Loving Linsey (27 page)

“Yes.
Ahem
. Miss Addie, there is no easy way to say this, so I'll just come right out with it—I don't want to marry you.”

She stilled. Her mouth fell open in astonishment.

“It isn't you,” he hastened to add. “I'm sure you'll make some man a fine wife. That man just won't be me. Even if I had the time . . . well, I just don't feel that way about you.”

For a moment, Addie could do little more than stare at him. Amazing. The man she had worshiped for years had just stated that he didn't want her, and she felt . . . nothing. No
heartache, no regret, no sorrow. Just . . . nothing.

How could that be, when a short while ago, her world had been shattered by a man she'd known only a fraction of that time?

She walked a few paces away, wrapped her arms around her middle, and tried to make sense of her confusion. “A year ago—a month ago, even—I would have been crushed to hear that.”

“And now?”

“Something has changed,” she said carefully, as if testing the fit and feel of the syllables. “I've changed.” Addie smiled through her tears. A weight had rolled off her shoulders, just by voicing the words that had been lingering in the back of her mind lately, words she hadn't dared voice until now. “I've always been a basket of nerves whenever I get near you. You are too strong, too powerful, too overwhelming. I could never feel like your equal.”

As she spoke the words, another realization came. With Oren, she never felt that way. With him, she felt cherished. Desirable. Strong and independent. All the doubts she'd been carrying around about herself didn't exist when she was with him.

But when she'd promised to help Linsey fulfill her last wishes, the last thing she'd expected was to fall in love—with the wrong man.

She had, though. She'd fallen in love with Oren Potter. She'd wasn't sure when it had happened, or how, but she suspected it had
been the day he'd stood out on the schoolhouse stoop in the pouring rain with a handful of drowned blossoms.

Her promise to Linsey had never felt like a heavier burden.

“Let me see if I understand this: you don't want to marry me, either?”

She shook her head slowly.

“You didn't have anything to do with article in the
Herald
, or inviting me to supper, or the balloon, or any of the other schemes against me?”

Again she shook her head.

“But if I don't want to be with you, and you don't want to be with me, why is Linsey so hell-bent and determined to see us wed?”

She closed her eyes. Why did he have to ask her the one question she couldn't answer?

“Tell me the truth, Addie—why is Linsey so determined that we marry?”

A door opened, then shut, and suddenly Linsey was there. “Because I'm dying.”

Red hair, whether “ginger,” auburn, or copper-hued, is supposed to be a sign of fiery and ungovernable temperament, or of a passionate disposition in love.

T
he words hit Daniel like a sledgehammer, driving through his middle, stealing his breath. Linsey . . . dying? No, it wasn't possible. Not Linsey. Not this vibrant creature who could brighten a room with just her presence.

His blood turned to ice.

“What the hell do you mean, you're dying?” He searched her face, looking for some clue as to what affliction she might be suffering from. She looked perfectly healthy to him. Still the same glowing ivory complexion, the same glossy red curls, and the same sweet curves and hollows that made a man want nothing more than to tumble her in the grass. “From what?” he managed to ask.

“I don't know exactly. I only know that before year's end, harps will be heralding me to the pearly gates.”

He looked at Addie, who stood pale and shaken, her head bowed and her hands clasped, offering neither dispute nor explanation.

Jesus.

Daniel's legs folded beneath him. Numbly he sat. The thought of Linsey—reckless, cursed, passionate Linsey—cold in the ground . . . “How long have you known?”

“A month or so. No one knows but me, Addie, and now you.”

“You haven't told your aunt?”

“Not yet,” she said, settling down beside him, filling his senses with the intoxicating fragrance of lavender and reckless winds. “I'm not sure her heart could take it.”

“Did my father make the diagnosis?”

“I never saw your father.”

“Then who?” he demanded. “I'll contact your physician and get a full report of your symptoms, take them to my colleagues. Hell, I'll give you an examination myself and compare findings. He could have misdiagnosed you. Even doctors make mistakes.”

