Liz Ireland (6 page)

“I can see you’re crippled with regret,” he bit out sarcastically.

“I certainly will be if we can’t be friends, Roy. You may think I forgot you, but I never did. Your uncle Ed surely told you that.”

Uncle Ed? His last bachelor uncle, who still lived out on the old McMillan homestead, had never mentioned his mother to him.

A cynical snort shook through him.
“Friends!”
he spat. “What could that word possibly mean to a woman like you?”

She cocked her head at him, making him notice the jaunty plume decorating the red velvet hat perched atop her head. “A great deal more than you realize, obviously.”

Her patient smile irritated him. Had the woman no shame? He looked over to the doorway, seeking confirmation that he was dealing with an impossible woman, searching for a reason to think that all women weren’t so duplicitous and callous, but Ellie had disappeared.

“Oh, Parker, I’ve made a horrible mistake!”

Parker grinned, poking the fire in the parlor aimlessly. “I was wondering how long it would take for you to figure that out.”

Mortification
was too kind a word for what she felt. “I thought you all felt that Roy was merely too sick to see his mother, not that he hated her!”

Parker looked questioningly at her. “Do you think he does?”

Could there be any doubt? “Why didn’t someone say something?” Apparently Ike had been too amazed to point out she was making a huge blunder
by inviting Isabel to the farm. “If I had only known…”

Parker shrugged. “What could I do? She was already here, and she seemed determined to see Roy.” In that one unflappable gesture, Ellie could see that despite the years of separation, he was still his mother’s son.

Hotheaded Roy, however, must have been cut from an entirely different bolt of cloth. “If you could have seen them together—it would have broken your heart!”

His dark blond brows raised in interest. “Don’t tell me they had a tearful reunion.”

“Just the opposite!” she exclaimed. “Roy was so brittle, and as for your mother—well! She didn’t express a drop of remorse about having left you all. I could have cried. Roy was so unforgiving, and yet she didn’t seem inclined to say one thing that would sway him, or express the tiniest morsel of regret.”

He nodded, but looked a little puzzled. “What could she say?”

“She could tell him she was sorry!”

“And that would make up for two decades’ absence?”

Ellie felt as if she were battering her head against a stone wall. “It might have been a start.” Roy clearly needed that humbling expression of regret from her, and she didn’t seem willing to give it. Ellie felt so for Roy, the whole situation made her want to scream.

Parker gazed at her patiently. “I think I’ll see to tea for the guest,” he said, turning toward the kitchen.

The coldness in the house racked Ellie’s bones, and she moved closer to the hearth. Yet why should she be so involved in the lives of these people? Their familial relations should have meant nothing to her.
She, too, was raised motherless—because of death, not abandonment—but to her, that fact just made her love her father all the more dearly. As always, thoughts of her father warmed her. He’d given her so much; humor, a love of knowledge, endless kindness. Even if theirs was only a family of two, she was lucky to have belonged to it.

Footsteps approached from Roy’s bedroom.

“Well, that’s that!”

At the sound of Isabel’s voice and the sight of the placid lift of her shoulders, Ellie thought for a moment that she would give the woman the tongue-lashing Roy had managed to restrain himself from giving her. But then she looked into Isabel’s eyes, dark blue orbs shiny with sorrow, and she sensed that Isabel felt the sting of her son’s iciness more than she had let on.

It wasn’t only Roy she had hurt by bringing Isabel here.

“I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed, barely holding back tears as emotion flooded her once more.

“Don’t be,” Isabel said, smiling as she placed a hand upon her arm. Funny how she was so demonstrative and easy with a comparative stranger when she couldn’t communicate with her own son. “That meeting had to happen, you know. And now, perhaps, things will go easier next time.”

Next time! From the glower in Roy’s eyes, Ellie couldn’t imagine there being a next time.

Isabel smiled. “I think it’s sweet that you’re so worried about Roy, which is just why I hoped you were his intended. He might pretend to be a gruff old bear, but everyone needs an ally, I think.” She smiled. “I had one once, and it helped more than I can say.”

