Loving Linsey (5 page)

Daniel broke off in midsentence. His shoulders straightened, and he sucked in a deep breath in an effort to control a rapidly spiking temper. “No apology can
ever
make up for what you did, and I wouldn't take a plug nickel from you. Just stay away from me and I'll do the same.”

He stormed into the apothecary, leaving her to swelter in the echo of his anger. He headed straight for his office at the back of the shop, knowing he had to get his emotions under control before he broke something.

Like Linsey Gordon's pretty little neck.

How did she do it? he wondered, throwing himself into the well-worn leather chair behind his desk. How did she manage to take a two-year-old event and make it feel as if it had happened just yesterday? All it took was one look, one touch, and his normally staunch composure turned to ash.

It was hard to believe, even harder to admit, that there'd been a time—a long time ago—when he'd been interested in her. Sure, she was lovely. Hell, as much as he hated to say it, she had the kind of beauty that could stop a war—or cause one. Curves filled out the seams in dresses that used to sag on her gangly frame. Eyes bright as polished amber. Lips ripe enough to tempt fate. Even the pumpkin red hair she'd had as a kid had become more golden over the years, the curls looser, somehow softening her features, yet doing nothing to dim her personality.

Then again, there had always been an aliveness about Linsey that attracted him, a carefree
spirit that beckoned to him like breath to a dying man. . . .

Daniel wiped his hand down his face, cursing.

He'd been seventeen when he'd entered Tulane, nineteen when he'd gotten his degree. At twenty he'd begun working in the local hospital where he met Charlotte. They courted for a year, but it wasn't until her father arrived from Vienna to accept a teaching position in Maryland that Daniel had grown serious about her. He'd known even then that Ian McIntyre's immense influence and prestige in the medical field had prompted him to propose to Charlotte more than any affection he felt for her.

Then his mother's illness had driven him home. Coming back to Horseshoe, to his mother's debility and his father's iron fist, felt like a death sentence. And Linsey . . . she'd been his glimpse of sunrise from the gallows. Young, refreshing, reckless. Always from a distance, always with discretion, he would watch for her, wonder about her, want her. Charlotte had been the means to a promising future; Linsey had been a forbidden fantasy.

He'd gotten over his insane infatuation the day Linsey had cost him the opportunity of a lifetime.

Of its own will, his hand reached for the varnished box that sat on his desk. It had been a gift from his mother the day she died: a keepsake box, she'd told him, to hold his most treasured mementoes. From beneath
the hinged lid he retrieved a rumpled, water-stained envelope, the postmark smeared, the address nearly illegible.

He didn't need to open the letter to know what it said. Charlotte's blurry script had been burned into his memory that long-ago summer day:

It had been the chance he'd been waiting for his entire adult life.

And it had come and gone without his even knowing it . . . until a month later, when several townsmen had finally located and fished the mailbag—and Charlotte's letter—out of Horseshoe creek.

The rush trip to Baltimore had been a wasted effort. His apprenticeship, and his fiancée, had already gone to another. And no wonder: a chance to study under Ian McIntyre was a coveted position, especially since a year later the man had taken his skills back to Vienna.

It might as well have been the moon, as far as Daniel was concerned.

He slumped back in the horsehair chair and stared unseeingly at the ceiling. God. He'd never wanted anything so badly as that apprenticeship. He'd worked his fingers to the bone, socialized with all the right people,
devoted all his spare time to charity work to broaden his skills. There was nothing he wouldn't have done to get it—even committing himself to the life sentence of marriage to McIntyre's daughter.

But in one fell swoop, Linsey had ruined everything.

Forgive her? The letter crumpled in his fist. When hell froze over.

If your shadow is touched by a passing hearse you will be the next to ride in it.

“W
ell, that certainly went well,” Linsey muttered.

She glared into the apothecary for several long minutes, a tenuous grasp on her own temper, before realizing she stood alone on the boardwalk, looking through the window like a vagrant child.

