Loving Linsey Read online

  Again she shook her head.

  “But if I don’t want to be with you, and you don’t want to be with me, why is Linsey so hell-bent and determined to see us wed?”

  She closed her eyes. Why did he have to ask her the one question she couldn’t answer?

  “Tell me the truth, Addie—why is Linsey so determined that we marry?”

  A door opened, then shut, and suddenly Linsey was there. “Because I’m dying.”

  Chapter 16

  Red hair, whether “ginger,” auburn, or copper-hued, is supposed to be a sign of fiery and ungovernable temperament, or of a passionate disposition in love.

  The words hit Daniel like a sledgehammer, driving through his middle, stealing his breath. Linsey . . . dying? No, it wasn’t possible. Not Linsey. Not this vibrant creature who could brighten a room with just her presence.

  His blood turned to ice.

  “What the hell do you mean, you’re dying?” He searched her face, looking for some clue as to what affliction she might be suffering from. She looked perfectly healthy to him. Still the same glowing ivory complexion, the same glossy red curls, and the same sweet curves and hollows that made a man want nothing more than to tumble her in the grass. “From what?” he managed to ask.

  “I don’t know exactly. I only know that before year’s end, harps will be heralding me to the pearly gates.”

  He looked at Addie, who stood pale and shaken, her head bowed and her hands clasped, offering neither dispute nor explanation.

  Jesus.

  Daniel’s legs folded beneath him. Numbly he sat. The thought of Linsey—reckless, cursed, passionate Linsey—cold in the ground . . . “How long have you known?”

  “A month or so. No one knows but me, Addie, and now you.”

  “You haven’t told your aunt?”

  “Not yet,” she said, settling down beside him, filling his senses with the intoxicating fragrance of lavender and reckless winds. “I’m not sure her heart could take it.”

  “Did my father make the diagnosis?”

  “I never saw your father.”

  “Then who?” he demanded. “I’ll contact your physician and get a full report of your symptoms, take them to my colleagues. Hell, I’ll give you an examination myself and compare findings. He could have misdiagnosed you. Even doctors make mistakes.”

  She hushed him with a hand to his arm. “Daniel, I appreciate your concern, but there is no cure for my condition. I can’t even say I’ve contracted a disease.”

  “Then how do you know you’re dying?” he cried in frustration. And, he admitted, fear.

  “I saw my reflection at Bleet Haggar’s wake.”

  For a moment, he simply stared at her. He couldn’t have heard right. She was dying because she’d looked into a mirror?

  He threw back his head and laughed.

  He laughed until his ribs hurt and his eyes watered, partly from relief, partly from genuine amusement. Of all her nonsensical claims, this one had to take the prize.

  A glance at Linsey caught her staring at him down the slope of her nose, her eyes narrowed. “I fail to see the humor in this, Daniel,” she said.

  Daniel wiped his eyes; his laughter abated to bone-quivering chuckles. “You had me there for a minute, Linsey, I’ll give you that.” He shook his head. “Oh, damn. Here I was, thinking you were serious.”

  Her mutinous expression grew. “Make light of it now, Mr. Skeptical, because you’ll be choking on those chuckles when they’re shoveling dirt over my coffin by year’s end.”

  The iron-clad ring of certainty in her voice rendered him mute. “You are serious!”

  “Of course I am. Do you think I’d joke about something like this?”

  “For chrissake, Linsey, you don’t really believe that looking into a mirror will foretell your death!”

  Her refusal to answer spoke for itself.

  Events began clicking in his mind: the day she’d run into him at Bleet’s wake, the horrified expression on her face; her mysterious and hasty compulsion to marry him off without his consent.

  She believed it. She honestly thought she was going to die because of some crazy superstition.

  Humor turned to irritation. “Linsey, do you know how absurd that is? People die because they get sick, or because of their own stupidity, or another’s carelessness. They don’t die just because a hearse crosses their shadow or because birds land on their clothesline or because they look into a mirror.”

  “My mother did.”

