Plots and Pans (35 page)

MINE
. This time the desire didn’t surprise him. Tucker wasn’t stupid enough to pretend he hadn’t been intrigued from the moment he spotted her through that curtain window. The tightness in his chest eased. Thinking of the two of them together felt right.

He’d been trying to regain his balance since Simon pulled the rug out from under him with that surprise inheritance. Jess struggled to find her footing in the home she hadn’t wanted to leave.
Maybe God threw us both off balance so we’d have even more reason to lean on each other
.

Tucker wondered if Jess saw it that way.
It makes good sense
.

Then again, sense wasn’t her strong suit.

He watched as she broke out in a dazzling smile and made his decision.
If she doesn’t see it yet, I’ll bring her around. Persuading her that we should be a team has to be easier than trying to rein her in
.

Besides … he planned to be
very
convincing.

I have to convince him to change his mind!
Jess searched for a way to turn the conversation back around, grasped on the shopkeeper’s insult, and beamed as inspiration struck.

“You’re right, sir. I can’t presume to know the mind of a grown man. But I can certainly enlighten you as to the tender heart of a woman.” She turned things around so quick the shopkeeper couldn’t hope to keep up. “We can’t stand to see needless suffering. We want to help. What’s more, we want to see that the people we rely on for what we need—especially every day—feel the same way.”

A great swell of agreement filled the room, women waving their hands in the air and nodding to each other.

“It’s not that I don’t want to help.” He tried another track, bellowing over a chorus of demands that he go ahead and help already. “But I can’t engage in commerce on the Lord’s Day!”

“Christ Himself went out of His way to heal others.” The preacher Jess had half forgotten stepped in. “Even on the Sabbath.”

“And by His example I’m more than willing to lay hands on the boy and pray for his health,” the shopkeeper declared. “Healing is only a business if you’re a doctor. But I don’t heal by trade. I sell things. And seeing as how Christ also turned over the tables of the money changers at the Temple, I can’t sell anything today.”

I can’t believe he’s still arguing!
Jess would have been impressed by the man’s mule-headedness, if it wasn’t about to cost Porter so dearly. The whole thing was downright ridiculous. What kind of callous idiot would risk a boy’s life—and withstand the anger of his entire town—over something so trifling as a
hat?

She didn’t believe his protests about biblical principles for a second. A man who truly lived the Christian creed would’ve given Porter a hat and been done with it before coming to service. If he weren’t selfish right down to the soles of his boots, by now he would’ve made the concession simply to save face.

“You aren’t obligated to accept payment just because it’s offered.” Apparently Tucker’s thoughts ran along the same rails as hers. “I said I wasn’t asking for a handout, and I stand by the notion that charity should be reserved for those in need. But today, this boy is in need.” Tucker clapped a hand on Porter’s shoulder, but stared so intensely at the slug-like shopkeeper he missed the boy’s look of admiration. He missed Jess’s, too.

Standing at the front of the church with his shoulders thrown back, his baritone voice deepening with the force of his conviction, Tucker Carmichael blazed with righteous anger. The force of his character exuded an almost magnetic appeal. Not a woman in the place could look away, and Jess found herself thinking it was a shame there weren’t more of them present to enjoy the display.

After all, how many modern men could evoke the ancient strength of mythical heroes while denouncing hypocrisy and protecting those in need of aid? Hours ago, Jess would’ve laughed at the thought. But that was before Tucker took up the cudgels on Porter’s behalf.

“What?” Selfishness begat a certain shrewdness as the shopkeeper played dumb. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

“I’m saying …” Tucker lowered his voice even more, as though confiding a promise and offering a warning all at once. It gave Jess chill bumps, and she hoped it did the same to their opponent. “That if you’re offering to be charitable so you won’t break the sanctity of the Sabbath, then I won’t let my pride stand in the way of you honoring your principles.”

“Oh, well, I, er …,” he stammered, eyes a bit wild around the edges as he searched for some way to escape the corner he’d backed himself into. When he straightened up, Jess feared he thought he’d found one. “That is to say, I—”

“Wanted to offer all along, but didn’t want to embarrass us?” Jess finished the question on a high note of glee then produced a girlish gasp. “I’ve misjudged you, sir!”

“What?”

“This whole time I was thinking such terrible things about your selfishness, when all along you were willing to let everyone think the very worst about your character, just to spare strangers from embarrassment.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“We would!” Tucker stepped back and pushed Porter forward so the boy headed down the aisle toward the grudging generosity of the shopkeeper, extending his hand in gratitude.

“Oh yes.” Jess grinned at Tucker, relishing the success of their shared conspiracy. “Now’s the time to take credit where credit is due!”

F
or a moment there, when the tide turned and everyone knew the boy would get his hat, Desta fought the urge to follow Porter up the aisle and ask for an extra. The man deserved to lose the money from as many sales as possible after he acted so shamefully, then had the nerve to try and pass off his pettiness as piety.

Jess turned from watching the tiny troupe of townspeople rush to the store. “Are you sure you don’t want to join everyone and watch Porter get his new hat?”

Desta shook her head. “Sometimes it’s nice just to pause.” They left the church and reached a patch of shade where Desta halted, leaning gratefully against the rough clapboards of the building.

