Page 51 of A Convenient Heart
Merritt laughed a little. “I’m fine. I told you, my knees might be scraped.” A pulse of pain there echoed her words.
Corrine was making sympathetic noises, but Merritt pushed the wrapped dress into her friend’s hands.
“Jack!” He’d already moved a couple of steps away, but he turned back in the darkness.
She went to him, pressed in close and wound her arms around his waist.
“I’ll miss you tonight.”
He was curiously still. She’d thought his arms would come around her, but maybe he was conscious of Corrine still behind her.
“I’ll see you at the church in the morning,” she said softly.
She reached up on tiptoe, but her lips met the cool skin of his cheek.
“Goodbye.”
There was a finality to his words as he slipped away into the darkness.
She let the warmth of her friends’ chatter slip over her, their exclamations over her skinned palms, but her heart followed Jack into the night.
* * *
Jack only walked as far as Merritt’s neighbor’s house, then doubled back in the small alleyway behind the row of tidy houses.
He stood outside at the back corner of Merritt’s house, in a patch of darkness between two windows. A place where her marshal friend wouldn’t be able to look outside and see him if he happened to move.
He felt breathless with fear, adrenaline still pumping after the near-miss on the boardwalk outside that saloon.
He hadn’t seen who’d given Merritt the push, but in the fractured second before he’d been able to react, he’d seen the flash of a face in the light thrown by the saloon door that had closed an instant later.
Morris.
Her fall had been no accident, Jack was sure of that.
He couldn’t figure out why. Had Morris been trailing them? Jack had spent all afternoon out in the open at the school site, praying that Morris would seek him out. Hoping that the man could be talked down from whatever violence he wanted to do to get that money back.
Was it possible the man had followed him and Merritt down to the milliner’s, then back again? It seemed too coincidental that he’d come out of the saloon at just the right moment to knock into Merritt.
There was movement in Merritt’s kitchen, female voices chattering excitedly. He couldn’t hear what they were saying.
For once in his life, he didn’t know what cards to play. Couldn’t see an obvious next move.
There’s always tomorrow. And the day after…
Merritt’s anticipation for the wedding tomorrow had been bright enough to light up the night, but all he felt standing beside her was coldness. And fear.
He ran a shaking hand down his face. Remembered that the town marshal was inside. She’d keep Merritt from harm, at least for a while.
Jack snuck back the way he’d come, then down the street that would take him back along the boardwalk.
He had a terrible urge to return to the work site. What if Morris had undone all the clearing Jack had done today?
He’d told himself he could make this work. He could give up his nomadic ways, could try and be a good husband to her, make a life here.
Who was he kidding?
He hadn’t even been able to get the words out.