Ellie was once again baffled by the woman’s musings.
Who could she possibly be referring to—her first husband? Her second? God forbid, someone else? She sensed that whoever it was was a man. Isabel looked like a woman who would attract men like a flame would entice fluttering, misguided moths.

In fact, even Ellie felt compelled to like her. Her actions might seem callous, but when one looked into Isabel’s eyes, it was hard to believe there wasn’t good in her. Anyway, she was Roy’s mother. Ellie would have done anything to have her father or mother brought back to her—why couldn’t Roy be more forgiving?

“Perhaps Roy will come around, sooner or later,” Ellie said. “He’s just a bit…”

“Hard? Stubborn?” Isabel laughed. “Lord, yes. So was his father!”

This was the first description Ellie had heard of Roy and Parker’s father. “He was like Roy?”

“Oh, my. There wasn’t a bit of give in him. It’s obvious Roy takes after him somewhat—but only somewhat, I hope.” For the first time, she saw Isabel make a grave face. “That’s why I had hoped he would fall in love early. With you, for instance.”

Ellie sputtered incoherently before even managing to get the simplest word out. “Me?”

“Wouldn’t that work best for everyone?” Isabel blinked. “Roy desperately needs someone to love, and you—if you don’t mind my speaking frankly, Ellie—you obviously are in dire need of a husband with that baby on the way.”

If embarrassment had a name, it was Eleanor Fitzsimmons. She’d feared that Isabel had known she was pregnant, but now that her suspicion was confirmed, she wished she could sink straight through the floor.

Isabel didn’t seem to discern her discomfort with the whole subject. “The first moment I saw you, I
thought you would provide just that soft touch Roy’s always needed. And why shouldn’t you marry Roy? He could provide well for you and your child—give you financial stability for the first time in your life.”

How did she know so much about Roy? About herself?

Ellie was stunned. “But…” Any inclination to draw up, play Park Avenue matron, and deny the statement, completely eluded her. Instead, she almost sagged with relief and spent ten minutes spilling her story to Isabel. The words just tumbled out of her. She didn’t know why. Perhaps because she’d needed someone to talk to for so long—and there was something about Isabel that made Ellie believe that she would understand.

Isabel listened sympathetically, and nodded when she finished. “Yes, I thought your background would be something like that.”

“How did you know?”

Isabel chuckled softly. “My dear, that dress! Certainly, it’s a cut above some of the rags these poor women around here wear, and the puffed sleeves are rather stylish, actually. But I could guess by the color and the simplicity that it was a maid’s uniform, slightly disguised.”

“Oh, dear.” And this was her
best
dress!

“Widows I have known,” Isabel informed her, “especially young ones, usually try to look their best. After the shock has worn off, of course. After the first month they’ll come by my shop for a jaunty black outfit.”

“Is that what you are, a dressmaker?”

“And milliner. I intend to open a shop in Paradise.” She looked critically at Ellie’s bonnet. “You might consider becoming one of my first customers.”

Ellie smiled. “Would you consider hiring me as your first employee?”

Isabel shifted, her expression all business now. “Do you have any experience making hats?”

Ellie shook her head. “No, but I’m a fast learner.”

“Are you quick with a needle?”

Ellie swallowed, remembering all the crooked hems, loose buttons, and uneven cuffs she’d left trailing in her wake. “Quick, yes.”

Her potential employer cocked her head. “Have you ever worked as a seamstress?”

“No…”

“But you did mending for your previous employer, surely.”

Among the throngs of women working at the Sternhagen house, there had been many skilled seamstresses. “Once or twice perhaps,” she confessed, fearing opportunity was slipping away from her. “But I’ve always mended for myself, as well as for my father while he was alive.”

Her poor father, trundling off to work with his clothes bunching at the seams!

Isabel smiled as kindly as she could. “It’s not very nice work anyway,” she said in consolation. “Think how much happier you’d be married to Roy.” She shrugged. “Or Parker.”

“Oh, but—”

Isabel patted her on the shoulder. “You already have my blessing.”

“Yes, but—”

“And surely you want your baby to have a name?”

Ellie shuddered. “You can’t mean that I should set out to…well, to trick them!”

