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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 so unfair!”
“Soon you’ll forget all about Ty Saunders,” she assured Sally optimistically. “You know what mother always said—‘Time tames the strongest grief.’”
Unfortunately, her words did not have the desired effect. Sally burst into tears and ran from the room, leaving Toby and Louise blinking in confusion.
Toby shrugged. “I guess she’s pretty upset.”
“I wish there was something I could say to make her happy,” Louise said.
Her brother hesitated before speaking again. “Speaking of happy…you know what, Lou?”
Louise, still thinking about Sally, answered absently, “What?”
“I was talkin’ to Louden and Jim outside the saloon the other day, and they said somebody’s discovered a whole lake of gold down south!”
Louise took a breath for patience. Even after spending his formative years in California, watching men go bust on a regular basis, Toby still had the gold bug in his system. “A lake of gold? Don’t tell me you believe that!”
“But what if it’s true?” he asked, his eyes glinting with speculation. When she glimpsed that expression in his eyes, she sometimes felt as if she were looking at her father. Jonah Livingston had been a dreamer and a gambler, despite their mother’s efforts to rein him in.
“You’re not going to look for a golden lake,” she said.
“Aw, Lou, please don’t start telling me about labor being the only way to spin gold.”
She laughed, pushing him toward the door. “I’ll spare you that if you promise to forget about lakes of gold and get back to the store and your studies.”
“Oh, all right,” he muttered under his breath.
She watched him go, wishing desperately for a way to work gold out of Toby’s system and Ty out of Sally’s. Then she turned around once more and sighed.
Ty Saunders. A vision of his bearded face and those alarming gray eyes danced tauntingly in front of her eyes. She hoped she would work him out of her system. Then again, ten months of trying hadn’t succeeded in making her forget him.
She feared the man was unforgettable.
Chapter Three (#ulink_7bce2e10-c128-5f78-918b-d2808aa9410e)
Cal was miserable. That’s all there was to it.
For two days, Ty had been trying to explain to his little brother that there were other women in the world besides his precious Sally. Prettier women. Women with better temperaments. And most important of all, women with nicer relatives.
And what did Caleb have to say to all these assurances?
“You’re right, Ty.”
Nevertheless, for two days Cal had moped around the ranch like a lovesick puppy, his head drooping sadly as he went about his work. Nothing Ty said could tug him back to his normal spirits. He had no more energy in him than a damp rag.
Until now. When they were supposed to be having a quiet, relaxing evening by the fire. Cal was now restive, uneasy. The tromping of his heavy boots echoed through the room as he paced, punctuated by sad, ragged sighs that bordered on moans.
Finally Ty had to put aside the paper he was reading. “Darn it, Cal, why don’t you just forget her?”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.” Cal combed a hand restlessly through his blond hair.
“Here, do you want to read the paper?” Ty always lost himself in newspapers from faraway places, when he could get his hands on them. He liked imagining what it would be like to move on to a new spot. “This one’s from Oregon.”
“Nah.” Cal flopped into a chair and looked at him with eyes that were bleary from moping and lack of sleep. “Ty, have you ever been in love?”
“I sure haven’t,” Ty replied with something like a mixture of relief and pride.
“I certainly envy you.” Cal sighed. “You don’t know what it’s like to stay up all night, dreaming of a woman.”
Ty frowned. That wasn’t true, entirely. Just the night before, he had tossed and turned, thinking of that infuriating sister of the gal Cal was so stuck on. Louise Livingston. He’d had his eye on her from the moment he first landed in Noisy Swallow. Not only was she damned pretty, but there was something about that brittle pride of hers that endeared her to him, made him want to take her in his arms. The way the woman acted, a body would swear she’d been carved out of an iceberg. Yet when he’d danced with her that night so long ago, then kissed her, she’d melted for a few glorious moments. Moments that made him suspect that underneath her layers of coolness and efficiency, there was buried a real woman with a real woman’s desires.
He’d felt it again, fleetingly, two days ago when he’d grabbed her around the waist. She’d been pliant and warm…for the few seconds until she got away from him.
He let out a ragged sigh.
“Ty? Ty?”
“What?” Ty replied, startled from his enticing thoughts.
His brother looked at him suspiciously. “Are you sure you’ve never been in love?”
“Listen,” Ty said, purposefully turning the focus away from himself. “If you’re so determined that Sally is the girl for you, why don’t you go tell her so?”
“But Louise said she didn’t want us seeing her family anymore.”
“Oh, hang Louise Livingston! That woman’s head is all mixed up. She didn’t even know which of us her sister was in love with.”
