Ana Seymour (14 page)

Sean grinned, tipped his hat, then turned and walked away down the path.

He’d come every night without fail for a week. Each might Kate brought Caroline down to him, said a polite “good evening” and then retired to her room until nine o’clock, at which time she would walk down the stairs, her heart pounding a little heavier than normal, and collect Caroline for bed.

Sean had not asked again to go upstairs to her room. He’d not tried to get close to her or made any suggestive remarks. He’d not called her “sweetheart.”

But to Kate’s immense annoyance, each day she found herself looking more often at the time in the late afternoon. On the fourth day, she’d taken out one of the two San Francisco dresses she’d brought with her when she’d left. It was the blue taffeta that matched her eyes. She’d left it on the bed all afternoon, and each time she went up to her room to change Caroline or put her down for her nap, she’d look at the dress, trying to decide if she should wear it that evening. In the end, she’d angrily hung it back in her wardrobe and worn the simple green cotton she’d had on all day.

But it was obvious to herself, if not to the rest of the household, that she was weakening. The following day was a Sunday. There was no work at the mine, and Sean had asked to be permitted to come earlier in the afternoon to have more time with his daughter. Jennie had invited him for supper.

Telling herself that it was in honor of the Sabbath Day and nothing more, Kate put on the blue taffeta.

She hadn’t expected that Sean would recognize it, but he did, and his own blue eyes danced as he gave her a thorough perusal from her piled-up hair to the kid leather shoes that had also been a San Francisco acquisition.

“I’m glad you took this dress at least,” he told her as she joined him in the parlor with Caroline before supper. “I couldn’t understand why you left so many of your new things. I would have brought them all with me when I came, but I thought maybe you’d left them because you didn’t like them any better than that first batch my mother got for you.”

“Oh no,” Kate exclaimed. “They were beautiful. But I didn’t feel right since I was, well, you know. I
was
leaving you, after all.”

“Running away,” he said.

“Coming home,” she corrected.

He smiled. “We’ll send for the rest of the things. Your beauty needs no adornment, Kate, but I like to see you in pretty things.”

The compliment brushed a blush up her cheeks. She held Caroline out to him. “I’ll see you at supper, then,” she said.

He took Caroline and kissed her, but said to Kate, “Couldn’t you stay with us until supper? Maybe Caroline would like some time with both her parents together.”

Kate hesitated. “I should see if Jennie needs help.”

“Barnaby’s helping her. I went back to the kitchen to say hello when I got here.” When she still hesitated, he sat down on one end of the settee with Caroline on his lap and nodded at the opposite end. “C’mon, Katie.
Sit there and let me at least look at you for a few minutes. Give a starving man a crumb.”

Kate laughed. “You don’t look to be starving, Sean.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you could sample the food at the hotel.”

“You’re trying to make me feel sorry for you, and it won’t work.”

“Hmm. Not the right tack, eh?” He jiggled Carohne and made her giggle. “Your mama’s got a cold heart, pumpkin. Did you know that? Hard to believe in someone so beautiful.”

“Flattery won’t work, either,” Kate said, but she was smiling.

Sean leaned toward Caroline’s ear and told her in a conspiratorial whisper, “We’ll have to think of something else, pumpkin. She’s on to us.”

By the time Jennie arrived to announce that supper was ready, Sean and Kate were sitting on the floor with Caroline between their outspread legs. Kate’s hair was mussed and her cheeks were bright. Her eyes were shining with laughter in a way Jennie hadn’t seen in months.

The good humor lasted all the way through supper. Carter entertained them with a story of an unusual case he’d handled—a rancher who’d willed his ranch to his cattle, which were now roaming the surrounding territory causing all kinds of commotion. That story had set Dennis off on one of his Irish tales. The meal lasted two hours and could have continued if Caroline hadn’t decided that she’d had enough of behaving for one
night. She started fussing, and even Sean’s cajoling wouldn’t quiet her.

“I’d better take her up for her bath and put her to bed,” Kate said, standing. “You all can continue talking, if you like.”

But the three miners had grown suddenly serious. “Before you go, Kate, we need to make kind of an announcement,” Dennis said, looking from Kate to Jennie.

Kate picked up Caroline from her high chair and stood rocking her. “What is it?”

Dennis looked down at his coffee and cleared his throat. “You know we love you two gals as if you were our own sisters.”

“That’s for
darn
sure,” Smitty agreed, and Brad nodded vehemently.

“But we’re miners,” Dennis continued, “and the Wesley’s beginning to play out, just like a lot of the mines in this area.”

Caroline continued her fidgeting, but Kate merely brushed a kiss on the top of her head and said, “Shh.”

