He waited.

Rhett waited for the rest of the day and well into the night for Jenny to come to him. While he waited, he practiced the words he wanted to say to her out loud.

“Jenny Higgins, I like you.” Not
like
.
Love
.
Say it, you fool!

“I love you,” he said, savoring the sound of it. That wasn’t so hard. Now if he could just get his tongue to cooperate when the time came to tell her to her face how he felt.

He could tease, joke, and banter with the best of them, but when it came to talking about the things that mattered most, he was tongue-tied. It hadn’t always been that way. Then Leonard died, and suddenly he couldn’t talk about feelings.

Leonard Stanford
.

The official cause of death was listed as fratricide—blue killing blue, gray killing gray. It happened all the time. Even Stonewall Jackson had been shot by his own troops. The army blamed such mishaps on the fog of war, an all-encompassing term for smoke, fatigue, weapon failure, confusion, miscommunication, or just plain carelessness. Any and all could lead to a comrade’s death.

For someone who claims it was an accident, you don’t seem the least bit remorseful
. The memory was like a knife piercing his heart. He could still see the rigid face of his commanding officer firing questions at him,
bang, bang, bang
.
Where were you? Where was he? Who gave the order to fire?

Remorseful? That was the least of it. Though the army eventually ruled in his favor, he would never forget that he had killed his best friend.

Rhett was a front-rank soldier, not Leonard. Leonard should never have been up front. He had taken Rhett’s place as a favor. Why Leonard had chosen that particular moment to bob up from his trench—the exact moment Rhett pulled the trigger—he would never know.

After the war, Rhett didn’t know what to do with himself. He went back to Missouri to face Leonard’s family, and it was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. They didn’t blame him, which somehow made him feel worse. What they did was talk about Leonard’s dream of going into law enforcement.

That’s when Rhett decided to become a lawman. He couldn’t bring Leonard back, but he could keep his friend’s dream alive.

It had been a long, hard road back. If it hadn’t been for his faith, he wouldn’t have survived. He still had nightmares. Still suffered from a soldier’s heart. Still hadn’t been able to talk to anyone except Reverend Wells about it. But recently something had changed.

Not something. Jenny!

For the first time since the war he found himself looking forward instead of back. He wanted to live life to the fullest again. He didn’t just want to live another man’s dream; he wanted to pursue his own.

She
likes
you.

She certainly seemed to like his kiss, or was it only his imagination? Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined her response. So where was she?

He could hardly tell her how he felt at the railroad station with all those people around. Nor did it seem like a good idea to meet her at the hotel. He asked that she come to him so he wouldn’t have to talk in front of her sisters.

He pulled his watch from his vest pocket. It was almost nine o’clock. She might have already retired for the night.

So what if she had? This was no time to worry about proper etiquette. He grabbed his hat and hurried toward the hotel. He bumped into Mary Lou in the lobby, and she looked nervous and anxious. Obviously the girl was up to something.

“Everything okay?” he asked. “You’re not still leaving Rocky Creek, are you?”

“Not now,” Mary Lou said, sounding strangely out of breath. “We’re so grateful for your help. Brenda is going to marry Mr. Barrel.”

So that’s what Jenny and Kip had been discussing. He stared at her, his mouth dry. “Is that why you and your sister were so anxious to stay? Because Brenda’s sweet on Barrel?”

Mary Lou’s cheeks flared red, and she lowered her lashes. “Yes,” she admitted.

Had someone physically trampled on his heart, he couldn’t have felt any worse than it felt at that moment. So all that business about Jenny liking him was just a trick to get him to talk to her on their behalf. Lies, all of it?

“But that’s not the only reason,” she added as if to guess his thoughts, and his optimism soared.

A smile played at the corner of her mouth. “There’s someone I’m interested in too,” she said, as if that made everything right.

His hope dashed again, he couldn’t even bring himself to say he was happy for her. So Mary Lou had taken a fancy to someone too. The girls had played him like a fool and he had let them.

Afraid of what he would do or say if he stayed a moment longer, he bade Mary Lou goodnight and walked away, crushed.

And no matter how many times he told himself that he was better off without Jenny, he couldn’t make the pain go away.

Twenty-two

Never show affection in public. Love may be blind but the townspeople are not.

— M
ISS
A
BIGAIL
J
ENKINS
, 1875

T
he moment the marshal left, Mary Lou pulled the message from behind her back where she’d hidden it from his view and read it again.
Meet me tomorrow at 11 p.m
.

It was written in a childish scrawl with none of the bold flourishes she would expect from a man like Jeff Trevor. Since Jeff claimed he could neither read nor write, she suspected someone had written the note for him, perhaps the messenger.