Summer Breeze (26 page)

Joseph met the old foreman's gaze, saw the glimmer of hope in those green depths, and decided the poor man had been getting the small end of the horn long enough. "She wouldn't marry you all those years ago because she felt unworthy. 'Tarnished,' was the word she used. She believed that you deserved someone pure and untouched, so she refused your proposal. She couldn't tell you why because she'd sworn to her father that she'd never speak of it to anyone. But she never stopped loving you, Darby, not once in all these years."

Darby struggled up on his elbow, clenching his teeth at the pain.

Joseph grabbed the foreman's bare shoulders, which were amazingly well muscled for an old fellow's. "What the hell are you doing?"

"I got some—hash to settle," Darby bit out. "Damned fool girl. I knew—about the baby. What'd she think—that I believed she went off to finishin' school like her daddy said? She didn't come back finished. She came back skinny, with that little belly gone. In addition to bein' stupid, does she reckon I'm blind, to boot?"

Esa heard the commotion and appeared in the doorway. "What's going on?"

"I need my britches and boots," Darby said.

"You can't get up," Esa cried. "Doc said so. Two weeks bed rest, no less."

Darby flung his wiry legs over the edge of the mattress. Hugging his waist with one arm, he sent Esa a fiery look. "I don't care squat what Doc said. Get me my trousers, boy."

"Darby," Joseph tried, "you can't be doing this. You'll start that wound to bleeding again. There'll be time enough later to—:"

"Don't talk to me about time. I almost died with that fever. What if it comes back? I have to talk to her
now.
So she'll know I love her back. I can't take that to the grave with me, son. I need her to know my feelin's."

As crazy as it would be for Darby to stand, let alone get dressed and try to ride a horse, Joseph could understand the old man's sense of urgency. That was sobering. A week ago, he would have thought him totally insane. But that was before he met Rachel.

Thinking quickly, he said, "If you're bent on talking to her, Darby, I'll bring her here."

The tension eased from Darby's shoulders. "I'm

bent on it. I love that woman to the marrow of my bones."

"Fine, then. I'll go fetch her. You can't get up. You'll bleed to death before you get there."

Darby lifted his head. "You reckon she'll come?"

"I know it," Joseph assured him.

Darby sank weakly back onto the pillows. "Well, damn it, go get her then. I gotta give her a large piece of my mind."

David's horse was tethered to the hitching post in front of Amanda Hollister's house when Joseph rode in. He swung down from the saddle and looped Obie's reins over the horizontal pole, then ascended the steps two at a time to rap his knuckles on the front door. A few moments later, Amanda answered. She sat off to one side of the doorway in her wheelchair.

"Joseph," she said with a sarcastic edge in her voice. "Have you come to attend the inquisition?"

"No, ma'am." Joseph peered into the room and saw David sitting on the sofa. "I'm sorry to interrupt, little brother, but something important came up. Miss Hol-lister is urgently needed over at my place."

Amanda's face drained of color. "It's Darby, isn't it?"

"Yes, ma'am, but not in the way you think. The fever broke, and he's on the mend."

She placed a shaking hand over her heart. "Thank God. I thought he'd taken a turn for the worse."

"No, ma'am. But he insists on seeing you, straightaway. If you don't go to him, he'll try to come here. The effort's liable to kill him."

Amanda's eyes filled with tears. "You told him."

It wasn't a question. Joseph nodded and said, "Damn straight I told him. Someone needed to."

"You had no right."

"I know it, and I apologize. But I can't honestly say I'm sorry. He needed to know."

"Is he angry?"

Joseph considered the question. "Well, now, let's just say he'd be whipping wildcats right now if he weren't weak as a kitten."

Amanda rolled her chair back so Joseph could enter. "I trusted you."

"Yes, ma'am, I know you did." Joseph considered trying to explain his reasons for breaking her confidence, but the words just wouldn't come. "But there are some things a man has a right to know, and that's one of them. He knew about the baby all those years ago."

"He what?"

"He knew," Joseph repeated. "He never believed the story your father told about sending you off to finishing school. He knew you'd gone away to have a child in secret long before he asked you to be his wife."

A stricken expression came over Amanda's face. "Why did he never say anything?"

