Lisa Plumley - [Crabtree 01]

by The Matchmaker

  She swallowed, looking upward. “Am I…what?”

  “In a position to give orders.” He sent his gaze over her face, seeming to savor the sight of her. “Especially to me.”

  Oh, my. Her whole being quivered with a nonsensical urge to agree. To nod her head, to blurt her assent and be done with it. In the shadow of Marcus’s imposing form and surprising force of will, Molly could barely remember what they’d been talking about.

  “I’ll wear what I like,” he assured her.

  His tone, deep and sure, somehow signified that something greater than mere wardrobe was at stake. Alerted by that tone, Molly felt her usual backbone return.

  Time to be brave. Businesslike. Unimpeachably proper.

  “Perhaps a hat, then?” she ventured.

  He laughed out loud, stepping back a pace. Something akin to respect glimmered in his eyes. “You don’t give in, I’ll credit you that.”

  “I do not,” Molly agreed. “Is that a yes?”

  “To the question of a hat? No.”

  Disappointed, Molly frowned. But she had made progress, she was sure. It was almost as though by standing up to Marcus, she’d passed a test of some sort. Things between them had shifted subtly.

  They shifted again when Marcus next looked at her. Speculation enlivened his expression. “All this talk of suits has me thinking of work. But I’m not expected at the mill until noon, and until then the place is in capable hands with my foreman Smith. Why don’t we use this time to take a walk together instead? These things can wait.”

  The sweep of his hand indicated the baking supplies Molly had prepared. Dumbly she stared at them, then at Marcus’s broad palm. His hands looked capable, she thought inanely. Masculine. Unreasonably enthralling. She wondered how one of them would feel clasping one of hers.

  “You don’t really want to think about a boring business venture like ours, do you?” he went on, his tone persuasive. “Not when the sun is shining and there is leisure to be had.”

  His smile coaxed her to agree. Lulled by it, Molly almost nodded. It would be nice to take a stroll, to enjoy the changing colors of the oak leaves outside. Especially with someone whose company she enjoyed by her side.

  At times, she did grow lonely in Morrow Creek, where the townsfolk only thought of her as flighty Molly Crabtree, liable to embark on a silly quest at any moment. They didn’t understand that she’d only been searching for something all this time…something that would make her feel whole.

  “Your expression says you agree,” Marcus said, breaking into her thoughts. “Excellent.”

  He grasped her hand. His fingers, strong and slightly callused, entwined with hers as he tugged her away from the kitchen. The sensation was every bit as enthralling as she’d imagined. Surprised, Molly let herself be led for a moment, her only protest a backward glance at the flour, sugar and milk assembled in a tidy row.

  The supplies seemed to offer a silent rebuke. Are you here for a pleasurable stroll? they asked. Or a businesslike arrangement?

  She couldn’t very well expect Marcus to help with her dreaded bookkeeping, she realized abruptly, if she didn’t hold up her end of their bargain.

  “Wait! You haven’t eaten yet,” Molly said. “I’d planned biscuits with honey for breakfast. The fire is stoked and the oven should be ready soon. Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Hungry?” Marcus repeated. As though taken aback by the question, he examined her.

  In the process, his regard changed. At first rather hurried, it mellowed into a leisurely perusal that caught Molly by surprise. He did look hungry, she thought—and with a multitude of appetites. Not all of them, Molly expected, could be satisfied with her baked goods. Again she remembered her sisters’ cautioning words.

  She may have been a bit…reckless in thinking she could deal successfully with a man like Marcus. Particularly given her unexpected, untoward interest in him.

  “Let me worry about that,” he finally said, freeing her from his heated gaze. “Get your hat.”

  “No.”

  He looked perplexed. On him, the expression seemed a poor fit. Perhaps it didn’t get used often.

  “What?” he asked.

  “No,” she repeated, pulling her hand from his. She straightened her spine. “I’ll not get my hat.”

  He frowned, obviously displeased at her refusal. But why? Surely a walk wasn’t so urgent as all that. Yet Marcus seemed quite put out that she…no. There was something else afoot here. Suddenly Molly was sure of it.