Isabel smiled, then straightened her trim coat jacket. “In any case, marry one of them. Isn’t that the logical thing for a woman in your position to do?”

Then, as if the subject had been thoroughly discussed and settled to her satisfaction, she turned to the kitchen. “Goodbye, Parker!”

By the time Parker could dash to the doorway, Isabel was gone, leaving only the cool wind from the opening and closing of the front door to let them know she’d been there, rather like a ghost would.

Parker glanced at Ellie, astonished. “I should give her a ride back to town.”

Ellie nodded numbly. Isabel knew. How long before she told her sons all about their guest?

Or would she? Ellie wondered as she saw Parker scramble for his coat and speed out the door to catch up with his mother. Isabel wanted her to marry one of her sons. She wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize what little chance there was of that actually happening.

Isabel was right in many respects. It was going to be terrible to have the baby by herself—and worse on the child than on herself. She’d thought perhaps the west might be more accepting of these things, but from the stares she’d received today, she realized that she’d moved to a smaller, more insular world where illegitimacy might be even more of a stigma. True, she had her false identity as a widow to hide behind—but if Isabel could see through that facade so quickly, wouldn’t others as well?

But to marry just for the sake of necessity—she rebelled at the unromantic notion. She’d always assumed she would marry for love, like in books. Jane Eyre wouldn’t have married Rochester for convenience.

Then again, Jane had steered clear of linen closets.

But it would never work! Even if her overly romantic nature didn’t forbid marrying for the sake of convenience, what chance did she have of success?
The only man she had tried to win had fled the length of six states to avoid further contact with her. History hadn’t shown her to be a precious marital commodity.

Or even a precious domestic commodity. She’d known of cases, of course, where servants were so valued for their skills that lapses in character could be forgiven. Wainright, the Sternhagen’s irreplaceable butler, had also been at times the chief consumer of the Sternhagens’ wine cellar. During lapses he kept his job by dint of the fact that he had been with Mr. Sternhagen since before his marriage, and therefore knew exactly what temperature the master liked his bath, what time he expected his nightly toddy, and to whom to say that Mr. Sternhagen was not at home.

That’s what she needed to do. She needed to make herself irreplaceable.

“Ellie!”

Roy’s call was almost a roar.

She hurried toward his bedroom.

“Yes?” she asked breathlessly at his threshold. “Is there anything I can do for you, Roy?”

His arms were crossed and he looked as angry as a bear. “You can drop the surprises from now on.”

“I’m so sorry, Roy. I had no idea!”

“Neither did I!” He harrumphed, scrunching down into his chair as he brooded. “Did you hear what she said? Did you hear even the tiniest apology?”

She shook her head sadly. Now that she was back with Roy, it seemed impossible not to take his side in the matter. Yet she couldn’t forget that prick of sympathy she’d felt for Isabel when they’d spoken in private. Nor could she forget the things Isabel had said to her.

Marry Roy, indeed! Right now Roy looked as if he never wanted to see another woman as long as he lived.

And yet he
had
called her into his room. He hadn’t asked for Parker, or Ike…. Did Isabel sense something Ellie was too shortsighted to see herself?

“Well, of course it wasn’t your fault, Ellie,” Roy said. “You didn’t know how things stood. It was Parker who should have told me she was in town.”

“I’m sure he would have…eventually.”

He laughed. “A fat lot of good that would have done me if I had run smack into her in town one day. I suppose I should thank you for not keeping me in ignorance.”

She was thunderstruck.
Thank her?
He should have wanted to throttle her!

She tilted her head, regarding him more closely. Maybe Isabel wasn’t so far off the mark. Maybe Roy and she…

She blinked, astonished at her thoughts. Oh, no! Roy was a crusty old bachelor, through and through.

But luckily for her, even crusty old bachelors needed housekeepers!

C
lara Trilby pretended to be tidying buttons while Doc Webster gave a detailed description to her parents of what exactly he’d seen at the McMillan farm.

