The Rascal (25 page)

They gave her commiserating looks.

Grace hesitated, her heart pounding. “Jack is miserable?”

“Without you?” Glenna nodded vigorously.

“Only until we women take charge,” Nealie assured her.

“It’s simply the way of things,” Arleen added.

Hmm. Grace quite liked the way the Murphy sisters viewed things. They were very practical. For the first time in days, she felt hopefulness soak all through her like sunshine on the springtime soil.

“I would like to know about his life in Boston,” Grace admitted. “And about what happened there.”

“Easily done,” Corinne said. “Come right this way.”

Alone in his saloon, Jack wandered between the tables. He righted those that had been upended, then snatched empty bottles and added them to the armload he already carried.

Last night, the whole place had been packed as a pickle barrel, filled with patrons eager to see the Excelsior Performing Troupe. Grace’s suppositions of culture aside, the retinue had included more than one bawdy dance-hall girl, two jugglers and one magician. Hardly refined, but very profitable.

Even if Jack had had to endure numerous ribald jests about underwear while his customers paid their admissions. Nowadays, those jokes seemed more friendly in nature than he’d first supposed though…and it felt strangely liberating to have his secret in the open, too. Not that Jack would admit it.

Scowling, he left the liquor bottles on the bar. Harry would
be here soon to help clean up, open the saloon and prepare for the troupe’s second night performing. In the meantime, Jack needed to do all manner of restocking.

He bent to the crate of tequila he’d brought from the back and plucked two bottles free. By rote, he carried them behind the bar, treading slowly. If last night was any indication, he had finally achieved the successful saloon he’d long worked for. He’d earned enough to pay Jedediah Hofer in full, to square up his other accounts and even to expand sooner than he’d thought.

Right now, though, Jack felt anything but pleased.

Behind him, the doors creaked. A shaft of light fell over the bottles in Jack’s hand, alerting him to a visitor.

“Saloon’s closed.” Grouchily, he turned. “Come back later.”

Adam Crabtree planted his feet, his usually jolly demeanor anything but this morning. “If I do that, I will not have done my utmost. And that is not like a Crabtree at all.”

Jack wanted to groan. Evidently doggedness ran in the family as much as freethinking did. He nodded. “Crabtree.”

“Murphy.” Adam gave him a shrewd look. “I don’t care if you’re closed. I’m here to talk about my daughter.”

Grace. Jack could not speak. He shelved two more bottles.

“I can see you’re feeling uncommunicative,” Adam said, untroubled by that fact. “Very well. I’ll get straight to the heart of things, shall I? Then I can go back to my peaceable retirement, and you can go back to being obstinate.”

Against his will, Jack smiled. Appalled, he sobered before turning to the crate to fetch another pair of tequila bottles.

“I have to tell you,” Adam announced, striding across the saloon floor like a practiced orator, “I am most displeased with the way this matchup has turned out. Or not turned out,
as the case may be.” He wagged his finger at Jack, his whole manner blustery behind his spectacles and graying hair. “I’ll admit—with no undue modesty, mind you—that I am quite skilled at these matters. It didn’t seem possible that two such brash, bookish, unnaturally muleheaded individuals as yourselves wouldn’t suit one another, so quite understandably I assumed—”

“Matchup?” Jack asked. “What matchup?”

Adam gave him a warmhearted, almost commiserating smile. “Between you and Grace, of course. Why else would I be here?”

Wholly confused, Jack stared at him. “I don’t know.”

“It took me months to find you,” Adam mused. “I must have perused hundreds of applicants for this building. My land agent was pushed near to fisticuffs several times, he was so frustrated with me. But I insisted on waiting till I was sure.”

This made no sense at all. “Sure of what?”

“Why, that I’d found the right man for my Grace. And when I met you at last, I knew you were the one for certain.”

On that bewildering note, Adam strode across the saloon, studying the place as though seeing it for the first time. It occurred to Jack that perhaps he was. Crabtree did not attend meetings of the Morrow Creek Men’s Club here, nor indulge in whiskey like most men in town. He was an anomaly.

