“Very well. A life lesson well learned. From now on I’ll assume nothing, Mr. Sullivan. But in the interests of fair play, I’ll give you a friendly warning to do the same.”
“Nobody’s called me Mr. Sullivan in a long time. Jake’ll do.” He frowned. “How’d you find out?”
She winced, as if caught snitching from the cookie jar. “It’s written in some of your books.” Without the hat, her brown hair gleamed in the sun, reflecting like still water. “Speaking of which, I should get those back to you. I’ll go pack them up, bring them over to—”
“It’s not necessary.”
“I don’t mind.”
“No point in it. I’ll just have to move them back in when I do. Might as well leave them there for now. I’ve got enough to hold me for a week or two.”
She glared as if she thought the look would make him cower. Amusing, and he hadn’t been amused in such a long time it would almost be worth keeping her around for a while. “I’m not giving up.” And then she left him, with a flip of her skirts, a toss of hair, leaving a sweet drift of soap and lavender water in her wake.
“We’ll see,” he murmured, very nearly smiling.
Chapter 4
Dear Kate…
So much for the easy part. From this point the letter got considerably more difficult. However, she simply couldn’t put it off much longer. She truly did not want Kate to worry—though in all honesty, Kate would worry no matter what Emily wrote. But how to blunt it a little…she’d given a lot of serious consideration to the matter and had yet to come up with a good solution.
But for Kate to receive a routine letter from Anthea and thus discover not only that Emily hadn’t shown up there but that Anthea didn’t expect her would naturally cause worrying of truly epic proportions. Emily hoped her letter would scale it back to Kate’s ordinary, everyday worrying.
First, Kate, before you go any further you must promise me you will read this entire letter through without panicking. No, not yet! Stop here. Promise me.
Now then…no, no, uncross your fingers. Every word before you make up your mind.
I’m not in Colorado. But I am perfectly safe and comfortable—there’s no bandit holding a gun to my head forcing me to write this, no wild Indians hammering at my door. I am absolutely, positively, not only safe but exactly where I want to be. Truthfully, the utter lack of high adventure thus far has me slightly disappointed.
There now, breathe. It’ll be all right. It is all right, though perhaps not what you would have chosen for me. Well, I know what you would have chosen for me, but I decided it was about time for me to do the choosing.
I’m in Montana. Yes, Montana, on my very own claim, in my very own house, snug as a bug, excited over this new stage in my life…in our lives. This homesteading is the simplest thing: choose a claim, pay a few dollars, sit tight until the land is yours, and then sell it for a tidy profit. Really, I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.
Sit right back down now, Kate. I mean it! I know you’re halfway to booking a ticket here but really, there is no need. I’m perfectly safe. My claim came complete with a furnished house—yes, my luck is holding well. My neighbors are congenial, the landscape astoundingly scenic. But this place is a tad rustic for your tastes. You know that has never bothered me, I like things simple. But you would go stark mad in a week. There’s no place to shop, there’s no one to draw you a bath, and I’m too busy settling in to entertain you. Give me a few months and I’ll welcome you happily, but please, give me those few months.
Until then…dearest sister, you are free! I know, I know, you have always claimed that caring for me all these years was more for your sake than mine, that the sacrifice was none at all. I even mostly believe you. But now, with the doctor’s death and my new endeavor it is time for you to have one of your own! Have a glorious affair, take a fabulous trip, break those dozens of hearts you know you could. I’m grown now, though you are loath to admit it, and you are still young enough to enjoy a great adventure of your own. Find it, my dear. Find it.
Montana stoked up the heat. Summer blasted away the last, soft vestiges of spring. The grass lost its fresh hue, the earth its soft give. It hardly rained in the ten days Emily had been in Montana, and she was weary enough of hauling buckets of water from the creek that she was getting mighty frugal with the stuff. She hoped to heavens her letter would dissuade Kate from coming; just the thought of Kate without plenty of water made her shudder.
