Mary Connealy (46 page)

“What am I doing lying on the floor?” Grace sat up so quickly they almost bumped noses. She didn’t add “next to you.” The words were just not ones she could force out of her mouth.

“Grace.” Daniel studied her face so intently it distracted her from why she’d come to be here and how she’d come to be here and when she’d come to be here and…

“Where am I?”

“I’m glad you’re awake. I was worried about you.”

They stared at each other for a long second, and then, in Grace’s muddled mind, another memory clicked into place. “Parrish.”

Daniel’s expression softened. “No, you’ll be fine. I kept you close by the fire all night. What were you doing in my wagon anyway?”

Grace tried so hard to answer that question she could feel her forehead crinkling from the effort. “Am I…This is your…?”

She looked past his shock of white-blond hair, which he’d passed on to all his sons. She looked past his broad shoulders, which proved to be next to impossible because they seemed to block out the whole world.

Then she knew. She’d come calling when she’d started teaching. And it
was
a rat hole. The man and his family lived underground like vermin.

Still, she’d come. It was her duty as schoolmarm. She’d heard about the new family that had yet to send their young ones to school. She rode out here alone, on a rented horse she could ill afford, determined to urge the parents to educate their children.

She’d talked a skeptical Daniel Reeves into letting his boys attend school, and she’d been paying for that mistake ever since. But no mistake to do with the Reeves family made any difference to her life now. If she hadn’t been fired from her job, she’d have had to leave anyway because of Parrish.

“I brought you home. Well, I didn’t exactly bring you home.” Daniel’s eyes dropped to the space between them, which Grace noticed was minimal. He rolled up on his knees. She noticed he’d been stretched out on the bare dirt floor with no blanket while she had a stack of them. “More like I drove home, and when we went to unload the wagon, we found—”

“We don’t need a ma none.”

It looked for all the world as though Daniel had sprouted another head, a slightly smaller one coming out of his right shoulder.

“Good morning, Mark.” Grace recognized the oldest of the triplets. She knew him by the fire in his eyes that the other boys couldn’t fake and he couldn’t mask. And it wasn’t because the others weren’t always in mischief—heaven knew they were. But this one had a diabolical bend. Grace had always been one step behind him. Oh, who was she kidding? She’d always been miles behind all of them.

Ike tended toward hard work and determination, traits he often used to cause problems, but he’d been the best behaved of the bunch. Ike had brought a kitten into the schoolroom one day and spent his noon hour fussing over it by the potbellied stove in the schoolhouse. Ike had actually talked to her a little that day as she found a soft rag to wash away a deep cut on the kitten’s belly.

Abe, the oldest, was the leader, or so it seemed until she’d watched Mark for a while. Abe gave the orders, but he very subtly looked to his little brother for ideas, not being quite diabolical enough on his own.

John was the sweetest one, but only by comparison. He was still more unruly than any non-Reeves child in Mosqueros. He was a follower, but he followed with an enthusiasm that had left Grace stunned on many occasions. He was also a good student, for some reason taking pride in doing his work quickly and well. Grace had learned not to draw attention to that fact, though, because it embarrassed John and he’d act up extra for a few days to prove what a troublemaker he could be.

Luke was the toughest. Maybe because he was youngest, he’d learned to take anything anyone handed out and return it with interest. He never cried, he never complained, but he never forgot a wrong. He had a knack for paying back anyone who crossed him that had quickly taught every child in Mosqueros, even those twice his size, to steer clear of him.

But this one, staring at her now, was the brains of the outfit. Mark Reeves was a creative genius. Grace had often thought if she could harness that brilliance, the boy could cure diseases and build great buildings and invent new wonders of the world.

Instead, he just tortured her.

“We don’t
want
a ma, neither.” Luke’s head appeared over Daniel’s other shoulder.

“I’m sure that’s very interesting, Luke, but why are you telling me this?” Grace waited; all the potential heads hadn’t even begun to sprout out of Daniel’s shoulders.

“Because Pa brung you home to be our ma, but we don’t want you.” Abe appeared. “So thanks ’n’ everything, but—”

“Your father
brought
me home to be your ma, not
brung
me home to be your ma.” Grace thought about that for a split second before she added, “Your pa didn’t bring me home to be your ma.”

