Tomorrow's Shining Dream

by Naomi Rawlings

  He stood with his back to her and his arms propped on the low bookshelf that sat beneath the south-facing window. His body was still, and he looked almost frail as he stood before the massive opening. Strange. Pa had always been thin, but he’d moved about this office with the same authority that an army commander would stride about a camp of troops. Now the ten-point deer, mountain goat, and other hunting trophies hanging on the wall seemed to dwarf him, as did his large mahogany desk.

  “Pa?”

  “Charlotte…? I…” He started to turn, giving her a glimpse of an unnaturally white face. Then he crumpled to the floor.

  “Pa!” She raced around the side of the desk. “What’s wrong?”

  She knelt and gave him a gentle shake, and his eyes fluttered open.

  “What… what happened?” He wheezed out a cough.

  “You collapsed.” She raised her eyes to the door. “Consuela!”

  “Goodness, child.” Pa winced. “Take a few steps away before you start hollering.”

  “Sorry.” Charlotte set his head back down on the floor. The housekeeper was probably in the kitchen and too far away to hear the call, but if she was cleaning the dining room, she might come. “Just a minute. Let me—”

  “Use the bell pull,” he muttered as another cough racked his chest.

  The bell pull. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She rubbed her sweaty hands on her split skirt, then stood and headed to the wall where the rope hung. She tugged it three times before kneeling back beside her father and placing his head on her lap.

  “What happened? Do you have any idea why you collapsed? I’ll send to town for Doc Grubbins as soon as Consuela gets here.” Where was Wes? With the cowhands? Somewhere on their property?

  “Don’t.” Pa wheezed in another breath, his lungs working far too hard for what should be a simple action.

  “Don’t what?” She looked down at his pale face, then reached out to lay a hand on his forehead. He was hot.

  “Send for the doctor.”

  “You collapsed onto the floor. Of course I’m calling for the doctor.”

  “There’s no need.” He gave his head a small shake, though the bit of movement seemed to take all his strength. “I know what he’ll say.”

  Something about the flat, resigned tone of her father’s voice caused her to still, and a cold ball of fear lodged in her stomach.

  “What… what will the doctor say?” She whispered the words, but they reverberated through the room in a way that sounded like a shout.

  “That I’m dying.”

  “Dying?” Her hands clenched in the fabric of her father’s shirt. “No, you’re not dying.”

  He couldn’t be. Maybe he’d hit his head on the stone floor when he’d fallen, or perhaps he’d cracked it against the corner of the bookshelf. She raised her hands up to prod his snowy hair for any hidden lumps.

  Another cough shook his chest. It wasn’t overly loud, but it sounded deep.

  “Stop poking at me.” He waved her away but didn’t try to stand. In fact, he didn’t even try moving his head from her lap. “I might be old, but I know what I’m saying.”

  “You’re not that old.” He was just over sixty. She knew men who had lived twenty years past that. “Come on, let’s get you up and into bed. You ought not to be lying on the hard floor.”

  “Wait until Consuela gets here. She knows what to…” Another cough shook his body, loud and ugly. He rolled away from her and dug in his pocket for a handkerchief, which he used to cover his mouth.

  “Pa, what are you…?” But hard coughs filled the room, coming faster and faster atop each other, and the splotchy red stains that seeped into the handkerchief at his mouth answered all her questions.

  “Get away,” he rasped before another round of coughing started. “Don’t want you… to catch it.”

  It seemed like it took an hour for the fit to pass, though it might have only been minutes that she sat on the hard floor, watching her father curl into a ball as he coughed blood into not one or two, but three different handkerchiefs.

  When he was finished, he raised himself to a sitting position and reached for the waste bin beneath his desk—a waste bin filled with other bloody cloths.

  “I’m sorry.” Pa grabbed another handkerchief, this one from his bottom desk drawer, and wiped his mouth and hands before depositing that into the waste bin as well. “The doctors at the sanitarium say you can spread it through your blood and spit. That’s why I have to stay away from you and Wes. Don’t want you to get it, too.”