She’d propped open the front door and peeled the flap back from the window, hoping for a friendly stray breeze. Even the stingiest fire notched the temperature up, but one could be content with cheese and stale crackers for supper for only so long.
The air was marginally cooler by the door, and she leaned against the frame. Almost immediately he looked up, his gaze simmering across the space between them for a long moment before he returned his attention to his book.
He slouched in his chair, which she still expected to shatter beneath his bulk the next time he sat down. The charred remains of the fire that he almost never lit darkened the ground. A burst of wind sent the doorway to his tent flapping.
He read with furious concentration, shoulders hunched, eyes hidden beneath the wild fringe of his hair. Once in a while she’d see him erupt from his chair and spring across the land at a breakneck pace, as if he couldn’t contain his energy any longer and had to release it in one wild surge. He’d return, sometimes hours later, panting, throw himself down on the bare ground, and fall into a sleep that seemed little more restful than his run.
But mostly he was just there, relentlessly, impatiently waiting. And unfailingly, as soon as she glanced out the window to see if he was still there, he’d lift his gaze as if somehow alerted to her attention.
At first it infuriated her. Then it annoyed her. Now he was simply there, as much a part of the landscape as the shivering grass and the stunted box elders atop the next rise.
As she watched, he balanced his book on his knee, reached over, and grabbed a can out of a nearby crate. Without even looking to see what he’d unearthed, he pried off the lid. He tipped his head back, shook something from the can into his mouth, and chewed while he read.
Emily frowned. That was no way to have dinner. It had to be exceedingly unhealthful to subsist on tinned food. Not to mention that a man of that size surely required more fuel than most. And Emily believed that proper digestion required both attention to one’s meal and congenial atmosphere and companions. Mr. Sullivan failed on all count
She reminded herself firmly that it was not her problem. Rather, she should hope that starvation drove him to the nearest city and away from her.
In any case, her own supper must be nearly done. Heat boiled from the tiny oven when she cranked open the door, carrying the warm scent of biscuits.
Perfect. It had taken her a few days to get the hang of cooking on the thing, but really, it was a shame there was no one around to admire her skill.
She’d planned to finish the biscuits over the next couple of days, but they really were best warm. And the pot of stew, made from the rabbit the Blevinses, her new neighbors, had brought her when they came to visit on Sunday, was far more than she could finish in the next few days.
She grabbed a tin plate, plopped a hefty ladle of stew in the middle, rimmed the edge with a half dozen biscuits, and headed out before she could change her mind.
He glanced up again the instant she stepped out the door, and she felt the focused intensity of his regard. No emotion, not even curiosity, revealed itself on his face. But then he could have been smiling like a child at Christmas behind that great bush of a beard and she couldn’t tell.
“Here,” she said when she gained his side, thrusting the plate at him.
For a long moment she thought he might ignore her completely. Finally he set the book aside. “What’s this?”
“I made too much. Thought you might like some.”
His gaze slid up to her. His eyes were so dar
k they were almost black, handsomely shaped, with lashes as thick as his hair. It was all she could do not to shift under his wary inspection, and she forced her smile wider.
“Why?” he asked.
“It’s no more complicated than I told you.” At least she didn’t think it was, and she didn’t want him prodding her into looking any deeper. “You’re a suspicious sort, aren’t you?”
“Maybe I am.” A trait he’d learned well and painfully, Jake thought.
He half expected her to take her peace offering and dash on home. Hell, he would have; he’d deliberately been a far sight less than friendly. She’d have to be desperate for company to find his desirable.
But she didn’t seem desperate about anything. More like unnaturally cheerful. She sang—badly—as she fetched water. She whistled as she attempted to tack the loose tar paper back on the walls, even when it took three tries. And, always, she smiled, the same sunshiny smile she bestowed on him right now.
Her permanent and extreme cheerfulness had to be the oddest form of mental deformity he’d ever run across. There was no other explanation for it.
