Breanna smirked at him. “Was my brother a huge annoyance while he was in your care?”
Catherine glanced up from her plate to see the cowboy’s cheeks had gone pink in the shadow of his hat.
“In some ways,” she said.
Now his eyes cut to her, narrowed slightly.
“He was helpful cooking meals…but his penchant for games was…interesting.”
*
Matty’s irritation with his sister was minor in comparison to the joy of sitting next to Catherine.
She picked at her food, kept glancing all around. Her gaze seemed to keep hanging on Luella, who’d sat down with friends from town and Michaela. The men he’d invited. They were good workers. But the two gals had turned it into more of a social.
He’d seen Luella unload from the wagon with her friend Eileen and immediately sent a prayer winging heavenward that she wouldn’t do anything to humiliate Catherine. When she’d first arrived and gone to greet Breanna and Catherine, he’d been in the middle of discussing the final layout of the barn with his brothers and afraid that it would’ve made things worse if he’d rushed away from that discussion to bust into a female conversation.
But that didn’t mean he wasn’t worried about Catherine’s feelings getting stomped on all over again. He’d stopped noticing her trousers after those first days spent lying on the cot at her place, but he knew womenfolk could be persnickety about clothing and didn’t want a repeat of their school days.
He’d been glad when Luella had kept her distance and thankful that the women in his family seemed to make Catherine feel welcome. He trusted his ma and his sisters-in-law to keep any kind of gossip from spreading.
But now, seeing Catherine still nervous about the other fillies had his own nerves strung tight.
So of course he made a joke, guiding the conversation back to his games. “Don’t be fooled by her shy nature. Catherine whupped me at dominoes. Twice.”
Breanna and Cecilia laughed.
“I hope he wasn’t a sore loser,” Breanna said through a mouthful of his ma’s fried chicken.
“Do you remember the time he got so mad at Ricky—” Cecilia began speaking but broke off in a fit of giggles.
“Accused him of cheating,” Breanna agreed with a nod and a fit of giggles herself.
“Don’t believe anything they say about me,” he told Catherine.
As she watched the two younger women, a smile played at the corners of her mouth. “I don’t know. Your family might have other interesting stories about you I’d like to hear.”
For a moment, he got caught in her eyes. His chest seized up and he just let himself look, not caring that his sister and Cecilia were looking on.
“Oh!” Breanna exclaimed. “What about the time he put a snake in the teacher’s desk drawer—”
“Not that one,” he told his sister, aware of Catherine’s curious gaze. He didn’t want her to have any reminders of the ornery boy he’d been during his school days.
“Mmm—” Cecilia swallowed. “What about when your brothers put his saddle on backward?” She leaned toward Catherine as if they shared a confidence. “He was out courting—was it Luella?” She turned toward Breanna as if to confirm her statement.
Catherine’s eyes flicked to him. He met her gaze head-on. There was nothing between him and Luella now. He knew she’d been right to end it. If he’d felt an inkling of what he felt for Catherine for the other woman, they would’ve been married already.
But he hadn’t.
God must’ve known he was waiting to meet Catherine.
“So his brothers snuck onto her family’s farm and resaddled his horse, only backward. When he went to mount up, the horse was so confused it went one way and Matty the other.”
Catherine looked to him for confirmation. His face was hot, but he nodded. “Tumbled off head over feet. My backside was bruised for days.”
His sister and niece had dissolved into giggles again. Catherine looked as if she didn’t know whether to join them or to interrogate him more.
He’d finished his food and now set his plate on the blanket in front of them. “Don’t worry.” He leaned back on his hand, letting his fingers slide over hers where she reclined on the blanket, as well. “I’ll protect you from my siblings.” And he’d protect her from any trouble, whether it was gossip or a threatening neighbor.
“Oh, yes!” Breanna sat forward again, her eyes dancing.
He narrowed his eyes at her, warning her not to tell another story on him.
And Breanna being Breanna, she promptly ignored him.
“It was maybe a year after he came to live with us. What were you, ten? Eleven?”
Matty remained silent with his eyebrows raised. He wasn’t going to help his sister tell this story.
“Matty had gotten ahold of this storybook. Something about knights and Camelot. He made this sword out of a tree branch and rode around on his horse protecting his kingdom.”
“A prince, hmm?” Catherine’s head tilted toward him. Her eyes had gone soft.
“Knight,” he corrected softly.
Her mouth turned up in a smile.
If his sister telling stories about him made Catherine look at him like this, he’d sit through a thousand of them. Ten thousand.
A stifled giggle interrupted his perusal of Catherine’s lips. Breanna and Cecilia had gone suspiciously silent.
He looked over to find them hiding smiles behind their hands. Catherine cleared her throat. Her cheeks had turned pink.
“I have another surprise for you,” he said. He got to his feet and held his hand out to her.
She glanced back at where his ma sat. “I should help with cleaning up…”
“It’ll keep.” He held her gaze. “Please.”
She took his hand and allowed him to help her up. He tucked her close to his side and they walked on a path that would take them past the barn. And leave his family behind.
