Читать книгу Willow in Bloom - Victoria Pade - Страница 10

“Hey.”

Willow looked up from the paperwork she was doing at her desk the next afternoon to see her oldest brother, Bram, standing in her office doorway.

“Hi,” she replied, setting down her pencil.

“Got a minute to spare for your favorite brother?”

“Sure.”

“I wanted to talk to you.”

“I already told you I didn’t rob that bank, Sheriff,” she joked.

Bram came in, closing the door behind him. “Don’t make fun,” he ordered.

But Willow knew he was only kidding. She and the rest of her brothers were proud of the fact that Bram was Black Arrow’s sheriff, and they’d made him aware of it.

Bram sat in one of the visitors chairs, leaned low in the seat and put his feet up on the corner of her desk.

“Anyone who puts their big clodhoppers up there has hell to pay with me,” Willow warned.

Bram was unperturbed. “Don’t make me come around there and give you a noogie to put you in your place.”

Noogies were what her brothers called it when they put her in a headlock and rubbed their knuckles on her skull.

His threat must have been more effective than hers because he grinned and left his feet where they were, and Willow didn’t do anything about it.

“Met Carl at the gas station last night,” her brother said then.

“Uh-huh.” Willow braced for what she knew was coming, since she’d already had this conversation with two of her other three brothers. Apparently Bram, Ashe and Logan had had breakfast this morning and discussed her, and if Jared hadn’t married and moved to Texas with his new wife, he would have been in the mix, too.

“Carl says something’s wrong with you,” Bram continued. “He thinks you’re sick or something.”

“And you reported it to the other Musketeers over breakfast,” Willow said. “Well, I’m not sick or anything. Just like I told Ashe and Logan when they called.”

But Bram wasn’t going to let it drop that easily. “Carl says he caught you sleeping at your desk. That you’re dragging your tail around here, and that you don’t even have the strength to move a feed sack.”

Willow had made a special call to her doctor to ask if it was all right for her to go on lifting the heavy bags of feed and grain that she’d always hoisted without a second thought before. The doctor had advised against it.

“I have the strength. I’m just trying to learn to delegate.”

Bram looked at her as if she were out of her mind.

“I know this comes as a surprise to you,” Willow said, “but I’m not a man. And I might want to have kids someday. Gloria always said I shouldn’t be lifting such heavy things or I was going to strain my insides, and I just thought maybe it was time to take that seriously.”

Bram laughed. “Right. You’re a delicate little daisy.” He was making fun.

“I didn’t say I was a delicate little daisy. But I’m also not one of the guys. And the guys around here can do the lifting. That’s what I pay them for.”

She hadn’t intended for that to come out so brusquely, but it had, and she hoped her brother might just let it pass.

No such luck.

“Geez! Don’t bite my head off,” he exclaimed. “That’s another thing Carl said—you’re not acting like yourself. I can see what he means. Touchy, touchy.”

Willow rolled her eyes.

“Carl says you’re always in the bathroom, and the other day when he came looking for you he was pretty sure you were in there throwing up.”

“Oh for crying out loud, I had the flu,” Willow said, as if it were nothing. “And what’s Carl doing counting how many times I’m in the bathroom?”

Bram ignored her question to ask one of his own. “Why didn’t you call one of us if you were sick?”

“Because I’m a big girl and I can take care of myself,” Willow said, exasperation ringing in her voice.

Her brother stared at her, his forehead creased in a frown, and Willow knew that she was not putting on a convincing defense.

She made a conscious effort to lighten her tone and said, “I appreciate that you care. You and the rest of the guys, and even Carl. But I can’t call you all every time I have a hangnail. I must have caught a bug of some kind, which was here and gone before it was worth talking about.”

“Are you sure?” Bram asked suspiciously.

“I’m positive. I’m fine.” Then Willow decided the best thing to do was to get him talking about something else, so she said, “Is that the only reason you came in here today?”

“No. I was coming in to talk to you anyway, and then I met Carl and he gave me another reason.”

“So what was the first reason?”

Bram went on staring at her for a moment longer, as if he wasn’t sure he should let her throw him off track.

Willow calmly waited him out, afraid that any more attempts to defend herself would be overkill and do more harm than good.

Apparently it worked, because he finally said, “I wanted to know if you’d seen anyone suspicious hanging around, or if you’ve had anybody asking questions about us.”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“Some people say there’s a tall, skinny guy—homely with dirty brown hair—asking questions about our family.”

Willow shrugged. “That could be a lot of people we know. But no, I haven’t seen anyone fitting that description who we don’t know. Are you thinking this might be the same guy who broke into the newspaper office and set the fire at the town hall?”

Both were recent incidents that Willow knew Bram was investigating.

