“Thank heavens you were here.” Bobby’s mother hugged his waist, and the dad shook Bridger’s hand. “We need someone like you right here in town.”
“I’m not a doctor, but thanks for the vote of confidence.”
He was born for the job, though, Pen thought. And found herself waiting to walk back with him.
“Thanks,” he said. “You’re a good assistant. You keep your head in a crisis.”
“Not like you. They’re right, you know. You’re meant for this work. Ever thought about going to medical school?”
“Hell, I’m thirty-six already. I’d be older than dirt by the time I finished.” He shrugged. “I did think about the training for a PA—physicians assistant—some, but it’s quite a commitment and there’s no program in that part of Tennessee. I’m fine with what I’m doing.”
“You’re good with kids,” she observed. “Have any of your own?”
Pain skated over his features, then gone. “Nope.”
She found herself intensely curious about his story, but there was no point. He was only here for a few days and so was she.
“You?” he asked.
“Children?” she recoiled. “Not hardly. No room in my life for them.”
“Hotshot lawyer, right? D.C. lobbyist?”
“Please—expert witness. I have my pride.”
He laughed, and she was charmed. “All Greek to me, anyway. Whole country would be better off if a nice epidemic would sweep through D.C.”
She frowned.
“Present company excepted, of course. I’m sure you’re real good at what you do, but politicians?” He shook his head. “No use for a one of them. They’ve gotten too far away from what government was meant to be.”
She started to argue as a matter of course, then stopped. Could she really disagree?
“What? No scathing retort? I heard you were all about the pithy comeback.”
“Do yourself a favor and don’t listen to a word Mackey says.”
“But Ian?”
“Ian’s a great guy, the best. But anyone who remembers me when I was all knobby knees and colt legs…” She sighed.
He gave her a slow up and down scan. “Those legs turned out fine, you ask me.” The appreciation in his gaze warmed her.
“Penny!” called out Melba Sykes. “Since you’re free, come let me show you how to quilt. Your mother was one of the best I ever saw.”
“Shoot me now,” she groaned.
He chuckled.
“Hey, you’re handy with a needle—you go.”
“Uh, I’m supposed to be cooking meat now. So sorry I can’t join you.”
“Chicken.”
Bridger’s big, gorgeous smile was her reward. He tapped her nose. “You know it. See you, Legs.” He veered off toward the courthouse.
Pen sighed and walked toward the quilting tent.
“Try this needle,” Melba offered. “Thread is right there on that holder.” She pointed to a little contraption that looked sort of like a rotisserie spit over a campfire, only instead of meat, a spool of thread perched. Nifty little invention, really. Who thought of these things?
“How much thread?”
“Try about a foot at first. Don’t worry about knotting it yet,” Melba ordered.
Don’t knot it? Then she got it. Easy to remove her stitches.
“Don’t feel bad,” added Nita Benefield across the frame. “With your mama as a teacher, I know you can sew a fine hand.”
Pen wasn’t so sure. Yes, her mother had taught her a lot about running a home, but that was years and years ago. Pen paid the dry cleaners to sew on a button now. She didn’t own even the most rudimentary sewing kit.
But as she lifted the needle and threaded it on the first try, she nibbled at her lower lip. Mama would be glad to see that one thing, at least, hadn’t been forgotten. Hand poised in the air, Pen turned to Melba. “What now?”
“Your mama didn’t teach you to quilt?”
“She was just a girl, Melba. Why would she have wanted to quilt when she could be swanning around and breaking boys’ hearts?” The speaker was Mrs. Ritter, who was Ian’s foreman Billy’s mom, she realized, older now and hair gone silver.
What would her mother look like now? She was struck to the heart. Her memories of Mary Gallagher were of a laughing woman, small and sweet, hands always busy but never too busy to sit down and read a book to a curious child or pause for a cuddle, place a kiss on a troubled brow. She lived in an apron, and she moved through her kingdom with ease. She was the queen, but one in blue jeans who kept the cookie jar full, who fed the family and the ranch hands and made it look easy, and in the evenings, no television watching for her—or if she did, she had needlework in her hands.
