Meeting Her Match , livre ebook

© 2014 by Mary Connealy
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www . bakerpublishinggroup . com
Ebook edition created 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-44126-336-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Excerpt from Swept Away, T ROUBLE IN T EXAS #1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
About the Author
Books by Mary Connealy
Back Ads
Chapter 1
D RY G ULCH , T EXAS D ECEMBER 1893
It was downright silly to be the mother to three boys and running a busy household when you were twenty-one and single.
It was a good thing Hannah Taylor was up to it.
“Abraham Taylor, you leave Kevin alone!” Hannah, big sister and schoolmarm, stood at the bottom of the schoolhouse steps. Hannah was a quiet woman and too busy to have much in the way of friends. But when it came to her little brothers, she could melt stubborn with a single glare, and she felt no great need to be quiet with the little varmints. Abe settled down fast. Then she added, “Abe, remember you have to get the clinkers out of the stove.”
“It’s Jeremy’s turn!” Abe wailed.
“You traded with Jeremy for a chance to get out of pitching hay to the horses just yesterday. Now it’s time to pay.” Hannah went up the steps to the schoolhouse. She paused to wave at Dottie Brighton, who was on her way to Claasen’s General Store for supplies. After Dottie smiled and waved back, Hannah hurried inside, leaving her little brothers on the playground. The oldest of them, Jeremy, took charge while Hannah got ready to start the school day. She didn’t scold Abe anymore. He was a good boy, just active and noisy. He’d be in to clean out the heating stove soon enough.
Hannah heaved a sigh of relief when she shut the schoolhouse door on the chilly December morning. “Thank heavens I’m back at work so I can get some rest!” She smiled at herself when she thought it. But it was true. The town of Dry Gulch, Texas, halted school for harvest, which was as much work for the women as it was for the men. And Hannah had convinced the school board to give her an extra week of freedom to help prepare for Nelda’s wedding. It was Hannah’s second little sister to marry. Two Taylor weddings in three years, leaving Hannah the only girl in the family. She had three little brothers, another baby on the way, and a ma who was mighty tired.
As always, Pa was hoping for a boy.
Now here they were, a week before Christmas. There was barely going to be time to organize a school Christmas program, and Hannah loved making Christmas special for her students.
She smiled as shouts of laughter echoed from the playground, all of the noise coming from her little brothers—including two-year-old Kevin, who was too young for school. But Hannah had informed the school board that bringing her baby brother was part of the deal. Hannah couldn’t teach if she couldn’t bring him along, because Ma wasn’t up to it.
She savored the peace of the brisk winter morning in her familiar classroom, enjoying the dusty smell of chalk and the biting odor of ashes from the stone-cold potbellied stove. She kept her cloak and bonnet on until the stove could be cleaned out and lit, yet she didn’t mind that Abe was slow in coming. She needed a few more quiet moments to enjoy her surprising success with helping some lonely friends find happiness.
She hadn’t really set out to spark a romance with her meddling. But it was a pleasure to think of her former co-teacher, Grace O’Malley, married to Clayton Weber and already expecting a baby. And word had come back to town that Neill and Clara Archer had married, as well as Lucy and Andrew Simms. Hannah had a hand in all of that and it pleased her to no end. It gave her such a warm feeling that she thought maybe she had a true gift for helping others.
She’d never had much luck helping herself.
Hannah heard the schoolhouse door open and looked up, expecting Abe.
Marcus Whitfield came in with an armful of wood. He’d never delivered the wood before. A member of the school board saw to their wood supply, usually dropping off a week’s supply at one time, stacked behind the schoolhouse, but it had never been Marcus. And Hannah routinely assigned the chore of hauling it inside to one of her students.
“Good morning.” Hannah had been his classmate in this very school. Now she was the teacher and he was a partner in his father’s bank.
Marcus glanced up at her awkwardly and nodded without speaking, then concentrated on where he was walking as if the floor were riddled with holes.
“I hadn’t heard that you’d be bringing wood,” Hannah said politely, trying not to roll her eyes at Marcus’s strange ways.
“Pa’s turn.” Marcus kept his chin down as he made his way to the stove at the front of the room.
