by Hill, April
“All I’m saying is that you could have handled it differently.”
“What I want to know is what you’re going to do about it.”
He shrugged. “Nothing.”
“Nothing!” she cried.
“She’s a grown woman, Amelia, not a six-year old brat I can put across my knee and spank. And I can’t send her to bed without her supper, or wash her mouth out with soap, either. I can’t tell her to leave, because she’s sort of my responsibility. If nothing else, I owe it to Abner and Martha to look out for her. Yeah, she behaved badly, tonight, but what happened at the dance was between you and her, and I’m not about to get dragged into it and make things worse by taking sides.”
“Why on earth not? What happened tonight was entirely about you.”
“Me?”
“You surely can’t be that naïve, Griffin—or that blind. The girl is clearly in love with you.”
He chuckled. “Try to remember that this is the same girl who threatened to cut out my gizzard with a rusty fork. And I got the feeling she knew exactly how to go about it.”
“Be that as it may, her feelings for you have obviously changed,” she said smugly. “And you either can’t, or won’t see it. It’s quite possible that you may have feelings for her as well—deeply hidden feelings, perhaps, that you’re not aware of, yet.”
“That’s ridiculous. I haven’t seen her in four years, and didn’t even recognize her when she showed up. Until two days ago, I hadn’t laid eyes on Elyn O’Malley since she was in pigtails, with a face full of freckles. What you don’t understand is that a lot of bad things happened to her while she was growing up, and I think maybe she’s started looking around for someone she can try out her new female wiles on. And she’s trying it first with me, because I’m the safest man she knows.”
“And are you, Griff? Safe?”
“What the hell does that mean?”
She paused, and began toying with her gloves. “I think it’s possible that the feelings you have for her are not the kind you’re able to admit to yourself, for some reason. And if that’s true, it means that your feelings for me are… are not what I had hoped.”
“That’s not true,” he argued. “Any of it. It’s just that…”
“Then tell me this, Griffin. Are we going to be married someday, or not?”
The hesitation before Griff answered wasn’t long—perhaps three or four seconds—but that was around two seconds too long.
“I see,” Amelia said softly. She sat down on a small velvet bench, took a lace handkerchief from her matching green satin evening purse, and began to weep quietly.
He stayed with Amelia until she stopped crying and went to bed, but as he walked back out to where Elyn was waiting, Griff Harper felt like a coward for the first time in his life He hadn’t handled Amelia’s unhappiness any better than he’d handled Elyn’s spiteful performance at the dance—which more or less proved what he’d been worrying about since Elyn reappeared in his life.
He’d handled going off to war and being badly wounded. He’d handled the death of his father and the loss of the home he’d loved and expected to grow old on. He could handle cattle, and hard, backbreaking work. He could handle bad weather, crop failure, sick animals and every other problem life handed him. But it was pretty clear now, that he couldn’t handle women—and sure as hell not two women at a time.
* * *
He and Elyn drove home without much conversation, other than one or two comments about the condition of the road, and how cold it had gotten, this early in the fall. When they arrived back at the ranch, Griff unhooked the wagon and put the team away, then came back to the house, where he found Elyn sitting at the kitchen table, with an expression of pure misery on her face.
“I was a bitch tonight, wasn’t I?” she moaned.
He yawned. “You were a bitch.”
“Do you hate me now?”
“No, but I sometimes wish you weren’t too old to spank.”
“That never bothered you, before.”
“You were just a kid then. But it still bothered me.”
“It bothered me, too,” Elyn said, her voice low with remorse, “because I loved you, and I wanted you to love me.”
Griff chuckled. “You had a damned peculiar way of showing it, if you don’t mind my saying so. And besides, I did love you—in a way.”