  “But the outdoors awaits,” Marcus urged again.

  Beyond the glass-paned window he gestured toward, ponderosa pines crowded the small house’s yard. Mixed between them, the slender-trunked oak trees common to the northern parts of the territory brandished multiple-colored leaves. Molly could almost smell the fresh scents she knew the trees carried.

  Marcus didn’t glance longingly at the landscape at all, she noticed. It was then that she realized the truth.

  “You’re afraid!” She turned in wonderment to face him. She crossed her arms with the conviction of her revelation. “You’re trying to divert me from our tasks because you’re afraid. I can’t believe it!”

  “I’m not afraid of anything.”

  “You’re afraid of baking.”

  “Ha! Ridiculous.” He ran a hand through his hair. “You women and your outlandish ideas.”

  “Identify the flour,” Molly challenged, sweeping her arm toward the supplies at the other end of the room. “I dare you.”

  “Don’t be childish.”

  “He said, glowering,” she teased.

  “This is a very unbecoming side of you. Do you think I’m so helpless I can’t pinpoint something so basic as flour?”

  Silently she waited. The flour, salt and baking powder were in identical canvas sacks, perhaps eleven inches high and eight inches wide. Molly had sewn them herself, specifically for transporting baking provisions today.

  “I think you’re afraid to try,” she said. “Don’t worry. Everyone is uncertain at the beginning.”

  “I am never uncertain.”

  “That’s something we have in common, then.”

  Her pronouncement seemed to goad him into action. With one final, exasperated look, Marcus went to the worktable. He jabbed his finger toward one of the sacks. “This is the flour.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then we’ll begin the biscuits with two cups of that.” Molly joined him at the opposite side of the worktable and pointed to the teacup she’d found for measuring. “Go ahead and measure some out, then pour it into that bowl I prepared.”

  Marcus blanched.

  “Afraid you’ve guessed wrong?”

  He scoffed and grasped the teacup. It looked ridiculously fragile in his hand as he scowled into its bowl. He drew in a deep breath, then thrust the teacup into the opened sack he’d chosen.

  White powder billowed upward. Molly hoped he liked sour biscuits. She could tell from this distance that the substance held suspended in a stream of sunlight was far too fine to be the rather coarse milled flour she’d purchased at the mercantile. Sugar didn’t waft in a cloud like that. Neither did salt. Marcus had chosen the baking powder.

  She waited for him to admit his mistake. He did not.

  Instead, he peered skeptically at the teacup, now overflowing with baking powder. His drawn-together brows were frosted with white. The sight might have been humorous, if not for the earnest concentration on the features below them.

  Marcus snagged the rim of the earthenware bowl. He dragged it closer. He held the baking powder above it and prepared to empty the teacup.

  “Wait!” Molly cried. “I can’t let you do it.”

  He gave her a bland, cocksure look. Without taking his gaze from her face, he overturned the cup. Baking powder landed in the bowl with a muffled whump.

  Oh, no. This was worse than she’d thought, Molly realized. There would be no reasoning with a man who believe
d himself capable of everything. She hurried around the table to Marcus’s side.

  “That’s baking powder,” she protested, staring aghast into the bowl.

  “And…?”

  “You don’t need a whole cup of baking powder for this recipe. Unless you’re making biscuits for two hundred people.”

  He squinted. “We’ll need a much larger bowl.”

  “No, we won’t. We’ll need to start over.”

  Marcus gave the bowl an accusing look. “You see? We should have taken that walk I suggested.”

  “No, we should have begun at the beginning.” She refused to be swayed. Because Marcus was otherwise so capable, Molly had credited him with too much kitchen competence. But that didn’t mean she intended to give up, or let herself be distracted from her mission. “I can see now that I should have begun with something simpler for you. Something like…”

  “Like a walk.”

  “Like toasted bread,” she decided.

  “I prefer biscuits,” he said stubbornly. “I have biscuits every morning at the Lorndorff Hotel.”

  “Every morning?”

  He nodded. “Coffee, eggs, an edition of the Pioneer Press, and biscuits.”

  “What if you fancy griddle cakes one day?”

