“Do you not think for a moment that I don’t know just how stupid I was to travel here? Do you think I need it pointed out on an hourly basis? Perhaps you should borrow some of your brother’s charm because you, sir, certainly need a large dose of it. I’d rather be charmed to death than bored to death.” Amelia smiled smugly, obviously proud that she’d come up with a suitable insult for him. But if she thought to hurt him, she was going to be sorely disappointed. He threw back his head and laughed.
“Bored to death,” he repeated, as if she’d made the funniest of jokes. “You are something else, Miss Amelia. I haven’t had this much fun in years.”
“So happy to have been of help,” she grumbled.
He gave her a lopsided smile, because he knew full well how horrid he’d been. “I’ll keep my ears open for news about Carson. If he’s nearby, I’ll go get him, and then the two of you can sort out what you’re going to do.”
“Is murder an option?” she asked darkly.
“Unfortunately, no,” he replied goodnaturedly. “I’d give you a loan but my charming brother ran away with nearly everything I had. And that wasn’t much. I could probably get you as far as St. Louis.”
“Where’s that?” Amelia asked, hopefully.
“About nine hundred miles west of New York City.”
“Oh.” It seemed as if, right before his eyes, some of her bravado left her, for she sat down on the bed as if she could no longer bear the weight of all that had happened to her.
Boone wished he could help her, he really did. Because the last thing he needed around him was a woman like Amelia, a spoiled rich thing who probably hadn’t suffered a day in her life. No one with hands that soft and skin that pale had ever worked for anything.
Other than Agatha, who was about as tough a woman as he’d ever met, his experience with women was limited to his practice. He’d never had a sweetheart, never lain between a woman’s legs, never kissed a girl on her lips. With that thought, his eyes drifted to her soft, well-formed lips and he felt a flood of lust so strong he turned away abruptly. He’d gone twenty-eight years without a woman and had thought, perhaps, he’d go another twenty-eight years. The one time he’d tried, with the whore Geraldine, he’d been so nervous, his body had failed him miserably. She’d laughed, not in a cruel way, but because she thought it was cute that a twenty-year-old was shaking like a leaf, staring at his uncooperative male part in horror. She’d told him he could try again another day, but the thought of lying between her legs where dozens of other men had been, including his own sixteen-year-old brother, made him slightly nauseous. And that made him think there was something wrong with him, for wouldn’t a man, a real man, want to bed a woman, any woman?
And here he was, eight years later, lusting after another of his brother’s conquests.
“Boone?”
He let out a sigh and turned back to her, trying to resist drowning in those eyes of hers. Truly, he had never seen anything quite so pretty as those eyes, even red-rimmed and slightly swollen from her tears. She’d only been in his house one day and already he was feeling himself drawn to her, like a helpless animal pulled down by quicksand. Now she was going to be stuck here for weeks. If he had the money to give her, he would have gladly done so. But with most of the people in this little town far poorer than he, he accepted barters rather than cash most of the time. “Everything will work out,” he said, and was surprised when she smiled at him.
“No, it won’t. But thank you for saying that. Is there a telegraph office in town?”
Boone shook his head. “The closest one’s in Abilene.”
The poor girl looked like she couldn’t take one more bit of bad news. “Where is that?”
“About three hours east of here on the T&P,” Boone said. “That’s if the train’s in the mood to go fast.”
“That’s not so bad,” she said, but he could tell she was slightly dismayed that it was so far. “Is it cooler there?”
Boone chuckled. “Not that you’d notice. Maybe you should start wearing your summer frocks.”
Amelia looked down at the pretty blue dress she was wearing. “This is a summer dress,” she said.
To Boone, it looked mighty uncomfortable, with a lacy collar that covered her neck completely and sleeves that ballooned out on her upper arms, but fit tightly down to the delicate bones at her wrist. It seemed silly and completely impractical.
“Perhaps you are right. This was made for English summers, not summers spent in tropical heat. In Hollings in the summer, even in July and August, the temperature rarely gets past eighty degrees. And when it does, it feels as if it’s sweltering.”
“It hasn’t gotten hot since you’ve been here,” Boone said, just to see what she’d do. Someone watching might have thought that Boone Kitteridge was flirting, but since he’d never flirted with a girl in his life, Boone would have denied such a ludicrous notion.
“I pray you are joking,” she said darkly. “If I’m to be here for weeks, I should have some dresses made from a lighter material. Perhaps muslin. That’s what all the women in India wear, I’ve heard.”
“I’ve got some material in the back of the store. Most women ’round here go to Fort Worth if they want something fancier.”
Suddenly, Amelia felt overwhelmed. Just talking about dresses was too much. And, she realized, this tiny town no doubt did not have a seamstress, and she would be expected to make the bloody thing herself. How she hated Small Fork. And herself. And her bloody, bloody foolish heart. “I wish I could blink my eyes and be home. I wish I could go back in time and give myself a good lecture on all the reasons I should not come here.”
“Sometimes the best thing to do is look forward, not back.”
