by Lisa Plumley
“He must have a very good reason for waiting,” Olivia assured her. Privately, she considered Adeline to be the most attractive woman in town—far more beautiful than Olivia herself. She couldn’t fathom what would prevent any reasonable man from proposing to her. “You’ll just have to be patient, I guess.”
“I guess,” Adeline grumbled good-naturedly. “For now...”
From beside Adeline, their mutual friend Violet Benson only gave a silent nod. While the game continued, so did their conversation. It hardly seemed fair, they agreed, that the men were allowed to play first, when the women were also keen. But that had been the compromise Grace had finagled with the league.
The menfolk simply weren’t willing to allow anything more. As it was, most of the spectators drifted away after the men’s game was finished. At the moment, though, the crowd was large.
It was a little too large for Olivia’s liking—for the ill-advised plan she’d initiated for herself this morning. Facing a field full of almost everyone she knew, from her father to the Pioneer Press’s editor, Thomas Walsh, was unnerving at best.
To her left sat Mr. Walsh’s sister, the famous cookery book author, Daisy Walsh, who was visiting Morrow Creek for a spell and had decided to accompany little Élodie Cooper—daughter of the livery stable owner, widowed Owen Cooper—to the game. Both ladies, larger and smaller, applauded their menfolk. Near them, Miss Mellie Reardon appeared to root for the town’s newspaper editor with a special enthusiasm. As a part-time typesetter at the press office, she had reason to be enthusiastic, but it seemed to Olivia that there was more than genial interest in Mellie’s cheering. Watching her, Olivia couldn’t help hoping she snared Mr. Walsh for her own, as she clearly wished to do.
“Ooh!” Violet elbowed Olivia in the ribs. “Here’s your Mr. Turner, coming up to bat.” She watched avidly as Griffin approached the plate. “He’s playing with such heart, isn’t he?”
At Violet’s sincere remark, Olivia smiled. “That’s a diplomatic way of describing it.” She couldn’t tear away her gaze from Griffin’s masculine form, displayed to advantage by his athletic stance and slightly too form-fitting clothing. He’d borrowed those togs, but Olivia couldn’t complain about the result. “I can promise you, Mr. Turner does everything in that fashion—as though he intends to win big or go down swinging.”
“I admire that about him.” Violet put her chin in her hand, gazing at Griffin as though she admired more than his determined attitude. She sighed. “He was very nice to me, you know.”
Ah. With relief, Olivia remembered Griffin’s gracious encounter with Violet on the day of the handicrafts show. Likely, that was all she meant. “Yes. He is quite nice.”
He’s especially nice when he’s kissing me, she couldn’t help thinking...and daydreamed through his first turn at bat.
Reassembling her attention, Olivia tried harder for Griffin’s next attempt. So far today, he’d missed more balls than he’d hit, but that hadn’t unsettled him in the least.
“He’s quite...unusual looking, isn’t he?” ventured Daisy Walsh as she handed a rag doll to little Élodie. “His nose—”
“Is perfectly fine for his face,” Violet stated bluntly.
“A big nose indicates big...appetites,” Adeline added, leaning forward with a saucy eyebrow waggle. “It’s manly.”
Shocked by her brazenness, Olivia could only gawk as the other women in her group chimed in. One declared Griffin to be rugged. Another proclaimed him impressive. A third merely fanned herself with a bit of newsprint, watching Griffin bat.
Through it all, Daisy Walsh sat plainly mystified. She exchanged baffled glances with Élodie. They both shrugged.
“I guess you have to be a local to understand,” Daisy said.
“Or a grown-up,” Élodie added wisely. “Like my papa.”
As Daisy’s cheeks colored in response to that remark, Olivia frowned at all of them—except ten-year-old Élodie, of course. She couldn’t help feeling that Griffin was her man to appreciate. Hers alone. Protectively, she watched him bat again.
He swung hard. He missed mightily. His ensemble of admirers gave a collective “aww” of commiseration. Irked, Olivia frowned.
