Instant Prairie Family (Love Inspired Historical) (8 page)

Pacing in the kitchen didn’t get him any answer, so he quietly headed out to her room, debating if he should knock or just wait in the front room, but the problem was already resolved when he reached her door. It was open. Her bed looked as if it had not been touched and there was no sign of her in any of the other first-floor rooms or in the root cellar.

For a moment, rational thought fled, and he was left with nothing but the deep, aching fear that told him she had left.
She’s just like Caroline and Auntie Shelia.
His thoughts ran away, making his stomach churn with anger.
She ran off already.
It was what he had expected, but it still made him furious. At her, for leaving them in the lurch, and at himself for believing—even just for a few days—that he might actually have found a woman he could rely on.

But before the anger had a chance to build, common sense reasserted itself. She couldn’t have run off. Where would she have gone in the middle of the prairie? She knew no one out here. The closest neighbors were an hour’s ride away by horse, and all the horses were still in the barn.

Rushing up to the boys’ room, he held his breath and listened carefully, hoping against his better judgment to hear her soft murmuring with one of his sons, but there was only silence. Similar lumps on each of the twin beds confirmed that both boys were sound asleep and fine. Disappointment knifed him in the gut.

Where could she be? He checked his own room, Jake’s and even Matt and MaryAnn’s. Neither he nor Jake had ever cleaned out that room. Returning back to check on his boys, he stood at the doorway, wondering where she could have gone off to. Turning to retrace his steps, he halted abruptly and turned around, rubbing his eyes. Two small, shapely bare feet were sticking out past the end of Willy’s bed. Drawing closer, he couldn’t believe his eyes; she was asleep on a pallet on the floor between the twin beds. Why?

He wanted to shout for joy and yell at her for her foolishness in the same breath. How could she be sleeping on the floor? What was wrong with her bed? She could have used his bed or Jake’s if she hadn’t wanted to be on the first floor. Was she secretly scared of sleeping in the house without another adult? If she had just said something, he would have tried to find yet another solution.

He knelt down beside her and gently shook her shoulder. “Miss Stewart? What are you doing sleeping on the floor?”

It took her a minute to wake up. “Are the boys okay?” Her voice was gravelly. She rubbed her eyes and blinked at him. Something caught in his throat and he turned away for a moment. Even in her sleepy state she was obviously aware of where she was. Ignoring him, she sat up and checked one sleeping form and then the other.

Will studied the face of the young woman. Why hadn’t he noticed yesterday how tired she was? Was she getting sick herself? When she had mentioned something about not getting anything done with the boys sick, he brushed it off as something to be expected with them underfoot all the time. After all, he had plowed and planted his fields in half the time of last year and covered three times more acreage with the boys in the house. If God granted him the sunshine, rain and heat necessary, his wheat crop would be three times as large as last year’s.

But as he watched her try and force herself awake with those telling dark circles under her eyes, he realized he hadn’t been paying attention to his home. The boys had been sick and all he had done to help was oversee their bath after dinner and then help Abby...Miss Stewart get them into bed. Tommy insisted Auntie Abby be there when they said their prayers. Why hadn’t he noticed her fatigue?

“How much sleep did you get last night?” he asked, remembering the clean floor in the kitchen. Had she stayed up and scrubbed the floor on top of everything else?

“I don’t know. They slept better last night. I think the worst is probably over.” She glanced outside, and color drained from her face. She wrapped her arms around her middle and he remembered the same gesture when she was sick in the alleyway back in Twin Oaks the first day. Her eyes filled with fear.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m sorry I overslept. I need to get downstairs and start breakfast. If you’ll just give me a moment—”

“No. You need a few more hours of sleep.” He reached out his large hand, placing it on her thin shoulder, and stopped her from standing. “Go sleep in your own bed for a few hours.”

Instead of looking pleased, she looked crushed. “I’m sorry. I’ll get breakfast going and then there’s all the—”

“There’s nothing wrong with needing more sleep,” he said, more gruffly than he intended to. What drove her? She was almost falling over from weariness and yet she was apologizing for not having breakfast ready.