“You just said he did.” A little furrow appeared between John’s brows as he tried to make sense of her.

Grace wished him all the luck in the world, since she couldn’t begin to make sense of any of this.

“Which is it?” Ike asked with a suspicious narrowing of his blue eyes.

All six men stared at her, hanging on every word. She’d never seen a single one of them be still for this long. Maybe she should grab this chance to run.

“Why’re you here, then, Miss Calhoun?” Mark’s eyes seemed to bore into her brain. He was no doubt reading her mind. Finding out through supernatural means what would bother her the most so he could begin tormenting her.

She couldn’t tell them about Parrish. She couldn’t tell anyone, or she’d be sent back.

Daniel nodded. “Go on. Answer him. I want to know, too. Why
are
you here?”

Grace sat up and pushed the foot-high pile of blankets off her body then snatched them right back up to her chin. “Oh, good heavens.”

“What?” Daniel looked around the room; then he looked back at her, studying her as if he expected her to collapse at any second. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m wearing my nightgown.”

Dead silence fell on the room. Daniel’s blond eyebrows arched up until they disappeared into the scruffy overlong bangs that dropped across his forehead. “You are?”

“I can’t be out here alone with you wearing a nightgown.” Grace clutched the blankets until her fingers hurt, thinking of the scandal of it all. “It’s not proper.”

Daniel’s fair skin turned an alarming shade of pink as he stared at her. “I’ll bet it wasn’t proper of us to sleep together, either.”

“It most certainly was not.” The deep voice from behind hit them at the same instant the cold did.

They all turned to face Parson Roscoe.

The boys wheeled fully around. Daniel sat up. Grace clutched the blankets to her chest and looked into the startled eyes of the kindly parson and, just behind him, his gentle-hearted wife, Isabelle.

“Parson, it’s not what it looks like,” Grace said.

“Oh, thank heavens,” Mrs. Roscoe said. “Because it looks like you and Daniel spent the night together in this cave.”

“Then it is exactly what it looks like,” John said into a silence more frozen than Grace had been last night.

“Well, yes,” Daniel said. “We did spend the night together, but—”

“Daniel,” Grace gasped in horror.

Daniel looked away from the parson, his skin now fully flaming red. “Well, we did. Do you want me to add lying to the parson in on top of having you in bed…I mean, sleeping together…I mean, having you here without your clothes…I mean…” Daniel lapsed into silence.

“Pa brung her home to be our ma, but he tried her out for the night and he decided to return her,” Mark said.

Parson Roscoe stepped fully into the cave. “Both of you get up immediately.”

Daniel stood in a single, lithe movement.

“In front of the children, Grace? I’m shocked.” Mrs. Roscoe came in and shut the door behind her. The plump woman clutched her hands together in front of her chest as if desperate to get away and spend an hour in prayer just to wash the shock out of her mind.

Grace climbed to her feet. She fumbled with the blankets. There were too many of them to hold. She tried to drop a few of them and managed to drop them all. She caught at them and almost fell forward trying to keep herself covered.

Daniel caught her before she pitched over on top of him.

Every bone in Grace’s body hurt. Every breath cut across her chest like a knife. Her arms and legs were so stiff she wanted to cry out with pain.

“We saw the broken window in your room.” The parson produced his Bible from his coat pocket.

Grace remembered now. She’d fallen out of her window. No, she’d jumped out of her window.

“The whole town is up in arms about what happened to you, Grace.” Mrs. Roscoe crossed the room, all three steps wide, and rested her hand on Grace’s shoulder. “Search parties have been out all night.”

“Someone mentioned Daniel being in town yesterday afternoon.” The parson took up the story. “We offered to ride out and see if he knew of your whereabouts. Now I see you must have…uh…settled your differences and…uh…decided to…”

Grace could see the parson striving to be diplomatic when faced with the very worst possible sort of evidence of immoral behavior between two adults.

“Plan an elopement.” Mrs. Roscoe’s kind eyes found Grace, and the intertwined hands begged Grace to go along with this wild stab at respectability.