“Are you completely overwhelmed?” he asked.
“Not…completely. A little.”
It was a start.
“I’m wondering…did you tell them about my parentage?”
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s your business and no one else’s. I don’t know who used it to shame you before, but…if you choose to tell people, my family will support you.”
There was a beat of silence as they passed the unfinished corner of the new barn. Part of the wood sides were up, but it was still a skeleton. Give them the rest of the afternoon and it would be complete.
“I don’t know how to thank you for this,” she murmured.
Then they were past the structure and crested a small hill, and finally they were upon his next-to-last surprise for her.
She went still at his side.
“What are they—”
Her feet moved, as if she was going to rush forward, then went still at his side. She looked back at him. Her eyes were suspiciously bright.
“Are they…?”
He didn’t care if Oscar and Edgar saw from where they sowed wheat seed—that he’d bought from the mercantile in town—he put his arm around Catherine’s shoulders.
“As long as the weather holds and there’s no plague of locusts, you’ll have your crop at the end of summer.”
Her eyes had a sheen of moisture as she looked up at him. He let his hand move to cup her cheek.
“Eye spy something blue,” he whispered.
She rolled her eyes, shook her head slightly. “The sky,” she murmured. The intimacy of being in close proximity kept their voices low.
He shook his head, not looking away from her face.
“The jay in the tree.”
“Wrong again.”
Her gaze flicked briefly over his shoulder and then back to his face. “I can’t think of anything else.”
Neither could he.
“Your eyes,” he whispered. He cupped her cheek and did what he’d wanted to do since he’d ridden in this morning. He kissed her, h
is lips moving softly against hers. Completely heedless of his brothers in seeing distance.
Her hand came up to rest against the nape of his neck.
When he finally drew away, they were both breathless. He hugged her close before releasing her, but he couldn’t seem to let go of her hand.
He thought about stealing a second kiss, but shouts and movement from the dugout had them both whirling in that direction.
Pop rushed from the soddy doorway, wielding what might’ve been a hoe. He ran straight at the picnic blankets. Oscar and Sarah were nearest the soddy with their children and Oscar jumped up, throwing himself toward Pop.
Matty started toward the melee at a run, barely registering Catherine behind him. Seb, Davy and Jonas had joined Oscar, all of their voices blending into a cacophony of noise. Someone—a woman—shrieked. Matty’s breath burned his chest as he got close. “Stop!”
And Catherine’s cry above it all. “Pop!”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Pop’s eyes were wild, his hair sticking out in all directions, as Catherine elbowed her way past two of Matty’s brothers and tried to get close to him.
Pop swung out with the garden hoe again and the man nearest—she thought it was Maxwell—grabbed hold of it, wrenching it from Pop’s grasp.
“Don’t hurt him!”
“Cath—” Matty’s exclamation was a warning, but he didn’t understand. He couldn’t know how scared Pop was going to be when he woke up from his memories.
And then there were still two bodies between them, but she was close enough to see sweat bead across Pop’s forehead and upper lip. His face went white as death and his eyes rolled back in his head as he collapsed.
“Pop!” Her shoulder bumped someone’s side, throwing her off balance.
“Everybody get back,” Matty ordered as she banged her knees hard in her bungled attempt to kneel beside her grandfather.
“Maxwell.” The quiet woman’s voice was followed by a shadow falling across Pop’s face.
Catherine smoothed back his hair from his sticky forehead, looking up to see Hattie’s compassionate expression as she extended a black doctor’s bag to her husband.
“Let’s take him inside,” Matty suggested.
He gently took her elbow and helped her stand, and that’s when she noticed the silence.
With so many people around, it hadn’t been quiet the entire morning. But now…she could hear a far-off bird chirp. The splash of the creek over the rocky streambed.
She began to shake.
Matty and one of his brothers carefully bent to lift Pop, ready to carry him back into the soddy. And she knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t keep her eyes from darting to the faces surrounding her.
Concern. Pity. Fear. Uncertainty.
And there, hidden deep in Luella’s eyes, something more. She would never forget this. She might even go home to Bear Creek and tell all her friends.
But Catherine refused to duck her head in shame. This might be her lot in life, but she was proud of it. Proud of the man who’d cared for her until he couldn’t anymore.
Even if her eyes burned with tears as she followed the men into the soddy.
*
“What does that mean? Cardiac hypertrophy?” Catherine asked.
She stood just outside the front door of the soddy, Matty at her side. Not touching. She’d kept a careful distance between them since Pop’s spell earlier this afternoon.
The hammering had started up again first, after they’d brought Pop inside. Matty had hovered until Maxwell had told him to go back to work.
She’d been allowed to stay.
When Matty had opened the door, just long enough to slip outside, she’d heard the soft buzz of conversations. And been glad for the reprieve.
The doctor had been patient as Pop had recovered from his faint. And thorough, listening to Pop’s chest with a funny-looking hollow tube, asking Pop question after question—quietly, so that Pop didn’t get agitated again.
He’d given Pop a sedative to help him sleep and then asked to talk to her outside.
