Liz Ireland (29 page)

“You sure had us worried, miss!” cried Fanny Baker. “Especially your daddy.”

Cecilia half dreaded seeing her father. Somehow, she had never dreamed that her disappearance would have caused so much heartache...and controversy. No one had been able to figure out if she had eloped, or whether another Summertree girl had tragically disappeared.

Her father met her with tears in his eyes. “Cecilia...” he said, his voice catching in his throat. “My daughter.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Cecilia said, throwing her arms around him happily. After all they had been through, this was the first time she had seen her small, hot-tempered father cry. “I’m back now.”

He pushed his hat back on his smooth head and looked her over from tip to toe, as if to make sure no damage had been done. “I was so worried. And when they told me that Pendergast characte—”

Clearing his throat, Jake reluctantly stepped forward into Summertree’s angry glare. “I’m Jake Reed, sir.”

The people from town gasped in astonishment. “You’re not Eugene W. Pendergast?” Lysander Beasley bustled forward to ask. His froglike eyes looked as if they might just pop out of his head.

“No, sir, I’m not,” Jake admitted.

It took quite a while to explain who exactly Jake was to Beasley’s satisfaction. They went indoors, and Cecilia’s father sat dumbfounded through the whole story, as if he couldn’t quite believe that even his muddle-prone daughter had gotten herself mixed up in a mess like this.

Clara had no such trouble. “Girls with independent notions always come to sorrow in the end.”

“But you see,” Cecilia assured the dining room full of people, “everything turned out just fine.”

But the skeptical glare Clara sent toward Jake indicated that lady had yet to be convinced.

“Oh, boy!” Suddenly Bea Beasley ran forward, so excited that her glasses looked as though they might fall off their perch on her turned-up nose. She grabbed Jake’s hand and looked up at him with more adoration than ever. “This was even more exciting than what happened to Pete and Willa!”

“Who are they?” Beasley asked his daughter indulgently.

“A gunfighter and a woman of ill repute,” Bea announced loudly and dutifully. “Mr. Pen—I mean Mr.
Reed
taught us all about them at school.”

“A woman of...” Beasley’s jaw hung slack.

Jake blanched. “Bea, I don’t think this is quite the time...”

The little girl’s face screwed up in puzzlement. “They weren’t bad people, Father. And they didn’t kiss nearly as much as Mr. Reed and Miss Summertree.”

Cecilia felt a red flush creep into her cheeks as all eyes in the room turned on her yet again.

“Only Pete and Willa’s story was a lot happier,” Bea added, unaware of the reaction around her, “because they ended up married.”

Cecilia opened her mouth to speak, then failed as her father stepped forward. She had a feeling their audience was in for another famous Summertree scene.

At the last moment, Jake stepped between the father and daughter. “Actually,” he said, quickly snaking an arm around Cecilia’s waist and still finding himself nose to nose with her father, “before we came back, Cecilia promised to become my wife.”

For an agonizing moment, the room was filled with stunned silence. Cecilia looked at one shocked face after another before her gaze finally alit on her father’s eagle eyes looking into her own. Slowly, as he detected the depth of feeling he read in her pleading glance, a grin wide enough to match Jake’s appeared on his face.

It was as if ten years of grieving disappeared from Silas Summertree in that one moment. The dark circles beneath his eyes were lost beneath the happiness that shone in them, and the careworn wrinkles in his forehead fell away.

He shoved his hand forward and pumped Jake’s arm energetically. “Well, well!” he announced robustly, “I told them all along this was nothing but sweetheart shenanigans.”

Everyone around them laughed and clapped. Cecilia couldn’t believe that all the drama she’d been through was being reduced to the status of a lover’s prank. “Oh, no, you don’t understand,” Cecilia told her father. “I told you, we were being chased by a madman!”

He reached forward and pinched her cheek. “Come, come. I knew you were in love when I saw you at the dance together.”

Cecilia opened her mouth to deny it when she remembered what had happened when she left the dance. She
had
been in love all those weeks ago—it just took some people longer than others to get things straightened out. Especially when they weren’t willing to admit who they truly were.

She turned to Jake. For years, she had dreamed of being something she wasn’t, of living a life she wasn’t by temperament suited to. But she knew now exactly who she was, and who she wanted to spend the rest of her life with, and, thanks in part to the loving reception the people around her had given them, and the pains they’d taken to find her, she knew where she wanted to spend that future.

On a ranch.

Jake sent her a tender wink and reminded her, “You promised you’d marry me as soon as we found a preacher, remember?”

