Free Summer of Dreams by Elizabeth Camden Page B

cuff Clyde on the shoulder. “That will be a good opportunity for you, won’t it, laddie?”
    Clyde locked eyes with her. “It would, Evelyn. It really would.”
    She set down her fork. The last thing she wanted was for her father to meet Clyde. She’d become very protective of Clyde, and her father could be so blunt and cutting. “My father is aterribly intimidating man. When I was seven years old, I wrote him a letter to his post in Texas. He sent it back with my spelling errors marked and asked me to resubmit.”
    “My spelling is perfect,” Clyde said with a grin, and she had to laugh at his buoyant confidence.
    “Even so, I don’t think there is much point in it,” she said. “My father doesn’t have anything to do with the initial assignments of graduating cadets. I think that’s handled entirely by the superintendent.”
    “It would still be good to make the connection,” Clyde said. “There are thirty of us graduating with engineering degrees and only a fraction get assigned to the Corps. I’d give anything for one of those slots. That is my goal. It’s always been my goal.”
    Clyde watched her with fierce anticipation on his face. In the past, she’d always been suspicious of West Point cadets who paid special attention to her in hopes of getting close to her father, but after the past months it was impossible to believe that of Clyde. Every Saturday they clicked along in perfect mutual harmony, so why should she block access to her father? She wanted Clyde’s career to soar and did not doubt his motives.
    “All right, you can come to dinner,” she conceded. Clyde leapt into the air and reached out to give Smitty a tremendous hug. The two of them looked like they’d just struck gold.
    “Thanks, Evelyn.” Clyde grinned when he finally took his seat again.
    Evelyn could only clasp her hands and pray this wasn’t the biggest mistake in Clyde’s professional career.

    Evelyn peered out the front window into the darkening gloom, twisting her hands and wondering when Clyde would get here for dinner with her father.
    Thank goodness Romulus had agreed to come, as well.Romulus had returned for the Christmas holidays, and she’d begged him to come tonight because he could be counted on to keep the conversation moving. She dreaded having her father and Clyde come face-to-face, but Romulus promised to bring a bottle of cherry brandy, which was her father’s favorite drink in the world.
    She spent the afternoon baking her father a warm vanilla soufflé, something he complained he could never get army cooks to master. But for all her planning, this evening’s dinner was already turning into a disaster, and Clyde hadn’t even arrived yet.
    Her father had been surly ever since this afternoon, when he’d read about the election of the nation’s first female mayor in Kansas. Mrs. Susanna Salter had won the election on a temperance ballot, further enraging her father.
    The newspaper trembled in his hands. “Are we to be ruled by a petticoat dictatorship?” he growled. “Who is this woman to suggest a man can’t have a drink of wine with his meal?”
    Evelyn knew a rhetorical question when she heard one and went about setting the table without commenting, which was good, because her father was on a roll. The deeper he read into the newspaper account, the angrier he became.
    “She’s pregnant!” he roared. “The woman has the gall to assume a man’s duties while about to give birth. And what kind of husband would permit it? Has this nation lost all sense of decorum? Of decency? This is ten kinds of disgraceful, irreverent, reckless, and irresponsible!”
    “Is someone speaking about me?” Romulus asked, still standing in the front doorway, wrapped in a greatcoat and carrying the bottle of cherry brandy in his hands.
    Her father crumpled the newspaper into a ball and flung it aside as he stood to greet Romulus with a condemning stare. “Close the door before we all catch galloping pneumonia.