Free Courting Susannah by Linda Lael Miller Page B

“Can you look after Victoria while I’m gone?”
    â€œSure.” Maisie beamed, bending to pat the baby, who lay in a bassinet at Susannah’s side, gurgling and kicking. “We’re thebest of friends, aren’t we, sweet’ums?”
    â€œTell me about Ethan,” Susannah urged. She was on her feet—the carriage would arrive in a short while, and she wanted to changeher clothes before venturing into the heart of Seattle—but curiosity restrained her.
    Maisie was bustling about the kitchen, building up the fire in the cookstove, pumping water into the tea kettle, emptyingand rinsing out the coffee pot. She seemed, to Susannah, to be everywhere at once, moving and doing and being. “He’s Mr. Fairgrieve’syounger brother, but then you knew that. Lives outside Seattle, on land of his own.”
    â€œAnd his wife? What is she really like?”
    Maisie laughed fondly. “He don’t have one. He just likes to stir things up a little now and then. We’ve missed him aroundhere, Jasper and me, I mean.” Her expression became solemn. “It don’t seem that Mr. Fairgrieve has, though. I don’t believethey’d been in the same room, the pair of them, since Mrs. Fairgrieve’s funeral, until dinner last night. And even on theday they buried that poor woman, there was some harsh words and some door slamming afore it was all over.”
    The distant buzzing clang of the doorbell interrupted the discussion before Susannah could think of a way to extract moreinformation from Maisie. “I’ll answer it,” Susannah said, because her friend was still flashing about the kitchen, movingwith a strange, hasty grace between one task and the next.
    She had expected to find the carriage driver waiting on the porch when she peered through the glass oval in the front door,but instead Mr. Hollister was there, wearing a practical suit, a bowler hat, and a polite, slightly pensive smile.
    Susannah admitted him. “Good morning, Mr. Hollister,” she said. “I’m afraid Mr. Fairgrieve is out—”
    Hollister took the knob gently in hand and closed the door, removing his hat in almost the same smooth motion. “I’m not hereto see Fairgrieve,” he told her. Westerners, Susannah was fast learning, could be very frank, despite their stubborn propensityfor guarding their privacy. “Forgive me, Miss McKittrick. I shouldn’t have come uninvited like this.”
    Susannah was embarrassed for the man and touched his arm lightly, hoping to reassure him somehow. The face of the long caseclock dominating the entryway loomed behind his right shoulder, like a numbered moon, ticking away the time she’d allottedto putting on another dress and making sure her heavy hair would not come tumbling down around her shoulders the first timethe carriage struck a rut.
    â€œDo come in,” she said, for the mores of the day afforded little other choice, and, besides, she liked Mr. Hoilister, forall that she knew almost nothing about him.
    Hollister stood fast. “Oh, no, I can’t stay,” he said. Color surged past his tight collar to pulse in his neck. “I was hopingthat—well—you might consent to join me for dinner one night soon. Tomorrow, for instance?”
    Susannah was taken aback and not a little flattered. She had lived her life as a spinster and had never been invited to dance,let alone to go out in a gentleman’s company. “Why, Mr. Hollister, I don’t know what to say,” she confessed, placing one handto her chest.
    He shifted his feet, almost imperceptibly. “Say yes,” he urged. “Unless I was mistaken in concluding that you are—unattached?”
    Susannah caught her breath. “But I don’t even know you.”
    â€œI’m trying to remedy that,” he replied. His smile wasbenign and wry and quite winning, and if he wasn’t as compellingly handsome as