As he watched, her eyes filled with tears and she turned her face into her hands and sniffed. She stood and fled the room. He watched her leave. “What did I say this time?” he asked himself out loud.

Minutes later, he slunk back down the stairs, careful not to make too much noise so Miss Stewart could sleep. Except he could have made as much noise as he wanted because standing in the kitchen, her feet still bare, was Abby, trying to fill the coffeepot with water from the pump. Tears streaking her face, she wiped them away quickly with the back of her hand as she turned her shoulder to him.

“Why aren’t you resting?” he asked, frustration darkening his words.

“I need to make breakfast. You can’t go out and plant on an empty stomach.”

“I’m not planting today. You need a rest. I didn’t realize how much work the boys had been, being sick and all. I’ll get breakfast ready. Don’t worry about it.”

She looked so fragile and small, trying to wake from her exhausted slumber just a few minutes before, and now barefoot and crying in the kitchen.

He had seen enough tears from Caroline to last a lifetime, but they had never made him as uncomfortable as Miss Stewart’s tears. Maybe that was due to his suspicion that Caroline’s tears had been a display to manipulate many a situation in her favor. Miss Stewart’s were obviously sincere, and the result of exhaustion. In fact, she had worked very hard since the first day she stepped across the threshold and hadn’t murmured a single complaint.

To take care of her basic needs would only be the Christian thing to do, especially since she had worked herself to exhaustion caring for his family. It was easy to see why the boys were taken with her. He had seen her when she read to them at night, cuddling Tommy on her lap and wrapping an arm around Willy’s shoulders. She had won them over with her kind words and affection. It was only right that they take care of her as if she were part of the family, too—even if it were only for the summer.

That excuse seemed to fit. He clung to it and squared his shoulders, ready to do battle with the feisty, crying lady. She was going to get some sleep, even if he had to force her to.

She hadn’t responded to what he had said, just kept going through the motions of putting breakfast together. She set the water on the stove. Picking up the bread from yesterday, she started to slice it.

“Why don’t you sit down and I’ll cut it up for you?” He stood right beside her and reached out for the knife. She released it with a weariness resembling surrender.

“I’m sorry. I was going to do this. I usually have more energy than this. I know you need to get out to the fields and I don’t want to slow your progress down. I wanted to—”

“I’ve done more this week than I did in three last year. You’ve already more than earned your keep.” Suddenly it made sense, the way she was wearing herself down, refusing to stop working—she was worried he would send her back East without a referral because she had not been able to keep up with her chores. “You could’a told me they weren’t letting you get any rest. I would have come in from the fields earlier so you could have taken a nap, or I could have had them sleep out in the barn with me.”

“That’s just what I want!” she almost shouted back, clearly frazzled. “I come here to take care of your boys and your home and end up forcing everyone else to sleep out in the barn. I could sleep out in the barn, Mr. Hopkins. Then everyone else could have their own rooms back.”

Abby stood looking out the window, her fingers clutching fistfuls of skirt at her thighs. Her tears had stopped but were threatening to spill over the long blond eyelashes framing her expressive eyes.

Standing close, studying her profile, he saw the light glint off the specks of blue and green in her eyes, changing from green to blue and back again with every word she spoke.

“That’s not going to happen here, miss. You won’t be sleeping out in the barn when there’s a perfectly good house here that’d be more comfortable and safer. Now, why don’t you just go to bed and get some sleep!” He was too exasperated by the girl to keep his voice down.

She didn’t look at him but spun away and fled to her room. He could hear her muffled sobs a few minutes later when he went as far as the hallway to check on her. He couldn’t bring himself to knock on the door. Ma had once said that a woman just needed a good cry every once in a while. He hoped that was all she needed.

When Tommy appeared in the kitchen a while later, Will motioned his son to be quiet. He was amazed Tommy didn’t question him until he was seated at the table.

“Pa, where is Auntie Abby? She wasn’t in my room when I woke up. I like it when she’s there ’cuz she gives me kisses on my head and then helps me get my shirt all buttoned up right.”

