Chapter 9

M erritt smoothed the skirt of the sky-blue dress, twisting in front of the kitchen window to try and see her head-to-toe reflection in the wavy glass. Night had fallen, but the lamp on the table didn't throw enough illumination to show her reflection clearly, even though it was dark outside.

She'd been a young girl the last time she'd had a store-bought dress. Mostly, she sewed her own. The fancy stitching and hint of lace at her wrists made this gown special.

She was going to marry Jack in two days. This was to be her wedding dress.

She pressed the fingers of one hand against her mouth in realization. In thirty-six hours, she'd belong to Jack. They'd be a family. She'd have a husband of her own. A family, more than the snatches of hours she got to spend with her cousins every few weeks. She wasn't going to be alone anymore.

She twirled in the middle of the room, idly watching her reflection. Imagined Jack dancing with her, one strong hand at her waist. Holding her like he had just this morning.

After settling Velora and the baby with Mrs. Castlerock, who'd promised to get the church ladies involved in their care, Merritt had spent her morning in the makeshift classroom, teaching her last lesson of the calendar year. Tomorrow, they'd spend their classroom hours in final preparations for the pageant on Monday.

She'd been in the middle of coaching Samuel through an arithmetic problem, leaning over his shoulder and pointing at his slate, when Mr. Polk had come into the dance hall. He hadn't said a word to her but had spent over an hour observing. A silent figure, towering at the back of the room.

Before today, his presence would've made her nervous, made her overthink every action, every word she said to the children.

After what Jack had divulged, she'd only been angry at Mr. Polk's interference. She'd stuffed the emotion away, concentrating on the children and what they needed. Her job might be threatened, but she'd fight for it.

The perfect idea for how to make that happen had come to her during a quiet supper alone, and she had spent the rest of the evening making plans. What could be better than an auction benefiting their school? And right before Christmas, when folks might feel more generous or need to buy a last-minute gift. The papers she'd scribbled notes on were spread across the table.

But once her steam had run out, she'd started thinking about the wedding. And this dress. When she'd seen Danna in passing earlier this week, she'd asked her friend to stop by and see it. She could always count on Danna to tell her the truth. Danna was a straight shooter, a no-nonsense kind of person.

If the dress was too much or made Merritt's skin look sickly, Danna would tell her.

A soft knock sounded at the door. That must be Danna now.

Merritt's skirts rustled around her as she moved through the sitting room, where she'd lit a lamp in expectation of her friend's arrival, and opened the door.

It wasn't Danna on the other side. Her heart leaped as she registered Jack. He was facing away, staring pointedly into the darkness.

He only flicked one quick glance at her before backing toward the door. "Can I come in?"

Merritt's heart was pounding. He wasn't supposed to see her dress before the wedding! And she also wrestled a sinking feeling of disappointment as she backed into the room to allow him inside. He had to have seen the dress, but there'd been no reaction.

Maybe it wasn't as special as she'd thought.

He shut the door with a decisive click and turned to face her, hands on his hips beneath his coat.

He blinked. His eyes raked up and down, and his hands dropped to his sides.

The disappointment she'd felt seconds ago swelled and changed into something else entirely at the look in his eyes.

"What—" He cleared his throat, and his eyes jumped to her face. "You look—I can't—" He shook his head.

A sense of shyness threatened to overtake her, but she fought through it, just as she fought off the blush stealing up into her neck.

"I've never rendered someone speechless before. I suppose the dress was a good investment."

If Jack kept looking at her like that, she'd wear the dress every Sunday to church. Maybe Saturdays too.

"It's not the dress." There was a roughness to his voice that sent prickles of goosebumps up her arms. "It's you. You're beautiful. Like a princess from some book."

Pleasure suffused her. She'd been trying not to think about the kiss Jack had given her this morning, but it had broken into her thoughts in quiet moments throughout the day.

He stuffed his hands in his pockets, still looking at her with warmth in his eyes, and scooted around her toward the kitchen. "You mind if I make a pot of coffee?"

She followed a step behind him, stopping in the doorway when he crossed toward the stove and the shelf where she kept her coffeepot.

He filled the pot with water but hesitated before bringing it to the stove.

"I'm happy for you to make yourself at home," she murmured, leaning one hip against the doorway. "This will be your home, too, in another two days."