Amelia shook her head. “But I don’t like what’s ahead. I don’t want to go there.” She pressed her fingers against her mouth, as if she could stop the rampaging thoughts in her head. What she really wanted was her silly dreams to come true. Why couldn’t they, just once? Why couldn’t she have her happy ending? Amelia knew she was not a sensible girl, just as she knew her silly daydreams were never going to come true. So she took a deep breath and searched for that sensible girl she knew was somewhere inside her. That girl knew reality, knew her mother and father and sister were dead, knew she was never going to be a family with them again, knew she was never, ever going to live on a ranch with Carson and raise their children together. She knew all this. She did. But it was so, so wonderful sometimes to just pretend that none of the bad things that had happened to her over the years were real.
Amelia gave herself a bit of a shake, then took a deep breath. “I shall cross that bridge when I come to it,” she announced stalwartly. “There is nothing to do about what I’ve already done. You are right. I can only move forward and forget all this ever happened.” She clenched her fists to give herself the resolve to listen to those words of wisdom. “When are you leaving for Abilene?” she asked.
“When am I leaving for Abilene?”
“Surely you didn’t think I would travel there myself,” Amelia said, completely dumbfounded by his reaction.
“You came here by yourself,” he pointed out with infuriating logic.
Amelia could feel her eyes start to burn with tears. God help her but she’d never been this weepy in her entire life, and she refused to give in to it.
“Hell, if you’re going to start that crying again, I’ll go.”
Amelia lifted her chin. “I was not going to start crying and I would never use tears to manipulate a man,” she said with a certain amount of guilt. She was fairly sure she might have used tears more than once in her life to get her way with her brother. But she was not doing that now. She despised these particular tears.
Boone narrowed his eyes at her. “I may be just a country doctor, but those sure look like tears to me,” he said.
Amelia smiled, unable to keep her ire up. “Perhaps a smidgeon of a tear. But I am not crying. And I would very much appreciate it if you could go to Abil
ene for me.”
Boone grunted what Amelia thought was consent. “I have some business there anyway,” he said.
Just then a small furry animal seemed to appear out of nowhere, and jumped on Amelia’s lap. She let out a screech before realizing it was just a little black-and-white cat. “Oh, what a pretty kitty,” she said, then let out a small cry when she saw it was missing one eye. “Poor thing.”
“That’s Blink,” Boone said.
Amelia laughed. “What a positively terrible name for such a pretty girl.” The cat was kneading her lap rather painfully at the moment, but Amelia didn’t care.
“Boy.”
“Even so. Poor thing.”
“You probably won’t like what I named my dog, then.”
“The old dog out front?”
“Three Legs.”
Amelia’s mouth gaped open, but she let out a laugh. “I didn’t notice that particular affliction.”
“That’s because most of the time he’s too lazy to get up. But he gets around just fine if he puts his mind to it.”
Amelia smiled as something immense dawned on her. “You save things,” she said, as if making a great discovery.
“I am a doctor,” he stated.
“No. That’s not what I mean. I mean, you can’t help yourself. Julia, the cat, the dog. Me. You, Dr. Kitteridge, as disagreeable as you are, are rather nice.”
“I never said I wasn’t.”
“But you’ve been acting absolutely horrid to me this entire time, and you’re not horrid at all, are you?”
“I can be if you want.”
Amelia gave him a look of pure exasperation. “You never had any intention of making me go to Abilene by myself, did you? Be honest.”
“Probably not,” he said, as if admitting a great flaw.
Amelia felt a great sense of relief for some strange reason. A bit of the tension that had made the base of her head ache for days was slightly relieved. She put the cat aside, stood, and gave his cheek a quick kiss.
“Thank you,” she said, then turned back to the cat, not noticing that Boone’s entire body turned rigid, his face to stone, as if she’d struck him, not kissed him.
Boone mumbled something and left the room before he made a complete idiot of himself. It had been the most innocent of all kisses, but seeing that it was his first, it pierced his heart in such an unexpected way, it nearly drove him to his knees.
Chapter 5
Boone had learned at an early age that something was inherently wrong with him.
He was four years old when his mother died giving birth to the blond-haired, blue-eyed angel that turned out to be Carson. His little brother was the spitting image of his father, and as soon as he could, John Kitteridge would carry his little son about proudly, showing off Carson while Boone walked behind.
Boone couldn’t remember his father grieving for his dead wife, so Boone did that for him. Boone’s only real memory of his mother was simply a feeling that he missed her desperately. He couldn’t remember her face, her smell, the color of her hair. He couldn’t remember, no matter how hard he tried, whether she’d tucked him into bed or given him a good-night kiss. He only knew that as a little boy, his life changed the instant his mother died and his brother was born.
It didn’t matter, even all these years later, how many times he told himself that his father had been a cruel drunk. The seeds of doubt planted by John Kitteridge lived still. Because his childhood had been long years of living in hell, of desperately protecting his little brother, of beatings that left him bloody and words that left him raw.
He knew everyone felt sorry for him. But because there was something missing in him, no one did a thing. Carson was so loving, so handsome, so full of little-boy mischievousness, how could it be that the father was only good to one child? It must be that Boone deserved it. He must be doing something to get that whupping. You’d think the kid would learn.