  The flat sobriety in her voice had a quelling impact. Linsey had never spoken of her mother that he could recall, but with those three little words, he understood how deeply the woman’s passing had affected Linsey. He didn’t know whether to console her over her loss or shake her for the ludicrous idea that a mirror had somehow caused it.

  Before he could do either, Linsey gathered her skirts in her hand and rose with stiff hauteur.

  “I understand that you don’t put much store in the power of portents,” she told him, “but mark my words, Daniel, this will come to pass. By year’s end, I will no longer be around to ruin your life. That should make you blissfully happy.”

  At that, she marched into the house. With commendable loyalty, Addie followed, little more than flash of wrinkled paisley and ruffled hems.

  Daniel stared at the closed door long after the echo of its slamming had faded away. The tremor in Linsey’s voice, the sheen of tears in her eyes, disturbed him more than he wanted to admit. He’d been trained to ease pain, not cause it. Yet that’s exactly what he had done, and to the one person whose laughter and passion and spice of spirit had stirred more life in him in the last month than he’d felt in all his twenty-seven years put together.

  He rubbed his brow. Life had been so much simpler before it had been invaded with Linsey’s quirky notions and manipulative schemes. He’d never found himself fighting for control. Or resisting the pull of the forbidden. Or treading that thin line between lust and something deeper. . . .

  No, his staunch hold on his emotions had only been shaken when one reckless, irrepressible redhead charged into his well-ordered world and waged war.

  Happy? Just the thought of anything happening to her made the bottom fall out of his soul.

  From the parlor doorway, Addie watched her sister furiously flip through the pages of a Harper’s Weekly. A hasty swipe of her wrist across her eyes told Addie that her instincts had been right on the mark; Daniel’s reaction had injured Linsey deeply. She didn’t know who she felt more sorry for: Linsey, Daniel . . . or herself. So many lives were being affected by one woman’s misguided determination.

  “Linsey?”

  She briefly glanced up. “That man makes me so angry sometimes that I want to scream!”

  Addie knew the feeling, Linsey made her feel that way sometimes, too.

  “Can you believe the nerve of him?” her sister continued. “I trusted him with the most shattering secret of my life, and he laughed—laughed!—at me.” She turned back to the catalogue and pitched several more pages over. “Thank God I’m not the one planning to marry that insufferable wretch—we wouldn’t last beyond the wedding feast before I had his head on a platter.”

  The fiery tone couldn’t hide the hurt behind the heat. It was puzzling. Linsey barely seemed to tolerate Daniel, yet he was the only one Addie had ever known who could make Linsey cry. Could she . . . was it possible that . . . ? No. Addie dismissed the notion instantly. Linsey couldn’t possibly have developed feelings for Daniel. The two clashed like paisley and flannel.

  Addie perched on the edge of the sofa beside Linsey, folded her hands in her lap, and approached her as she would have one of her students. “I know you meant well when you had that article put in the paper, but surely you knew it would upset Daniel when he saw it.”

  “Actually, I’d hoped it would give that hard-headed mule’s behind a shove in the right direction.”

  “You shouldn’t have gone to such extremes.” Such public ext
remes. Not only one secret had been revealed today, but two.

  “You’re right.” Linsey agreed without compunction. “I should have shoved him in the horse trough again, instead.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. He doesn’t want to marry me, Linsey. He doesn’t want to marry anybody—he told me so.”

  “People often say things they don’t mean when they’re angry. Daniel is a bit miffed right now, but he’ll come around. Don’t give up hope.”

  Addie felt the tight hold on her composure slip. “I can’t give up something I don’t have. For heaven’s sake, Linsey, love isn’t something that can be forced. The heart latches on where it wants to, where it feels safe and secure and loved in return. We have no control over that—sometimes it happens without warning!”

  “Exactly! Isn’t that what I’ve been saying all along? Given time, Daniel’s heart will latch onto you; then all our wishes will come true.”

  “Oh, Linsey, why can’t you simply accept that I am not meant to be Daniel’s wife?”

