by Lisa Plumley
She wished she could know. So many things.
Including everything there was to know about him.
For the first time, Olivia was forced to acknowledge that superficial details like suits and books and hard-drinking habits could not define Griffin. Not in the way she wanted them to. They could not tell her how he looked when he drowsily awakened in the morning. How he sounded when he brought the day to a close with a murmured farewell at midnight. How he felt when he pulled his beloved close, kissed her passionately, and shared himself with her in all his unclothed grandeur. Madly, she wanted to. But she had not earned that private knowledge, Olivia reckoned. Given their situation, she likely never would.
After all, she was supposed to be considering the fate of The Lorndorff...not becoming smitten by the high-handed investor who’d assumed control of it and half the town’s whiskey supply.
Not that she’d glimpsed him imbibing a drop for days....
She was supposed to be minding her ladylike manners, too. If she had any sense whatsoever, Griffin would be off-limits to her. Until she was duly married, any man would be forbidden. But truthfully, it felt far too late to heed any of those constraints. Olivia felt much too needful herself for that.
“Once you’ve decided to be yourself among the townspeople here,” he declared, unaware of her improper thoughts, “you might find that you learn many new things.” His quizzical gaze took in her newly upright posture. He accepted it in his stride, seeming to understand that—for now, at least—their tranquil idyll had come to a close. Agreeably, he sat up, too. “You’d be surprised how much time for philosophical theorizing can be freed up simply by cutting back on discussions of ladies’ hats.”
“I do not only discuss hats,” Olivia retorted, suddenly feeling all too aware that the very things everyone valued her for in Morrow Creek were just amusing vagaries to him. “I’m also a member of the ladies’ auxiliary league, two sewing circles, the town picnic planning committee and the women’s ornithology club. It meets at my very favorite place in the world.”
He raised an eyebrow. “The Lorndorff?”
“Somewhere else.” Relieved to have a momentary distraction—and a puzzle for him for a change, Olivia waved away his guess. “My home is important, of course. It always will be.” Even if you steal it away. “But I can’t count it as my favorite place.”
Griffin considered that. “It must be Reverend Benson’s church, then. Given all your talk of perdition earlier on—”
“That was your undertaking. I only expressed concern for our good morals. You’re the one who volunteered to pay for our supposedly licentious sins in such a drastic fashion.”
“I did.” His soulful, suddenly sizzling gaze moved to capture hers. “And if that’s what’s destined to happen, I think I’d like to earn my perdition more fully first.”
Olivia couldn’t guess what he had in mind. She was too innocent for that. But the look in his eyes suggested it would be something pleasurable. Wholly pleasurable.
“Let’s move on.” Feeling bewilderingly overheated, she fanned herself with his hat. “Do you have another guess?”
“About your favorite place in the world?”
She nodded. “You’ll never guess. No one ever does.”
Griffin gave her a long, perceptive look. “Your favorite place in the world is the Book Depot and News Emporium.”
Olivia’s jaw dropped. “We didn’t even visit there!”
“We passed by it this afternoon.” Confident in his guess, he lifted his chin. “Your arm was in mine. You practically towed me clear off my feet and into that bookshop like a mule with an empty cart and a straight path to a barn full of hay.”
“Pshaw. I did nothing of the kind.” I hope.
Worried, Olivia bit her lip. She did have a distressing habit of veering toward that haven of books and periodicals when she had a chance. But ordinarily she limited herself. Purposely.
“Mr. Nickerson’s shop is not someplace I frequent.”
It was too dangerous to her boringly decorous reputation.
“Really?” Griffin angled his head. “I’d have thought you’d be there during business hours and afterward, as well...possibly with your nose pressed longingly against the window glass.”
She gave an outraged snort, pretending he wasn’t right. “The picture you paint of me is hardly complimentary.”
“It’s entirely complimentary!” he disagreed. “I happen to enjoy books myself. Two of my businesses relate to publishing.”