“Smash it, Griffin!” she yelled through cupped hands, having had enough of poise. “You can do it! Hurray, Griffin!”
A wave of incredulity swept through the crowd, strong enough to make Olivia’s cheeks heat. But she just...didn’t care.
Importantly, Griffin did care. He’d heard her. He winked at her, and then he pulled down his hat and prepared a sockdolager.
Olivia held her breath. Griffin wound up. He swung.
This time, his bat connected with the ball. In fact, it connected hard enough to splinter the bat in pieces—but not before the baseball soared into the sky toward left field.
Griffin stared. Then he ran.
Olivia leaped ecstatically to her feet.
Barely aware of her own actions, she jumped up and down, watching Griffin make a triumphant run around the bases. He was full of power and might, grinning like a conqueror, running hard. His black hat flew off. It wheeled away in the breeze.
Still Griffin kept running. With his face wholly revealed, he powered his way past third base. He was heading home.
“Go! Go! Go!” Olivia shrieked, waving her arms. “Go!”
When he cleared home base, Olivia thought she might swoon from excitement. Clapping madly, she hurtled herself toward the improvised wooden bench where the baseball players sat.
She was in Griffin’s arms an instant later. Laughing with delight, she hugged him. “You did it! You were magnificent.”
Still hatless, with his dark, unruly hair half-undone from its leather tie and his skin glistening with sweat, Griffin gave an offhanded shrug. “That’ll show those glasshouse boys for not letting me onto their damn team.” Full of pride, he cupped her face in his big, dirt-smudged hands. He grinned. “You did root for me. I heard you all the way on the field.”
“Half the town heard me,” Olivia joked, still struck by the fact that the reason Griffin hadn’t ever played baseball wasn’t—as she’d assumed—because he hadn’t wanted to join in. It was because he wasn’t allowed to join in. Her heart went out to him.
“Ahem.” Nearby, one of the male players cleared his throat. “Can we proceed, Turner?” he asked facetiously. “Or do you plan on spooning with your sweetie some more first?”
Like startled cats, Olivia and Griffin leaped apart.
That didn’t stop the entire bench of players from laughing.
Or dissuade the whole pile of spectators from hooting.
Well, it was too late for decorum now, Olivia decided, casting her friends and neighbors a discomfited glance. She needed to show Griffin a little of her true self, didn’t she? Otherwise, he’d be duped into marrying someone she wasn’t.
At that thought, she went still. She didn’t want to fool Griffin. She only wanted to love him. If the woman she was wasn’t good enough for that—with her love of science and fiddles, inventions and baseball, philosophy and books—well, if she wasn’t good enough, Olivia thought with a sudden burst of rebellious courage, she might as well learn that hard truth now.
Because, true to her challenge to him at the handicrafts show, Griffin had appeared in public while hatless and wearing nonblack clothes. He had changed his ways. Olivia could see with her own eyes the tight-fitting tan britches and white Henley shirt he’d borrowed for the baseball game. As for his hat...
Well, it might never be recovered. The wind had it now.
Further, it occurred to her, it had been days since she’d last glimpsed Griffin drinking whiskey. It had been even longer since he’d smoked a cigarillo. For her sake, he’d left his hotel suite and gotten to know Morrow Creek. He’d trusted her.
Wasn’t it time,
Olivia wondered, that she trusted him?
You must show yourself, she remembered him saying while urging her to claim her inventions as her own. Otherwise, you’ll never really be happy. Suddenly, she believed it was true.
“I’m sorry. We’re finished,” Olivia told the other player. She recognized him as local rancher Everett Bannon, whose meddlesome vaqueros had doubtless accompanied him to town today. They were a famously interfering lot of cowboys—unrepentantly so—but they all meant well. Olivia turned to Griffin. “You’d better get back to it,” she advised him. “As soon as you men are finished playing, the ladies on my team have some fantastic athletic feats to show you. See? I’m already prepared.”
Bravely, Olivia unbuttoned her coat. She removed it.
