by Jill Barnett
The noise continued. Muffled, but it continued. The gaslight in the room shimmied and rattled. That was it!
He pulled on his pants, buttoning them as he moved toward the door. Once in the hall, he ran up the stairs, glared at her door, and then pounded it with his fist.
He waited, rocking on his feet in anticipation.
But there was nothing. He hammered the door again and waited. All he got for his effort was some more noise. He pounded on the door so hard, they could've heard it in the Bronx. "Open this damn door!"
Nothing.
He knew she was in there. An eternal minute passed. Maybe he was scaring her, which was not a smart move. He leaned toward the door. "Nellibelle?"
Nothing.
He drummed his fingers against the doorjamb. He took a deep breath for patience. "Miss Austen?" He paused, then called out. "Eleanor?" He pressed his ear against the door and listened.
For just a second he thought he heard her. It sounded like she was shouting from miles away. Something cold and wet pooled under his bare feet. He looked down, instinctively stepping back.
Water seeped out from under the door. He tried the doorknob but it was locked. He rattled the handle, then, without another thought, he stepped back and rammed his shoulder against the door.
It flew open with a loud crack.
A good inch of water flooded the hall. The floor inside the flat was soaked. He walked in and looked up. From all over the roof panes hung soggy women's clothing.
Not clothing, exactly, but underwear. Water dripped onto the floor from drenched black cotton stockings. More water poured from a couple of those thin corset cover things women wore that always took forever for his big hands to unbutton.
Staring up, he moved to the center of the room. A pair of white lacy bloomers dropped on the floor in front of him like a sodden flag of surrender.
"Nellibelle?"
A muffled call for help came from deeper inside the apartment. He looked around, then crossed room. "Where the hell are you?" He looked around the corner, but then heard something behind him and spun around.
That oak cabinet with the stupid and useless bed shuddered like it was alive. A voice came from deep inside it. "Help! Help!"
Swearing, he crossed the room and jerked open the doors. The bed fell forward so fast he had to jump backward so it didn't hit him.
It banged against the watery floor with a loud crashing splat. Nellibelle bounced up off the mattress with a shriek. Her tangled mass of wet hair flew outward; it looked like floating black spaghetti.
Momentum made the front legs of the bed frame collapse.
Before he could move, she hit the slumping bed again and rolled down the mattress, landing on the wooden floor with a hard wet thud that made him wince.
He moved to her side and hunkered down. "Are you all right?" He reached out tentatively and touched her shoulder.
She shifted slightly.
He heard a choking sound. "Nell? Uh . . . Eleanor? Are you crying?"
"Yeeeeeessssssss!" she wailed all curled up in a pitiful wet ball.
He scooped her into his arms, and water dripped down to his hands and onto the soaked floor. He held her tightly against his chest, and she turned into him as if she were trying to hide, sobbing the whole time.
He patted her back a little tentatively. "Don't cry. Okay?"
She cried harder, then slid her damp arms around his neck. She buried her head against him.
He could feel her, every soft feminine inch of her. He had to remind himself just who he was holding in his arms. He looked down at her and saw nothing but a small woman with a mass of hair that hung past her butt. Her bare feet poked out of the hem of her nightgown. They were pink and narrow and looked as soft as she felt. He studied the back of her head, then spoke to it because he couldn't see her face. "Tell me where it hurts."
"All over." Her words were muffled against his shoulder and neck.
He rubbed her back with one hand, making soothing circles to stop her pitiful crying. "If I'm going to help you, then I need you to be more specific."
"Okay." It was barely a whisper. She said nothing more, just hiccuped against him as she tried to catch her breath.
"Please. Tell me, sweetheart. What hurts the most?"
The silence dragged on. Finally he felt her take a deep quivering breath, then she muttered, "My pride." She tightened her arms around him and began to cry all over again.
* * *
Eleanor's pride was still smarting a few hours later. She was wearing a huge flannel nightshirt with sleeves that came to her knees and sitting on the most dangerous place she could think of—Conn Donoughue's bed.
Bed. The word was enough to make her want to crawl in a hole and never come out. The bed was what go her into this mess. Trapped in a bed cabinet. She wanted to bury her head in her hands in horror. She was so foolish, especially around him. What a goose! All that silly crying. Whenever she was around him, she was not herself. The trouble with love was it made you different; it made you act in the most irrational ways.
Love was a lot like the winter weather. It came at the worst time and made your life as difficult as possible. Like the way snow and ice always fell, then melted. There was no reason why, it just did. Love just smacked you right in the face for no logical reason at all. You could ask yourself why forever, but that didn't change the fact that you loved the person you were destined to love.
Conn Donoughue….
To make the whole thing even worse, he had been really kind to her. A perfect gentleman. Completely out of character.
She drew his brush through her hair with hard quick strokes that hurt, a handy way of punishing herself. Her scalp was tingling. She kept brushing through her long straight hair, more out of nervousness than need. Heat swelled from a corner woodstove that crackled with burning splits of live oak. The brush stilled in her hand. She watched the sparks from the fire and realized that for the first time she'd awakened that night, she was actually warm.
