Liz Ireland (11 page)

“What are you doing here? Have you gone plumb crazy? You shouldn’t be riding.”

He looked into her face, making sure she still had color. “Nonsense!” Her cheeks and nose were pink, and her lips pulled back in a big smile. “I brought you some bread!” she said through chattering teeth.

Roy rolled his eyes. “Good, good. We aren’t exactly hurting for baked goods here, you know.”

She looked offended by his less-than-welcoming tone. “No, I didn’t know.”

“What was Ike thinking, letting you come out in this snow?”

At the sound of a door slamming, Roy turned and saw his uncle running out toward them.

Ed hadn’t put on a coat, only a hat and gloves, and he was banging his hands against his arms to keep the heat circulating in his long limbs. “Hello, ma’am, my name’s Ed McMillan.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Ellie said. “I’m Ellie Fitzsimmons.”

That, apparently, was all the conversing Ed was capable of with a woman. He pivoted toward his nephew. “Don’t keep her out here, Roy. Come inside after you take the horse to the barn.”

Roy watched as Ed helped Ellie down from her mount and escorted her inside. It was a good thing his uncle had a firm grip on her arm, because he slipped on the ice and nearly fell more than once in their dash inside. As they disappeared, Roy couldn’t believe his rotten luck.

He’d come here to get away from Ellie—but now he was stuck in an even smaller house with her. Was there just no escaping this one troublesome, beautiful widow?

E
llie was never so shocked in her life as when she walked into Ed’s kitchen and found a bakery. The smell alone nearly knocked her out, but nothing prepared her for the shelves and shelves of preserved apples and bottles and jugs of apple vinegar, applejack and apple cider. Apples were practically piled up to the rafters.

“You do all this?” she asked, half in awe, half in horror. No wonder the man had a distracted look. She wondered that he had time to sleep!

His cheeks colored ever so slightly, and he raised his head with modest pride. “Well now…I wouldn’t say
all
by myself. My nephews and Ike come over when they can and help me with the picking. That’s the onerous part, especially for an old soul like me.”

She smiled. “You’re not old—I’ll bet you’re the best picker of them all.”

“No, that would be Roy,” Ed said with a reverent nod toward his nephew, who was caught in the middle of the act of busting into a jug of applejack.

Roy had taken no pains to conceal the fact that he wasn’t exactly thrilled to see Ellie. Now, apparently,
he was going to try to drown out her presence with alcohol.

“Roy does a heap of work for me at harvest time,” Ed said.

Ellie folded her arms and grinned with just a tad too much sweetness. “And how nice it must be for you, Uncle Ed, to be able to tell Roy to go climb a tree.”

Roy popped the thick cork out of the applejack, scowled and stalked away.

Ed laughed. “Here, I’ll show you the pie he helped make just this morning.”

In a cool closet dug into the wall just off the kitchen, Ed revealed his real treasures. There were several pie safes bulging with the fruits of his labor—pies, loaves of bread, even strudels. Her mouth watered, and she realized that she hadn’t had a bite to eat since Ike’s breakfast that morning.

“I’ll be taking most of these into town. I sell a few things at the store there.”

Ellie thought of Clara Trilby behind the counter of the mercantile. “I see. I suppose Roy is an eager volunteer for that duty, too.”

Ed’s blue eyes blinked at her in incomprehension. But then, Ed was so caught up in the bounty of the apple he probably didn’t have time or inclination to worry about his nephew’s romantic life. In fact, Ellie would have given anything not to have to worry about it herself.

Why had she come here? It was certainly the most harebrained idea she’d had since…well, perhaps since her decision to come to Nebraska. Her next move would be smarter; she would go to town and tramp door to door and beg for a job if she had to.

Yes, beg. Doing so wouldn’t be any worse of an idea, or more humiliating, than coming here and
throwing herself at Roy McMillan had been. And it certainly couldn’t be any less successful!

A wave of queasiness washed over her.

Ed squinted at her. “Are you all right?”

She shook her head, suddenly realizing it would be pointless to lie when she felt as if she was going to faint. “If I could just lie down…”

She darted out a hand to brace herself as her body sagged against the wall.

“Roy!” Ed cried out in alarm.

In a moment, she was swept up by strong arms—Roy’s, she discovered. She tried to take comfort in that, at least. It might be the last time she ever found herself in Roy’s arms.

“These are the finest pies you’ve ever brought in, Ed,” Cora Trilby observed. “Just look at how beautiful the crust is!”

Ed regarded his creations as an artist might view a canvas—with love but with inescapable acknowledgement of his work’s flaws. “There’s a jagged strip on the lattice crust there. You might want to discount that one.”

