A Family For Carter Jones

Jennie regarded him with genuine surprise. “I’ve misjudged you, Mr. Jones,” she said softly. “I think I owe you an apology for yelling at you this morning.”

Carter grinned. “I’ll forgive you on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“That you call me Carter.”

The glow in her brown eyes dimmed. “I don’t think I could do that”

“It’s not so much to ask. You call Lyle by his first name.”

“We’ve known Lyle since we were children.”

Carter slid off the stool and walked around to stand in front of her. After a moment’s hesitation, he plucked her right hand from where it rested on her knee and wrapped it in both of his. “You have lots of old friends in town. I’d like to be a new one.”

Jennie’s breathing deepened. She looked up into his eyes and nodded slowly without words.

“So you’ll call me Carter?” he asked softly, his voice persuasive, a little husky.

She gave another slow nod.

“Let me hear you say it,” he insisted. “Say, ‘good night, Carter.’”

“Good night, Carter,” she repeated, her eyes never leaving his.

He dropped her hand in her lap. “I’ll come by tomorrow after I’ve had a chance to wire the district judge in Virginia City about this case.”

Her only response was another nod and the wide gaze of her brown eyes.

He gave a satisfied smile and said, “I’ll see myself out” Then he turned, crossed the kitchen and went out through the front hall. By the time he got to the stoop, he was whistling and thinking to himself that perhaps the gentling of Miss Jennie would not be quite as slow a process as he had feared.

Flapjacks had been their father’s specialty. Or rather, they had been the only item that he ever cooked in his entire life, so it had been customary to make a big fuss whenever he, with great ceremony, donned their mother’s apron and took over the stove. Jennie and Kate had avoided the food for the first few weeks after the deaths, but when the silverheels had asked about flapjacks for breakfast, Jennie had decided she would take over her father’s duties.

She stood over the pan ladling and flipping until there was a platter of the fluffy cakes big enough to feed, as Kate pointed out each time, the entire Seventh Cavalry…or three hungry miners.

“He said he wants to help, but he didn’t say how?” Kate asked her sister as Jennie watched carefully for the first bubbles to rise on the last batch.

“He said he’d get back to us today with more ideas,” Jennie answered carefully. She’d had no choice but to tell her sister about last night’s visit from Carter Jones. The silverheels would have revealed it if she hadn’t mentioned it first. But she wasn’t sure she was ready to discuss the encounter with Kate. It had left her too confused.

“So what did you talk about?”

“I don’t know…just…well, Lyle, for one thing.” That ought to shut her sister up, Jennie thought smugly.

But she was wrong. Kate continued the interrogation. “What about Lyle?”

“Mr. Jones says he’s still smitten with you.”

Kate shrugged. “That’s his problem, I guess. Any man who would be fool enough to carry a torch for a fallen woman deserves to suffer.”

Jennie knew it was unhappiness, not cruelty, behind her sister’s brittle words. “Fallen woman, indeed,” she snorted.

But Kate would not be led away from the subject. “Well, what did you think of the man? You never answered my question about him yesterday.”

What did she think of him? “Think” wasn’t precisely the word she would have chosen. It had not been rational thought that had made her turn into a speechless goose last night when Carter Jones had taken her hand and looked at her with those riveting gray eyes. “I think he was sincere about wanting to help. And, Lord knows, we can use all the friends we can get these days.”

“And he’s a lawyer, which is good. But why does he want to help us?”

What had he said? Something about injustice. Jennie didn’t completely buy it. Carter Jones didn’t strike her as the idealistic type. But she was afraid to offer the only other explanation that seemed logical, because it was a possibility that she didn’t even want to consider. He couldn’t be attracted to her. For one thing, they’d barely met. For another, the last thing either Jennie or her sister needed in their lives was another fast-talking, charming scalawag of a male.

She piled the last three flapjacks on the platter, then put down the turner and wiped her hands on her mother’s apron. “I don’t know. It’s probably a lawyer thing. They’re always trying to see if they can find an angle that no one else has thought of.”