“Oh, I suspect it’s all innocent as can be, all right,” the old doctor said, then added ominously, “for now. If you ask me, that New York widder woman’s got one thing and one thing only on her mind—marrying one of those McMillan boys. Why she had to come all the way out here to catch a husband is beyond me. Except I heard she and Parker were writing heaps of letters to each other. Love letters, no doubt.”

Clara’s heart stopped. Love letters?
Oh, Parker!
It was too, too awful!

“And no doubt the McMillans would like to get their hands on all the money she’s supposed to have,” the doctor finished.

This was more distressing news to Clara. How could she compete with a New York woman—some rich vixen who’d already hooked one man and now had her sights set on Parker!

“Rich?” Cora’s voice was full of disdain. “Rich in blarney, maybe! Munsie Warner was here earlier
this morning and said that her sister told her that the Fitzsimmons woman had gone by the hotel looking for a job! Naturally Tilda turned her down cold. Said she didn’t want any girl working in her hotel who was bold enough to take up residence with two bachelors and no chaperone!”

“Rich or poor, there’ll be a wedding in that house by January, mark my words,” Dr. Webster said. “Three bachelors, and a girl that pretty…?”

Clara feared she might pass out.

It just wasn’t fair. Everyone knew Clara and Parker were going to be married!

Eventually…

Well. Maybe she herself was the only one who really knew it, but it was true nonetheless. That little tiff she’d had with Parker was just a slight snag in their relationship, and the fact that he hadn’t spoken two words to her in nine months…well, every couple had little disagreements now and then. It was just natural. And theirs had been over such a silly thing!

She could just picture the scene now. Last November on a fine sunny Saturday they had gone on a romantic afternoon picnic together and were leaned up against a golden haystack, looking out at a little colony of prairie dogs nearby, standing at attention outside their homes. Parker had his arm around her, and she felt especially hopeful that something was going to happen between them, that they might become engaged. She was in love with Parker…and besides, her mother was getting very impatient with her to marry Leon O’Mara, the dentist, who she couldn’t abide.

Feeling Parker’s warmth next to her, she was flooded with hope. “Oh, Parker, don’t you think those prairie dogs look so happy together, so…domestic?”

A girl had to hint every now and then, after all.

He’d nodded, making her heart patter against her
corset. “Sure do…sort of reminds me of Roy, Ike and me.”

That
had brought a troubled frown to Clara’s face! “But you must get weary of having just Ike and Roy for company,” she said. “I mean, you must enjoy talking to someone else or you wouldn’t come visit me all the time. In fact, I have big plans for tomorrow. I was going to make fried chicken and—”

He cut her off. “I can’t come to town tomorrow.”

Parker went on to say that he didn’t want to see her the next day because he had some work to do, and then he wanted to finish reading a book.
A book.
Just the memory of it made her blood boil afresh. The man had actually chosen a book over her! So she had told him that if he liked books better than her he might start trying to dance with a book and have a book make fried chicken for his picnics, because from now on she wasn’t going to have anything to do with him.

What’s more, she told Parker that if he was going to come all the way to see her just to say foolish things like he preferred books to her, he could just stop coming for visits altogether. In fact, she would be perfectly happy if he never spoke to her again!

And he hadn’t.

And now he had a new woman hanging about him in his very house—a rich New York City woman, or else a grasping marriage-minded New York City woman, who, in either case, no doubt knew everything about everything.

“A redhead!” Mrs. Trilby exclaimed in disdain. “My good mother always says you shouldn’t trust them.” She threw a glance over at her daughter. “For heaven’s sake, Clara—stand up straight or you’ll bring down that whole button display. I swear you’re sagging like a wilted sunflower.”

Clara made a halfhearted effort to do as she was told. Her mother always wanted her to look her best because Leon O’Mara made daily stops at the store. Leon was nice enough, but he wasn’t handsome like Parker. In fact, he was five and a half feet tall and looked like the slightest breeze would blow him over. He never talked about anything besides the weather and people’s teeth. But she’d made the mistake of being nice to him once after Parker had abandoned her and she was just desperate for something eligible and male to talk to, and now Leon was as hard to shake as a cocklebur in her skirt hem.

