LITMIR.BIZ

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thought for a moment. “Only about the starch, Madge. I gave my word of honor about the rest. It will be all right in the end.”

      The housekeeper sniffed. “You hope.”

      Kellen jerked. He did hope. Then for the thousandth time in the past week he wondered how he’d gotten himself into this fix.

      He’d considered marriage once, before the Great War and his twenty-first birthday. She’d wait for him, she said. But she hadn’t. She married his best friend the spring he marched off with the Army of Virginia, and the next winter she succumbed to typhoid. Women laced their fingers around one’s heart and then threw it away.

      His intent was to keep his pledge to the school building fund committee, help them raise money. But he’d resolved that Dora Mae’s harebrained scheme wouldn’t involve any part of his heart. Plenty of people did not marry for love.

      Mrs. Squires eyed him. “Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?”

      “Reasonably sure, yes. For one thing, it will put a stop to that gaggle of matchmaking mothers pushing their daughters at me. And their sisters and their widowed aunts and their cousins and…”

      Besides, he was the last male in the Macready line. He would hate to pass from this world without leaving an heir.

      And in addition, you damned fool, you gave Mrs. Landsfelter your word.

      Underneath he knew there was more to it than Dora Mae’s persuasive powers. Lately he’d been hungry for something more in his life. Something to fill the void yawning before him as he grew yet another year older. It was the one thing Kellen could not admit to anyone else. He was lonely. He wanted someone to talk to. Someone to laugh with.

      Lolly’s heart plunked into her stomach like a bucket full of rocks. The receiving line stretched from the ballroom entrance halfway around the huge ballroom to the cloth-covered refreshment table, a distance of maybe twenty feet. To her, it seemed like the Great Wall of China.

      And all those people!

      She liked people, but she preferred them one at a time. In big crowds, her throat went dry as a dust dolly and even when she could think of something to say, she couldn’t push a single word past her paralyzed tongue. In Kansas, she had let her newspaper editorials and Papa’s revolver speak for her. Out here in Oregon she felt tongue-tied. A flatland country weed in a citified rose garden.

      The line of faces turned toward her, waiting. In the glow of the huge gaslight chandelier overhead they looked like a row of smiling hard-boiled eggs.

      “Thank heavens you’re finally heah,” a voice hissed in her ear. “They cain’t staht the reception until all three of us go through the receivin’ line together.” Fleurette stepped to the head of their little procession and signaled for Carrie to follow.

      The young schoolteacher looked sweet in a high-necked mint-green dotted muslin with no trimming other than covered buttons to the hem of a softly pleated skirt. Fleurette’s frothy puff-sleeved concoction of yellow taffeta engulfed her slim figure in layers of ruffles and frills, swirled into a train at the back, punctuated with a large silk rosette.

      “Are we-all ready?”

      “Leora, you look just lovely,” Carrie whispered as Fleurette’s hand reached out to snag the young schoolteacher’s sleeve. “But…” Carrie paused as Fleurette pulled her into position. “Somehow you seem…shorter.”

      “I changed my shoes.” Unable to trust her voice further, Lolly brought up the rear in silence, her lips twitching into a smile. What a picture they must make: The Three Musketeers turned out in full battle regalia.

      She knew she must look like a gypsy, and she’d removed her shoes because they pinched her toes like an iron vise. But at the moment she couldn’t let herself think about it.

      A hand reached out, clasped hers and pumped it up and down. The next thing she knew she was being introduced to the mayor, Cyrus Bowman.

      Then the mayor’s imperious-looking wife, Hortense, and the banker and his wife and, next to her, his mother-in-law, all named something that sounded like Shumaker. Next came the head of the school board; the town doctor and his twin daughters; a mill owner named Hickmeyer; the newspaper editor, Orven Tillotsen; a retired railroad builder; and more wives and daughters and mothers-in-law than any one town deserved. The blur of names and faces made Lolly’s head ache.

      Another outstretched hand grasped hers just as Carrie, one step ahead of her, made a little moaning sound. “There he is,” she murmured. “At the very end of the line.”

      Lolly could see nothing beyond Carrie except great clouds of yellow taffeta, but over the next mumbled introduction, Fleurette’s voice rang out.

      “Why, Colonel Macready, Ah have heard so much about you. So charmin’ to meet you at last. Ah, too, am a Southerner.”

      Carrie turned her head toward Lolly and rolled her eyes before stepping up to the next person in line. “Mrs. Whipple, may I present Miss Leora Mayfield?”

      Lolly tried to smile. “Mrs. Whipple.”

      The old woman in plum sateen shot her a keen look and nodded brusquely. “My dear.”

      At her side, Carrie heaved another sigh, and Lolly heard her quavery voice. “Good evening, C-Colonel.”

      After Carrie, Lolly was next in line. Great balls of brimstone, she was but one step away from the moment she had agonized about ever since she left Kansas—meeting a perfect stranger who would marry her.

      Kellen watched the three guests of honor unknot themselves from the circle they had formed and step up to the Meet and Greet Trail, as he termed it. Barbarous custom, receiving lines. An uncivilized way to trot out the goods for inspection before the fair.

      He knew Careen Gundersen from many previous occasions over the years, mostly birthday parties her parents had hosted. Careen had turned out to be a very capable young woman. Prim, maybe. And a tad…flat, somehow. The girl had always had a sensible head on her shoulders; it was beyond his understanding why on earth she, of all people, would want to enter this matrimonial charade.

      Gliding down the line ahead of Careen was a meticulously groomed lady in a voluminous flounced skirt that was wound up in the back like a beehive. Quite a lot of baggage resting on that derriere. He watched her navigate from Sol Stanton to Mrs. Whipple and on toward him, her posture so rigid that her golden-blond corkscrew curls didn’t bob but hung stiffly in place, even when she tossed her head. Sugar water and rag rollers, he guessed. Females put up with the damnedest things.

      The women looked somewhat like curious birds, though of different species. Careen resembled a baby wren, her folded wings yet untried. The lady with the curls reminded him of a yellow silk peacock.

      His gaze drifted beyond the peacock to the next person in the line, but he couldn’t get a clear view of her. All he could see was the gracefully flared black skirt she wore, which, now that he studied it over the bare shoulder of Miss—what was peacock’s name again?—struck him with its simplicity. Not a wren. Not a peacock, then. An elegant black swan.

      “Why, Colonel Macready…” The peacock’s voice chirped on. “…am a Southerner.”

      Kellen tore his gaze from the woman in black and focused on the beaming heart-shaped face before him. “I beg your pardon?”

      “Ah said Ah am also a Southerner, like yourself.”

      “Actually, after nearly fifteen years in Maple Falls, I now consider myself an Oregonian.”

      “Oh, now, Colonel. Ah don’t believe that for one li’l minute.”

      He made polite noises while she gushed on until he saw an opportunity to pass her on to the refreshment table, where Ruth Underwood and her husband were pouring champagne.

      And applejack, he remembered from his earlier conversation with the hotel bartender. He

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