Still gawking in surprise and confusion, Caleb pushed himself off the muddy ground and observed unnecessarily, “That was Miss Livingston!” His tall, gangly frame made him look like a mud-soaked scarecrow. “What did she want?”
Ty frowned. He feared that he’d just unwittingly fouled up his brother’s romance.
“Why did she say that about Sally?” Cal asked. “What did it all mean?”
Ty sighed. His brother set quite a store by Sally Livingston. Cal wasn’t going to be too happy when he discovered the course of true love had just hit a snag. Ty punched his brother’s arm in a playful, calming gesture. “We’d better go inside, Cal, and think this whole thing through. It might take me a while to sort out Louise Livingston.”
As soon as Louise put Blackie away, she scurried toward the house—but not fast enough to avoid Will Bundy, an old miner who was huddled outside the boardinghouse with several of his cronies.
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!” he cried, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the mud. “What happened to you?”
Nothing she cared to repeat. “Just some mud, Will,” she muttered, circling quickly to the kitchen entrance, a ragged soul seeking sanctuary. It was late; dinner for the boarders would be soon. Her nostrils flared happily at the smell of baking bread, and she hovered near the oven, warming herself. She felt chilled to the bone, though indignation still coursed hot and fresh through her veins.
The gall of that man!
She shook in fury at the memory of Ty Saunders’s broad smile as he hoisted her out of the mud. Worse, she couldn’t forget the feel of his arm around her waist, the strength with which he’d picked her up, as though she weighed no more than a rag doll. She had experienced a tightness down in the pit of her stomach as she’d looked into his mocking gray eyes then, but God help her, her response had had nothing to do with revulsion at being manhandled by that creature. Rather, it was a tug of attraction, a feminine appreciation of Ty Saunders’s looks and strength and raw unshaven masculinity, coming at the worst possible time.
It was lust, pure and simple. And somehow, that only made her all the more angry at the despicable man.
Sally dashed in and stared in wide-eyed shock at her sister. “Oh, Louise—your dress! What happened?”
Mud covered her practical, dark blue frock, and now it was drying in front of the heat of the oven like a wet clay pot in a kiln. Louise shifted to give her backside time to warm.
“I had words with Mr. Saunders.”
“Ty Saunders?”
Toby burst through the door. “What happened!”
Her mind instinctively turning to business, Louise sent a reprimanding glance Toby’s way. “Who’s minding the store?”
“I put up a sign that said I’d be back. Please tell us what happened, Louise. It looks like you’ve been wrestling!”
His guess was closer to the truth than Louise cared to admit. “It’s just as well you’re both here, because I’m only going to say this once.” She lifted her chin and took a deep, fortifying breath. “Never, never, are we to have anything to do with the Saunders family.”
“Did Ty throw you down into the mud?” Toby asked, his voice sounding suspiciously enthusiastic.
Louise pursed her lips. “He did not. That was his brother’s doing.”
Sally paled visibly. “Caleb did that to you?”
“He did, indeed. After his brother thoroughly insulted me—and you, too, Sally. Then Tyrone Saunders had the unmitigated nerve to call our saloon a ramshackle booze shed!”
“Oh, no.” Sally’s voice was a fearful murmur. The two younger Livingstons exchanged dire glances.
Louise stepped forward, took Sally’s hands in hers and looked earnestly into her sister’s eyes. “Sally, I understand you fell prey to that…man. In deference to your tender feelings, however misguided, I won’t tell you the extent of my low estimation of his character. But I do want you to know how strongly I feel that you should never see him again. And that I blame myself entirely for not watching over you more closely.”
There, she thought proudly. She’d sounded very reasonable, very judicious.
But Sally fidgeted restlessly, her light brown eyebrows meeting in worry. “Did Caleb really wrestle you in the mud?”
Louise felt humiliated anew just from the memory. “He’s even worse than his brother! At least Tyrone can spit out a complete sentence, however vulgar and insulting.”
Sally pulled her hands back. “I’ll have you know that Cal went to college back East—Pennsylvania or somewhere. Only he didn’t like it so he quit after a year.”
“That figures,” Louise grumbled, then turned her mind back to the problem at hand. “Oh, Sally, don’t you see? Ty just isn’t good enough for you.”
“Louise, you’re a snob!”
“I am not,” Louise denied heatedly. “I just don’t want a sister of mine mixing with ruffians. Just look what those men did to me!”
Sally sighed, unable to deny that her sister looked as if she’d just returned from a trip to a hog wallow. “But it’s so unfair!” she cried petulantly. “If we don’t mix with uncouth people, who’s left in Noisy Swallow for us?”
This wasn’t the first time Louise had been forced to explain the importance of keeping the flame of civilization burning, even in Noisy Swallow. “We’re not like everyone else here. Don’t you remember our home in Chicago?”
“But we’re here now,” Sally argued. “What good are social respectability and appearances when there’s no one around to appear respectable to?”
Louise considered carefully. “Well, we always have each other. And if you’ll just consider our mother’s memory—”
“I meant, who are we going to marry?” Sally rolled her eyes in frustration. “Oh, Louise! Don’t you see, I don’t want to become a hopeless old maid like you!”
The room fell deadly silent. Louise, her own face flaming, looked from one beet-red face to the other.
Old maid?
Hopeless?
Louise had never given it much thought before, but perhaps her being twenty-three with no romantic prospects in sight did make her seem a bit of an old maid. Though it was difficult to think of herself as old. Mature, perhaps. Hardworking and financially successful, absolutely. She had developed those traits out of necessity since coming to California. Why, back in Chicago she had had plenty of beaux. But did everyone now look at her and simply think, there goes Louise Livingston, pathetic old spinster?
It seemed unbelievable to her, and, as Sally was so fond of saying, so unfair! For the first time in her life, Louise felt as if she had failed somehow, but not in the area of husband catching. Worse. She had failed to make her family see that she had their best interests at heart. That she was willing to make small sacrifices, such as not getting married, so she could devote her life to them.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Sally mumbled in an apologetic attempt to break the icy silence hovering over the kitchen. “I didn’t mean it like it sounded.”
“I know you didn’t,” Louise said. “But the point is this—I’m trying to maintain some standards for you all, and what I saw of the Saunders family just didn’t rise to that standard.” Which was a laughable understatement. Those two barbarians hadn’t even come within spitting distance of her standard.
Sally frowned unhappily. “That’s