She hushed him with a hand to his arm. “Daniel, I appreciate your concern, but there is no cure for my condition. I can't even say I've contracted a disease.”

“Then how do you know you're dying?” he cried in frustration. And, he admitted, fear.

“I saw my reflection at Bleet Haggar's wake.”

For a moment, he simply stared at her. He couldn't have heard right. She was dying because she'd
looked into a mirror
?

He threw back his head and laughed.

He laughed until his ribs hurt and his eyes watered, partly from relief, partly from genuine amusement. Of all her nonsensical claims, this one had to take the prize.

A glance at Linsey caught her staring at him down the slope of her nose, her eyes narrowed. “I fail to see the humor in this, Daniel,” she said.

Daniel wiped his eyes; his laughter abated to bone-quivering chuckles. “You had me there for a minute, Linsey, I'll give you that.” He shook his head. “Oh, damn. Here I was, thinking you were serious.”

Her mutinous expression grew. “Make light of it now, Mr. Skeptical, because you'll be choking on those chuckles when they're shoveling dirt over my coffin by year's end.”

The iron-clad ring of certainty in her voice rendered him mute. “You
are
serious!”

“Of course I am. Do you think I'd joke about something like this?”

“For chrissake, Linsey, you don't really believe that looking into a mirror will foretell your death!”

Her refusal to answer spoke for itself.

Events began clicking in his mind: the day she'd run into him at Bleet's wake, the horrified expression on her face; her mysterious and hasty compulsion to marry him off without his consent.

She believed it. She honestly thought she was going to die because of some crazy superstition.

Humor turned to irritation. “Linsey, do you know how absurd that is? People die because
they get sick, or because of their own stupidity, or another's carelessness. They don't die just because a hearse crosses their shadow or because birds land on their clothesline or because they look into a mirror.”

“My mother did.”

The flat sobriety in her voice had a quelling impact. Linsey had never spoken of her mother that he could recall, but with those three little words, he understood how deeply the woman's passing had affected Linsey. He didn't know whether to console her over her loss or shake her for the ludicrous idea that a mirror had somehow caused it.

Before he could do either, Linsey gathered her skirts in her hand and rose with stiff hauteur.

“I understand that you don't put much store in the power of portents,” she told him, “but mark my words, Daniel, this will come to pass. By year's end, I will no longer be around to ruin your life. That should make you blissfully happy.”

At that, she marched into the house. With commendable loyalty, Addie followed, little more than flash of wrinkled paisley and ruffled hems.

Daniel stared at the closed door long after the echo of its slamming had faded away. The tremor in Linsey's voice, the sheen of tears in her eyes, disturbed him more than he wanted to admit. He'd been trained to ease pain, not cause it. Yet that's exactly what he had done, and to the one person whose laughter and passion
and spice of spirit had stirred more life in him in the last month than he'd felt in all his twenty-seven years put together.

He rubbed his brow. Life had been so much simpler before it had been invaded with Linsey's quirky notions and manipulative schemes. He'd never found himself fighting for control. Or resisting the pull of the forbidden. Or treading that thin line between lust and something deeper. . . .

No, his staunch hold on his emotions had only been shaken when one reckless, irrepressible redhead charged into his well-ordered world and waged war.

Happy? Just the thought of anything happening to her made the bottom fall out of his soul.

From the parlor doorway, Addie watched her sister furiously flip through the pages of a
Harper's Weekly.
A hasty swipe of her wrist across her eyes told Addie that her instincts had been right on the mark; Daniel's reaction had injured Linsey deeply. She didn't know who she felt more sorry for: Linsey, Daniel . . . or herself. So many lives were being affected by one woman's misguided determination.

“Linsey?”

She briefly glanced up. “That man makes me so angry sometimes that I want to scream!”

Addie knew the feeling, Linsey made her feel that way sometimes, too.

