At last it was time to take her leave. Billy Joe insisted on walking her home, and while she was touched by the courtly gesture, she suspected the boy also wanted to go on to play at the creek while his father was still asleep. She hoped, as she waved goodbye to him from the kitchen doorstep, that today had been the doorway to progress in helping him.
Her duty as a teacher done, she could now look forward to Jack returning with the girls. She hoped he intended to stay for supper, though she was a little surprised at the warm feeling the idea brought her. She only wanted to tell him about her meal with the Hendersons, she told herself, and see if he had any male insights that would be useful in dealing with Billy Joe. He’d seemed sympathetic when she’d talked with him about the boy before.
The knock sounded at the front door as she was helping her mother prepare the meal.
Goodness, why was Jack being formal and coming to the front door? He’d been to the house often enough to know that everyone came in via the kitchen.
But it wasn’t Jack and the girls.
Chapter Twelve
An overpowering aroma of bay rum assaulted Caroline’s nostrils as she opened the door. Superintendent Thurgood stood on the front step clutching a gold-headed cane and wearing a dark frock coat and trousers and a gold brocade vest, his thinning hair pomaded flat to his skull. Beads of perspiration dotted his florid face.
“Mr. Thurgood. What...c-can I do for you?” she stammered, wondering wildly why he’d come. Had it taken him three days to decide to dismiss her after all, and he’d come to her house to humiliate her in front of her family?
A smile turned up both corners of his lips. “Please, Miss Wallace, it’s I who hope to do something for you,” he said smoothly. “I felt we got off on the wrong foot during our previous meetings—”
“Caroline, dear, who is it?” her mother called from the kitchen. “Tell him to come in.”
That was the last thing Caroline wanted to do, but she had no civilized reason to refuse.
“Please, won’t you come in, Superintendent?” she managed to say, and stepped back.
Her mother bustled in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. Caroline spotted Dan lurking in the hallway, too, curious about who had come to call on his sister.
“Mama, this is the county school superintendent, Mr. Thurgood,” she said, feeling as if she was in the middle of a dream—no, a nightmare, for she was becoming surer by the second that this was no quick social call. Oh, don’t let Jack and the children come while he’s here!
“Mrs. Wallace, I’m honored to meet the mother of our fine teacher.” He extended a hand and shook her mother’s a little too heartily.
Caroline stared at the man, certain she’d heard wrong. Her mother, who’d heard the whole story on Friday, blinked in confusion.
“Won’t you sit down, sir?” she asked. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
Mr. Thurgood looked from Caroline’s mother to Caroline and back again. “No, thank you, ma’am. I came to ask your daughter if she’d have supper with me at the hotel—with your permission, of course. Perhaps Miss Wallace has told you about the unfortunate incident the other day. I’m afraid I was a bit harsh with your daughter. I wish to make amends by—ahem!—taking her to supper, so we can start our acquaintance with a clean slate, so to speak—quite an appropriate phrase for two in the profession of education, hmm?” He chuckled at his own joke.
Caroline’s jaw fell open. “I—I appreciate your kindness, sir, but th-that’s not necessary,” she said. “You were entirely correct to upbraid me for what happened, and as I said before, it will not happen again.”
“Miss Wallace, it would be you who would be doing me the kindness by accepting my invitation,” Mr. Thurgood said, eyes once more goggling dangerously behind his spectacles. “I do not like to think of myself as a harsh man, but I will admit I am a lonely one. My children are grown and gone, and my late wife passed on quite a number of years ago. Please, certainly you could spare an hour or so of your time and allow me to buy you supper, and we could speak of teaching. And I would feel I had made amends. It would make me most happy.”
Caroline’s gaze darted to her mother in hopes that her mother would find a way to save her, but her mother only gave her a sympathetic smile and murmured, “How nice of you, Mr. Thurgood,” before giving Caroline a meaningful look.
