Rugged and Relentless (40 page)

“Language!” Miss Higgins fixed him with a gimlet eye.

“It’s worth worse, and if that offends you, believe me when I say you’d faint dead away had your ears been sullied by the speculations made about the four of you last night.” Jake refused to apologize. If one little “blasted” brought home the seriousness of the situation, he’d count himself blessed.

“You do offend, Mr. Creed.” The hint of hollows pressed beneath her cheekbones, mute testimony to Evie’s perseverance. And the fact she still wasn’t eating enough. “Not only with your swearing but with your low opinion of us.”

“Low opinion?” He was reduced to parroting her, unable to make sense of the statement.
I’ve never met a woman I think more highly of, and very few men
. “Aside from your determination to put yourself in harm’s way, I highly regard each of you.”

“They can also be bossy,” Lyman added in. “But their stubborn ways overtake that. Paired with an inability to exercise critical thinking, stubbornness becomes dangerous.”

“Lyman?” Jake waited for his so-called ally to look at him. “Now would be a wise time to stop talking. Before you win the ladies’ argument for them.”
Or I gag you for insulting Evie
.

“The one time Braden’s outpouring of negativity can work in our favor, and he stops it.” Miss Thompson rolled her eyes. “But the damage is done, Mr. Creed. It’s foolish and dishonest to claim you hold any one of us in esteem when all you do is denigrate our decisions and order us about like children.”

“All the while accusing us of selfish and shallow reasoning,” Miss Higgins tacked on. Only a woman could manage to sound both triumphant and aggrieved in the same sentence.

“Selfish and shallow have no part in it. Nonsensical, I’d more than agree with.” Jake searched the gaggle before him for any hint of solid reason and found only indignation. “We wouldn’t bother trying to keep you safe if we didn’t value you.”

“Then you must value vapid fools who care only for what other people think.” Evie’s words hit too close to home.

All the way back to Jake’s parents. “That’s the last thing I value.” Not that they were vapid, but the rest came within a splinter of describing his family. None of it came anywhere near depicting Evie or her friends. Or their worth.

“The Bible specifically tells us we can’t speak out of both sides of our mouths, Mr. Creed.” Miss Thompson fingered a golden cross hanging around her neck. “You can’t claim to think both ways on a single issue, or you’ve ruined your own credibility.”

“Would you believe he looks confused?” Miss Lyman shared glances with the others as Jake tried to dissect where they’d gone wrong, because obviously the women were the ones confused.

“I’d believe he judges us so trivial as to put the opinion of other people above our own safety.” Miss Higgins furrowed her brow in mock concentration. “Yet he clearly claims he doesn’t value petty people who think like that, so how can he value us?”

“They’re doing that female thing again, where they ask a question with no good answer.” Lyman’s warning told him nothing new, only validated a long-standing suspicion that women took logical conversations and warped them into terrible traps.

“Every question possesses a good answer,” his fiancée snapped at him. “It’s just a matter of men not doing that male thing of refusing to admit how wrong they’ve been!”

“Hold it.” Creed held up a palm to stop the squabbling and return to the issue at hand. “Lyman’s a man who forgoes shovels to dig himself into a hole with nothing more than his mouth. That much is evident to anyone. But there’s no denying you four took a solid conversation and chopped it to kindling. So instead of trying to undo the damage, let’s go back and start again.”

“We’ll take that as an admission that men go about things backwards and graciously go along with it.” Miss Lyman’s capitulation—and the dig behind it—bought smiles from the women.

“Only because if men always go ahead, it means we can’t look
after
you.” Jake emphasized his point. “So you find danger. Now here’s where things stalled. We place importance on your
safety because we find you worth protecting. You four place more significance on what the men think about you than you put on your own security. That has to change.”

“It’s gratifying to hear you find us worthy.” If a certain dry humor laced Miss Higgins’s remark, Jake could overlook it.

“But far less gratifying to hear you disparage both our actions and our motives.” Evie had stayed quiet since her comments about fools who cared only about what others thought. The grace period ended as she fixed her stare on him. “We don’t deliberately put ourselves in danger, nor do we choose to remain in a precarious position out of a misguided superficiality. Simply put, Mr. Creed, we don’t only keep our promises for the sake of the men. We keep them because we owe it to ourselves.”

“You don’t owe it to anyone to stay!” Lyman shouted. “Foolish decisions reflect poorly on you and your planning!”

“If a man’s words are worthless, so is he,” Evie threw back at him. “It’s no different with women. We uphold our pledges because it respects the men we made them to and shows we value our judgment and promises enough to act on them. That you and Creed dismiss that reflects poorly on the two of you!”

“All that would be so, if not for one thing.” Jake met her gaze with a fierce look of his own, standing so close his boots almost touched hers. “You’re wrong when you say you didn’t deliberately place yourself in danger. The moment you wrote that ad, the four of you brought this down upon Hope Falls. You set it in motion, and now you need to rectify your mistake.”

