A Match Made in Texas

by Mary Connealy

  “I have ten dollars, Mrs. Claasen. Would that pay for the table and chairs, too? And how much would you want for that bed frame?”

  Essie came and put an arm on Hannah’s shoulder. “I’m glad to see you fixing up your place, Hannie. It needed doing.”

  Hannah had a surprising surge of affection for Essie, and she gave the woman a one-armed hug, glad that Essie wasn’t taking offense that she was changing things in the attic room.

  “These are pretty pieces,” Mrs. Whitfield said, studying the furniture. “You have excellent taste.”

  She seemed a bit too enthused, and Hannah had no idea why. Especially since this was the only furniture in Claasen’s store. It said little about a person’s taste when the choices were so limited.

  Mrs. Claasen smiled. “You’ve been real good to our boy at school, Hannah. I know what a handful he is. Ten dollars is just about what I gave those folks for the furniture, and I don’t really have a place for it in the store. If you’ll haul it away today, I won’t have to do a bunch of rearranging. I’ll give you the lot for ten dollars.”

  Hannah couldn’t control her pleasure as she pictured the lovely furniture brightening up her room. “Done,” she said, and nodded firmly.

  Essie smiled so kindly that the last of Hannah’s resentment slid away. Hannah doubted she’d ever be able to call Essie Ma, but she was part of Hannah’s family and it was good they felt kindly toward each other.

  “Well, it was nice to see you, but I need to run an errand.” The abrupt way Essie spoke seemed to have a deeper meaning, but Essie hurried out before Hannah could find out if something was wrong.

  Essie’s errand had her running across the street and into the diner, where Hannah could see the owner, Rosella Bindle, through a dirty window. The two women began talking rapidly, and Hannah thought Rosella looked out the window and straight into her eyes.

  Mrs. Whitfield whispered something to Mrs. Claasen that pulled Hannah’s attention back to the furniture. Mrs. Whitfield stopped whispering.

  Mrs. Claasen smiled. “I’ll be closing up for the night in about a half hour. I’ll wait while you get things hauled away, but if you could make it quick, I’d appreciate it. I’ve got to get home and put a meal on.”

  With a strangely sharp look, Mrs. Claasen added, “You could use some help carrying these things.”

  “I think Marcus is still working,” Mrs. Whitfield said as if she despaired of her son ever doing anything but work. “I’ll see if he’s available.” She hurried away before Hannah could stop her from pestering Marcus.

  Even though it would take several trips, Hannah knew she could carry these things herself. But it was too late. Mrs. Whitfield was steaming across the street like a locomotive.

  Hannah handed the ten dollars over. “I’ll get things moved as soon as I can.”

  Mrs. Claasen smiled a bit too enthusiastically. “Thank you, dear.”

  Reaching for the rocking chair, Hannah was stopped by a gentle but firm hand on her arm. “I’d like to help you carry that, Hannah,” Dottie said, “but Clayton is waiting for Grace at my home.”

  “That’s fine. I can do it myself.” Hannah reached again for the chair.

  Again Dottie caught her arm as if she wished to delay Hannah for some reason. “We haven’t seen much of you lately. Now that you’re living in town, you should join our sewing circle.”

  Hannah said, “I think that’s a good idea. I’ve been too focused on myself, Dottie. I’m going to try and be more sociable.” Hannah had let herself sink into self-pity when she should have been friendlier. Why, she hadn’t even taken the time to meddle in anyone’s life for a while. Her eyes went to Grace, who was standing by Dottie. Grace looked wonderful. She was round with Clayton’s child and glowing with serene contentment, even though she was blind. Hannah had no business feeling sorry for herself when Grace was managing with so many challenges.

  “I haven’t seen you for a long time.” Hannah pulled her old co-teacher into a hug. “I’m happy I ran into you today.”

  In the moment they hugged, Grace whispered, “I know you were part of bringing Clayton into my life, Hannah. Thank you. I know you’ll have your own happy event soon.”

  Grace released her after that odd comment. Dottie seemed to be looking out the front window, and suddenly she stopped looking and tugged on Grace’s arm, and the two them said good-bye and bustled out of the store.

