In Your Arms (Montana Romance) (23 page)

“We’ll put you up at the hotel,” he said, channeling his fury into making decisions.
“I’m sure Delilah would be more than happy to—”

“I can’t stay in a hotel on a teacher’s salary,” she cut him off.

“I’ll pay for it,” he replied without pause. “I have plenty of money sitting around collecting dust.”

She shook her head harder.
“How would that look? There are rumors already. Imagine how they would grow if it was known you were keeping me in a hotel.”

He really and truly needed to punch someone.

“I’ll figure something out.”

They continued on in silence until they reached Main Street.
Lily paused to take a deep breath and stare at the uncertainty in front of her. For Christian, it was a whole new kind of torture.

“Let’s start by asking Michael if we can borrow his wagon to pick up your trunk,” he said.

“He’s helped me too much already,” Lily protested.

“Well, dammit, Lily, someone has to!”

Her eyes went wide with fury and her lips tight as a trap. Of all things, it set him at ease.

“You have a better plan?” he challenged her.
“One that won’t make it look like we’re involved to the extent that we are?”

Color rose to her cheeks.
The mark he’d left on her neck the night before peeked up above the edge of her collar as she tilted her chin up. Hot need hit him through his frustration. As stuck as they were, he’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

At last she blew out a breath and lowered her shoulders.

“I don’t know what to do,” she confessed.

Fast as lightning, his frustration gave way to the need to hold her and let her know it would all work out.

“Let’s start with Michael.”

She nodded reluctantly and they
headed up Main Street.

The store was crowded for a Friday afternoon as people who had been stuck in the snow the day before finally made it into town for supplies.
Christian managed to catch Michael’s eye as he and Lily entered the store and made their way to the side of the counter where Charlie worked.

“Afternoon, Christian, Lily,” Charlie greeted them with more than a little censure as Christian ignored her.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. West,” Lily said for the both of them. “Could we talk to your husband for a moment?”

Charlie’s blue eyes burned with curiosity.
“Certainly. Michael!” She waved him over. He had already left the customer he’d been helping and was halfway across the room. “Mrs. Deen, could you take over for a minute,” Charlie said to the middle-aged woman who stood behind the counter with her.

“Anything you need, Charlie,” Mrs. Deen replied.
She sent a knowing look to Christian and Lily as the four of them stepped into the storeroom.

Christian headed all the way to the far end of the room before saying, “I need to borrow your wagon.”

Michael adjusted his glasses, glancing to Charlie, who planted her hands on her hips as if waiting for answers.

“Either you’ve finally decided to join a traveling circus or something’s gone wrong,” he said, gesturing to the two bags Christian carried.

“Viola—”

“Miss Jones has evicted me from her house,” Lily rode over Christian’s attempted explanation.
“And she has every right to do so. Rumors are circulating and she has always made it clear to her lodgers that she will not tolerate scandal.” She finished by arching an eyebrow at Christian as if daring him to add more.

Christian set the carpetbags on the nearest shelf so that he could rub a hand over his face.
His neck and shoulders needed a good rub too.

“I need to pick Lily’s trunk up from Viola’s place and take it….”
He sighed. “Well, wherever we can find for her to stay.”

“Thank you, Christian, but you can stop using the word ‘we’ now,” Lily said with all the deceptive calm of a schoolmarm in front of her class.

“Like hell I will!” he contradicted her. “It’s my fault as much as yours that you’re in this mess. You are going to let me help you get out of it.”

“I do not need your or anyone else’s help!” Lily spat back.

“Then prove it!”

She turned to face him with a glare so fierce he was certain she would slap him.
He met her ferocity with his own, will battling against will. The air between them bristled with a heady mix of emotion that would either kill them or land them in bed within the hour.

“Oh, dear,” Charlie murmured.

“Mmm,” Michael agreed. “See what I mean?”

“I certainly do!”

Christian broke eye contact with Lily long enough to frown at his friends. They stood shoulder to shoulder, both of their arms crossed as though puzzling through a riddle.

“Don’t you two go looking like that,” Christian said.

Lily turned away, pressing a hand to her forehead. She still had her mittens on.

“So you’re out of a home?”
Charlie took a step toward Lily and lay a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“Yes,” Lily answered.

“I’m so sorry.” She slid one arm around Lily’s shoulders. “There is an obvious solution here.”