With a frustrated sigh, she turned a half circle and headed toward the smithy shop. How was she supposed to give her sister the gift of a life mate if the gift wouldn't cooperate with her?

Cooperate. Ha!
Daniel barely tolerated the sight of her. She could understand his anger in the beginning. She'd probably have felt the same way if the situation were reversed, and he'd been responsible for the loss of an important letter of hers. But for the love of Gus . . . two years?

And why was the incident entirely her fault?
Had she been the one driving the coach? Had she caused the horses to bolt straight toward the creek's banks and dump its passengers and its cargo into the water?

Linsey stopped at the corner of Wishing Well Lane and the road to Houston, and closed her eyes. No, she wouldn't do this, she chided herself. Aunt Louisa always told her to accept the consequences of her actions, and Linsey
had
been the one to suggest—okay, insist—that the driver turn around after the rabbit had darted out in front of them. Everyone knew that a rabbit dashing across your path meant bad luck would follow, unless one turned around and began the journey anew. And though she'd only been trying to protect a coach full of people, every deed had its price.

That particular one just happened to be someone else's dream.

The weight of regret lay as heavy on Linsey's soul as the heat coming from Oren Potter's furnace. She thanked her lucky stars that he wasn't around. The smithy had a knack for sensing things about people that they didn't always want known, and Linsey didn't feel much like pretending all was well with her world. She strode to the huge workbench to the left of the entrance and sorted through the bins.

Keeping her thoughts from straying to Daniel was like trying to stop a full-speed locomotive with a haystack. Yes, she'd admit he had every right to hold her to blame for his getting rejected by that college back East and, according to the gossip mill, being jilted by the woman he'd intended to marry. Frankly, Linsey
couldn't bring herself to shed any tears over that. A woman who would jilt a man just because he wasn't attending her daddy's school wouldn't have made much of a wife—but her opinion hardly mattered here. What did matter was persuading Daniel to put the past behind him and look to the future: a future with Addie.

Since Addie could hardly talk to the man without swooning, the responsibility of getting Daniel to notice her rested on Linsey's shoulders. But unless she settled this storm between them, she'd not be able to convince him to talk to Addie, much less court her. If only there was some way to make it up to him—

Her hand froze upon a pile of two penny irons. Her head snapped up.

Make amends to someone I have wronged.

That was it! That's how she could make things right with Daniel—by replacing the bride he'd lost with an even better one! And by matching him with Addie, she'd fulfill two wishes with one stroke!

Her spirits lifting with the brilliance of her plan, Linsey shoved a handful of nails into her pocket, dropped a few coins on the workbench, and left the smithy.

Fate seemed to be in complete agreement with her intentions, for she spotted Daniel coming out of his father's store, carrying yet another crate to the buggy parked in front.
Well, no time like the present
, she thought, starting in his direction.

A bulbous black coach drawn by a pair of
mules pulled into the business sector just then, forcing Linsey to wait on the curb while the vehicle lumbered by. Once the way had cleared, she stepped over a puddle onto the road. She didn't get two paces across it before it struck her that the coach rolling down the road was none other than the community hearse.

And it was heading straight for Daniel's shadow.

For the first time since she had taken the job as schoolmistress, Addie wished she were anywhere but inside the stuffy confines of the one-room schoolhouse.

She sat at her desk, Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation open in front of her, yet in her present state of mind, she couldn't solve a single one of Peter's playful puzzles to save her soul.

She knew she should be furious with Linsey for forcing her into such a humiliating encounter with Daniel Sharpe this morning. Marry Daniel indeed! It was true that she'd dreamed of the day she might share his name and bear his children, but how could she consider marriage to Daniel—or anyone else for that matter—when Linsey . . . when her sister . . . oh, heavens, Addie could barely think the word without a sharp pain gripping her.

