Stephanie Mittman (10 page)

And try as he did, he couldn’t keep the laughter tamped down, couldn’t keep the smile from his lips.

“Where’s my mule?” he demanded. “Every good prospector has to have an old mule.”

“Old Bessy’s out front. Didn’t you see her?” Abby asked, and for a second he almost turned around and looked, but then he saw the tiny shake of her head before her smile dazzled him, made him dizzy with its brightness.

“What am I going to do with you?” he asked, poking at the gold pan with his boot toe. “You’re nothing short of incorrigible.”

“Isn’t it awful?” she asked him, stretching once
again, this time with her arms up over her head, guilelessly revealing a figure that had blossomed a good deal since the last time he’d pressed a stethoscope to her chest.

“It is,” he agreed, but he wasn’t talking about her incorrigibility that was awful anymore. What was awful was the way his body reacted to hers, as if he didn’t know better, as if he and she were two hands on the clock and it was a minute to noon.

“I’d better get over to the grange hall,” he said, when he was sure that staying alone with her in his office was as dangerous as a stroll on Ridder’s Pond.

“So how is Johnnie doing?” she asked, not budging from his chair any faster than it appeared she’d budge from his thoughts or his life.

“Better,” he admitted cautiously. Sometimes, miraculously, the flare-up of an appendix was an isolated event, never to be repeated. In his experience this was rarely the case, but as he’d told the Youtts, it was possible. Except for his announcement at Panner’s funeral, he hadn’t told them how dangerous an operation would be in the confines of his office. “I’ve got to get to the grange hall, Abby. Will you be all right getting home yourself?”

It was an odd question for him to ask. Abby came and went as she pleased. Before he could retract it, take back the caring that had seeped into his voice, she told him that she was going to the grange hall with him. “I have to cover it for the paper,” she explained, though they were both well aware that Ansel would be there and would no doubt write the story and the editorial that would accompany it.

“I appreciated what you said at Panner’s funeral,” he admitted, albeit grudgingly. He could feel himself at the top of the slippery slope, the toe of one foot already on the mire. “I don’t imagine your father was very pleased with you.”

“I didn’t say those things because of my feelings for you, Seth. I said them because they are true.”

“Don’t,” he said, picking up the mining tools on the floor. “Don’t think yourself in love with me, Abby. It isn’t so.” He didn’t dare let her believe it, or he might start to believe it too, to return the feelings, to forget about leaving medicine and Eden’s Grove and everything behind him. He might start to think about dinners at a table surrounded by his family, his loving wife, babies.

Babies!
Abby herself was a baby, he thought as he piled the picks and pans beside the door. She was full of childish dreams he could never take part in. And if he had any dreams himself, they were too sad, too dull for the woman with the radiant smile and the too-bright eyes.

“You can tell me all you want that
you
don’t love
me
,” she said, rising finally from his chair and heading straight for him, not stopping or completing her sentence until she was close enough for him to smell the lemon she rinsed her hair in. “But don’t tell me that
I
don’t love
you
. You may not like it, you may not want it, but it is the way it is and the way it will always be.” She put her hands on his chest and he made no effort to stop her. “And there is nothing you can do about it.”

Was it simply that he was flattered by the attentions of a beautiful, intelligent young woman? Whatever it
was, he didn’t want to stop Abidance Merganser from loving him, from moving her hands up his chest and around his shoulders, from pressing her body closer to his and tilting her head at just the right angle so that kissing her would take less effort than pushing her away?

“You know I don’t love you,” he said as he lowered his head and tasted first her temple, then her cheek.

“I know,” she said, tipping her head back farther so that her lips brushed against his as she waited for him to take possession of those lips.

“And that I won’t ever love you,” he murmured against the softness he could taste.

“Of course not,” she agreed, leaving her lips parted slightly so that he had no choice but to kiss her fully, soundly, to take her head in one hand and her back in the other and pull her against him until he could feel her heart beating against his chest, feel the crazy throbbing of her pulse as it matched his own.

“Just so there isn’t any misunderstanding later, Abidance, I am leaving Eden’s Grove,” he warned her, his fingers lost in the waves of hair piled on her head.

“I could go with you,” she whispered, leaning back so that he could kiss her neck. “Anywhere you want to go,” she added, sighing, her eyes closed, as ready for bedding as he had ever seen a woman.

This was madness. Insanity. If he weren’t a man of medicine, he’d think he’d been bewitched by some magician with a very strange sense of humor. He felt as if he’d come in through the door and onto some Shakespearean stage—one of the bard’s comedies with mistaken identities and gods that played tricks on man.

And with every ounce of strength he had, he fought against the urge to just give in to it all—that it was all too big to fight, too strong.

“Abby, look at me,” he said, setting her away from him with his hands circling her upper arms. “I am not going to marry you. Consequently, I am not going to bed you. Which means that kissing, which leads to touching and holding and wanting, is now out of the question. Understood?”

She raised one delicate finger and rubbed her bottom lip, making his insides do flips. Then she shook her head slightly. “No, I don’t understand. Because you don’t now have plans to marry me someday, you can’t kiss me today, is that right? I think you see everything backward. You think, ‘I like kissing you, but I don’t want to marry you,’ so then you can’t. Why can’t it be ‘I don’t want to marry you, but I like kissing you,’ and then you could?”

His mind turned to mush around her. “I have to get to the grange hall,” he said when he could think of no answer for her, no good reason not to go on kissing her all night and all the next day.

“Let me just get my coat on,” she said, but he put a hand on her arm as she walked past him.

“You better go freshen up some first,” he said, winding one of her curls around his finger.

“Do I look as if I’ve been well kissed?” she asked him. He didn’t know how she did it, this woman child who was red-hot innocence—a paradox if ever there was one.