  When Linsey turned her head, Addie found herself pinned with an implacable stare.

  “Because I love you, Addie, and because I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure you are happy—now and always. And if that means seeing you married to the man of your dreams, then by God, before one grain of Texas soil falls on my casket, I will see it done.”

  Stunned numbness descended on Addie. Hadn’t Linsey heard a word she’d said?

  No, obviously she hadn’t. She wouldn’t even listen. She refused to. Her mind was so set on her own goals, her own set of wishes—last wishes—that she couldn’t even consider that maybe the man of Addie’s dreams and the man Linsey deemed she should marry were not one and the same.

  Torn between wanting to clout Linsey over the head and bursting into tears, Addie sprang from the sofa and flounced into the foyer. She stood outside the door, clenching and unclenching her fists, fighting tears of shame and frustration. Why couldn’t she simply tell Linsey that her feelings for Daniel had changed—if, in fact, they had ever existed at all, except in her own foolish imagination? What was so hard about being honest about the fact that it wasn’t Daniel she wanted to spend her life with, but Oren?

  She hated her lack of courage, especially where Linsey was concerned. But how did one change a trait that was as much a part of her as her love of teaching or her fear of heights?

  She closed her eyes, but a tear escaped anyway to trickle down her cheek. A yearning to seek comfort in Oren’s arms, to feel his quiet strength surround her, stunned Addie with its force. After this morning, though, she doubted Oren wanted anything to do with her—and she could not bear his rejection atop everything else that had happened.

  Feeling as lost and alone as she had the day her mother had stuck her on a coach bound for the unknown, Addie wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and drifted outside, her shoulders slumped with defeat.

  To her surprise, Daniel still sat on the top step. “Daniel? You’re still here?”

  He jerked his thumb toward the house. “She’s angry with me, isn’t she?”

  Addie glanced over her shoulder into the window, then back at Daniel. His black hair looked as if it had been combed back with a pitchfork. His eyes had gone dull. Troubled, even. That was peculiar since, in the past, he hadn’t seemed to care a whit how Linsey felt about him. “She loves to laugh,” Addie explained. “But she hates to be laughed at.”

  “I wouldn’t have laughed at her if she hadn’t concocted that absurd story!”

  “Is it absurd?” Addie asked softly.

  He turned on Addie. “Don’t tell me you believe that drivel!”

  She hesitated, once again torn between a lifetime of habit and an onslaught of practicality. Finally she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter what I believe.”

  “Damned if it doesn’t! If you believe it, then you’re as daft as she is. And if you don’t, then why in the hell aren’t you doing something to convince her otherwise?”

  “Because it isn’t that simple, Daniel! You, of all people, must know how opinionated she can be. Once she gets her mind set on something, a wedge and hammer couldn’t pry it loose.”

  Linsey’s strength of conviction was a trait Addie had clung to for years. Often she’d envied Linsey the ability to stand firm, no matter what windstorm swept through her life. Only recently had Addie begun to see that Linsey’s strongest virtue could also be her deepest flaw.

  And Addie’s most indomitable foe.

  Suddenly weary, she slipped the hat pin out of the back of the net-and-felt concoction perched on her head, removed the hat, then lowered herself to the step above Daniel, far enough away that his aftershave would not send her into a fit of sneezing. “Look, the truth is, I don’t know what to believe. Sometimes there will be a sign, and something wonderful or terrible will happen. But other times, good fortune comes my way with no warning. But Linsey . . . there is no doubt in her. She honestly believes she will not survive beyond the end of the year.”

  “Because her mother died?”

  “Because her mother died after seeing her reflection in a mirror at the wake of her husband’s commanding officer. Three months later, she was stricken down with the cholera.”

  The tight set of his jaw an indication his cynicism, Daniel squinted into the glare of morning sun that cast an amber glow across the autumn-kissed landscape.

  At length, Addie softly told Daniel, “I think that deep down, Linsey feels that there was something she could have done to change things, some way she could have prevented it—or at least been prepared for it.”

