Weeping Angel (25 page)

Her gaze blazed up at him, but surprisingly, she didn't slug him. “No.” Her voice cracked, and he sensed he'd struck a chord. “But I don't have m-m-m-many left! I'm a sour grape withering on the vine to a dried-up, wrinkled old raisin!” Then the mother of all torrents was unleashed.

Amelia bunched his shirtfront in her fists and hid her face next to his chest. He never would have believed one person could cry so much. “You're not a wrinkled old raisin, sweetheart.”

“Oh yes, I am!” Her voice came out muffled.

“What makes you think that?”

“It's obvious.”

Frank stroked her back, feeling the corded edge of her corset underneath the callous pads of his fingers. He ran his fingertips higher until he met the soft percale of her shirt and the vague impression of eyelet chemise straps. “It's not obvious to me.” Then he confessed before he thought better, “I think you're pretty.”

“Ewooh dah?” He felt the vibration of her mouth moving against his chest.

“What?”

She raised her chin and gazed at him; her lashes were spiked with dewy tears. “You do?”

There was no sense in taking it back. He'd spoken the truth. “Yes, Amelia, I do.”

She gave him a soft smile and a cute sniff. But then a pitiful frown. “But you'll probably marry Emmaline Shelby and I'll . . . I'll . . . I'll still be a wrinkled old raisin!”

“Ah, shit,” he cursed. “Where would you get an idea like that?”

She wouldn't give him an answer.

“I'm not in the marrying market, and whoever told you otherwise is deluded. Hell, I have enough trouble figuring out what to do with my life. I don't need to worry about somebody else's.”

“Well,” her voice broke with teary emotion, “I'm glad you set me straight on that subject. Neither one of us will ever get married.”

Frank was startled by her declaration. “Don't sell yourself short, Amelia.”

“Why not? I'm a . . . spinster.” She cringed when she said the word. “I'm destined never to marry.”

It angered Frank she would think so bleakly about her future. Holding her chin with his fingers, he said, “You shouldn't worry about something that's not true. You've got a lot to offer the right man, only you just haven't found him yet. Someone is going to snap you up.” Pap came to mind, and Frank tried to stifle his critical squint. “Sooner than you think,” he went on without much enthusiasm. “So you can stop wasting tears on spinsterhood.”

“I'm not,” she spoke with denial in her tone. “I'm mourning the frog.”

“Well, don't.” He brought his hand down and put his arm around her waist again. “I have to tell you, I didn't intend to give you a frog.”

“You didn't?”

“Naw. I sent Jakey and Daniel to pick the cattails, and the frog was their idea.”

“You didn't pick the cattails?”

“I'm sorry. I didn't.”

“I see,” she said in a flat tone. “Why did you bring me cattails anyway? I don't sign your business permits.”

“Because I thought you'd like them.”

“I see.”

“Why do you keep saying that?” Frank asked, drawing his brows down.

“I can't help wondering about your ulterior motives. You yourself more or less admitted you never give out presents for nothing. So it's only natural that I wonder.”

Frank felt uncomfortable. “I gave them to you
because I was apologizing for Budweiser and Beam, and because . . .” He was on the brink of admitting more to her than he was ready to admit to himself. “Well, Amelia, there's something about you that—” He broke off his thought, not liking the direction he was headed. “You're something, is all, Amelia.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but he went on. “And another thing, you're coming back to the Moon Rock to give lessons. I don't want to hear any argument, so don't give me one.”

“I won't.”

“You won't?”

She blinked a crystalline tear off lower lashes. “No. And you can thank ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' for my answer.”

Baffled, he asked, “What does ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' have to do with anything?”

“I'm supposed to play it at the Fourth of July picnic and have my students sing. The problem is, Mrs. Beamguard is the only one in town who has a piano besides you, and she won't let me use hers. I asked her, but she refused. Her excuse was the racket would upset the store. But I knew better when she advised me to go back to your establishment, or Daniel wouldn't be taking lessons anymore. She gets an illicit thrill of stealing into that stale drinking parlor of yours every week.” Amelia pulled back to gaze at him. “When I think of all the times I let her add the points in her favor during our Thursday Afternoon Fine Ladies Society canasta games. I would have said something if she hadn't been my partner.” Then from out of the blue, “Do you
really
think I'm pretty?”

He gave her a half smile and a scowl. “Pretty enough to get me into trouble.”

Her face brightened. She tilted her chin higher, closed her eyes, and made her full lips part.

Seeing the expectant expression on her face, he was tempted. The idea of recapturing the pleasure he felt
while kissing her pulled at him stronger than he would have liked. Cloaked in the cornstalks, it would be so easy to give her slow, shivery kisses without anyone seeing.

Staring at her inviting mouth, he lowered his head a few inches. He paused, contemplating the taste of her mouth against his. She'd be soft and damp, salty and sweet. He'd tease her lips apart this time, kissing her with more intimacy.

That last thought sobered him.

Intimacy.
As in a very close association, familiarity and devotion. Words he couldn't promise. Not to a woman like Amelia. And especially when Pap O'Cleary was counting off the days until he would marry her—never mind the man hadn't bucked up enough nerve to ask her to the Fourth of July picnic.

Frank dropped his arms from around Amelia's waist and took a step backward. “I think you better get inside. It's too hot out here for you.”

Her eyes fluttered open, and she stared at him with a bewildered sparkle in her gaze.

“I'll send Coney Island over to finish your lawn.” Frank steered Amelia out of the garden and across the grass toward her back porch. “I'm going to pay the kid to come once a week. Consider it a gesture of goodwill on my part with absolutely no strings attached.” He propelled her up the painted steps, deposited her in a green lawn settee, and stood over her. “If Dorothea Beamguard says the only way Junior will play the piano is at the Moon Rock, then that's how it'll be for now. I expect to see you there tomorrow at whatever the hell time it is you arrive. I won't hear you come in, I sleep—”

“—like the dead,” she quoted him.