Kate started to pick up the platter, but Jennie pushed her sister’s hands out of the way and lifted it herself. By now Kate had stopped protesting when Jennie took over her share of the work. “Well, it doesn’t sound as if he left a very good impression on you.”

Jennie headed toward the door of the dining room. “Good enough,” she said, keeping her voice light “At least I didn’t yell at him and slam the door in his face like the first time.”

Kate giggled. “Dorie Millard says when you treat men badly it makes them want you more.”

Dr. Millard’s daughter, Dorothy, was notorious for giving advice on romance to anyone who would listen. Jennie would have liked to discount her words as giddy nonsense, but the truth was that Dorie had always had more suitors than any other girl in town.

She hesitated a minute before she said, “Mr. Jones doesn’t want me, Kate. The idea’s absurd.” Then she pushed her way through to where the miners were impatiently awaiting their breakfast.

Kate had perked up her head at Jennie’s last words. She’d only been teasing by bringing up Dorie’s proclamation. But the break in her sister’s voice had been unmistakable. And unprecedented. Could it be possible that Jennie was finally feeling what it was to be attracted to a man? Kate smiled, then clasped her hands over her stomach and addressed her unborn child. “What do you think, sugarplum? It sounds to me like we’d better have ourselves a look at this Mr. Carter Jones.”

Jennie tried to tell herself that she was acting no differently than she would on any other day. She and Barnaby cleaned up the breakfast dishes while Kate lay down for her morning rest Then she deliberately made herself put on her gardening dress, the least attractive thing she owned, and went out to weed and pick the vegetables. She refused to admit that she was hurrying through the task so that she could clean up and change her attire. And she picked her second-best day dress, the yellow one with five pink primroses tucked along the bodice. Of course, it was the one she’d been wearing when Jack Foster had told her that the yellow dress and her glossy dark brown hair made her look as pretty as a black-eyed Susan.

If she was jumpier than normal during the day, it was because she hadn’t slept well last night, still nursing her headache and thinking about that blasted court order. It had nothing to do with the fact that every time that broken shutter in front blew open she’d thought it had been footsteps coming up the walk.

In the end it was nearly five before he came. And by then she was more or less convinced that she truly didn’t care if she saw him again. But when she opened the door to see him standing there holding a nosegay of delicate purple flowers complete with a trailing ribbon, she knew that she was in trouble.

“How are you, Mr. Jones?” she managed to say calmly enough. “Come in.”

Carter frowned. “We’d progressed farther than that last night,” he said, handing her the flowers with a slight bow. “You called me Carter, remember?”

Jennie remembered every second of last night’s encounter. But she said, “It was done under duress, I believe.”

Carter laughed. “Turning legal on me, are you?”

“It’s your profession, Counselor.” The banter was making Jennie feel giddy. Growing up, she’d avoided the casual flirtations with the boys in town, preferring the solitude of home with her books or her music. Kate had always been the one who’d drawn the boys’ eyes, and that had been fine with Jennie. After Kate’s disaster with Sean Flaherty, Jennie was even more strongly convinced that men were not a necessary ingredient for happiness. Indeed, they could sometimes be the major obstacle to it.

Which didn’t explain why she was standing in her front doorway, grinning up at Carter Jones as if he were the candy man at the circus. She forced her face into a more sedate expression, took the flowers from him and gestured for him to come in.

“You can finally meet my sister,” she told him over her shoulder. “She’s back in the kitchen shelling some peas for supper.”

Carter touched her arm. His fingers were warm through the soft yellow muslin of her dress. “Would you mind if I spoke to you alone first?” he asked.

His suddenly serious tone made her stop at once. She turned back toward him. “Of course. We’ll go into the parlor.”

Once again they entered under the draped archway, but this time the room was empty. The table the miners had used for their card game was pushed back against the wall and held a vase of freshly cut flowers. Carter pointed across the room to the piano. “Do you play?”