“They do?” Olivia perked up. “That’s so—” Exciting. Ideal. Heavens! He probably received books and periodicals at cost! No wonder he’d had a whole valise stuffed full. “Profitable for you?” she finished lamely, not wanting to reveal anything more.
It was no use. “It’s just as exciting as you believe it would be,” Griffin confided. “Except for the tabloids.”
He couldn’t mean... “You own the same tabloids that mock you? That work to create what I hear is an outrageous ‘legend’?”
“You sound skeptical of my legend. You don’t believe it?”
“Of course not. I believe me. Aside from which...” She goggled. “You really own the same tabloids that ridicule you?”
“Some of them.” He lifted his shoulder offhandedly. She’d have sworn he seemed pleased by her skepticism. That made no sense whatsoever. Why have a legend, if not to impress people with? “If it’s going to occur,” Griffin explained, “and I know it is,” he added as an aside, “I might as well profit from it.”
“That’s...perverse of you.”
“So is your zeal to deny your interest in the Book Depot and News Emporium.” Griffin grinned. “We are alike, you and I.”
“I only ever visit the Book Depot during the women’s ornithology club meetings,” Olivia informed him. “Grace Murphy has wrangled very favorable meeting space terms. She’s quite a force of nature here. She’s the town’s most avowed suffragist.”
“You’ve tried to distract me, but you haven’t denied my guess outright,” Griffin said. “I’m right. It is your favorite.”
Blast. Of course he was right. “Stop looking so pleased.”
“When I’m with you,” Griffin said, “that’s proving to be difficult.” He stood, then politely extended his hand to help her to her feet. “Contentedness is a peculiar feeling.” Briefly, he studied the creek. “But I believe I could get used to it.”
For a heartbeat, Olivia wanted nothing more than to hold his hand...and assure him that he could. So she did. Then handed him his hat, besides. After which, it felt only correct to say...
“I don’t only love books, you know.” She felt uncomfortably vulnerable to have been deciphered by Griffin so easily. Fruitlessly, she fixed her skirts. “There is also—”
“Music,” they said in unison.
She frowned. Then regrouped. “Inventing,” she declared.
“Inventing,” he echoed. At her incredulous look, Griffin merely made a funny face. “You left your sketchbook behind. I realized it was yours when I examined its pages as a means to return it to its proper owner. I thought it might be Palmer’s.”
“No one else even knows I possess a sketchbook!”
“I reckon that makes me special.”
It did. “And you haven’t returned it yet!”
“It’s fascinating,” he said in apparent defense of his keeping it. “Palmer isn’t half as imaginative as you are.”
Olivia couldn’t stifle a tiny smile. “They are good ideas, aren’t they?” Even though she hadn’t intended to share them, she was proud of them. Proud of herself. “It would be instructive to have a few prototypes produced. I don’t plan to, of course—”
“Why not? It could readily be arranged.”
“Not by you!” She didn’t want him to
think she’d been fishing for financing, like her father. “I can do it on my own.”
“I don’t doubt that. If you want to proceed the difficult way, I won’t stop you.” Griffin plunked on his dark hat, then took her hand. “You see? There’s no need for you to hide yourself from me, Olivia. As I said, when I’m not talking, I’m listening. I’m watching.” He smiled. “I like what I’ve learned.”
“Well.” Another man would have said he liked what he saw. Griffin was unique in that. But he’d never guess her most secret diversion. Olivia felt convinced of it. “That may be true. Thank you for that. But that doesn’t mean you know about my love of—”
“Baseball,” Griffin said.
“Pitching,” she declared at the same moment, referring to her cherished position on the emergent Morrow Creek women’s league, created and organized and picketed for by Grace Murphy.
Olivia actually experienced a momentary sense of triumph—until she realized that she and Griffin were simultaneously describing the same pastime. Again. Suddenly, she understood all too well Jimmy’s consternation when Griffin had addressed him by name this morning. “How did you know that?”
“Easily.” Griffin squeezed her hand. “You interest me.”