He'd turned away from her to put the pot on, but she saw the way one hand fisted at his side.

"I need to?—"

"I'm disappointed?—"

Their words tumbled over each other and he half smiled. "What're you disappointed about?"

She jutted her chin up. "I thought you might kiss me hello. Didn't you want to?"

If he was upset by her directness, he didn't show it. "The wanting is the problem," he said dryly. "If I let myself get too close, I won't want to let you go."

Oh.

Warmth crept into her neck.

There was a sincerity that rang through his words, something in his tone that she couldn't understand.

"You won't have to let me go, not after Sunday."

He moved to the shelf to pull down two tin mugs. The scent of coffee began to filter through the room. "I know you've got your plans. I was talking to Mr. Carson today after our meeting and started thinking…you and I don't have to rush things."

Her stomach swooped. Rush things? Didn't he want to marry her? Confusion swirled. Hadn't he just said he didn't want to let her go?

"I've been thinking…won't you want your parents to be here to see you married? We could send them train tickets…"

He'd spoken the words over his shoulder but trailed off as he turned to face her, still across the room.

"They won't return to Calvin," she said quietly. Was this why he'd wanted to delay the wedding? Thinking of her parents?

"Why not. You're their only daughter, aren't you?"

She exhaled a long breath through her nose. "I am—now."

She saw his confusion in the wrinkle of his brow.

She moved toward the table and sat down, careful not to wrinkle her skirts. "I suppose if I'm asking for there to be no secrets between us, you deserve to know."

He took the pot off the stove and moved to the counter to pour. "I'm listening."

She moved the papers into a stack, nervously flicking through their edges. "I had an older sister, Maisey. She was twelve when she died. She'd gone swimming in a little water hole, a pond in someone's property, and there—" Merritt's voice broke.

Jack moved close, setting her coffee cup on the table in front of her. He touched the back of her shoulder blade with his warm palm, and it gave her the strength to go on.

"There was a terrible accident, and she drowned." Saying the words quickly was the only way she could get them out.

He sat down in the chair next to her, his knee pressing into her skirts. His hand closed over hers in her lap. It was only with his warmth surrounding her that she realized how cold her own skin had grown.

"My parents drowned too, in a way. They disappeared into their grief. My mother couldn't bear to eat. My father spent hours alone in the barn."

Merritt had been left to her own devices—a younger sister who had missed Maisey with a fierce grief that she hadn't known how to process.

A tear slipped down her cheek, and she whisked it away before it could fall on the skirt of her dress. Tried to smile a wobbly smile. "It's silly, I know. I remember my next birthday, after…after…" She couldn't say the words again. "I woke feeling both excited and sad. I missed her greatly, but it was also my birthday. A day to be celebrated. But my mother couldn't pull herself out of bed. And my father was nowhere to be found."

There'd been no cake. No gifts.

Merritt had felt guilty for expecting anything at all. And forgotten, like she was only a shadow. The sister who'd lived but who didn't really exist anymore.

She tipped her chin up, staying more tears by sheer strength of will. "I found solace in books," she said. "Maisey had taught me to read. And I could slip into the pages of a book and be someone else for a while. Someone brave. Someone adventurous." Someone wanted.

She had lost herself in books and in her studies for a long time.

"That's why they left town, left you to become a teacher without any support."

Jack said the words in an even tone, but she heard the underlying anger.

She finally gained the courage to look at him. His eyes were full of concern.

"It's all right," she told him. "I have my cousins, and friends in town. And you. I don't mind that my parents can't return for the wedding."

Thinking about the wedding made her remember the round box sitting half hidden behind a sofa in the sitting room.

"I've got something for you," she told him. "Hold on."

She rose from the table and went to fetch it. The box filled her arms, and she could feel her heart drumming in her chest as nerves overcame her.

"I was going to save it for a wedding and Christmas gift, but I think you should open it now."

He was sitting in the chair where she'd left him, turned away from the table, and he stared at her, perplexed. "A gift? For me?"

* * *

Jack didn't know what to say as Merritt pressed what looked to be a hat box into his hands.

He turned it around, uncertain.

"Open it," she prompted.