“Can you believe the nerve of him?” her sister continued. “I trusted him with the most shattering secret of my life, and he laughed—laughed!—at
me.” She turned back to the catalogue and pitched several more pages over. “Thank God I'm not the one planning to marry that insufferable wretch—we wouldn't last beyond the wedding feast before I had his head on a platter.”

The fiery tone couldn't hide the hurt behind the heat. It was puzzling. Linsey barely seemed to tolerate Daniel, yet he was the only one Addie had ever known who could make Linsey cry. Could she . . . was it possible that . . . ? No. Addie dismissed the notion instantly. Linsey couldn't possibly have developed feelings for Daniel. The two clashed like paisley and flannel.

Addie perched on the edge of the sofa beside Linsey, folded her hands in her lap, and approached her as she would have one of her students. “I know you meant well when you had that article put in the paper, but surely you knew it would upset Daniel when he saw it.”

“Actually, I'd hoped it would give that hard-headed mule's behind a shove in the right direction.”

“You shouldn't have gone to such extremes.”
Such public extremes
. Not only one secret had been revealed today, but two.

“You're right.” Linsey agreed without compunction. “I should have shoved him in the horse trough again, instead.”

“It wouldn't do any good. He doesn't want to marry me, Linsey. He doesn't want to marry anybody—he told me so.”

“People often say things they don't mean
when they're angry. Daniel is a bit miffed right now, but he'll come around. Don't give up hope.”

Addie felt the tight hold on her composure slip. “I can't give up something I don't have. For heaven's sake, Linsey, love isn't something that can be forced. The heart latches on where it wants to, where it feels safe and secure and loved in return. We have no control over that—sometimes it happens without warning!”

“Exactly! Isn't that what I've been saying all along? Given time, Daniel's heart will latch onto you; then all our wishes will come true.”

“Oh, Linsey, why can't you simply accept that I am not meant to be Daniel's wife?”

When Linsey turned her head, Addie found herself pinned with an implacable stare.

“Because I love you, Addie, and because I'll do whatever it takes to make sure you are happy—now and always. And if that means seeing you married to the man of your dreams, then by God, before one grain of Texas soil falls on my casket, I
will
see it done.”

Stunned numbness descended on Addie. Hadn't Linsey heard a word she'd said?

No, obviously she hadn't. She wouldn't even listen. She refused to. Her mind was so set on her own goals, her own set of wishes—last wishes—that she couldn't even consider that maybe the man of Addie's dreams and the man Linsey deemed she should marry were not one and the same.

Torn between wanting to clout Linsey over
the head and bursting into tears, Addie sprang from the sofa and flounced into the foyer. She stood outside the door, clenching and unclenching her fists, fighting tears of shame and frustration. Why couldn't she simply tell Linsey that her feelings for Daniel had changed—if, in fact, they had ever existed at all, except in her own foolish imagination? What was so hard about being honest about the fact that it wasn't Daniel she wanted to spend her life with, but Oren?

She hated her lack of courage, especially where Linsey was concerned. But how did one change a trait that was as much a part of her as her love of teaching or her fear of heights?

She closed her eyes, but a tear escaped anyway to trickle down her cheek. A yearning to seek comfort in Oren's arms, to feel his quiet strength surround her, stunned Addie with its force. After this morning, though, she doubted Oren wanted anything to do with her—and she could not bear his rejection atop everything else that had happened.

Feeling as lost and alone as she had the day her mother had stuck her on a coach bound for the unknown, Addie wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and drifted outside, her shoulders slumped with defeat.

To her surprise, Daniel still sat on the top step. “Daniel? You're still here?”

He jerked his thumb toward the house. “She's angry with me, isn't she?”

Addie glanced over her shoulder into the window, then back at Daniel. His black hair looked as if it had been combed back with a
pitchfork. His eyes had gone dull. Troubled, even. That was peculiar since, in the past, he hadn't seemed to care a whit how Linsey felt about him. “She loves to laugh,” Addie explained. “But she hates to be laughed at.”

“I wouldn't have laughed at her if she hadn't concocted that absurd story!”