Jennie folded her napkin carefully and put it on the table. Her expression was strained. “Are you thinking of leaving Vermillion?”

Dennis looked from Smitty to Brad, then back to Jennie. “We’ve taken jobs down at the Comstock.”

“All of you?” Kate gasped.

“We wanted to stick together,” Smitty explained. “It’s bad enough having to leave you two, and Barnaby here,” he added, reaching over to rough up the boy’s hair.

“This will be our last week,” Brad added.

Jennie bit her lip and looked around the table with a brittle smile. “We’ll miss you dreadfully, you know.”

Dennis’ round face was mournful. “We’ll come back and see you. I promise.”

She nodded without speaking, her eyes brimming.

“What about the rooms? Do you know of anyone who might want to rent them?” Kate asked. She had also felt the tears rising at the thought of their kind, protective silverheels leaving them. But she had learned over the past two years that sometimes sentimentality had to give way to practicality.

Dennis shook his head. “That’s part of the reason we’re feeling so bad. More and more fellows are leaving. There are rooms to spare these days.”

“No one has responded to the advertisement I posted up at the mine,” Jennie said, glancing quickly at Sean.

Caroline let out a wail, irritated by the delay. “Well, we’ll think of something. It’ll work out,” Kate said firmly. “I need to get her to bed, and I’ll probably just go on to sleep myself, so I’ll say good-night.”

The others around the table bid her good-night. Sean stood and said, “Do you need help?”

She barely glanced at him. “No, thank you. I’ll manage.” Then she looked at Jennie. Compared to what they’d already faced together, this setback was minor. “We’ll manage, sis.”

The two sisters exchanged a nod of understanding before Kate turned to go upstairs.

“I
want to be out of the house when you tell her.” Carter’s voice was lazily amused.

They were lying together in bed after a particularly satisfying session of lovemaking. Jennie snuggled against him. “I always knew you were a coward.”

“I’m not a coward, I’m just a lawyer. We deal with people in trouble and learn how to stay out of it ourselves.” He pulled the blankets around them. “For example, I don’t intend to say anything to rile you for the next few months. I’ve heard that mamas-to-be can be very touchy.”

Jennie gave a low laugh. Although her stomach was becoming gently rounded, she still wasn’t totally accustomed to the idea that soon she would have a precious son or daughter of her very own. “I’ll try not to make this pregnancy too hard on you,” she teased.

Carter grew serious. “I just hope it’s not too hard on
you.
I wish you’d agree to visit that special baby doctor who helped Kate.”

“I’ve never felt better, darling. And as long as my
sister doesn’t tear my head off for renting a room in our house to her husband, I’ll be fine.”

Carter leaned over to put out the light. He liked to leave it on when they were making love, and after her initial shyness, Jennie had decided that she liked it, too. “You’re sure about letting him come to live here?”

“No, I’m not sure. But, first of all, with the others leaving, we need the money. And second, Sean’s been working hard every day for two weeks. The silverheels say he works almost harder than anyone up at Wesley. Then he comes here after work every day without fail and plays with Caroline She adores him—”

“Kate avoids him,” Carter interrupted.

“Yes, but she’s not as adamant about it as she was at the beginning. I think she’s weakening.”

Carter chuckled. “Or you want her to weaken.”

Jennie found his chin to kiss in the dark. “I just wish she could find the happiness you and I have found.”

He kissed her in return. “I do, too, love, but it’s not something that a third party can engineer. People have to find their own happiness when it comes to love.”

“I know. I can only do so much. But Sean’s a different man than he was on his previous visits here. I think Kate should give him a chance to prove that to her.”

“Well, it will be kind of hard for her to ignore him if she has to run into him every time she heads to the outhouse.”

Jennie gave him a gentle shove. “You can think of a more romantic encounter than that, I hope. I seem to
remember you and I having some trouble staying away from each other when we were both living here.”

“Even though you thought I was an arrogant, undependable male.”

“And you thought I was a stubborn, independent female.”

“Which you are “

“Oh, yeah? Then how come you married me?”

“That’s easy. I couldn’t get you m bed every night any other way.”

Jennie pulled away with a gasp. “Carter Jones!”

He laughed and pulled her back. “All right, honey, I married you because I thought you were the most beautiful, desirable, intelligent, noble-hearted, stubborn minx I’d ever met. There, does that satisfy you?”

“That’s better,” Jennie said.

“But like it or not, you have to admit that lovemaking did have something to do with our rather, ah, uncontrolled attraction to each other. And when two people live in the same house, that kind of thing becomes quite clear.”