Joseph removed his hat and finger-combed his hair, thinking that she hadn't exactly been the epitome of forthrightness herself. But this wasn't the time for accusations. "I can't speak for Darby. You'll have to ask him why he never said anything. Will you go with me?

If you don't and he tries to come here, it'll be on your head."

Riding alongside the buggy, Joseph escorted Amanda Hollister back to his place and sat in the kitchen while she made her precarious way along the hall to Darby's room. The instant Darby saw her in the doorway, he said, "Come in and shut that door, girl. I don't want everybody and his brother hearin' what I've got to say."

Esa glanced up from pouring Joseph a cup of coffee and whispered, "What's this all about?"

"Love," Joseph said with a broad grin.

"Love?" Esa came to sit at the table across from his brother. "They're old people."

"Just goes to show that love isn't only for us young folks, I reckon."

"He called her 'girl.' How crazy is that?"

Joseph thought about it for a moment. It was true that Amanda Hollister had left girlhood behind her well over a half century ago, but maybe in Darby's eyes she was still as young and beautiful as she'd ever been.

Just then they heard Darby's voice booming through the walls. "I never heard such a bunch of poppycock in all my born days! Unworthy? I oughta tan your fanny for even thinkin' it. You're the finest swatch of calico I ever clapped eyes on, and that's a fact."

"Don't refer to me as a swatch of calico! I don't like it, Darby McClintoch."

"The prettiest thing I ever saw in a skirt, then."

"There's a lot more to me than this skirt."

"Like I don't know it? I loved you with all my heart, and damn it to hell, I still do!"

Amanda's softer voice didn't carry through the walls. All they could hear was a low murmur.

"All these years, I thought you didn't love me back!"

Another murmur.

"And that was the only reason? Damn it, Amanda Grace, what were you thinkin'? You havin' the child never mattered a whit to me. I loved you then, I love you now, and all I can think about is the wasted years."

The front door opened just then and David stepped inside. "You got enough coffee to spare another cup?" he asked.

Esa swung to his feet. "Sure. Come take a load off. The entertainment's above average."

Darby's voice rang out again. 'Too
old?.
The hell you say. I'm not takin' no for an answer this time. As soon as I get back on my feet, I'm marryin' you, and that's my last word on the subject,"

Joseph chuckled. "Church bells are gonna be ringing in No Name."

"We don't have any church bells," Esa pointed out.

"Then we'll all ring cowbells," Joseph retorted. "When two people wait this long to get hitched, they need bells to mark the occasion."

David shoved his hat back to glare at his older brother. "Have you plum lost your mind? The woman may be a cold-blooded killer. If I can prove it, she may hang."

Joseph shook his head. "Are you still stuck on that?

You're never going to prove it. Darby says you're trying to tree the wrong coon, that she couldn't possibly have done it. That's good enough for me."

"So why did Rachel scream when she saw Amanda?"

"I don't know," Joseph replied. "I'd venture a guess that Rachel doesn't even know for sure. But I'm willing to wager every cent I've got that it wasn't because Amanda Hollister committed the murders or was somehow involved."

"You can't be sure," David shot back.

"Yes," Joseph replied. "I'm as sure of it as I've ever been of anything."

Rachel sat at the table with her chin propped on her fist, staring vacantly at nothing. Joseph had been gone for hours, and she felt lonely. Over the last five years, she'd become accustomed to being alone. But this was different. The silence that had become such a mainstay of her life suddenly seemed almost deafening. She missed the sound of Joseph's voice. She yearned to hear his deep, silky laughter. Even Buddy had deserted her in favor of playing outdoors with his brother.

She had tried to read, but for the first time in her recent memory, her books brought little comfort.

Crocheting and needlework held no appeal, either. In a very short time, she'd come to like—no, to
need
the company of others to make her world seem complete.

The realization frightened her. Darby was recovering nicely, and he'd soon come home. When he did, Joseph would leave. There would be no more laughter in her kitchen, no more guests for supper, no more reading aloud long into the evening. She would once again be alone with the silence. The thought made her feel almost claustrophobic, which might have been hilariously funny if it hadn't been so sad. A claustrophobic agoraphobic?