The thing was, it didn’t matter what Boone did—he still got blamed and beaten. He wasn’t sure if he was the dumbest kid or the bravest, but he even took the blame when Carson did something. As if his father would ever lay a hand on his little brother. When Carson got older, he reveled in his father’s attention and joined in on the belittling, sneering when his father sneered, laughing when his father did. But Boone knew, even then, that it wasn’t his little brother’s fault. How many times did he lie in bed and wonder what was wrong with him, that his father hated him so.
Boone’s life changed when he was ten years old, the day Roy Johnson, the original owner of Small Fork’s only mercantile, gave him a job. Even then Boone suspected the man felt sorry for him, but he didn’t care. He had a job and money to buy food for Carson when his father spent it all on booze. Roy, a gruff man whose own wife had died years before, gave Boone the only kindness he’d ever had.
Boone worked at the store every day but Sunday and, more often than not, showed up at the store Monday morning with new bruises that Roy would examine and scowl at.
One day, after a particularly bad beating, Boone didn’t go to the store. His face was swollen and one eye was open just a slit, and he couldn’t bear the thought of Roy looking at him and feeling sorry for him. He hid in their shack-of-a-house, trying to quietly clean up the mess his father had made. His father was snoring off a drunk in another room and if you woke him up, it was purely the scariest thing on earth. But if he woke up to this mess, it would be worse. So Boone tiptoed about, picking up the pieces of crockery and dried-up food scattered about their tiny front room, praying his father wouldn’t wake up.
The snoring stopped and Boone froze, his hand clutching the skin of a baked potato. He began to shake fiercely, his eyes pinned on the bedroom door, his ears straining to hear whether his father was getting up. When he heard the telltale creak of the bed and his father’s groan, he nearly peed his pants. He couldn’t get hit again. His face still hurt so much. He couldn’t take it, not one more time. He just couldn’t.
That’s when Roy knocked on the door, and Boone nearly jumped a foot off the floor.
“Boone, you in there?”
Boone went to the door, torn between letting Roy in to see him, and keeping him out for fear his father would do something horrible to Roy. He opened the door a crack.
“I’m not feeling too good today, Mr. Johnson,” he’d said.
Roy pushed open the door and Boone would never forget the expression on his face when he took a look at him. He seemed torn between murderous rage and terrible grief. “Let me in, Boone. This has got to stop.”
Panic such as Boone had never known flooded him. “I’m okay, Mr. Johnson. I’ll just finish cleaning up here and be right…”
“What the hell are you doing here, Johnson?” his father boomed from his bedroom door.
Boone would never forget what happened next. Roy gently took Boone’s arm and pulled him back so that he was behind his boss. Protected. “Boone, you go on down to the store now. I’ll be right there. Go on, now.” And Boone ran as fast as he could to the store, and waited, shaking like a leaf, more frightened than he’d ever been in his life. He just knew it would be his father walking through that door to bring him home. He just knew it.
But it was Roy, looking grim, with not a scratch on him except for his knuckles.
“You’re living with me now, Boone.”
“I can’t,” he’d said, even as hope surged through his veins.
“You sure can. Your father agreed.” He smiled then, a strange smile that Boone didn’t really understand until later, when everyone was talking about how mild-mannered Roy Johnson beat the living hell out of John Kitteridge.
“I can’t leave Carson.”
Roy hunkered down and placed two gentle hands on Boone’s skinny little shoulders. Boone still remembered thinking that it was the closest thing to an embrace he’d ever felt. “I’ll tell you what. If Carson shows up with bruises just once, he can live here, too.”
“But Carson can’t take care of himse
lf. I do it,” Boone said, tears streaming down his battered face.
“I don’t think your daddy will let me take Carson,” Roy had said sadly. And Boone knew then, without one doubt, that his father didn’t love him and probably never had.
Boone lived with Roy until he went off to college and medical school. For a time, Carson became a stranger and Boone couldn’t help wondering what his father had told him about what had happened. But when their father died, Carson was back, needing him. As always. By then, Boone was a grown man in college. Boone traveled home from Louisiana every chance he got, and when Roy died three years ago, he left everything to Boone.
All those memories came surging back, just because a sweet-looking woman had kissed his cheek.
Two days later, Amelia was standing behind the counter at the Kitteridge Mercantile, neatly cataloguing purchases and waiting on the curious customers who came in a constant stream. It seemed as if nearly every resident of Small Fork strolled into the little store with some excuse or another to see just what an English lady looked and sounded like.
Amelia was used to small towns, for Hollings was the quintessential small English village, a place where everyone knew every else’s business, and so she took their curiosity in stride. In fact, she was surprised it had taken the townsfolk so long to try to get a glimpse of her.
Boone had shown her how to mark sales in his ledger, for he didn’t have a cash register in the store. Apparently, she was to earn her keep until her brother’s money arrived. It was the least she could do for the man who was taking what would be a four-day trip just to send a telegraph for her. Because the train only ran twice a week, Boone would be stuck in Abilene until Tuesday, and someone had to help out Agatha at the store.
“Mama said you was a princess,” a dusty little boy said. It seemed as if everyone in town was covered with a fine layer of dust, but perhaps it was just Amelia’s imagination.
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