Rugged and Relentless (43 page)

“He’d known you only a few weeks, but he noticed the difference.” Lacey all but bounced on the trunk she’d chosen as a seat. “Between your motion sickness for days on the train and all the running around you’ve done since we arrived, you’d started shrinking. We knew, but a man who didn’t pay extremely close attention wouldn’t see it—or care.”

“Creed likes you as you are, Evie.” Naomi’s eyes softened. “Not just your cooking, but the way you look. And if you listened to him yesterday, he clearly values you, even when he disagrees with the decisions you make. Your safety is important to him, more than the rest of ours. It’s the reason why he argues the most with you. I can’t believe you didn’t realize it!”

“I never imagined Creed might want me,” Evie admitted.
So I never allowed myself to think about wanting him. Why borrow the pain, when I knew I’d be choosing after Lacey and Naomi?

“You need more confidence.” Lacey sniffed. “I never understood why you seemed to think men wouldn’t clamor around you if you gave them the least encouragement. It’s not that men won’t want you, Evie—look at Klumpf and Williams if you need more proof of that—but that you made it seem like you didn’t want them to! So don’t doubt that Creed likes you. And it won’t hurt to admit it,” Lacey prompted.

Evie let out a shaky breath.
You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and I can’t make the most of what’s before me if I’m not willing to leave my own shell behind
.

“I like him, too.”

     THIRTY-ONE     

I
don’t like her much, to tell the truth.” The words floated into the kitchen from the dining room, where men bored holes into cribbage boards. Unable to distinguish the speakers from where he’d just tightened the outside pantry door hinges, Jake took two steps.

And stopped.

Because, by opening the inside pantry door leading to the kitchen, he caught sight of four women. Mrs. McCreedy had left to look after Mrs. Nash, leaving only the four original females of Hope Falls to prepare the midday meal. Jake thought they’d all adjourned to the mercantile for a futile search for cribbage pegs. But before him stood the proof they’d returned earlier than expected. Earlier, it seemed, than anyone had expected.

How on earth did they manage to find such a small item amidst the epic disarray inside that store? I imagined they’d be kept busy for at least another hour before having to give up
.

Reality replaced expectation yet again. The four of them clustered to the side of the swinging doors to the dining room, where the wall would hide their skirts from any man wise enough to glance back. From the sounds of the conversation going on in
the next room, Jake seriously doubted any of the men speaking possessed that wisdom. Or rudimentary survival instinct, if he wanted to be particular about the entire mess.

Unfortunately for those men, the more they talked, the more particular Jake felt like getting. It hurt their case even further that he could see the women’s faces and reactions to the foolish assessments spewing into the kitchen.

“What do you mean you don’t like her?” One dumbfounded dummy yelled. “You’ve eaten same as the rest of us, and everyone knows she’s the cook. Ain’t a man alive who shouldn’t like her!”

Jake’s hands clenched, but he didn’t move. If he budged an inch, he’d keep right on going and bust up the conversation before the women got to hear frank appraisals undiluted by threat of punishment. He owed it to them to allow the ladies an unfettered glimpse of the men they might choose to marry—but hopefully wouldn’t.

“I like her cooking just fine, but the Lyman gal’s prettier. Always took a shine to blonds, so you keep the chef.”

“Don’t go givin’ any of the women away, now, Bob.” Another speaker identified one of the fools. “I’ll give Earl a run for the cook. She may be round as a biscuit, but I bet she keeps a man warm as anything she bakes fresh in the oven.”

Feminine hands slapped over mouths to hold back outraged gasps, but that didn’t concern Jake. Aside from a powerful fury at the thought of any man warming up next to Evie, he wanted to take away the dejection widening her golden gaze at the poorly phrased biscuit comment. The same dejection he’d seen when he’d fumbled over a way to protest how she’d started wasting away.

“She and the Lyman gal have spirit to spare,” someone added in. “For me, I’d take the Higgins woman. She’s more settled, knows her place, so it wouldn’t take much to keep her in line.”

“I like a high-strung filly.” There was no mistaking Williams’s strident tone. “And the rest of you can stop talking about Miss Thompson. Any man who tries to cozy up to her will have to go
through me, and he won’t make it in one piece.”

Dodger’s reedy, nasal whine cut through the jeers. “Stop your jawing, Williams. Everyone knows which woman you want—same as everyone knows she doesn’t want you. Leave her be.”

The first twinge of respect for the shifty high-climber niggled at Jake’s mind. Even if Dodger turned out to be Twyler, at least he’d had the decency to tell Williams off—which would mean every man had at least one moment of usefulness.

“I’ll gladly leave her be,” someone chortled. “No appeal in a pudgy woman, but she holds true to the old adage about good cooks and housewives. The rest of you are welcome to Thompson.”

