thought she’d pop the buttons off her red gingham shirtwaist. “I know enough,” she said in a tight voice.
“Not hardly.” He tried to gentle his voice, but he was irritated. Damn fool woman. No doubt she’d stepped up to fill her brother’s shoes and take on the newspaper, and he had to admire her for that, but wanting and succeeding were two different things. Doing it badly could get her killed.
“There are rules,” he said. “Good journalists don’t go off half-cocked, and good journalists don’t sling accusations around without hard facts to back them up.”
“Oh.” She sounded contrite, but her eyes were blazing. “Exactly why are you helping me, Cole? After all, we are competitors.”
“You’re darn right, we are competitors. But look at it this way, Jess. We may be on opposite sides of the fence, but actually we’re helping each other. My subscriptions have nearly doubled. I’d wager your subscriptions are up, too. But if your newspaper goes under, there goes reader interest in the competition between my Lark and your Sentinel.”
She gripped the handle of her teacup so tight he thought it might snap off. “I’ve sunk every last penny I have in the Sentinel,” she said in a shaky voice. “I cannot afford to fight a lawsuit.”
“Then don’t. Get yourself a set of law books and start studying what’s libelous and what’s just legitimate criticism.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but Rita interrupted. “Eggs and bacon, right?” She plopped down two loaded platters and stepped back. “You two aren’t gonna fight over breakfast, now, are you?”
“Not this morning,” Cole said with a smile.
“I guess not,” Jessamine said in a small voice. “Not when I’m this hungry.”
Cole crunched up a strip of crispy bacon. “Hunger makes us good bedfellows.”
She flushed scarlet and he suddenly realized how that might have sounded, but it was too late. Then with extreme care she upended her teacup and poured the hot liquid over his knuckles.
While he mopped at his hand and swore, she calmly picked up her fork. “Bedfellows?” she said, her tone icy. “That remark is positively indecently suggestive. I should sue you.”
Cole bit back a laugh. “Yeah, well, it just slipped out. But maybe you should think about it.”
“Think about what?”
Bedfellows, he almost blurted. “Libel,” he said instead.
She pushed away from the table and stalked out, her behind twitching enticingly.
* * *
At the choir rehearsal that evening, Cole appeared with a bandage wrapped around his hand and an odd gleam in his blue eyes. Jess smothered a stab of regret over her impulsive act at breakfast and concentrated on not biting her lips.
The director clapped her hands for attention, and the singers rose to begin their vocal warm-ups.
“You’re dangerous, you know that?” he whispered when he and Jessamine stood side by side.
“And you,” she murmured, “are insulting.”
“I meant the word bedfellows figuratively speaking,” he intoned.
Jessamine turned away, but she wondered at the niggle of unease that burrowed under her breastbone. She wished, oh, how she wished, she didn’t have to stand next to Cole Sanders one more minute.
It wasn’t that he sang off-key. Quite the contrary. His voice was warm and, surprisingly, he read music better than either tenor Whitey Poletti or alto Ardith Buchanan. And he paid attention to Ellie’s directing better than she was at the moment.
It wasn’t musical unease she felt. It wasn’t even unease about their competing newspapers. It was how he made her feel when she stood so close to him she could sense the sleeve of his blue wool shirt brush against her arm. She wanted to lean into his warmth, his strength. He made her feel small and fragile in a way she had never felt before.
Even as a schoolgirl, she had never hesitated to double up her fists and pound any boy who made one of her friends cry. Miles said she had been a real stoic when Mama died and then Papa had succumbed to a heart attack.
But the truth was that Cole Sanders made her feel not only fragile but both furious and frightened at the same time. Furious when he exposed how much she didn’t know about running a newspaper and frightened at the hot, trembly feeling that built inside her when she stood near him.
As a dried-up spinsterish twenty-two, she was shocked by her reaction. But she was too old to force her hands into fists and beat him up for upsetting her. And Lord knew she was too young to know anything about men and what went on inside them. Cole had smiled at her, but what did that mean? The truth was that Cole Sanders kept her feeling off balance.
And no matter what he said about the advantages of their newspaper competition, she would bet he was just waiting for her to make a dire mistake so he could force her Sentinel out of business.
She straightened her spine. Whatever it was Cole Sanders wanted, she would never let him have it.
“Mr. Sanders?”
Cole kept his gaze on the page proof spread out on his desk. “Hmm? What is it, Noralee?”
“How do you know when you fall in love?”
“What?” His head jerked up. “What did you say?”
Noralee scuffed her leather heels against the bottom rung of her stool. “I said,” she repeated, annoyance coloring her voice, “how do you know when you fall in love?”
Cole stared into his typesetter’s guileless brown eyes. “Well, uh...”
“My sister, Edith, she’s my twin, she says your head goes all fuzzy and your heart doesn’t beat right.”
“She does, does she?”
“Yeah. And she says your hands shake and—”
“Noralee, you shouldn’t believe everything your sister tells you. Just ask yourself, how would she know?”
“Oh, Edith says she knows everything.”
“You believe that?”
Noralee studied the type stick cradled in her palm. “I dunno. That’s why I asked you.”
Cole studied the girl’s earnest face, then let his gaze drift out the front window. How did you know when you fall in love? Talk about a punch straight into his gut. Oh, shoot, he didn’t want to remember.
“Mr. Sanders?”
“Well, um...”
“And don’t tell me you just know. That’s what Ma always says, but I think she says that cuz she doesn’t really know.”
“Why wouldn’t your mother know? She married your father, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, but... But I think she did it just cuz Pa kept askin’ her. Not cuz she was in love. And that’s what Pa thinks, too.”
“Noralee, usually when people get married they care about each other. It might not be all flutters and blushes, but it’s real all the same.”
“How do you know, Mr. Sanders? You ever loved anybody?”
Cole shut his eyes. God yes, he’d loved somebody. And his heart had pounded and his head had gone fuzzy and all the rest. It had been the most earth-shaking thing that had ever happened to him, and he knew right down to the bottom of his boots that he would never, ever forget it.
Or her. He swallowed over a sharp rock lodged in his throat and