Pen’s father smiled back in those days. He was intrinsically a man of few words, but his eyes, as they looked upon his Mary, spoke volumes. James Gallagher was a hard man to live with…but his Mary soothed his soul in a way no one else could.
Even his Princess.
“—now you try,” Melba finished, and Pen realized she’d been daydreaming. With a quick scan, however, she got the gist of it and stuck her needle in the fabric, then reached below it to push it back up again.
Then she frowned. The others were getting two or three stitches with each insertion of the needle, so she waited and watched.
She needed a thimble.
Melba seemed to sense it. “Here—use mine. I have two. Shirley, you remember Mary’s thimble that James found her when he was on a cattle-buying trip? Ornately engraved silver? She loved that so.”
Abruptly an image rose in Pen’s brain, a small thimble with raised flowers all around it. “The one with the flowers?” she asked.
“The very one. Do you have it?”
After all she’d lost and all these years later, the loss was suddenly unbearable—how silly, given everything else that had vanished. “No. I’ll ask Daddy, though. Maybe he knows.”
“You’re a brave girl if you do, Penny. James doesn’t talk about Mary to anyone. Maybe to his princess, though…”
“He doesn’t?” She and he hadn’t spoken of her mother in years, she realized, but it was part and parcel of moving on, she’d thought. The subject, entwined as it was with Jackson’s disappearance, was too painful.
“Not a word. The man adored her to distraction.”
“He did,” she agreed.
“Then when everyone left but poor little Clarissa…” Shirley shook her head. “The poor little mite had such a hard time. She must have been so lonely.”
Lonely. Pen knew all about that. She’d thought she die of it the first year out on her own. She’d buried herself in her coursework and shoved all thoughts of this place into a box locked far away in her memory.
The alternative was to fall apart. Without Jackson, with his voice silenced, the cord cut as if it had never existed…
And her mother gone, all the kindness in her family vanished…
That poor mite.
Clary—Rissa—had been twelve. At twelve, Pen was tall and coltish and in desperate need of her mother’s guidance.
Rissa had been all alone, and being with James Gallagher must have been like living with a ghost.
She owed her sister an apology. A lot of them.
Abruptly she stood. “I have to see Rissa.”
“But, honey—” Melba’s insistence softened as she studied Pen’s face. “Of course. You go right ahead, but we’d love to have you visit while we’re here. We meet every Tuesday and Saturday in the old Hanford building.”
“Thank you.” Pen didn’t make promises she wouldn’t keep. She didn’t know where she’d go, but she couldn’t stay long. Not if she ever hoped to reclaim her life.
I promise you I will ruin you. If you ever contact my husband again, if the press ever figures out who you are…
Pen shivered.
She all but ran over people in her haste to get to her sister, her throat tight.
When she realized w
hat she was doing, she forced herself to slow, though the thought of losing the one person who felt like safe ground right now was more than she could bear.
Good grief. She was not this person, this needy, quivering mass of emotions. She’d accomplished far more than anyone she’d grown up with, had excelled at everything she’d tackled—
Her gaze was caught on her former classmates Alan and Debbie Patterson, flirting despite their pack of children. By Granny Cosgrove sitting at the storytime Perrie Gallagher was conducting, one great-grandchild in her arms, another holding her skirt.
She hadn’t mastered family, though, had she?
Wow. Her mother would be horrified. What Melba had just said rocketed around in her brain. She’d cut and run, pure and simple. Maybe she hadn’t vanished completely like Jackson, but she’d made herself scarce, for certain. She’d called, she’d visited occasionally.
But she hadn’t paid attention. Hadn’t seen that her little sister was struggling. When she’d returned to town once in a blue moon, she’d focused on being her father’s Princess again, on his pleasure in having her home. She’d regaled them with the stories of her triumphs, described a life that must have felt like hearing from someone from Mars.
She’d generally been in and out within two days, three max.
