Prim And Improper

“Here, do you want to read the paper?” Ty always lost himself in newspapers from faraway places, when he could get his hands on them. He liked imagining what it would be like to move on to a new spot. “This one’s from Oregon.”

“Nah.” Cal flopped into a chair and looked at him with eyes that were bleary from moping and lack of sleep. “Ty, have you ever been in love?”

“I sure haven’t,” Ty replied with something like a mixture of relief and pride.

“I certainly envy you.” Cal sighed. “You don’t know what it’s like to stay up all night, dreaming of a woman.”

Ty frowned. That wasn’t true, entirely. Just the night before, he had tossed and turned, thinking of that infuriating sister of the gal Cal was so stuck on. Louise Livingston. He’d had his eye on her from the moment he first landed in Noisy Swallow. Not only was she damned pretty, but there was something about that brittle pride of hers that endeared her to him, made him want to take her in his arms. The way the woman acted, a body would swear she’d been carved out of an iceberg. Yet when he’d danced with her that night so long ago, then kissed her, she’d melted for a few glorious moments. Moments that made him suspect that underneath her layers of coolness and efficiency, there was buried a real woman with a real woman’s desires.

He’d felt it again, fleetingly, two days ago when he’d grabbed her around the waist. She’d been pliant and warm…for the few seconds until she got away from him.

He let out a ragged sigh.

“Ty? Ty?”

“What?” Ty replied, startled from his enticing thoughts.

His brother looked at him suspiciously. “Are you sure you’ve never been in love?”

“Listen,” Ty said, purposefully turning the focus away from himself. “If you’re so determined that Sally is the girl for you, why don’t you go tell her so?”

“But Louise said she didn’t want us seeing her family anymore.”

“Oh, hang Louise Livingston! That woman’s head is all mixed up. She didn’t even know which of us her sister was in love with.”

Cal shook his head. “Even so, I reckon I made a rather poor impression.”

Ty laughed, recalling the look of horror on Louise’s face after she’d been rolling around in the mud.

In despair, Cal buried his head in his hands. “It’s not funny! She probably told Sally that I’m an imbecile.”

Ty’s smile immediately disappeared. He could stand that annoying woman thinking the worst of him, but his brother was a different matter entirely. She had no right to turn her nose up at Caleb, the kid brother he had raised from the time their mother had died, when Cal was no more than a sprout. Ty had worked hard to provide for his brother, was trying to make this farm profitable for his sake, and he wasn’t going to let some crazy woman go around saying that Caleb wasn’t good enough to be seen with her sister.

Just the thought made his blood boil.

“I tell you what you should do. Just go into Noisy Swallow tomorrow and give that woman a piece of your mind. Tell her you’re in love with her sister and you don’t give two hoots whether she approves or not.”

“But I do care.”

Ty grumbled. “Then why don’t you sneak into town tonight, snatch Sally right out of her bed and have a good old-fashioned elopement?”

His brother looked askance at that idea, too. “I wouldn’t want to do anything that would cause a permanent rupture between her and her family.”

“Well, hell, then, what do you want?”

With a heavy sigh, Cal propped his chin on his knee and looked dreamily into the fire. “Sally,” he said simply.

Ty harrumphed loudly and tried to turn his attention back to his paper. But again it proved impossible to concentrate on the rosy reports of verdant hills and farmland ripe for the picking. Since he had entered into a fight with Louise Livingston knowing that she was mistaken about which Saunders man her sister was in love with, he felt some responsibility for Cal’s hopeless situation. On his own, Cal would never have created such a bad impression. Normally Cal was well mannered, conscientious and unfailingly polite. But when Cal got nervous…

Louise was never going to allow Cal to court Sally as long as she thought he was the oaf she had met two days ago. Somehow, Ty decided, he was going to have to set things right again between his brother and Sally’s sister, a feat that was never going to be achieved with Cal out here and Louise ten miles away in Noisy Swallow.

Standing idly behind the counter, looking out the mercantile’s window through glazed eyes, Sally took in a huge breath and then slowly exhaled with a long, mournful hum. Louise frowned in irritation.

As soon as the one customer in the store paid and left, Louise turned to her sister. “Sally, why don’t you go to the boardinghouse and get the washing started?” Sally let out another of those hums. “Oh, all right.” Ever so slowly, she floated toward the door, as if there were no purpose to anything in the world. By contrast, she was almost flattened by her brother coming in the same door.

“Louise, can I go out with Louden and Jim today?” Louise waited until Sally was safely out the door and on her way toward the house before addressing Toby’s question. Between the two of them she hadn’t experienced a moment’s peace in two days.

“Certainly not,” she said.

“Aw, shoot! Why not?”

“Because you’ve got Latin and mathematics to study.”

“I’ve studied them,” he whined. “For three whole days I’ve done nothing but study.”

“‘Work is what makes the man,’” Louise answered patly.

“That’s what Ty Saunders says, too,” Toby said enthusiastically, circling her. “Only he also says that a body can’t study all the time. He says men have to get out and move around outdoors.”

Louise frowned. That man! Bad enough that she had to watch Sally mope about him, and that she herself couldn’t forget about him. Now she had to listen to her brother quoting Ty Saunders!

“Animals have to get out and move around outdoors,” she corrected. “It’s not entirely surprising that a man like Mr. Saunders would be confused about the differences between men and beasts.”

Toby stubbed the toe of his boot petulantly against the wide pine plank floors. “You’re too hard on Ty, Louise. He’s really a nice fellow. Cal, too.”

Louise harrumphed loudly.

“Their spread made a lot of money last year. Bet you didn’t know that!”

Despite her intention to betray not the slightest curiosity about the Saunders men, Louise felt her eyebrows rise in interest. “It did?”

“Sure,” Toby confirmed. “And Ty said they could make more if they had more people working for them.” He paused. “He even hinted that I could work out there regularly.”

“What!”

Toby shrugged. “But of course, I said I couldn’t, on account of you forcing me to go to an old stupid university someday.”

She shook her head. “If you need something to do, you can watch the store while I go help with the wash.”

“Aw, heck,” Toby moaned. “I guess you’ll never see my side, Lou. Just like you’ll never understand about Sally.”

She tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

“She’s just not like you, that’s all,” Toby said, shrugging. “You don’t seem to want the things normal women do anymore.”

“Toby!”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Before we came to California, you used to flirt and have beaux just like she wants to. I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.”