“You had a damned peculiar way of showing that,” Elyn shot back. “You may not believe this, but after you left me with Martha and Abner, I used to daydream about you. Even that was hard for me, though, because I didn’t have a lot of romantic moments to daydream about. After a while, I figured out why you left me there, instead of taking me with you. You just didn’t love me.” She laughed. “I wasn’t surprised that you didn’t love me. The big surprise is you didn’t drown me. I was awful back then. So, there I was, only sixteen years old, dumb as dirt about men, and already a failure with them.”
Griff shook his head. “I did love you, but I wasn’t in love with you. There’s a difference.”
“Like a little sister, possibly?”
“Not exactly.”
“So, how exactly? I need to know, Griff, because… well, because I can tell that Amelia loves you, and you probably love her, and…”
“I don’t love her, Elyn, not really. I like her a lot. I enjoy being with her. She’s made it easier to…”
He stopped talking, because Elyn was staring at him in an odd way that made him nervous.
“All right, I’ll admit it,” he began, again. “I missed you. And don’t ask me why, because I don’t know why. You’d been nothing but trouble to me back then. I kind of understood why you acted the way you did, but you were still a pain in the ass, and getting in the way of what I needed to do. During those four years we wrote to one another, though, I began seeing you differently. And when I left Abner’s place, knowing that I’d probably never see you again, I… Let me put it another way. I probably was kind of in love with you, even back then, but I didn’t want to admit it—to you, or to myself—because you were just too damned young.”
“Too young for what?”
“Too young to tie yourself down. Too young to get tangled up with someone like me, with no roots, and nothing to give you. I knew, even then, that there were a lot of places where nobody blinked an eye when young women even younger than you got married and had children. Maybe because of what you’d been through, but you were too young to be making that kind of decision about what you wanted to do with the rest of your life.” He hesitated for a long moment, and then continued. “And after the last few days, I’m beginning to think that maybe you still are.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Two days later, Griff drove into town to pick up Amelia, who had asked him to take her for a drive through the woods at Crabapple Valley, to see the last of the fall leaves. The wind had come up the night before, though, and most of the trees had been fairly well stripped of color, which now lay in brilliant, quickly fading heaps of red and gold. There was something sad about the leaves that they both felt, but that only Amelia articulated.
“This will be my last autumn here in Wyoming,” she announced quietly. “I’ve decided to move back east, finally. The shop did well, at first, but I believe the ladies of Mill City and I may not see eye to eye on what’s fashionable. In any case, business simply isn’t good enough to wait out a long winter, in the hope that it will pick up in the spring. I have an uncle in Boston who has asked me several times to come and work for him as a window dresser. He owns quite a large department store there, and it’s becoming quite the fashion, to do lovely things with display windows.”
Griff nodded. “Well, that’s right up your alley, for sure,” he agreed clumsily. “Everyone in town talks about that big window at Le Bon Chapeau—how it’s always so original, and all.”
She sighed. “Thank you, Griff. Decorating pretty shop windows does require a certain degree of artistic… Well, let’s just say that it’s the kind of thin
g I’ve always been good at.” She pulled her shawl closer around her shoulders and patted her hair back into place.
“Would you mind taking me by the house for a few minutes, so I can collect my things—my paints and brushes and what have you, and the clothing I’ve left there for our weekend visits? There’s quite a lot, I’m afraid.”
“You don’t have to do this, Amelia,” Griff said quietly. “I was thinking about asking Elyn to leave, as a matter of fact—as soon as I got back to the house, tonight. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t told her she could stay. I’m afraid she took it to mean… something it didn’t mean.”
Amelia shook her head. “No I think it would be best if I were the one to… I was hoping that you might have a few boxes you’re not using, though, that I could…”
“I have plenty of empty crates in the shed,” he offered. “I’ll have one of the boys to help. All you need to do is point, and… Are you sure you want to go to the house, tonight, with Elyn still…”
“I’m sure it will be fine, Griff.”
Griff shrugged. Personally, he wasn’t convinced it would be fine at all, but he was already making a silent vow to himself. If it didn’t turn out to be fine, someone was going to spend the next day or two with her jealous little butt on fire—the same shade of autumnal red as her damned hair, if he could arrange it. And what’s more, the red butt in question was going to be on a train south—on its way back to Rainbow Water.
