Loving Linsey (6 page)

“Bryce forgot his lunch this morning, so I took a break from work to bring it by.”

She reached to take the pail from him. “That wasn't necessary.” His fingers brushed hers and a spark leaped between them. Addie yanked her hand back, shocked by the sensation.

Hoping he hadn't noticed her reaction, her gaze shot to his craggy face. The hooded cast of the smithy's gilded lashes didn't hide the direction of his regard. Teal blue eyes had focused on her . . . on her . . .
oh, my.

A blush burned its way up her neck and into her cheeks. Addie placed a flustered hand over her bosom and licked her lips. She gave him as wide a berth as the cramped cloakroom allowed, though she couldn't escape the scent of straw and cinder and brazed iron that filled the space. It gave her little comfort to noticed his face had turned an even deeper red than the schoolhouse door. “I-I'd never let one of my students go hungry,” she said to break the strained silence.

“I didn't think you would, Miss Witt,” he said, worrying the brim of his hat between work-worn fingers.

“I-I always bring a spare lunch. But on the occasion I forget, there is always another child with more than enough food to share. . . .” She couldn't seem to stop babbling. What was wrong with her? Perhaps she hadn't been born
with Linsey's open and outgoing nature, but rarely did being in the presence of a man—save for Daniel Sharpe—reduce her to a stuttering idiot. Even then, Addie couldn't recall a single time when Daniel caused sparks to shoot from her fingertips as they done brushing against Oren Potter's knuckles. His
knuckles
, for heaven's sake! And he the parent of one of her students, no less.

The unsettling thought spurred her toward the door. “I understand the inconvenience this errand must have caused you, Mr. Potter, but I do need to supervise the children.”

“I'm sure you do.” He popped his hat onto his head and opened the door for her, being very careful to step back a goodly distance.

She proceeded him out the door and paused on the stoop beneath the brass bell Aunt Louisa had donated upon the school's construction. Shading her eyes from the sun, Addie scanned the yard, mentally counting the children—though she would have counted grass blades to keep her mind off the man behind her. A group of boys shot marbles beneath the pine tree beside the schoolhouse. Several of the girls played jump rope near the white picket fence. Beyond them, ladies in bonnets or shading themselves beneath parasols strolled past the shops, gentlemen congregated outside the mercantile, and midday traffic preceded down the lane at a crawling pace.

A movement in the street brought her attention swinging back to a red-haired figure in flapping burgundy skirts dashing
across the path of a fast-moving black carriage. Addie's breath dammed up in her throat. Her heart stopped cold. “Oh my heavens . . . Linseeey!”

Eyes, which reveal their owner's thoughts and feelings more clearly than any other part of the body, have always been considered vehicles of strong spiritual power.

S
he pushed him into a goddamn horse trough.

Daniel cursed himself for not expecting something like this, for not bracing himself the instant he'd seen her racing toward him as though wildfire licked her heels.

But it happened so fast, the shove to his midsection had come so unexpectedly, that he found himself flying ass over appetite over the hitching rail before he could blink.

He sat upright, sputtered grimy water from his mouth, and wiped his eyes. In the street, the horses reared against the traces of the black carriage Ira Graves used to cart folks to their final resting places. The crate of vaccine vials Daniel had been lifting into his father's buggy lay shattered across the boardwalk.

And in the center of it all stood Linsey Gordon.
His gaze zeroed in on her immediately, pinning her in place.

Hands clapped against her mouth, eyes wide, she stared back at him with an expression any onlooker might mistake for astonishment. Daniel knew better. He'd been the target of her machinations far too long to believe her apparent surprise was anything other than a cover for spiteful glee.

To his further humiliation, well over a dozen people had seen his ungainly spill and loitered around snickering at their very own Doc Jr., drenched from head to toe and sitting in a damned horse trough of all places.

Hot fury infested his bloodstream as Daniel braced his hands on either side of the trough and struggled to haul himself out of the water—no minor feat, considering the small confines his large body had landed in.

Once he managed to stand, he fixed Linsey with a glare hot enough to make a grown man quake in his boots. “What in the Sam Hill did you do that for?”

