Dana knew. “I’m sorry.”
“I should have told you when I proposed this sham wedding.”
“You mad at Danie?” Danny stood in the doorway, confusion and uncertainty taking the sweetness from his expression. Dana had no idea how long he had been standing there.
“No, I’m not mad at Dana,” Gabe said.
“You hollered. Mama says hollering makes people cry.”
“Well, I’m not crying,” Dana assured him. She knelt down and gave him a reassuring hug. “Did you hide the train from Gabe?” She didn’t know how to explain away the argument. She knew Danny wouldn’t forget it—children never forgot anything that threatened their security—so she decided to get his mind on something else.
Danny nodded. He glanced at Gabe, a smile peeping out from behind threatening tears.
“I bet I can find it,” Gabe said.
“Can’t,” Danny said.
“Bet I can.”
Danny cast a questioning look back at Dana, then let himself be lured back into the den. Dana went back to cleaning up, her irritation over the spoiled dinner completely gone.
As stupid as it seemed now, she’d always assumed Gabe was mad at her because of the uncharitable things she’d said to him the night she told him she had been planning marry him since she was eleven. He hadn’t known how to handle her confession any more than she’d known how to handle her rejection.
She hadn’t known he held her responsible for the rift in his family. He hadn’t known his sister very well if he thought anybody could tell Mattie what to do. Dana had learned that before they were six. Now that he knew the truth, he might even be grateful for what she’d done. At least he might not be angry at her. He might even learn to like her.
She had to admit she’d been just as blind, as determined she was right, that he was entirely wrong. She’d never tried to think of anything from his perspective. What could he have done to keep from hurting the pride of a sixteen-year-old girl who’d had nearly everything she’d ever wanted except to be loved by the people most important to her?
It had taken her a long time to realize she wasn’t so much angry at his refusing to marry her as his not loving her, something she wanted desperately. She wanted a substitute for her parents who’d always had something more important to do than be with their daughter. She’d settled on Gabe as the person to fill that need. When he hadn’t, she’d been unable to forgive him.
Now that she had, she hardly knew what she did feel about him. Or her marriage. But did it make any difference? He still thought of her in terms of New York, her success, her money. He still didn’t know the real Dana.
Did she? After the happenings of the last few days, she was beginning to wonder.
The top row of blocks tumbled off the train. “You’ve got too many on there, little fella,” Gabe said to Danny. “You’ll have to make another trip.”
They’d compromised. They both played with the train, each taking a turn transferring everything in Danny’s toy box from one side of the room to the other. They’d built a fort, a castle and a zoo for all of Danny’s animals. Now they were carrying everything back across the room. Gabe’s knees were killing him. He hadn’t spent so much time on the floor since he replaced his mother’s old pine floors with oak.
He hadn’t been much of a playmate tonight. He couldn’t get his conversation with Dana out of his mind. Now he couldn’t be sure what he felt.
Though he’d stopped blaming her for standing between Mattie and her family, he’d always blamed her for talking Mattie into leave home. If he believed what she said, nothing either of them did could have made any difference. Mattie would have found a way to leave even without Dana’s help.
Why hadn’t he understood his sister better?
Mattie had told him she wouldn’t talk to their father because it wouldn’t change anything. She threatened to refuse to see Gabe if he kept trying to change her mind, lecture her, tell her what to do. She’d told him to go back to Iron Springs and forget he had a sister. Had she also wanted to keep him and Dana apart?
“Gabe, your turn!”
He came out of his abstraction long enough to find Danny had unloaded his blocks and was waiting for Gabe to take his turn with the train. Gabe would have been happy to let Danny have the train all to himself, but taking turns was part of the game.
“What do you want to take next?” he asked.
“Animals,” Danny chirped.
But as he loaded the giraffes, leaning their long necks against the lions so they wouldn’t fall out of the train, Gabe’s thoughts turned back to Mattie. He knew she’d wanted to go to school to be an artist, but their father had said that was out of the question. He’d said she could practice her drawing, but she had to marry Orson. With their mother’s intervention, their father had agreed to let Mattie go to a local college. Mattie hadn’t argued, so Gabe had assumed she’d accepted their father’s decision.
He hadn’t been living at home then, but he still should have remembered that, even as a little girl, Mattie had been very determined to get what she wanted. She’d probably have found another way to leave home. Her applying for scholarships proved that.
All the blame he’d pinned on Dana had suddenly been washed away. So where did that leave him? He didn’t know. He had to start all over again.
He couldn’t decide whether that excited or frightened him. The enormous attraction between them had been manageable when he could still hold her at least partially responsible for what had happened to his family. Everything looked different now. He couldn’t be certain what his unruly feelings would do. Already they’d caused him sleepless nights, with thoughts of a future that included Dana. That had been out of the question before. What about now?
Chapter Eleven
Was she merely running away? Dana asked herself the following morning as she waited in her grandmother’s house for the carpenter. Ever since last night’s talk, the thought of being Gabe’s real wife had started her questioning beliefs she’d considered bedrock. Desperately in need of a calming influence, she had thought of her grandmother.
