A Great Catch (20 page)

Something was wrong.

And if Carter had to guess, that something had to do with him. The congratulatory peck on the cheek he’d anticipated from Emily never arrived, nor had any words of praise. Instead, Emily waited for him at the sideline, her face stony, while his teammates milled around, relishing their win.

“Out with it,” he said as soon as he approached.

“Not here.”

“Yes, here.”

“Not now.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Why not?”

Her gaze flitted to Greta and Elwood.

“Did Elwood say something to you? Upset you?” Carter clenched his fists. “Tell me what he did. I’ll take care of him.”

“And who’ll take care of you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you remember any bets you made? Perhaps ones involving my ability to hit a baseball?”

Carter’s gut clenched as if he’d been punched. “It’s not what you think.”

“Tell me what you were thinking.” She bit out the words. “Because as far as I can tell, there wasn’t a single intelligent thought involved.”

“Elwood Taylor got to me. He was saying you couldn’t do it.” He fought to keep his voice low. “I knew you could.”

“And so you bet on me?”

“I’m sorry, Emily. Honest.” He took her hand in his. “And at least we’re getting him back.”

“By dressing him up like a woman!” Her voice rose, and other players turned toward them.

“Shhh.”

She glared at him.

“Please.”

Her green eyes flashed. “You cannot make him do that.”

“Oh yes I can.” It was over Carter’s dead body that Elwood was going to get away with the rude things he’d said about Emily. No way. No how.

Emily jammed her fists against her skinny hips. “Carter Stockton, you are not going to ruin my Bloomer Girls’ game. Either the dress goes or you do.” Brushing past the gaping faces of Carter’s teammates, Emily marched off the field.

Carter took off his hat and scratched his head. What in heaven’s name had just happened?

Could things get any worse? Of all the people to be waiting upon her return from the Atlantic baseball game, Aunt Ethel was the last person Emily wanted to face. Didn’t elderly women go to bed early? And wasn’t this why Emily had spent the last three hours skipping rocks on the glassy surface of the lake until the sky had ribboned with color?

Her heart squeezed. On one hand, it was such a silly argument. Carter wanted to make Elwood Taylor wear a dress to the Bloomer Girls’ game. On the other hand, the deeper subject of the fight was an impasse they’d not been able to breach. At its very foundation was his respect for her work.

Three more steps and she’d reach the screen door without having to talk to Aunt Ethel.

Her aunt cleared her throat. “Getting home a bit late, aren’t you, Emily?”

“It’s been a long night. I’m heading to bed.”

“Don’t you mean it’s been a heartbreaking night?”

Emily stopped. How had Aunt Ethel been able to tell?

Aunt Ethel set down her knitting. “Problems?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Come now.” Aunt Ethel patted the empty rocking chair beside her. “I can see you’re upset, and I’m not the ogre you’ve made me out to be. I do know a thing or two about men. Your uncle Leo and I enjoyed many happy years together.”

Emily sank into one of the new wicker rockers beside her aunt and traced a curlicue on the armrest with her finger. “I don’t think you’re an ogre.”

“Old-fashioned and stuffy?” The dying sun caught a brief smile on her aunt’s sharply angled face. “I hope you realize I care a great deal about you—as if you were my own granddaughter.”

“Thank you, Aunt Ethel.”

“So, what happened? Did you have a tiff? I promise to listen without passing judgment. Or at least try.”

What did Emily have to lose? She wouldn’t be able to sleep for hours anyway.

Once she began, the words tumbled from her lips. To her aunt’s credit, she did not interrupt.

“This is worse than I thought.” Aunt Ethel heaved a long sigh and shook her head. “He loves you.”

“What?” Emily gaped. “How did you get that out of what I told you?”

“Let me see if I got this right.” Aunt Ethel peered over her spectacles. “Carter is angry with this Elwood fellow because he said unkind things about you, but you’re angry with Carter because he’s doing something about it.”

“No, it’s not that way. I mean—well, maybe it is, but not the way you think.”

Aunt Ethel tsked. “Emily, you are a brilliant young suffragist, but you don’t know a thing about a man in love.”

“Why do you keep saying that? This isn’t about love. It’s about him respecting my work.”

“You see it that way.” She stood and smoothed her skirt. “But for Mr. Stockton, I believe it’s about respecting you.”

“And there’s a difference?”

Her aunt emitted a rare chuckle. “Oh yes, Emily, there is. Good night, dear.”

“That’s it? No advice? No telling me what to do?”

Aunt Ethel gathered her knitting and peered over her spectacles. “You know what to do. You simply don’t want to do it.”

And Emily thought she was stubborn.

Two days of baseball practice and Carter hadn’t said a word to her.

Not one.

Even in passing.

The men whispered among themselves like gossipy old ladies. She heard them wagering on whether Elwood would have to wear the dress or not. She’d have marched over there and put an end to it if she hadn’t heard the odds were in her favor.

Lifting the bat over her shoulder, she allowed a hint of a smile as she met the pitcher’s eyes.

Hard as the dirt on his pitcher’s mound, Carter’s expression never changed. He fired a pitch. It flew by her so fast she felt the breeze, and it landed with a thud in Ducky’s glove.

Emily blinked. His anger certainly hadn’t cooled.

The next one sailed in even harder. Ducky grunted. “Easy, Stockton. This is only practice.”

