Nellie stood. “No, you don’t use yeast in pancakes. Mr. Montgomery, I’m going with you.”
“With me?”
“There seem to be six hungry children who need help, and I’m going with you to give them that help.”
“I’m not sure you should.”
“Why not?” she demanded.
“I’m afraid your father might not like it, and what about your reputation? Driving twenty miles out into the country alone with me, and you’ve heard what a womanizer I am.”
“It seems that these children’s hunger was caused by my father, therefore it is my Christian duty to help them.” She looked down at him, at his dark hair and eyes, at his broad shoulders. “My reputation is nothing compared to hungry children. I must take my chances with you.”
He leaned back in his chair and smiled to show the dimple in his cheek. “We all must make sacrifices at times.”
Nellie put out of her mind that she was leaving a heap of Terel’s dresses yet to be ironed. She pulled the pastries out of the oven, started to let them cool, then, on impulse, dumped them all into a canvas bag. Tomorrow there would be no home-baked goods for Terel’s tea, and supper tonight was almost sure to be late.
She wrote a hurried note to her father telling him where she was going, then turned to Jace. “I’m ready.”
He smiled at her again and distracted her so much that she didn’t see him take the note she’d written and stick it in his pocket. “I have a wagonload of food outside so we can leave now.” Before anyone sees us and stops us, he thought.
“With baking powder?”
“Sure,” he said, having no idea what was in the wagon. He’d just told the grocer to fill it and never looked at the contents.
Jace got a great deal of pleasure helping Nellie onto the wagon, and once she was seated he flipped the reins of the horses and took off. He wanted to get out of Chandler as fast as possible. He held his breath until the houses were in the distance and open country surrounded them.
He reined in the horses and slowed them to a walk. “How have you been, Nellie?”
Nellie looked at him, so handsome, his strong white teeth showing against lips she knew to be soft and warm, and swallowed. Perhaps she had been hasty in her decision to leave with him. “All right,” she mumbled, trying to move away from him on the seat, but the way he drove, with his legs wide apart, caused his thigh to press against hers.
“I hear you and your sister have been receiving invitations to everything in town.”
“Terel has, not me.”
He looked at her, surprised. “Yesterday Miss Emily asked me why you’d been refusing all the invitations sent to you. People are beginning to think you’re snubbing them.”
It was Nellie’s turn to be surprised. “But I haven’t been invited. All the invitations have been to Terel.”
“Hmmm,” he said, looking back at the horses.
“Mr. Montgomery, are you implying that my sister kept the invitations from me?”
“Did you get the flowers I sent? I’ve sent you flowers every day for the past week.”
“I received no flowers,” she said softly.
“How about the two letters I sent?”
Nellie didn’t answer.
“The puppy?”
“Puppy?”
“Cute little collie pup. It was returned to the hotel with a note from you saying you didn’t want anything from me, nor did you ever want to see me again. He was a frisky pup, wasn’t he?”
“I never saw him,” Nellie mumbled.
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you.”
“I didn’t see the puppy,” Nellie said louder. Could Terel or her father have kept her from knowing of these gifts and messages? Why would they do that? Terel had said that no word had come from Mr. Montgomery. “How is Olivia Truman?”
“Who?”
“Olivia Truman. She’s a very pretty redhead. Her father owns quite a bit of land outside Chandler.”
“I don’t remember meeting her.”
“You must have met her at one of the social events you’ve attended this week. The garden party? The box lunch? The church supper?”
Jace was beginning to understand. “Since I saw you last I have worked in your father’s office, bent over a stack of dirty ledgers, and I have spent my evenings at my cousin’s house. Houston will tell you that I’ve had dinner at their house every night this week, and my social life has consisted of giving about a million piggy back rides to those three kids.”
Nellie was silent for a while. Every evening Terel had told her where she had seen Mr. Montgomery and with whom he’d been. One of them was not telling the truth and instinctively she knew it was Terel. Perhaps she meant to protect me, Nellie thought. Perhaps she was doing what she thought was best for me.
