Montana Bride

by Joan Johnston

  “I could spend the rest of my life looking into your eyes,” he murmured. “They’re beautiful.”

  Grace took a quick step back, her green eyes flashing. “Flattery is wasted on me, Mr. Peterson. And I have no respect for men who spout compliments, especially when they’re not true.”

  “I wasn’t lying. Your eyes are the prettiest thing I’ve seen since I got to this godforsaken valley.”

  “Get out.” She pointed to the door, knowing from past experience that the flush of embarrassment was turning her red-freckled face into something freakish. “And don’t come back.”

  He shrugged and headed for the door. He stopped before he opened it and turned back to her. “Do you like kittens?”

  Grace made a moue of disgust. “Is that a trick question? Of course I like kittens. Who doesn’t like kittens?”

  He smiled and Grace felt her insides flip-flop.

  “If you like kittens,” he said, “there’s a new batch of them at the barn. I can show them to you now, if you like.”

  Grace wanted to go see those kittens more than anything she’d wanted in a very long time. But she didn’t dare encourage Andy to think she liked him or had any intention of spending time with him just for the fun of it. Because the truth was, she did like him and she would have loved spending more time talking with him.

  She knew better. Liking this boy would surely lead to other, less savory activities with him, activities she wanted no part of. “I don’t think I should,” she said at last.

  “Go see the damned kittens!” Griffin yelled from the other room. “You know you want to.”

  “Have you been listening all this time?” Grace shouted back, mortified.

  “Of course I have,” Griffin replied with a laugh. “Sounds to me like Andy’s sweet on you, Grace.”

  Grace felt her whole face turning red, which she knew for a fact made her head look like a giant tomato. “Just for that,” she yelled back, “I’m going to leave you in this house all alone, while I go to the barn and see those kittens!”

  “Have fun!” Griffin called after her.

  Grace grabbed her coat and scarf from the hooks near the door and said, “Let’s go.”

  Andy held the door for her, and she marched through. She stopped just outside, turned to him, and said, “Don’t get any ideas. I’m going to the barn to see those kittens, not for any other reason.”

  Andy lifted a brow and winced. “I didn’t ask you to come to the barn for any other reason. But if I think of one between now and the time we get there, I’ll let you know.”

  Grace strode away without looking back. The nerve of him! Suggesting that she thought he wanted to kiss her!

  Grace felt a frisson of anticipation skitter down her spine. Andy’s lips had felt pliant beneath the cloth she’d used to clean away the blood that had stained them. She wondered what they would feel like beneath her fingertips. She wondered what they would feel like against her own.

  Grace’s stomach heaved, and she felt nauseated. Kisses weren’t all nice. Kisses weren’t necessarily the stuff of fairy tales. She knew better.

  She would see the kittens and return to the house. Period. She wouldn’t allow herself to linger to talk with Andy.

  “I’ve thought of another reason for you to be visiting the barn with me,” he said when they were almost there.

  Breathless because Andy’s long legs had made it necessary for her to walk fast to keep up with him—not because she was expecting him to suggest a romantic tryst in the barn—Grace asked, “What reason is that?”

  “You can meet my oxen, Oats and Barley.”

  Grace laughed with relief. Maybe if Andy kept his mind on kittens and oxen, she’d be safe with him. Maybe they could talk about subjects that had nothing to do with the fact that he was male and she was female. Maybe they could be friends.

  Oh, Grace hoped so. She needed a friend to relieve the loneliness she felt, despite having a younger brother, and despite having a stepmother and stepfather. There were things she couldn’t tell any of them. Things she could only share with a friend.

  Andy had lost his family, too. Of course, he didn’t know Hetty wasn’t her real mother, and she couldn’t tell him the truth. But she thought he would understand about feeling lonely even when other people were around.

  Grace was still fantasizing about Andy as a friend when they reached the barn.

  “Grace!” a voice called.

  Grace turned and saw Hetty cutting across the meadow, making a path through the snow. She glanced at Andy and saw the guilt on his face and suddenly knew that he’d been thinking about showing her a lot more than kittens and oxen.

  “I thought we could be friends,” she said to him in a stricken voice.

  “Grace, I—”

  “What are you doing here, Grace?” Hetty asked as she joined them.

  “I wanted to see the new kittens,” Grace said.

  Hetty shot Andy an admonishing look before she put her arm through Grace’s and said, “You can see them another time. Right now I need you to help me get supper on the table.”

  Hetty took off for the house, tugging Grace along beside her.

  Grace glanced back once at Andy, who stared back at her and shrugged. In apology? In frustration? She had no way of knowing.

  “I see you got Andy’s face patched up,” Hetty said.

  “He seems nice,” Grace ventured.

  “He didn’t do anything to upset you, did he, Grace?” Hetty asked, a worried look in her eyes.

  Grace stopped in her tracks. “No, he didn’t. He was just going to show me the kittens, Hetty. That’s the only reason I went with him to the barn.”

  “Grace, I’m not sure you can trust—”

  Grace pulled herself completely free. “I wish everybody would stop trying to tell me what to think. I know what I’m doing. I’ve been taking care of myself for more years than I can count. I know what men are and what they do. You don’t need to warn me off. I can handle Andy Peterson!”

