The Heart's Haven

by Jill Barnett

  An unspoken hope, a whispered desire...

  “You are the most stubborn, bull-headed man I have ever met. Why I would even try to make this marriage real is beyond me. I don’t know why I was thinking you—” Hallie started to turn away.

  Kit grabbed her wrist. “What were you thinking?”

  “Nothing. Let go.”

  Kit wasn’t going to let her go, not until he heard her say exactly what she meant.

  Hallie pulled her hand away, and he wrapped his arms around her. Her hair fell over his arms. She looked up at him, glaring, and he was lost . . .

  Her lips parted, an invitation. He tasted her, and sweet desire bolted through him. “Tell me you want me,” he whispered. “Tell me you’re not afraid.”

  Hallie closed her eyes and a small moan escaped her lips.

  “Tell me with words. I need to hear the words,” he breathed.

  “I want you . . . but I didn’t know how to show you. I . . .”

  “Show me now . . .

  The Novels of Jill Barnett

  Now Available In Ebook

  From Bell Bridge Books:

  JUST A KISS AWAY

  BEWITCHING

  DREAMING

  IMAGINE

  CARRIED AWAY

  WONDERFUL

  WILD

  WICKED

  THE HEART’S HAVEN

  SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

  THE DAYS OF SUMMER

  BRIDGE TO HAPPINESS

  Visit Jill at www.jillbarnett.com and www.bellbridgebooks.com

  The Hearts Haven

  by

  Jill Barnett

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  eISBN: 978-1-935661-72-6

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 1990 by Jill Barnett

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers. You can contact us at the address above or at BelleBooks@BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo credits:

  Woman (manipulated) © Eric Simard | Dreamstime.com

  Swans/frame © Jaguarwoman Designs

  :Ehth:01:

  Dedication

  To Meagan McKinney, who believed in a stranger’s story.

  Chapter One

  A patch of faded blue gingham hovered in the lofty branches of Abner Brown’s precious apple tree. As the branches shuddered, dropping the delicate pink blooms onto the grass below, Haldis Fredriksen stopped, eyeing the tree. Her gray eyes narrowed when she recognized a familiar swatch of cloth—the same cloth that was becoming more and more visible with each quiver of the tree.

  She crept closer, using the furrow of lush rosebushes for cover. As she peeked through the roses, she could see the checked fabric now waving like a flag in the gentle spring breeze. She glanced around, assuring herself that her nemesis, that priggish Mr. Brown, was nowhere in sight.

  Three feet from the tree, she straightened and planted her hands firmly on her hips. “Liv, get out of that tree . . . now!”

  There was a frantic rustling in the upper branches, followed by a heavy shower of apple blossoms, and suddenly a mass of gingham skirts and blond braids tumbled to the ground. Sitting indignantly on a bed of crushed apple blossoms was Hallie’s nine-year-old sister, Liv.

  “Thunderation! Hallie, you scared the spit out of me!” Liv stood up, carelessly slinging a knotted pair of black stockings over a shoulder before attempting to dust off her debris-covered behind. “A person could get hurt, having a body creep up on them like that.”

  “I know a person who’ll be hurting—and soon.” Hallie turned Liv around and swatted the dust off the girl’s skirt a bit harder than necessary. “You swore you’d stay off Mr. Brown’s property. Two days later and you’re back in his tree again. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Liv mumbled. She gave Hallie a quick, guilty glance before she sat down and started fumbling with her knotted hose.

  Hallie looked down at Liv, who was tugging on a stocking over her bark-scraped leg and muttering something about crossed fingers. The sight struck a familiar chord in her. It seemed that all she did lately was lecture Liv. Was she being too hard on her, or was Liv just testing her limits? She’d been a handful for as long as Hallie could remember, but in the three years since their mother’s death, Liv’s belligerent attitude had worsened. Hallie had tried reasoning with her, but that hadn’t worked. Her youngest sister kept defying the rules. With Liv, you never knew what to expect next. “Well, young lady, it seems you don’t know why you’re doing anything lately, doesn’t it?”

  Liv was stubbornly silent.

  Hallie tried to infuse a stern tone into her tired voice. “A day spent inside might improve your memory. And while you’re trying to remember why you broke your word, you can do that stack of mending sitting by my bed.”

  “But Hallie—”

  “And if you finish before supper, you can give the boys a bath.” Hallie watched Liv’s face contort into a grimace of distaste. They both knew from experience that bathing the four-year-old twins was like being thrown from Noah’s Ark—only forty days and nights of rain was probably dryer.

  Liv scrambled to her feet. “A person could get sick, stuck in a stuffy house all day, breathing that stale air.” Her eyes grew big as she added dramatically, “And then, if she got wet, a person could get lung fever and die!”

  “You’re going to wish you were dead if you give me anymore backtalk. Now get!”

