by Jill Barnett
“Hallie.” Kit spoke her name quietly. “You should have told me what happened in the first place. Abner Brown is taking advantage of you. Let me take care of him.”
“But I’m the one who should take care of it. It’s not your problem, and while Da’s gone, I am the head of the family. I have to learn to deal with these things. I’m an adult.” In a disgusted voice she added, “I’m not a child.”
“Your father is our friend. He would want us to watch out for his family. You’re a woman, Hallie,” he said. “And a young one at that.” Kit smiled. The poor girl needed some masculine reassurance. “This is something that is better handled by a man.”
Hallie looked at Lee, who was nodding in agreement. Did they really think men were so superior? They probably thought she was too young to handle her own problems. Well, she couldn’t change her gender or her age, so that didn’t leave her anything to argue with. Men and their stupid egos!
Lee rose and helped an agitated Hallie from her seat. “You go on home and don’t worry about Mr. Brown. Just leave him to us.”
Kit stood, plucking his hat and coat off the rack behind him. “That’s right, Hallie. Just run along and don’t worry your pretty head about him.”
Hallie knew she had been dismissed. She and her pretty head.
She moved silently to the door. Turning, she said, “You’re right, I should have come to you first. After all, if a smart woman needs water to clean up a mess, she doesn’t haul it from the river herself. She finds two asses to do it for her!”
The door slammed shut.
“I think she’s mad.” A perplexed Lee turned toward Kit. “Why do you suppose that is?”
Kit shrugged on his coat. “Who the hell knows? That kid is a hellion. Nothing she does makes any sense at all. She comes right in here out of the blue and accuses me of cheating her father. She tells half-truths, fakes tears, and then gets violent when I try to teach her a lesson.” Kit rubbed the back of his knee.
Lee listened but appeared to have trouble suppressing his grin. “Is that what you were doing when I came in? Giving lessons?”
Kit had the grace to blush, especially since his mind was on the same track as Lee’s. He didn’t like feeling out of control. And he’d felt that way.
Jo taught him that women weren’t to be trusted. The pain of the lesson was severe enough to keep him from ever allowing a woman to get the better of him. He always controlled himself where they were concerned. But with Hallie he had acted on pure instinct. Lusty, carnal instinct, with the daughter of his friend. And he felt guilty.
To relieve his guilt, he glossed over the incident. “Get your mind out of your pants, Prescott,” Kit said, arrogantly ignoring the fact that his own mind, at least during the kiss, had been in the very same place. Then he justified his actions, both mentally and vocally. “I was trying to scare the kid.”
Lee’s look penetrated right through Kit. “She’s not, you know.”
“Not what?”
“A kid.”
“Of course she is a kid. Just because her body has grown doesn’t mean her mind has. While we’re on the subject, I don’t think Jan would like the way you were ogling his daughter. I know I didn’t.” Lee just looked at him with a knowing expression. But before he could say anything, Kit added, “I mean, if she were my daughter.”
Lee had the good sense to be quiet, although from his wry expression, Kit knew he was jumping to all kinds of wrong conclusions. His thoughtful silence made Kit uncomfortable. Lee could be perceptive enough to realize that Kit was confused by his own unusual behavior.
Blast it all, he had enough pressures right now. He sure as hell didn’t need to stand here trying to buffalo his own friend. He settled for distracting him instead. He opened the office door. “Come on. Let’s pay a visit to good ol’ Abner Brown.”
Hallie walked into the dim house. Though the days were getting longer, a blanket of fog covered the town, dulling the afternoon sun with its damp mist and blocking the light through the narrow windows. The house was quiet.
Too quiet.
She walked out of the foyer and down a narrow hallway that ran alongside the steep staircase. A scream of frustration pierced the air. Hallie reached for the paneled door of the kitchen and pushed it open.
Inside there was a large tub half filled with water. Standing next to it, drenched from head to foot, was Dagny.
“You little monsters!” Dagny swiped her dark, dripping hair back and rubbed the water from her brown eyes.
Two identical white-blond heads popped up from the deep metal tub. “He started it,” accused the boy on the left.