A twist of hope spiraled up through Christian’s chest.

“The apartment?” Michael answered his wife.

Charlie nodded.
“We’re more or less moved into the house now. I would be honored to have Lily stay here until she can figure out another long-term situation. You wouldn’t want to live here for too long,” she said to Lily as though everything was settled already. “There’s no door to the apartment and it gets loud, particularly on weekends. It is nice after the store closes though.”

“Are you saying Lily can live upstairs?” Christian asked.
Relief spilled through him. He hadn’t heard a better idea in years.

“Why not?”
Michael shrugged. “It’s completely furnished, more or less clean, and there’s more than enough food if you get hungry.” He grinned and gestured over his shoulder to the store.

“I couldn’t,” Lily protested.
“It’s too much, too generous.”

“Nonsense,” Christian said.
“It’s a brilliant idea.”

“Christian,” she warned him, jaw clenched.

“Yes, I know I’m giving you orders,” he cut her off before she could accuse him of anything. “Only in this case it’s the right thing to do. You can’t stay at the hotel, you can’t look like you’re getting help from me, and you need something right now. Explain to me how this isn’t the ideal situation at the ideal time?”

“I—”

He raised his brow, daring her to say more.

She blew out a breath and shook her head.
For all her ferocity, she knew he’d won the argument.

“It will only be for a short time,” she told Charlie as though her words were gravel in her mouth.
“I couldn’t impose on you indefinitely.”

“Stay as long as you’d like,” Charlie said with a smile.
“Here, we’ll take these bags and I’ll show you the apartment while Christian and Michael fetch your trunk.”

She reached for the carpetbags, handing one to Lily, and led Lily back along the narrow row of storage shelves to the apartment stairs.

“You should have seen me the first time I set foot in this apartment,” Charlie chattered. “I was exhausted and flustered and my head had just been turned by an enigmatic gentleman who liked to keep secrets. I cured him of that.”

As they disappeared at the top of the stairs, Christian turned to Michael.

“Are you sure I don’t owe you yet?”

“For giving my wife someone to fuss over?
I’d say we’re still about even.” Michael thumped him on the back and pointed on to the door at the back of the store. “But if you don’t fix this soon, I’m sure I’ll come up with at least a hundred ways you owe me.”

Chapter Eighteen

Lily paced the hotel ballroom, script in hand, sweating with the effort of making herself pay attention to the children at the front of the room. She hadn’t slept well at the West’s store apartment for the last two nights, but not because it was loud or uncomfortable. Quite the opposite.

Charlie had been right when she said it was peaceful after the shop had closed.
No one had known she was there, no incriminating looks were thrown her way, and best of all, Christian hadn’t been there to stir her up and leave her caught between wanting to lecture him into next Tuesday and tearing the clothes from his body. That had been the problem. One reckless night in Christian’s bed had blown her life apart, and still she wanted more.

She fought her restles
sness with pacing and with work, calling a rehearsal of the Lewis and Clark play on Sunday afternoon.

“The Corps of Discovery set out from Camp Dubois on May 14
th
, 1804,” Amos recited from his podium at the side of the dais. He glanced to Lily, and she nodded for him to go on.

Isaac
and Grover and the students who had been cast as their expeditionary crew picked up several satchels and fake parcels that were being sewn by a trio of mothers sitting to the side of the dais. They took up a cutout of a boat that had been painted on a thin sheet of wood and started walking across the stage as though sailing upriver.

“They headed west along the Missouri River,” Amos continued.

“You know there hasn’t been a robbery or theft of any kind since last week.” The gossip of the women sewing captured Lily’s attention as she paced closer to them. Christian wasn’t the only reason sleep had eluded her.

“Of course not,” a second woman replied.
“What thief in his right mind would stage another robbery when his accomplice has been caught.”

“Jasper Frye and his friends were planning to ride out to that Indian homestead this afternoon to see
what they can see,” a third woman informed them.

A flush of anger
inched its way up Lily’s neck.

“I’m not convinced the Indian that they’ve got at the jail is one of the thieves,”
the first woman said. The other two scoffed at her.

“Of course he’s a thief.
Indians don’t have any morals,” the second woman contradicted her. “Everybody knows that.”

Lily saw red.
She dropped all pretense of paying attention to the children on the dais and turned to the sewing women, hands balled into fists.

