Jessamyn bit her lip and studied his face. Abruptly she dived into her handbag and pulled out a crumpled letter. Standing on tiptoe, she thrust it under his nose.
Ben snagged the envelope with one thumb and forefinger. “Miss Jessamyn Whittaker,” he read aloud. “Care of the Boston Herald.”
He scanned the contents, refolded the letter and handed it back. “Give me the key.”
Her eyes widened. After a slight hesitation, she opened her handbag and plopped the key into his outstretched palm.
“Lock sticks,” Ben offered. “Trick is to lift up on it.” He inserted the metal implement into the lock, brought one knee up to the knob and pushed upward.
The door scraped open. Before he could draw breath, Jessamyn Whittaker brushed past him, her bustle dancing a quadrille.
Ben swallowed. Next to those soft graygreen eyes, that backside was the prettiest sight he’d seen since—
Instinctively, he squashed the thought. Those eyes of hers were unsettling. Something about them made him sick for home, hungry for the smell of plantation tobacco and jasmine vines in bloom over the arbor. Suddenly he ached for all the things he’d tried to forget for the past four years. Things he’d lost.
She had no right to be here nosing about Thad’s office as if she owned it. Not only that, she’d come from Boston. She was a Northerner! A Yankee. No Yankee had a right to have eyes that color.
The woman moved about the room, blowing dust off the scarred oak desk, opening cabinets, even inspecting the plank floor beneath her feet. Her mouth made continuous tsk-tsking sounds.
What the hell was she looking for? The last newspaper Thad had printed was a month old now, run off just a few hours before he died. Did she know her father had been shot? Worse, had she come out to the valley to meddle in his investigation of Thad’s death?
Probably. She looked like a real busybody.
Thad had never mentioned a daughter. Ben knew the older man’s wife had died during the war—sometime between Shiloh and Vicksburg. After Ben’s internment at Rock Island.
An involuntary shudder moved up his spine. Outside of Jeremiah, Thad was the only human being Ben had ever told about the horrors of the Union prison in Illinois. The older man had listened, nodding and sucking on his pipe, until Ben’s voice had faded and only the crackle of their campfire remained. Then Thad had hoisted his stocky form off the log he’d been straddling, squeezed Ben’s shoulder and trudged off into the woods.
“Sometimes a man’s gotta talk” was all he’d said.
Now Ben watched Thad Whittaker’s daughter move to the open doorway of the Wildwood Times office. Turning her back to him, she peered out at the street and propped her hands on her gently curving hips.
His breath caught.
And sometimes a man’s got to keep his attention on the business at hand.
He’d have to find a way to get Miss Busy Bustle out of his hair and back to Boston where she belonged. He nodded to himself. Shouldn’t be too difficult. She looked as out of place in this dusty town as a silk bow on a steer’s tail.
Jessamyn positioned herself in the doorway of her father’s newspaper office and studied the dirt trail that passed for Wild wood Valley’s main street. I’m here, Papa, just as you wanted Her heart swelled with a mixture of joy and regret.
Something told her Wildwood Valley wouldn’t be as enthusiastic about her arrival as her father would have been. Her throat closed. But here she was, as he had asked, and here she intended to stay.
She gazed at the ramshackle buildings on either side of the street and her heart sank. A dilapidated hotel and restaurant, a saloon—no, two saloons, one across the street from the other—Frieder’s Mercantile, Addie Rice, Seamstress, the sheriffs office and three other weathered structures with painted signs that were no longer legible.
That was all? No church? No library? Not even a doctor’s office?
Her father had exaggerated. This wasn’t a town, as she had pictured it—whitewashed buildings and neat picket fences. This was nothing but a motley collection of graying clapboard shacks plunked down in the middle of nowhere.
No, she amended. In the middle of Wildwood Valley. Oregon, she thought with a shudder. Rampaging Indians. Drunken cowboys. Worn-out women with sun-scorched, leathery skin. Lord help her, she’d left a position on a thriving newspaper in Boston for this?
Yes, she had. She hadn’t lurched in stuffy railroad cars and bone-rattling stagecoaches all the way from Boston to quail at the last minute. She’d come because Papa had needed her, and she wouldn’t retreat unless she failed to accomplish what she’d come out here to do.
“And that,” she said aloud with a determined stomp of her small, leather-shod foot, “a Whittaker never did.” She was her father’s daughter. In her entire twenty-six years of life she’d never failed at anything she set her mind to.
She drew in a double-deep breath of the warm, dusty summer air and straightened her spine. Well, then, she’d better see what was in store for her before she grew one minute older. God had no love for sluggards.
Jessamyn turned to face the open front door of the Wildwood Times office and prepared to embrace her future.
Jessamyn ran one gloved finger over the black iron printing press in the center of the room and breathed out a sigh of satisfaction.
After her meticulous inspection of the Wildwood Times office, her fingers fairly itched to dust off the Washington handpress, grab up a type stick, and start composing her first issue. But before she wrote one single word she had to sweep the cobwebs out of the corners and give the grimy plank floor a good scrubbing. Papa may have been a firstrate newspaper editor, but his housekeeping left much to be desired.
Ignoring the sheriff, who still lounged casually against the front wall, she cast a glance at the dirty windowpanes and groaned aloud. Mama, you should have gone with Papa when he went out West! Her mother would have been too frail to work the long hours putting an edition to bed, but she could have cooked and cleaned for him, at least until she died. Maybe Papa would have lived longer if he’d kept regular hours and eaten nourishing food.
Jessamyn understood how physically demanding it was to publish a weekly newspaper. Lord knows she’d seen her father gray with fatigue often enough when she was a child. But Papa had loved his work.
And he had loved Mama, too. But not enough. At least, not enough to resist the lure of establishing his own newspaper in the West. “Got printer’s ink in my veins,” Thaddeus Whittaker had said each morning before breakfast. Mama had preferred the cobble streets of Boston over the dusty roads of Oregon.
She sighed. Papa’s zeal had more than rubbed off on her. By the time she was ten, she could set type faster and more accurately than he could. When her father left for Oregon, Jessamyn decided she would also become a newspaper editor. Like Papa. He had encouraged her through all the years of learning and struggle; in some indefinable way she had felt close to him, following in his footsteps, even though he was thousands of miles away.
How Mama had scrimped to send her to Miss Bennett’s Young Ladies’ Academy and then to Hazelmount Women’s College. After she graduated she took a job as the only woman reporter on the Boston Herald. Then, just a month ago, his last letter had arrived.
Come to Oregon, Jess, Papa had written. I need you here.
She hadn’t known whether to laugh