The quarrel Griff had feared didn’t happen, because when he and Amelia arrived at the house, Elyn had already finished doing what Amelia had come there to do. It was obvious when they walked in that the self-appointed “mistress of the house” had gone from room to room, packed up everything of Amelia’s she could find, and stacked it in neat little piles. The few dresses Amelia had kept in Griff’s bedroom armoire were hanging on the hall tree by the front door, along with the floppy straw sun hat she always wore in the yard while trimming the roses. Her paints and brushes were bundled together on the dining table, along with her sewing and knitting basket.
Every last trace of Amelia Pomeroy had been stripped from the house, in the clear hope of hastening her departure.
“I knew you’d want to be coming by for your things,” Elyn announced as Amelia entered. “So I tried to help out a bit—with the packing, and all.”
For a long moment, Amelia didn’t say anything. Finally, with a wan smile, she picked up a small basket of yarn and handed it to Griff. “Thank you, Elyn, that was very thoughtful of you.”
Without a word to either of them, but a hard glare at Elyn, Griff carried the bundles and baskets outside. While he loaded everything into the back of the wagon, Amelia waited on the porch, bravely wiping away the lingering tears from her flushed cheeks.
Meanwhile, inside the house, Elyn was lurking nervously behind the new lace parlor curtains, watching as Griff helped Amelia into the seat and tucked a blanket around her legs to keep the dust from her skirts. Seeing the two of them together was hard enough, but Elyn found this tender and gentlemanly gesture on Griff’s part especially annoying, since she was convinced that it was exactly the sort of thing he’d never think of doing for her.
When they were gone, Elyn was disappointed to find that she wasn’t quite as pleased as she’d expected to be about humiliating her opponent, and driving her from the field of combat. The discovery both surprised her, and left her feeling oddly depressed, and even ashamed. The elation she had felt at Amelia’s tearful departure was already beginning to fade, and turning into what for Elyn, was an unaccustomed wave of remorse and regret. She was just beginning to understand the extent of the damage she had done with her childish fit of jealousy. Griff was mad at her now—probably madder than he’d ever been at her before. He might even tell her to leave, and send her back to Abner and Martha’s.
All of which left Elyn with a self-inflicted dilemma she’d never had to face before. What good was victory, in the end, if it cost you what you were fighting about in the first place? And if it was going to lose you the one thing in the world you wanted desperately not to lose?
She was also concerned about the expression she’d seen on Griff’s face when he left the house. More than simple anger, it was a look of disappointment, and a kind of weary sadness. What Elyn needed to know, but wouldn’t know until he returned, was what it was that he was disappointed about? And what was he sad about? About her? Or about Amelia?
When he didn’t come home by dark, Elyn told herself that he had simply decided to spend the night in town, rather than risk driving home over the rocky and badly rutted road. Traveling after dark could be dangerous at this time of year, with the cold setting in and ground getting harder every day. It was particularly unsafe in an aging buckboard, where a wrong turn could result in a lost wheel, or even being overturned into a ditch.
In going over all these dangerous possibilities, Elyn was trying not to think about the other, all too likely possibility—that he had left the house intending not to come back that night at all. That he was so angry he didn’t even want to see her, or talk to her.
By midnight, she was fervently wishing that Amelia hadn’t described her house in town in such excruciatingly charming detail. A delicious little white clapboard cottage, the woman had gushed, with the prettiest hollyhocks you can imagine, just outside my front door. She had elaborated even further, by describing the brass bed in her bedroom as enormous, with a new feather bed “So deep and soft, it’s like sleeping on a big, fluffy white cloud.”