“Do you think perhaps the Corps should come a little further downstage as they make their journey
up the Missouri?” Hattie Wright said beside her.

Lily jumped.
She hadn’t heard the woman approach. She hadn’t noticed the placement of the students on the stage either. Her mind was a thousand miles away, with the man in jail, with Christian, with the mania that had the town in its grip. She flexed her fingers out of their fists and took a deep breath, facing Hattie.

“Yes, yes I think you’re right,” she said, clearing her throat when her words came out rough.
“Isaac, Grover, see if you can bring your expedition a little closer to the foot of the stage,” she gave the direction.

“We don’t have enough people to hold the boat!” Grover complained.

Lily frowned. “Where is David?”

An uncomfortable pause followed.

“David’s mom won’t let him be in the play anymore,” Samantha informed her.

S
hame slithered down Lily’s back, but so many other emotions had beat it to her gut that she didn’t have the energy to entertain it.

“Is he being punished for something?”
she asked.

The children
kept their mouths shut, looking to one another and the mothers sewing by the side of the dais for a way to answer. The mothers paused in their sewing and chatting, looking up to see what had happened. The whole room was suddenly hushed.

“David’s parents have decided to school him at home for the time being,”
Hattie broke the news to her.

“They have?”
Lily turned to her with pleading eyes, praying it was all just a misunderstanding.

Mrs. Wright tried her best to smile, but the expression came off as pitying.

“Some folks are much quicker to believe libelous rumors and to act foolishly on them when the subject of the rumors isn’t their kind of people,” she said.

Lily took in the woman’s chocolate brown skin, glanced down at her own brown hands.
Would people believe the rumors circulating about her and Christian if she were white?

She
raised a hand to the spot on her neck under her collar where Christian had left his mark. People were believing the rumors because they were true.

She forced a smile for
Hattie, then turned to the students on the stage. “Peter, could you take David’s place in the expedition?”

The sandy-haired boy stood from where he was painting set pieces with several other boys and two fathers.
“But I’m supposed to be an Injun later.”

“We may need to double your parts if David doesn’t come back,” she said.

Glum as only a thirteen-year-old boy could be, Peter put down his paintbrush and shuffled onto the dais. It was a shame to take him away from painting. They were short-handed all around.

“Miss Singer, are we going to have to replace Red Sun Boy and Martha too?” Isabella Kuhn asked.

Lily was surprised that the girl was still there. If David’s parents had withdrawn him from her class, then surely Samuel and Alicia Kuhn would have done the same with their daughter.

“Red Sun Boy and Martha will be back
tomorrow,” she assured Isabella and herself.

In fact, she wasn’t sure anymore.
With all the fuss on Friday, she hadn’t had a chance to ride out to Sturdy Oak’s place to check on her students. She hadn’t heard anything from Snow In Her Hair or River Woman either.

A fresh wave of worry rolled over her.
There had been so many other things to fluster her in the last twenty-four hours that she hadn’t had room for that worry. The comment about Jasper Frye and his friends “seeing what they could see” wasn’t lost on her. She would have to do something about it.

“Let’s begin again from the top of page two,” she directed her students.

The rest of the rehearsal passed in a blur of dropped lines, missing actors, and props and set pieces that proved to be more unwieldy than she had imagined. She didn’t have time for any of it. As soon as the children were turned back into the care of their parents and the props and set pieces were stored in the fateful storeroom, Lily turned her full attention to the Flathead. She had to find out if they were all right. To do that she would need Christian to drive her.

Finding him proved to be the problem.

“Mrs. Reynolds, have you seen Christian?” she asked as she met Delilah in the lobby of
the old hotel. “He’s not at the courthouse and the West’s store is closed for Sunday. I thought perhaps he would have come here to meet some of his friends.”

Delilah greeted her with a knowing smile.
“I wish he had,” she said. “It’d keep him out of trouble to knock down a few drinks with Eric and Michael and Phin.”

“Are Mr. Quinlan, Mr. West, and Mr. Bell here?”

“They sure are,” Delilah informed her.

Delilah motioned for Lily to follow and led her across the lobby to the hotel’s restaurant.
It was only moderately busy for a Sunday afternoon. A few couples were finishing up a Sunday luncheon while at the other end of the large room three men sat at the bar in various stages of intoxication.

