by Jillian Hart
Maggie thought of something else. “Maybe we’re looking for a family when we should be looking for only one adult person.”
James shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “A woman with a child would find it almost impossible to travel that terrain alone in this weather, I’m afraid. It’s highly unlikely. And a single man traveling with a three-or four-month-old infant is also extremely unlikely, simply because most men aren’t comfortable alone with babies. And because there were no milk bottles to be found, the baby’s probably still being nursed, so a woman is mandatory.”
Everyone nodded in agreement.
“So we are looking for a man and a woman.” James turned to Maggie. His leg brushed hers, drawing her attention to how close he stood. “Do you remember anyone who might fit that description who passed through town more than three weeks ago, possibly even two or three months ago?”
“I get so many customers two or three months prior to Christmas.” Maggie sighed. “So many families with children. But some of them don’t shop with their children if they’re staying with relatives in town, or at the inn, or passing through. I don’t remember anyone with a small baby.”
Maggie angled her side against the counter, noting that James followed her movements with his gaze. “The fact that these people brought Christmas spices with them…it’s encouraging, isn’t it? I mean, it says something about their character. Someone intended to bake something nice for themselves or for their family, not to harm someone.”
“I used to cook in a penitentiary,” Mr. Rumley blurted above his stew. “Murderers like cake, too.”
His blunt comment hushed her to silence.
James lifted her chin with smooth, warm fingers. “That’s something only a woman would think of, Maggie, but yes, the baby’s folks do seem to be good people.”
With James’s reassurance, Maggie allowed herself the pleasure of optimistic thoughts regarding Holly’s family.
James approached the commander. “Sir, I’d like to send a team of scouts back to that area, if I may. One to the lumber camp and one to the local mines. If they take the route along the river, opposite to High River Landing, they can be there and back in three or four days.”
“In this weather?”
“The chinook is starting to melt everything. They could take the dogsleds.” James spoke in a commanding tone that Maggie had never heard before. “Maybe there’s something else going on that the Mounties should know about. I mean, if there was something foul involved in the fire, maybe it’s spread to the camps. Folks could be in trouble. I could head one team—”
“No, you stay here and finish what you started with the baby.”
“But I could—”
“No.” The commander shook his head. “I’ve got one almost the same age. I reckon the tyke’s grown attached to you, and considering the time of year, everyone needs someone to be attached to. Think of yourself as her guardian angel.”
The kindness of the commander’s words resonated with Maggie. James did make a wonderful guardian angel. He’d found the baby and brought her to safety.
The commander turned to Maggie. “Thank you, Miss Greerson, for keeping her with you in your home, and please relay my thanks to the other women for their generosity in helping. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll direct those scouting teams to leave immediately, and then I’m getting back to my tuba.”
Their walk back to town on snowshoes wasn’t nearly as difficult as their walk to the fort. Maggie suspected it had something to do with the buoyancy in their hearts, at concluding that Holly’s parents were loving folks who only through tragic circumstances had left their baby behind. She prayed for a family reunion, that Holly’s parents weren’t hurt or in trouble, that there was a reasonable explanation.
Yet doubts nagged at her. Even if Holly’s parents were good folks, were they the best people to look after a child? How could they leave their daughter behind? Even to an optimist, it was clear there was trouble here.
Taking a deep breath, Maggie wondered what would happen to Holly if no family was found. Would the child be taken away to an orphanage? There wasn’t one in town. There hadn’t been a need for it, for most families took care of their own if tragic circumstances befell another relative.
Maggie couldn’t seem to shut off her mind, no matter how she tried to convince herself that her runaway thoughts were premature. But who would take in Holly? Could she stay permanently with Maggie?
Her mind raced with wonderful possibilities, but in the end, sorrow rooted in her soul for Holly. The best thing for Holly was her own family.
“Hey, what’s on your mind?” James stopped beneath the same forest’s edge they had three hours earlier. The sun was setting and would soon sink behind the trees. Maggie stared at the long red streaks it cast over bulging drifts.
“You were looking fairly cheerful at the fort,” he told her, “and now you’ve developed a ridge between those big brown eyes.”
“I was thinking, what if Holly’s family never came back.”
“Don’t allow yourself to think that way. Tell your mind to stop.”
“And I suppose you do that all the time?”
“If I think of every worst thing that could happen in my duties, I’d never get through one day.”
“But in order to prepare ourselves about Holly’s future—”
“You can think a little bit about it, but just don’t dwell on it.”
“How do I turn off my mind?”
“Distract it with a completely different topic.”
She laughed. “Like what?”
“Like what are we going to do about these feelings between us? Between you and me, Maggie.”
Strapped into his long snowshoes, James continued on, his powerful stride emphasizing the handsome proportion of his body, leaving her agape at his staggering question.
Chapter Seven
“How can you say that?” Maggie pursued him down the gentle slope.
James heard her panting behind him. She caught up quickly. Her blond braid trailed beneath her red wool cap and flapped against her coat.