He leaned down slightly, lifting her chin with just one finger, and answered, “Almost.” Then he dipped
his head and took one long draft of all that was Abby, swearing to himself that it would be the last draft, the last time that he took her into his arms, that he kissed her, that he let his heart wish that maybe, just maybe it could be.

When he was done he had to steady her on her feet and couldn’t help laughing at his little siren.

“Didn’t that man in St. Louis kiss you like that?” he asked.

“What man in—” she began, little phony that she was, playing games with him. She looked thoughtful, then finally said, “Oh, Armand! You must think I’m a faithless hussy, but kissing him was just so different.
So
different!” She looked in the little framed mirror on his wall and patted at her hair. “Well, we’d best get going, or we’ll be late.”

So then, had she, or hadn’t she? Was she just pretending about Armand? One of her infinite fabrications? If so, where had she learned to kiss like that? Where had she learned the art of seduction? “Different how?”

“Well,” she said, turning and giving him that damn bright smile of hers. “In between kisses he told me he
did
love me.”

“And did that make you as dizzy as I did?” he asked, as if he were in some sort of competition with some man he didn’t know for the hand of a woman he didn’t want. Well, he wanted the woman, but not the … she really did tie his brain into a knot!

“Kissing him was a dream,” she said with a great sigh as she wrapped her cloak around herself.

“
He
kissed you.
I
kissed you. How many others are
there?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest while she took one last look in the mirror, examined her lips and apparently found them satisfactory.

When she finally turned to present herself to him, she laughed, and said, “Why, Seth Hendon! And I thought you knew everything about me.” And then she reached around him for the doorknob, brushing against him as she did.

He’d thought he knew everything about her, too. He was sure of it.

But that was before he’d kissed her.

H
E IS NOT ALLOWED IN THIS HOUSE!” HER FATHER
grumbled when they finally got home after the meeting at the grange hall. “Add that to my list!”

So far Seth wasn’t allowed on their street, in their garden, on their porch. He wasn’t welcome to Sunday dinner, he wasn’t invited to any future parties they would ever host, and Abby’s father didn’t even want Seth to attend his funeral, whenever that happened to be.

“And you are not to speak to him, to dine with him, and needless to say, keep company, kiss, or marry him, young lady!”

Too late
Abby thought, smiling to herself. Much too late. Oh, could Seth Hendon kiss! She was positively weak in the knees at just the thought. Had he not held her up, she’d have been a melted puddle of woman on his office floor.

“I should send you to your room,” her father continued, while her sisters came to see what all the commotion was about and her mother took off her coat and
headed for the kitchen, no doubt to put up some tea to calm her husband down. “But then you wouldn’t hear me yelling from there. I should probably disown you, but then I couldn’t tell you what to do anymore….”

“She only spoke her mind,” Jedediah said.

“A woman’s mind belongs to her father until she is married and to her husband after that. Did I say already that you won’t be marrying him?” he asked.

“‘A woman’s mind belongs to’ … you can’t be serious, Father. A woman has enough curses in life, bears enough burdens—”

“That her mind shouldn’t be one of them,” her father cut in. “Do you think that your mother would ever voice an opinion that wasn’t mine?”

“Well, I’d certainly like to think so,” Abby said. “Otherwise why not just cut out our tongues when we’re born? That way we’d never say anything that’d displease you.”

Her mother had come back into the room. With her sisters there, they stood four women to two men, and Jed certainly seemed to be on their side.

“It’s just like a woman to be as silly as all that,” her father said. “You know quite well that I think women have a lot to say—some of it even worth listening to, especially in the house and in the garden. But what to do with Joseph Panner’s money, well, that’s just not their business. They can’t possibly understand—”

“I understood everything that was said at that meeting, Ezra,” her mother said firmly. “And I didn’t raise five children so that three of them could stand mute while matters that affect them were being decided.”

“Now look! You’ve turned your mother against me,”
her father roared, wagging a finger in her face. “I always listen when your mother is thinking. But it’s something we do in private. When we’re outside of this house, in a public place, for you to side against me—”

“I didn’t side against you,” Abby said. “You know I never would. I simply said that it was a matter of priorities. You could hold services in the grange hall, but Dr. Hendon could not operate on Johnnie Youtt there, now could he?”

“I heard you in the grange hall, Abidance,” her father said, sitting down in his chair with a huff and crossing his arms over his chest. “Mother, we named all of our children wrong. Well, all the girls. The boys we gave real names to, but Patience isn’t, Prudence wasn’t, and Abidance won’t!”

Her mother smiled that indulgent smile reserved for those she loved. “If one of my children needed an operation, Ezra, I’d want Dr. Hendon to have a safe place to do it. And it isn’t as if he’s asking for himself. He’s asking for all of us.”

“Thank you, Mother,” Abby said. Finally a voice of reason.

“And I’m asking for myself?” her father asked petulantly. “Is that what you’re saying?”

She let out a big sigh. There was obviously no use. Tomorrow she would write an editorial for the paper advocating the use of the funds from Joseph Panner’s estate to build a medical facility. Her father had been invited by Ansel to write an opposing editorial urging the erection of a new church. It had been agreed that in two weeks, at the town’s regular meeting, a motion
would be made, a discussion would follow, and ultimately a vote would be taken on the disposition of the funds.

Obviously her father did not think there was anything to discuss. “A waste of everybody’s free time,” he said. “How can there even be a question? As I told everybody, Dr. Hendon’s been practicing here for ten years in the same house that Doc Spinner practiced in for twenty before that. I’ve been supporting the doctor for years. Didn’t I have a bowl at the back of the church for the sick? Without the church where would we put that bowl? The town needs a church with that money and that is how this family will vote.”