“You do have a spy. I swear, when I see Mr. Grant—”
Griffin only chuckled. “Don’t blame him. You and I have conversed over the past two weeks, Olivia. I’ve never talked so much in all my life. Why do you think I sound so raspy?”
His apparent disgruntlement over that was uproarious. But Olivia didn’t have the heart to needle him. “You were drunk. I didn’t think you’d remember a word of those conversations.”
“I wasn’t as drunk as you believed I was.”
“Evidently.” She pulled a frown, remembering her own blithe chitchat during those shared moments. “So all that chatter—”
“Only endeared you to me more.” He kissed her. “You’re lively, Olivia. When I was in the darkness, you brought the light. Whether I wanted it or not. You were strong and sweet—”
“Like a cantankerous slice of pumpkin pie?”
“—and without you, I don’t think I’d have survived.”
His simple declaration touched her like nothing else. Olivia sighed. She smiled. Then she gave up all her resistance.
Griffin Turner knew her. As incomprehensible as it was, he did. For as long as it lasted, she might as well enjoy that.
Lord knew, this feeling would not come round again.
“I’m happy you know about my fondness for baseball, then,” Olivia said, setting them both straight on the footpath to town. “Because that’s what we’ll be undertaking later next week.”
Griffin gulped. He looked adorably fretful. “Next week?”
“Yes. After the additional visitations I’ve planned for us, and the upcoming handcrafts show, and the town musicale,” Olivia told him briskly. She paused, feeling duly proud of her plans to bring Griffin out of his hermit’s suite and into the sunshine. He would enjoy the neighborliness and conviviality she showed him. She was sure of it. She was sure it might convince him to give up The Lorndorff, as well. “I’ve even finagled an invitation for you from the infamous Morrow Creek Men’s Club. It’s secret. It’s only for the gentlemen of town, so I won’t be attending with you. But I have an intuition that you’ll be quite—”
“Up to my ears in Levin’s ale, ribald jokes and faro?”
“Most likely.” Clambering nimbly up the rocks with Griffin’s hand to steady her, Olivia nodded. “If that doesn’t make you feel lucky to be alive, I don’t know what will.”
“I do.” Griffin stopped at the top of the ridge. He pulled her nearer, then kissed her. Reverently, he stroked her cheek. “I know what would make us both feel lucky to be alive.” For an instant, his gaze turned smoldering again. Then he blinked. “But if I ever give in to it...heaven help us both.” A smile. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Eleven
The only person more implacable than Olivia Mouton with a mission to roust a man from his bed, steal away his whiskey and bring him into the sunshine, Griffin realized four days after his creek-side outing with Olivia, was Olivia Mouton with a mission to introduce a man wholesale to Morrow Creek—and to all its many residents in a nearly nonstop parade of faces, names and backslapping bonhomie.
By the end of the first day, Griffin’s jaw ached from rare, unaccustomed smiling. By the end of the second day, his ears rang with half-remembered conversations and bellowed spontaneous greetings. By the end of the third day, his hand shot out at the least provocation, permanently in a state of readiness for a handshake. His throat felt sore from interminable chatting with the townspeople and with Olivia herself.
If he was honest, Griffin would have had to admit that he liked it. He liked knowing people who—true to Olivia’s example—did not care who he was, or did not know who he was, and bluntly accepted that, in the West, it was a man’s right to start over.
Griffin wanted to start over, he discovered as he accompanied Olivia to the millinery shop, to the livery stable and to the cooper’s yard. Maybe that was what had pushed him to come to the territory, he reckoned—a desire for change that he hadn’t been able to acknowledge, even to himself. He wanted to forge a simpler life. He wanted to be free of the Turner legacy. He wanted to follow the straightforward example of Morrow Creek’s residents and live according to his own rules. He wanted to awaken in the morning to birdsong—MacGillivray’s Warbler, Olivia informed him—instead of carriage traffic. He wanted to spend his days with honest folk—the cobbler, the railway men and the hardworking staff of The Lorndorff—instead of with scheming industrialists. He wanted to smell roses and spice cake and buttermilk toast instead of factory smoke and coal fires.
