Then she turned her profile to him and gave him an unhindered view of her right sleeve, pinned between her shoulder and elbow.
As if to ward him off.
He didn’t mind the injury. He’d seen worse as he’d traveled the state, boxing and spending time in saloons and places good girls didn’t go.
It certainly didn’t detract from her looks.
It was the memory of how it happened, his part in it, that made him wince. He tried to disguise it by chomping a bite of the cake.
He didn’t know if she expected him to just walk away, and she didn’t know him from Adam, but she’d soon learn he was about the stubbornest cowboy she’d ever meet.
He kept his feet planted right where they were. He’d waited through the last of the summer and all of fall to even get a chance to speak to her.
For once, he was right where he was supposed to be, doing what he was supposed to be doing.
He couldn’t mess this up.
She still didn’t look directly at him. She looked past him, into the other room. He let his eyes wander over his shoulder and saw her sister in conversation with Ned and Beau, his boss and the cowboy who’d become a close friend during the months they’d worked together.
The fact that she wouldn’t say a word to him was starting to make him nervous, and he reached up to stick a finger in the collar of his shirt.
And forgot that it was his burned hand.
Her eyes tracked to the scarring on the back of his wrist. Her face paled.
He saw her lips part and a silent gasp emerge. Her eyes went unfocused, as if she got lost in a memory. And he could guess what she was thinking about. That night. He’d been drunk, gotten into a brawl that had spilled from the saloon out into the street—where he’d spooked the horses tethered to her wagon. The animals had bolted and the wagon had overturned. And she’d been caught beneath it.
Her pa had said she didn’t remember everything about that night. She didn’t seem to recognize him at all or know that he’d had a part in the accident.
Now she made a sound like a hurt animal, some kind of soft cry.
His gut constricted. What if he’d done the wrong thing, coming in here today? But it would’ve looked suspicious, him not coming to the boss’s wedding when the cowboys were invited.
A glance over his shoulder showed no one from the parlor had even noticed her distress. He didn’t know if that was a good or bad thing.
He had to shake her out of the memory, if he could.
He stepped between her and the doorway, giving her a modicum of privacy and asked, as calm as he could, “You want some punch?”
Her panicked eyes rose to meet his, and he tried to give off the same confidence that his older brother Oscar had taught him when they trained horses together.
“Punch?” she asked tremulously.
There. He’d gotten a word out of her. Only the thin sound wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind when he’d come inside the ranch house today.
Still keeping himself between her and a view of everyone else, he stepped up to the counter and used the silver dipper from the punch bowl to get some of the pink liquid into a cup. He pressed it into her hand, and she inhaled, probably because the glass was cold.
But it seemed to break into her thoughts.
She flicked a glance over his shoulder, seemed to calm the slightest bit. Her breathing steadied.
“You okay?” he asked.
And she shook her head slightly. “No. No, I am not okay.”
With that, she swept past him and through the parlor. He turned in time to see her skirts swish as she climbed the stairs in the front hallway.
That hadn’t gone anything close to the way he’d planned.
Copyright © 2014 by Lacy Williams
ISBN-13: 9781460344385
A Season of the Heart
Copyright © 2014 by Dorothy Clark
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