She shrank at his bellow. Unfortunately Daniel couldn't savor the satisfaction of making her cringe for long before pride got the best of her.

She straightened her shoulders, tilted her chin at a defiant angle, then damned if she didn't stride right up to him and plant her hands on her hips. “It just so happens that I saved your life.”

He tilted his head to the side and squinted at her with quizzical disbelief. “
What?
”

She reached into her sleeve for a scrap of
linen tucked inside the lace cuff. “Everyone knows if your shadow falls on a passing hearse, you'll be the next to ride in it.”

He pushed away the hand reaching for his face. “That's the biggest crock of bull . . . nonsense I've ever heard.” But not surprising, considering the source. He'd heard so many outrageous things spill from her lips over the last ten years that he could scarcely count them all.

“Nonsense?” Her brows rose. She bit the inside of her cheek. “Mr. Haggar was the first person to die after a rooster crowed three times in his yard. That leaves two more to go, because death always comes in threes.”

Daniel moved his face so close to hers that barely an inch of space remained between them. To her credit she held her ground, though a flash of wariness skittered across the bright green of her eyes. Enunciating each word so there would be no misunderstanding, he said, “Bleet Haggar
died
because he was
sick
, not because some stupid cock crowed in his yard.” The man had been wasting away for years from a liver disorder—one Daniel had done his best to treat—but beyond doses of roots and ash, and prescribing a morphine and quinine tonic to ease his discomfort, there'd been nothing more he could do. In the end, the wheelwright's death had not only been inevitable but probably a blessing.

Either Linsey Gordon had forgotten that little fact, or she had conveniently used the poor man's demise to feed her crazy delusions.

He suspected the latter.

The two of them stood nose to nose and will to will for several long seconds, so close he could see the starburst design in eyes made greener by the sweep of thick dark lashes against fragile lids. A kernel of respect for her planted itself inside Daniel. This was no shrinking violet. Linsey held her own in a way that Daniel had always admired in a woman but rarely saw.

As their gazes continued to hold, respect gave way to something deeper. A strange and uneasy sensation slithered through Daniel—as if invisible strings were weaving around the two of them, binding them together. In her ever-widening eyes, a vision began to unfold, of himself and Linsey lying together on a grassy carpet, he wearing nothing more than a loose pair of trousers, she wearing little more than a smile. Moonlight washed her skin in the palest of pearls, her eyes shone like emeralds, her hair glistened with amber fire. And as he watched himself bring her hand to his mouth, press his lips against her knuckles, and tuck her head against his heartbeat, an impression hit Daniel with frightening clarity that his future and hers were not only connected . . . but destined.

He wrenched back with a hot chill. He didn't believe in destiny. Or chance. Or fate. Cold, hard facts—that's what he believed in. And the cold, hard fact was that he had never, nor would ever, lie in the grass with Linsey Gordon, or kiss her knuckles, or any other part of her, for that matter. He wanted nothing to do with this woman.

Ever.

As if needing as much distance from him as he did from her, Linsey stepped back a pace and folded her hands in front of her, striking a demure pose that contradicted the wild, wicked streak he knew she possessed. Her voice wavered as she told him, “I apologize for pushing you in the water, Daniel; that was never my intent. I only meant to save you from certain disaster.”

He looked her up and down with unconcealed derision. “The only disaster around here is you.” Still shaken by his disturbing reaction to her, Daniel turned on his heel and stormed across the boardwalk into the apothecary.

“I was only trying to help!” she hollered after him.

Daniel's jaw tightened. He needed Linsey Gordon's help like he needed an outbreak of cholera. Her and her stupid superstitions. They—and she—had been an albatross around his neck for more years than he cared to count. Thanks to her, half his patients were convinced that charms would protect them from illness better than vaccinations, and the other half swore that paying a doctor's bill in full was considered unlucky.

Causing the stagecoach to flip when a damned rabbit jumped out in its path had only been the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

And now all this blather about saving his life from a hearse?

Hell.