He wanted to be with Olivia.
The more time Griffin spent with her, the more he believed it to be true. Their creek-side outing had been...miraculous.
Holding Olivia in his arms had shown Griffin that there was goodness and pleasure and sweetness in the world. Feeling her touch him—feeling her stroking him without shirking or steeling herself to do so—had been revelatory. So had Olivia’s insistence—so unlike Mary’s—that she didn’t believe a word of his vaunted, ever-formidable “legend.” For the first time in his life, Griffin felt improbably at peace. He wanted to share that.
He wanted to share it with Olivia, if she’d let him.
Feeling all too mindful of his missteps with Mary, Griffin was careful to be courteous, yet interested, when in Olivia’s company. He did his utmost to behave honorably, yet passionately, toward her. When he held her hand, he made it plain that he was in command of their togetherness. When he kissed her, he did so not as a platonic friend, but as a man...a man who wanted more than he could reasonably expect or should practically allow himself to take.
Still, he wanted...and day by day, his hopes grew.
To him, Griffin realized as their time together lengthened, Olivia’s beauty lay more in her heart than in her appearance. Her appeal resided more in her intelligence and vigor than in her feminine figure and her innocently seductive movements. Griffin knew he ought to have cherished her for the same reasons every other man did, lest he disappoint Olivia by not raving about her obvious beauty. But he simply could not.
To him, Olivia was...more than beautiful. She was kind. She was considerate. She was funny and spirited. She was genuine.
At least she was, Griffin recognized, when they were alone together. When they were in polite society, though, his Olivia seemed to vanish. His spunky, determined, onetime chambermaid disappeared, replaced by an insipidly pretty automaton with perfect posture, vapid interests and a senselessly loquacious manner. In polite society, Olivia lived down to the commonplace expectations her friends and neighbors held of her. She laughed over their jibing that she was “too choosy” for a husband�
�when Griffin knew she simply refused to settle for a man who couldn’t appreciate her. She took in stride their remarks that she was “too mercurial” or “too frivolous.” She showed off her needlework to her friends with apparent zest—when Griffin had seen her abandon that sedate hobby with absurd haste every time he proposed another philosophy discussion.
Prompted by those observations and countless more, Griffin resolved to help Olivia break free from the constraining box she’d placed herself in. He knew she wasn’t happy there. He could glimpse it in her eyes when she launched another round of dizzy gossip or professed her undying pride in her mending abilities. Not that she was rude, or even that her feelings were apparent to anyone except him. Griffin didn’t think they were. But once he’d seen the signs of unhappiness in her, he could not ignore them. Olivia had saved him. Now he meant to save her.
Unlike him, Olivia didn’t need sunshine. She needed quiet rooms and books to read and sketchbooks to sketch in. She didn’t need introductions. She needed understanding and tolerance and a populace who would embrace her for who she was. She didn’t even need a rescuer in the form of a beastly industrialist with more determination, money and power than good sense.
Olivia needed courage. She needed love.
And because Griffin could not give her courage—not the way he could, and did, give her gifts and flowers and even the surprise of an enormous book delivery sent from his publishing house to her hotel—he had to make do with giving her love.
His love. He’d never offered it in such a wholehearted way before. Not even to Mary, who’d long since meandered from his thoughts. But to Olivia, Griffin did offer his love. He had to. He was so full to bursting with affection for her that he thought he might not be able to survive without expressing it.
So on a day when Griffin would have otherwise, in his old life, been brokering a contract or examining a property or upbraiding a colleague for behaving in a less-than-cutthroat fashion, instead he was holding open the door to the Morrow Creek meetinghouse for Olivia. He was ushering her inside with a sweep of his arm and an unreserved smile, feeling as proud as a peacock with a new set of tail feathers, ready to make a fool of himself if it made her smile. He was, on a temperate and peaceful territorial evening, racking his brain for new and impressive and heartfelt ways to make Olivia feel brave.
