Wildwood. Lynna Banning

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СКАЧАТЬ here.”

      Eyes the color of Spanish moss flared into his, then narrowed to a bone-penetrating look. “I’m Jessamyn Whittaker. I own the Wildwood Times.”

      “Ben Kearney. Like hell you do.”

      She blinked. “I beg your pardon? I most certainly—”

      “Prove it,” Ben drawled. “Thad Whittaker left no surviving family.”

      “The only time Thad Whittaker stuck to the truth was when he was setting type! The rest of the time, I assure you, my father’s forte was stories so fantastical it would put Fenimore Cooper to shame.”

      “Yes, ma’am. Still, would Thad lie about his family?”

      “Especially about his family,” the young woman snapped. Her voice softened unexpectedly. “He didn’t lie, exactly. He just…tended to forget about us.”

      Unconvinced, Ben nodded. It would be hard to forget someone like Jessamyn Whittaker. Of course, Thad had lived in Wildwood Valley for almost fifteen years, long before a daughter would have grown up enough to wear a bustle. Maybe old Thad never even knew he had a daughter.

      Ben leaned against the hitching rail, crossing one long leg over the other. “Can you prove you’re Thad’s daughter?” he repeated.

      Jessamyn blew her breath out so fast the ostrich feather in her hat swayed. “Look, Mr…. Klooney, I haven’t jounced my way across this godforsaken desert for the last six days to be put off by a busybody claiming to be a law officer. You have no badge. And where’s your gun? If you’re the sheriff, I’ll eat my—”

      Ben straightened. “Kearney,” he corrected. “Badge is on the desk in my office. Never carry a rifle, just a revolver. That’s back in my office, too. Next to,” he added with quiet emphasis, “the jail. And from the looks of it, that fancy hat of yours is going to make mighty fuzzy eating.”

      Jessamyn bit her lip and studied his face. Abruptly she dived into her handbag and pulled out a crumpled letter. Standing on tiptoe, she thrust it under his nose.

      Ben snagged the envelope with one thumb and forefinger. “Miss Jessamyn Whittaker,” he read aloud. “Care of the Boston Herald.”

      He scanned the contents, refolded the letter and handed it back. “Give me the key.”

      Her eyes widened. After a slight hesitation, she opened her handbag and plopped the key into his outstretched palm.

      “Lock sticks,” Ben offered. “Trick is to lift up on it.” He inserted the metal implement into the lock, brought one knee up to the knob and pushed upward.

      The door scraped open. Before he could draw breath, Jessamyn Whittaker brushed past him, her bustle dancing a quadrille.

      Ben swallowed. Next to those soft graygreen eyes, that backside was the prettiest sight he’d seen since—

      Instinctively, he squashed the thought. Those eyes of hers were unsettling. Something about them made him sick for home, hungry for the smell of plantation tobacco and jasmine vines in bloom over the arbor. Suddenly he ached for all the things he’d tried to forget for the past four years. Things he’d lost.

      She had no right to be here nosing about Thad’s office as if she owned it. Not only that, she’d come from Boston. She was a Northerner! A Yankee. No Yankee had a right to have eyes that color.

      The woman moved about the room, blowing dust off the scarred oak desk, opening cabinets, even inspecting the plank floor beneath her feet. Her mouth made continuous tsk-tsking sounds.

      What the hell was she looking for? The last newspaper Thad had printed was a month old now, run off just a few hours before he died. Did she know her father had been shot? Worse, had she come out to the valley to meddle in his investigation of Thad’s death?

      Probably. She looked like a real busybody.

      Thad had never mentioned a daughter. Ben knew the older man’s wife had died during the war—sometime between Shiloh and Vicksburg. After Ben’s internment at Rock Island.

      An involuntary shudder moved up his spine. Outside of Jeremiah, Thad was the only human being Ben had ever told about the horrors of the Union prison in Illinois. The older man had listened, nodding and sucking on his pipe, until Ben’s voice had faded and only the crackle of their campfire remained. Then Thad had hoisted his stocky form off the log he’d been straddling, squeezed Ben’s shoulder and trudged off into the woods.

      “Sometimes a man’s gotta talk” was all he’d said.

      Now Ben watched Thad Whittaker’s daughter move to the open doorway of the Wildwood Times office. Turning her back to him, she peered out at the street and propped her hands on her gently curving hips.

      His breath caught.

       And sometimes a man’s got to keep his attention on the business at hand.

      He’d have to find a way to get Miss Busy Bustle out of his hair and back to Boston where she belonged. He nodded to himself. Shouldn’t be too difficult. She looked as out of place in this dusty town as a silk bow on a steer’s tail.

      

      Jessamyn positioned herself in the doorway of her father’s newspaper office and studied the dirt trail that passed for Wild wood Valley’s main street. I’m here, Papa, just as you wanted Her heart swelled with a mixture of joy and regret.

      Something told her Wildwood Valley wouldn’t be as enthusiastic about her arrival as her father would have been. Her throat closed. But here she was, as he had asked, and here she intended to stay.

      She gazed at the ramshackle buildings on either side of the street and her heart sank. A dilapidated hotel and restaurant, a saloon—no, two saloons, one across the street from the other—Frieder’s Mercantile, Addie Rice, Seamstress, the sheriffs office and three other weathered structures with painted signs that were no longer legible.

      That was all? No church? No library? Not even a doctor’s office?

      Her father had exaggerated. This wasn’t a town, as she had pictured it—whitewashed buildings and neat picket fences. This was nothing but a motley collection of graying clapboard shacks plunked down in the middle of nowhere.

      No, she amended. In the middle of Wildwood Valley. Oregon, she thought with a shudder. Rampaging Indians. Drunken cowboys. Worn-out women with sun-scorched, leathery skin. Lord help her, she’d left a position on a thriving newspaper in Boston for this?

      Yes, she had. She hadn’t lurched in stuffy railroad cars and bone-rattling stagecoaches all the way from Boston to quail at the last minute. She’d come because Papa had needed her, and she wouldn’t retreat unless she failed to accomplish what she’d come out here to do.

      “And that,” she said aloud with a determined stomp of her small, leather-shod foot, “a Whittaker never did.” She was her father’s daughter. In her entire twenty-six years of life she’d never failed at anything she set her mind to.

      She drew in a double-deep breath of the warm, dusty summer air and straightened her spine. Well, then, she’d better see what was in store for СКАЧАТЬ