At that moment he strode back in the room balancing a tray and set it down on a table. He picked up some ice wrapped in a towel. "Let me see that ankle again."
Reluctantly she stuck her foot out from beneath the flannel shirt. Her ankle was so swollen and purplish gray that it looked like it belonged on a circus elephant.
Conn stood next to the bed looking every inch the giant they called him. But he leaned placed the ice on her foot with such gentleness. He made a point of tucking the ice around her ankle in the exact place it ached. She sat there silent, staring at his wonderful hands.
"That should bring down the swelling," he told her.
"Thank you." She couldn't look him in the eye. She was half afraid he would be able to read her thoughts.
"Here."
She looked up.
He was holding out a blue earthenware mug. "It's soup, not poison." She could hear the smile in his voice.
She took the mug with two hands and looked in it.
"Go on. Taste it."
She slowly raised the mug to her mouth and took a tiny sip. Frowning, she looked down at the mug, then glanced up and took another bigger sip.
He was smiling at her. No cynicism. No double meaning. Just a sincere amused smile.
"It's good."
He crossed his arms and leaned a shoulder against a nearby wall. "My grandmother always gave me a mug of soup in the winter. After I came home from work."
"You worked a job?" The minute she said the words, she wanted them back.
He laughed.
"I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I had assumed boxing was your only profession."
"I didn't start fighting until I was eighteen. Before that I worked in a carriage factory."
She took a drink. It was so warm and wonderful. He was watching her closely, so she asked, "For how long?"
"Eight years."
She choked on the soup. "You worked in a factory when you were just a little boy?"
"I was neve
r a little boy," he said as joke, but there was emotion in his wry humor.
She subtracted the years. "Ten years old is too young to be working."
"We were poor. By then it was just my grandmother and me. If I didn't work, she would have had to. She wouldn’t have had an easy go of it, working in a factory. Me?” He shrugged. “Work kept me out of trouble. She took in laundry, and we got by.”
From the way he spoke she suspected they struggled, and older woman and her young grandson..
“She was all Irish, still had a brogue. By then she was almost seventy years old."
She could hear the tenderness in his voice as he spoke about his grandmother and talked about how she had raised him after his parents died when he was a young boy.
"She wasn't afraid of hard work, and neither was I. She didn't like me working there, not at first. But I had fought so hard to get the job, and I'd already been working there a week before I told her. She gave in, mostly I think because it was honest work. No one took advantage of me. Within a couple of years I was bigger than most of the men, so I never had any trouble."
He straightened. "I guess I'd better let you get some sleep. Tomorrow I'll have some of my friends help me, and we'll see if we can fix the roof."
She searched for the right words, but could only say, "Thank you." She paused, then added, "For everything you did. The cabinet, the soup, the ice, and the bed. The shoulder to cry on. I'm not normally like that. I... well, I haven't been very nice to you. You and I are usually not—"
"I know. You don't have to say it, Nellibelle."
She wanted to tell him how very much she hated that name, but she just couldn't bring herself to destroy this moment.
"When we're around each other, it's like we're in the ring together. You come out punching."
She was quiet for a second, then had to admit, "I do, don't I?"
"Yeah, you do."
"But you don't make it easy on me." She sat up straighter and saw him break into a smile.
"No. I don't."
She laughed then, too. "I think that's the first thing you and I have agreed on since—" She cut off her words. It would be a mistake to mention that horrible dinner together and what happened afterward.
He knew exactly what she meant. She could see it on his face. She felt her own flood with color. He didn't speak, thank God. Didn't tease or give her a knowing smile. He just nodded.
She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. Then she gave him a direct look. "Thank you, again. For all you did for me tonight."
"Sure. It was nothing." He left the room.
She flopped back on the bed with a huge sigh. She stared up at the dark ceiling. He was a nice man. Under all that bluster and cockiness was a good person. He loved his grandmother. He had honor and scruples, even when he was ten. Who would have thought it? The lamp went out, and she could hear him settle in on the sofa. She reached over and turned down the gas lamp. Then she lay there.
The silence was strange. It was almost too quiet. She could hear nothing from outside, not even the rain. There was only the sound of her own heartbeat, which was like drumming in her ears.
He was there, just around the corner. And she was here, sleeping in his bed.
She turned on her side, then sat up and adjusted the ice and drew the covers over her. Her head sank into his feather pillow. She turned her face into it and breathed in. Conn. It smelled like his shoulder. She turned and grabbed the other pillow, hugging it to her chest, and she curled onto her side, then closed her eyes.
"Nellibelle?" he called out from the next room.
She resisted the urge to moo. She flopped over on her back, arm over her eyes before she answered,. "Yes?"
"Don't go thinking I'm some kind of hero…or anything."
What was this all about? “You did rescue me."
“Found in the dangerous jaws of a bed cabinet?”
She was smiling. Dangerous jaws. Of course he was somewhat of a hero in her eyes. He'd rescued her.