A meddling, matchmaking, property-owning anomaly.

Jack stared in disbelief, realizing the truth with a jolt.

Adam sensed exactly the moment when he did.

“That was a near thing,” he observed, chuckling. “If you hadn’t cottoned on by now, Murphy, I would have had to revise my entire opinion of your intellect. Very good. Excellent.”

“You own this property,” Jack said.

“Indeed I do. Bought it with the first profits from the
Pioneer Press
and held on to it until the time was right.”

“But your land agent.” Jack marveled over it all, the pieces dropping into place like parts of the puzzles Grace had claimed her father loved so well. “Your lease demands. Your—”

“All necessary, I’m afraid.” Adam shook his head. “My daughter is too savvy otherwise. Grace doesn’t know the whole story, you see.” The man eyed Jack’s drooping bottles. “You might want to put those down. No profits in spilled tequila.”

Awkwardly, Jack did. “You set us up,” he declared.

“Yes, and I’m not sorry either. Sometimes people require a certain nudge in order to do the right thing, I’ve found.”

“I see where Grace gets her meddling streak.”

“Perhaps.” Adam’s face glowed with affection. “Of all my daughters, Grace is most like me, I’ll admit. But the fact remains—enough is enough.” His expression hardened as he wheeled around, suddenly the staunch businessman. “I’ve heard how you and Grace are avoiding one another, and I’ve had my fill. I’m fit to turn you both out if you can’t cooperate for a change.”

Instantly, Jack objected. “Grace will be forlorn!”

A telling twinkle entered Adam’s eyes. “Ah. Interesting, that you thought of Grace’s well-being before your own.”

Disgruntled, Jack frowned. But before he could refute that outrageous claim, Adam strode to the bar. He studied Colleen’s painting, nodded, then addressed Jack with satisfaction.

“But since Grace is
already
forlorn,” Adam pointed out, “and since her broken heart is likely to blame for it, my reapportioning your shared property can hardly injure her much more, can it? A clean break would be best.” He paused. “However, I’ll hear your arguments to keep your share intact if you wish.”

Jack met the man’s ostensibly cheerful expression with a fierce one of his own. He thought of Grace, turned out of her meeting rooms. Thought of her without her clubs and activities and nook for hiding contraband baseballs. Thought of her alone.

“Let Grace have the upstairs.” He frowned. “I’ll leave.”

Aggravatingly, Adam smiled. “Perhaps you should think about why you made that offer, Murphy. Think about why you withstood all those seamstress jokes. Why you owned up to your past at all.” He gave Jack a measuring look. “I have a feeling packing up and pulling foot for someplace new won’t look quite the same to you after that.”

Then he tipped his hat and took himself away, leaving Jack with a scowl as wide as the new saloon stage he’d constructed—and a lion’s share of food for thought in the bargain.

For the first time in all her years of rabble-rousing, Grace missed a protest march that day. Instead of carrying a banner and agitating for women’s rightful equality, she sat enraptured at the square while Corinne and Nealie and Glenna and Arleen told her all there was to know about their brother, Jack.

They spoke of his fine work at Boston College. His long history of inventing things. His abiding care for his family, and the scandal that had chased him from home. All of it.

Rapidly, from that conversation onward, Grace found herself welcomed into the chaotic fold that was the Murphy family. It was wondrous and lively. Even though Jack himself had not come round—not even two days after her enlightening talk with his sisters—Grace could not help but feel a little better.

No wonder Jack had reacted so strongly to her publicizing his drawings, Grace realized. No wonder he had felt betrayed when all the scandalous doings he’d left behind had
turned up again at Grace’s unwitting instigation. Likely she would have felt the same if their situations had been reversed.

“All I needed was the proper information,” she proclaimed to her father a day later, breakfasting with him before the final engagement of Heddy Neibermayer’s speaking tour. “The correct and complete information. If I had known about Jack’s past, I would never have called attention to those drawings.”

“Of course you would have, Grace.” Her papa munched his toasted Graham-flour bread, his eyes mischievous and somehow wise behind his spectacles. “You wouldn’t have been able to help yourself. You were born to meddle and manage and interfere.”