  “Sanitarium?” The word spun through her head. “You… you were at a sanitarium?”

  “Remember how I was gone for two months this spring?”

  “You were away on business.”

  He looked down. “Didn’t want anyone to know how sick I was. If the treatment would have worked, I’d have come back with no one the wiser.”

  If the treatment would have worked… And people only went to a sanitarium to cure one disease. Tears filled her eyes. “Is it consumption?”

  “Yes.” His voice sounded faint and weak, carrying none of the rich, strong, tones she remembered.

  She wiped a tear from her cheek. “And the sanitarium didn’t help?”

  “I’m still sick, aren’t I?”

  “People go to sanitariums to live for years. You were there barely two months. Maybe you should go back. I’m sure with time—”

  “I’m not a fool.” He pressed a hand to his chest and wheezed in a breath. “I could tell I was dying, even in the mountains of Colorado, even with a team of the best tuberculosis doctors in the country. You can’t blame a man for wanting to come home to die.”

  She pressed her eyes shut. This couldn’t be happening. Not her father. He was too young, too hardy, too—

  “Besides, I had to come home and find you a husband.”

  She sucked in a breath, sharp and piercing, as though she’d just inhaled jagged shards of glass into her lungs. “You didn’t leave the sanitarium because of me. Say you didn’t.”

  “I did, and I’d do it again.” His jaw was hard, though his eyes had a foggy sheen to them, and they were sunk back too far into a face that now seemed thin and hollow. “I mean to see you settled before I die.”

  Settled. Marriage. Andrew. She drew in a breath. “I like Andrew well enough, Pa, but I’m still worried he won’t—”

  “He will.” He made a slashing motion with his hand. “I’m already seeing to that. And I don’t want to hear you’ve made any hair-brained plans to marry someone from Twin Rivers. I know full well you would have run off with Sam Owens had he not found himself a wife.”

  Sam Owens? She twisted her hands in her skirt. How did he know about Sam… and did he know about Robbie, too?

  A firm knock sounded on the other side of the room, though from where they were sitting on the floor behind the desk, neither of them could see the door.

  “Mr. Harding?” Consuela’s familiar voice filled the room. “I heard the bell and… Mr. Harding?”

  Footsteps raced across the floor.

  “It’s all right, Consuela.” Pa’s voice held a raspy quality, and he wheezed in a breath. “Charlotte’s with me.”

  The plump housekeeper rounded the corner of the massive desk, her bosom heaving. She knelt beside Pa and placed a hand on his forehead, the movements smooth and gentle.

  Charlotte narrowed her eyes. There was something routine about the way Consuela handled herself. She was worried, yes, but not shocked, not asking what had happened.

  “I collapsed,” Pa rasped.

  “You knew.” Charlotte shoved at Consuela’s arm. “You knew he was this ill, and you didn’t say anything.”

  “Don’t be mad at her.” A cough shook Pa’s chest. “I wouldn’t let her tell you.”

  “Why?”

  His shoulders shook with a bigger cough, and he reached for another handkerchief. “I already said. No sense in telling anyone if my condition could be reversed.”

>   “But you returned home from the sanitarium. Why didn’t you tell anyone since?” She fisted her hands in her skirt. “When are you going to let Wes know?”

  “He has enough to worry about with the daily running of the ranch. No sense in worrying him more than I need to, so don’t you think about running off to find him when you leave.”

  “He needs to know now.”

  “I just need a few more weeks to get everything in order and then I’ll tell him. It won’t be much longer, I promise.” He reached out and patted her hand like he’d used to do when she was a young girl needing comfort.

  “I don’t think this is smart. If Wes is going to inherit—”

  “Stop fighting, please.” Consuela worked an arm under the top of Pa’s shoulders. “No good will come of arguing, and we need to get Mr. Westin to bed. Charlotte, can you put an arm under his shoulder to help him walk?”

  “I can get to my room fine on my own.”

  “Mr. Westin, please. I don’t want—”

  “Stop fussing.”