"You still awake?" he called out.
"Yes."
"I have a confession to make."
"What?"
"I knew the roof leaked."
A moment later she heaved the pillows across the room.
Chapter 5
The next morning Nellibelle went back to being herself.
She was stiff and cold, which made him moody and brooding. They didn't speak, until the next day when he took it upon himself to repair her roof. It took a week for Conn to fix it. While he worked on it, he discovered something about his landlady.
Miss Eleanor Austen was so soft-hearted, she fed cream to all the stray cats in the neighborhood.
He had been high above her, working with some glass sealant when he heard her chattering away. He looked down through the glass and saw her puttering around the kitchen, gathering bowls and filling them with cream from the bottles he'd seen the milk wagon deliver.
Every day the cats came up the fire escape and sat there until she opened the window. They would huddle near her feet, whining and crying until she placed the bowls on the floor.
Afterward she tied red and green Christmas ribbons with silly looking little brass bells around their necks as if they were gift-wrapped, and she opened the window for them. Four cats stayed after that first morning, curled up on her sofa. Five others left, but from what he could see, they came back at the same time every day.
She began to talk to him the second day. By the third, she fed him sandwiches and coffee. They sat at her table and talked about the building, about her grandfather, and she explained about the lease and Andrew Austen's dream.
Conn had liked the old man and thought him fair. But Conn's first impression of Austen’s granddaughter had been that she was completely unpredictable and unreasonable. He never did understand her.
Until now when he knew her better.
While he worked on the roof, he learned her routine, kept watching her when he should have been working. She was tall and lean and had an efficient manner about her. But he'd seen her do the strangest things, like the bells on the cats.
She was an odd mixture of logic and illogic. He supposed that wasn't her fault. She was a woman. But watching her try to put together one of her grandfather's telescopes had been something he wasn't likely to forget. She sat in the middle of the floor, with all the parts spread around her while she kept muttering that nothing fit. He watched her as she stuck to it for three days.
In exchange for supper one night, he put the pieces together in an hour. He had taken twenty minutes longer than he needed to make her feel better.
It was after that he had found himself thinking about her. At the strangest times. Every night, he lay in his bed staring at the ceiling and wondering what Miss Eleanor Austen looked like naked.
He listened to the tap of her shoes across the wooden floors. But it was the soft padding of her bare feet late at night that made him sweat like he had before his first fight.
She was a night owl like he was, which surprised him. He'd have never thought it. Somehow he had imagined her rising at the same exact time every day, going to bed at the same time every night, eating the same breakfast, the same dinner, the same supper in polite little portions that for him would have been a single mouthful.
He was so wrong about her. She ate like a horse. He had never seen a woman who could pack away food like she could. She ate it with perfect manners. She just ate almost as much as he did.
The day after his third night of sleeplessness, Conn was in a foul mood. It was late afternoon. He was working on the gymnasium's account books and making a mess of it. Nothing added up. He was just adding up a column again when a loud racket echoed up the stairwell.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
He ripped his door open and scowled at the third floor landing. "What are you doing now?"
She held a Christmas tree by its top and dragged it up another three stairs.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
He didn't ask if
she wanted his help. He simply took over. He picked up the tree, slung it over his shoulder and walked upstairs.
She still stood on the stairs below.
He stood outside her flat for a minute, then leaned over and scowled down at her. "You want to open this door, or do you want the tree out here?"
She grabbed her skirts and ran up the stairs, fiddled with the key for a moment, then shoved open the door. She blocked the doorway with her slim frame. "Thank you. This is far enough. I'll take it from here."
If she hadn't have moved, he would have walked right over her. "Where do you want it?"
For just a moment it looked as if she were trying not to smile. "There." She pointed toward a bucket filled with sand.
He carried the tree over to it and stuck it in the wet sand. The tree was too big, too crooked, and it tipped over. He picked it up again and told her, "You need to buy trees with straight trunks."
"Do I? You believe the right Christmas tree must be straight, like all the other trees? Perfect in every way?”
He merely stared at her.
“I think the bend in it gives it character."
"Trees don't have character."
"Well, I think this one does.”
He struggled until he finally got the thing to stay put, then stepped back and eyed the tree. It was as straight as possible for a crooked tree.”
"You know..." she said. "I think it needs to be tilted toward the right."
"I thought you wanted a crooked tree. What happened to its character?"
"Just because it's a little bent, doesn't mean I don't want it standing straight."
He turned around and stared at her. "Then why didn't you buy a straight tree?"
She waved a hand in the air as if to dismiss him and began to drag a wooden trunk across the floor by its leather handle.
He walked over and picked up the trunk. "Where?"
"You can set it by the tree."
He put the trunk down and the tree slumped to the right again. Half an hour later she was finally satisfied the tree was where it should be. He thought it still looked lopsided. But she was happy.
He had finally tied the tree to a line of rope that he wrapped around the stem of a wall lamp. When he was done, a hurricane wouldn't move that tree.