by Merry Farmer
The look Libby sent him might have appeared as a smile to everyone else, but to Mason it was more of an expression of gratitude and a hint that there was more she wanted to tell him. “Thank you, Mason.” She nodded, then glanced to her boys.
Her boys. Teddy’s boys. The younger one peeled away from Pete’s side and crossed to throw small, tired arms around his mother’s waist. He even looked like Teddy, with the same sandy hair and green eyes. It was all the reminder Mason needed of the embarrassment that had nearly fallen into deeper shame all those years ago. But that was then. Libby wore black now.
“Hold up, Cody,” he called after his brother. With a final nod to Libby, he hurried up Main Street.
“I didn’t realize you were as close to…to the Montrose boys as it appears you are,” Josephine said as soon as Mason was out of earshot.
The comment caught Libby as she stared at Mason’s retreating back. She’d surprised herself by wanting nothing more than to fly into his arms so that he could hold her and make everything else go away. After everything she’d been through. Heat flooded her cheeks. “I became friends with the entire family.” She gave Matthew an extra hug, then took his hand and continued to walk along Station Street.
Josephine fell into step by her side as Pete and Petey—two Petes in a pod, as the family had taken to calling them on the rare occasions when they were together—followed behind with the luggage. “Mason seems to be especially fond of you.”
Prickles of self-consciousness shot down Libby’s arms, making her hands numb. “I’m closest with the sister, Annabelle. Teddy and I used to travel up to Seattle to visit her after she married.” She glanced sideways, making contact with Josephine’s curious gaze. “The Montrose brothers are friends, and it’s such a relief to have trusted friends around in times of trouble.”
Josephine nodded and hummed. Her smile softened. She had gotten Libby’s point. “Friends are a godsend. I’m sure your Teddy would be pleased that you have Mason and Cody and Travis nearby right now.”
An unexpected smile touched Libby’s lips. “Yes, I think he would.” Teddy had always been fond of the Montrose family. Like her, Teddy was orphaned at an early age, and several times he’d said that the Montrose men were like the brothers he never had.
Would everything that happened after Teddy’s death have been different if the Montrose men—if Mason—had been nearby to help her?
Of course it would have. That must explain why her instinct was to turn to Mason now, in spite of everything. Libby pressed a hand to her stomach, tears stinging at her eyes all over again. She was growing to despise those tears.
“Aw, Libby, sweetheart.” Josephine stepped closer, circling her arm around Libby’s back. “I’m so sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to put you out or make you feel uncomfortable in any way. You must miss Teddy so much.”
Libby sniffed, willing herself not to fall to pieces. “I do,” she said, and yet in less than three months, so much had changed that her life with Teddy felt as though it had happened a hundred years ago.
“We’ll get you settled at home and you can take it easy for the next few days,” Josephine went on.
Libby concentrated on breathing until her emotions steadied. “No, no, I don’t want to be a burden to anyone. I want to contribute, do my part.”
“You know you don’t have to,” Pete seconded Josephine from behind.
“I want to.” Libby twisted enough to reassure him with a smile. “I cooked and did wash for the men at the logging camp, so I can cook and clean and do whatever you’d like me to do here. Maybe I could even get a job, give something back.”
Josephine laughed. “Honey, you don’t need to give anything back. You bring me joy, and that’s all that matters.” They turned a corner and headed up the tidy row of houses that made up Prairie Avenue. “Besides, you brought me my boys, and that’s good enough for me.”
She reached for Matthew with a laugh, tickling his sides. Matthew let go of Libby’s hand and took Josephine’s hand with adoration in his eyes.
“We saw cows and cows and cows from the train on the way here,” he said.
“Did you?” Josephine played along with mock amazement.
Libby smiled as the two of them fell into playful conversation. It was reassuring that at least someone was happy with life and the twists it had taken.