One of them, Lily noted, was Jed Archer.
He sat half slumped in his chair, and as Lily walked toward the table where Eric, Michael, and Phin sat finishing up their lunch she could see he was more than half drunk. She arched her eyebrow. Jacinta would have a word or two for him and then some.

“Boys,” Delilah brought her to a halt in front of the table, ending her speculation about ways Jacinta would punish her brother.
“Have you seen Christian? Lily’s looking for him.”

“I thought he was with you,” Eric answered.
He sat straighter, surprised.

Phineas Bell stood and offered Lily his seat.
She replied with a polite smile and a shake of her head.

“Why would you think he was with me?” she asked, cheeks flushed.

“Well….” Eric exchanged a grin with Michael. “You two are courting, aren’t you?”

She clenched her jaw until the urge to deny everything down to her name
subsided.

“We are not Siamese twins,” she answered as fairly as she could.

Her answer only made Eric’s grin wider. “Maybe he’s helping Charlie and Amelia pack up the apartment and move out to the new house?”

Michael shook his head and answered.
“We’ve been moved out for a week.”

“You have?”
Eric blinked and took a bite of the pie in front of him.

“You helped us move, remember?”

“I helped you cart a load of stuff to the house. I didn’t realize that was moving.”

“It was.”

“So you’re not living at the apartment at all anymore?”

Michael sighed and shared a glance with Phin, who leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee as though he was at the theater.

“That is the general idea of moving,” he explained. “One vacates a location only to reestablish oneself in another location.”

“Bastard,” Eric grumbled, then chuckled.
“I never thought I’d see the day when you vacated your store.”

“The store is still there,” Michael said.
“It’s the apartment that’s been vacated.”

“Still, I thought—”

“Gentlemen,” Lily interrupted them, teeth on their last edge at the circular conversation. If this was the answer to the riddle of what men talked about when passing time with each other, then Lord help them all. “I need to know where Christian is.”

“He’s at the jail.”

Lily blinked and spun to where Jed Archer had slipped off his barstool. He took an uncertain step towards her.

“Saw him there earlier.”
He hiccupped. “Said he was going to make the Injun talk.”

“Jed, it’s not even two o’clock on a Sunday,” Delilah scolded the young man.
“What do you think you’re doing all soggy at this time of day.”

“Sorry, Delilah,” Jed mumbled an apology.

“Thank you, Jed,” Lily countered the scolding. “Gentlemen.”

She
nodded to the crew at the table and turned on her heel to rush out of the restaurant and the hotel.

Jed
was right. Christian was at the jail when she marched through the door. He stood beside one of the cells, his arms crossed and his scowl as dark as ever. Wilkins leaned back in the chair at the sheriff’s desk, one hand hiding the lower half of his face as though he had been laughing. Kent Porter stood between the desk and the jail cell, looking as lost as a schoolboy who had forgotten his books before a test.

“Christian, I need you to drive me out to Sturdy Oak’s place,” she interrupted the tableaux.
“The children were missing from rehearsal again today, and I—”

She stopped at the sight of the man in the cell
. He was Indian, no doubt, with brown skin the same shade as hers. He sat rigidly with his back against the wall, legs crossed. He wore a simple white man’s suit, though his hair was long and a piece was braided and tied with a strip of leather. So this was the man that had stirred Cold Springs to a frenzy.

The man’s eyes only moved to look at her.
A hint of shock rippled through his stoic expression. Then, as if freed from a spell, he loosened his limbs and stood. Christian, Kent, and Wilkins all flinched as though he had flown into a fit.

“I will speak now,” he said.

The three men continued to stare. When none of them made a move or a peep, Lily walked to the edge of the cell.

“Who are you?” Lily asked.
The possibility of getting to the bottom of the mystery that had wrapped up so many people for so long was too tempting for her to stay quiet.

“I am Seeks For Her,” he said.

An inexplicable chill raced down Lily’s spine. She met the man’s eyes and held them. There was something there that felt familiar and yet worlds away. A fire burned in the man’s expression, as though he were full of joy in spite of being in a jail cell. He made her want to smile. The only other man who had drawn her in so quickly was Christian, but this was entirely different.

She blinked, swallowed.

“Did you attempt to rob the pharmacy last Saturday night, Seeks For Her?” she asked.

“I did not,” he said.

Relief flooded Lily. She saw it reflected in Christian as he shifted his weight and dropped his arms.