She swiveled her gaze to her sister, grown tall and strong. Curvy, a warrior queen fully in command of creatures that outweighed her ten times, yet kind so that even the smallest child seeking a ride beamed when Rissa turned her attention their way.
Three boys, early to mid-teens, crowded around—one was Ben Butler, she thought she’d heard, and Rissa’s Eric was another. The other two belonged to her cousins or maybe one of the Marshalls. All of them were awestruck and admiring.
Little Clary had grown up just fine without her.
Maybe she wouldn’t accept Pen’s apology now, and that would be perfectly understandable. But Pen had to try, so she put her feet into motion.
At her approach, Rissa turned. Smiled. “Hey, Sissy.”
Sissy. What the little Clary had called her all their lives.
Rissa frowned. “You okay?”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For everything. For running out on you when you were little. For not staying in touch better. For not seeing—”
“Hold on.” Rissa turned back to the little girl atop her horse Lolly. “Time for the next turn.” Against the girl’s protest and the cheers of other kids, she only smiled. “Got to give everyone a turn, but first, Lolly and I need a little break. Grant,” she said to one of the boys Pen decided might be Quinn Marshall’s. “I bet you have a ton of experience with horses, since your dad is the best horseman I ever met.”
Grant beamed. “He says you’re the talented one.”
“Does he now? I knew I liked that man. Here—” She held out the reins and turned to the boy who would soon be legally her son. “Eric, you know Lolly well, so you and Grant keep an eye on her, all right? Grant can water her under that tree while you feed her a little sweet mix, all right? Only a little—you know what a pig she is.”
Eric bounced on his toes. “I won’t feed him too much, Mom.”
Mom. Her baby sister was a mother now, even if it wasn’t quite legalized yet.
“Thanks, guys. Ben, will you be around? Davey? Will you help Ben keep the kids in line? I just need a minute.”
“Sure thing, Rissa.” Her cousin Mitch’s son, Pen realized. How sad was it that she didn’t know him at all?
Rissa ruffled Davey’s hair. “You guys are the best. I’ll just be over there with my sister, okay? Holler if you need me.”
“You’re good with them,” Pen said as they moved to a secluded spot.
“They’re good kids.”
“Eric is lucky.”
Rissa glanced fondly back. “I’m lucky. You’ll be around long enough for his birthday party, right?”
She had nowhere to go, but she wasn’t ready to admit that. “Absolutely.”
“I’m glad.”
“Why?”
Rissa reared back. “Why? You’re my sister.”
“But I abandoned you. After Mama died and Jackson disappeared, I couldn’t leave fast enough. I left you with Daddy.”
Rissa glanced away. “That’s over and done.”
Pen touched her arm. “Is it? I never, until right this moment, realized what it must have been like for you. He’s not an easy man, and you were so young.”
Her sister’s jaw flexed. “It’s water under the bridge.” But she wouldn’t meet Pen’s gaze.
“I don’t think it is, and I know that saying I’m sorry means nothing at this point, but—”
Rissa cocked her head. “But what?”
Sudden moisture stung her eyes—she, who never cried. “Oh, Rissa…” She battled for control.
“What is it?”
“Ladies—” interrupted a voice from nearby. “We have a problem.”
They both glanced over to see a grim look on Maddie Gallagher’s face.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s Scarlett. I had to tell her about the wedding, and to say she’s unhappy is putting it mildly. I don’t know how to tell Ruby that Scarlett is so mad at Ian—and he’s mad right back—that there might not be a wedding ever, much less today.” She blew out a breath. “Boone warned me I was playing with fire, but Ruby was so sure this would all work out…and when Ruby finds out about her own wedding?” She threw up her hands. “I’m going to talk to Ruby now and confess my sins. Anybody want to come along?” Maddie exhaled. “I could use reinforcements.”
“Not at all sure I’d be an asset, but I’ll come,” Rissa offered.
Maddie looked at Pen. Pen nodded. “Me, too.”
“Let’s go then.”
“Could you give us a minute?” Rissa asked.
Pen shook her head. “No, let’s go.”
Rissa eyed her curiously. “You sure?”