Inspecting Tommy’s shirt, Will realized that Abby’s help had been missed. “Here, son, let me help you.” He rebuttoned his son quickly as he explained, “Auntie Abby was really tired today because of all the hard work she’s been doing around here for us. I told her to go get some sleep so she could play with you boys later. We’re gonna be real quiet this morning so she can rest, okay?”

“Yeah, we can be real quiet like we have to be when she’s rocking me and Willy is asleep.” Tommy’s sweet voice added to Will’s guilt. His boys had been up in the nights, miserable and grumpy, and he hadn’t been there for them. At least Abby had been.

“Pa, we gonna wait for Auntie Abby to make us breakfast?”

“No, I’ve got it all fixed already,” Will answered, ignoring his son’s groan.

“But, Pa, I like the way Auntie Abby makes breakfast. She doesn’t make it start on fire.”

“Hey, that was only once. I was doing better lately. I fried some eggs and put them on bread with butter.” Lifting the platter from the back of the stove, he set it on the table and sat down in his spot.

“I like butter. Why didn’t we have it before?”

“Because no one took time to churn the butter. We were always too busy with—”

“Pa, can we make Auntie Abby my new ma?” Tommy’s question stopped Will’s lungs midbreath. Neither boy had ever mentioned having another mother.

“No. She came to be the housekeeper, and she’s not here to stay. She’s going to go back,” he stated as calmly as he could still gasping for breath. He should have thought about how attached the boys would get to her. After all, she was the first woman who had ever shown them any real affection.

“But I don’t want her to go back. I want her to stay here with me, forever and ever. She says ‘I love you’ and kisses us when she puts us to bed. I want her to do that all the time. I want—”

“There are lots of things that we want in life, Tommy. Most of them we never get,” Will retorted sharply.

“But she’s really pretty and she sews really good, too. She made a shirt for Willy and is almost done with mine. She said she’s gonna have something for us men to wear by the time we go to meetin’.”

“Tommy, she’s a really nice lady, but she’s only here for a short time so that she can take care of you and Willy and teach you some book learning this summer. She deserves to go find some nice place to live in a town somewhere not in the middle of the prairie. Then she can get married and have kids of her own.”

“You could marry her, Pa. Jenny said her Ma was telling Mrs. Scotts it was high time you got us boys a new ma. I think Auntie Abby is a good one. She even smells good. Jenny said if you married a new ma, she wouldn’t be my ma but my stepmother, and she said that stepmothers beat on their stepchildren. But I don’t think Auntie Abby would. Only if I were really bad.”

“Well, I have no plan on getting you a new ma,” Will stated with enough volume that Tommy sat staring at him for a minute in silence.

Jake chose that moment to come in through the back door, looking around for the new housekeeper. When Will explained that she was resting and that no one was to disturb her, Jake’s smile fell and the boy slumped into a chair and waited for his breakfast with a glum expression. Willy finally came down and they all managed to eat the sparse breakfast Will put on the table. Even with the boys still itchy, they all went out to the barn to finish chores.

By dinnertime, Abby made a full meal and had bathed the boys again. She smiled at everyone around the table and thanked them for letting her rest all morning. They all seemed to agree if it meant she was going to go to so much trouble with dinner, including raisin tarts for dessert, they would be willing to let her sleep in more often.

Will had sent the boys up to ready for bed when he turned and noticed Abby’s grimace as she stuck her hands in the dishwater. “Did you burn your hands?” he asked, curious more than worried.

“No, I’m fine,” she denied through gritted teeth, a fine line of perspiration dotting her forehead and upper lip.

“Let me see.” He stepped closer and almost said a few choice words. Each hand looked like a pincushion with ten splinters or more, and her palms had blisters the size of peas. “What happened?” he demanded, clasping her wrists between the thumb and forefinger of each of his hands to keep them in view.

“Nothing. I’ll be fine,” she denied again, tugging her arms back without success.

“If it were nothing, you wouldn’t have blisters and splinters. Did this happen last night?”

She stood still, not even speaking. He was intently looking at her hands when he noticed her trembling. He looked up to find her eyes on the floor, but her fear was almost palpable. He led her to a chair and pulled it out.