Page 3 of A Convenient Heart (Wind River Mail-Order Brides #1)

“W e’ll rebuild. The children need a school.”

“Where’s the money gonna come from? Town’s got no budget for rebuilding.”

The conversation between the two male voices washed over Jack, though he was hardly paying attention.

He was having some trouble looking away from Merritt. She’d given him her name in a storm of tears hours ago, and he had felt such a punch of connection.

Early morning sunlight was spilling over the horizon. Sometime in the wee hours, the clouds and snow had moved off. It looked like it would be a cold, sunny day later. Right now, everyone who had gathered on the streets was covered in gray soot. Wisps of smoke and steam filtered up into the sky from the ashes and coals that had once been the school building.

Merritt was covered in soot too. She had a smudge of it right on her nose, and he wanted to do something about it—but he didn’t dare.

For one, she was surrounded by other people.

But the real reason he was poking through the ashes with a long-handled spade, as far away from her as he could manage, was because it was time for him to go.

Past time.

He’d gotten too involved already.

This wasn’t his home, and she wasn’t for him.

His body ached from weariness. No one out here had slept, and hauling all that water had taxed his muscles. In a moment, he was going to slip away into one of the nearby alleyways and disappear.

Something about the thought was like the last draw in a poker hand revealing a worthless card.

“So, you’re Miss Harding’s beau?”

A youthful voice cracked on the words and Jack looked up.

Two boys of roughly twelve or thirteen had approached, both holding hoes.

“I’m Jack,” he said instead of answering the question.

He stuck the spade upright into the ground and held it with his left hand while he extended his right.

The two boys ignored his outstretched hand in favor of digging into the rubble with their hoes. They were enthusiastic with their efforts, and ash flew up into the air.

Jack moved a step away from them and tried not to cough. His lungs still felt a little singed.

“I’m Daniel,” grunted the nearer boy.

“And I’m Paul,” said the other, who was maybe an inch taller.

“I suppose you two are former students of Miss Harding?”

His assumption that they were older puffed out their chests. The two boys glanced at each other.

“Naw, we’re in our last year now,” Daniel said as he poked at the charred rubble.

Jack nudged a large piece of still-smoking wood with his spade. “Do you have plans after your schooling?”

“My pa works at the bank,” Daniel said. “He thinks maybe I can go to college if I study hard enough.”

Paul was turned away from Daniel, and the other boy didn’t see the way he mimicked the last of his words. Was this opportunity a sore spot between the two?

“What about you?” Jack asked Paul.

The kid shrugged. “I dunno.” He sent a resentful glare at Daniel, but the other boy didn’t see it. “Miss Harding says I could be a doctor, but that’s a lot more schooling.”

And money.

Daniel scoffed. “Your pa is a farmer. How you gonna pay for doctor school?”

Paul dug his hoe into the ash and flipped it in Daniel’s direction, sending a puff of ash wafting toward him.

“Hey!”

Jack cleared his throat, and the two boys frowned but settled down.

“What’s Miss Harding like? As a teacher?” he asked.

“She’s all right,” Paul muttered, shoving his next scoop with a little more force than necessary.

“She’s the best,” Daniel said. “She’s real good at explainin’ complicated ’rithmetic problems, and she’s patient when she’s teaching the little kids to read.”

“She’s a good reader,” Paul added. “She does different voices for different characters in the book.”

“She even wrote the script for our Christmas pageant…” Daniel’s voice trailed off as he surveyed the mess of what had been their school building.

It must have just hit him that the pageant wouldn’t go on as they’d planned.

“It’ll be all right,” Jack said. “Your Miss Harding will figure something out.”

He’d seen it himself. She was smart as a whip. And from what the boys had described, she was well liked in the classroom.

Paul leaned on his shovel, chin jutted out. “Anyways, we came over here to find out about you. Whadda you do for work?”

“A little of this, a little of that.”

Daniel squinted at him. “What’s that mean?”

The kid was smart too. Or had learned from his teacher. He hadn’t accepted Jack’s offhand answer.

“I travel to different places,” Jack said. “And sometimes I find problems. And I fix them.”

The kid seemed to think on that for a minute.

It was Paul who threw out the next question. “How come you needed a mail-order wife anyway?”

For a tick, as Paul tilted his head just so, Jack was thrown back in time—fifteen years, to when Dewey had worn the same narrow-eyed expression. And then Dewey’s expression had changed as he’d smiled. His eyes had danced.

Are we going fishing tomorrow?