     TWENTY-NINE     

I
t wasn’t our mistake!” Miss Lyman slapped a hand on her brother’s mattress for muffled punctuation. “We did not invite all these men into town in person and put ourselves in peril!”

“She’s right.” Miss Higgins sighed. “The ad may not have been the wisest idea, but, as written, it didn’t invite danger.”

“Since you’ve had over forty men come into town, despite only two dozen being allowed to remain, I’d say the general public disagrees with you, ladies.” Jake silently dared them to refute that bit of evidence—a mistake.

“Of course they side with you. The general public of Hope Falls is male,” Evie burst out. “They’re the ones who misread or willfully disregarded the print and ruined our plans. Face it, Mr. Creed. This entire situation isn’t because the four of us rushed headlong into danger. It’s because men”—she paused as though to savor her next point—“refuse to follow directions!”

“You four are ones to speak.” Lyman’s roar muted to a thunderous growl. “Refusing to follow a single order since you arrived. No matter your intentions, no matter your plans, at least we can all agree that the outcome placed you at risk. Which means you need to abandon this failure and return East.”

Four feminine heads gave mutinous shakes.

“Stop acting as though you need to stay. Safety and common sense overshadow some misguided principle here,” Jake coaxed.

“Then we have different definitions of honor, Mr. Creed.” Evie’s remonstrance, a perfect echo of his parting words to his mother, robbed him of the ability to continue the conversation.

Honor is what brought me here. Honor is what keeps me spending time protecting you women. Honor is the bark that binds together the loose rings of my life. And she defines it as though I’m lacking
. The irony roared in his ears until the sudden stillness of the room broke through to grab his notice.

“You don’t mean that.” Miss Thompson’s brittle voice shattered the unnatural quiet, but no one moved.

“I do.” Lyman’s tones came out hollow. False. “If you won’t leave, you have to marry. As soon as possible.”

As Jake realized that his friend’s alternative was to force the women into hasty weddings to gain the protection of husbands, his temples pounded in rage.
No. They’ll marry the men they choose. Evie won’t be given away to just any man so Braden Lyman can rest easy
. He opened his mouth to start objecting, but Lyman kept going.

“Even Cora.”

Especially
Cora. Evie leaped from her chair, intent on reaching her sister’s former fiancé.
Cora will need another husband more than any of us once I’m jailed
. Her hands curved, pulling Lacey and Naomi away from where they tried to block her path. She couldn’t tell whether the pair sought to protect their kin from her wrath or tried to beat her to him so they could let him have it first. They probably knew her well enough to know that there wouldn’t be much left of Braden Lyman once Evie finished with him. Old adages claimed blood ran thicker than water, but Evie figured men thought that one up.

Battles didn’t always leave visible bruises, friends became extensions of families when distance and time left loved ones lonely, and women knew well the wounds inflicted by words. Men shed blood together; women shed tears. Evie knew which made her stronger and believed she knew which bond Lacey and Naomi upheld now.

But it didn’t matter why they blocked the bed. No matter their good intentions, her friends were in her way. So she barreled through.
I can’t hit him. I can’t kick him. I can’t smother him with his own pillow
. She ran into the solid, unmoving obstacle that was Creed as she pondered just how she’d exact retribution on Braden for trying to throw her sister to the wolves.
I’ll do worse than any of those. I’ll sit on him!

“Oh no, you won’t.” Creed slid to the side to block her when she tried to maneuver around, taking up far too much space.

Evie stopped. “Did I say that out loud?” Mortification swallowed surprise in a blink. Then she shrugged it away. If Creed stayed in the room, he’d see her act on the words.

“You didn’t say anything.” An inappropriate chuckle lightened his voice. “I could guess at a slew of possibilities by the look in your eye, but I’m not going to let any of them happen. So I don’t see the use in giving you any extra ideas.”

“Feel free.” She leaned right then darted left, only to be brought up short by one rock-hard arm suddenly encircling her midriff. Evie gave a strangled yelp and jumped away from the contact. The heat surprised her. His speed caught her off guard. The idea that he felt, however briefly, how wide across she measured was unimaginably awful. That mortified her more than if he’d heard her plotting vengeance against Braden.

Braden, who still sat hale and hearty—or at least as hale and hearty as he had five minutes previous—in his bed. Which meant Lacey and Naomi remained behind her, most likely consoling a bereft Cora.

The man will pay. Creed can’t guard him forever
. Evie clenched
her fists so tightly they cramped, the pulse in her fingertips matching the pounding at her temples and in the sensitive place behind her jaw. That Braden would stoop so low as to renege on the engagement, she’d suspected. That he’d throw her sister to a pack of lonely loggers without a word or any sort of arrangement for her protection, she’d never imagined.

Lacey, Naomi, and I came alone, knowing we’d find men. Agreeing to that plan. Cora came for Braden
. Evie began to shake as she considered all that Cora had given up for the ungrateful brute.
He may not be able to stand, but he could have stood by his word. The simple title of fiancée offered Cora a certain measure of protection. The men didn’t swarm around her equally
.