“How are you enjoying Chandler, Mr. Montgomery?” she asked, trying to make polite conversation.
“I’m enjoying it quite a lot now that you’re beside me again,” he answered.
Nellie didn’t know what to say in reply. Was he the villain portrayed by her father and Terel, or was he as he seemed to her? She’d never had any reason before to doubt her family, but now there were things puzzling her.
They were some miles out of town when, coming over a hill, Jace looked down into a valley and saw the freight driver’s wagon, loaded with corn and still sitting beside the cabin. He knew without a doubt that the man hadn’t understood his plan.
Jace brought the wagon to a halt. “Nellie, I have to leave you here. I’m afraid that the driver’s wife may have some contagious illness. I couldn’t bear to expose you to it.”
“Don’t be absurd,” she was saying, even as he came around the wagon to help her down. “If you can be exposed to it, so can I.” But he didn’t listen to her, just put his strong arms up to help her down. “Mr. Montgomery, I want to go with you. I—”
He kissed her softly but distractedly. “I’ll be back for you as fast as I can, honey. Don’t worry.”
He leaped onto the wagon, flicked the reins, and left in a cloud of dust.
Nellie stood back, coughing, and watched him. “Honey,” she murmured. No one had ever called her honey before.
By the time Jace reached the Everetts’ cabin he was in a fine temper. “I’ll wring his neck,” he muttered as he pulled the horses to a halt and leaped down from the wagon. The front door of the cabin was open to the Indian summer warmth, and inside the whole family—two adults and six kids—were quietly eating lunch. The table was loaded with ham and vegetables and corn bread, and a pie stood waiting on the sideboard.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Jace bellowed, causing all eyes to look at him. “I apologize for my language, ma’am,” he said, removing his hat as he stepped inside, “but what are you doing here?”
“I was up all night loading corn,” Frank Everett said. “I just got up.”
Jace glared at him. “You haven’t told her, have you?”
Frank leaned back in his chair. He wore his dirty longjohns with suspenders over them. He yawned and scratched his arm. “To tell you the truth, Mr. Montgomery, I ain’t sure I understood it all.”
Jace’s anger left him and was replaced by embarrassment. He looked down at the toe of his shoe.
The man’s wife stood. “Won’t you sit and eat? We got more’n enough. I guess you’re the man that gave Frank the job haulin’ the corn.”
“Yes, I am.” Now that he was here, what he’d planned to do seemed ridiculous. “But I can’t eat. I have someone waiting for me.”
Frank, looking puzzled, turned to his wife. “He wants you to be sick and he wants the kids to be hungry, then he wants to bring a young lady out here and save us all. Don’t make no sense to me.”
Mrs. Everett frowned for a moment as she thought, then her face lit with a smile. “Why, Frank, he’s in love.”
Jace’s face turned even redder as the older children began to titter.
Mrs. Everett took over. “I’d be glad of a few days of rest, and if one of them town ladies wants to save us, she sure can.” She looked at her children. “Sarah, I saw Lissie makin’ eyes at that oldest Simons boy you’re sweet on. And Frank Jr., your brother said he could outride and outshoot you any day of the week.”
The oldest girls immediately went into an earsplitting argument, and the two oldest boys, without a word spoken, fell on each other, fists flying. The youngest children, scared, started crying.
Frank looked at his family, at the girls just about to start pulling hair, and at his sons rolling about on the floor trying to kill each other, at the babies screaming so energetically that their mouths were bigger than their faces, then back at Jace. “You
sure
you wanta court a woman?” he yelled over the noise.
Mrs. Everett pushed past her husband. “Go on,” she shouted to Jace. “You go get your young lady and bring her here. We’ll be the neediest family she ever saw.”