Addie wanted so badly to discount the omen. Logic told her that looking into a mirror couldn't kill a person. And yet an unshakeable doubt had inserted itself under her skin, into her mind, causing goose bumps to break out
along her arms. Over the years, she'd witnessed too many coincidental instances to easily brush aside prophecy. Aunt Louisa and Linsey claimed they'd all been signs. Addie didn't know what to believe, but she couldn't forget that her own father had been snakebit right after his picture had fallen off the wall.

She could have sworn she'd cried herself tearless, but now she felt them well up again. She'd already lost her father. And even though her mother was alive and well, she might as well say the same about her for all Addie saw of the woman.

God . . . what if it was true?

What if, before the end of the year, she lost her sister, too? What if Linsey's glance into that mirror truly had been a warning?

“Miss Witt, is somethin' wrong?”

The sound of her name startled Addie from the frightening thought. She blinked back the sting of tears. A roomful of expectant faces came into focus, one in particular. “Did you say something, Bryce?”

“We finished our tests,” the eight-year-old said. He pointed at the book in front of her. “Do you want us to bring out our primers?”

After a moment's indecision, Addie set the book atop her meticulously planned schedule. She couldn't concentrate on schoolwork today, anyway. “How about taking an early recess instead?”

A cheer rose up from her pupils. Twenty freshly scrubbed youngsters ranging from five to thirteen made a mad dash for the coatroom at the front of the building. The older children
eagerly helped the younger children don their wrappers, then practically mowed them over in their haste to get outside.

Following along, Addie couldn't blame them for wanting fresh air since the recent rains had undoubtedly kept them inside all weekend, too.

She paused at the back of the room beside Bryce's desk, her attention caught by the drawing on his slate board.

Addie brought the slate closer to study the caricature of herself staring out the window. He'd captured the anxiety on her face with amazing accuracy. Had she been that transparent?

“Bryce?” she called to the boy on his way out.

“Ma'am?” Once he saw the slate board in her hand, the color in his cheeks paled, making his freckles stand out. Defensively, he drew his shoulders back. “I finished my test. I put it on your desk.”

“I know you did.” He always finished his work well ahead of the other children. “This is very good.” She tapped the frame.

The tension in his lanky body eased, though his dark blue eyes remained wary.

“You caught my mood quite precisely. Are my emotions always so apparent?”

He shrugged a bony shoulder. “Not really. You just seemed sorta bothered today.”

“Yes, I guess I am. You may join the other children.”

As soon as he slipped out the door, Addie returned to the chalk drawing, studying it
with a thoughtful frown. It was better than good; it was amazing. In the years since Bryce Potter had joined her classroom, she'd noticed more and more signs of exceptional talent, the least being his swift comprehension of academic studies. This semester alone saw him doing the work of an eighth-grade student. The only thing left was taking his graduate exams.

But then what?

She'd never come across a child with so quick an intellect as Bryce Potter, and he was only eight! Too young for a university, too advanced for her classroom.

Addie swallowed and set the slate on his desk, feeling inadequate.

In the cloakroom, she found little Amy Simmons struggling with the buttons on her threadbare cloak. Addie pushed thoughts of Bryce to the side, and knelt to assist the girl.

Just as she finished and started to rise, a shadow blocked the sun. A sideways glimpse brought into view long, muscle-bound thighs clad in brown woolen trousers. Her gaze rising, Addie took in a blue-and-green flannel shirt stretched tightly over a powerful chest and arms that could squeeze the sap out of a tree. Addie straightened slowly, her pulse beginning to jump at a perplexing and highly irregular rate. “Why, hello, Mr. Potter.”

“Miss Witt.” He nodded his head without disturbing one strand of the thick black hair slicked back from his brow.

Though not a classically handsome man, with his crooked nose and lazy eye, Oren Potter
was what many would term the strong, silent type, with a brawny figure and bulky muscles formed by years of wielding hammer and iron in his blacksmith shop.