4 
4 POOR AS SHE and Michael had been, Victoria had indeed owned a pair of ice skates; probably she had brought them with her on the journey west to Montana Territory. Jessica found them hidden away in the bottom of a trunk, their blades dull and rusted, amongst a sad collection of small mementos—dried flowers from her wedding bouquet; a few letters, the paper thin as a spill of light on glass, tucked into yellow-edged envelopes; and various small baubles.
Just the sight of those simple, unassuming things, so obviously treasured, filled Jessica with guilt. She had grieved so much over Michael that she had almost forgotten to mourn Victoria, a young woman who would never watch her own babies grow, or hear them laugh, would never see another spring . . .
Jessica took a deep breath and guided her mind in another direction. Holding the skates close against her chest, she remembered her girlhood, when she and Michael and a crowd of friends had spent winter afternoons skating on a pond not far from their uncle’s house. Those had been some of the happiest times of her life; she’d felt free while skating, exhilarated by her own smooth velocity and the brisk caress of the wind.
Soon enough, though, her thoughts turned back to Victoria, robbed of so much. Rest easy, she told her sister-in-law, in the silence of her heart. I’ll look after Mary Catherine and Eleanor as long as they need me. I promise you that much.
The babies were lying on the bed behind her, cooing and kicking, content because they’d just been fed and changed. Looking at them, their lost mother’s skates in her hands, Jessica felt a surge of joy so poignant that it was all she could do not to grab up her nieces and hug them with all her might.
June-bug was right; they were precious. Treasures for whom she would go anywhere, do anything.
“I love you,” she said to them. And they gurgled happily in response.
The skates might have been made for Jessica, they fit so well, but she was sorely out of practice. She stood, teetering, and flung out her arms for balance, like a high-wire artist performing in a circus. She looked at the babies, who were watching her with expressions of drunken wonder, each exactly matched to the other, although the twins were not identical.
“Suppose I fall through the ice and catch pneumonia and the pair of you are all alone in the world?” she asked.
It wouldn’t work as an excuse to stay home from the skating party; even if she did meet with such a dire and dramatic fate, the Parrishes would gladly take her nieces in and raise them with love.
“All right, then,” she speculated. “It’s sure to be too cold out there for a couple of brand-new babies such as yourselves. Suppose you get sick? Why, I simply couldn’t bear it.”
But the babies would not take ill, her logical side argued. June-bug had told her that careful provision was always made for infants and small children. They would be held and passed around, close by the fire. In the years they’d been holding these community celebrations, not one of the little mites had been lost.
Jessica teetered over and laid a hand to each of the twins’ foreheads. Both were satiny cool.
It was settled, then; she’d join the rest of Springwater in heralding what was bound to be a bitterly cold night. She might even enjoy herself, if she could stop worrying long enough.
She removed her skates, put the babies back into their cradle, where they promptly fell asleep, exhausted by a morning spent socializing with June-bug McCaffrey, and made for the kitchen without bothering to put her shoes back on. There, she made a pot of tea.
The brew smelled lovely and rich, and she heated milk to flavor it. She felt afraid of what the future might hold, that was for sure, but there was a certain quiet joy within her, too. For the first time in her life, she was truly on her own. She would be the one to make the rules she abided by—not her uncle, not her employer, not even her brother, much as she’d loved him. No, she was going to be independent from here on, and, scary as that was, it made her want to spread her arms and laugh as she had done long, long ago, spinning on the skating pond until the world was a blur of color and shape.
* * *
Jacob himself had built the horse-drawn sleigh for just such nights as that one, and it was already full of fresh hay and crowded with laughing people when he drew the team to a halt in front of the newspaper office.
Gage jumped down from the flat bed of the sleigh and marveled at the jittery twitch in the pit of his stomach. Just the prospect of seeing Jessica Barnes again did that to him, and the hell of it was, the reality was bound to affect him even more. He just hoped she didn’t slam the door in his face, that was all, with half of Springwater down on the street listening for any word that might pass between the two of them. Trey and Landry were already ribbing him about Miss Barnes anyway, and here he was, letting himself in for more grief.