Mr. Trilby hovered nearby. “Why don’t we take that one home ourselves, Cora? We haven’t had a pie since…”

His wife frowned at him. “Since the last time Mr. McMillan was here!” She turned to Ed with a laugh. “My husband’s going to eat us out of the family business one of these days.”

Ed nodded and forced a smile. Usually he enjoyed talking with the Trilbys—he spoke to so few people, and as business partners, they seemed to appreciate his work more than anyone else. But today he couldn’t seem to build up much enthusiasm for idle conversation.

He cleared his throat. “I was wondering…”

Mrs. Trilby tilted her head with interest.

It was all Ed could do to keep himself from stammering and blushing like a schoolboy. “I’ve heard that a woman named Isabel Dotrice is in town. Do you know where I might find her?”

The store proprietors’ eyes widened with curiosity. Of course they would find his question interesting, since everyone in town would know of his family connection to the woman. They probably wondered why he didn’t ask Roy or Parker where Isabel lived. He wondered that himself. His only answer was, he didn’t want his nephews to see how eager he was to visit their mother.

And Roy—if he hadn’t noticed Ed pumping him with questions about Isabel, it was only because Roy was too in love himself with the Widow Fitzsimmons to notice. He’d never seen his nephew in such bad shape over a woman, although when he saw the woman he certainly understood that she would drive a man to distraction. The unfortunate thing was, she didn’t seem to know it. In fact, she seemed to be eating her heart out instead of just plain eating, bringing herself to the brink of collapse.

It was an object lesson for anyone in love, he decided. Try to avoid it, let it fester, and you ended up with one woman sick in bed and a man guzzling applejack. Ten feet apart, crazy in love, and neither seemed to know it.

And so he’d left them. Loaded up his wagon, left a note in the kitchen, and driven off on his own quixotic mission.

Now he was so nervous he wished he was back guzzling applejack with Roy.

Mrs. Trilby’s face lit up with a polite smile. “Of course you’d want to know,” she said, her voice just
hiding the fact that she was trolling for gossip, “she was your late brother’s wife, wasn’t she?”

Ed nodded. “They divorced.”

As if the whole town didn’t know that. The breakup of Abner’s marriage had been the talk of the town—heck, of the whole county—for years and years.

Sensing that Ed was not going to say any more, Mr. Trilby leaned over the counter. “Says she’s going to open a dressmaking and millinery shop.”

Mrs. Trilby
tsk
ed loudly. “Can you imagine? There’s no call for any such establishment in Paradise! Why, we sell perfectly fine ready-made hats right in this store. I haven’t heard any complaints.”

Ed squinted over at the hat rack in the corner. He was no expert on women’s fashion, of course, but looking at the faded felt, limp trim, and drooping feathers that adorned the goods for sale there, he couldn’t imagine that Isabel’s enterprise could possibly fail.

“And she’s rented the building right next door!”

“Next door?” So close!

Cora nodded curtly. “The building with the red door. I think she’s living upstairs. Maybe you can talk some sense into her, Ed, but she doesn’t seem to listen to anybody. In fact, she seems a most peculiar sort of individual.”

He strained to hide his anger at that description. “If you mean that she’s rare, I’d certainly agree.”

He thanked them and bid them good-night, then had to hold himself back from running out of the store.

Just next door!

He scurried toward his wagon, not stopping until he had his hand on the basket he’d prepared for Isabel. His fingers shook as he checked each item. In the package he’d gathered all his best goodies. A pie with
a perfect crust, an applique apple made of dough adorning the top. Two jars of sweet applesauce with ribbons tied around the lids. A little jug of his best cider, and a loaf of quick bread baked that morning. Cushioning his goods were apples themselves—the most perfect he could find in his cellar, with drying leaves still on their stems. He tucked his best cloth napkin around the goods, and fiddled with the bow tied around the basket’s handle until it looked just the way he wanted it.

And all the while, he was aware of the fact that Isabel was right next door. So close she could see him if she looked out her window.

So close!

Why hadn’t she told him she was coming? Why hadn’t she written? He would have met her at the train….

He nearly laughed. Meeting her at the train seemed so insignificant after all the years they’d corresponded. Maybe she didn’t understand what her letters had meant to a man living alone. Certainly, he hadn’t poured his heart out to her, or anything near it. They’d always just written of everyday things. He’d been giving her reports on her children for fifteen years, until he felt almost foolish informing her that Roy and Parker, now grown men, seemed to be doing well and washing behind their ears, eating fine and all the things a mother might worry about.

In turn, she wrote him of her life in Philadelphia, of her shop there, and about her husband’s slow decline. The last time he’d written, it was to express his sympathy over the death of Mr. Dotrice.