“I did not,” came the indignant reply.
“Did too.”
“Did not,” Knut whined. “Gunnar kicked me first!”
Gunnar took offense and spit water all over his twin brother. “Tattletale.”
“You two stop it! Right now.” Hallie walked toward the soggy group.
Both wide-eyed, freckled faces turned toward her. Each pointed a finger at the other and spoke at the same time. “But he started it!”
“And I’m finishing it.” Hallie glanced at Dagny. “Let’s get them dried off, Duggie. Then you go change into some dry clothes yourself.”
“Stand up, boys.” Hallie grabbed a large piece of cloth, wrapped it around one of them and lifted his wiry body out of the tub. She rubbed his head vigorously and inspected his oversized ears. “Where is Liv?” she asked.
“Not in there.” Her little brother quipped and the boys both giggled.
“Hush,” Hallie scolded at their silliness, but she bit back a smile.
“Liv is upstairs, brooding,” Dagny answered. “You know how she’s been lately. All grumpy and gloomy.” She drew a flannel nightshirt over Knut’s head, picked up a pair of gray pants and held them out for him to step into. “Do you think she’s like this because Da’s been gone so long?” She pulled the pants up around the youngster’s waist, tucked in the shirt, and buttoned the pants closed.
“I don’t know,” Hallie replied. “I found her up in Mr. Brown’s apple tree again.”
Dagny shivered. “That man gives me the willies! Every time he comes here he’s always staring at me.”
“Well, hopefully Liv’s latest punishment will keep her away from his prized garden for a while. She hates sewing almost as much as she hates being indoors, so I told her to do all that mending that was stacked upstairs.”
Dagny smiled. “No wonder it’s been so quiet up there. It takes her half an hour just to get a knot in the thread.”
Gunnar was dressed, and Hallie gave his backside an affectionate pat. “You two go up and tell Liv to come down and set the supper table.”
As the boys raced through the door, Hallie straightened. “Mr. Brown caught me in his yard after I’d sent Liv home.” She saw her Duggy shiver. “You go on and change before you catch a chill. I’ll tell you the whole story after supper.”
Hallie bent down and pushed the sloshing tub to the back door. Well, maybe not the whole story, she thought. A girl didn’t talk about her first kiss. Besides, Dagny would want to know what it felt like, and Hallie wasn’t sure she could put it into words.
She leaned against the wooden frame with her eyes closed, trying to relive the feel of his lips on her own. They had been hard at first, pressing the sensitive inner flesh of her lips against her teeth. Then he bit her upper lip, and it should have hurt, but before she had a chance to think, his tongue filled her mouth. His tongue! Imagine that! Never in her wildest dreams did Hallie think you used a tongue to kiss. She always thought you just puckered up and pressed.
It felt good, though, once she figured out that she should breathe through her nose. She’d felt so light-headed, and when he pumped his tongue in and out of her mouth, her body started to tingle in all sorts of odd
places.
She was getting all warm again at just the memory. She opened her glazed eyes and shook her head to clear it. Forget it, Hallie! That is probably your first and last kiss from Kit Howland. He calls you a kid, remember? He thinks you’re a silly child. You should be angry at his superior attitude.
She shoved the tub outside and emptied it over the side of the back steps. For the moment before his lips descended, he’d looked at her so strangely. He’s a hard man to figure out—doesn’t make any sense at all.
With a sigh, she turned to go back inside and see about supper and she heard the kids thundering down the stairs. Later, she would have to think about it. Maybe she could find a way to get Kit to see her as a grown woman. She would have to use her head. She smiled. Her pretty head.
Chapter Three
The funeral parlor was empty as Kit and Lee entered its draped darkness, but a loud hammering echoed from the next room. Kit moved past the false light of a flickering wall lamp and looked through an archway into the adjoining room.
A pensive Abner Brown stood in the doorway of a workroom, watching a huge blond man drive nails into a pine box. The giant’s beefy hand repeated the motion, continuing around the edge of the wooden coffin with efficient but noisy strokes. Abner shut the workroom door and stepped back. His bony hand rummaged through the wealth of heavy, tasseled draperies until it found a gold-braided pull. He drew the drapes closed, turned and his pallid face colored with surprise.