At the sight of what she’d worn beneath it—what she’d fearfully hidden all day, only to reveal now—Griffin’s eyes widened. “Your lady’s rational cycling skirt! You wore it.”
“I thought it would be ideal for many different sporting activities,” Olivia said. “It’s a flawless fit, too. I sized the prototype to my own specifications. It was only convenient.”
Griffin’s approving gaze said he agreed. Unreservedly.
The increasingly impatient grumbling of the crowd said otherwise. The spectators and players wanted to continue.
Olivia could cope with their impatience—and even with their potential disapproval—she realized. Because as long as she believed she was doing the right thing, she was. For her.
Not that her father’s shocked face in the crowd didn’t give her a moment’s pause. It did. But she smiled at him...and Henry Mouton gamely smiled back. He was absentminded. But loving, too.
“Good luck!” Olivia curtsied in her shirtwaist and clever divided skirt. She slung her lightweight coat over her arm, done with it now. “I’m sorry for the interruption. Please, carry on!”
The players did, even as Olivia tromped gamely over to the ladies’ practice area of the field. There, the former Crabtree sisters—Grace, Sarah and Molly—greeted her with enthusiasm.
“Your sporting costume is ingenious!” Grace marveled, clearly wanting one of her own. “I should have guessed, when Molly was cutting it and Sarah was sewing it, that its creation was your doing, Olivia. You’ve always been so imaginative.”
“Your Mr. Turner brings out something special in you,” Sarah added with a gentle smile. “I can see it, plain as day.”
“I knew my spice cake could work magic!” Molly finished, cheerfully handing Olivia a bat to practice with. “Next thing you know, it’ll be wedding bells for you two! Mark my words.”
Hoping Molly was right, Olivia rested her bat on her shoulder. In thought, she turned to watch Griffin on the bench.
He wiped his brow. He saw her. He smiled broadly at her.
As one, all the women on Olivia’s quilt audibly sighed.
Well, that clinched it. For better or worse, Olivia realized, her infatuation with Griffin was public knowledge.
She turned back, intending to practice her batting swing...and met the three sisters’ inquisitive gazes instead.
Grace, in particular, appeared full of questions.
“So,” she said directly and without preamble, “exactly why do they call Mr. Turner The Tycoon Terror?”
Chapter Sixteen
For as long as two hours after Griffin had concluded his first triumphant personal encounter with baseball, he still felt aglow with accomplishment. His senses felt sharper. His arms felt stronger. His whole body felt downright enlivened. His hands remembered the feel of the bat, his ears the crack of the hit he’d made, his eyes the clear skyward arc of the ball.
It was lunacy, but it was also undeniable. The small, ridiculed boy inside him felt victorious. Proud. Accepted.
Accepted by a rural group of miners and lumbermen and calico-clad town housewives, but accepted, all the same.
The knowledge of that was far better than whiskey.
After watching Olivia’s ladies’ baseball team take the field—divided amongst themselves to create their own opponent, as they were obliged to do—Griffin had cheered on his invention-making, fiddle-music-loving, philosophizing woman as best as he knew how. He’d shouted until he’d grown hoarse. He’d waved his arms, then pinched a team pennant from one of the women and waved that, too. He’d overflowed with pride when Olivia had taken to home plate for her first turn at bat, wearing her rational sportswoman’s skirt and winding up with a look of determination.
He’d leaped to his feet to applaud the wobbly ground ball that brought her to first base, then waved with joy—earning himself several amused sidelong glances in the process and one elbow in the ribs from the closest spectator, Adam Crabtree.
“Easy there, Turner,” the founder of the Pioneer Press had said with a grin. “Anyone would think you’d hit that ball.”
But Griffin had endured Crabtree’s friendly joshing along with all the other men’s ribbing. That he needed to do so at all was partly his fault after all. Not because he was too rowdy in his admiration of Olivia’s baseball efforts, but because he had been largely responsible for the hefty crowd that remained to watch the second game, in direct contravention of what he came to understand was the usual Morrow Creek response of rolling up blankets and leaving during the ladies’ league game.