Accepting the plate seemed a bigger surrender than it should, softening their uncompromising antagonism. He really should show her on her way. Make her understand that he couldn’t be bribed by something as cheap as biscuits. But damn, they smelled good, and he was getting awful tired of cold beans.
So he grabbed the plate and figured he owed her something back. “You been busy. Lots of visitors.”
She blinked in surprise. “Was that a conversational gambit?”
“Hey, miracles happen sometimes.”
Her smile dimmed a bare fraction. He figured it had to go away once in a while, but this was as close to solemn as he’d ever seen her. “Do you believe in them?”
Had he ever believed in miracles? The concept was as foreign to him as flying to the moon, the word he’d mouthed a meaningless combination of random letters. “No.”
How’d she do that? he wondered. Make her smile brighten while her eyes went soft and sad with sympathy?
“Did you ever?” she asked.
“I can’t recall.”
“But—”
“You’re not the sort to leave something well enough alone, are you?”
She laughed then, rich and raucous. How odd that there was nothing at all ladylike about Emily Bright’s laugh. “No. You’d do well to take note of that, too.” She gestured at the plate. “You should eat. Before it gets cold.”
“Eat right in front of you, when you’re not? That wouldn’t be too polite of me, would it?”
She plopped her fists on her hips, tried to scowl at him. “You’re not trying to get out of tasting it, are you? I didn’t poison it, I swear.”
He picked up the biscuit, tore into it, and nearly groaned aloud in pleasure. “It’s good,” he said in outrageous understatement. “When you give up homesteading, you can get a job as a cook, no problem.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“If you’re trying to look threatening,” he told her, “you’re failing miserably.”
She squinted further before giving up with a laugh. “I know. It’s a curse; try as I might, I look as innocuous as a kitten.”
“You just look harmless?”
“Only look. I’ve got nasty claws, and don’t you forget it.”
“Uh-huh.” He popped the rest of the biscuit in his mouth. “Heck, I’ll hire you, if everything you make is as good as this.” Now why hadn’t he shooed her on her merry way by now? he wondered. He was not given to small talk. Not given to talk, period, when you got right down to it. Even if he were, she wouldn’t be the one he’d be small-talking with. “But for all I know you’re running a restaurant already, for all the people trotting in and out.”
“Hmm.” Speculation lit her eyes.
“Oh no you don’t,” he said warningly.
“Thanks for the suggestion. I was getting worried about scaring up enough cash before I proved up.”
It should have infuriated him. But hell, who could take her seriously? Playing frontier girl might be all fun and games right now, but the instant winter grabbed hold, she’d be begging to get out of Montana. And if it didn’t happen that way, well, he’d just have to give her a nudge.
“But I doubt very much you’ll be able to run a restaurant with an obviously dangerous maniac capering outside your front door,” he warned her, but there was no heat behind it.
“Hasn’t stopped the neighbors from coming over so far,” she replied lightly. Teasing him. The concept was strange enough to stun him for a moment. “That was the Blevinses on Sunday. You know them of course. I like her very much; she reminds me a bit of my sister Anthea.”
He started on the stew, half listening to her bright chatter. Whyever she thought that he wanted to hear all about her visitors, he’d no idea. Still, he didn’t want her grabbing her food and running off with it. Listening to her babble was a small price to pay for those biscuits.
“Joe seemed inordinately fond of my chess pie,” she said slyly, “maybe even more than five dollars’ fond.”
“Joe? There’s not a chance he’s giving up a cent and you know it.”
Jesus. Now she was beaming at him with delight, as if immensely proud of his pathetic banter. He’d have to remember not to give her any encouragement, because she clearly took the slightest bit and ran with it.
“And I had Mr. Biskup over on Sunday, too. You do know him; he’s been here since before you came.”
“Yeah, I know him.” Vaguely. Skinny old duffer with a beard down to his waist. At all hours of the day and night, he bounced around on the back of a nag that looked even older than he was, canvas packs piled high behind him like a lumpy throne. They’d passed perhaps three words between them the six months Jake had lived there before.