  She stomped away toward the house, her throat swollen with emotion, her eyes glistening with tears she refused to shed. The truth was, she couldn’t trust herself around Andy Peterson. She liked him, which meant she wanted to give him her trust. And she knew exactly where something like that might lead.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” she muttered. She’d really wanted to see those kittens. She’d always wanted a kitten, the way Griffin had always wanted a horse. Her mother hadn’t allowed her to have the kitten, and they’d never been able to afford a horse.

  “Is a kitten too much to ask?” she wondered aloud.

  There would be other chances to sneak away to the barn. By God, she would get there and see those kittens and pick one out for her very own. She had a birthday coming up, and when Hetty asked what she wanted, she was going to say, “A kitten.”

  She’d name it Blackie or Whitey or Ginger, depending on its color, and bring it into the house and give it all the milk it could drink and let it sleep on her pillow beside her head at night. Just see if she didn’t!

  She was sure Andy would help her. After all, he was the one who’d told her about the kittens in the first place. She would be forever grateful to him for that, even if he’d tricked her into coming to the barn with him. She could handle him. She could handle herself. She would never give another man the chance to take what she wasn’t willing to give. Not even one she liked as much as Andy Peterson.

  Grace discovered that Hetty was absolutely right about how cantankerous Griffin would be once he began to recover. Her sympathy for her brother was dying a slow, but certain, death. Over the past three weeks she’d lost patience with Griffin’s demands that she find him just the right piece of wood to whittle, that she sweep up the wood shavings, that she fetch the chamber pot, that she get him another pillow, that she fluff up his pillow, that she rearrange his covers, that she get him a cup of coffee—which he didn’t even drink—and then a cup of tea—which he also didn’t drink.

  G
race had been holding on to her temper because she could see her brother was in a lot of pain as the blisters popped and his skin began to slough off and new skin began to grow in. The way he constantly fiddled with his dying little toe, touching it and worrying it, was getting on her nerves. Finally she snapped, “If you keep playing with that thing, it’s going to fall off!”

  To her horror, just as she said it, the toe fell sideways off his foot, hanging by a thread of dead skin.

  “Oh my God, Griffin!” she cried. “I didn’t mean it.”

  The expression on his parchment-white face was somewhere between sick and amused. “Bao told me it might do that,” he said with a halfhearted smile. “I thought the whole thing would fall off. I didn’t know it would hang there like that.”

  Grace stared at the thread of skin holding the blackened toe to his foot and said, “What do you want me to do?”

  He handed her his whittling knife and said, “Why don’t you cut it off?”

  Grace had done a lot of favors for her brother over the years, but she’d finally reached a line she couldn’t cross. She shook her head and said, “Let me get Hetty.”

  Griffin grimaced and said, “She won’t have any more stomach for this than you do. Go get Bao.”

  “Don’t touch it while I’m gone,” she admonished. Then she fled the room, grabbed her coat and scarf, and said to Hetty, “I think it’s time for Bao to come check on Griffin.”

  “Is Griffin all right?” Hetty asked, setting down the iron she was using to press Grace’s calico dress.

  “He’s fine. He just needs…” Grace racked her brain for something she could say to keep Hetty from checking on Griffin and said, “Some more salve. I’ll be back in a flash.”

  Once she was out the door, Grace ran pell-mell across the meadow. She shoved the cookhouse door open, saw Bao standing by the stove, and said between panting breaths, “You have to come quick! Griffin’s little toe fell off. Not all the way off. It’s just hanging there! He needs your help right away.”

  Bao remained unflappable despite her frantic plea. He said, “I go. You stir stew.”

  “Of course. Just hurry!”

  It wasn’t until Bao was gone with his box of medicines that Grace noticed that he hadn’t been alone. Andy was sitting at the trestle table with a tin cup of coffee in front of him.

  “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at work on the mountain?” It wasn’t until after the words were out of her mouth that Grace realized how accusatory they sounded.

  “I had a boil on my neck,” he said. “It was bothering me, so Bao lanced it.”

  “Let me see.” It wasn’t concern for Andy that moved her across the room, it was mistrust. He’d said he had a boil, but maybe he was a malingerer. Better to know that about him before she started liking him any better.

  Andy moved the collar of his navy wool shirt aside, and she saw a small white bandage above his red long john shirt. “Bao covered it with a sticking plaster, but you’re welcome to take a closer look if you want. It’s not a pretty sight.”

  “You should always take care of a boil right away. Otherwise it gets worse,” she said.

  “That’s why I stopped here on my way up the mountain.”

  “So you’re headed up there now?” Maybe he wasn’t a malingerer after all.

  “As soon as I get Oats and Barley harnessed. Want to come watch?”

  She glanced at the pot of stew on the stove. “Bao asked me to watch the stew.”

  Andy rose and crossed to the stove, grabbed a mitt, and moved the pot off the heat and onto another part of the stove. “It’ll be fine here for a while. I don’t expect it’ll take Bao long to clip off that toe.”

  Grace gagged and her stomach pitched at the image Andy had painted.