Jake bit back a growl, his hand on the door before he stopped himself from barging through. Evie’s horror would only be worse if she knew he’d been listening.
Never mind her own practice in the fine art of eavesdropping
. The stray memory almost made him smile. But not now, not over the rhyme of …

A roar of laughter met the recitation, but tears clouded golden eyes as Evie spun on her heel and made for the door. The pantry door.

Jake stepped out of the way, pressing himself to the side of the shelves as she swept through as though determined to burst outside into the rain and keep walking until she’d left behind everything she’d overheard. Instead, he snagged her elbow, the speed of her own motion swinging her to face him.

“You!” Livid blinks kept her gorgeous eyes afloat in unshed tears Jake saw all too clearly. They hadn’t built the pantry wide enough for two people, so she stood close enough to kiss, all but nestled in his arms. “Let go of me right now, Creed!”

If a man could call a squirming, arm-slapping fury of a woman the nestling type.
Wonder what it says about me that I think a woman like that’s worth holding, so long as the woman is Evie
. Jake didn’t take the time to ponder that thought before her elbow landed in his midsection and her heel stomped on his instep—just beyond the steel lining his boot, so it hurt.

The second he let go, she whirled out of his arms and through the door. Which she also managed to slam in his face, courtesy of those newly tightened hinges. Not exactly Jake’s idea of thanks for a job well done.

I’d rather take that kiss
, he decided as he jerked the door open and raced after her. Needles of rain stung his forearms, hands, and face where his hat didn’t protect him. Wind pushed against him, a cold chill doing its level best to bite through his jacket. Jake bit back, his stride eating away at the distance between himself and Evie.

She didn’t stand a chance, hampered as she was by long skirts and those confounded contraptions women strapped themselves into to look thinner. Men weren’t supposed to acknowledge the existence of corsets, much less mention the fact they made it difficult for a woman to breathe when she laced them too tightly. But for all her good sense in other areas, Jake knew Evie didn’t allow herself so much as an extra inch.

Some people never know when to give themselves some slack
.

“Evie!” He bellowed her name, watching as she scampered even more quickly toward a thick stand of trees. Jake caught her in three paces, snaking his arm around her waist and tugging her beneath the protective canopy of the densely packed trees.

“Leave me be, Jake Creed!” She wriggled like a rabbit in a snare, water streaming down her face. Whether tears mingled with the rain or not was impossible to tell. Evie gave a great big sniff, the tip of her nose glowing an affronted red.

Tears, too, then
. Jake scowled. “I’m not letting you hie off into the mountains because some idiot recited a nursery rhyme. Now
don’t move. If I have to chase after you again, I’ll carry you back.” He waited for her to gulp an acknowledgment of that threat before regretfully slipping his arm from her waist.

Actually, he wouldn’t have minded a reason to carry her back. She felt warm and soft and needed some comforting. Maybe—

Maybe I should hurry up and shrug out of this coat before I do something stupid
. He whipped off his wool-lined leather coat and wrapped it around her, frowning to feel her shivering.

“Thank you.” She clutched the lapel, threading her arms into the sleeves before wrapping her arms around herself—as much to ward him away as to keep in warmth, he guessed. Good idea. She looked far too alluring with her hair straggling in streams of cinnamon and coffee around her fresh-scrubbed face, the rest of her tucked into his coat.

It didn’t quite close in the front—God made her too womanly for that—but the leather hung far past her hips. Evie’s strength often made him overlook how small she was, but now, with her golden eyes dimmed to dark amber, her nose red as she huddled outside in the rain, it hit him anew how much she took on. And how much thinner she’d become over the past month.

“You’re not plump,” he blurted out before thinking.

Her eyes widened, and Evie stared at him, saying nothing. She tilted her head, looking for all the world like a curious little owl as she blinked and waited. What she waited for, Jake didn’t know. He only knew he didn’t plan to say more until he knew it wouldn’t be the wrong thing this time.
Which means I’ll most likely have to go mute around women
.

He blinked back, watching as she nibbled her lower lip the way she did whenever she thought something over. Jake liked the way she did that. Especially now that no other men could see it.

“Yes, I am.”

“No, you aren’t.” Jake’s—Creed didn’t suit him, and Evie had never
understood why—jaw set in that stubborn way of his.

“Oh, but I am.” She rocked back on her heels and lifted her own chin. “In a pinch, Cora, Naomi, and Lacey could exchange clothes. A few quick alterations, tacked-up or let-down hems and so forth, and they’d manage.” She looked down to where Jake’s coat—a man’s coat, cut wide across to accommodate his broader shoulders—didn’t close over her own chest. “But not me.”

“So?”

Evie let loose something sounding perilously close to a growl. “So, it’s because I’m plump. I’m larger than other women, far more than fashionable.”

“There.” Relief lightened his blue eyes to an almost crystalline shade as he reached out and flipped the coat collar up to warm her throat. “You said it yourself, Evie. You’re not plump or round or anything else you think of as bad. You’re more than most women ever manage, in a lot of ways. Don’t regret it.”