Kit knew the minute the scrawny undertaker recognized him, for an ingratiating smile lit the man’s pinched features. As the youngest son of a prominent and wealthy family, Kit had been the recipient of that sort of smile many times; and it never ceased to annoy him. Experience taught him that the person bestowing the smile was usually what the whalemen called a windsucker—someone who attached himself, leechlike, to another in order to milk the wind from his sails.
“Mr. Howland, forgive me. I had no idea you were here.” Abner’s falsetto voice scraped the air as he rushed into the front room. “Please have a seat.” He gestured toward a pair of ornately carved chairs separated by a rosewood lamp table. The matching settee and an inlaid tea table sat upon a raised dais; and like a throne, their position allowed Abner to sit regally above whomever occupied the Moorish chairs.
Ready to hold assembly, he sat on the settee, crossing his stringy legs foppishly and looking so engrossed with his image of self-importance that he didn’t notice that Kit and Lee were still standing.
Kit and Lee exchanged a look and Kit sauntered up to the dais, where he hitched his hip nonchalantly on the arm of the settee, calmly rested an elbow on his thigh, and stared down silently at Abner.
The air chafed with enough tension to penetrate the undertaker’s self-concentration. He glanced up and found his eyes trapped by Kit’s piercing green gaze. “Wh-what’s wrong?”
Kit looked at Lee and casually nodded toward the right side of the sofa, and Lee walked over and sat on Abner’s other side. He was fairly certain Lee’s predatory stare mirrored his own. Neither of them said a word, but they didn’t take their gazes from the scrawny undertaker.
A sharp stench of fear saturated the briny air inherent to the mortuary. Abner looked back and forth at the two men. He nervously licked his thick lips.
“Business bad?” Kit said casually. He broke eye contact with his prey and surveyed the gaudy room. Looking past several dark marble bust stands, Kit found his attention captured by the ungodly amount of gilded cherubs decorating the room’s cornice.
Abner, who looked as if the red-flocked walls were closing in around him, stammered, “Why . . . n-no . . .”
Kit leaned an inch closer. “Then why are you trying to filch five hundred dollars out of a helpless young girl?”
The eyes of the sniveling undertaker darted back and forth between Lee and Kit. Like a snake coiled and ready to strike, he bit out, “She destroyed my property! I have every right to claim damages. Maybe that group of young vandals will learn a lesson. They ought to be turned over to the orphan society. Uncontrollable brats, that’s what they are! Practically abandoned by that father of theirs, and the one in charge, that chit you call helpless? Ha! She’s about as helpless as Delilah with a pair of scissors. What that family needs is a firm, male hand.”
Not more than an hour earlier, Kit would have heartily agreed with Abner’s assessment of Hallie. But hearing her described as such by this obsequious twit whose snide face made Kit crave to rearrange it, struck a protective chord in him.
Abner foolishly ranted on, “Why, the only one that’s civilized is the dark, pretty one—”
The man’s whiny tirade changed to a gurgle as Kit grasped his collar tightly in a white-knuckled fist. “Leave the Fredriksens alone.” The words clipped from Kit’s lips like shot from a rifle.
“But the fruit from that tree is worth—”
Kit lifted Abner up by his collar. “How would you like that tree to become part of your anatomy?”
Abner managed to gulp down the rest of his words.
“Leave it be, Kit,” Lee said. “He’s not worth the trouble.” Lee nodded toward the other room, where the blond giant stood, hammer in hand. Although the man’s expression was blank, his eyes were locked on his employer’s flushed face.
“You want to get out of here, or do you feel in the mood to break heads?” Lee asked.
Before Kit could answer, the front door opened and Sheriff Hayes walked in, followed by a procession of men carrying two dead bodies.
Abner slipped through Kit’s loosened grip.
“Got a couple more for ya, Abner,” the sheriff hollered into the room before he turned and spotted Kit. “Oh, how ya doin’, Howland?”