Jennie smiled to herself in the dark. “Well, now, that’s exactly what I’m counting on.”

“Kate, if you’re absolutely opposed, I’ll find another place.”

Sean had just come down from putting Caroline to bed. Most evenings, Kate continued to busy herself in the kitchen until he left, but tonight she’d waited for him m the parlor to tell him, angrily, that she did
not
want him moving m just down the hall from her bedroom. “Well, I’m absolutely opposed,” she said.
When he didn’t answer for a moment, she asked, “Why can’t you just keep staying at the hotel?”

“On a miner’s salary?”

Kate threaded her fingers through the magic shawl that covered the arm of the settee. “I thought you said you had money saved.”

“Well, I won’t have if I keep living at the hotel at twelve dollars a week.”

Kate winced. “I didn’t know it was so much.”

“That’s all right. Don’t worry about it. I’ll ask up at the mine if anyone knows of a place I can go.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to find something?”

Sean leaned back into the cushions. “You heard what the miners said. With all the men leaving town, there are a lot of places available. And anyway, I guess a place for me to stay is not your problem, is it?” He shot her a look out of the corner of his eyes.

“Well, you are here in Vermillion because of me.and Caroline.”

“Yes, I am.”

“But I didn’t
ask
you to come.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Kate gave a long sigh. “Sean Flaherty, you’re trying to make me feel sorry for you again, and I’ve already told you, it won’t work.”

Sean shook his head and smiled. “Katie, if I’d thought making you feel sorry for me would change things between us, I’d have started that campaign the day after I arrived. For example, I could have showed you these.” He held out his hands, palms up so she could see the red welts where blisters had evidently turned into open sores that were just beginning to heal.

“Lordy. You’ve been working at the mine with your hands like this?”

“Working at the mine was what
made
my hands like this. But they’re getting better.” He held them up and twisted them around in the air. “See, no play for sympathy.”

Kate stared over at the fireplace where the fire she’d laid earlier was dying out. “What if I said it was all right for you to stay here for a while. Do you think we could act civilized around each other? You know.like friends?”

Sean didn’t answer for such a long time that Kate shifted her gaze from the fire and turned around to face him again. Finally he spoke with deliberation. “Katie, the easiest thing would be to say, sure Anything to get you to agree to have me here. But perhaps you haven’t noticed that I’m not trying to do things the easy way anymore. I’m trying to do them the right way.”

“Which means?”

“Which means, I won’t lie to you. The reason I want to move in here is not to be your friend. It’s to be able to spend as much time as possible around you and perhaps little by little begin to convince you that there still is some hope for the two of us.”

Kate sighed. “I don’t think there’s any way you can do that, Sean.”

“I know you don’t. And maybe you’re right. But if we don’t spend some time together, we’ll never know, will we?”

Kate still had trouble recognizing this new, serious side of him. She kept expecting him to burst out laughing
and make a joke or to tell her that he was tired of playing working man and had decided to go back to San Francisco and the good life. But day after day he’d stuck it out. “Jennie says you’ve changed,” she said after a pause.

“I always thought Jennie was a smart woman,” Sean said, but his grin was not the carefree, taunting one she remembered.

“I’m not saying I’d spend time with you,” she said, hedging.

Sean must have sensed his victory. He carefully kept his face even, but his hands tightened on the velvet cushions of the settee. “I wouldn’t force my company on you. I think you know that, Katie.”

“And it would just be a trial. If things don’t work out, you’ll have to agree to find somewhere else.”

Sean nodded and risked a small smile. “I knew your big heart would win this battle, sweetheart,” he said.

“And you’re not to call me ‘sweetheart.”’

“That will be a tough one. What would you like me to call you, Mrs. Flaherty?” His grin was more like the old, cocky Sean.

Kate stood up with a little huff, already regretting her change of heart. “Just behave yourself, Sean. I mean it. Or else you can go spend your nights in the mine shaft for all the difference it’ll make to me.”

“Thank you, Katie,” he said, his voice serious again. She looked at him with a despairing expression as if she had just lost a battle that she’d once thought won. “You won’t regret it, I promise,” he added.

She bit her lip, then nodded her head and turned to leave. “I hope not, Sean,” she said wearily.

Her back was long and straight as she walked out of the room. Even that small moment of watching her move was enough to arouse him. He’d been without her too long. And he had the feeling that if they could wade through all the emotions, she’d welcome the renewal of their passion as much as he.

He’d not do anything to risk getting banished to sleep in a mine shaft. But he’d have to figure out some way for them to spend time together. Alone. Because there was no doubt about it. The place he really wanted to be spending his nights was his wife’s bed.