She admitted that being in Iron Springs with Danny and Gabe made her career seem less important than at any time during the past ten years. Yet it seemed ridiculous that she could like Gabe just because he made her think of the summers she spent at the farm. Maybe he represented the personal freedom and fulfillment she’d found so elusive. He had done exactly what he wanted without worrying what other people thought. After trying to please people all her life—parents, teachers, customers—Dana found that enormously appealing. New York seemed distant, the pressures of her business vague, even unimportant. The quiet, the stillness, acted on her like a release mechanism. Pressures let go; ideas she’d once thought fundamental fell away, exposed as shallow and meaningless; some things she’d thought essential to her happiness suddenly seemed trivial; needs she’d denied, truths she’d refused to acknowledge, rose to their full importance, demanded attention at long last.
She climbed the steps to the front porch, turned and looked out over the hills and valley below. How many times had she and her grandmother sat out here sharing thoughts so random they might have been snatched out of the ambient air. She’d never realized how important those times had been, how much she missed them after her grandmother’s stroke. After her death, it hadn’t seemed possible to come back. The memories were too close.
She’d gone to college and started her career.
Somewhere along the way she’d lost her connection to this place. She wondered if she could get it back. The sound of a truck coming slowly up the lane warned her the carpenter had arrived.
A heavyset man of about fifty got out of the truck. Dana didn’t remember Mr. Bledsoe, but Gabe had said he was the best in the area.
“Hannah said you’d grown up to be right pretty,” he said, giving her a thorough inspection. “She fell shy of the mark.”
“Do you open negotiations with all your female customers wit
h flattery?” Dana asked.
He grinned. “It starts things out on a better foot.” He looked up at the house. “Glad to see you’re thinking about doing something to this place. It’s a grand old house. It would be a terrible waste to let it go to ruin.”
“I’m depending on you to make it ready to live in.”
“You planning to sell? If you are, I know—”
“I’m going to keep it myself.”
“Now why would a woman like you want to do a thing like that?”
Leave it to country folk not to beat around the bush. If they want to know something, they just up and ask.
“A lot of reasons.” She opened her mouth to say she needed a place to stay when she came down to visit Danny, but realized he’d think that peculiar since she was married to Gabe and saw Danny all the time. “It’s taken me too long to learn to appreciate my grandmother. Fixing up the house will help make up for lost time.”
“We miss her. Sarah Ebberling was a grand lady. They don’t make them like her anymore. She wasn’t easy on people, but she had a kind heart.”
Dana realized that in all the time she’d spent with her grandmother, she’d never once criticized her daughter for leaving home. She couldn’t have been happy that she never came back, but she’d realized it was up to her daughter to make her own life. Dana wondered if her grandmother had tried to explain that to Mr. Purvis. Or whether her giving Mattie the scholarship was an admission he would never understand.
But where did Dana belong? She thought she hated Iron Springs and had included the town in her anger and hurt at Gabe’s rejection. She’d certainly included the people for rejecting Mattie.
As Mr. Bledsoe completed his inspection and drove off, she realized she wanted this farm for more than a place to stay when she visited Danny. Having come back to this house and having reconnected with a part of the past she’d so foolishly forgotten, she didn’t want to lose it again. The farm gave her a sense of peace, a feeling of belonging she hadn’t had since she left. She understood now that her grandmother had been trying to give her the feeling of permanence all children need, the security her parents were too busy to provide.
But she also realized she wouldn’t have been able to see it—or understand—if it hadn’t been for Gabe. She didn’t want to ask why that should be so. She wasn’t sure of the answers. Right now she had more than enough questions that had no answers.
Dana disliked the buyer from Middleburg the minute he stepped into Gabe’s shop. He obviously didn’t think Gabe’s furniture warranted his attention. She wondered why he had come.
“Where are the pieces you wanted to show me?” he asked.
“You can look at anything in the shop,” Gabe replied. “If I can’t sell you a piece, we can make you one just like it.”
“Our clientele are extremely selective,” he said. “They wouldn’t want copies of anything in their home scattered all over the valley.”
“Gabe’s pieces aren’t scattered anywhere,” Dana said, trying to keep the irritation from her voice. She could do this. She did it all the time in New York. “Everything he makes is unique. Naturally any piece you ordered would be designed to suit the particular customer and the position the piece will occupy in the client’s home.”
The buyer turned—rather dramatically, Dana thought—and looked at her much as she expected he would look at a wood beetle. “Who are you?”
“His wife.” Her response didn’t come as quickly or as easily as it sounded. The word had caught in her throat. It only tumbled past her tongue because she was so angry at this man.
“And what do you know about fine furniture?”
“Enough to know Gabe makes the best you’ll find.” She wasn’t about to give him the advantage of knowing her background.
“You would naturally feel that way.”
“Not all wives are blind to their husband’s imperfections.”
“Why don’t I show you what I have,” Gabe said, “and you tell me how close it comes to meeting your requirements.”