  Was every woman who’d spoken to her acting strange or was it all Hannah’s imagination? Well, she’d worry about that later. For now she had to get this furniture home.

  Her room was just across the street, down an alley to the back of the diner, and up a single flight of stairs. No one piece of furniture was overly heavy, and she could manage alone by taking several trips.

  She stepped out of the general store to see that Marcus had just come out of the bank, straight across the street from her. His mother shoved his coat into his hands and he pulled it on. His mother smiled at Hannah and waved, then hurried toward the diner. Hannah could see that once inside, Mrs. Whitfield began talking with Essie and Rosella.

  Marcus strode over the packed dirt of the street and climbed the steps in front of Claasen’s, his feet thudding on the wooden sidewalk. “Ma said you could use a helping hand.”

  Hannah smiled at him. “I ended up with more than just this rocking chair. I also bought a table and two other chairs and a bedstead.” She pointed into the store to see Mrs. Claasen talking with her husband.

  Mrs. Claasen was watching her and Marcus through her window. She saw Hannah point, and Mrs. Claasen and her husband both waved cheerfully. A bit weakly, Hannah waved back, at a loss as to why the couple was so happy. Maybe they really needed the ten dollars.

  Marcus reached for the chair. He was six inches taller than she and he had a lanky body that made him seem taller still, but to Hannah he had always been a scarecrow of a man. He hefted the chair away from her as if it weighed nothing, and she noticed his upper arm muscles bulge beneath his coat.

  Why, Marcus wasn’t a scarecrow of a man at all. He strode straight out onto the frozen ruts of the street toward the diner. Hannah watched him for a few seconds, drawn to the way he moved. She probably should go back for the next piece of furniture, but instead she followed Marcus. He got across the street and went down the alley between the diner and the building next door, to Hannah’s door in the back. She hurried to keep up with his long-legged stride.

  When he got near the door, she rushed past him and opened it.

  “Thank you, Hannah.” He waited for an instant before she realized he was waiting for her to go first. She thought of the second door at the top of the stairs and knew she would need to open it. Feeling rude for making him wait with the chair, she stepped in, awkwardly holding the door open ahead of him. He stepped close to block the door open with his body. Very close.

  She left the door to him and headed up to her room, with Marcus following her. As they stepped inside, Hannah thought she heard a squeak, like someone else was coming up the stairs. Was Mr. Claasen helping carry the furniture, too? Hannah turned to thank the man just as Marcus said, “You want me to put this where the old chair is?”

  Hannah noticed her door had swung shut, which it rarely did. Maybe she hadn’t closed the door downstairs firmly and there was a draft.

  Marcus set the rocker down beside Essie’s old chair.

  “No, let me move it.” Hannah reached for Essie’s chair.

  “I can get the chair.” Marcus rushed toward it.

  Hannah bumped into him. Marcus stumbled.

  Marcus grabbed her by the waist to steady himself. Then his warm hands flexed against her sides, which felt unbelievably nice. She glanced up at him and their gazes locked. Time stood still in Hannah’s little room. Sounds from outside faded to nothing.

  Those strong hands tightened and pulled her closer. Marcus’s eyes changed to a darker, warmer shade of blue. A color so intriguing, Hannah felt she needed to study it a bit longer
. Then he leaned down an inch at a time and settled his mouth on hers.

  Chapter 7

  A thousand wishes and as many prayers, hundreds of dreams that stretched through the days and nights, years and years of wanting and wondering, and now he finally was where he’d longed to be, standing with Hannah in his arms, kissing her.

  He’d longed to kiss Hannah Taylor since the first time he’d laid eyes on her at school when he and his family had moved to town.

  He’d been eleven at the time.

  Back then, just as he’d been working up his nerve to talk to her—he’d been working at it for almost four years—she started going around with Charlie. It had broken Mark’s fifteen-year-old heart, but he knew that Charlie was the better man. Charlie was handsome and charming and one of the nicest guys Mark knew.

  Then Charlie died.