The revealing question had slipped out of his mouth. Now he wondered if he should have gone to the fort himself to speak to the commander, and Maggie should have remained in her store.
“Look, Maggie, we both know what’s going on.”
“What?”
Was she really too stubborn to admit it?
“Every time you come close, we both start twisting out of our long johns struggling so hard not to look at each other, or say the wrong thing.”
“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“Oh, no?” He gazed at the blood infusing her face, the overheated brow, the pumping of her hot breath that created clouds in the cooling air. As soon as the sun started to fade, temperatures dropped.
“What I know is that you’re just as drawn to me as I am to you.”
She sputtered. Her mouth flapped open, then closed. If the topic weren’t so serious, he’d consider her reaction comical.
“You’re the one who kissed me five years ago!”
“I don’t remember.”
“You do so. I can see it in your expression.”
“As I recall, you participated fully.”
Her gasp echoed down the valley. “What kind of a gentleman are you?”
“A straightforward one.”
“Well, I don’t think you’re straightforward at all. I think you’re overly complicated, forcing yourself to remain aloof and pretending you don’t give a hoot about folks or feelings or that little baby down there, when secretly you’re concerned about us all!”
Maggie stalked off down the hill, fueling his anger. Was she trying to race? Damn it, he’d give her a run for her money.
But she outmaneuvered him, stomping in and out of protruding branches too thick for his bigger shoes, so he had to go around, which took longer.
“Now just a minute!” he hollered down the snow.
; But her braid swung faster and faster against her red coat. What was wrong with this woman? Why did she have to compete?
“Slow down! You’ll fall!”
“I will not!” she yelled over her shoulder, leaning into the wind and now practically running.
“Maggie! Slow down and let’s talk about this. I won’t bite!”
He saw the branch too late. It stuck into his webbing and down he went. He toppled onto his shoulder, twisting his ankle in the process.
It was likely his cursing that stopped Maggie from running.
His feet had slipped out of his snowshoes, but they were still loosely bound by the ties around his moccasins. He flopped into the snow and lay there, looking skyward at the speeding clouds as they whizzed past in the deepening hue of the sky, wondering what to do about Maggie.
Her face came into view as she leaned over him. Her cheeks were tinted rosy from the cool air, her lips rich with color. An apology seeped into her soft expression. “Are you all right?”
“Why, in God’s name, were you running?”
“Because you make me mad.”
“Give me a hand and I’ll try not to make you madder.”
With a straining puff, her braid sliding over her shoulder, Maggie braced herself and held out her gloved hand.
He took it, but with great delight, gave a playful tug, which propelled Maggie down on top of him. He saw her snowshoes kick off, as they should in emergencies.
Her weight thudded helplessly against his sheepskin jacket and sank into his muscles for a split second before she tried to bounce out of his arms.
“You tricked me! Let me go! You’ve no right—”
He rolled her over so that she was lying beneath him. He pinned her arms into the crunchy snow. The thong ties of their snowshoes twisted together, but even entangled they still had enough leeway to move their feet. He braced his on either side of hers, enjoying the way the bottom half of his body sank comfortably into hers.
“You were saying?”
“You’re a bully.”
“No, I’m not, I’m much too soft for my own good. You said so yourself.”
“What do you want?”
“This.”
He kissed her. Right there in the white field with a hawk screeching above them, the sun dripping red glaze into the snow, and the cooling wind tugging at their hair.
It was more of a slow burn. A kind of heat that built up from inside his chest and made its way through his limbs, tingling beneath his skin and causing a wonderful friction between his lips and Maggie’s.
To his surprise and adding to his surge of pleasure, Maggie returned his kiss. As his bare fingers intertwined with her gloved ones and their palms locked, their mouths slid together.
At first he was more adventurous, moving with tantalizing slowness and trying to capture every heated inch of her smooth lips. She moved her mouth beneath his with an even rhythm, responding slowly then just as ardently as he. With eyes closed, he enjoyed the scent of Maggie, the taste of her, the feel of her soft body lying beneath his hard one.
She turned her head softly in the snow and he followed, then gently slid his right hand to rest his thumb at her throat. His long fingers spanned the entire left side of her face. The soft downy hairs of her cheek felt so feminine, so unlike everything in his life he usually touched and held.
He ached to connect with Maggie, and had been aching to connect with her for years. Why had he never realized it?
Her hands remained half buried in snow, above her head, as if the kiss had caught her so completely off guard that she couldn’t move.
But real life set in; the logical, unemotional part of him that kicked up a fuss whenever he suspected he was heading in the wrong direction, or too quickly, or that he was implying things by his actions that he shouldn’t be implying.
Kissing Maggie was like being caught in an unexpected ice storm. It felt exhilarating, made his senses come to life to details he normally never dwelled on, and brought awareness that he, too, was a living, breathing part of nature.
But when the storm was over, he’d be drenched, slightly stinging from the encounter, and all alone again, wondering if what he’d seen and felt had ever truly happened.