“Could be,” he answered noncommittally. “The guy is asking about Gloria and any kids or grandkids she might have had. Which brings me to my next point—have you gone through her room yet like I asked you to?”

Bram had been after Willow to do that for weeks now, ever since he’d been contacted by another stranger in town. Rand Colton, a visitor from Washington, D.C., had brought up the possibility that there might be a connection between his family and theirs. It had become Willow’s job to go through Gloria’s things to find out if there was any information their grandmother might have had about it. Willow knew Bram was particularly curious because on her deathbed, Gloria had implored him to find the truth, something he was still trying to figure out the meaning to. She couldn’t help wondering if this stranger had anything to do with that request.

“No, I haven’t gone through her room yet,” Willow admitted somewhat reluctantly. She was embarrassed at how long she’d been dragging her feet about it.

“I know it’s a tough thing to do,” Bram said, showing more understanding than he had about her not wanting to lift feed sacks. “Do you want me to do it?”

“No, I said I would and I will.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow,” she promised, knowing herself well enough to know that if she made a firm commitment she would follow through even though it was something she didn’t want to do.

Bram knew her, too, and didn’t need any further assurance. “Good. You may not find anything important or revealing, but we need to rule out the possibility. And who knows? There might be something up there that will help me figure out what’s going on.”

Willow nodded in spite of the knot her stomach twisted into at the prospect of going into her grandmother’s room, going through her things.

But her brother was satisfied.

Unfortunately, that meant he was ready to return to the previous subject.

“And you’re sure you’re okay?” he said.

“I’m sure. But if I come down with scurvy or rickets or green slime disease, you’ll be the first to know,” she joked, trying to cover up the uneasy feeling she had that her brother suspected the truth.

Bram gave her that hard stare again, but before it went on too long, there was a knock on the door. It opened at about the same time, and a strikingly pretty, blond-haired, blue-eyed head popped through the opening.

“It’s just me.”

“Me” was Jenna Elliot, and Willow saw her brother’s whole being light up instantly.

“Come on in,” Willow invited as Bram yanked his feet off her desk in a hurry and stood.

It didn’t take a genius to see how much he cared for Jenna, who had nursed their grandmother after the first stroke Gloria had suffered in July and gotten involved with Bram in the process.

“I got your message to meet you here,” Jenna said to Bram, her own face beaming with love for him in return.

To Willow, Bram said, “We’re going for coffee. Want to come with us?”

Coffee was the one thing that could make Willow nauseous even after the morning sickness had passed. Even the thought of it raised her gorge.

“Thanks, but I have work I need to finish up. Besides, you know you don’t want me horning in on you guys.”

Neither of them denied it; they merely exchanged a glance that verified that they couldn’t wait to be off alone.

But Jenna also seemed to have an attack of conscience about not really wanting Willow to tag along, because she said, “It seems like I haven’t seen you forever, though, Will. Think we could have lunch? Maybe Saturday?”

“As a matter of fact I’ve hired a few high school kids to come in Saturdays now, so I probably can sneak away for lunch.”

“Oh good. One o’clock at the coffee shop?”

“I’ll be there.”

Bram had stayed out of the exchange to that point. But then he said to Jenna, “Maybe you can get her to tell you what’s going on with her.”

“What’s going on with you?” Jenna asked Willow, surprised.

“Nothing. Carl is imagining things and telling tales out of school about it.”

Jenna looked from Willow to Bram, clearly confused and not thrilled at being put in the middle of whatever was going on between brother and sister.

“I’ll fill you in over our coffee,” Bram promised.

“There’s nothing to fill in,” Willow said.

But neither her brother nor her friend paid much attention to that.

Instead Bram placed a hand at the small of Jenna’s back to steer her toward the door again. “Let me know if you find anything tomorrow,” he said to Willow.

“I will.”

“And I’ll see you on Saturday,” Jenna added.

“One o’clock at the coffee shop.”

“See you later, delicate little daisy,” Bram said then in a near singsong, referring back to his earlier remark about her not lifting grain sacks.

Willow just made a face at him as he ushered Jenna out of the office.

It was difficult for Willow to return to work, because she knew she was about to be the topic of conversation between her brother and her friend, and it wreaked havoc on her concentration. She couldn’t help worrying that the more people thought about and talked about what was going on with her, the greater the chance that someone would guess her secret.

Willow took off work not long after Bram and Jenna left her office. She wanted to do some shopping for herself before her evening of furniture shopping with Tyler.

Ordinarily she bought most of her clothes out of catalogs, so the local boutique was not a place she frequented. In fact, her going into the place was such a change of pace that the owner and the clerk assumed she was there to buy a gift. Neither of them hid their shock very well when she informed them that she was looking for a few things for herself.