Tears filled Rachel's eyes, and the next thing she knew, she was weeping without really knowing why. She only knew that she felt desolate and absolutely forlorn. And trapped. She felt so trapped. Her kitchen, which had been her safe haven for so long, was now also her prison. She needed her walls in order to breathe, but Joseph's intrusion into her life had awakened other needs within her, some of them needs she'd felt before, others completely new, mysterious, and in-definable, yet just as compelling.

She loved Darby. She truly did. And she looked forward to hearing his knocks on the wood safe again. But to go back to living her life around those three knocks a day? Rachel wasn't sure she could do it again, not after having Joseph and Buddy there. They'd made her realize how barren her existence was, and now she wanted more, so very much more.

Rachel knew it was beyond silly to sit there in her dim kitchen, weeping over the things that were missing in her life, but that didn't make her want them any less. Even more horrible was her certain knowledge that they were all things she could never have or experience. She would grow old without ever knowing what it was like to be loved by a man. She would never hold her own baby in her arms. She would never know the joy of watching her children grow up and become productive adults. And when she grew old, she would have no one with whom to share her memories. In

truth, she wouldn't even live a life worth remembering. The days and nights would blend together in a lantern-lighted, silent, empty blur.

And so she wept, her sobs bouncing back at her off the walls that she needed so desperately but had also come to hate.

When she heard Joseph talking to Ace out on the porch some time later, she dried her eyes, patted her cheeks, and leaped up from the chair to tidy her clothing and hair. He would come inside soon, and she didn't want to look a fright. Nor did she want him to know that she'd been crying.

He would ask why, and she wasn't at all sure she could explain without bursting into tears again.

Joseph's heart caught when he saw Rachel's face. At a glance, he knew that she'd been crying.

Strike that. She'd apparently been sobbing her heart out. Her eyelids were inflamed and puffy.

Blotches of red stained her otherwise pale cheeks. Her mouth was swollen.

"Sweetheart, what's wrong?" He stepped into the kitchen, closed the archway door, and dropped the bar into place. "Did something happen?"

"No, no, nothing." She flapped a slender hand and flashed an overly bright smile. "I just spilled the pepper, is all."

"The pepper?"

Joseph stared after her as she scurried away to the kitchen area. Over the years, he'd held his sister Eden in his arms more times than he could count, trying to soothe away her tears, and he instinctively knew that spilled pepper hadn't done that to Rachel's face.

"Lands, yes. I'm allergic. If I get a sniff, I'm sneezing and tearing up for hours."

Joseph didn't buy it. As he moved farther into the kitchen, he remembered Darby's description of Rachel right after the tragic loss of her family—a gaunt, terrified girl, hiding in the corner. Over time, she had put some weight back on and become a beautiful young woman, but in all the ways that counted, she was still hiding. Darby had just given her a much larger area to do it in.

"I have some wonderful news for you."

She turned from the range. "Really? What's that?"

He glanced behind her at the stove. No simmering pot demanded her attention. In fact, judging by the ambient temperature of the room, the fire in the box was dead out. Busywork, he decided, a way to avoid talking about whatever it was that had upset her.

"Darby is looking fit as a fiddle," he said. "Sitting up in bed, laughing, and—you won't believe this one—talking almost nonstop."

She smiled again, this time with a gladness and warmth that made her blotched cheeks glow.

"That
is
wonderful news. Did you give him my best?"

"I did. But judging by his progress, I doubt it will be long before you can tell him yourself. Doc wants him to stay in bed for two weeks, but I won't be surprised if Darby is up and about long before that."

"That's my Darby," she said with a wet laugh. And then her eyes filled with sparkling tears.

Joseph moved toward her as if being tugged along

by invisible strings. This wasn't the reaction he had expected. He'd hoped the news would please her. "Honey, what's wrong?"

She cupped a hand over her eyes and shook her head. "Nothing. I'm just being foolish."

In his opinion, anything that had her so upset couldn't be foolish. He grasped her wrist to draw her hand from her face. The pain that he saw in her blue eyes made him feel as if someone were driving a sharp blade straight through his heart. "Can't you tell me? Whatever it is, maybe I can come up with a solution."