  Mark had left Hannah alone to grieve.

  Then he’d left her alone because her ma was ailing.

  Then he’d left her alone because her ma had died.

  Then he’d left her alone because she was busy with her little brothers.

  Then he’d seen her quiet, hurt expression when she’d been as good as thrown out of her own home to live in the tiny room over the diner, and he’d left her alone to get over that.

  He’d been hauling the school’s firewood. He lurked by the bank window like a cowering hound and watched her leave school so he could stumble outside and have a two-minute walk with her every day. He greeted her after church each week. Once he’d offered to carry her groceries.

  He admitted his attempts had been pathetic, just like everything about him was pathetic.

  Then today, at his ma’s prodding, even though he was in the middle of the bank audit late on a Saturday afternoon, working in the safe and filling cash bags, which took time to close up, he’d rushed out to lend her a hand hauling furniture. He’d offered earlier, but Mark suspected that if it hadn’t been for his ma fussing at him to go help, Hannah would have handled the furniture herself and he would have let her.

  And now . . . now he was kissing her, and not only had she not slapped him but she was kissing him back!

  Her arms settled around his neck, and Mark almost lost his mind from the sweetness of it. He wanted to break off the kiss and beg her to marry him, but that would require talking, and somehow when he was around Hannah something jammed up in his chest and words were close to impossible.

  So instead, since it was going well, he kept kissing her. He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her closer and she came to him. She willingly, even eagerly maybe, tightened her arms on his neck.

  He slid one hand into her hair and tilted her head to slant his mouth over hers and deepened the kiss. She stayed right with him.

  The whole world seemed to go away as Marcus poured all his years of longing into one endless, perfect kiss.

  Marcus never wanted this moment to end.

  A sharp rap at the door made Hannah jump out of his arms.

  “Hannah Taylor, have you got a man in there?”

  Rosella Bindle’s nasal north-Texas twang made both of them whirl toward the door as if they’d been caught doing something wrong, which they most certainly had.

  Mark felt his cheeks heat up in the blush he so despised. Going to Hannah’s room and shutting the door, a single man and woman—it was scandalous.

  He glanced sideways at Hannah just as she looked frantically at him. He saw more than guilt on Hannah’s face, though. He saw shock, as if she’d just now realized she’d been kissing worthless Mark Whitfield.

  Mark couldn’t stand to be alone with that expression another second. He hurried to the door and turned the knob. It was locked.

  Mark looked at Hannah. “Did you lock the door?”

  “No!” She grabbed a key hanging from a nail and reached for the lock. In her rush to escape him, she dropped the key with a loud ping, which was as good as a confession that they’d locked themselves in the room on purpose.

  Mark swooped to pick it up at the same time she did, and they almost cracked heads.

  Mrs. Bindle hammered louder. “You make yourselves decent and get this door open.”

  Hannah looked at Mark and said, horrified, “Make yourselves decent?”

  Mark’s face felt so hot it would likely ignite any second. He jammed the key into the lock and quickly got the door open. Mrs. Bindle marched in.

  Essie was right behind her, looking upset. Mark’s mother stood one step behind Essie with the look of a woman whose son had just been sentenced to hanging. In fact, Mark thought his ma, a very calm woman, looked a bit overly—perhaps even theatrically—upset.

  Short and brusque, Rosella stormed straight into the middle of the room, all of three steps, as if she were charging to the rescue. “Now see here, Hannah, I made the rules absolutely clear when you moved in.”

  “Mrs. Bindle—” Hannah started politely.

  “There were to be no gentleman callers of any kind.”

  “It’s not like it seems,” Hannah argued.

  “It seems,” Rosella said, “like you and Mark were alone together in your bedroom with the door locked.”

  “Well, then it’s exactly like it seems, but I can explain—”

  “I run a respectable business downstairs,” Rosella said, cutting Hannah off.

  Mark thought respectable was a little much. She ran the only diner in town, so it kept fairly busy serving tough beef and overcooked beans, with biscuits that veered erratically between doughy and rock hard, never finding a middle ground. It wasn’t overly clean, and Rosella was known to keep the boisterous crowd of customers in gales of laughter with her insults. Her customers were mainly single cowboys, because anyone with a wife ate at home.