  Apparently the look on Hallie’s face did the trick. Liv scurried off toward home. As she rounded the corner, Hallie noticed her sister’s shoeless feet. She dared not call back and risk alerting Mr. Brown. They’d been trespassing in his prized garden long enough, and if children’s shoes weren’t so hard to come by in San Francisco, she would have been sorely tempted to just leave them dangling up in that tree.

  She looked around the base of the tree and found nothing. Poking in a few nearby bushes only resulted in disturbing a few bees. As she swatted the bugs away, she looked up. Dangling from one of the uppermost branches of the apple tree were Liv’s new shoes.

  Now what? For as long as she could remember, anything steeper than a flight of stairs had sent her into an attack of vertigo. Her one prideful attempt at overcoming this weakness was burned into her memory, along with the humiliation she had suffered when she, the captain’s own daughter, had to be cut down from the tangled rigging some thirty feet above the ship’s deck. The endless five minutes she had spent helplessly swaying from the ropes convinced her to not test her fear again.

  Of course, that had been six or seven years ago. Maybe it had only been a childhood fear. Didn’t one grow out of such things? She was much taller now. What could be so frightening about climbing a tree? Besides, she reasoned, how else was she
going to get those shoes?

  Now, she was convinced that retrieving those shoes symbolized her new emergence into womanhood!

  The lowest branch was right above her head, and for once thanking her Nordic ancestors for her height, she pulled her five-foot-ten-inch frame onto the branch. By throwing her right leg over it, she managed to get into a sitting position. Fortified with her new confidence, she reached up and grasped the next limb, pulling herself into standing position.

  Then she made a mistake. She looked down.

  The ground appeared to rise like yeast on a hot day. Her vision blurred, her head swam, and she wrapped her arms around the limb, holding on for all she was worth. Sucking in great breaths of air, she managed to calm down enough to see. She glanced around the tree, hoping to somehow recapture her nerve. It was gone.

  Hallie stared up at Liv’s boots. The blasted things were hanging high on the branch. With one arm gripping the limb, she very slowly stretched her free arm toward the shoes. She was still a few inches shy.

  She searched around for a twig to help extend her reach, found one, and broke it from the branch. Standing on tiptoes, she hooked the forked end of the twig around the knotted shoelaces. Gradually, she lowered one boot enough so she could grab its toe. With a quick tug, the leather half-boots came free, along with most of the blossoms on the high branch. Clutching the shoes in one hand, she waited for the drifting petals to clear, and then she turned slowly, carefully, her heart in her throat, still keeping her grip on her security limb.

  A second later, the wood cracked. The branch tipped sharply toward the ground and Hallie slid down the limb, stripping it of twigs and blossoms as she skidded to the ground.

  “My tree! My tree!”

  A high-pitched Abner-Brown-wail pierced the air, penetrating Hallie’s rattled brain. She brought one stinging hand up to brush the pale hair out of her face. There, with arms waving like the semaphore atop Telegraph Hill, was a very unhappy Abner Brown. Clad in his usual black undertaker’s garb, he was hopping up and down while he hollered.

  “Mr. Brown, I . . . uh,” Hallie stammered, at a loss for words as she watched him.

  His pallid skin was unnervingly lifeless for a man in his thirties, and its sallowness made his brown hair appear lank. The huge hook nose that dominated his homely face was his only bit of color. It was bright red. And as his jaw worked in and out, it looked to Hallie as if the man had finally grown a chin. The anger that emanated from his hard, oddly pale eyes had often carried a sinister quality. Now was no different. She watched his long, skinny fingers form claws which she could picture wrapped around her throat—squeezing.

  “Mr. Brown, I know I’ve damaged your tree,” Hallie said in a rush of words, noticing that as his anger became more rabid, the knotty Adam’s apple in his long throat began to twitch. “I’m sorry—”

  “Sorry! You’re sorry?” he cried, walking over to stand directly above her. “I’ll tell you what’s sorry! You and those rowdy children. Don’t have any respect at all for other people’s property!” He paused and his pale blue stare turned into icy assessment. “Do you realize I had this tree shipped from New Hampshire? It made it all the way around the Horn, enduring stormy seas and traveling with that gold-seeking riffraff. It survived the last three San Francisco fires, and what destroys it? A blight known as the Fredriksen family!” Abner stopped directly in front of her.

  Hallie looked up at his accusing finger, barely inches from her nose. “I know how you feel about your tree.” Oh do I know, she thought, feeling an unexpected affinity with poor Liv. She watched him raise his spindly arm and shake one finger at the sky, a gesture she knew from experience preceded one of his lectures.

  “Girlie, do you realize this is the only apple tree in San Francisco?”

  Oh no, Hallie groaned inwardly, here it comes.

  “It produces only the finest fruit. Back East, people pay the highest prices for the succulent apples from this strain of tree. They come from township after township to taste the crisp, luscious, red . . .”

  Hallie stood. She knew the story well enough from the times he’d come to the house, dragging out Liv or the twins and accusing her of letting the children run wild. He called them vandalizing little urchins and said she was too young to control them. Hallie shook out her skirts. She wasn’t too young; she was almost nineteen.