“No, oh no, no!” Daniel said. “We didn’t plan no elopement. I don’t want to marry the schoolmarm. Sure, we slept together. That doesn’t mean—”

“What’s ’lopement, Pa? Is that like an antelope?” John asked. “Are we gonna eat venison ’stead of dumb old steak all the time?”

“No, it’s like an envelope, stupid,” Abe sneered. “The parson wants to know if we’ve got any letters to mail.”

“We don’t rightly know how to fetch a letter around, Parson,” Ike said. “We haven’t had much schoolin’.”

“And what we’ve had isn’t much better ’n nothin’,” Mark added, “’cause Miss Calhoun was a mighty poor excuse for a schoolmarm.”

Grace turned on Mark. “I was not a poor excuse for a schoolmarm, you little—”

“Do not tell me, Daniel Reeves,”—the parson stopped Grace from grabbing Mark by stepping past the boys and the table until he stood toe-to-toe with Daniel—“that you expect to keep this young lady, a
respectable
woman from
this
town and a member of
my flock
, out at your home
overnight
and not
do the right thing.
”

“Right thing?” Grace forgot about Mark as she saw Daniel’s Adam’s apple bob up and down as he gulped.

Grace waited for the floor to swallow her up. If God really loved her, He’d just strike her dead right this minute. Then she thought of Parrish. If he found her married, would that negate any legal claim he had on her as her adoptive father?

Grace looked from Daniel Reeves and his multitude of sons to her future if Parrish caught up with her, something it now seemed inevitable he’d do.

Daniel or Parrish or death. Those were her only choices.

“Grace!” Parson Roscoe’s voice interrupted her panic.

“I’m thinking!” Weighing her options carefully, she prayed,
C’mon, God. Death. I’m ready
.

The parson could be formidable without half trying. Grace saw that he was trying like the dickens right now.

In a voice that seemed to promise eternal flames, he said to Daniel, “Yes, the right thing. We’ll get on with this. Call it an elopement if you will, and no one will have to know what exactly went on here last night.”

“Miss Calhoun’s reputation will be spared.” Mrs. Roscoe scooted closer to Daniel. She laid a comforting hand on his shoulder and pleaded. “Otherwise she’s ruined, Daniel. You knew that when you brought her here.”

Grace wondered what the parson and his wife were imagining happened in the tiny cave with five children as chaperones. She felt her cheeks heating up as she considered what might be going on in their minds. Although truly she didn’t have a clue what might be going on in their minds, because she had no idea what went on between a man and a woman.

“Well, Daniel, will you do the right thing by this young lady?” the parson asked in a hard voice. “Answer now, in front of God, your pastor, and your children. Think well before you speak.”

Daniel looked at the parson. He looked at his boys. Grace saw him look at the stone roof only a couple of inches over his head. Then he looked at her. It was the look of a wild animal caught in a trap.

He appeared for all the world to be considering the pros and cons of gnawing off his foot.

He turned back to the parson. “Nothing improper went on here last night.”

“I won’t hear another word,” the parson thundered. “She’s ruined, and well you know it.”

“I don’t mind being ruined,” Grace said. “Surely it’s better than being stuck with him!”

The parson turned his eyes on her, and Grace remembered his roaring sermons, all aimed straight at her. She was suddenly afraid to go to church on Sunday. And as soon as she spoke, she realized she
did
mind being ruined. She’d lived close to disaster for a long time, but she’d always clung to the highest level of respectability. With her background, it was terribly important to her.

The parson looked away from Grace, having silenced her. Grace took just a split second out of this living nightmare to envy the parson that glare and wish she could look at her students like that. Of course, she didn’t have any students. She’d been fired, thanks to the King of the Rats, here.

“Daniel Reeves, don’t make me ashamed of you.” The parson gripped his big black Bible in both hands as if he needed to physically hang on to his faith in the face of this indignity. “You will stand side by side and make right this grievous wrong you’ve perpetrated on this innocent maiden.”

“What’s
per potato
, Pa?” John tugged on Daniel’s sleeve. “Does the parson want to stay for breakfast? I’m hungry, and I’ll be glad to start cooking if you—”

“As long as Pa brung us a ma for one night, don’t it seem like she oughta do the cookin’?” Luke asked. “It’s the least she could do after she and Pa shared the blankets overnight.”