  “Mark, what is the meaning of this?” his mother demanded. She sounded distraught.

  “He was helping me carry,” Hannah tried to explain.

  Rosella narrowed her eyes. “Helping you carry on, it seems to me.”

  “You’ve been up here quite a while actually,” Mrs. Whitfield said.

  For one awkward moment Mark wondered how long he and Hannah had spent kissing. True, it had only seemed like a minute, but Mark had lost track of time.

  “Essie,” Hannah said, turning to her stepmother, “you know I only left the store a few minutes ago.”

  Mrs. Claasen chose that moment to yell up from the street below. “Are you coming back, Hannah? We’d like to lock up the store now.”

  Mark knew he should jump in and defend Hannah’s honor, but he was still stunned from the kiss and how Hannah had responded to him. And talking never came easily to him at any time, but especially not under duress.

  “As the only teacher in Dry Gulch, you have an obligation to uphold the very highest moral standards.” Rosella sounded lofty for a woman who slung hash for a living. “You think the minute my back is turned you can ride the whirlwind?”

  Mark almost smiled at that image. It had been a little bit of a whirlwind. Mrs. Bindle was hitting the whole situation just about exactly right. Except how in the world had the door gotten locked?

  “Mrs. Bindle, except for a few brief visits from my family, I’ve never had so much as a visitor. How can you think so poorly of—”

  Mark finally found his tongue. “If you were watching us, you saw us come up those stairs only minutes ago.”

  “Now, Mark,” his ma said, “it was more like—”

  “Let me finish!” He’d never spoken to his mother like that before.

  She arched a brow at him that threatened reprisal later, yet Mark went on talking. “I carried that chair. I set it down and then moved the other out of the way. Neither of us swung the door shut and neither of us locked it. It must’ve jammed somehow when it closed.”

  “By itself?” Essie asked with quiet skepticism. “Closed and locked by itself?”

  Mark ignored the interruption. “We’re on our way right now to collect the other pieces of furniture that Hannah purchased at Claasen’
s. Now, would we stay in here when we know Mrs. Claasen is waiting to close?”

  “I really do need to hurry, Hannah,” Mrs. Claasen sang out from below.

  Mark soldiered on in the face of some of the more formidable women he’d ever seen, most especially his ma. “Would we leave that furniture while we—as you so rudely put it—carried on? If you don’t trust Hannah and me to do this chore, then I suggest you all come along and grab a piece of furniture.” He looked at Essie, then his ma. “I will not hear a word against Hannah. Do you understand me?”

  His mother narrowed her eyes a bit. Essie looked more amused than chastised.

  Rosella said, “I’ll be watching you, and I want this door left open even if you have to prop it!” With an indignant huff she stalked out of the room.

  Mark met his ma’s eyes next. “We’ll talk about this later, Ma.”

  “I’ll go in just a moment,” she said, every inch the wealthy banker’s wife. She turned to address Hannah. “You, young lady, might want to straighten your hair. It seems to be quite a bit messier than when you were buying furniture a half hour ago.”

  Mark winced. A half hour? Had they really been up here for a half hour?

  Hannah reached for her hair, and only then did Mark realize it was hanging free. He was shocked at how much he wished he remembered doing that.

  Ma plucked a long blond hair off Mark’s collar, and with a quick rub of her thumb and two fingers she opened her hand to let the hair float gently to the floor. “Your hair could stand straightening, too, son.”

  He wondered what it looked like. He seemed to remember Hannah’s fingers there.

  “You can be sure we will talk about this later.” Ma jerked her head with the attitude of a woman who was not easy to fool, then turned and stomped with unnecessary firmness down the stairs.

  This was not the first time Mark was glad he had his own home.

  That left Essie, the closest thing Hannah had to a ma. “Essie, I respect Hannah too much to ever hurt her or harm her reputation. And you know Hannah well enough to know she’s completely honorable. Please, head on down now.”