“Yeah.” He laughed in a low voice. “You know the routine, honey.” Adjusting the angle of his panama, he tipped his hat at her. “I have to confess, the place
hasn't been the same without you. I got used to having you around. So did Pap.”

A small, shy smile touched her moist lips.

Frank was frozen for a long moment by the expression on her beguiling face. Unbidden, he slowly leaned forward. But when her lashes began to lower, he realized what he was thinking and curbed his impulse to kiss her. Straightening, he shoved his hands in his pockets. He couldn't keep doing this to himself. To her. Why was it, he had this need to get close to her? He'd never felt this way before about a woman, and it unsettled him.

“I have to get back to the Moon Rock,” he mumbled. “I'll be seeing you.”

She nodded, but he barely noticed. As he walked down the steps, he began to wonder if it would have been better for him to concede the piano and cut his losses. Continuing to see Amelia Marshall five days a week could cost him a lot more than being minus a New American upright.

O
n Monday, Amelia went to the mercantile to inform Dorothea Beamguard she was back teaching at the Moon Rock. The woman had been ecstatic and once again proposed Amelia give a small concert before the fireworks on the Fourth of July. Amelia went along with the idea to keep the peace.

Her first day back at the Moon Rock Saloon, Amelia was tense and nervous. Something special had sprung into existence between her and Frank in the corn rows of her garden, and she was reluctant to put a name to the intangible feeling. Friendship would have been the safest answer, but she knew there was more to it than that. She sensed Frank did, too.

Rather than sit in his favorite chair, drink a beer, and eat crackers during her practice time, he didn't show his face until four o'clock—the designated hour he had occupancy of the upright. When she looked up at him from the piano stool, his gaze met hers. His eyes were a blue so familiar to her, she didn't have to be close to him to recognize their dazzling color. He didn't say a word and just studied her with unhurried
intensity. She did likewise, noting he was freshly shaved, wore natural linen trousers, and sported a peacock green vest with gilded threads. His hair was damp from a comb and styled straight back from his forehead. Knowing he'd kissed her, and knowing how wonderful his mouth had felt on hers, she was hard-pressed to control the butterfly-like flutters in her rib cage.

Frank broke away first. He crossed to the bar, zipped some seltzer into a glass of ice, and drank it as if he were parched. Cobb Weatherwax came in with a few of the boys from the mill, so they had no opportunity to converse. But she felt him watching her back while she packed up her music bag. Just before she left, their eyes met over the hatted heads of men lined up at the bar. His parting look was so galvanizing it sent a tremor through her.

That Tuesday Amelia was afraid she was falling in love with Frank.

Wednesday she suspected her fears were sure.

On Thursday she made the hard-fought decision to make herself available to him . . . should he inquire. Which she almost hoped he wouldn't. Thoughts of what happened with Jonas Pray were too fresh in her memory for her to jump blindly into another relationship. Though all men weren't the same, Frank's vocation paralleled a part of her past. She couldn't ignore the pain and humiliation she'd suffered. If she lost her heart again, she would have to be sure she wouldn't be hurt.

She and Frank had been treading lightly around each other all week, careful to be polite. Yet there was an underlying current that seemed to charge the room whenever they occupied it at the same time. Even so, she could practically count on one hand the number of times Frank spoke to her. What he lacked in conversation, Pap O'Cleary made up for tenfold.

Pap bragged about himself so much, Amelia was
sure he had calluses on his hands from patting his own back. At first, she found his flagrant regard for her distressing, though not because she didn't care for him. Like a barbed-wire fence, he had his good points. But she could not encourage him because she had strong affections for another tugging at her heartstrings.

Friday, Amelia decided to test those feelings. She dressed in her very best Eaton style summer suit of imported navy cloth. The skirt was lined with rustling taffeta and interlined with crinoline, and every step she took whispered like fall leaves. She had chosen a smart scarlet four-in-hand scarf for her neckwear and a hat of her aunt Clara's she'd restyled with wired wings of lace and pretty bunches of wildflowers on the right and left sides.

Her first lesson was at one o'clock, and she'd finished her lunch early so she could go to Beam-guard's Mercantile to purchase red, white, and blue paper festooning to decorate the piano on Sunday.

Opening the door to the general store, the pleasant smells of new merchandise and old wood wafted in the air: the pungency of ripe cheese and sauerkraut; the smell of bright paint on new toys; kerosene, lard and molasses, poultry feed, gun oil, calico, coffee, and tobacco smoke.

The right side of the store contained dry goods: shelves of yardage, ready-mades, and the cabinet of Clark's Our New Thread. On the left was the grocery section: barrels of flour, sugar, and crackers, glass cases for cigars and penny candy, and a good array of cans, kegs, bottles, boxes, and bins. At the center stood the black potbellied stove gone cold for the summer. The chairs still circled around it with a chipped spittoon for the loungers.

Mr. Oscar Beamguard had been stocking jars of his wife's fresh strawberry preserves for sale when she'd
entered the store. He wasn't nearly as skeptical as his wife—nor as round. In fact, he was slim as a bed slat, probably only producing a shadow when he faced west or east.

“Good afternoon, Miss Marshall.” He set up his last jam-filled mason jar, then climbed down from his stepladder. “What can I do for you?”

Amelia peered through the curved glass display at the Independence Day decorations of red, white, and blue items and the shining stars surrounding them. She wished she could afford handheld flags for all her students, but they were a penny apiece. Lifting her gaze to Mr. Beamguard, she said, “May I buy the paper festooning by the yard, or do I have to purchase the roll?”