“He showed me several of his sketches. They’re quite remarkable. But then I imagine you know that.”
“Sketches?” he asked without thinking.
“You didn’t know he was an artist?” She looked as shocked as if he’d up and confessed a penchant for rolling in the mud. Obviously the idea of living next to somebody for more than a day and not knowing all about them was abhorrent to her. He should be grateful she’d spared him that long.
Maybe, he thought bleakly, if they’d had company as often as she did, formed friendships there, Julia wouldn’t have felt so alone.
Ruthlessly he pushed the memory away. He’d wallowed in what-ifs for a long time and it hadn’t helped one bit. He’d come back there because it was time to try another way. He’d put this place to rest one way or the other.
He glanced up to find her studying him, her mouth and eyes sober, as even he already knew they seldom were. “He mentioned you.”
“Did he,” Jake said flatly, hoping it’d be warning enough.
“He said you came with your wife then. Where is she?” Emily asked. And there, thought Emily, was all the emotion he never allowed to surface. Grief, oceans of it, deep, dark, turbulent, welling up from where it lived inside him, fresh as if born yesterday, old as if it’d been there forever.
He thrust the plate at her. “Thanks for the food. I’m done.”
There might as well have been “No Trespassing” signs posted all around him. It was not the sort of thing that Emily generally let stop her if she considered it beneficial to forge ahead. One of the first things William Goodale taught her was the usefulness of lancing wounds. But Mr. Sullivan was not a patient who’d put himself voluntarily in her care. And she had to remember she certainly did not know him well enough to make such judgments about him.
She glimpsed a flash of white in the unruly thicket of his beard, as if he’d bared his teeth in a snarl. Really, did he think she’d be scared off so easily?
She looked down at the half-eaten plate of food, his fingers, strong and dark, curled around the bent metal edge. His sleeve was rolled up and his wrists were thick and powerful-looking. But where the wind blew his limp b
lue shirt against his torso he was thinner than he appeared at first glance. Still strong, but as if he’d lost some of the sturdy weight he usually carried.
“You keep it,” she murmured. “I’d consider it a favor if I didn’t have to waste it.”
She turned and walked away, forcing herself not to look back and see whether he finished her food or dumped it on the ground.
Emily awoke late, fuzzy light leaking through her eyelids before she even opened them, her mind just as dull. She’d slept poorly and now found herself staring at the ghostly shapes of Mr. Sullivan’s wife’s dresses, hanging limply over the foot of the bed. She should’ve packed them away by now but it had seemed a violation to touch things that so clearly belonged to another. He’d abandoned them as surely as he’d abandoned the claim, and she’d used his pots and tools without a qualm. But clothes seemed so much more personal.
She slipped her feet into her boots, didn’t bother to fasten them up, and clumped to the door. She paused for a moment before yanking it open. One of the more disconcerting effects of having Mr. Sullivan camp a few yards from her front door was that she couldn’t discreetly slip out back. Thus far he’d shown no inclination to politely pretend not to see. She didn’t expect last night had changed that. If anything, he’d probably make it all the more embarrassingly obvious he knew where she headed.
Emily did not have the same reticence about private matters that most young women did. Dr. Goodale had been brutally clear right from the start, when she’d first expressed an interest in assisting him with his patients, that he would not be inconvenienced by trying to shield her virginal sensibilities. Kate had objected briefly, contending that, at twelve, Emily was far too young to be exposed to such things. And then, as always, she’d meekly bowed to Dr. Goodale as she never did to anyone else.
But Emily’s usual unconcern with matters others found mortifying did not extend to Mr. Sullivan’s possessing intimate knowledge of when she needed to relieve herself, and so she usually tried to rise before he’d stirred from his tent. Today it was far too late. She mentally steeled herself for his smirk—how she knew he was smirking behind that infernal beard, she wasn’t sure, but she had no doubt.
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