  Consuela dropped her hands and sat back, her lips trembling ever so slightly while Pa used his desk to climb to his knees.

  Something twisted in Charlotte’s chest, and moisture dampened her eyes. Her father shouldn’t struggle to raise himself onto his knees like a babe trying to crawl, or gasp for air as he heaved himself to a standing position.

  Almost as soon as he stood, another coughing fit came upon him, this one worse than before. His entire body shook, and he gasped for breaths in between rounds of endless coughing. Somehow he managed to keep his legs beneath him while bracing his arms on the desk. Consuela knew right where the handkerchiefs were and alternated between handing him clean cloths and holding up the waste bin for him to dispose of one blood-soaked rag after another.

  Charlotte didn’t know a whole lot about tuberculosis. She knew they called it the wasting disease, and now that she was aware her father had it, she could see the way his clothes hung on a frame that had grown painfully thin. She also knew the disease took months, sometimes even years, to ravage a person.

  Her father might have kept his illness hidden from her and Wes, but to do so, Consuela would have needed to know from almost the beginning.

  When the coughing finally subsided, Charlotte slid one arm beneath her father’s shoulder while Consuela supported his other side. He didn’t argue about the help this time, not when his lungs still rasped for air and his chest still shook with a series of small coughs.

  Never before had their house seemed so big as she and Consuela helped Pa out of the office and down the corridor toward the stairs. He moved slowly up one step, then another, and when they reached the top, he stopped for yet another coughing fit, sending Consuela rushing down to his room for another stack of handkerchiefs and a waste bin.

  Charlotte didn’t want to think about how long it took to get her father moved and settled in his bed.

  The furniture in his room had been rearranged after he’d returned from his trip that spring. She’d noticed it once or twice before, but hadn’t thought overly much about it. Now the position of the bed screamed at her. Its headboard had been placed on the western wall, allowing him to see out the windows that faced both south and east as he lay there.

  Was he really too sick to get up and walk to the windows if he wanted to look out them?

  “You need to drink.” Consuela poured a cup of water from the pitcher and basin on the dresser and handed it to her father.

  Pa shoved the cup away. “You don’t give a dying man water. You give him whiskey.”

  “Doc Grubbins said one of the best things you can do is drink lots of water.”

  Charlotte pressed her lips together. Of course Doc Grubbins would know about Pa’s condition, but Pa had probably paid the doctor a small fortune to make sure no one else knew of it.

  “I don’t care about how much water I drink. Now leave us alone. I’m not finished talking to Charlotte.” Pa settled his foggy eyes on her.

  “What about broth?” Consuela prodded. “Or a biscuit maybe? Marceau made bread this morning. I can bring a slice of that with—”

  “I said I don’t need anything!”

  Consuela ducked her head, then muttered some sort of apology before scurrying out of the room.

  “You need to treat her better.” Charlotte stalked over to the full water cup Consuela had left on the bedside table.

  “Sorry. I just… this disease is getting to me in ways I never expected.”

  “I’m not the one you should be apologizing to. Now drink this water, or you just might die of thirst before Andrew Mortimer returns from El Paso, and you’ll never know if I end up marrying him.”

  Pa didn’t even glare at her when he took the cup and drank half of it before plopping it back on the table with a thud. “You’re going to marry him whether I’m around to see it or not. I know you like living in the desert, but you need a man worthy of you, a man who can provide for you and keep you comfortable. No one in Twin Rivers matches that description.”

  “But what if Andrew isn’t happy with me as a wife?” She slid into the cushioned wingback chair beside his bed.

  “You’ll learn how to keep him happy. He doesn’t seem like a picky man. Confound it, Charlie, he’s probably easier to live with than me. Besides, I’m in the process of working out some negotiations with the Mortimers. Trust me, the business benefits of joining our families will be more than enough to make up for any initial shortcomings Andrew finds in you.”

  “Negotiations? Are you listening to yourself? I want a husband, not a business partner.” A tear slipped down her cheek and plopped onto her skirt.