“Papa!”

“What?” He blinked. “I mean that in the most loving manner possible.” He patted her hand fondly. “You have always been boundlessly aware of your own opinions, from the day you first wailed out your displeasure at having been born so abruptly. You haven’t stopped stirring up a fuss for a minute since.” He smiled. “It’s one of your most endearing qualities.”

“Endearing?” Grace frowned.

“To those of us who love you,” he specified, spying the jam. He helped himself to more. “Which is how I knew, if I were ever to match you up with someone suitable—as I so love to do, being singularly meddlesome myself—I would have to be clever.”

Grace stilled, no longer enjoying her oatmeal. “Match me up with someone?” Thoughts of the whispered-about matchmaker of Morrow Creek swirled through her mind, making her distinctly uneasy. All this time, she’d thought she was immune to the family legacy. Now it seemed… “Papa, tell me you didn’t!”

“I did. You and Jack Murphy were an ideal match,” her
father informed her, his chin jutting in stubborn likeness to her own. “Pairing you with him was an excellent idea. My only mistake was in underestimating your identical obduracy.”

Grace groaned, long familiar with her papa’s…unusual tendencies toward romance. He’d done this before. But she’d never expected to find herself at the wrong end of his meddling.

“You promised you would leave me alone!” she reminded him, wadding up her napkin in frustration. “You promised you would not interfere with my life, because I am the eldest, and—”

His warmhearted smile stopped her. “Dear girl. A promise is nothing compared with making sure you’re happy. I’m a father! My whole purpose is to raise daughters who are secure and loved.”

Still… Grace could not believe it. “But to match me with a man? With Jack Murphy?” She waved her arm, aghast at the very notion. “As though I were a silly skirt with no sense at all? With no mind of my own to handle my own affairs?”

Her papa regarded her calmly. He pushed away his plate, then laid his hand gently on her forearm. His beloved face was sincere and serious and terribly, wonderfully, honest.

“It is because you have a mind of your own that I was compelled to intervene,” he said kindly, shaking his head. “Else see the daughter I love trapped in a solitude she’d never admit—nor ever be able to solve on her own.”

Stricken, Grace gazed at him. She opened her mouth, instantly prepared to deny it…but in the end she could not.

Her papa was right, she knew. Without being forced to deal with the man she fancied, without having Jack Murphy situated so vexingly downstairs, Grace might never have broken free of her lonesome routine. She might never have
touched real happiness, nor ever understood what it meant to truly love someone.

To truly be loved in return.

“Don’t be angry with me.” Her papa’s voice was quiet among the china and toast. “I only meant the best for you.”

“I’m not angry. I—” Another thought struck Grace. “Is this why you refused me the editorship of the newspaper?” she asked, distraught. “Because you wanted me to be matched instead?”

“No. Not at all.” As though that were patently obvious, her papa patted her arm. “I did that because the
Pioneer Press
really did require an experienced editor. And because you never truly wanted to have that job yourself.”

“Papa! Anything an experienced man can do, I can do.”

“That’s true.” Blithely, he crunched more toast. “But you didn’t want to be editor. You wanted me to be proud of you.”

She shook her head. “They were the same thing.”

“They were not.” His smile was sunny—and understanding. “It’s not what you do that makes me proud, Grace. It’s who you are, both inside and out. So long as you are yourself—truly yourself—I’m beyond proud of you. Always and forever.”

Grace’s eyes filled with tears. She simply couldn’t help it. “You are? You’re proud of me?”

“Endlessly proud,” her papa assured her. His startled gaze met hers. “You didn’t realize that already?”

Grace could not speak. She felt too astonished.

“Well. All talk of pride aside,” Papa blustered, “I still insist you are doing yourself a disservice by giving up on love so easily. Poor Mr. Murphy is bereft, you know.”

And with that reminder—and an extra helping of toast with jam—Grace knew exactly what her next mission had to be.