He hesitated a moment at the foot of the stairs, then bounded up them and knocked hard on the door.
Jessica answered, of course, looking surprised and damnably beautiful, even in her plain brown woolen dress. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she was holding a baby in each arm, he would probably have bolted, like some shy kid, rather than risk a rebuff from her, but the twins won him over. He just couldn’t walk away from them.
“Put your cloak on,” he said, taking both bundles from her with a grace that surprised him as much as it did her, and speaking rapidly, as if that could stop her from changing her mind, saying she wouldn’t go. “It’s cold out.”
She stared at him. “I was planning to walk to the pond,” she said.
“Walk? With two babies? Miss Barnes, it’s a mile to the springs, and even though the cattle have worn paths through the snow in some places, it’s still hard going.”
She blinked. He knew she wanted to snatch the babies back and refuse to have anything at all to do with him—it wasn’t hard to figure why, given the political differences he’d had with her brother—but he’d be damned if he’d return to that sleigh without her.
He gestured with his head, since his arms were full. “The whole town’s waiting down there,” he told her impatiently. “So you needn’t fear for your virtue.”
That brought a blush to her cheeks, a phenomenon he thoroughly and shamelessly enjoyed. She might be a prickly little bluestocking with an icicle for a heart, but she sure made a man want to warm her up and smooth her out.
“Very well,” she said, putting on her cloak and snatching up a pair of well-used skates. “I guess I have no choice.” She stepped out onto the stair landing, and winter stars caught in her eyes as she looked up at Gage, her expression uncertain, rather than saucy. “I—perhaps we could be civil to each other—just for tonight?”
He wanted to laugh. She might as well have gone on to say that hostilities would resume in the morning, so he shouldn’t let himself get too comfortable. “All right,” he agreed, with hard-won solemnity. He turned and led the way down the stairs, kicking himself all the way for not coming up with something memorable to say. So much for his reputation as an orator.
He sat close to her aboard the sleigh, ostensibly because he still had charge of one of the babies—June-bug had immediately claimed the other—and was annoyed to find that his heart was beating against his rib cage like a fist. He felt light-headed, as if he were suspended somewhere between the earth and the sky, and he hoped to God it didn’t mean what he thought it did.
The last time he’d felt this way, he’d made the mistake of a lifetime, a mistake that had cost him virtually everything he held dear. The sizable trust fund left to him by his maternal grandmother had been—and still was—paltry comfort, compared to the loss of his family, his dreams, and Liza.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Jessica’s face was alight; she enjoyed the company of neighbors, if not his company in particular, and knew even then that she would find her heart’s home in Springwater. In no time at all, she’d be somebody’s wife, deeply cherished.
The idea left a sour scowl in its wake.
Jacob was at the reins, which lay easy in his big hands, and when he glanced back once, his Indian-dark eyes smiled on Gage and Jessica, taking them both in as one, even if his mouth stayed still.
By the time they arrived, both babies had been absorbed into a cluster of chattering, admiring women. Having his arms empty gave Gage the excuse he needed to catch hold of Jessica by her narrow little waist—she didn’t weigh much more than a mail sack—and lift her down from the edge of the sleigh. She looked surprised, all right, but he didn’t give her a chance to comment. He just took her arm and steered her toward the huge, waiting bonfire, built earlier by Toby and the Kildare boys.
All the while, he wondered what in hell he was doing. Jessica had made it plain that she didn’t like him, and he was just asking for trouble by hanging around. He couldn’t seem to help it, that was the discouraging thing. It seemed to him that history was repeating itself: he was falling in love with a woman who’d sooner watch him burn than spit to put the flames out.
* * *
“This here’s Rachel Hargreaves,” June-bug said, tugging at Jessica’s cloak to get her attention. Jessica turned to see a small, dark-haired woman smiling at her. “Rachel, here’s Jessica Barnes. Michael’s sister.”
There was a brief and respectful silence at the mention of Michael’s name, but then, to Jessica’s profound relief, the conversation continued.