Jess edged into the cool patch along with her, and Desta wondered whether her niece was really holding up to the rigors of the trail drive as well as she pretended.

Jessalyn refused to fail, admit defeat, or even show signs of weakness. In some ways, Desta admired that about her niece. In others, it made things downright difficult. How could she confide how much the heat bothered her, and that she wished she’d listened to Jess and brought along a sensible Stetson instead of her bonnet, while her niece rushed around faster than a tumbleweed with a tailwind?

It seemed too hard to catch her to hold a conversation in the first place, and that made it a shame to waste that time with whining. Looking after the men kept them hopping from—well, Desta would have said from morning till night, but these days morning began at three and night nudged right up against it.

Everyone’s sense of time was fluid, flowing in a different direction depending on what the day brought and how the terrain stretched out. The night hours, in particular, streamed by. Desta wished she could say the same when the sun rose, but daytime minutes moved like mules—the hotter it got, the slower the seconds crawled by.

Unless she was stealing a moment with Ralph, of course. Then the sun fair flew across the sky. During some of her less-charitable moments, Desta considered asking Jess to arrange more of the “breaks”—not so she and Ralph could see more of each other, but so the entire trip would speed up! Not that she needed to ask her niece for assistance, when Jess already tried to help her sneak those increasingly precious snatches of time. Every time he walked up to the wagon, Jess started clucking at her to go sit a spell.

Desta tried doing the same thing whenever she spotted Tucker making his way over. But her efforts yielded such poor results, with Jessalyn speeding up instead of slowing down, that Desta finally stopped giving any warning. She feared those two would never drop their defenses.

But today things changed, and I got a front-row seat to see it
. Tucker couldn’t keep his eyes off Jess, sneaking peeks every time he thought no one would notice. Jess didn’t display the same sort of interest until later, when Tucker brought the force of his strength against his opponent and revealed the warrior within.

“‘Sides, just watching you and Tucker join forces and wage war against that shopkeeper leaves me with plenty to think over.” Since she and Jess were alone, Desta confided her most important observation. “Brought out a side of Tucker I’ve never seen before, like a warrior come to life. I swear, if ‘n he’d been swinging a sword at that man instead of shaking his Stetson, Tucker would’ve looked right at home riding with King David.”

“I know what you mean.” Jess looked off into the distance as though calling the memory to mind. The longer she enjoyed the memory, the more her smile blossomed. “He tried so hard to come alongside me and be civil, but when that wasn’t working, Tucker transformed.”

Her niece had a habit of tiptoeing right up to what she most wanted to say, then stopping if she thought she’d sound silly. Desta raised a brow, but didn’t respond, hoping the void would keep Jess talking to fill it.

“One minute, he was the man we know. The next, well … he called to mind heroic deeds and ancient titles. Provider. Protector. Defender.” Jess rubbed her arms as though afflicted with a sudden chill. “It made me grateful he fought for our cause this morning. I wouldn’t want to be the one going up against him.”

“As though that’s not exactly what you’ve been doing almost since you first laid eyes on each other.” Desta hooted. The look on her niece’s face as understanding dawned struck her as funnier still, so she had a good chuckle. Especially after Jess joined in. There was something about sharing laughter that made it restorative.

“You might have a point,” Jess admitted sheepishly. “But if he’d ever turned all that intensity loose on me, I wouldn’t have wanted to stand against him.”

“What ’bout standing alongside him?” Desta pressed. “Seems to me the two of you make a real good team.”

“We did, didn’t we?” Pride and surprise mingled in her expression, finding release in a sigh. “But that was for Porter’s sake. Truth of the matter is, once you fall into the habit of disagreeing with someone, it carries on. It takes both people wanting more than an argument to make it stop.”

“Well, what if he wanted you on his side more of the time?” Desta pressed. “Maybe what you need isn’t a stop—do that, it’s mighty hard to start over, and yore not looking for an end to anything. You want a change.”

“A change …” Jess got that faraway look again that told Desta her niece was thinking of Tucker from church. “Might be a wonderful idea.”

“I’ve got a great idea!” Tucker tried to make it sound as if something just popped into his head. A man just couldn’t admit he’d been antsy over every extra minute it took for them to grab the goods and get going.

Those minutes added up when the entire town populace insisted on squeezing into the store behind them, cutting off the exit and refusing to let them leave until every woman present personally told Porter how fine he looked in his new hat. Neither of the Creevey kids talked much, so Tucker got the feeling Porter didn’t get too many compliments. He didn’t mind letting the townsfolk shore up the boy’s confidence.

He minded not knowing whether or not Jess and Miss Desta would wait for the two of them before heading back to the campsite. They hadn’t had a chance to make plans before the triumphant town pushed Porter and him out of the church and into the shop. Would the women wait, or would they hasten back to make up lost time making lunch?

They stayed
. Tucker spotted them soaking up a square of shade and picked up his pace.

“Yeah?” The kid loped along beside him, trying to keep up.

“Miss Jess loves riding more than most, but she’s been busy driving the chuck wagon ever since we pulled out.” As soon as he said that last part, Tucker could’ve kicked himself for not noticing sooner. It wouldn’t have been hard to assign someone to drive the wagon for her every once in a while.