Cal shook his head. “Even so, I reckon I made a rather poor impression.”
Ty laughed, recalling the look of horror on Louise’s face after she’d been rolling around in the mud.
In despair, Cal buried his head in his hands. “It’s not funny! She probably told Sally that I’m an imbecile.”
Ty’s smile immediately disappeared. He could stand that annoying woman thinking the worst of him, but his brother was a different matter entirely. She had no right to turn her nose up at Caleb, the kid brother he had raised from the time their mother had died, when Cal was no more than a sprout. Ty had worked hard to provide for his brother, was trying to make this farm profitable for his sake, and he wasn’t going to let some crazy woman go around saying that Caleb wasn’t good enough to be seen with her sister.
Just the thought made his blood boil.
“I tell you what you should do. Just go into Noisy Swallow tomorrow and give that woman a piece of your mind. Tell her you’re in love with her sister and you don’t give two hoots whether she approves or not.”
“But I do care.”
Ty grumbled. “Then why don’t you sneak into town tonight, snatch Sally right out of her bed and have a good old-fashioned elopement?”
His brother looked askance at that idea, too. “I wouldn’t want to do anything that would cause a permanent rupture between her and her family.”
“Well, hell, then, what do you want?”
With a heavy sigh, Cal propped his chin on his knee and looked dreamily into the fire. “Sally,” he said simply.
Ty harrumphed loudly and tried to turn his attention back to his paper. But again it proved impossible to concentrate on the rosy reports of verdant hills and farmland ripe for the picking. Since he had entered into a fight with Louise Livingston knowing that she was mistaken about which Saunders man her sister was in love with, he felt some responsibility for Cal’s hopeless situation. On his own, Cal would never have created such a bad impression. Normally Cal was well mannered, conscientious and unfailingly polite. But when Cal got nervous…
Louise was never going to allow Cal to court Sally as long as she thought he was the oaf she had met two days ago. Somehow, Ty decided, he was going to have to set things right again between his brother and Sally’s sister, a feat that was never going to be achieved with Cal out here and Louise ten miles away in Noisy Swallow.
Standing idly behind the counter, looking out the mercantile’s window through glazed eyes, Sally took in a huge breath and then slowly exhaled with a long, mournful hum. Louise frowned in irritation.
As soon as the one customer in the store paid and left, Louise turned to her sister. “Sally, why don’t you go to the boardinghouse and get the washing started?” Sally let out another of those hums. “Oh, all right.” Ever so slowly, she floated toward the door, as if there were no purpose to anything in the world. By contrast, she was almost flattened by her brother coming in the same door.
“Louise, can I go out with Louden and Jim today?” Louise waited until Sally was safely out the door and on her way toward the house before addressing Toby’s question. Between the two of them she hadn’t experienced a moment’s peace in two days.
“Certainly not,” she said.
“Aw, shoot! Why not?”
“Because you’ve got Latin and mathematics to study.”
“I’ve studied them,” he whined. “For three whole days I’ve done nothing but study.”
“‘Work is what makes the man,’” Louise answered patly.
“That’s what Ty Saunders says, too,” Toby said enthusiastically, circling her. “Only he also says that a body can’t study all the time. He says men have to get out and move around outdoors.”
Louise frowned. That man! Bad enough that she had to watch Sally mope about him, and that she herself couldn’t forget about him. Now she had to listen to her brother quoting Ty Saunders!
“Animals have to get out and move around outdoors,” she corrected. “It’s not entirely surprising that a man like Mr. Saunders would be confused about the differences between men and beasts.”
Toby stubbed the toe of his boot petulantly against the wide pine plank floors. “You’re too hard on Ty, Louise. He’s really a nice fellow. Cal, too.”
Louise harrumphed loudly.
“Their spread made a lot of money last year. Bet you didn’t know that!”
Despite her intention to betray not the slightest curiosity about the Saunders men, Louise felt her eyebrows rise in interest. “It did?”
“Sure,” Toby confirmed. “And Ty said they could make more if they had more people working for them.” He paused. “He even hinted that I could work out there regularly.”
“What!”
Toby shrugged. “But of course, I said I couldn’t, on account of you forcing me to go to an old stupid university someday.”
She shook her head. “If you need something to do, you can watch the store while I go help with the wash.”
“Aw, heck,” Toby moaned. “I guess you’ll never see my side, Lou. Just like you’ll never understand about Sally.”
She tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“She’s just not like you, that’s all,” Toby said, shrugging. “You don’t seem to want the things normal women do anymore.”
“Toby!”
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Before we came to California, you used to flirt and have beaux just like she wants to. I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.”