Jack heard the voice from his past as clearly as he did the two boys who were arguing right next to him.

Dewey had been a blood brother only in the sense that they had sworn it to each other after they had nicked their palms with a knife and pressed them together on a muggy summer morning.

Dewey had been three years younger than Jack and, while he might have had an occasional bout of orneriness, had been one of the kindest souls Jack had ever known.

Jack hadn’t thought about him in a long time. It was too painful to recall the memories. And it was only a fluke that he had caught the faint resemblance of Paul to Dewey.

“Can’t have you catching cold.” The gruff female voice came only a moment before a woolen blanket was slipped over Jack’s shoulders.

He blinked away the painful memories and caught sight of an older woman in a drab green dress with at least two more folded blankets in her arms. She was looking at the boys. “You lads need warming up?”

“No, ma’am,” they chorused.

“That’s what I thought. Mr. Jack has been out here all night, while you two’ve only been out for a bit.”

Jack pointed to where Merritt was flanked by two women. “Merritt—Miss Harding has been out all night too.”

“I’ll go to her next.” The matronly woman who’d delivered the blanket was watching Jack with dancing eyes. “She sure did pick a good one. You jumped right in to help when we needed it.”

He was opening his mouth to tell her that she was wrong—that Merritt hadn’t picked him, that he didn’t belong here—but the woman was already gone.

“That’s Mrs. Stoll from the boardinghouse,” Daniel murmured. “Yer lucky she likes you. She don’t like hardly anybody.”

That was the woman Jack would’ve stayed with if he’d been this John Crosby fellow?

Paul jerked his chin toward another woman, this one in her forties, with a coffee pot in one hand and tin mugs in the other. She was passing out a warm drink that would help the people still standing around.

“That’s Mrs. Steele. She owns the café.”

Jack had never seen anything like this. The townsfolk had stepped up to help, not just to stop the fire, but now they were rallying around each other. Figuring out how to fix things, keeping each other warm and fed.

It was like something out of a fairytale. He wasn’t sure he believed in it. He sure knew that he didn’t belong here.

The question was how best to slip away without causing any more trouble.

* * *

Merritt heard the husky laugh, and she couldn’t help the way her head turned toward Jack.

He was poking through the debris at the edge of what had been the schoolhouse. Daniel and Paul stood nearby, both now leaning on their shovels while they talked to Jack. Each boy watched him with rapt attention, and then Daniel said something as he waved his hands in an animated way.

Jack responded. She couldn’t hear what he said, but it was clear that he had made an instant connection with the two boys.

Here was another unexpected side of Jack. She had thought that perhaps it would take a while for him to warm up to her students, or that he might only be casually interested in connecting with them socially.

For a moment, his gaze floated over the crowd, and then it crashed with hers. Her stomach pitched, and she raised one hand to wave at him.

He nodded, unsmiling.

She couldn’t help but notice the distance between them. Ever since she had burst into tears in his arms hours ago, he’d been closed off. Had carefully avoided being close to her.

He’d put walls up.

It would be all right, she told herself. Everyone was exhausted after a sleepless night.

The crowd was dispersing slowly as families returned to their homes.

“I want a full investigation.”

She glanced over her shoulder at the familiar voice and slightly hunched shoulders beneath a tailored coat. It was Mr. Polk, one of the school board members. He was a young father with a child not yet old enough for the classroom, but he had connections to prominent businessmen in town, including Billy Burns, who owned two of the saloons.

Polk’s dark eyes cut to Merritt and then away. He was speaking to a woman in trousers, who had a badge pinned to the vest beneath her coat. Danna O’Grady was town marshal and one of Merritt’s close friends.

“The school board will need to be informed immediately if there are any signs of willful negligence that caused the fire.”

Merritt’s shoulders tensed as her tired brain took a moment to process his words.

He thought Merritt had somehow caused the fire.

They had butted heads more than once over her teaching methods, her classroom discipline, and over this year’s Christmas pageant. But for him to make such a terrible assumption…

She had half a mind to march up to him and set him straight. Only her own exhaustion and a check in her spirit—the echo of her thoughts from last night—kept her feet unmoving.

As tired as she was, her temper would have a short fuse. She didn’t want to say something that couldn’t be taken back. The man, along with two others, was responsible for overseeing her job.

“Don’t let that blustering fool rile you up.” The low voice from her side reminded Merritt that she wasn’t alone. Mrs. Quinn, Daniel’s mother, linked her arm with Merritt’s so that their backs were to Danna and Mr. Polk.