She couldn’t quite interpret the look he gave her. It seemed to be compounded of surprise, amusement and even a little uneasiness that she might drive off a potential customer.
“Why don’t I come along,” Dana said. “You might want a woman’s perspective,” she said.
“How could you know what my clients would like?” the buyer inquired.
“Women are women, no matter how much money they have.”
The buyer obviously didn’t agree but declined to argue the point. Gabe’s look still contained surprise and a question, but the amusement had grown more pronounced. She breathed a little easier. He might not want her here, but at least he wouldn’t kill her if things went wrong.
For the next hour she followed the two of them from one piece of furniture to another, remaining silent while Gabe told the buyer what the piece was designed to do, why he’d chosen that particular style and design, how he’d put the piece together. Then before the buyer could make any of the disparaging remarks Dana could sense were hovering on his tongue, she launched into a more exhaustive discussion of the style, its usefulness and how it could fit into the various homes and decorating styles found in wealthy estates in the Middleburg area.
“We don’t limit ourselves to Middleburg,” the buyer said, irritated when Dana had anticipated his criticism of a large and particularly beautiful sideboard.
“Do you get buyers from Washington, D.C.?”
“Why would you want to know that? And anyway, what makes you think you know anything about the taste of people outside this…town.”
Dana bristled at the implied slight of Iron Springs. “They let us leave the mountains once in a while. Sometimes they even let us go as far as New York.” She sounded like Gabe.
“I doubt that would be sufficient exposure to make you an expert in furniture.”
“Some of us mountain folk are fast learners.” The man was saying exactly what she’d thought most of her life. But hearing it from someone else, especially this insufferable snob, made her so angry she couldn’t control her tongue.
“I’ll offer you sixteen hundred for that piece,” he said to Gabe, indicating the sideboard.
“It’s worth twice that,” Dana protested.
“Not to me,” the buyer replied. “I’ll give you eight hundred now and the rest when it’s sold.”
“I don’t sell on consignment,” Gabe said.
“It’s the only way I buy handmade pieces,” the buyer said. “If my customers like your work, maybe we can work out something else. I want it delivered to my shop within the week. If there are any scratches or imperfections, I won’t accept it.”
“You won’t get that chance,” Gabe snapped. “I’m not selling you this piece or anything else. My shop turns out top-quality work. I wouldn’t sell anybody anything I wouldn’t be proud to put my name on. If you’re not equally proud to have it in your store, then I don’t want it there.”
“If you think you can rob us just because we don’t have a showroom in a major city, you’ve badly mistaken your man this time,” Dana said, delighted Gabe had refused to knuckle under to this snob.
“I don’t recall that your man has said much I can mistake, one way or the other,” the buyer said. “What about the chest and tables I wanted?”
“We’re not selling you anything,” Gabe said.
The buyer looked stunned. Dana couldn’t tell whether he was reconsidering his offer or whether he was just too shocked to speak.
“You’ve heard my offer,” he said. “I won’t increase it, but I will pay you the entire amount now. I’ll also assume responsibility for delivery.”
“We have nothing for sale,” Gabe said. “Sorry if we wasted your time.”
The buyer appeared to consider whether to change his offer but changed his mind. He turned and stalked out of the room. Dana and Gabe followed him to the main room in the shop. He didn’t stop to speak to Sam and Billy or say goodbye. He simply walke
d out.
“Is he crazy?” Sam asked.
“No, just greedy,” Dana said. “He thought that he could buy cheap and make a killing.”
“He thinks we’re stupid rednecks,” Billy said.
“Pretty much,” Gabe said. “But we set him straight in a hurry. Unfortunately that means we’re not going to get any money.”
“You know, this stuff is good, really good,” Dana said. “You can sell it in New York for at least three times what he offered. Everything you make will be collector’s items in a hundred years. People would pay thousands for a signed piece. By the way, don’t let anything leave this shop without a signature. You’ll be famous. You’ll be rich.”
Gabe laughed. “Don’t let that get out, or I’ll have everybody dragging me out to their houses to sign their pieces.”
“You should. And buy back anything you can.”
“With what? Look, all this sounds wonderful, Dana, but we need money to pay the bills.”
“You’ll get it,” Dana said. “I’ve got contacts all around the country.”
Gabe laughed. Then Sam and Billy started laughing. They laughed so hard they could hardly stand up.
“Don’t you believe me?” Dana said. Her professional pride was on the line.
“I was remembering how you practically ran that buyer out of the shop,” Gabe said.
“I was thinking of being rich,” Sam said.
“Do you really think I’ll be famous?” Billy asked.
“Yes,” Dana said.
“I can buy that new lathe I wanted,” Gabe said.
“I’m on my way to pick out my new truck,” Sam said.
“What do you want, Billy?” Dana asked.
“I want to go to New York and see something I made in the showroom of one of them fancy shops.”
“We can all go to New York,” Gabe said. And the three of them started tossing out all the things they wanted to do. Their mood quickly became hilarious.
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