Kit gave Hayes a nod of recognition. Abner stepped out of Kit’s reach, then he wrenched his collar back into place and gave his coat hem a precise tug. He pushed his shoulders back in a gesture of authority and stepped forward.
“Will ya look at these damn idiots?” the sheriff said. “Tried to fight a friggin’ duel.” He gnawed on his cud of tobacco and shook his head in disgust. “That tight-assed Methodist, Will Taylor, was givin’ one of them fire-fangled preachin’s of his. Damn fool got ‘em all riled up with his flapjawing, and next thing ya knowed, this pair’s shakin’ hands with St. Peter.” The sheriff pushed the chaw to the other side of his mouth, then searched the room with a frown. A look of relief crossed his face, and he walked over to a rare oriental urn perched on one of Abner’s marble stands. He spat out the wad.
Abner sputtered to a stop.
The sheriff wiped a sleeve across his stained mouth and looked up. “Where ya want these carcasses, Abner? In the back room?”
Kit bit back a laugh as he watched Abner try to mask his horror. Lee suddenly convulsed in a phony coughing fit. He glanced toward the blond giant, but all he saw was the man’s back—and a slight quiver in those massive shoulders.
Abner raced to a door in the corner, half dragging the sheriff with him. “I’ll show you. Bring them through here.” Abner all but shoved the sheriff through, and then he paused, eyeing the giant as the motley band of pallbearers filed by. “Duncan! Come in here. I’ll need your help.”
Kit watched Duncan lumber to the corner door through which Abner had just disappeared. The huge man paused and turned back, surprising Kit with the sparkle of intelligence that lurked in those suddenly sharp eyes. The man winked and was gone.
“Come on.” Lee stood and clapped Kit on the back. “I think Abner Brown will think twice before he bothers Jan’s family again. From the way his eyes bulged as you lifted him off the ground, I’m sure he’s sufficiently intimidated.”
Lee made for the door. “I’m so hungry my equator’s shrinking. I’m off to Millie’s. For weeks I’ve been dreaming of one of those knuckle-thick steaks, smothered in red onions. And the bread pudding, Lord, I can tas
te it now.”
Kit followed Lee outside. “Fine, but first I need to check at the custom house for any news of the Abigail.”
“No need. They were repairing her rudder when we put into del Cabos for sup—” Lee was a good five feet away when he stopped abruptly. He turned back and gave Kit a thoughtful look. “I thought you steered clear of your former in-laws, despite their friendship with your family. Why would you want news about one of their clippers, especially one captained by your wife’s brother?”
Kit moved past his friend and sloshed through the mud-mired intersection. “I’ve received word my aunt Madeline’s on board. She and my mother got it into their obstinate, maternal heads that I need coddling. It’s likely they could pull strings with the Taber line to book her passage immediately. Once my mother makes a decision, she’d never let a little thing like a year-long waiting list postpone her plans. My aunt Maddie’s even worse. That harridan is, without a doubt the most—” Kit turned, stopped by Lee’s bellow of laughter. “What’s so damned amusing?”
Lee was leaning against the pole of a makeshift street sign, consumed by one of his obnoxious fits of horse laughter. Sometimes his bizarre sense of humor could really get to Kit. This was one of those times. If Lee had any idea of what Madeline could be like, he wouldn’t be standing there laughing like an ass. Kit crossed his arms and waited.
“Is your aunt an orange-haired shrew about so high?” Lee raised his hand to about chest level.
“Aye. Hard to miss her.”
“You needn’t worry, old man,” Lee clapped him on the shoulder. “When last I saw your aunt, she was brandishing a deadly looking parasol around the head of Taber’s first mate and demanding to know where that scalawag of a captain was hiding.”
“So much for wishing she’d washed overboard,” Kit muttered sarcastically.
“From what I saw of her, I doubt that woman would let the sea swallow her,” Lee said, shaking his head.
“You’re right, Kit laughed. “The sea would spit her back out.” Kit glanced over his shoulder. “You look fairly unscathed. Still, I doubt even your Prescott charm would work on her.”