He raised his head and broke from her lips.
She looked at him directly, her brown eyes shimmering in the last strands of the sun’s glorious rays, her swollen lips pressed closed.
When she inhaled, her chest drew up beneath her coat. “That’s twice now you’ve kissed me, and both times outdoors. What is it about you and snow?”
Despite the tension between them, James smiled. “I guess it’s the chilly air combined with my hot blood and your temper that does something strange to me.”
“You are strange. First you tell me you enjoy my company, then you ignore me at the fort, then you argue with me, then you kiss me. What are you trying to tell me?”
“I’m not sure.” He rolled off of her and into the snow, so that they both faced the sky. Watercolor streaks of pinks, blues and purples announced the coming of nightfall.
Maggie lay remarkably still.
He listened to her breathing. He wasn’t sure if he should allow himself to feel something…and if he did, where it might lead them. He wasn’t sure if the desire he felt for Maggie was strong enough to overcome his doubts about the future, about what sort of man he might be if he felt harnessed by a woman. By a wife. He’d never felt good being responsible for anyone, and he might disappoint her the same way he’d disappointed his family when he was thirteen. Sure, he was an adult now, but he’d never been able to patch up his hurt feelings with his folks, even after all these years. He sent a brief note home to his mother once a year at Christmas, accompanied by many dollars, but he never spoke to his father. As a policeman, James found it much easier to help others with their problems, much easier to see clearly and advise.
Was it simply lust he felt for Maggie, or was it growing, looming over his head into something much, much deeper and more permanent? And much more terrifying.
“I’m crazy about you, Maggie.”
She didn’t answer. He listened for a long time, but she said nothing. Maybe she expected him to say more, or maybe she couldn’t respond in kind because she didn’t return the feeling, but either way, it left him with a large lump in his throat.
On the sullen walk to town, after James said his ankle felt better, Maggie thought about the mess they were in. She knew that James was the type of man who didn’t speak unless he had something important to say, so the weight of his words rang in her ears the entire trudge home.
Being crazy about someone meant you wanted to be with them as much as possible. Being crazy about someone meant you tried to get along with their family. Being crazy about someone meant that you opened up about your own family, that you shared your problems and your joys. James hadn’t done any of that, and to Maggie, what people did counted for much more than what they said.
How many men had whispered similar notions to her over the course of the last three years? Four? Five? It always came with a price. Not at first, not in the courting stages, but later, when they suggested matrimony and how they’d share in her house, or how they’d sell her business to put the money in their bank account, or how they’d order her around and how she was supposed to adapt to their way of life.
Maybe Maggie was just too set in her ways to make room for a man. Too set in her ways to let a man tell her how to live or run her business.
For all she knew, James would expect her to wait for him at home while he ran off trapping and scouting in the woods for weeks on end, only to come home to tell her how to operate her store.
Her sisters called her extra guarded with men, a no-settling type of woman, but Maggie called it being intelligent.
Wait and see, she told herself, the fabric James is made of, and make your decision then.
They reached the edge of town. The main roads had been plowed and the lamplighter was shuffling along the b
oardwalk using a long pole to light the street lamps. Orange balls of light glowed ten feet in the air as Maggie and James passed in silence.
James tugged off his snowshoes and Maggie did the same.
He took them from her hand. “Mr. Billings invited me to stay at his house as long as I needed, so I’ll just come inside your store to check on the baby and any news, then I’ll be out of your hair.”
But Maggie had a lot more to say. “I’d like you to come inside and stay awhile, if you’ve got the time.” Shaky with emotion, she swiped the fallen hairs from her eyes. “We could talk after the others leave.”
“Maggie…James! How did everything go? Have you learned any news about the baby?” Tamara greeted them at the door, shooing them inside, offering warm cider and quickly making James feel welcome. Come to think of it, Maggie’s family always made him feel welcome.
“We deduced a few things.” Maggie untied her moccasins then slipped into her house shoes, avoiding his gaze. “We’ll tell you about it as soon as we warm up.”
While James stripped off his sheepskin, Maggie did the same with her coat. He ran a hand along the black V-neck sweater that clung to his chest, and was glad to see that his denim pant legs were dry along the bottom.
He wondered what Maggie wanted to talk to him about. The anticipation made him worry, that she might tell him to permanently leave. And maybe that’s what he wanted, what was best between them. But then again, his pulse beat with hope that maybe she had feelings for him, too. Hadn’t he seen excitement in her eyes when he’d kissed her? Hadn’t he felt it?
And if he truly wanted to be straight with her, shouldn’t they clear the air and go from there? Don’t be such a coward, he told himself. She deserves to know how you feel.
Tamara brushed at the snowflakes that encrusted Maggie’s red coat, then looked quizzically at his, also covered. “Did you two fall in the snow?”
Flustered, Maggie ignored the question and slid the coat from her sister’s fingers to hang it on the peg. “How’s Holly?”
“She’s a darling.”
