Free The Bridegrooms by Allison K. Pittman Page B

making way for Doc to get closer to Vada’s bed. “Come see.” He beckoned and Vada stepped forward.
    On any given day, her narrow bed would be covered with a lavender quilt patterned with scattered peonies. Now, lying atop her pristine bedding was a man dressed in a tattered brown suit. Someone, at least, had thought to remove his shoes, which fell short of a blessing as it forced them all to see a pale, white toe jutting through a hole in the well-worn sock. The pants were frayed at the hem, and the shirt was coarse cotton, but clean. His hands lay perfectly still at his sides, knobby wrists poking out of cuffs fastened with twine.
    Her gaze followed, up to his pale neck, riddled with an angry-looking red rash, to the face framed by the pure white linen of her goose-down pillow. He had broad, soft lips topped with a thin fuzz of mustache and a narrow nose with the tiniest hook at the top. But above that nose—that was the image that caused Vada to gasp.
    “Oh, dear Lord!”
    The man’s eyes wore a mask of bruising. Deep purple orbs extended to the top of his cheeks, filtering nearly to the temple. And his forehead, where thick, blond hair had been slicked away with water, was equally discolored—a marbled pattern of red and purple and green, with a distinctive mark just above his left eye. Vada leaned closer.
    Lace marks. Like someone had molded a baseball right into the flesh.
    “What on earth?” She reached forward but kept her fingers aloft.
    “Got hit with a clean line drive.” The voice behind her was rough but warm, and it held the last three words just long enough to indicate the speaker was from somewhere south of Cleveland. Maybe Texas? And he spoke with an air of admiration, although she couldn’t decipher just what was being admired.
    “First home run of the season,” said the second man at which the third snorted.
    “Quite a price to pay for a silly game.” Her father spoke from just behind her, and she felt his hand on her shoulder.
    “Oh, Doc. Is he…?”
    “He’s unconscious,” Doc said.
    “Knocked clean out.”
    “Dropped like a sack of hammers.”
    “Poor sucker never saw it coming.”
    “Unfortunately neither did my outfield.”
    The ensuing laughter enraged Vada, and she spun around only to find herself inches away from a Bridegroom, according to the letters stitched across the expanse of dark gray fabric. B RIDEGROOMS . Faint lines crisscrossed each other creating a field of perfect squares, and the center was laced up in a pattern identical to the wound on the unconscious man’s head.
    The shirt was open at the top, revealing a triangle of sun-bronzed skin. She had to take a step back to take in the breadth of him, and she lifted her gaze to look up and up and up, past a strong, clean-shaven jaw, not stopping until she found a pair of warm hazel eyes—a mischievous marble of brown and green—poised on the cusp of a wink. Never, in all the time she’d known him, had Garrison ever looked at her in quite that way.
    She squelched the unwelcome flutter his gaze invited and tried to remember why she was angry. Oh yes. The man on the bed.
    “How can all of you laugh? A man is dying here.” She managed to tear her eyes away from those tipped with ginger-colored lashes and looked to her father. “Isn’t he, Doc? Is he dying?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Her father’s words brought a quiet to the room that her outburst never could, and Vada took the opportunity to study the other men in the room. Neither stood as tall as the one directly behind her, though the three of them served to dwarf her father in their midst.
    “Gentlemen, allow me to introduce my daughter. Vada, this is Mr. Oliver Tebeau.”
    “Most call me Patsy.” He had a face as round as a chipmunk and wore a rough woolen shirt that long ago lost its battle to be white. The word S PIDERS crossed his chest in a rainbow arc of square block letters interrupted by a vertical row of black buttons.
    She hesitated to take