Page 12 of Taming Lady Temperance

Clevenger!

James’s jaw tightened as he hoofed it down the street. The insensitive clout. So caught up in his own agenda he gave no thought to his stepdaughter’s feelings. Noreen might be a bit on the prickly side, but anyone with half an ounce of common sense could see that her barbed spines protected a bruised heart. If James recognized it, how much more aware should a family member be?

James stretched his stride, gradually closing the distance between him and the surprisingly fleet-of-foot woman he trailed. Not wanting to holler and draw undo attention from anyone who might be nearby, he waited until he was less than five yards away to call to her.

“Noreen.”

She cast a startled glance over her shoulder, and James’s gut hardened like a knot that had just been yanked tight. Tears streamed down her face. Tears. On Noreen O’Sullivan’s face. The grittiest woman he’d ever met, the one who stood toe-to-toe with Milton Taggert without flinching, had been brought to tears. James’s normally cool head erupted in flames, but he batted down the worst of them to focus on the woman in front of him. The one currently trying to shoo him like an unwanted fly.

“Go away, Deputy. I’ve no need of your services.” Loud sniffing ensued, followed by a jig of jutting elbows as she attempted to wipe her face while trotting with increasing speed toward the millpond.

“Noreen. Slow down, would you?”

She kicked into a canter. Ornery woman.

“I just want to help you.” James sprinted forward and cut into her path, forcing her to a halt. She tried to bolt in another direction, but he was onto her game and dodged side to side to block her as if she were a goat set on escaping her pen.

“Why can’t you just let me be?”

Never had he heard a more broken sound than her tear-clogged plea. His heart throbbed in his chest as he dug out a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and extended it toward her. “’Cause it’s my duty to help the good folk of Albany in their time of need.” Though the compulsion that had demanded he give chase felt a mite more personal than simple duty now that he’d corralled her and witnessed the evidence of her distress.

“I’m not one of the good folk of Albany.”

She accepted his handkerchief, mopped her eyes, then blew her nose. Her nostrils made a rather robust honking sound, but he was too concerned about her well-being to find any humor in the instrumentation.

“I’m a selfish, willful, unhinged fanatic bent on destroying my family.”

James leveled a stern look at her. “Those sound like Arthur Clevenger’s opinions, not yours. They certainly aren’t mine. So why are you speakin’ them as if they’re truth?”

She raised her chin but refused to meet his gaze. She stared off toward the pond instead, fighting to pull together scraps of composure. Gradually, her quivering lower lip firmed, and the pools shining in her coffee-colored eyes receded. Her shoulders lifted as she drew in a breath, and James found himself holding his as he waited for her to respond.

Would she trust him enough to open up? Or had his evasion of her proposal earlier today demoted him in her estimation?

“Arthur kicked me out,” she said, her voice flat. “And my mother did nothing to stop him.”

A hammer slammed into his chest at her pronouncement.

“His association with me is causing him to lose business. He’s afraid he’ll lose favor as well—favor with the men in this town who hold the power to advance his political career.” Her head turned, and her eyes brushed over his. “An increasingly common concern, I’m discovering.”

Her well-aimed arrow jabbed him somewhere between his conscience and his pride. The very idea of her viewing him in a similar light as Clevenger stuck in his craw like a sideways fishbone. Yet he couldn’t argue her point. His motives might be more noble than Clevenger’s, but the end result was the same.

His motives were more noble than those of Clevenger, right? Beneath Noreen’s gaze, he was no longer so sure.

James took a small step toward her. “I’m sorry.”

She sighed, and some of the starch leaked from her spine. “I’m not homeless. I haven’t lived under his roof for nearly a decade.”

“But it’s not about the roof.”

Her attention fell to the ground between them. “No, it’s not.”

She didn’t elaborate, but she didn’t need to. She’d already revealed the truth. “My mother did nothing to stop him.”

James’s parents had always supported him, even when they disagreed with his choices. His father had raised him to take over the family ranch in Breckenridge. His mother had tried to pair him off with no fewer than three different local gals, making no secret of her desire to see him married and on his way to producing grandbabies for her to dandle on her knee. When he told them of his plans to work as a lawman, they didn’t exactly rejoice. In fact, they spent the next several weeks trying to talk him out of it. But when they saw how serious he was about it and how important it was to him, they accepted his choice and never said a word against his chosen vocation again. Had they turned their backs on him . . . nothing would have cut deeper.

“I don’t know why I came here,” Noreen said, sharpening his attention on her. She stared out over the surface of the placid millpond. “I didn’t want to interrupt Jane or Martha. Brother Cowan always has guests to the house after services, and Martha rotates eating Sunday dinner with different families of her students.” She glanced back at him, but she failed to hold his gaze for more than a heartbeat. “I didn’t intend to interrupt you, either. You shouldn’t have followed me out here on a fool’s errand.”

He grinned. “You’re not calling me a fool, are you, Miss Noreen? I might have to take offense at that.”