He could barely look at her in that dress. He'd walked inside, still raw and reeling from the kiss they'd shared that morning. Still fighting with himself, Mr. Carson's story from earlier today echoing in the back of his mind. The story of a boy who'd taken his inheritance and walked out on his family. Who'd lost everything and come crawling back.

Jack could relate to the boy in the story, except Jack had no one to come crawling back to…

Merritt .

There'd been a moment this morning, while she was talking, when his selfish nature had roared to life, and he'd known—this woman, this life. She was what he wanted.

Ever since he'd arrived in town, he'd told himself she wasn't for him. But he was so tired of fighting?—

And he'd given in. Taken the kiss he shouldn't have. Taken the adoring way she'd looked at him when he'd drawn back.

He'd been fighting with himself all day, trying to figure out if there was a way he could stay in Calvin, build a life with Merritt.

He didn't know any way of supporting himself other than gambling. He'd spent his teenage years working on the Farrs' farm, but he didn't know how to manage one.

And there was the matter of Morris, and Jack's past catching up to him.

He'd come here tonight to ask if she'd be willing to wait. Wait until he figured some things out. He'd brought up her parents to see whether that might buy him some time.

He hadn't expected what she'd shared.

"Come on," she said with a little laugh. She was still standing nearby, watching him expectantly. "It's a gift, not a rattlesnake."

He kept his eyes on the box he held in his hands. "I've never been given a Christmas gift before."

He slipped the lid open as he said the words, and found a dark-brown wool cowboy hat inside. Nearly the same as the one he'd lost, only brand-new.

He had to clear his throat of emotion before he could speak. "It's a fine hat."

His hand trembled slightly as he took it out of the box.

She was looking at him with shadowed eyes. "How is it possible you've never received a Christmas gift before?"

He stood, overwhelmed with emotion he shouldn't be feeling, and tipped the hat onto his head. Turned away, because it was too difficult to look at her in this moment.

I don't want secrets between us .

Her words from this morning echoed in his mind, and everything he was keeping bottled up boiled inside him, like a pot with the lid ready to blow off.

She'd figure it out if he stayed, if he married her. Merritt was smart.

"I'm not the man who wrote those letters." The words tasted like ash in his mouth. This was the moment she'd tell him to get out, to leave and never come back. The pain of it tore through his gut.

But when he turned to her, she was looking at the hat, and then her gaze trickled down to the rest of him.

"I've already pieced together some of it," she said softly, no judgment in her eyes. "You wrote certain things, trying to present yourself in the best light."

I'm not John!

She didn't get it, and the words to tell her so were right there on his lips.

But he chickened out. Told her a different truth instead, delaying the moment when he'd reveal his identity.

"I never knew my parents."

He couldn't watch her, quailed under the compassion in her gaze and turned to look out the darkened window. Blinked at the reflection of himself in that hat.

"My first memories are of sleeping in a dormitory in a Chicago orphanage. Eating meals that never quite filled me up at a table so long and so filled with kids just like me that I never could see the end of it."

Those were the good memories.

He gripped the counter with both hands as he forced himself to say the rest of it. "When I was eleven, I was shipped west on a train, along with a car full of other orphaned children."

He heard her soft intake of air and the rustle of her skirts, felt motion behind him as she sidled closer.

"The caretaker at our orphanage said we'd find families, but we were all pretty scared."

He'd met Dewey on the train that day. The boy had been from another orphanage, and Jack had hardly known anyone at all. Dewey, three years younger, had been hiding his tears behind angry words, and Jack had known he'd have to calm the boy down or all of them would be in a heap of trouble.

So he'd started spinning yarns. Stories about the homes they'd find. Stories about a hero detective who helped people in the city they'd just left. Stories that he'd almost started to believe in himself. How could he not when the kids around him watched and listened with wide-eyed attention, believing that he was a hero himself, just because he told the stories?

"It took a while before I got taken in by a family. Me and Dewey."

Jack had been disillusioned by then, watching the younger children, the delicate girls, be adopted. Dewey too, though he'd stuck by Jack's side and still pretended to believe it when Jack told the story of the family they'd find together.

"They only wanted me. The—Farrs." He was unable to hide the roughness of his voice. "But I talked fast"—the way he always had—"and convinced them to take Dewey and me both." Jack had insisted they were brothers—the new scar on his palm had seemed so important.

What had happened later had been his fault. It was so clear now.