Her mother clucked her tongue. “Of course I always did say Parker McMillan was a weak-willed sort of character. It’s no surprise to me that he’s let himself be twisted round the finger of some skinflint wily redhead.”

Clara moaned.

Her mother looked at her sharply. “Good heavens, child, what’s the matter with you!”

Clara was about to choke out a defense of Parker McMillan, when suddenly her mother’s face brightened unnaturally. The bell at the store’s entrance tinkled, and the older woman practically did a minuet as she hurried toward the door.

“Why, Mr. O’Mara! I was wondering when you’d drop by.”

Clara spun on her heel and bolted behind the counter, where she bent to fiddle with her shoe.

Mrs. Trilby bustled over to Clara, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her up to standing. “Look, Leon, here’s Clara.”

Clara smiled limply.

To her distress, Leon’s eyes lit up when he looked at her, and he scurried forward, an anxious grin on
his face. “Oh, good. I wanted to ask you to the dance, Clara,” he blurted out unceremoniously.

Clara froze. “What dance?”

He frowned. “The autumn school dance, of course. This year it’s to raise money for a library.”

Lovely. More books!

“But Leon, that’s over a month away!”

“I thought I’d better grab this opportunity. I wanted to ask you last year, but last year it seemed Parker McMillan had you reserved forever.”

Oh, the wretchedness of having Leon O’Mara talking about Parker’s abandoning her, right here in front of the doctor and her parents! Especially when her parents were so much more anxious for her to marry Leon than they had ever been about Parker. They were all colluding against her!

Gasping, Clara paled, turned on her heel, and bolted from the room. Oh, she knew it was rude, but she simply couldn’t face talking to that man another minute—or worse, having her mother coerce her into going to the dance with him.

She simply had to do something to get Parker back, and avoid the terrible fate of becoming Clara O’Mara!

Overnight, it seemed to Roy, Ellie took over the house.

He wasn’t quite sure how it happened. Or exactly when, even. Suddenly, however, he noted things getting done that one of the three men had heretofore had to do themselves. Eggs were gathered. Cows were milked twice a day. The house was kept spotless without any of them having to lift a feather duster.

A lot of this activity took place under Ike’s tutelage, although the farmhand liked to brag on his pupil, saying that for a fine lady she took to housework like a duck took to water. Soon she was also cooking,
baking up mouth-watering cornmeal batter bread in the morning, and biscuits and flapjacks. During the long days when they harvested sorghum, she managed the evening meals, too, albeit a little less successfully. Ike, so much needed in the fields, wasn’t there to instruct her during the day. But as they often pointed out, nothing could taste worse than what they were used to cooking for themselves.

Ellie’s new accomplishments made Roy uncomfortable on several fronts. He didn’t like the idea of a fine lady visiting them being put to manual labor. It wasn’t right, and he told Parker so. But even after they confronted her with the fact that she was a guest in their house and it reflected poorly on them to have her slaving away all day, she merely chirped that she enjoyed pitching in while she was there. She wanted to learn all she could about prairie life, she said.

But why? Roy wondered. Could it be that she had secret plans to become a prairie wife? That possibility made him anxious; he began watching Ellie and Parker together very closely. And watching them with something that felt suspiciously like jealousy.

The jealousy was silly, he knew—another result of his mother’s brief visit. While she’d been here, after Ellie had left them alone in the room, Isabel had told him that she thought Parker and Ellie made a nice couple. A couple! She’d even gone on to say that Ellie would make a good
wife
for Parker.

The woman had the nerve to come waltzing back into their lives without so much as a howdy-do, then had the additional gall to start assigning them spouses!

Even now he had trouble containing his lingering ire. Not that he had any cause to be worked up over any imaginary union between Parker and Ellie. Because that’s all it was—a figment of Isabel’s imagination.
Why, anybody with half a brain could see that Ellie and Parker were just friendly. He’d seen none of the warmth between Ellie and Parker as he’d witnessed between, say, Ike and Ellie. Yes, she was much friendlier toward Ike. And as a matter of fact, he had to admit—objectively, of course—that Ellie was even much friendlier toward himself. Naturally, having absented herself from their lives since he and Parker were barely out of diapers, Isabel wouldn’t have noticed
that.

