Plum Pudding Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

peelings and grease blobs. He clung to his lone strip of meat.
    “You have some nerve being in my house.”
    Peter’s eyebrows rose. He’d been in this house dozens of times before. “Kitty told me to let myself in.”
    “That’s Miss Callahan to you.” Mr. Callahan glared at Peter. His broad hands closed as if he wished Peter’s neck was between them.
    Peter blinked. “She’s only seventeen.”
    “And you take that as reason enough to take liberties with her?”
    “Sir?”
    “I heard about you consorting with her in church. Telling the entire town you were marrying her. Have you no sense of shame? What about asking the father’s permission? You’re twenty-eight years old. What are you doing taking advantage of a seventeen-year-old—”
    “Actually, sir,” Peter started hastily, “Kit…your daughter and I are just pretending to be coupling off to make Patience jealous. I want to marry Patience, you see, and now with this Mr. Dehaven, Kitty and I thought. I mean. I know it’s terribly improper…” Peter dropped his piece of bacon into the sink beside its comrades. Now that he said it aloud, his plan sounded plain exploitive. Fake wooing one daughter, manipulating the other into a marriage proposal.
    Mr. Callahan would throw him out of the house on the spot, and he’d never get to speak to Patience again, even long enough to beg her not to board that Montana-bound train. Maybe he could sneak on her train the morning she was about to leave.
    “Oh, thank heaven.” Mr. Callahan’s sweaty body wrapped around him in a bear hug. “Here.” Kitty’s father shoved the pewter plate of remaining bacon and flapjacks at Peter. “Would you like some syrup too? Grits? Apple pie?”
    Extricating himself from the man, Peter received the plate Mr. Callahan thrust into his hands. Blinking, he took a piece of bacon and put it in his mouth.
    “You absolutely have to save us from that man. Have you read the letters he writes our Patience? He can’t even spell. And he keeps going on about breaking an arm chasing wild horses or snapping a collarbone in a raft. How does the clumsy oaf think he can rear children?”
    So true. “Will you forbid your daughter from marrying him then?” The strip of bacon in Peter’s mouth turned pungent at the thought of Patience trapped in a blizzard with a newborn babe while the broken-boned dimwit couldn’t even stay out of mud pits long enough to come home.
    “Definitely. If you also have a locked tower and pack of guards to loan me, that is. The moment I tell Patience no, she’ll be northern bound on a train to Montana.”
    Her ticket was for six days from now.
    Peter dumped the plate on the counter. The noise of crockery clapping against wood echoed his heart. He had to find a way to make her stay.
    ~*~
    The noise of Christmas shoppers filled the store. Women’s voices rose and fell as they sorted through candies and children’s books. Mrs. Clinton held up bolt after bolt of fabric to the weak winter sunlight that sifted down through the clouds outdoors. Susannah Johnson ran lengths of ribbons through her appraising fingers.
    Work apron knotted neatly around her slim waist, Patience cleaned the floor with firm strokes. The brown of her dress sleeves clung to her arms as she swept.
    Peter’s hand slipped off the ledger he was supposed to be balancing as his gaze followed her.
    Broom against floor, sweep. Broom against floor, sweep. It was a motion he’d made a thousand times before. The sound of broom straw against pine floor was one he’d heard a thousand times more.
    Only two more days until she left. Was she weakening at all? Next week, would it just be him in this shop? Only his solitary broom beating the floor, a dirge with no harmony?
    “Did you need something?” Patience’s beautiful face leaned towards him. Her delicate hands rested on the tip of her broom handle, her pert chin balanced on top. She smiled at him. Her lips were so pink. He’d never seen lips quite