  “I prefer biscuits,” he said firmly.

  Evidently Marcus Copeland was a creature of habit. That masculine trait could work to her advantage, Molly decided, if she handled things correctly between them. She’d simply have to train him properly, and she’d succeed. Magnificently.

  “Then it’s biscuits you shall have today,” she acquiesced with a smile. Molly scooped the baking powder from the bowl. She returned it to its sack, then dusted her hands clean. “The eggs and coffee will have to wait for another lesson. But you must agree to do everything I say. To follow my every direction. In this, I’m your instructor. You are my pupil.”

  “You are enjoying this far too much.”

  “Nonsense.” She hid a smile. “I’m merely doing my part to make our business arrangement work. You’ll find I’m a very determined woman.”

  “You’ll find I’m a very poor pupil.” Marcus stared at their baking supplies, hands on hips in a disgruntled pose. “What I’ve learned I’ve learned on my own. I don’t take kindly to being told what to do.”

  “Then why did you agree to our arrangement?”

  For a moment, Marcus only went on with what he’d been doing—frowning the baking powder into submission. Then he shifted his gaze to her face. He shrugged. “I have my reasons,” he said.

  Leaving Molly to wonder, for all the rest of that day, exactly what those “reasons” of his really were.

  Chapter Five

  Molly Crabtree was a singularly confounding woman, Marcus decided after a morning in her company. She chattered nonstop, but never seemed to reach any kind of conclusion. She smiled reassuringly at him when he made mistakes, yet looked discomfited when he performed his unfamiliar tasks correctly. She gazed at him often, touched him occasionally, and nearly drove him mad with the way she held the tip of her tongue between her teeth while concentrating…but somehow managed to sidestep every flirtatious advance Marcus made.

  This last put a serious splinter in his plans. He’d come downstairs that morning intending to use everything at his disposal to end Molly’s cautiousness, win her confidence and extract the truth about the matchmaker from her. He’d expected her to crumble beneath his charm. He’d expected to have her babbling by noon. Instead, he’d survived three hours of biscuit tutorials, with nary a sign of weakening on Molly’s part.

  Was it possible he’d found the only person in Morrow Creek who possessed as much stubbornness as he did?

  Marcus didn’t think so. After all, it was widely known that women were indecisive creatures, prone to flights of fancy and changing interests. All he had to do was figure out Molly Crabtree, and he’d have this task completed. How difficult could it be, he asked himself, to reckon out one woman’s true nature?

  He’d have her tallied by sundown, Marcus vowed. He’d have the matchmaker’s secret delivered to the members of the Morrow Creek Men’s Club by moonrise. Tonight, the rafters of Murphy’s saloon would shake in celebration.

  The only trouble was—and Marcus was certain it was but a minor glitch—that she’d put him completely off balance. He could find no logical excuses for Molly’s behavior at all. No matter how he tried, he could not anticipate her actions. She was a puzzle to him.

  He should have realized the challenge that lay before him from the first. What kind of woman bypassed a leisurely stroll in favor of work? What kind of woman nattered on about her bakeshop with as much zeal as some ladies discussed quilting? Only Molly.

  As the morning wore on, Marcus became uncomfortably certain that, had he waved an issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book in front of Molly’s face, she’d have used it to flatten biscuit dough. She was singular. Confusing. And, he had to admit—however begrudgingly—fascinating to him.

  He wanted to figure her out. And then, to best her. Marcus refused to believe there might be any more to his interest in her than that.

  “Watch this,” he told her, brandishing a round copper biscuit cutter. “The third time’s the charm.”

  “Very well. Have at it.”

  Molly gestured toward the flour-dusted rectangle of biscuit dough before them on the worktable. It was their latest batch. The first had yielded breadstuff so tough it had nearly chipped his tooth; the second, flat mounds too brittle to do anything but crumble when touched. Molly had proclaimed herself mystified at the biscuits’ failure. Marcus knew that her lamentable baking skills were likely at fault.

  He brought down the biscuit cutter.

  “Push straight down,” Molly instructed, laying her hand atop his wrist. “Don’t twist the cutter. The biscuits won’t be able to rise properly.”