Finally, when her always fertile imagination began coming up with visions of Griff and Amelia in intimate embraces on the soft-as-a-fluffy-white-cloud mattress, Elyn jumped up from the sofa and marched into his bedroom. She dragged Amelia’s hoity-toity hand embroidered coverlet and matching pillows off the bed, dumped the entire ensemble on the floor, then crawled under the covers, making sure to twist the sheets and the quilt in opposite directions. If the sonuvabitch was doing this to make her feel guilty, he was doing a damned good job of it. The least she could do in return was wreak vengeance on her defeated rival’s handiwork.
The problem was, it didn’t help. None of it—even punching her fist into his pillow until her shoulder tired. Soaking the pillow with tears wasn’t part of her plan either, but it happened anyway—at around four in the morning, when she still hadn’t been able to fall asleep. So, with the damage already done, she went ahead and wept into Griff’s ruined pillow until shortly before dawn.
The sun was just coming up when the sound of the front door being opened roused her from a sound sleep. She was still trying to get free of the tangled sheets and out of bed when Griff opened the bedroom door and came in.
He didn’t seem surprised to find her there, and barely glanced in her direction while he changed into a flannel work shirt and buckled on a pair of worn leather chaps.
“Aren’t you going to say anything to me at all?” she asked, in a pitiful voice.
Without looking up, he shook his head. “It seems to me you said enough, yesterday afternoon, but if you’ve got something else you want to add, just save it. Right now, I need to get back to work.”
With that, he left the room, and a moment later, she heard the front door slam again. Elyn threw herself back down on the damp pillow and began weeping even harder.
* * *
It was close to noon when she finally crawled out of bed, bleary-eyed after less than three hours of restless sleep on a wet pillow and in a pile of jumbled sheets. Somewhere during those highly unrestful three hours, she had had a dream in which the kitchen stove was on fire, and she was too tangled in the sheets to get out of bed and put the fire out. In the dream, Griff had come in, accusing her of starting the fire by trying to bake him an ugly, inedible birthday cake that he didn’t want. After hurling the ugly cake out the window, he bent her over the kitchen table and walloped the bejeezus out of her bare ass with one of Amelia’s hand-painted wooden spoons. (The biggest one, with little yellow rosebuds on t
he business end.)
The worst thing about the dream, though, was that the whole time Griff was scalding her butt, Amelia was standing right there in the kitchen, watching. She had her usual angelic smile on her face, and had just put the finishing touches on her own freshly baked birthday cake—four layers of frosted perfection, decorated with tiny, intricately detailed little horses and cows made with leftover icing.
Elyn remembered her grandmother telling her that no dream was simple nonsense, the way it usually seemed when you woke up, but that every dream foretold something that was going to happen in your life—not immediately, perhaps, but eventually, and inevitably. And it wasn’t hard to figure out what this dream had meant.
Thanks to her early upbringing, followed by hard years of forced domestic labor at Angels Unaware, Elyn was an efficient housekeeper, and a competent everyday cook. But she knew that she didn’t have a chance in hell of ever being as good as Amelia at the “finer” things about cooking and baking. Winning a second place ribbon in a cupcake and pot roast contest wasn’t what concerned her. She couldn’t have cared less about bettering Amelia at anything having to do with a damned kitchen. In the bedroom, on the other hand… Not only had she never actually baked a big fancy cake, she’d never done anything—fancy or otherwise—in bed with a man.
She spent the rest of the day bustling around the house—sweeping, mopping, dusting, and burning her fingers three times trying to iron two of Griff’s shirts. Next, she hauled in an enormous armload of kindling and wood, fired up the iron stove, and put a freshly plucked chicken in the oven to bake. Coming home to an immaculate house and a savory stuffed chicken for supper might not be enough to get her back in Griff’s good graces, but it was the only way she could think of to make at least a start toward a fragile peace.
It was already well past suppertime when an a obviously embarrassed Bob Givens came to the door to announce that Griff—who was currently down at the bunkhouse playing poker with him and the rest of the hands—had sent him up to tell her that he would be sleeping there, as well—all night.