  Pa reached for her hand. “If I were going to live another year, maybe you could spend longer getting to know Andrew, but the doc says I’ll be lucky to see Thanksgiving.”

  “Thanksgiving?” she squeaked.

  Pa heaved in a breath, and his shoulders seemed to fold around him, leaving him looking even frailer on the bed. “I’ll be the first to admit I haven’t always been the best of fathers, being so busy with the ranch. I should have hired some fancy governess from back East or maybe even Europe, should have had you do your schooling here instead of in town with all the other children. Then you would have learned to be more proper. But Consuela always said looking after you was no problem, and you loved riding out with Wes or me on horseback.

  “You were so small when your ma died.” The sorrow of old, bitter memories etched itself in the lines of Pa’s face. “I failed you then, but I’m going to make it right before I die. I’m going to see you married to a good man who can take care of you.”

  She swallowed. “You didn’t fail me. Never say that. It’s just… I don’t need fancy dresses or big houses or lots of money like Mariah. I wouldn’t mind marrying someone in town, someone like… like Daniel Harding?”

  She clamped her teeth down on her tongue. What had possessed her to say that? She didn’t care for Daniel in that way. At least, she didn’t think she did. But the more time they spent together, the more comfortable she became around him, and the easier it became to accept his compliments. She was even coming to believe most of them.

  But none of that changed the fact that Daniel didn’t care for her. The only reason they spent time together was because she’d begged him to do so. Either that or pity.

  So why couldn’t she get the memory of him calling her beautiful from her mind? Of him saying he liked how she looked in a split skirt or when she rode Athena hard and hair slipped from her updo?

  Why couldn’t she stop thinking about the way he’d stared at her lips when they’d talked about kissing at Closed Canyon?

  “Look, dumplin’.” Pa positioned himself higher on his bed and reached for his cup of water. “We’ve known the Hardings forever. They’re good folk, and I have no doubt Daniel would do his best to take care of you. But marriage is for life. Maybe you think you could be happy with Daniel now, but what about in five more years, or in ten?”


  He stopped talking long enough to take a swallow of water. “I’m looking toward the future, and while you say you don’t need fancy dresses or a big house or a place for your horses to run, you don’t know what it’s like to live without any of those things. What if you come to hate it? You don’t even know how to cook, and Daniel will never be able to afford a cook on his sheriff’s salary. Or maids to clean, for that matter. This is why I made arrangements for you to get married the first weekend in September. That’s a right nice time for a wedding.”

  The first weekend in September? Charlotte sucked in a breath. It was all so real, so true, so heavy. Even though she’d been telling herself she’d be happy in San Antonio with a man who shared her love for horses, the notion of actually donning a fancy dress and speaking vows to Andrew had still seemed distant. But there was nothing distant about having a wedding four weeks away. “Did you plan this with the Mortimers? When Andrew wrote to say he’d be spending three weeks here…”

  “He plans to marry you at the end of his time with us. I meant what I said about intending to see you married before I die, and I won’t apologize for it.” Pa kept his gaze pinned to hers, his fever-riddled eyes all too aware of the corner he’d backed her into.

  She drew in another breath, though the burning sensation in her lungs didn’t seem to lessen. If anything, it grew worse.

  She could fight it. Her father might be a hard man, but he didn’t have the power to force her to marry.

  But for whatever reason, when he looked at Andrew, he saw a better future for her than she’d have in Twin Rivers. And he loved her enough that he wouldn’t ask her to do something he knew she’d hate.

  Besides, if she didn’t marry Andrew, what would she do? Live here after her father died and become Wes’s spinster sister?

  Or ask Daniel to marry me.

  No, she was being ridiculous again. Like her father had said, she might know her way around a ranch, yet that would do the wife of a sheriff little good. And she didn’t have a clue how to cook or clean either.

  And if Daniel had gone twelve years without kissing someone because he wasn’t willing to share something so personal with a woman he didn’t love, he certainly wasn’t going to marry a woman he didn’t love.