Emma rubbed Katie’s arm, trying to reassure even as she battled her own apprehension. “I’m sure Betty would understand if you wanted to move into town until this is over. The boardinghouse is full, but there are rooms above the café that aren’t in use. It’s right next door to Victoria’s store. You might feel safer there.”
Katie started shaking her head before Emma finished. “No. I’ll not leave Betty and Helen out here alone.” The change in her was swift. Gone was the panic-stricken girl, and in her place was a determined, loyal young woman. “Helen might be willing to come to town with me, but Betty will never leave her hens. She’s too stubborn. We’ll face whatever comes just like you’re always telling us to do, Miss Chandler. Together.”
“Good for you.” Emma’s chest swelled with pride. Perhaps she really was making a difference with these women. She gave Katie’s arm a brisk pat, then turned to face the barn once again. “Shall we go see what they’ve discovered?”
Katie nibbled her lip again but nodded as she lifted her chin. “Yes.”
13
It took nearly three hours for Emma and Malachi to make the rounds to all the residents of Harper’s Station. By the time they’d made it back to the boardinghouse, most of the ladies there had already moved on to their usual duties—Grace to the telegraph office, Flora and Esther to the gardens, Daisy and her young roommate, Pauline, to the sewing circle. They’d spoken to the boardinghouse proprietress, Stella Grimes, and then worked their way through town, stopping at the store and the medical clinic before working back toward the garden, the station house where the quilters were working in the aunts’ parlor, and finally the telegraph office.
Eager to get all the random pieces of information out of her head and down onto paper so she could organize them, Emma led Malachi to the bank and showed him to her office.
“So this is where you work,” Mal said as he followed her through the doorway and walked about the office. He ran a hand along the scalloped corner of her desk and the base of the hand-painted desk lamp sitting there. His rough fingers looked strange against the delicate rose pattern, but this room had never anticipated hosting such a masculine guest.
Had he been the tailored sort she was accustomed to seeing in a bank office, men in striped suits with slender hands and short-trimmed hair, he might have fit in. But Malachi was no tailored dandy. His scuffed boots testified to the physical labor he performed. Broken-in denim trousers hugged slim hips that looked right at home beneath his holster and gun belt. His blue cotton shirt, black worsted vest, and black Stetson could have belonged to a hundred different cowboys, yet somehow they seemed suited only to him. Malachi Shaw exuded rugged masculinity in this lacy woman’s room the way a cougar would exude sleek power standing in a field of wildflowers. Both seemingly out of place, yet both so confident in who they were that their surroundings held no sway.
Malachi strolled from her desk across the room to examine the bookshelf that stood out from the cream-colored walls papered in a faint scroll pattern. The shelves held her ledgers, several financial treatises she’d inherited from her father, a few newer books she’d purchased herself, and a trio of framed photographs prominently displayed on the second shelf from the top. The photograph on the left depicted her parents holding her as a baby. The one on the right showed the aunts as much younger women in front of their home in Gainesville. And the photograph she most prized . . . she and Malachi as children, standing behind the aunts, who were seated in matching parlor chairs—Henry looking so serious and stoic, Bertie with her soft smile, Malachi looking stiff and uncomfortable, and she . . . Well, she wasn’t looking at the camera at all. She was looking at Malachi, a devilish gleam in her eye as if she were determined to goad a smile out of him.
It had been taken the summer before Malachi left, and it had kept her company all these years. Now seeing him pause to stare at it—his hand arrested in midair above it as if he’d been temporarily frozen by the memory of that day—Emma’s breath caught. Dragonflies flitted about in her stomach, the tickling commotion making her light-headed.
“I have a copy, too,” he said softly. “In my trunk.”
In his trunk. Hidden away. Forgotten?
The tickling in her stomach dimmed, as if the dragonflies had suddenly been drenched with molasses. Their wings heavy. Their bodies falling.
“I keep it in that stationery box you gave me when I left . . . along with your letters.” Malachi’s back was to her, but his deep voice resonated through the room, through her. His near-reverent tone restored the tickle inside her and increased the fluttering tenfold.