Free Thea Devine by Relentless Passion

then,
they
wouldn’t let him die. They wanted his spirit, still alive, to walk among them.
    Damn him.
    She had never been able to make
him
do what she wanted.
    She wondered who, after all this time, she was really fighting.
    What she loved to do most was spiking type, and late Friday afternoon, when the sun streamed heavily in the back room windows, she sat at her type boxes, printer’s sticks in hand, and picked and laid the type one letter at a time, one line at a time, according to the layout. The office was closed. A.J. was at the books. Jean was laying out typefaces for the headlines. They worked quietly and well together, with a minimum of comment.
    It occurred to her, in an edgy kind of way, that she and Jean had done this very chore every Friday afternoon fora year since Frank’s death, and yet this was the first time she was aware of him as a man, the first time she wondered about his emotions in more than an abstract way.
    He did everything with a thorough, graceful efficiency that was almost unobtrusive. His calm expression gave away nothing of what he was thinking. Nothing. And she had never thought to ask.
    He stood beside her, tall and lean, pulling type, hardly ever saying a word, his practicality and common sense like a crutch to her, strong and stalwart, to be leaned on whenever she was in need. But what about him? What did he need? How did he make do? And what if, in the foreseeable future, he should want to leave Colville—leave
her?
    She felt a moment’s pure terror sweep over her at how fragile the relationships were between her and Jean, and her and A.J.
    And all because Logan Ramsey had kissed her.
    She shook herself mentally. She was thinking utter nonsense. A.J. and Jean had stayed because they wanted to be in Colville, nothing more and nothing less. She was their boss. She didn’t need to know motives and life histories to employ a man, she only needed to know he could do his job well, as well as she did hers. It was as simple as that. Nothing would interfere with that and the paper would go on as it always had, and if one of them left her, she would find someone to replace him.
    But still—Jean was not bound to her with a contract. He was young, vibrant, talented. He could pick up and go at a moment’s notice. Why hadn’t he?
    He slanted a look at her as he sensed her eyes on him, and she turned her head away abruptly. “You’ll have to set the Danforth letter, Jean,” she said brusquely, reaching for a well-used cloth that was smeared with a thousand wipings of her ink-stained fingers. “I do nothave the stomach.”
    “As you wish,” he said noncommittally, sliding onto her high stool as she moved across the room to examine and proof the first plates she had spiked.
    “I’m tired of this railroad business,” she said suddenly, and she realized she was. Her puny protestations made no dent in the progress of things. Life would go on after Denver North passed through.
    “It will soon be over,” Jean said comfortingly.
    “No! What no one understands is, once they come through, it will never be over. Still…” She reversed several pieces of type on one long line, “everyone wants the bounty the railroad will bring.”
    “Except Maggie.”
    His stark comment startled her; she couldn’t tell if he were being sarcastic or if he agreed with her. She darted a look at him and was surprised to see his whole body turned toward her in a posture she could not define. In another moment, he had swiveled around again to focus on his work, and she thought she had dreamed the anger she saw in him, and—impossibly—the desire.
    They pulled the first issues of the paper late that night and on into the morning, until the first two hundred bifold pages were stacked, ready for distribution.
    There was nothing that made this week different than any other, Maggie thought as she wearily climbed into bed, except that Reese Colleran slept in a bedroom down the hall from hers and two men whom she had