if he felt the same way.
She should end this charade right this minute. Return to her cottage and read or…do something. Anything. Even hang wallpaper.
Her brain told her it was just a card game, a harmless pastime. Her heart told her something else—that it was dangerous. The more he unearthed about her, the more vulnerable she felt.
And that, she realized all at once, was how she had grown up—protecting herself from the real world of loss and pain by keeping everything hidden inside herself.
She felt dazed. Some sort of tension was building between herself and Clayton Black. Not as an opponent, but as a man.
Against her better judgment, Irene gathered up the deck and reshuffled it. She laid out five fresh cards for each of them and watched his capable fingers fold themselves around his hand.
“You know,” he said as she gathered up her own cards, “When I find Fortier, I just might kill him.” The words he heard himself utter sent a cold fist of surprise into his gut. He’d never shot a man in cold blood. Never even considered it.
“I don’t believe so, Mr. Black. For one thing, you’d hang for murder.”
“Tell the truth, sometimes I kinda figure on that. I don’t know how I’ll feel living and remembering what Fortier did to Pa and Jannie. Dangling at the end of a rope would be quick and easy.”
Irene heard his words through a jumble of her own thoughts. The man had given up hope. He would throw his life away because he was desperately lost, alienated from himself. Alone. She knew how he felt, knew the hurt, the helpless fury that came with the loss of someone you loved. They had both come to Crazy Creek on the same quest—to find a reason for living.
A little flutter of pleasurable apprehension laced across her belly. She wondered about him. She wanted to know…all kinds of things. She had to win the next hand!
Which she did. Her three nines beat his pair of jacks.
“Now for my question, Mr. Black.” She paused to phrase it with gentility. “What is the reason for your curiosity regarding my person?”
His gray eyes regarded her with studied detachment. “The truth?”
She nodded. “The truth.”
“Well, now there’s different levels of truth.”
“I want to hear them all,” Irene heard herself say.
“All right, then. On one level, I’d say it’s because you don’t ‘fit’ out here, and things—people—that don’t fit kinda make my nose twitch.”
“It is true, I do not fit. I come from Philadelphia.”
“And on another level I’d say because you’re the best-looking thing in this town and I’ve got a bit of time to admire it and be a tad curious.”
“Oh. Oh!”
“And at bottom, I guess you could say I haven’t had a woman in more than a year and I just wondered about you, the way a man wonders about a woman.”
“Mr. Black!” Irene jumped to her feet.
He lifted his hands from the desk and slowly got to his feet. “Miss Hardisson,” he echoed. “I warned you about this game. Truth is what we think we want to hear. Most times the real truth is unwelcome or shocking or—like right now—damned impolite. My apologies for offending you.”
Irene hesitated. She wasn’t offended, not deep inside. She was thrilled right down to her toes! He was a man—all man, from his broad shoulders to his tooled leather boots—and he had those kinds of thoughts about her? Something turned over inside her chest.
“I accept your apology, Mr. Black.” Her sentence came out a bit breathily, and she cringed in the silence. She couldn’t let him see how pleased she was by his admission. No man had ever uttered such stirring words to her! Back in Philadelphia, young men spoke ridiculously flowery phrases. But Miss Hardisson, I have long admired you from afar just didn’t measure up to this Western man’s blunt talk.
She loved it!
Heavens to Betsy, what was wrong with her?
Clayton stepped around the desk and took her elbow. “That’s probably enough poker for one evening. I’ll escort you home.”
“Mr. Black, you needn’t—”
His fingers tightened on her arm. “Clay,” he said. “And I do need.”
He blew out the lamp and walked her out the door.
At the bottom of her porch steps he released her elbow. “Good night, Miss Hardisson.”
She could not utter one single word. Everything about him pulled at her senses, his steady gray eyes, the squint lines etched at the corners, the dark, silky-looking hair that brushed his shoulders. She felt slightly dizzy in his presence.
She unlocked her door and on unsteady legs found her way upstairs to her bedroom. For an hour she sat staring out the open window, breathing in the warm, honeysuckle-scented air and feeling more lonely than ever before in her life.
Clayton. An unusual name. She’d ask him about it the next time they played poker.
Irene wakened when the sun was high and hot and the cackle of Mr. Gerstein’s chickens floated from the neighboring yard, punctuated by the snip-snip of his wife’s flower clippers. She lay still, listening.
A horse clopped by, pulling a rattletrap wagon. In its wake rose the scent of warm dust. Lulled by the sounds and smells, she offered up a short prayer of thanks to God for bringing her safely across the plains to this peaceful place.
Children’s voices echoed from the path winding past her house to Schoolhouse Hill. When the bell began to clang, the voices gradually faded into silence.
Irene sat up. Heavens, it was nine o’clock! She had Mrs. Madsen’s letter to answer and Arlen Svenson’s will to draft! Hurriedly she splashed water from the china basin over her face and neck and dressed in a royal-blue sateen work skirt and high-necked white shirtwaist trimmed with lace. Arranging her hair in a loose bun on top of her head, she secured her straw hat in place with a pearl-tipped hat pin and descended the stairs.
Except for her footsteps on the wooden staircase, the house was quiet. It still smelled faintly of paint and wallpaper paste, but even in its unfurnished state, it felt like home. Her home.
Her furniture—inherited along with the Philadelphia house where she and her father had lived until death took him—would arrive in early August, along with Nora. At the moment she didn’t miss either the housekeeper or her furniture.
She had selected only the most cherished pieces to ship west—the chiffonier from her mother’s bedroom, her father’s polished walnut rolltop desk, the embossed silver umbrella stand, Great-Aunt Emily’s gold-bordered Haviland china, the Oriental carpets in her father’s study, and the carved four-poster bed he slept in. The rest she had directed Nora to sell. She could purchase new settees and tables and chairs in Portland, seventy miles away.
In the meantime, she would manage. She much preferred a bedroll on her very own hardwood floor to Mrs. Bauer’s boardinghouse across the street.
True, she was lonely, but not for her housekeeper. She still grieved over her father’s loss, but she vowed she would not allow thoughts of missing him to spoil this brand-new, beautifully clear day.
In fact, she felt so full of energy she thought she might pop. First, breakfast at the Maybud Hotel dining room, and then…she rubbed her hands together relishing the prospect. Then she would finish up her letters and wallpaper the front parlor!
She could hardly believe she was here in this lovely little town, settled in a pretty white cottage on Park Street. She tried to suppress a smile, but it grew and grew, no matter what.
A whole month without Nora! She did miss the housekeeper, but now that