  “Hey,” he said. “You okay? Maybe you better sit down.”

  Andy crossed back to her, eased her down onto the bench he’d vacated, then sat down beside her. He pushed her head down between her knees and said, “Keep your head down. I don’t want you fainting on me.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, trying to sit up.

  He kept the pressure on her nape. “Stay there a minute more. Just to be sure.”

  It was an ignominious position to be in, but Grace was forced to stay in it until Andy said, “All right. Come on back up. Easy now.”

  The truth was, her head felt a little fuzzy. She wasn’t sure whether it was the thought of Griffin’s hanging toe, or the fact that she’d spent the past minute being held down with her head between her legs by a boy she liked.

  To Grace’s dismay, when she’d put her head down, a riot of red curls had tumbled forward, and when she sat up again, they were still drooped across her face. She reached up to try and straighten them out, but Andy gently pushed her hands away and said, “Let me do it.”

  Grace stared at him wide-eyed, too shocked by the offer to stop him. His fingers sorted through her hair, gently twisting curls this way and that and brushing his fingers through the tangles until her face reappeared.

  “You have the most incredible hair,” he said. “It’s so soft. And so curly.”

  “It’s a rat’s nest most of the time,” she countered. “And those red curls are the bane of my existence. I’d give anything for hair as blond and straight as yours.” She had the urge to reach out and brush his hair back from his face but resisted it. This wasn’t her brother, whom she could handle freely. This was someone she barely knew.

  “Your red hair makes you special,” Andy said. “And those freckles are spots of brown sugar waiting to be kissed.”

  Grace bolted to her feet. “Keep talking like that and you’re going to need a plaster on your nose as well as your neck.”

  Andy scooted a little farther away on the bench. “You don’t like compliments?”

  “I don’t like false flattery.”

  Andy met her gaze. “I meant every word I said.”

  “We can’t be friends if you’re going to talk like that.”

  “Are we going to be friends?” he asked.

  “I’d like us to be friends.”

  “But not more than that?” Andy clarified.

  Grace shook her head. “No.”

  He rose and said, “Come on then. We better go.”

  “Go where?”

  “To the barn.”

  Grace stared at him suspiciously. “You’re awful quick to be running off alone with me to the barn.”

  “We won’t be alone. The place is full of animals. You can meet Oats and Barley and watch me harness them. And you can get a good look at those kittens.”

  Hetty had purposely been keeping Grace away from the barn so she wouldn’t run into Andy. That also meant Grace hadn’t gotten to see those kittens, which were getting older by the day. “All right,” she said. “But no funny stuff.”

  Andy grinned and said, “I’ll do my best not to make you laugh.”

  Grace made a face. “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m afraid I do,” he said as he gathered his coat and cap and escorted her out the door.

  Every second they were walking to the barn together, Grace half expected Hetty to show up at the front door to the house and call her inside. She didn’t take an easy breath until she and Andy were closed inside the barn.

  “What’s that big sigh for?” Andy asked.

  Grace couldn’t tell him she was relieved to have escaped the careful rein Hetty kept on her, so she said, “I’m glad to have a chance to see those kittens at last. Where are they?”

  “In the hayloft.”

  Grace glanced up at the hayloft, which was a dozen or more feet off the ground. “How are they ever going to get down from there?”

  “When they’re big enough, they’ll figure it out,” Andy said. “You want to go up?”

  Grace didn’t want Andy looking up her dress as she climbed the ladder to the loft so she said, “You go first.”

  He scrambled up the ladder lickety-split, and Grace did h
er best to follow quickly after him. When she got to the top, she felt him reach under her arms and lift her the rest of the way up, taking care that their bodies didn’t touch as he set her on her feet.

  “Thanks,” she said, brushing at her dress to make sure she was decent. “You’re pretty strong.”

  “You’re light as a feather.”

  Grace frowned. “I don’t appreciate you making fun of me.”

  Andy stuck his hands on his hips. “What are you complaining about now?”

  “I’ve never been light as a feather. Matter of fact, I’m…” Grace couldn’t get the words pleasingly plump to come out of her mouth, although that was the expression her mother had most often used to describe her.

  “I like your curves, Grace. My dad always said the kindest women, like my mom, didn’t have any sharp angles to them.”

  It took Grace a moment to realize that Andy’s mother must have been pleasingly plump. Like her.

  Andy squatted by the nest the mother cat had made in the hay for her kittens and gestured Grace over to him. “My dad told me it made him feel like he was a good provider when he held my mom in his arms and she wasn’t all skin and bones.”

  “You must miss them a lot,” Grace said wistfully as she dropped to her knees beside him.

  “I do,” Andy said quietly. “Which kitten do you like the best?”

  The mother cat must have been out hunting supper, because the four kittens were sleeping curled up in a ball around each other. One was ginger, one was calico, one was black, and the tiniest one was black with white socks.

  Grace reached out carefully and detached the smallest kitten from the rest of the bunch, then held the furry ball against her cheek. “I like this one.”

  “She’s my favorite, too.”

  “I think I’ll call her Socks.”

  “That’s probably a better name than the one I gave her,” Andy said sheepishly.