W
ith a mixture of pride and dismay, Jack gazed at his saloon’s packed tables and full bar. Men stood between both, hefting whiskeys or lagers, and they lingered at the billiard tables, too. Even the skinniest drinker in Morrow Creek could not have found room to bend an elbow at his place today.

“It looks as if Heddy Neibermayer is good for business,” Marcus observed, setting down his sarsaparilla. “There’s hardly a man in town who isn’t hiding out in here.”

“Hiding out? Pshaw.” With a blustery exhalation, Daniel waved to a friend in the crowd. His brawny reach almost upended a nearby cowboy. “There’s not a man alive who’s afraid of a bunch of tiny little women. Not me, that’s for sure.”

Jack smiled. “I’ll be certain to let Sarah know that.”

Daniel’s horrified look made him laugh.

“You can’t.” Marcus shrugged. “Sarah’s getting ready for that closing rally today, just like Molly is.”

The rally. Jack knew Grace would be there, too. But after…

“There won’t be any livin’ with ’em,” opined a banker who
stood within spitting distance, rolling his eyes, “now that those suffragettes have all our women het up over ‘equality.’”

“A man just can’t reason with them,” said another. “Last night, my wife made me wash my own dinner dishes! Said I ate the blasted food happily enough, and I might as well wash up, too.”

The men beside him grumbled. More grousing was heard.

“Ah, but the ladies at Miss Adelaide’s place have got them corsets you made now, Murphy,” a miner volunteered with an eager grin. “The sight of them ’most makes it all worthwhile.”

“That’s for certain!” O’Neil raised his mescal.

“Three cheers for Murphy’s underwear!” someone yelled.

Bedlam erupted. Men from every side of the saloon hoisted their drinks, sloshing ale and tequila with good-natured yells.

All was forgiven, it seemed to Jack—secret past and all. At the realization, a curious sense of relief struck him. Even Jedediah Hofer—recently paid a bonus for his kind business terms—genially raised a glass in salute.

Daniel joined in. Then, seeing his friends watching, he lowered his drink. He winked. “There’s something special about those unmentionables, all right.”

“So, Murphy.” Marcus addressed Jack with an interested gleam in his eyes. “I guess you’ve gone from seamstress to savior in a matter of days. And you’ve given every man in town a sanctuary to hide from the suffragettes in, too.” His satisfied smile flashed. “How does it feel to turn from sissy to hero?”

Jack scowled. “Shut up and drink, Copeland. Else I’m giving your place to someone who spends more money.”

“I want to know, too,” Daniel butted in, edging closer. “What miracle are you going to work next, Professor?”

Professor
. The designation had rapidly become his
nickname. Jack decided he didn’t mind the sound of it so very much after all. He spread his hands along the bar. “Well, as soon as Harry gets here, I’ve got something special in mind.”

“Something to do with Grace,” Marcus crowed. “I knew it!”

“I didn’t say that,” Jack countered—not entirely convincingly, he felt sure. “I didn’t say a thing about Grace.”

But she had been all he’d thought about for days.

“We figured you’d come round eventually.” Daniel whacked the bar, making drinks totter. “Just like us. If two of us are going to be hog-tied to uppity Crabtree women, we might as well all three of us be.”

“Damned straight.” Marcus took a celebratory sarsaparilla swig. “What’s your plan?” he asked, always eager for strategy.

“Tell us,” Daniel urged. “You’re sure to need our advice.”

Jack rolled his eyes, then slapped down his bar cloth.

“It’s true. You will need help.” Marcus offered a solemn look, untroubled by the raucous saloongoers all around him. “You shouldn’t go off half-cocked, especially with Heddy Neibermayer and her retinue in town. Their opinions matter to Grace.”

“She’s likely to turn you down flat just to save face,” Daniel opined. He caught Jack’s aggrieved look and raised his hands in apology. “Can’t argue with a woman. The last thing Grace Crabtree is going to do is accept your proposal—”

“Who says I’m going to propose to her?” Jack protested, appalled to be caught in such a sentimental wallow.

“—with a whole caboodle of lady reformers around.”

Wisely, Marcus nodded. “Daniel is right. Wait till Grace is alone, Jack. You’ll have your best chance with her then.”