Carter glared. He’d made his point and he knew it.

More like what she was used to, the third pitch came in a bit slower and she connected her bat with the ball—a grounder right toward Carter. Without hesitation, she tossed the bat to the ground and raced toward the bag. Carter didn’t toss the ball to the first baseman. Instead, he scooped up the ball and tagged her himself.

“You’re out,” he growled.

Maybe it was how hard the caramel in his eyes had become or how his voice seemed to be made of ice, but her eyes suddenly filled with tears.

No! She would not cry. She tipped her chin upward. “At least I tried.”

“Since when did you care if someone tried to do something?”

Before she could respond, he turned and marched back to the pitcher’s mound. Shoulders slumped, she trudged back to the bleachers.

How had things gone from bad to worse?

Hoooot. Hoot. Hoooot.

Emily covered her head with a pillow. The barn owl outside her window needed to go back to a barn. For the second night in a row, he’d made sleep difficult for her.

Who was she kidding? The only owl truly keeping her from sweet dreams was over six feet tall and looked very good in a baseball uniform.

Giving up on chasing sleep, Emily sat up and jammed her feet into the slippers beside her bed. She snagged her crepe wrap from a hook and padded down the hallway to the parlor. It didn’t take long to locate the matches and light the lamp on the table. Soon the pale light bathed the small room. Now, to find a book.

Emily ran her finger over the spines of each book in the case. Grandma Kate kept the bookshelf stocked with a blend of classics and new works:
Emma
by Jane Austen,
The Awakening
by Kate Chopin,
The Castaways of the Flag
by Jules Verne, and
Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories
by Rudyard Kipling.

A ledger wedged between H. G. Wells’s
Invisible Man
and Stephen Crane’s
Red Badge of Courage
caught her eye. She recognized it as the one Carter had spent hours poring over. What was it doing here? It belonged on her grandmother’s desk.

Emily tugged it free and set it down on the table. Then, returning to the shelf, she selected Rudyard Kipling’s collection of stories and turned to
Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
. Maybe the short story of that title would be close to counting sheep.

She couldn’t have been more wrong. The story of the two youngsters, Punch and Judy, soon made her rumbly stomach churn even more than before. In the story, Judy was treated warmly by her foster family in England, while Punch was miserably abused.

Emily closed the pages. This was not the light reading she needed tonight.

Her heart ached to reconcile with Carter, but she couldn’t give in. This was too important.

But she missed him.

Longing for a part of him, her gaze fell on the ledger again. Maybe if she could see his handwriting, it would help.

She ran her hand over the leather binding. His hands had touched the same volume only this morning. She opened the pages to the last set of entries, which bore his familiar script in notations beside perfectly balanced columns. Her eyes clouded with unshed tears. One fell onto the page and smudged the ink. She blotted it with her palm and read the figures beneath.

One hundred twenty-seven dollars?

How could Grandma Kate have so little in her general account? Her grandma always liked to be flush. The stocks and money she held from Grandpa Ethan’s experience in the silver mines more than supplied her grandmother’s needs.

Or at least they had.

She flipped back through the pages. Other entries seemed odd. Large amounts subtracted without any notation as to why. Notes penciled in the margins about talking to Nathan.

Was her grandmother in some kind of trouble? Surely not. Carter would have said something. Perhaps this was the banking discrepancy he was working out.

She closed the book. It was really none of her business. Carter was taking care of this. He might be angry with her, but he thought the world of her grandmother. He would make sure it all got ironed out in no time.

Still, if the subject came up, she could ask him a couple of questions.

If he ever talked to her again.

“I’m here to offer you a position on our club team.”

Carter looked at the contract the scout from Des Moines handed him following the out-of-town game in Glenwood.

“You’d be one step closer to the majors, and you’d be playing with men who would appreciate that arm of yours.”

A surge of pride swelled Carter’s chest. This was it. What would Nathan think if he saw him now? Carter cleared his throat. “Mr. Gibbs, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested.”

“We have a lot to offer. A salary of twenty dollars a month, lots of travel, meals, and a place to stay.”

“When do you need to know?”

“Two weeks.”

“Before or after the fourth?”

Mr. Gibbs twisted the end of his mustache. “Got a girl you need to talk to, huh? I understand.”

Carter clamped his lips shut. His first thoughts had been of Emily, but right now that didn’t mean much. What would she think if he left? Would she wait for him? It wasn’t like they had any commitment to one another.

So why did his heart lurch at the thought of telling her? He hoped she’d come to her senses soon so he could talk to her about this offer.

“I’ll give you until after the holiday. I’ll be in Council Bluffs for a couple of days next week. I’m staying at the Ogden Hotel. After you read the contract, we can get together and discuss it.” The scout stood and offered Carter his hand. “I enjoyed the game, and you’d enjoy being part of our team. I look forward to hearing from you.”

“Thank you, sir. I appreciate your interest, and I’ll be sure to let you know what I’ve decided as soon as I can.”

Waffles.

Emily took one look at the checkerboard treat drenched in strawberry syrup and recalled Carter catching the bite that had flown off her fork when he’d first come to the cabin. He’d grinned but never said a word about it.

Her heart squeezed. Why did Britta have to serve waffles today, of all days? Carter had yet to say so much as hello to her, and tomorrow she’d have to face him at the tent meeting.