She’d been surprised to find the sun setting and most everyone gone. Only a few hammer strikes sounded from the barn that was now complete, down to the doors and a window high on one side. Matty must have been watching, waiting, because he joined her as she repeated the question to Maxwell.
“What does that mean?”
Maxwell’s expression was serious, compassionate. Not pitying, as some of the others had been. “It means that his heart is slowly giving out. One of these times, he’ll have a spell so bad that he won’t recover.”
“Like Walt?” Matty asked.
Maxwell nodded, and Matty explained. “Penny’s granddad lived next door to Jonas—that’s how they met, but that’s not here or there. He was around your Pop’s age when he started having symptoms similar to Pop’s. Weakness in his limbs. Shortness of breath.”
“He died a few months after the first episode,” Maxwell said quietly.
Matty’s arm came up. Reaching for her. She turned slightly so that it dropped away from the back of her shoulder. His action was presumptive. Though she guessed it was no more presumptive than showing up with several wagons full of wood and wheat for her field.
She…wanted his support. She brushed an errant tear that threatened to track down her cheek.
But after what had happened with Pop earlier, any seed of hope she’d had was crushed, just like the wheat stalks in the hailstorm.
“There’s no telling how long he might live,” Maxwell said gently. “Some cases I’ve read, the person suffering weakness and shortness of breath lived on for years.”
“But not every case,” she whispered.
He shook his head.
She could tell he was a good doctor. He’d delivered the news honestly, gently.
But his gentle manner didn’t soften the blow. Pop might have only months to live.
“And the delusions? The mood swings?” Matty asked. Of course he would ask the difficult question when she was so very shaken.
“The dementia is a separate issue.”
Dementia. How could one word hurt so badly?
“It probably exacerbates the heart problem when he runs or flies into a rage. His heart can’t do the extra work,” he explained gently.
She couldn’t stop shaking, but she held on to both of her elbows. She could hold on for a little longer. They were going to leave. Not long now.
Maxwell said something else to Matty, but his words flowed over her like water over a streambed. He took his leave, mounting up on one of the few remaining horses and riding out.
Leaving her alone with Matty.
The couple of men finishing out the barn were nowhere in sight. Her memories played tricks on her as she heard again his whisper from weeks ago, It’s all right to lean on someone.
But he wasn’t going to be here anymore.
He would be going soon, as well. His job, his life were in Bear Creek.
And hers was here with Pop. After today, she knew there was no way he could interact with others safely.
And if he had mere months left on this earth, she wouldn’t force him into a situation that would make his final days dangerous for him and for others. They would stay on the homestead, where he’d been happy for so many years of his life.
And she wouldn’t ask Matty to stay, either.
Before the dustup, she’d loved seeing him interact with his family. Even when he’d acted annoyed with Breanna at lunch, there had been an affectionate undertone to their conversation. He’d spent the morning working on the roof and ribbing his brothers.
She knew he’d chafed under the isolation of the homestead. How many times had he mentioned going home in those first days?
She cared about him enough to want his happiness, and she doubted it could be here, so far from the people and the job he loved.
Her heart was torn from wanting the cowboy she couldn’t have, and battered from the dire new
s of the seriousness of Pop’s condition.
*
Twilight fell around them as Matty looked down on Catherine. She appeared to be barely holding herself together, clutching her elbows as if she might fly apart unless she held tightly enough.
The joy he’d felt earlier, the closeness when they’d kissed…it was all gone. Stolen by an old man’s health problems.
He didn’t want to leave like this.
He wanted to reassure her but knew that words weren’t always a comfort in situations like this. Only time and God’s presence would comfort her as Pop slipped away.
“You should go. You’ll be riding in the dark.” She didn’t look at him as she said it.
It skewered him when she raised one hand to wipe away residual tears from her cheeks.
His voice emerged hoarse when he said, “There’s one more thing.”
“What more?” she asked, and where earlier her words would have hidden a laugh, now there was only a tense uncertainty. “How can there be more when you’ve done so much? More than we can repay.”
“I— They didn’t do this so you’d feel a sense of obligation. Any more than you rescued me and put me up for weeks.”
She kept her head down but allowed him to draw her along to where he’d tied off his horse. He took a brown wrapped package out of the saddlebag.
Her hands dropped with the weight of it. She looked down on the package, leaving him with only a view of the top of her head.
She tapped the coarse brown paper, then fiddled with the bow in the twine that held it all together.
He swallowed when he wanted to urge her to open it. It was her gift. If she wanted to savor it, she should.
Slowly, she untied the bow. The twine fell away. She unfolded the paper methodically. Finally, finally his gift was revealed. Three primers of different levels, all bought new from the store.
She didn’t look up from where her fingers traced a pattern on the first book’s cover. “How did you know?”
Her subdued reaction was not what he’d hoped for. He’d hoped that in this moment, she would open up to him. Let me in.
“I found your old schoolbook tucked in the wall. I’m sorry I’m nosy.”
She exhaled what sounded like a laugh. A sad laugh. “No, you’re not.”
Love Inspired Historical October 2015 Box Set Page 19