Once again, her hand slipped absent-mindedly to her stomach. Her smile vanished. Josephine and Pete had been so kind and generous to her and her family, but they had no blood ties. She had never lived with them in Haskell, the way her brothers and sister had. Her boys may have called Josephine and Pete “Grandma” and “Grandpa,” but that didn’t mean they owed any loyalty to Libby. There was a chance that when the scandal broke, they would give her the cold shoulder, shut her out of her own family in disdain. Josephine and Pete loved her boys like their own, but what would they say when they knew there was another baby on the way, and that it was not Teddy’s?
Chapter Three
A cold snap blew through southwestern Wyoming over the next few days. Mason was up to his elbows in work keeping the herd warm and comfortable. A few times he found himself in charge of Howard Haskell’s crew as Luke Chance, their foreman for the past couple of months, spent time in town with Libby and the rest of his family. There was work to be done, equipment to mend, cattle to be cared for…and all Mason could do was think of Libby.
“Did she seem all right to you last night?” he asked Luke as the two of them worked side-by-side, transferring hay from a horse-drawn wagon into troughs in the paddock for the cows to eat.
Luke shrugged, then jammed his oversized pitchfork into the load of hay. “Her husband died suddenly. They’d been married for almost ten years.” He paused, heaving hay into the trough with a pinched frown. “I don’t think I’d be half as calm as Libby is if something were to happen to Eden. Then again, I don’t have sons to be strong for, like she does.”
Mason grunted in reply, walking to the front of the wagon to coax the horses a few yards further down the paddock fence. “I guess you’re right. But are you sure Libby’s quiet is calm and not…not something else?”
Luke wiped the sleeve of his coat across his damp brow. He jammed his pitchfork in the ground, then leaned against it for a moment as he mulled over the question. “Libby’s always bottled up her feelings. I remember when our parents died. She cried at first, then she went all stony and stoic.”
“I forgot that the two of you were old enough to remember when they died.” Mason jammed his pitchfork into the hay in the back of the wagon, but left it there for a minute. “Must have been hard.”
“Hard? Yes.” Luke let out a humorless laugh and launched into motion again. The two of them heaved loads of hay into the next trough. “Damn scary is more like it. We all got dropped at the door of a third-rate orphanage because no one in the family wanted us. Libby was old enough to manage to keep us together, but I swear she didn’t smile for a year until things were settled.”
Even though that tragedy had been over for decades, Mason’s gut still twisted with anger on Libby’s behalf. “She’s a strong woman, a fine woman.”
“She is.” Luke agreed with a nod. “Or at least she looks that way to everyone else.”
Mason stiffened, frowning at Luke.
Luke met his eyes, then rolled his shoulders and continued to work. “My sister doesn’t know that I used to hear her crying in the night, when she thought the rest of us had gone to bed. When something’s wrong, she’ll hold it inside as long as she can, then she’ll fall apart. I’m just glad that so far, there’s always been someone there with her when that time came.”
“Teddy’s death.” Mason breathed out the words on a sigh. He didn’t know what he meant by them. Logging accidents happened all the time. He’d known more than one man who had fallen to his death while topping a tree. That’s why toppers were given extra pay. And why they were usually single, slightly older men.
So why was Teddy topping a
tree when he had a wife and children on the ground?
“You and Libby were friends before you and Travis and Cody moved down here, weren’t you?” Luke asked, pulling Mason out of his thoughts.
He wasn’t fast enough to hide the directions those thoughts had gone in, or how Luke’s question felt a little like an accusation. “Yep,” he answered, putting his back into his work.
Luke stopped, leaning on his pitchfork again. “Cody mentioned something to me once, after we’d spent a night at The Silver Dollar. The boys were talking about Bonnie’s girls, picking out which one would be the best match for each of us.”
“Drunk?” Mason grinned. Alcohol had its vices, but the conversations they all got into once the whiskey had been flowing were priceless.
Luke snorted. “Of course. Anyhow, Billy had just finished pairing you up with Pearl, when Cody contradicted him. He said there’d only ever been one girl that you’d taken a serious shine to, and the trouble was that she was married. Only you didn’t realize at first and nearly made a fool of yourself.”