He picked up the basket and carried it not toward her red painted door, but across the street, where he stood on the sidewalk and gazed at her new dwelling, trying to imagine her inside. His skinny legs practically
trembled beneath him, and he felt ridiculous for behaving so much like a young fool. He had every reason to simply walk up to her door and knock on it. No one, least of all Isabel herself, would think it odd. The whole town knew of their connection through Roy and Parker.

But no one could know what was in his heart. Any more than anyone could have guessed how he felt when, twenty-eight years ago, as a young man returning from what had seemed sometimes to be an endless and endlessly brutal and ugly war, he had finally stepped foot into the depressing sod house in the strange treeless land his family had moved to in his absence and found the most beautiful woman he’d ever laid eyes on smiling up at him.

And how he’d felt in the next second when he’d realized that she was his brother’s wife.

His brother’s marriage had been a kind of torture to him. He supposed he was actually in love with Isabel then; her smile brightened his days while she was there, and seeing her unhappy tore him apart.

Now she was free. And after twenty-four years, no one could say that he had horned in on his brother’s marriage or that his attraction for Isabel was unseemly. He’d waited. He’d been patient. Now he couldn’t wait another moment.

What’s more, he didn’t have to. When Ed looked up, he saw her, standing in the window by a gas lamp. He sucked in his breath, shocked by her appearance.

She hadn’t aged a minute! She was just how he remembered her—tall and slim and stylish. Beauty like hers could take a man’s breath away, as it had when he was a soldier coming back from war. As it did now. His eyes weren’t what they used to be, but even from this distance, he could see that her dark hair had the same soft sheen to it. Her blue eyes still
looked out at the world with humor and barely checked impatience, and her wide mouth was forever turned up in a wondering smile.

So much emotion flooded through him that he had to dart away from her line of sight. Though she hadn’t been looking his way, he suddenly felt terrified that she might have caught him staring at her. He stood in the shadow of a darkened building, clutching his apple basket and breathing heavily.

To see her so unchanged, so like the memory he’d held in his thoughts all these years!

The vision was humbling. She was the woman of his dreams, and now there was only a layer of brick and mortar and a few panes of glass standing between them. He was awestruck.

He was terrified.

He’d waited. Long years he’d waited. Years that had apparently glanced off her like water off a duck’s back. While he…

He looked down at his old hands holding his basket and suddenly made a quick assessment of the ravages time had taken on him. He was fifty-six years old, and looked it. No longer could he pretend to be her young and dashing McMillan ally. Years of living alone and doing farmwork showed: his hands were rough and brown. Under his old hat, his gray hair clung to the sides of his bald pate in unruly scruffs. Old, unstylish and unpressed clothes dropped off his lanky stooped frame. His moustache had gone untrimmed for what seemed like months—though surely it wasn’t that long? He couldn’t remember. That was another thing to make him shudder; his memory was going.

He was in the autumn of his years; not the gnarled old tree he was sure to become, but turning. Definitely turning. While Isabel—she still looked like spring
time to him, as fresh and as blooming with life as ever. She’d even come here with plans to start a new business. Hats! Still trying to make the world gayer, prettier. She would never be old.

He, on the other hand, already felt like Methuselah.

What could he do about that now? He couldn’t knock on her door looking like a rumpled old fool.

Slowly, he finally crossed the street. His heavy footsteps were not those of a romantic suitor now, but a condemned man. He reached the red door and hesitated a moment, staring at the doorknob her hand had touched probably a hundred times now.

He didn’t touch the knob. He didn’t even knock. In the end, after twenty-four years, all he could do was place the basket in her doorway and turn away.

When he was safely back in his wagon, heading away from town, away from Isabel, his hands still shook, but he felt better. Relieved. After all…he and Isabel…after all these years…

Well, it was a foolish notion. Why, everyone knew he was a dyed-in-the-wool bachelor, and happy that way. What did he know of love? It was all very well to lecture Roy about regrets and whatnot, but could he honestly say that he regretted having lived alone, free, creating his beautiful orchard? Isabel was beautiful, and he had happy memories of her. There were all sorts of things they could talk about, but that wasn’t love, was it?

Certainly not!

And when you came right down to it, love was damn painful. Look at poor Roy and that Fitzsimmons woman. Suffering? He was the one who had been suffering since Roy came for his visit. The boy had moped and growled and put too much cinnamon in the sauce, all because his heart was sore over a woman. Ed had recognized the symptoms immediately.
Roy had been acting exactly how Ed had on those days when he’d been sure a letter from Isabel would come, and none arrived.