Pen was mortified at how close she’d come to breaking down in public. Her dignity was all she had left. The last thing she wanted to do was be an object of pity. She wasn’t ready to talk about the life that had veered out of control. “I’m sure.”
“We’re not done,” Rissa warned.
“Chop-chop, girlfriends,” Maddie said. “We have only a few hours until the ceremony and a potential no-show bride.” The ever-cheerful Maddie sounded nothing like her usual upbeat self.
“Ruby loves you,” Rissa soothed. “And she did start this. She should have known better.”
Maddie’s shoulders sagged. “I tried to talk her out of it at first, but she was so positive this was best for Scarlett. Still, I made things worse when I got Scarlett involved. Boone told me to stay out of it.” She sounded absolutely miserable.
Rissa wrapped an arm around Maddie’s shoulders and squeezed. “Nothing we like better in Sweetgrass than a good round of gossip.” She chuckled. “Look at it this way—you’re handing the folks a doozy.”
“Gee, thanks,” Maddie said. “I feel so much better.”
“Glad to help.”
Pen followed, happy to have her sister’s focus on something else.
Pen filed inside Aunt Ruby’s bedroom behind Maddie and Rissa, but they weren’t the first there. Quinn’s wife Lorie Marshall was there, along with Perrie, Lacey and Jeanette. Her great-aunt looked up from the red gown spread out on her bed, her expression clearly worried. “I already heard. Scarlett hates me.”
Maddie shook her head sadly. “Me, not you.”
“Oh, hon, this is my fault.”
“Not really. And don’t forgive me until you hear the rest.”
“What?”
Maddie blew out a breath. “Might as well have everyone in town mad at me.” She met Ruby’s gaze. “It was going to be a double wedding.”
“Double? Who else is—” Every person in the room shifted uneasily. “No. Oh, no—Maddie, what have you done?”
“Scarlett was
in on it, but you’re right. My fault. I started it.” Maddie sank to the mattress. “I guess we’re done.”
“So…the flowers, the cake—”
“Cakes,” Rissa supplied.
“That beautiful red dress,” Lorie noted. “I bet you’ll look like a million bucks in it. Jeanette did an astonishing job.”
Ruby turned her gaze to the woman in question. “This is my wedding dress?”
Jeanette shrugged. “It suits you, the red. But maybe you don’t like it.”
“Don’t like it? It’s gorgeous—oh, honey, you went to so much trouble…”
Jeanette shrugged. “I’ll put it on eBay or something.”
“You absolutely will not! It’s my dress.”
“But you don’t want to get married,” Pen pointed out. “Haven’t you turned him down a hundred times?”
Ruby hesitated. “Even if I wanted to, he won’t have me now.”
“You’re kidding, right? The man’s been proposing to you for eons,” Rissa exclaimed.
“Twenty-two years—but he says he’s done asking.”
“Oh, Aunt Ruby…”
But to Pen’s surprise, Ruby smiled. “It would serve the old goat right if I turned this around on him.” She glanced at Maddie. “He has a suit?”
“And a ring. His grandmother’s.”
“I’ve seen that ring. I love it.” She thought a minute. “So…Scarlett’s put her foot down, has she? She’s going to jeopardize what her heart has been crying out for? What she needs so badly?”
“She’s your granddaughter, Aunt Ruby. Rock heads come with the territory. Maybe Ian will be as patient as Arnie.” Rissa made her disdain known with a snort.
“He won’t,” said a voice from the doorway.
Every head whipped around to see Scarlett standing there, eyes red from weeping. “He told me that tonight. I’ve pushed him over the edge.”
“You know that’s not true, sweetheart,” Ruby said. “The man loves you to distraction.”
“But he doesn’t trust me. He thinks I’ll leave at the slightest chance.” Her mouth pursed. “He’s wrong about that—but he is right about something.” She glanced at Maddie. “And so were you. I’ve let my priorities get all messed up.” She shifted her gaze to Ruby. “I just wanted you to have your dream, Nana. I figured mine could wait.”
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