“Cody said that?” Mason avoided Luke’s gaze.
“Yeah. And he said that the girl in question had a butt-ugly, ornery, no-good brother too. He looked at me and started laughing so hard his drunk ass fell off the chair after that.” Luke shifted his weight, smirking. “I think I just figured out the joke.”
Mason’s face was definitely bright red now, and not because of the cold wind. “You believe the stuff Cody says any time he’s at The Silver Dollar?”
“I do now,” Luke answered without hesitation.
Mason let out a breath and turned to him. It took a few more seconds before he could drag his eyes up to meet Luke’s. “Okay, I’ll own up to it,” he said, quietly. “I took a fancy to your sister when I first met her. I swear that I really didn’t know she was married. I’d been off at the logging camp with Pa when she and Teddy showed up, and I got back after Teddy left. Took two weeks of me mooning over her before Annabelle caught on and set me straight. I couldn’t look Teddy in the eye at first once he returned.”
“You still like her.” Luke cut to the end of the story Mason was working his way up to telling.
“What makes you say that?”
Luke’s grin widened, but his eyes held a certain wistfulness too. “Because you think there’s something wrong besides Teddy’s death,” he said, then turned to continue working. “And so do I.”
Energy and the desire to run to Libby and protect her with his life surged through Mason’s blood. “So why don’t you do something about it?”
Luke laughed. “Because she’s my sister. Every time I’ve tried to broach the subject in the past few days, she’s gotten all embarrassed and changed the subject.”
“What?” Mason paused, blinking. He didn’t understand women at all.
Luke shrugged. “Eden says that means it’s a girl problem of some sort.”
“What kind of girl problem? Do girls have problems?”
“If they do, they don’t tell us,” Luke chuckled.
For half a second, the conversation felt normal—like two men laughing over all the things they didn’t understand.
Another half second later and Mason’s fears swept back in, as worrisome as ever.
Luke glanced over his shoulder, catching the frown. He tossed one more load of hay into the trough, then jammed his pitchfork in the ground and leaned against it.
“You know, there isn’t much to do around here this afternoon. Lawson and Mike are working on repairs to the other wagons, and Billy’s inspecting the herd. If you wanted to go into town and, I don’t know, visit an old friend and see if she’ll confide in you, I think I could spare you for that.” He finished with a wink.
Unexpected relief washed over Mason’s shoulders. “You know, I think I might take you up on that offer.” He rushed to finish the job he had in front of him with a smile. “Don’t women like to have someone to talk to about things?”
“They sure do.” Luke’s smile seemed more relaxed too. “And once you get them talking, trust me, they never stop.”
Mason laughed, but it had a hard edge to it. “I’m beginning to think that I might not want her to stop.”
Luke’s grin twitched and his brow furrowed. “I didn’t really know Teddy that well,” he said. “Sure, I met him a couple of times, and he seemed like a really decent guy.”
“He was,” Mason assured him. “The very best of men. He was a good friend to us while we were living up there.”
Luke nodded, then went on. “You think he’s the kind of man who would want to know that his wife and sons were safe and well-looked-after now that he’s gone?” There was no mistaking the meaning behind the sideways look Luke shot him. It was a blessing and permission to court his sister if he wanted to.
“I reckon he was,” Mason answered with a sigh. “But really, that’s up to Libby.”
Luke nodded, his smile returning. “You’re right. And sometimes my sister takes convincing.” He emptied a load of hay into the trough, then grinned at Mason. “So you’d better get going.”
Libby had no idea that young boys could screech so loud.
“I’m gonna get’cha, you filthy reb,” Petey shouted at the top of his lungs as he tore through Josephine’s back yard.
“No ya won’t, ya damn Yankee,” Vernon Strong, ten-year-old son of stationmaster Athos Strong, hollered back.