“You two are daft. Grace isn’t like that,” Jack disagreed. But as he considered matters further, the certainty he’d
awakened with this morning—the certainty engendered by his visit with Adam Crabtree and his own damnable loneliness—slowly seeped away. Jack felt the blood drain from his face. “Although she does put a lot of store in what Humorless Heddy says….”

Alarmed for certain now, he gave Daniel and Marcus a wide-eyed look. They nodded somberly. “You don’t get many chances with women. They’re funny that way,” Daniel said. “Tetchy.”

The cowboy leaned in. “All I can say is, don’t wear your trail boots with cow patties on ’em.” He gave a sage wink.

Fraught with uncertainty, Jack stared back. But before he could so much as answer the cowboy, a strange sound reached him from outside. It sounded like many feet tramping in the street. Like chanting and rabble-rousing and marching. Like trouble.

He glanced to the doorway and glimpsed dust rising.

“Damnation. Is there a protest outside my saloon?”

His patrons heard it, too. One by one, they quit laughing and drinking and clanking billiards. The faro table fell silent. The dice stopped clattering. Whiskeys went slack in several hands as every head turned to the saloon’s entryway.

He’d waited too long
, Jack realized. Grace had gotten fed up and hurt and knee-deep in frustration and had taken out her dissatisfaction the best way she knew how. By leading a whole cadre of uppity women against his saloon. Or him. Or both.

She probably meant to shutter him for good, he realized, with an entire contingent of troublesome females at her command.

Swallowing hard, Jack steeled his courage. He fisted his hands. Then he headed for his saloon doors, ready to defend everything that truly mattered.

It would not be easy, he reasoned as he heard the chanting
grow louder. It would not be pretty, nor done the fancy way he’d hoped. But it would be done, and that was all that counted in the end.

With the saloon hushed behind him, Jack straightened his shoulders. Outside, all was in a ruckus. Inside, everyone held their whiskey-soaked breaths, waiting as he crossed the floor.

He pushed open the doors. Every chair scraped as men rushed to follow him, crowding behind in a tobacco-stinking clump.

Jack stepped onto the stoop. Sunlight blinded him. He shielded his eyes, ready to confront the trouble head-on.

It was even worse than he’d thought. Women crowded every inch in front of his saloon. More marched from either side, some ladies he recognized and some he didn’t—doubtless Heddy’s reformers. Many of Morrow Creek’s finest women had come, too.

In astonishment, Jack gaped at the placards they wore, the signs they held aloft. He spied a pair of dance-hall girls from the Excelsior Performing Troupe, then a lady juggler, then his four sisters, gaily waving from behind their banner.

Grace stepped from among the crowd, and the sight of her made his breath stop. Dressed in her usual commonsense garb, her hair up high, she held a gaudy sign firmly in hand. It did not—as Jack had feared—proclaim his uselessness to the entire world.

Instead, in enormous letters, it read…

GRACE CRABTREE LOVES JACK MURPHY.

Disbelieving, he blinked. Grace’s sign remained, held in a grip as steadfast as the gaze she fixed him with next. Her face flushed with love and trust and truthfulness, and Jack felt humbled by the realization of what he was seeing.

Grace. Beautiful, proud, maddening Grace. His Grace. If she would dare to declare her feelings this way, in front of
her suffragette idol and all her friends—in front of his sisters and hers—then surely there was a chance she meant it.

GRACE CRABTREE LOVES JACK MURPHY.

Every sign read the same, Jack realized in a daze. Somehow, Grace had marshaled all her reformer friends, all the members of her clubs and teams, nearly every female in town, just to say…

GRACE CRABTREE LOVES JACK MURPHY.

“I reckon she means it,” Daniel said from behind him.

“What are you waiting for?” Marcus poked him. “Go!”

The damned fools sounded nearly as choked up as Jack felt. Any minute now, they’d start blubbering. So would he. Casting them a helpless look, Jack stepped forward.

Grace met him halfway, her eager strides biting through the dusty street. Her gaze never left his. Jack welcomed the telling thump of her man-shoes all the same. He grasped her free hand, and knew that touching her again was all he’d wanted.

