He’d hate her if she wasn’t so beautiful.
He levered himself off the back step and angled across to the woodpile to decide how much more wood Marianne would want in the next hour, then stood with one foot propped on the chopping block. He had just started to sharpen his axe when her voice cut into his consciousness.
“Lance!”
He jerked at the sound. Jumping Jupiter, she did nothing all day long but order him around. But, when she wasn’t yelling at him, he had to admit he liked her voice, low and throaty and kinda murmury. Made him think of a breeze rustling through a dry cornfield. He heard that voice whispering in his dreams at night, and he woke up every single morning highly aroused.
“Lance! Where are you?”
“Hiding,” he said under his breath. This wasn’t the nighttime voice he heard in his dreams. This was the voice that sent a chill up his backbone.
“Lance, I need you! Right now!”
“Coming, ma’am.” He stepped around the corner of the house to see her flapping her ruffly blue apron at the red hen pecking at insects in the garden. The feisty bird fluffed up its feathers, and Marianne edged away until her back was against the fence.
“Shoo! Shoo! Lance, come and get Lucinda back in the henhouse.”
Please, he muttered inside his head. He advanced on the offending chicken. “How’d she get out?”
Marianne shot him an exasperated look. “How should I know?” she retorted.
He studied the rickety chicken coop in the far corner of the yard. A section of lath had slipped sideways off the front of the structure, and the chickens were venturing through the opening. He cornered the hen, pounced on her and grabbed the scaly yellow legs. While the hen flapped and squawked he flipped her upside down, kicked the lath back in place and tossed the hen inside.
He waited for a thank-you, which didn’t come. He sighed. “Anything else, ma’am?”
She propped her hands on her hips. “Yes. Repair the henhouse.”
“Right now?”
“Of course right now!”
“Uh...couldn’t it wait until after I’ve had my breakfast?”
“Don’t argue. I’ll save you some scrambled eggs.”
“Couldn’t I eat first?” he said through gritted teeth. “Lucinda won’t care.”
Marianne drew herself up so stiff the buttons on her blue shirtwaist threatened to pop off. “If you value your job here, Mr. Burnside, you will fix the henhouse. Now.”
He gritted his teeth. “Are you sayin’ you’ll fire me if I don’t?”
“Well, not me, exactly. But if I speak to Mrs. Schneiderman, you won’t last five more minutes here.”
Lance cleared his throat. “Miss Collingwood, you order me around almost twenty-four hours a day, and I do every darn thing you ask, even when it doesn’t make much sense. Sometimes I wonder if you really want me around here.”
“Well, yes, I do.” She swallowed. “Actually, the boardinghouse couldn’t function without you. I... That is, Mrs. Schneiderman and I, would be lost without your services.”
“Sure am glad to hear that, ma’am. And just in time, too.”
She shot him an apprehensive look. “Surely you were not thinking of leaving?”
He clenched his jaw. He would if he could. He’d thought about it often enough. But he couldn’t. The boardinghouse was a safe refuge for a man on the run.
* * *
Marianne closed the back door with a sigh. She really, really hated working at the boardinghouse. But when both her parents died of cholera when she was thirteen she’d found herself alone and penniless with no other choice. An orphan girl in a city like St. Louis was lucky to be respectably employed at all.
She was frightened at first, frightened of being hungry and cold and alone. And then she realized if she didn’t want to be hungry and cold, she would have to do something about it. She, and she alone. And so she had set out to look for work.
Mrs. Schneiderman had taken her in, and for the last eleven years she had dealt with the elderly woman’s crotchets, her short temper and her constant criticism. Every morning she dragged herself out of bed to slice bacon and scramble eggs and brew gallons of coffee for the boarders, and the rest of the day she spent scrubbing floors, beating the dirt out of the parlor carpets, scouring dirty kettles and polishing the silverware.
She had felt driven by the fear of being hungry, of not making it. In all these years she’d never had time to attend a church social or read any of the books she kept in her trunk or sit on the veranda on a warm summer evening and think about her life.
She bit her lip and walked back into the kitchen. She would be twenty-four years old on her next birthday. A spinster. On the shelf, her mother would have said. The life she saw stretching before her was totally without joy. Worse, it was without hope.
She studied the pile of dirty breakfast dishes stacked in the kitchen sink and groaned. She had no time to waste feeling sorry for herself. She had bread to bake and floors to wax and a dozen other chores to finish before she could even sit down to eat breakfast herself! She gritted her teeth and got out the mixing bowl.
She was kneading dough on the flour-dusted wooden breadboard when a messenger boy pounded up the porch steps, rapped on the front door and thrust a telegram into her hand. She stuffed it into her apron pocket until she could plop the bread dough into the greased bowl to rise, and then she sat down on the back porch step, unfolded the square of paper and smoothed it out on her lap.
REGRET TO INFORM YOU OF MATTHEW COLLINGWOOD’S DEATH STOP YOU ARE SOLE HEIR OF BUSINESS ESTABLISHMENT IN SMOKE RIVER OREGON STOP INQUIRE SMOKE RIVER BANK STOP WILL STIPULATES HEIR MUST BE OF GOOD CHARACTER, OVER TWENTY-ONE YEARS, AND MARRIED STOP MYERS & WALDRIP, ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW STOP
She let out a hoarse cry. Surely she was dreaming! Sole heir? Oh, my stars and little chickens, she couldn’t believe it! She had always dreamed of being free of Mrs. Schneiderman, of being in charge of her own life. Of even having a life to be in charge of!
She read the telegram again, and tears swam into her eyes. Great Uncle Matty was her grandfather’s younger brother, but all she knew about the man was what Papa had told her. Uncle Matty was eccentric, and he was rich.
She read the telegram a third time. Where on earth was Smoke River, Oregon? Probably in the middle of some desert with no trees or flowers or houses or people or anything even remotely civilized. Oh, pooh, what did that matter? It was a chance to leave the endless drudgery of Mrs. Schneiderman’s boardinghouse! She had dreamed of leaving for years, dreamed of striking out on her own, but no matter how carefully she hoarded her meager earnings, it was never enough.
Could this one single telegram really change my life?
She scanned the message a fourth time and clapped her hand over her mouth. Married! The heir to Matthew Collingwood’s business had to be married.
“But I am not married,” she muttered. “I have never even been engaged.”
She gazed into the backyard where Lance was hammering new pickets on to the front of the henhouse. Suddenly she couldn’t take her eyes off him.
She shut them and groaned. Oh, mercy, no. Not in a million years would he consider such an idea.
Then she popped open her lids and bit her lip.
Or would he?