Petey and Vernon had become instant best friends the moment they had met a few days ago. The overflowing Strong family lived next door to Josephine, and since sunrise on the first day after Petey and Vernon had spit in their hands, shaken, and declared each other life-long “spit brothers,” the Civil War had raged between their two properties once more. It was all in fun, of course, but the Strong family contained eight children, their mother had passed away a little more than a year ago, and Athos’s sister, Piper, only had so many hands.
“I wanna play, I wanna play,” Matthew shouted, running after Petey and Vernon. It was Matthew’s bad luck that the two closest Strong children to his age were girls, and that they were more interested in catching Matthew so they could dress him up in what they called “baby clothes” and force him to pretend to be their little boy. In the past hour alone, Libby had dried three sets of tears, kissed two bruised elbows, and tossed two of the shirts she was attempting to hang on a clothesline in a frigid breeze back into the wash-basket after they’d been knocked to the dirt by one screaming child or another.
To make matters worse, one of the upstairs windows clattered open.
“Can you get them to be quiet please?” Muriel begged Libby from her bedroom. “I’m trying to read about Alexander the Great for a school essay.”
Libby sighed and jammed a clothespin into a pair of Pete’s drawers. She shot out her arms to catch a rampaging child, then twisted to deal with Muriel.
“Sorry. The worms have wriggled out of the can a bit.”
“I’ll say,” Muriel muttered. A moment later, contrition pinched her face. “I’m sorry, Libby. I know you’ve got a lot on your hands. I’ll…I’ll come down and help as soon as I finish this chapter.”
She ducked her head back into her room and shut the window, and Libby sighed. A rubber ball went sailing past Libby’s head, thumping against the side of Josephine’s house.
“Sorry, Mama,” Petey called to her from the porch of the Strong house, only a dozen or so yards away. “I was bombing the Confederate camp.”
Libby tried to smile at her imaginative son, but the panic that had been clawing its way up her back for the past three days—for the past six weeks, if she was being honest—wouldn’t let her. She couldn’t control two growing boys who had never been a handful before, how would she be able to keep them from running wild with a third? How was she supposed to keep them safe? And what would she do if, as soon as the new baby was put in her arms, she couldn’t love it? What if it grew up and took after its father?
The upstairs window slapped open again.
“It’s General Lee! Get him!” A wiry boy with black hair and stunning blue eyes had joined Petey and Vernon on the Strong’s porch at some point. Libby thought she’d heard Josephine call him Toby Faraday. Whatever the little scamp’s name was, he hurled another rubber ball up at Muriel’s window.
Muriel yelped as the ball sailed right through her window, swishing the curtains as it went. “Oh! I’ll get you for that.”
She slammed the window shut. All of the boys in the yard—Confederate and Union—bellowed insults and invectives at the top of their lungs and began to scatter. Libby had to scoop the laundry basket up into her arms to keep it from spilling to the ground. At least it was almost empty.
“Children, could you please calm down?” she shouted above the fray. There would be bruised knees to treat and scrapes to bandage if they weren’t careful. Not one of them stopped long enough to listen to what she’d said. “Stop please,” she tried again in a shout. “Just stop.”
Icy, invisible fingers stretched down her back as memories pushed to the surface. “Stop. Stop it. I don’t want this. No, stop.” Her voice shriveled more and more with each plea. Her vision narrowed and dark spots formed in the corners. For a moment, she wasn’t standing in a bright, nippy back yard, hanging laundry while children played. She was alone in a room with a closed door, in the dark of night, no one around to hear her pleas. “Stop. Please, stop.”
A large hand closed around her upper arm, and she jumped.
“Whoa, hold on there.” Mason’s voice split right through the darkness of her memory. She whipped to face him. He wore a teasing grin, the afternoon sun catching highlights in his brown hair. “Did the monkeys break out of the circus?”
As soon as he saw her face, his amusement vanished. Libby lunged against him, hiding her face against his shoulder. His strong arms clamped around her, but unlike Hector’s cruel embrace, Mason’s hug was comforting, safe. He was the one man who had wanted her, but had respected her boundaries, her marriage.