"They didn't want a pair of sons," he said. "They wanted hands to work their farm. Mrs. Farr was…" He bit back the sudden cry that wanted to emerge. Merritt was so quiet he couldn't even hear her breathing. "If she'd been consistent in her anger, it would've been one thing. But a simple mistake made one day would get a scolding. A similar mistake the next might earn a beating."

He'd never known what might set her off. He'd tried to guess, tried to complete every chore, keep the farm clean.

Jack coughed to cover the sob that wanted to escape. "She gave Dewey such a bad beating that he never recovered."

Stop!

Jack had tried to stop her. He'd been fourteen and almost as tall as Mrs. Farr, but she'd had a thick leather belt in hand and had turned it on him while Dewey lay bleeding on the floor.

"He died a few weeks later." Dewey hadn't been right, even after a few days had passed. Had complained of stomach pains and headaches as he'd lain in his cot in the lean-to that was supposed to be their bedroom. Jack had covered for him, doing all his own chores along with all of Dewey's. Jack'd been trying to devise a plan for the two of them to run away, but then it was too late.

It wasn't right. It wasn't fair, what'd happened to Dewey. Jack had been young, helpless to do anything about the injustice his brother had suffered at the hands of Mrs. Farr. When he'd run away, he'd promised himself he'd never let something like that happen again.

Merritt's arms came around him from behind. She pressed herself against him, pressed her face into the back of his shoulder. "I'm sorry," she murmured. "I'm so sorry. It wasn't right. You shouldn't have had to live through that."

It was my fault .

He couldn't say the words out loud, though they lived inside him.

If he hadn't begged for his "brother" to come and live with the Farrs, Dewey would still be alive. If he'd fought harder…if he'd convinced his brother to run away…

Merritt held him for long moments, long enough for him to regain his composure.

I'm not John .

She loosened her grip on him, and he turned to face her, to say the words, but he didn't get the chance.

She pressed both palms to his cheeks, reached up on tiptoe, and pressed her lips to his in a seeking kiss.

He felt it all. Her care, her sadness—maybe for herself, maybe for the boy he'd been.

He drank her in like a man dying of thirst.

When she pulled back, he saw the tears tracking down her cheeks. He reached up to sweep them away with his thumb, saw more sparkling in her eyes.

She was compassionate and fiery and everything he hadn't known he wanted?—

A sharp knock on the door startled him into stepping back. He bumped into the counter. Felt for the hat that had been knocked askew.

Merritt glanced over her shoulder. "That'll be Danna. We planned to get together."

He nodded, trying to rein in emotions he hadn't let loose in ages. What was he doing?

Merritt swept both hands across her cheeks, clearing away the evidence of her tears.

He followed her into the front room. He felt raw and exposed. And the last thing he wanted was for the town marshal to find out his identity.

When Danna stepped inside wearing her trousers and vest, a baby in the crook of one arm, he was confounded for the briefest moment. The marshal was a mother? He reached up to tip his hat. Her sharp eyes took it in.

"I'll take my leave," he told the both of them. "See you tomorrow." Those words were for Merritt, and when he looked at her, he felt a beat of the invisible connection they shared. Somehow, talking about his past had bonded them. He'd expected the opposite—for the knowledge to drive her away.

"I'll step outside with you." The marshal's easy words put his hackles up.

The door closed behind them. She rocked slightly where she stood on the step.

Jack didn't want to talk to her, but he couldn't walk away when she'd so obviously followed him outside.

In the dark, he couldn't read her expression.

"Word around town is there's someone looking for you. Or rather, for Jack Easton. That's not you…is it?"

Morris.

He didn't say anything. Merritt was the one who'd asked for no more secrets.

But somehow it didn't sit right to lie to the marshal. Maybe because she was Merritt's friend. Or maybe he was having some strange attack of conscience.

She sighed, almost silent in the darkness.

"I can help you," she said quietly. "But you've got to let me know how."

"Is that all?" he drawled. "Merritt's been waiting on you."

He didn't say goodbye as she slipped back inside the house.

It wasn't Danna's job to look out for Morris. Jack hadn't been able to tell Merritt the rest of it—that he wasn't John at all. That this had been a farce from the beginning.

If he truly wanted to stay, he had to make things right himself.