She looked out among the group around them and sure enough, Parson Gibbons was staring right at her, with a smile that betrayed just the slightest hint of disapproval. “I certainly did,” she said without hesitation. “Is it too late for a spur-of-the-moment wedding?”

Silas Summertree bellowed his approval. Cecilia couldn’t remember seeing her father happier than he was now, surrounded by an entire town, with the prospect of having a new budding family around him.

Especially when Jake announced that he wanted to try his hand at ranching. What better place than right here on the Summertree ranch? Silas told Jake happily, extending an invitation to take over the running of the place in whatever capacity he would be happy with. Jake, though hesitant, seeing the need in the old man’s eyes to keep the last of his family with him, decided they could work something out.

And at this decision, the sad old house itself seemed to brighten.

The only person more pleased with the arrangement than Silas was Dolly. “This is wonderful!” she exclaimed happily. “Buck’s place on the ranch will be vacant once he moves into town.”

Buck, though looking anything but jubilant, had a smile frozen on his face. “That’s right. I’m gonna open up Jubal Hudspeth’s blacksmith shop again.”

“A town needs a blacksmith,” Dolly said, beaming, to which Lysander Beasley nodded approvingly. “So you see, it’s worked out perfectly!”

Perfect for everyone except the horses, Cecilia thought.

The wedding ceremony was short, with Cecilia’s father giving her away and Rosalyn serving as an impromptu bridesmaid. Bea, fresh off of Dolly’s wedding, adamantly insisted on being flower girl. That there was no aisle to march down, or even any flowers to hold, did not faze or discourage her.

After the wedding, Silas broke out his best wine and toasted the married pair, and Dolly came up to give Cecilia a choking hug. “Oh, Cecilia, I knew you’d be next.”

“Thanks, Dolly.”

Immediately, however, as Cecilia received a shy but heartfelt embrace from Cousin Lucinda, Dolly’s mind again turned to business and her gaze, a mite peevish, landed on Jake. “Only now I’ve got an empty room on my hands! What’s the town going to do for a schoolteacher?”

“That’s a good question,” Beasley said. “You don’t know how hard it is to find well-qualified teachers like...” His voice trailed off as he looked at Jake and realized that his Philadelphia import hadn’t been well qualified at all.

All eyes turned to Cecilia. “Oh, no,” she protested, “I’m a married lady now. I’ll have my hands full.”

Beasley looked peeved by the domestic turn her dreams had taken.

“I can teach,” Rosalyn announced. Her face was flushed, but her eyes glinted with determination.

“You?” Cecilia asked. “But don’t you want to go back to Philadelphia? I thought for sure you’d change your mind about that.”

“I’m staying,” Rosalyn insisted. “So I might as well make myself useful.”

And after talking to Rosalyn for five minutes, Lysander Beasley pronounced her more than worthy to be Annsboro’s new interim schoolteacher.

It took a while for the newlyweds to extricate themselves from the crowd, but when they did, the sky was a brilliant blanket of stars above their heads. The night might have been the most beautiful one Cecilia had ever seen. Walking arm in arm with Jake, and stopping at leisure for long, slow kisses, only made it more dazzling.

“Would you have thought this morning we’d be married by tonight?” he whispered teasingly into her ear.

A little thrill zipped down Cecilia’s spine. It seemed they had all the time in the world—and even that wouldn’t be enough. “I was just waiting for you to get around to asking.”

“That’s right,” Jake said, resting his forehead against hers, “put all the blame on me.”

“Where it usually belongs,” Cecilia said saucily.

He pulled her into his arms and kissed her like there was no tomorrow, and for a moment there wasn’t—only now, on this dark night, with the two of them so thoroughly in love with each other they would be just as happy never to see daylight again.

“I feel like I could live on moonlight,” Cecilia said, taking in a deep breath when their lips parted.

Jake placed another light kiss on the crown of her head. “If anyone should be able to, it’s you,” he said. “Your hair looks so luminous now, your eyes so deep blue, it looks as though you were made for night. Besides,” he whispered, reminding her of her first request of that morning, “you surely had some good reason for hanging the moon up there.”

Cecilia laughed lightly and laced her hands around the back of his neck. “You remembered,” she said, pleased. “You told me you would show it to me tonight.”

“There are more things than that I want to show you,” he whispered intimately, pulling her close.

“You had better get started, then,” Cecilia said, her eyes sparking with desire. “Time’s a-wastin’.”

And the kiss he answered with told her in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t have agreed more.

* * * * *

ISBN: 978-1-4592-8347-3

Cecilia and the Stranger

Copyright © 1995 by Elizabeth Bass

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