  Since her fifteenth birthday her father had left her in charge; he trusted her. As captain of a whaler, he was gone so much of the time that Hallie was left to rule the roost, and her roost consisted of her two younger sisters and her twin brothers. She tried to give the children a normal home, but with no mother, it hadn’t been easy. And their home was changing.

  In the last three years, San Francisco had grown from a sleepy little village to a wild and sprawling port. Hallie had watched the city fill with men who were lured by the tales of gold. And now many of those same men were so disillusioned that they had become as savage as the criminals who had also swarmed West. It was hard, living in a place where gold fever drove even the best of men crazy.

  Was that part of Liv’s problem? How could she expect a young girl to behave when grown men showed so little restraint? Maybe they needed to get away from the violence of this city. She would talk to Da when he came home.

  Abner Brown was so enthralled that he had now reached the pinnacle of oratory bliss. As she bent over and picked up the troublesome shoes, her long blond braid flopped over her shoulder. She flung it back and began rummaging through the broken foliage in search of the large hairpins that held her heavy braid in a tight bun. She only found two. Shoving them into her shirt pocket, Hallie straightened.

  Lord, that man loves to hear himself talk.

  “Look at that! Look, Girlie!”

  She wanted to cringe when she saw the damage. There were only a few dozen blossoms left on the fractured fruit tree, and its biggest base branch was angled down toward the ground as if struck by lightning. It was almost laughable the way the broken limb looked like a crutch.

  She knew she was at fault; she had practically destroyed his tree. But the way he was acting—well, it was unnatural. Of course, Abner Brown was pretty strange himself, kind of picayunish. And he was always talking. But then again, his job was dead people. Since the dead don’t talk, it was little wonder he would rattle on whenever he came across a warm body. “I’ll pay for the damage,” she told him.

  “You sure will, girlie. Someone your age climbing trees when you ought to be watching those—those brats! I’m going to report this vandalism!” Abner Brown raised his gump of a chin, crossed his gangly arms and waited.

  The authorities hardly had time to keep peace, much less cause her any trouble. But Abner Brown had influence. He knew Sheriff Hayes well, since he was the only undertaker in the city, and what with the lack of law and order, heaven knew San Francisco had enough bodies to be buried lately.

  “I said I’d pay for the damage,” Hallie repeated. “How much do you want?”

  Abner’s eyes took on a larcenous gleam. “Oh, I think five hundred dollars ought to do it.”

  Five hundred dollars! Hallie swallowed, hard. He had her trapped, and they both knew it. He could easily claim to have been paid that much by the miners. The prices were horrid. With so much gold exchanging hands, prices, especially for fresh food, were outlandish. Men had been known to pay ridiculous amounts for scarce items, bidding against each other for a single fresh egg.

  Since she had damaged the tree, she felt responsible, but it stuck in her craw that he could legitimately extort that kind of money from her. She didn’t need any trouble with Da gone, and on the slim chance that Mr. Brown could make trouble for her and the children, Hallie didn’t call his bluff. She was mad at the chiseling weasel, mad at Liv, and even madder at herself for getting into this mess.

  “I’ll have the money for you by Friday,” she
said and briskly walked away. Just before she reached the perimeter of the yard, she heard his nasally voice.

  “See that you do, girlie. See that you do.”

  Kit Howland crumpled the letter into a tight ball and pitched it across the room. Reaching over his cluttered desk, he lifted the brass lid from an ornately carved tobacco canister. The scent of rich dark tobacco wafted in the air. He filled and packed his pipe before jamming the bit between his teeth. Striking a flame, he lit it and began to puff.

  His father’s letter had been apologetic. He had tried to dissuade Kit’s mother and his aunt from their plan, telling them Kit was a grown man and doing fine on the West Coast. But his mother worried anyway.

  Kit remembered her tearful pleading a few years ago, when he had announced his plan to move to San Francisco. His wife had died and her death finally put an end to their disastrous marriage; he’d wanted—needed—to get away. As much as he loved his family, he couldn’t stomach the pity he saw lurking in their eyes. Staying in New Bedford would have only served to remind him of his failed marriage and of the bond of the love/hate he still perversely felt for his unfaithful and now dead wife.

  Now, he drew deeply on the pipe, holding the rum-flavored smoke in his mouth before expelling his breath. The bittersweet taste heated his mouth like the bitterness of his wife’s betrayal burned in his hollow heart. Kit stood and walked over to the wad of paper he had angrily thrown to the floor. He pressed it open and stared, hoping he had misread its contents. Two words loomed from the page. Aunt Madeline.

  Kit felt like the black cloud that had been shadowing him had just unloaded. It was bad enough that he had to pay exorbitant storage fees, while he cooled his heels waiting for the cursed merchant ship, but now his father wrote that his aunt Madeline was on board—something his family conveniently neglected to tell him until now. No doubt they assumed that the ship had docked and Maddie would already be billeted in his house, philanthropically mothering him. According to his father, Kit was her latest lost cause.