“I’m sorry, Jack.” The words came in a rush, husky and heartfelt. “I’m sorry I hurt you, sorry I doubted you—sorry I didn’t make sure to stand by you when you needed me most.”

He could only gaze at her, awestruck, taking in the beloved angles of her face, the familiar sprinkle of freckles on her nose, the telltale and hopelessly endearing tilt of her chin. Grace meant what she said. She meant it, and because of that, Jack knew he couldn’t wait any longer.

“Grace, listen—”

“Please say you’ll accept my apology,” she hurried on, giving his hand an impassioned squeeze. Her homemade sign wobbled, then straightened against the vivid sky. “Please say you’ll give me another try, Jack. If I have to ask you every day, you know I will. You know I possess the fortitude, when I really, truly want something, to try and try—”

“Grace.” Jack shook his head. “You’re not—”

“I’ve always said that anything worth having is worth fighting for. Haven’t I?” Her gaze beseeched him. Her speech rambled on, scarcely leaving a word edgewise for Jack. “You are worth having, and so is the love we shared. I won’t give up! I know now—thanks to my sisters and yours, thanks to Papa and my mother—that the important thing is being who we are. I couldn’t improve on you if I tried, Jack. I thought I was, only…only all I was really doing is loving you. Just as you are.”

He stood there, buffeted by her rush of words, waiting for Grace to say her piece. It was important that she speak freely, Jack told himself, before he turned loose all the explanations, the apologies, he held so tightly inside him. Grace needed to know he understood—and forgave. Wholly.

Instead Grace flung her sign-holding arm outward. “Say something!” she demanded, tears in her eyes. “Grunt at least!”

The women nearby pressed nearer. The men inside did, too.

But somehow Jack couldn’t do a thing but smile. His heart simply felt that full. So he contented himself with squeezing her hand once more, loving her courage and strength. “Grace—”

“I know we still have problems to overcome,” Grace rushed onward, jittery even in her clodhopper shoes. The pink in her cheeks heightened further. “They can’t all be shoehorned away, all neat and tidy just because we say so. But I know we can do it, Jack! If you’ll only forgive me, and—”

“I forgive you. Grace.” Happiness burbled up and threatened to cut off his words. Determined, he kept on. “I’m sorry, too. Sorry I didn’t tell you everything. Please—” His voice broke, causing him to try again. “Say you forgive me.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, Jack! Oh course I forgive you!”

“Because if you do,” he continued doggedly, “I feel certain there’s no problem too big for us to tackle together.”

“Do you mean that? Do you?” Grace pushed even nearer, her sign now threatening to conk him on the noggin. At his nod, her relief was evident. “Because there’s another matter we should discuss straightaway, and I know I can’t wait, because I love you so much, and I’ve already wasted so much time, and as often as a certain saloonkeeper—”

The women behind her beamed. A few lofted their signs.

“—has been pestering me to sample the ‘glories’ of marriage, I’ve decided there’s only one sure way to—”

Damnation, Jack realized. He was about to have his marriage proposal wrestled right out from beneath him. His freethinking reformer of a woman was about to lead his proposal herself.

“Stop.” Jack could scarcely form the word, so overwhelmed did he feel in that moment, with his palms sweating and his head swimming and his heart pounding and nearly all of Morrow Creek scrutinizing his every move. “Just wait a minute.”

Grace’s eyes widened. Biting her lip, she waited.

“I may not be the roughest man in the territory,” Jack said. “I may not be the most rugged either. But I do know that I love you, Grace. And I won’t have my marriage proposal sneaked out from under me.”

He tried to muster a fierce look—and knew he only succeeded in squeezing her hand still harder. Love caught his breath and made his heart hammer, and there was only one way to move forward. Still holding her hand, Jack dropped to one knee.

Grace gasped, her eyes shimmering with new tears.

“That is why,” Jack told her hoarsely, “you will stand silent while I tell you I love you. I love you, Grace, with all my heart and soul and every single breath I’ll take.”