“I closed up the school just the same as every other day,” Merritt muttered to herself.

Mrs. Quinn patted her hand. “I know, dear. There’s not an irresponsible bone in your body.”

Mrs. Stoll was distributing blankets, and Merritt noticed that Jack had one around his shoulders. The woman offered one to Merritt, who declined with a shake of her head. She should go home. Try to sleep.

Looking at the empty lot, now littered with ashes and clumps of wood, just made her sad.

“It’s a pity. But we’ll rebuild,” Mrs. Stoll said, following her gaze.

“Not soon enough,” Merritt said. She had been worrying over the problem all night. They would need a place for lessons in the interim, before the building could be rebuilt. “And the children had worked so hard on the pageant…”

“There is no reason we couldn’t hold the pageant at the church,” Mrs. Quinn said.

“Or even the dance hall,” Mrs. Stoll piped in.

She appreciated their enthusiasm to help find a solution, but the tradition in Calvin had long been to hold the pageant in the schoolhouse. There was no easy solution for the sadness that engulfed her. Even when a new schoolhouse was built, nothing would ever be the same. Of course, next Christmas she wouldn’t be coordinating the pageant at all. In his letters, Jack had promised they would remain in Calvin until her teaching contract was up, but there had been no mention of whether he would want to live in her hometown permanently.

Merritt caught sight of Daniel and Paul racing off down the side street.

The boys were classroom rivals, but they’d put aside their differences to build one of the pageant backdrops.

All of the children, not just Paul and Daniel, would be devastated if the pageant didn’t happen. It was a Christmas tradition. And for those two boys, it would be their last Christmas in her classroom.

Jack had stooped to talk to Harriet. Oh, and there was Samuel too. The five-year-old boy was sobbing inconsolably, while Harriet looked teary.

Merritt started toward them but stopped when she saw Jack speaking seriously to the boy. He slipped the blanket off his own shoulders and wrapped it around Samuel. It swamped his small body.

The boy sniffled and wiped one cheek with a corner of the blanket that covered his hand. He blinked, now calmer.

Jack had done that.

“I like your Jack,” Mrs. Quinn said.

He wasn’t hers yet.

Seeing him comfort Samuel made Merritt’s breath catch. She’d dreamed of a family of her own for such a long time. She’d put aside those girlish dreams after her parents had moved back east. It had seemed more prudent to focus on her studies, but there had been times when she’d stared at the ceiling during lonely nights in a girls’ dormitory at the normal college, and they’d slipped in when she couldn’t bear the loneliness.

Her dreams had never abandoned her. They’d come back full force months ago, and Merritt had known she couldn’t keep waiting for the right man to come along. She had to take action.

And here was Jack, settling his hat on top of Samuel’s head.

Now Samuel was looking at her fiancé, blinking as he talked. Harriet looked happier too. Samuel even cracked a small smile.

Whatever Jack had said, he had calmed the boy down. He was good with kids.

It felt like a confirmation that Merritt had made the right choice.

“What does he do for work?” Mrs. Stoll asked absently.

Merritt knew she would be fielding questions until everyone in town knew the answers. “He’s a businessman.”

The older woman’s brow wrinkled. “He is?” The skeptical tone to her voice made Merritt blink. “He doesn’t seem like a businessman.”

Before she could answer, the two women excused themselves.

“Miss Harding?” Henry, one of Merritt’s former students, the young man who’d waited on them last night at the hotel, came alongside her. “Your beau forgot this last night.”

He handed her Jack’s leather satchel and was gone before she could say thank you.

She hadn’t even realized Jack had forgotten it in their haste to fight the fire.

Jack’s gaze narrowed on her, and he started making his way toward her.

Behind him, she saw that Samuel still wore his hat.

“Let me take that.” His words were a command that brooked no argument, and the way he was frowning made her hand it over quickly. He slipped it over his shoulders.

It shouldn’t have bothered her that he’d wanted to take the satchel back, but something about the exchange niggled at her.

She tried to ignore it. Nodded to where he had just come from. “You left your hat.”

He glanced quickly over his shoulder and back. Gone was the charming Jack from supper last night. “I never liked that hat. He can keep it.”

She still felt the tension of walls up between them. Was Jack that discomforted that she’d wept in his arms? Other people still milled about, and suddenly, she was too tired to wonder or worry any more.

“I can walk you over to the boardinghouse,” she said.

“Fine. Then we gotta talk.”