“And this is Savannah Parrish,” June-bug went on, indicating a beautiful woman with red-gold hair. A little girl stood beside her on minuscule skates, clutching her mother’s skirts. The child was lovely, pretty as a porcelain doll, and dressed all in rich blue velvet.
This, then, was the woman who wanted to adopt little Mary Catherine and Eleanor. Jessica felt a pang, for it was clear that Mrs. Parrish cherished her own child, and would have been good to the twins, as well. “Hello,” Savannah said.
Jessica nodded in response, captivated by the little girl, who displayed her father’s dark coloring and her mother’s exquisitely formed features.
“I’m four,” the child announced.
Jessica smiled. “My goodness,” she marveled.
“And I can count.”
Savannah bent and kissed her daughter’s dark head through her hood of white fur. “Hush, now, Beatrice,” she said softly.
Other introductions were made after that, but Jessica soon lost track of who was who. There were so many faces to remember, so many names. And besides, she was almighty nervous, with Mr. Calloway staying so close by the way he was. She was conscious of him in every snippet and fragment of her being.
It was indeed a relief when they finally reached the pond, where the skating party was to take place. A gangly blond boy was already there, sweeping snow off the ice with a straw broom. The light of the fire, some fifty feet away, danced orange over the snow, and wood smoke rolled toward the dark, star-speckled sky, filling the air with a pleasant scent.
Later, Jessica could only account for that night by believing that a passing angel had cast a spell over her. She might have stepped outside the ordinary world for a little while, leaving her sorrows, her doubts, her struggles all behind.
When she sat down on a log to pull on her skates, Gage appeared and knelt before her in the snow. She knew she should refuse to let him unlace her shoes, run his hands lightly over her ankles, but she couldn’t. She was in the grip of some foolish, wonderful magic, and because she was certain it would be brief, she meant to enjoy it.
They skated together, arm in arm, and Jessica even laughed. She felt a part of things—part of Springwater, part of the world and the universe. Part of a couple, however silly that idea would turn out to be, in the harsh light of a winter morning. For that night, she could pretend to be Cinderella on the arm of her prince.
Later, he brought her hot cider, and they engaged in a friendly snowball fight. There was more laughter all around, and Jessica’s heart, held to the ground for so long, soared against a dark sky shimmering with stars.
Finally, in the shadow of a tree, one of the few that grew below the foothills, Gage kissed her. She thought she ought to struggle, for the sake of principle, but the plain fact was, she didn’t want to. She allowed the kiss, even responded to it, and when it was over, she felt as though east and west, north and south had gotten all mixed up, out of their right places.
She took a handful of snow from a low branch and tossed it playfully into Gage’s face.
He laughed, his arms still resting lightly around her waist. “What makes you such an ornery female?”
“I am not an ornery female.”
He chuckled. “I see. What are you, then?”
She was stumped for an answer, at least for the moment. The fresh, chilly air—at least, she told herself it was that—made her breathless, and she was feeling slightly intoxicated, the way she had one Christmas Eve, on shipboard, when old Mrs. Covington had persuaded her to have a glass of wine with dinner.
She was starting to remember things, though—that this man had ordered Michael’s loans called in. That he wanted the newspaper for himself, was probably only trying to sweet-talk her into selling it. The spell was fading, and she felt an inestimable sorrow, quite different from the loss of her brother and sister-in-law, sweep over her as she stepped back.
“It won’t work, Mr. Calloway,” she said.
He knew what she was talking about; she could see that in his face. But of course, being a lawyer, and practiced in the various ways and means of turning others to his way of thinking, he tried to keep up the pretense. “Why do you have to be so suspicious?”
“You destroyed my brother. You persuaded the bank in Choteau to call in his loans. He died because of you and others like you.”
Gage stared at her. Apparently he’d thought she hadn’t known, and his denial came too late. “I was Michael’s friend, whether he knew it or not. One of the best he ever had.”
Jessica squared her shoulders and hiked up her chin. The man was stark raving mad; surely he’d seen Michael’s editorials. Surely they had exchanged heated words, Gage and her brother.
Well, now the brief idyll was over. It was time she and the babies went home, where they belonged.