“I...uh... I don’t know if the hotel restaurant serves supper on Sunday evenings,” she said desperately. “After they serve Sunday dinner, I... I believe they close early. At least, they always used to...” Then she worried her mother would feel bound by courtesy to invite the superintendent to supper. The only thing she could imagine worse than dining with the superintendent alone would be dining with him under the watchful eye of Jack Collier, who would almost certainly arrive with the twins in time for the meal.
But Superintendent Thurgood was already smiling in triumph. “I took the liberty of inquiring at the hotel before I came, Miss Wallace. They assure me they will be serving supper for another couple of hours, so I have reserved us a table. I hope you don’t find that presumptuous of me.”
“No, of course not,” she replied with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. There was no graceful way she could refuse to do this. She could not even take refuge and claim she was still in mourning—half-mourning now, to be sure—because he had couched his request as a professional one, a meeting “between fellow educators.”
Nonsense! As if he’d ask me to supper if I were a man!
Yes, there was no escaping this ordeal. If she refused, it might make the relationship between them even worse—and if he took revenge by dismissing her she could not even cite impropriety on his part. If she accepted, she would have to pray he never asked her out again and hope that her tenure as a teacher would be secure now that she had allowed him to make amends.
“Then you accept?” he asked.
“I... Of course I do.” Her voice lacked strength. “Perhaps we’d better be going, then?” she added, hoping she did not sound as if she was trying to hurry him away from the house, even though she was. The sooner they went, the less likely it was that they would encounter Jack and the girls returning from the ranch. She hoped her mother would explain Caroline’s absence to Jack so that it sounded like nothing more than what Caroline saw it as, a professional obligation.
But maybe it was presumptuous of her to even think Jack would care.
* * *
Caroline breathed a sigh of relief as she closed the door behind her. The last two hours had seemed to take two months. Mr. Thurgood had talked endlessly, telling anecdote after anecdote of his teaching experiences, each one more long-drawn-out than the last. He would ask Caroline her opinion on some point of teaching, pretend to listen to her answer, then go off on a long dissertation about his own experience with that topic. And yet he had managed to put away a prodigious quantity of roast beef, heedless of the gravy that dripped from it and spotted his shirt.
The only thing Caroline could be thankful for was that they’d been the only people, other than a handful of travelers staying in the hotel, dining in the restaurant that night. Ella Justiss, the new Spinsters’ Club member, hadn’t been waitressing that night, and Caroline and Mr. Thurgood hadn’t been close enough to the window to be seen by anyone passing by. The fewer people in Simpson Creek who knew that she had had supper with the school superintendent, the better.
And now it was over, and he was walking away from the house to where he had hitched his buggy.
“Aunt Caroline!” cried Abby, dashing into the hallway where Caroline was hanging up her shawl. “You’re back!”
“Yes, dear,” she said, hugging the child and then her sister, who came running right behind her twin.
“I don’t know why you had to go eat supper with that awful man,” Amelia said.
Caroline sighed and knelt so her face was at
eye level with the little girl. “Sometimes, when one has a job, one has duties that are not always enjoyable. Mr. Thurgood is my boss, and he wanted to meet with me, so I had an obligation to go—does that make sense?”
Amelia shrugged. “What does ‘obulgation’ mean?”
“Obligation,” Caroline repeated. “It means a duty. Like you have a duty to mind your papa.”
“Oh. I see,” Amelia said, seemingly reassured that Caroline did not think of her supper with Mr. Thurgood as enjoyable.
Caroline looked over the girls’ shoulders. “Is...is your father here?” she asked, trying not to sound as if it mattered.
Abby shook her head. “No, he went back to the ranch right after supper.”
Amelia added, “He said he had to ride herd tonight or something.”
By an effort of will, Caroline kept her features blank. Until this moment, she had not realized just how much she had been looking forward to seeing Jack once she escaped Mr. Thurgood. Had Jack left early because she had gone out to supper with Mr. Thurgood? Had he misinterpreted the outing as something more than it was, a duty she could not have gracefully avoided? Surely he didn’t think Mr. Thurgood was courting her!