Halfway across the shop, a harsh bellow stopped him in his tracks.

“Junior!”

Daniel's eyes slammed shut. A muscle ticked in his jaw. Bad enough everyone in the county had dubbed him Doc Jr.; hearing his dad call him Junior felt as pleasant as a splinter under his fingernail. It was just one more reminder to Daniel that he'd never meet up to the old man's expectations. He schooled his features and turned toward the curtain that divided the examination rooms from the main shop.

The old man appeared a second later, pewter gray hair sticking up from his shiny pate, his sagging cheeks freckled with age spots. “Did you get that buggy—what the Sam Hill happened to you?”

Daniel glanced down at the clothes sticking to his chest and thighs. He thought about putting the blame for his appearance at Linsey's feet where it belonged, yet a strange compulsion made him say, “Hell, Dad, it was so nice outside I decided to go for a swim.”

Daniel Sr. narrowed his eyes. “I'm going to assume that you've got time to stand there giving me lip because those crates sprouted legs and loaded themselves into the buggy.”

Outwardly Daniel held firm under his dad's disapproving scrutiny, yet inside he found himself battling that old feeling of failure. “I'll finished getting them packed as soon as I've changed into some dry clothes.”

“You best put some fire under those feet, then. I'm pulling out at ten o'clock and not one
minute later.” Daniel Sr. poked his index finger into the air. “Efficiency! That's a physician's creed! If you ever want to make something of yourself, Junior, you'd do well to remember that.”

As if he could ever forget. The words had been drummed into his head since he was old enough to slobber on his father's stethoscope.

“I've got half a dozen kids waiting on those vaccines and I don't have time for—”

The monotonous tirade broke off as suddenly as it started. Both Daniel and his father became aware of a third presence at the same time, and both turned their head toward the apothecary entrance.

The first genuine smile Daniel had felt all day inched across his face at the sight of the stoop-shouldered woman watching them with amusement.

“If it isn't my favorite doctors sharing a tender moment of affection,” Louisa Gordon greeted them with a twinkle in her rheumy blue eyes. “Good morning, Daniel.”

God, how he loved the way she could make an insult sound like a compliment. “Miss Louisa.” His mood improving considerably, Daniel met her halfway across the room, picked up a veined hand, and kissed her knuckles. No matter what he thought of Linsey, her aunt had secured a fond spot in Daniel's heart. Not only was Louisa Gordon the only one in Horseshoe who didn't call him by that annoying nickname, but she'd been nothing but kind to him his whole life. And at no time had he appreciated her unfailing
warmth more than at the death of his mother six years earlier.

“Took a little bath, did we?”

“Something like that. How are you faring, ma'am?”

Louisa frowned, making the wrinkles in her forehead multiply like pleats in a linen sheet. “Better than Granny Yearling, I fear. I found her lying abed this morning.”

“She feeling poorly?”

“She says her bowels are giving her a bit of grief. I was hoping either you or your father would have time to pay her a visit.”

Daniel nodded. “If you'll give me a minute to change my clothes—”

“I'll fetch my bag,” his dad said at the same time.

Daniel sent a startled glance toward his father. “I thought you were heading out to Jenny Kimmel's place.”

“No reason why you can't give those kids their vaccinations.” Daniel Sr. reached beneath the counter for a black leather bag as old as he was and retrieved his bowler from a hook on the wall. “Take the stanhope. I'll stop in on Mrs. Yearling, then borrow one of Oren's nags and meet you later.”

Daniel bit his tongue to keep from reminding his dad that the whole reason the old miser had forked over money for the plush-seated buggy was because riding horseback aggravated his sacroiliac. But a man didn't argue with his father in the presence of a lady. Not that arguing with Daniel, Sr., ever did any good anyway.

“What are you waiting for, Junior? A brass band?”

Hell
, Daniel thought, heading for his room to change his clothes,
what else is going to go wrong today?

“When you said you wanted to go out with a splash, I didn't think you meant it literally.” Addie planted her fists on her narrow hips. “For Heaven's sake, Linsey, what were you thinking, dashing in front of those horses?”