Parker and Ellie!

Not that he was interested in giving up the bachelor life himself. Not at all. In fact, that was another reason Ellie’s sudden interest in housekeeping rubbed his fur the wrong way. Instead of batching it happily, the three men were now becoming dependent on Ellie’s help. Especially now, when Roy’s damn toe still smarted like the dickens and he couldn’t do half the work he was usually capable of, Ellie’s work seemed like a gift, a godsend.

And that, too, made him uneasy. He couldn’t help thinking that a woman’s gift was usually of the Trojan-horse kind, and what looked too good to be true at first blush would actually turn out to be not such a bargain after all.

Yet this was Ellie…Ellie who he liked beyond all expectations. Whose laughter could bring a smile to his lips even when he was in one of his broody moods. Who had a household of grown men suddenly spending Saturday nights showing her how to pull taffy. He came home from the fields at night with a quick step, which quickened a little more when he discovered the chores that he’d so dreaded at the end of the day had been magically done. Horse stalls were filled with fresh hay. Pigs were slopped and watered. Chickens were fed their thick, sticky cornmeal.

The times he didn’t look on her being here as a dangerous affliction, he thought of Ellie as something as a miracle. Despite his uneasiness, his heart beat lighter, faster. His limp had a skip in it when he least expected it. He hummed tunes he couldn’t even remember hearing before.

And for the first time, he felt dangerously close to making a fool of himself over a woman.

They could only wait a few days after harvesting the sorghum to mill it into molasses, or the juice inside the stalks would go sour. So the miller, Tom Bartlett, was sent for, and two whole days were set aside for making enough of the dark syrup to sustain them through the next year.

The morning Bartlett arrived seemed positively festive to Ellie. Their daily routine would be disrupted completely, and for a few days, the men would be around the house, tending to this special chore. A city girl, she’d never known that such a simple thing as molasses could involve such intense labor. But she was beginning to understand that most of the things she’d bought in stores and had always taken for granted were actually the products of considerable toil.

The men had already spent several days stripping down the sorghum stalks; the discarded leaves stood in piles to be used later for animal bedding. The dark seed clusters had been lopped off and saved, too, the only part of the plant that would be used for feed, Ike had informed her.

Now the harvested stalks were being hauled to the front of the barn, where the mill was set up. The contraption, which was powered by an orbiting horse attached to a circular sweep, ground the cane stalks between several rollers and drained the resulting juice
through a muslin strainer into a barrel. Ike and Parker tended to these tasks, including spreading the pressed, discarded stalks out to dry. Nothing would be wasted.

On the other side of the yard, outside the kitchen door, a boiler had been set up to cook the molasses, and Roy, still nursing his toe, had accepted the task of keeping the fire going and cooking the syrup.

“I could handle this,” Ellie assured him, “if you just instructed me what to do.”

At her suggestion, Roy shook his head adamantly. “It’ll be easier for me to do it myself.”

“I could learn.”

When he looked up at her, his light brown hair blowing in the breeze warmed by the smokey fire, she felt a powerful pull toward those blue eyes of his. He’d been watching her often these past few days…why, she couldn’t say. Half the time she felt something like a tug of attraction from him; other times, he seemed to view her much the way General Lee must have viewed General Grant. As if she were his natural enemy. The Yankee invader.

This wouldn’t have been so terrible had she not found herself so attracted to him. She had tried to avoid acknowledging the strangely familiar feelings that welled inside her whenever Roy was nearby. She’d tried to keep her thoughts focussed on learning so much she would be irreplaceable to a household—maybe even this one.

But more often than not, those blue eyes defeated her, and she found herself drifting into a girlish, dreamy reverie in which Roy was Heathcliff to her Cathy, a dashing Ivanhoe to her Jewess healer, or Byron’s Corsair to her lady in distress. Silly thoughts, unworthy of a woman mired in the reality of needing to prepare to support a child on her own. And yet the fantasies came anyway, no matter how hard she tried
to concentrate on scrubbing and cooking and unfamiliar farm chores.