Jace nodded and went out into the relative peace of the cool Colorado air. He took his time driving back to Nellie. He didn’t like staging this farce but he knew of no other way to get her out from under her family’s thumb. She was sitting quietly waiting for him when he returned, and slowly they drove back to the cabin. By the time he got there he was ready to tell Nellie that he’d lied to her and that Mrs. Everett wasn’t ill, and since Jace had given Mr. Everett a job, the family wasn’t starving. But the minute they entered the cabin he was glad he’d done what he had. All six children, with tearstained cheeks, looked sad and forlorn. There wasn’t a bite of food in the house; Mrs. Everett, looking very poorly, was lying in bed; and Frank and his wagon were gone.
Nellie took over at once. Within minutes she had the wagon unloaded, the stove going, and food cooking. From the beginning Jace had had an idea of what Nellie was really like, but his ideas were based on what he sensed, not what he’d seen. Now, out from under the influence of her dreadful family, she blossomed. Here there was no Terel telling her she was plain and fat and old. Her father wasn’t there to remind her that she should be grateful for everything she had.
All that was in the cabin were eight people who thought she was wonderful, for Jace saw that if Nellie liked children, it was nothing to how much children liked Nellie. Within an hour of her arrival all six kids were talking to her at once. The smallest girl dragged out a doll for Nellie to repair, the boys were bragging of their exploits, and the oldest girls wanted to know all about the young men in town. Nellie told them that Jace was a relative of the very handsome seventeen-year-old Zachary Taggert, and after that there was no peace for Jace.
Nellie also took care of Mrs. Everett, bringing her a plate of food on a tray, fluffing her pillows, and in general, making her more comfortable than she’d ever been in her life.
Jace sat back in the bustle and watched and participated. He had never felt more at home in his life. He held a child on his lap and watched Nellie rolling out dough for a pie while she helped one of the boys with his sums. The oldest girls had gone to gather eggs and milk the cow while a boy fed the horses.
Jace looked across the head of the child in his lap and exchanged a smile with Nellie. This was all he’d ever wanted in his life. He had never been like his brother Miles, who wanted lots of women. No, Jace had just wanted a home with a wife and some kids, a place of safety and security, a place where he knew he’d be loved.
Nellie looked across the table at him, sitting there with that blond child on his lap, and she knew that he had never lied to her about anything. If he said he cared for her, then he did care for her. If he said he hadn’t been out with other women, then he hadn’t. She smiled at him, and it flashed through her mind that she’d like to keep smiling at him for the rest of her life.
By the time she’d cooked enough food to last for a few days, bathed the youngest two children, and gotten the rest of them in bed, it was nine o’clock at night and fully dark outside.
“I must get back to my family,” Nellie said to Jace in the quiet stillness of the house. “But I hate to leave Mrs. Everett alone.”
Jace took her hand and led her outside into the cool, clean air. Leaving the warmth of the house made her shiver. He pulled her back against his chest and wrapped his arms around her. “It’ll be winter soon. Winter and snow and blazing fires and—”
“Christmas,” she said.
“I know what I want for Christmas,” he said, nuzzling her neck.
“Jace…”
“It’s nice to know I’ve finally graduated from being Mr. Montgomery.”
She leaned back against him. Here and now, standing so close to this man, she could almost believe that the moment could last forever. “I must go home,” she said, but she made no effort to move out of his embrace.
“There are no lanterns for the wagon and no moon to speak of. We’ll have to stay here tonight.” He clasped her tighter. “I guess you’ll be safe with all these chaperons.”
She turned around in his arms. “I’m not sure I want to be safe.”
She felt him draw in his breath, then he kissed her, long and deeply and lovingly, letting her know how he was coming to care for her more each day.
From the porch came a set of giggles.
“We have an audience,” he whispered as he nibbled her ear.
“So it seems.” She was reluctant to release him, but the giggles came again, so she dropped her arms and he took her hand in his and they started back toward the cabin. There was the sound of children scurrying into the cabin ahead of them.