Hannah couldn’t imagine Mr. Whitfield, the rather regal president of the town’s only bank, ever dropping off wood. And she knew he wasn’t on the school board. But maybe he’d volunteered just recently.
From the way he moved along the side of the room, it seemed Marcus was doing his best to stay as far away from her as possible. Marcus was the only unattached churchgoing man in town. Hannah should probably set her cap for him, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to feel any romantic notions about the poor, shy man. Marcus had no interest in her, either. In fact, judging by his effort to keep space between them, he actively disliked her.
Hannah felt a twinge of resentment. She had a sudden desire to march over to him and say, You can’t reject me. I’m rejecting you first, so there!
She didn’t do any such thing, of course. She even had the grace to realize she was having too strong a reaction to a man whose only provable crime was shyness. Why, maybe she’d make Marcus her next project. The man quite obviously needed a wife.
She mulled that over, watching him. So she was gazing right at him when he glanced up at her, saw her looking at him, and fell on his face.
“Marcus!” Jumping up, she rushed over to him. “Are you all right?”
He was sprawled awkwardly on his armload of wood. When he shoved himself up, a piece of kindling under his hand rolled and he fell again. Hannah got to her knees and pulled the small logs scattered under poor Marcus away and tossed them toward the place they’d be stacked. She had most of them removed when Marcus finally managed to get to his knees.
“Your glasses are bent.” Hannah’s whole life was spent helping people, so it came naturally for her to pluck his spectacles away.
“Here, let me—” she said.
“Hannah, I can fix . . .” Marcus grabbed at her hands.
She looked up to see a streak of blood trickle from the corner of his mouth. “Oh, Marcus, your lip is bleeding.” She abandoned his glasses to pull her handkerchief out of the sleeve of her blue gingham dress and dabbed at the small cut.
Marcus rushed to put his glasses on, and his hand tangled with hers as they knelt facing each other. Their eyes locked and held.
Hannah noticed that Marcus, up close, wasn’t quite so gangly as she remembered. His eyes were a clear light blue. His hair was blond, almost the same color as hers. His poor lip was mildly swollen and tender looking. The bleeding stopped after only a second or two of pressure from her handkerchief. Not a serious injury and yet she kept glancing at it.
Between looking at his eyes and lips, quite a bit of time passed.
Marcus’s hand on hers tightened. He seemed to draw her closer, and she was already very close. “Hannah, I wonder if you’d like to . . . to . . .”
“I have an idea, Hannie!” Abe shouted, charging into the schoolhouse. He stumbled and caught himself against a desk at the back of the room, knocking it out of line.
Hannah surged to her feet and almost ran to her desk, not sure what had just happened between her and Marcus Whitfield.
“If we don’t start the stove, we don’t have to clean it,” Abe said. “It’s warm enough.”
Hannah almost laughed out loud. Abe had the earflaps pulled down on his beloved red hat, and his mittens firmly on. Hannah had knitted them for Christmas but made the mistake of telling Pa, who’d insisted on giving the boys their hats and mittens early for the sake of being practical. Abe’s cheeks and nose were as red as the cap on his head. But he would rather freeze, and all his classmates along with him, than struggle with the minimal chore of collecting and disposing of the built-up ash in the stove.
Hannah didn’t blame him for trying, but it was his turn and he knew it.
Marcus quickly finished stacking the firewood and then nearly ran out of the place. He’d said, “ Hannah, I wonder if you’d like to . . .” If she’d like to what?
“Nice try, Abe,” she said. “Now get to work.” She spoke firmly, but her thoughts were drawn back to Marcus and his question. Could he possibly not be quite so indifferent to her as she’d imagined?
Hannah, I wonder if you’d like to go for a carriage ride with me?
Or did he wonder something quite different.
Hannah, I wonder if you’d like to get your own stupid kindling from now on?
Shaking away thoughts of Marcus, she listened with a smile as Abe moaned and groaned his way through the simple job of pulling the cast-iron tray out of the stove and carrying the sooty ashes—along with the hard black “clinkers” of unburned wood—out the door and tossing it all in the ash pile.
Hannah began pulling her books