  “Where’d she get a fool notion like that?”

  “A combination of things, I suppose. Coincidence, Aunt Louisa, her own fanciful imagination.”

  “Cholera wiped out entire settlements—there is no way to prepare for that.”

  “But Linsey needs to control things, and divining the signs is a way that she can feel as if she has some power.”

  “And that includes trying to get you and me married.”

  Addie sighed. It registered that this was the first actual conversation she’d ever had with Daniel, and the fact that it was getting them nowhere only confirmed her belief that he and she would never make a good match. But now that the truth was out, and Linsey’s secret in the open, Daniel at least had a right to an explanation.

  “My father died when I was very young. Three, maybe four. He’d been bitten by a snake while collecting wood. We’d lived in Kansas then—at the end of the world, my mother used to say. Sometimes months would pass before we saw another living soul. She said she could endure the solitude for my father’s sake, but after he was gone . . . well, she didn’t have it in her.

  “Then one day, the cavalry passed across our land. My mother literally got down on her knees and begged them to take us. That’s how she met Linsey’s father. Fell head over heels at first sight, she says, but I think she was just lonely, and scared—at first, anyway. As the years went on, they found love with each other. Their existence revolves around each other. It leaves little room for anyone else—even their daughters.

  “Linsey and I are all each other has had since we were five years old. She’s determined to see that I have someone to take care of me when she’s gone, since Aunt Louisa won’t be around forever. Linsey’s convinced you are the person I need to help me get through my grief.”

  “But there won’t be any grief,” Daniel argued, “because there won’t be any death.”

  Addie lifted her hands in a gesture of exasperation. “Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said?”

  “I’ve heard, but beliefs can change.”

  Good heavens, he was as bad as Linsey! “Linsey’s beliefs won’t change just because you say they should. They’re too ingrained in her.”

  “That’s why we have to prove to her that all these crazy signs she puts so much store by are nothing but folklore.”

  Addie went still, the words igniting the first spark of hope since the day Lin
sey had told her the news. If Linsey could be persuaded to put aside her notions—or at the very least, doubt them—then maybe there was still a chance for all of them to seize happiness. “How, Daniel? How can we prove it?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I’m a doctor, not a magician. I’ve never dealt with anything like this.”

  Slowly, a bright smile spread across her face. “But I know who has.”

  Addie didn’t understand how she kept getting involved in these plots. First with Linsey, now with Daniel. All she’d ever really wanted was to be a part of something outside herself, to love somebody, to be loved in return. To know that she meant something. What that something was, she couldn’t name, but watching and dreaming of Daniel had been the closest she’d ever come to finding it.

  Until Oren.

  Even that was doomed, though, negated by a promise she’d made to the one person who’d ever been loyal and true to her.

  Unless she took charge of the situation and helped Daniel prove Linsey wrong. And the best person to help them was the one person who understood Linsey better than anyone.

  It took them an hour to track down Aunt Louisa. They found her at Granny Yearling’s house, a tiny clapboard structure on an offshoot road behind the church.

  “Now remember, let me do the talking,” Addie said as they waited for someone to answer their knock.

  “What will you say?”

  “I don’t know yet, but Aunt Louisa’s faith in superstition is almost equal to Linsey’s, so we must be very careful that we don’t cause her any distress.”

  The door opened a second later.

  As she and Daniel stepped inside, the place reminded her of an open hope chest with a hundred year’s worth of memories crammed into one little cubicle. Every available surface was cluttered with memorabilia, doilies, lamps, quilts, figurines, miniature tea sets, embroidery hoops, picture frames, and wall sconces of brass, silver, and copper . . .

  It made a person dizzy just looking at it all.

  They sat on the edge of a thick-cushioned sofa crowded with pillows and dolls. Aunt Louisa and Granny Yearling sat across from them, Granny’s hearing horn propped idle on a table beside her, the pipe in her mouth puffing smoke like a steam engine.