By Wednesday, Sean had moved into the room once occupied by Carter. It was done with little fanfare. No one dared make jokes about the room’s previous tenant having subsequently moved in with one of the house’s owners. After agreeing to the move, Kate had been touchy all week, as if she regretted her weakness in giving in.

Jennie hoped that her sister’s ill humor would fade after she got used to Sean’s presence in the house. Jennie herself would see that he behaved impeccably and did nothing that could disturb her sister. She was convinced that part of the reason for Kate’s mood was her fear that she would
enjoy
being around him again. Which, Jennie confided to Carter, was exactly the point. “If two people are meant for each other, the universe will move in mysterious ways to put them together,” she’d said.

And her practical-minded, attorney husband had merely smiled and kissed her.

But two days into the experiment, Kate was not enjoying
much of anything. Caroline had been particularly fussy, perhaps because a streak of cold weather had kept her indoors. And Jennie had seemed unusually tired. She’d been late heading up to the mine three mornings in a row, and twice had asked Barnaby if he would help Kate with the washing up so that she could go up to bed.

Kate had to admit that Sean was keeping his promise to be a gentleman. But that didn’t help when her unruly, illogical body seemed so ready to jump to attention every time he was around, which was now entirely too much of the time.

The first morning he was there, she’d walked out of her room and practically run smack into him as he carried a basin of water from the backyard pump up to his room. He was wearing his boots, trousers and a rolled-up towel around his neck, leaving a good portion of his upper body naked. She’d tried to keep her eyes from his bare chest, in particular refusing to notice how it tapered down to his lean waist, how the shadow of dark hair made a vee into the top of his low-slung belt. But she’d headed down to breakfast flushed and irritated.

That night he’d insisted on helping her put Caroline to bed. When the baby had spit up on his shirt, he’d carelessly pulled it over his head without bothering to unbutton it and tossed it aside. “I’ll wash it out later,” he’d said. Kate had had to stand to one side and watch as he proceeded shirtless to bathe and change Caroline without the slightest self-consciousness, the muscles rippling in his arms each time he moved. When he’d reached toward her across the bed, she’d actually
jumped, which made him straighten, smile slightly and say, “Will you hand me a fresh diaper?”

By Saturday, Kate was almost ready to go to Jennie and plead with her to send Sean packing. She probably would have done so if Jennie hadn’t begun acting tired and listless. When Kate had first arrived back from San Francisco, it had appeared that Carter had merely been overprotective with his worry over Jennie’s pregnancy. But now Kate was beginning to believe that his fears might have some basis.

In any event, it wouldn’t help Jennie’s condition to worry about money. Tomorrow the silverheels would be leaving for Virginia City, leaving Sean as the only boarder. Perhaps it was selfish of Kate to want him gone. At least he was a paying tenant. It was selfcentered of her to put her own comfort over the welfare of the whole family. She would give the arrangement a little more time and see if she could become immune to Sean’s presence.

With the decrease in production, the Wesley mine had begun working half-day Saturdays. The silverheels had been happy to have the afternoon to pack up their belongings before a final farewell celebration that evening, but Sean was hoping to put the time to better use.

“I’ve rented the rig for the day,” he told Kate. “Caroline’s been cooped up for most of the week and now that the weather’s turned, a drive in the country would be good for her.”

Kate eyed him suspiciously. “I told you there’d be no repetition of Pritchard’s Hill, Sean.”

He blinked innocently. “We can go anywhere you like, Kate. I just want to take my daughter for a drive. I’d take her with Barnaby, but Jennie tells me he’s spending the day at the Colters’.”

“You and Caroline could go by yourselves.”

He held up his hands. “I can’t drive the carriage and hold her at the same time. It wouldn’t be very safe.”

“I suppose not.”

Sean ducked his head to look into her face. “You could use a drive in the fresh air, too, Kate. You look tired.”

Since she reckoned she’d been averaging about two hours of sleep per night, she wasn’t surprised. “Oh, all right. We can go. Just for a drive.”

They’d set out well bundled in blankets against the late January air, but before long the brilliant sun was warming them enough to throw the covers into the backseat. Sean had been right. The sun and brisk air were reviving her spirits. She felt better than she had all week.

“We should have asked Jennie and Carter to come along,” she said. “Jennie’s looking tired, too.” She hadn’t yet told Sean about her sister’s pregnancy.

“Perhaps she and Carter don’t get enough sleep,” Sean said with a mischievous grin.

Kate ignored the reference and concentrated on the beautiful winter day. “Isn’t the sky blue?” she asked, throwing her arm out expansively.

Caroline, sitting in her lap, duplicated the gesture, making both her parents laugh.