her words did not have the desired effect. Sally burst into tears and ran from the room, leaving Toby and Louise blinking in confusion.
Toby shrugged. “I guess she’s pretty upset.”
“I wish there was something I could say to make her happy,” Louise said.
Her brother hesitated before speaking again. “Speaking of happy…you know what, Lou?”
Louise, still thinking about Sally, answered absently, “What?”
“I was talkin’ to Louden and Jim outside the saloon the other day, and they said somebody’s discovered a whole lake of gold down south!”
Louise took a breath for patience. Even after spending his formative years in California, watching men go bust on a regular basis, Toby still had the gold bug in his system. “A lake of gold? Don’t tell me you believe that!”
“But what if it’s true?” he asked, his eyes glinting with speculation. When she glimpsed that expression in his eyes, she sometimes felt as if she were looking at her father. Jonah Livingston had been a dreamer and a gambler, despite their mother’s efforts to rein him in.
“You’re not going to look for a golden lake,” she said.
“Aw, Lou, please don’t start telling me about labor being the only way to spin gold.”
She laughed, pushing him toward the door. “I’ll spare you that if you promise to forget about lakes of gold and get back to the store and your studies.”
“Oh, all right,” he muttered under his breath.
She watched him go, wishing desperately for a way to work gold out of Toby’s system and Ty out of Sally’s. Then she turned around once more and sighed.
Ty Saunders. A vision of his bearded face and those alarming gray eyes danced tauntingly in front of her eyes. She hoped she would work him out of her system. Then again, ten months of trying hadn’t succeeded in making her forget him.
She feared the man was unforgettable.
Cal was miserable. That’s all there was to it.
For two days, Ty had been trying to explain to his little brother that there were other women in the world besides his precious Sally. Prettier women. Women with better temperaments. And most important of all, women with nicer relatives.
And what did Caleb have to say to all these assurances?
“You’re right, Ty.”
Nevertheless, for two days Cal had moped around the ranch like a lovesick puppy, his head drooping sadly as he went about his work. Nothing Ty said could tug him back to his normal spirits. He had no more energy in him than a damp rag.
Until now. When they were supposed to be having a quiet, relaxing evening by the fire. Cal was now restive, uneasy. The tromping of his heavy boots echoed through the room as he paced, punctuated by sad, ragged sighs that bordered on moans.
Finally Ty had to put aside the paper he was reading. “Darn it, Cal, why don’t you just forget her?”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.” Cal combed a hand restlessly through his blond hair.
“Here, do you want to read the paper?” Ty always lost himself in newspapers from faraway places, when he could get his hands on them. He liked imagining what it would be like to move on to a new spot. “This one’s from Oregon.”
“Nah.” Cal flopped into a chair and looked at him with eyes that were bleary from moping and lack of sleep. “Ty, have you ever been in love?”
“I sure haven’t,” Ty replied with something like a mixture of relief and pride.
“I certainly envy you.” Cal sighed. “You don’t know what it’s like to stay up all night, dreaming of a woman.”
Ty frowned. That wasn’t true, entirely. Just the night before, he had tossed and turned, thinking of that infuriating sister of the gal Cal was so stuck on. Louise Livingston. He’d had his eye on her from the moment he first landed in Noisy Swallow. Not only was she damned pretty, but there was something about that brittle pride of hers that endeared her to him, made him want to take her in his arms. The way the woman acted, a body would swear she’d been carved out of an iceberg. Yet when he’d danced with her that night so long ago, then kissed her, she’d melted for a few glorious moments. Moments that made him suspect that underneath her layers of coolness and efficiency, there was buried a real woman with a real woman’s desires.
He’d felt it again, fleetingly, two days ago when he’d grabbed her around the waist. She’d been pliant and warm…for the few seconds until she got away from him.
He let out a ragged sigh.
“Ty? Ty?”
“What?” Ty replied, startled from his enticing thoughts.
His brother looked at him suspiciously. “Are you sure you’ve never been in love?”
“Listen,” Ty said, purposefully turning the focus away from himself. “If you’re so determined that Sally is the girl for you, why don’t you go tell her so?”
“But Louise said she didn’t want us seeing her family anymore.”
“Oh, hang Louise Livingston! That woman’s head is all mixed up. She didn’t even know which of us her sister was in love with.”
Cal shook his head. “Even so, I reckon I made a rather poor impression.”
Ty laughed, recalling the look of horror on Louise’s face after she’d been rolling around in the mud.
In despair, Cal buried his head in his hands. “It’s not funny! She probably told Sally that I’m an imbecile.”
Ty’s smile immediately disappeared. He could stand that annoying woman thinking the worst of him, but his brother was a different matter entirely. She had no right to turn her nose up at Caleb, the kid brother he had raised from the time their mother had died, when Cal was no more than a sprout. Ty had worked hard to provide for his brother, was trying to make this farm profitable for his sake, and he wasn’t going to let some crazy woman go around saying that Caleb wasn’t good enough to be seen with her sister.
Just the thought made his blood boil.
“I tell you what you should do. Just go into Noisy Swallow tomorrow and give that woman a piece of your mind. Tell her you’re in love with her sister and you don’t give two hoots whether she approves or not.”
“But I do care.”
Ty grumbled. “Then why don’t you sneak into town tonight, snatch Sally right out of her bed and have a good old-fashioned elopement?”
His brother looked askance at that idea, too. “I wouldn’t want to do anything that would cause a permanent rupture between her and her family.”
“Well, hell, then, what do you want?”
With a heavy sigh, Cal propped his chin on his knee and looked dreamily into the fire. “Sally,” he said simply.
Ty harrumphed loudly and tried to turn his attention back to his paper. But again it proved impossible to concentrate on the rosy reports of verdant hills and farmland ripe for the picking. Since he had entered into a fight with Louise Livingston knowing that she was mistaken about which Saunders man her sister was in love with, he felt some responsibility for Cal’s hopeless situation. On his own, Cal would never have created such a bad impression. Normally Cal was well mannered, conscientious and unfailingly polite. But when Cal got nervous…
Louise was never going to allow Cal to court Sally as long