so Chris reluctantly allowed his attention to be drawn elsewhere.
It landed on the woman standing just in front of his father. A hat dipped low over her right eye. Yet it did little to hide the perfection of her slightly turned-up nose, the rosy blush racing across her high cheekbones or the sweet curves of her bow-shaped lips. She was beautiful. She was familiar. She was achingly familiar.
He caught her chin, tilted her face upward and got lost in her light green eyes. “Adelaide.”
A fleeting smile touched her lips. “Hello, Chris.”
Silence filled the air. He released her. His words came out as more of a growl than a greeting. “What are you doing here?”
Olan slapped Chris’s back just hard enough to knock some sense into him. “Son, is that any way to greet your fiancée?”
Time slowed. Chris saw Adelaide turn toward his father. He knew exactly what was going to happen. The truth was going to come out. He could almost see the disbelief, the shock, the disappointment on his father’s face. His imagination went even further until he saw Olan’s face whiten, his hand covering his heart as he sank to his knees in pain. Chris couldn’t let that happen. Instinctively, Chris reached for Adelaide. He caught her by the arms, tugged her toward his chest, then stifled whatever she’d been planning to say with a quick, ardent kiss.
All it took was one slow blink of her long lashes for the dazed look in her eyes to change to pure fire. She opened her mouth to say something rude and incriminating so he kissed her again—gently this time. For a second he feared she’d pull away. Instead, she responded hesitantly by lifting her chin. Her fingers tentatively touched the nape of his neck, then slid into his hair. Suddenly, he was the one who was distracted. It wasn’t just by her kiss, either. It was the wisp of a dream that came with it, the vision of what could have been if she hadn’t rejected him.
But she had—soundly and irrevocably with little explanation and no warning. He’d do well to remember that.
His father clamped a hand on Chris’s shoulder, no doubt to remind him that they had a store filled with gaping customers. “Why don’t you two take a walk and sort some things out?”
By “some things” Chris was certain Olan meant a wedding date. In response, Chris gave a quick wave and a nod on the way to the front door. He didn’t have time to do anything else because Adelaide wasn’t going to stay quiet for long. He barely managed to tug her outside, then into the nearby alley beside the mercantile, before she whirled and punched him in the shoulder. “Have you lost your ever-loving mind?”
He winced more at her yelling than the blow. Realizing they needed a bit more distance from the street for privacy’s sake, he grabbed her hand and dragged her around to the back of the building. Placing his hands on the wall beside her waist, he caged her in and waited for the lambasting to stop. She’d lost her hat and a few tendrils of her auburn hair had tumbled loose to gleam in the sunlight. She distracted him from the temptation to smooth them back into place by pushing at his chest. It didn’t move him an inch. Her eyes flashed in frustration. “What were you thinking?”
Realizing she’d finally taken a breath, he tilted his head and lifted a brow. “You know, all of this indignation would be a lot more convincing if you hadn’t kissed me back.”
She froze. A blush suffused her cheeks. Her eyes met his, then narrowed. Her gaze drifted to his mouth. From the look on her face, he wasn’t sure if she was going to kiss him again or slap him. He figured a distraction was in order. “Adelaide, what are you doing here?”
To his relief, she calmed down enough to lean against the building though she continued to glare. “My stepfather had business in town.”
“How long are you staying?” He forced the words out, not wanting to acknowledge that a small part of him had hoped she’d come back intending to fulfill her promise to marry him. Not that he would have agreed to anything that ludicrous. Trusting her with his heart would be akin to trusting Billy the Kid to look after the Johansen’s cash drawer.
“We’re leaving on the next train.” Her gaze turned searching yet guarded. “Why did you kiss me?”
“I couldn’t let you tell my pa that you weren’t my fiancée anymore. He still thinks... Well, my whole family, except for Sophia, still believes that you and I are planning to get married eventually. I never told them we—you broke off our engagement.”
“Then this is the perfect opportunity to do so.” She tried to dislodge his hand from the wall but he refused to move, allowing the desperation he felt to show in his eyes. She gave a reluctant sigh. “All right, Chris. What is going on? Why don’t they know?”
“It all started out innocently enough. On my eighteenth birthday, which was only a few months after you left, my parents sat me down ‘to talk about my future.’ They told me that when the time came for me to take a wife they wanted me to marry a girl from Norway.”
“What girl from Norway?”
He shrugged. “Any girl, really. Of course, at the time, that didn’t matter because I was engaged to you. I told them as much and showed them your letters. They were pretty shocked to hear I’d kept that from them, but they respected my commitment to you. They also agreed not to announce anything about it until your mother approved. But as much as they liked you, they never gave up the hope I’d change my mind and let them send for a mail-order bride.”
“So even after I ended our engagement, you just let them keep on thinking you were engaged to me because that meant you had a safeguard of sorts against their meddling.”
“Exactly.” He grimaced. “I guess that was a pretty self-serving thing to do.”
She bit her lip. “Don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it sounds like the kind of thing I would do.”
He laughed. “Really?”
“Honestly. The stories I could tell you about my mother and her matchmaking attempts...” She rolled her eyes. “Actually, I’d rather not think about them. My point is, I understand why you did what you did. I just don’t see how you got away with it for this long. It’s been four years.”
“It helped when I moved out of the house. That kept them from knowing your letters had stopped coming. They knew the fact that I didn’t have your mother’s approval was a sore point for me, so they didn’t bring the engagement up often. If they did, I changed the subject.”
“What about other girls? I know we never announced that we were engaged, but your parents and siblings knew. Didn’t they notice you courting women who weren’t me?”
Chris rubbed his jaw, wondering at the edge in her voice that made him feel lower than pond scum, as if he’d been unfaithful to her. She’d been the one who’d broken their engagement. Not him. If she hadn’t wanted to him to court other women, she shouldn’t have given up her claim on him. Still, it was a good question that begged an answer. “My parents didn’t know I courted anyone else. It wasn’t too hard for me to hide. After all, I’ve always had a lot of friends who were girls. We all spent time together in groups, so any courting I wanted to do was done then. Sophia would cover for me if things got sticky. It also helped that I’m one of five children. My parents can’t always keep track of us that well. Besides, it’s only been in the last year that my father really started to pressure me to settle down.”
“Why the last year?”
“That’s when...that’s when his heart started acting up. Or, at least that’s when he couldn’t hide it anymore. That’s part of the reason he’s so anxious for me to get married. He wants to see at least one of his grandchildren before he—”
“Oh, Chris.” Concern filled her voice as she placed a hand on his arm. “Isn’t there something that can be done?”
He swallowed hard. “Doc Williams wants Pa to see a specialist