And yet, she knew with a sick certainty that the superintendent looked at it that way. Something about the way the man had preened when he’d helped her with her wrap and when other diners had glanced their way told her Mr. Thurgood might well feel it was the beginning of a courtship.
Well, she’d have to nip that idea in the bud, she thought tartly, straightening. Even if she lost her job as teacher, she was not about to spend another moment in the company of that man, except at the schoolhouse when others were there.
The clock in the hall chimed the hour.
“Girls, it’s time for you to go get ready for bed,” her mother said, coming into the parlor. “Go wash up and put on your nightgowns.”
The twins scampered off.
“I’m afraid your brother’s responsible for Jack taking off so early,” her mother said with a rueful look. “He’s the one who told Jack that Mr. Thurgood had come to take you to supper all gussied up like a prize peacock, and smelling like a rose.”
Caroline groaned. She could just imagine the mischievous Dan doing such a thing.
“How did Jack react?” She hated to let her mother see how much she cared, but she had to know.
“He just got quiet,” her mother said. “You know how most men are when they’re thinking hard about something. He ate supper without hardly saying a word, just thanked me and said he had to be getting back to the ranch.”
“And Dan will probably tell everyone he meets about my supper with Mr. Thurgood, too. That’s all I don’t need, for the whole town thinking he’s courting me.”
Her mother’s smile was full of sympathy. “I don’t think you have to worry about that, Caroline. I gave Dan a lecture after Jack left about the virtue of discretion. Dan probably thought he was helping you by making Jack jealous.”
So her whole family had guessed she cared about Jack. At least she hadn’t had to explain it to her mother—Ma understood how Caroline felt without her saying a word.
“Thanks, Ma.” She sighed, then went and hugged her mother. “Do you think Jack was jealous? After all, I’ve told him often enough I wasn’t interested.”
Still embracing Caroline, her mother’s shoulders shook with laughter. “Now, if that isn’t a silly question. If he wasn’t, why would he have left? And you are interested, aren’t you?”
Caroline could only nod. Admitting the fact seemed to release a great weight from her shoulders. “So what should I do?”
Her mother let her go so she could look her in the eye.
“Sounds like you’d better find a way to show him you care, dear.”
* * *
Some of Jack’s trailhands had been surprised when they’d first joined the drive to see that the trail boss took his turn at night watch just as the rest of them did—often taking the second watch, the time after midnight when it was tough on a man to leave a warm bedroll and ride away from a campfire into the chill of the night.
To Jack it was only common sense to take his turn with the rest, for it was his herd. A cattleman who thought he was above taking night watch deserved to lose beeves to predators, both the four-legged and the two-legged kind.
Besides, if he couldn’t sleep, between the thoughts that plagued him and the snoring of his men around the campfire—especially old Cookie—he might as well circle the cattle. It was a chance to be alone with his thoughts, which a man didn’t often get when he spent his days among other men. Cowboys were usually talkative among themselves about other trail drives, other cowboys they had known, girls they had left behind or horses they had been thrown by.
Tonight, he’d ridden out early to meet Raleigh and take over the watch, eager to get away from Caroline’s face, which seemed to gaze out at him from the flickering flames of the campfire. He couldn’t stop imagining Caroline with the suitor who’d come to call and wondering how she felt about the man.
Maybe if he immersed himself in the calm of the night he wouldn’t think about Caroline stepping out on the arm of an older man, an established man, a man who would have books and learning in common with her. No matter how Mrs. Wallace had tried to downplay Caroline’s absence, it was her brother’s teasing words that stuck with him—“You shoulda seen that fine gent, Jack, lookin’ at my sister like she was a fresh-baked peach pie and he was hungry.”
No wonder Caroline had been easing out of strict mourning black. She’d said she wasn’t interested in courting—but that must have changed when the right man came to call. Apparently the county school superintendent filled that bill.