Watching the women play had been an eye-opening experience. Griffin had never given much thought to female suffrage or athleticism or leadership. But watching Olivia’s game made him realize a few things. First, that she was not the only woman who needed courage to wield a bat. The occasional catcalls from the spectators told him that. Second, that she was not alone in fearing to step from her usual role and risk public censure. The nervous giggling and red faces of the women players told him that. And third, that she was extraordinary among all her peers. Because Olivia alone played with mingled grit and fear. Unique in her, poise and doggedness battled for supremacy...and in the process, both of those qualities took their turns in the game.
In the end, Olivia’s side did not win—although she did apply considerable effort to try to wrangle a victory.
Breathlessly, she shrugged to Griffin after the game. “I never said I was talented at baseball. Only that I enjoyed it.”
“I was not considering the score,” he confessed, admiring her glistening skin and aura of exertion. “I was watching you.”
It was true. Throughout the game, Griffin had been unable to tear away his attention from Olivia. He loved her vigor and her fortitude. He loved her girlish swings of the bat. He loved the way she wiggled her hips while preparing to run, the way she encouraged all her teammates with generous hollers of praise and the way she tucked those wayward tendrils of hair away from her flushed face while preparing to take her turn.
He loved...her. Wholeheartedly and without hesitation.
After the game, everyone had celebrated with cold, fresh-pressed apple cider that had been brought to the field along with Molly Copeland’s peach-filled hand pies. They’d toasted each other with cups full of cider and hands full of sweets, and in those moments, Griffin had felt that he truly belonged there.
In a way he never had in Boston, he belonged in Morrow Creek. He’d come to know its residents. He’d helped them devise solutions to business problems and strategies for succeeding. He’d shopped in their mercantile and at their milliner’s, used their telegraph and postal services and admired their small-town handicrafts. He’d quit growling, quit grumbling and quit hiding himself away in the dark. Thanks to Olivia, Griffin had stopped scaring away the people around him and begun welcoming them, with all their quirks and foibles and homespun ideals.
It could almost be said that he’d found a family in Morrow Creek. But Griffin wasn’t ready for anything so foolish as that.
He’d found...peace in Morrow Creek, he told himself that eveni
ng as he stripped off his dirt-smudged, borrowed baseball clothes. He’d found solace in the mountain views, in the crisp scent of the ponderosa pines, in the burble of the creek. That would be enough, he swore to himself as he eyed the tub full of steaming water he’d asked the hotel staff to bring up for him, then lowered himself gingerly into it. He’d found a new beginning, he determined as he soaped himself up with the spicy scent of clove-oil soap and felt the day’s exertion slide away.
For now, for him, that would have to be enough.
But when a sharp knock came at his door, moments after Griffin had dried off from his bath and pulled on a pair of underdrawers, he knew himself to be a liar. Because at the sound of that knock, Griffin knew he wanted more. He wanted Olivia to be on the other side of that door, fetching and sweet, coming to give herself to him in the only way she hadn’t yet.
Cursing himself for his own weakness, Griffin covered himself more fully with a dressing gown, then stomped barefoot to the door. Summoning some strength, he inhaled a deep breath. Promising to be pure of mind and heart if it was Olivia on the other side of his suite’s door, he opened it.
She all but barreled past him through the opening, bringing a fresh, rose-scented breeze with her. Clad with astonishing informality in a chemise and a ladies’ flowered silk wrap that fell to her feet, with her hair in a loose topknot, Olivia strode inside.
“I came for a broom.” Speaking hastily, she scanned the suite’s furnishings. “There’s a bat in my room, and I’ll never sleep until I shoo it out the window.” With purpose, she trod to the suite’s corner. “Aha! I knew I’d left a broom in here.”
All Griffin could do was stare at her. Olivia was a genuine force of nature, full of tenacity and purposefulness and verve. He wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t imagined her—until she stopped before him with her broom clasped in hand...and made a funny face.