  “If you continue touching me that way, I won’t be able to concentrate properly.”

  “Oh!” She snatched her hand away. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” Marcus glanced at her. “I’d rather have your touch than another batch of baked goods any day.”

  As he’d expected, she looked flustered. Her cheeks brightened with a blush. Her hands fluttered.

  “Honestly, Mr. Copeland—”

  “Marcus, remember?” He paused amidst delivering his first few biscuit rounds to the waiting skillet that would serve as a baking pan. “We’ve been as close as dancers waltzing these past few hours. Surely you can call me Marcus. And remember to do so from here on, too.”

  Molly shook her head. “I truly shouldn’t. The matchmaker says that using given names is a sign of inappropriate familiarity between unengaged men and women.”

  Aha. Finally his patience had been rewarded with the opportunity he needed. He’d been right to wait for Molly to bring up the scourge that had been bedeviling the men. This way, she wouldn’t become suspicious about his interest in the subject.

  “The matchmaker?” Marcus scoffed, baiting his trap. “I don’t believe the matchmaker exists.”

  “Of course the matchmaker exists!”

  “I believe the women in town invented her. To have an excuse for pursuing the men the way they have been.”

  “That’s outrageous!”

  He shrugged. “The truth sometimes is.”

  With careful leisure, he arranged the final biscuits in the pan. Surveying them, he experienced an undeniable and ridiculous feeling of pride. Marcus dusted his floury hands.

  “Your theory is not the truth,” Molly protested. “The matchmaker does exist. I know it.”

  “You do?” Excitement simmered inside him. That, and a strong sense of impending victory. He had to tread carefully now. “Exactly how do you ‘know it’?”

  “I—I merely do. That’s all.”

  He tsk-tsked as he lifted the biscuits toward the oven. “Feminine logic. It’s as unassailable as a boat with a hole in the bottom.”

  Molly shot him an agg
ravated look. “How do you know the matchmaker doesn’t exist?”

  “I don’t.” Marcus grasped the oven door handle with a cloth to shield his hand, slid the biscuits inside and said a small prayer. If these were inedible, he didn’t think he could survive baking another batch.

  “It’s possible she exists,” he said with a careless gesture. “It’s possible I will wake up next week and find myself one of her hapless victims.”

  Molly grumbled something incomprehensible. It was probably just as well Marcus couldn’t understand the words, given her expression.

  “It’s possible,” he continued nonchalantly, “that Murphy’s dog will begin talking to him tomorrow.”

  “Ooh! This is all a joke to you, then?” Crossing her arms over her chest, Molly followed him to the stove. “The women in town merely wish to make matches with suitable husbands, and you find that humorous?”

  He pretended innocence. “Are you suggesting I shouldn’t?”

  “Of course you shouldn’t. There’s nothing funny about women making their own decisions, seizing their own destinies—”

  “Seizing any man within reach—”

  “Not any man! Particular men,” Molly disagreed. “Men whom the matchmaker has deemed appropriate. Haven’t you seen the matchmaker’s personal advertisements in my father’s newspaper? Even the blind advertisements are very precise.”

  “Precise?” Marcus echoed, setting aside his cloth. “Those advertisements are fiction. They’re about as believable as a dime novel.”

  She tilted her chin. “I happen to like dime novels.”

  “You would.”

  She gave a strangled exclamation and whirled around, then set to work cleaning bits of dough from their work surface with jerky motions. The exertion pinkened her cheeks, or maybe it was aggravation that lent her that particular glow. Marcus found it becoming, if a little alarming. Did she have to scrub the table with such…vigor?

  “Those advertisements,” he said, pushing a little further, “are obviously fabricated. They’re more proof that the matchmaker doesn’t exist.”

  “The matchmaker does exist,” Molly said tightly.

  “I’ll never believe it.”

  Fisting her hand on her cleaning cloth, Molly glared at him. Marcus tried to look as dubious as possible. She exhaled and went back to cleaning. She was close to revealing what she knew. He was certain. If nothing else, he figured, Molly would not be able to withstand being thought wrong about something. Anything.