Raleigh seemed disinclined to ride back to his bedroll and lingered at Jack’s side, even after Jack mentioned leaving a pot of coffee on the fire for him.
“That Miss Wallace, she’s a right fine woman, isn’t she, boss?” Raleigh said.
Jack had been staring up at the star-studded night sky without really seeing it, but now he looked back at Raleigh sharply. Why was his ramrod mentioning her?
“I reckon she is.”
“I mean, takin’ the girls in and all. Why, I happened to meet them comin’ back from school the other day, when I was in town, and they were each holdin’ one a’ her hands and lookin’ real happy-like.”
“Hmm.” He wished Raleigh would ride off and leave him to his thoughts, into which Miss Caroline Wallace had intruded far too much as it was.
“It’s a shame, your brother dyin’ like he did, and her wearin’ black for so long.”
Raleigh’s continuing to talk about Caroline when he should have been back by the fire drinking coffee fanned Jack’s spark of irritation into a flame. “Is there a point to your chin-wagging, Raleigh?” Jack demanded, letting the other man hear the edge in his voice. He could feel the other man’s surprised gaze on him as he went back to staring at the sinking moon without really seeing it.
“Sorry, boss. It was just that I was wonderin’...”
Jack felt himself tense. Was Raleigh about to ask Jack if he minded him asking Caroline out? He could feel acid churn in his stomach and knew it wasn’t just from Cookie’s coffee.
“Wondering what?”
“Well, my mama always said a bird in th’ hand’s worth two in th’ bush,” Raleigh said. “Mebbe you ought to take notice of what’s right under your nose, boss.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack snapped, but he was afraid he already knew.
“Well, you’ve said your plan was to find some nice lady to marry up with in Montana Territory, so the girls would have a mama again. Seems to me like they’ve found a lady they like plenty well right here in Simpson Creek. Don’t you think she’d make a good mama for the twins? Don’t you like her yourself?”
Jack’s horse shifted restlessly,
aware of his rider unconsciously tensing up in the saddle. “I like her just fine, and yes, the twins seem to, too. Only problem with your harebrained scheme, Raleigh, is the lady isn’t interested.” Not in me, at least. He wasn’t aware that he’d been gritting his teeth until he felt the pain in his jaw. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
Raleigh dropped his inquisitive gaze, and his voice was softer now. “Sorry, boss, I didn’t mean—”
“But maybe you think your charm is just what she needs in her life,” Jack went on, temper making him reckless. “Perhaps you think if I say I don’t care, you can go court Miss Caroline Wallace and change her mind. Well, go right ahead. Try your luck.” Wait till Raleigh found out he already had competition.
Raleigh held up a hand as if to stop the flood of Jack’s ire. “Whoa, boss, I didn’t say I was thinkin’ that. I wasn’t, on my honor. I’m too young to get hitched right now, too footloose for some woman to ever want to marry me, I reckon. I was just thinkin’ a’ you, boss.”
“Well, don’t,” Jack snarled. “Go on back and get some shut-eye. Sunrise is still coming when it’s coming, and we need to get that potbellied stove put in, unless you want to spend the winter in a cabin without heat.”
If he didn’t sound like a bear with a backside full of buckshot, Jack thought as he watched Raleigh lope back to the campfire. Sometimes caring for a woman—especially when he wasn’t sure she cared back—sure soured a fellow’s temper.
Chapter Thirteen
“So, how are things going with the twins now?” Louisa asked after they’d sent the children out for recess. Her manner was casual, but her eyes were bright with curiosity. “Both of them seem back to their cheerful selves.”
“They are, I think,” Caroline answered, staring out the window to where Abby and Amelia were once again playing jump rope with some of the other girls. “I had a talk with them about running off from school, and I asked their father to do so, too, on Sunday afternoon when he took them out to the ranch. So I don’t think it’ll happen again.”
The Rancher's Courtship & Lone Wolf's Lady Page 13