Coming Home to Wyoming (Peaceful Valley Series Book 1) by April Hill Page A

first? The one who already lives here with you?”
    With a weary sigh, Griff repeated what he’d said earlier. “Amelia doesn’t live here. She’s just visiting for a few days.”
    Elyn wrinkled her nose. “My grandma used to say that visitors are like fish. They both start to smell bad after a couple of days.”
    He nodded. “That’s funny. My grandmother always said the same thing. “I guess we’ll just have to give it a try, and see what happens.”
     
     
     

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    The meeting inside the house got off to a better start than Griff had expected. Amelia was relentlessly polite and pleasant, and Elyn said very little and smiled a lot. They had tea from the dainty china tea service Amelia had given him—with the little yellow roses she had hand-painted on each piece. The trouble began when Amelia asked where Ellen and Griff had first met, and when Elyn explained with a charming smile that he had found her in a tree “half-naked, with my dress over my head and my damned drawers flapping in the breeze.” Afterward, she went on, he had spent money on her like there was no tomorrow, and that they had spent “their first night together” in a hotel room in Brewer’s Creek.
    “ One room?” Amelia inquired stiffly.
    Elyn giggled girlishly. “Well, naturally, we didn’t need two rooms for what Griff had in mind, but I suppose, being a gentleman and all, he was worried that the desk clerk would spread it around town that I was a… well, you probably know what I mean. Which was just silly, of course, because Griff never paid me one single penny, and I wouldn’t have taken money even if he’d offered it. He was a real sweetheart about money. He took me to an absolutely wonderful dinner at the finest restaurant in Brewer’s Creek and bought me simply scads of the loveliest gifts you can imagine—dresses and shoes, perfume, some ornaments for my hair, and the most charming pair of drawers he picked out by himself—with these tiny little embroidered rosebuds and pink bows in some of the most scandalous places! Oh, and I almost forgot. He bought me a beautiful green velvet valise that I needed for the trip we were taking together.
    “He was wonderfully gentle with me, the whole time. I was terribly young, you see—barely sixteen, and…”
    Amelia was staring. “ Sixteen ?”
    “Barely, and until that night, I had no experience at all with men.” At this point in the story, Elyn blushed, also charmingly. “Griff was the first man I’d ever been with, you see. Of course, he did snore, but then, what man doesn’t?”
    Finally, with Amelia beginning to turn pale, Griff decided it was time to step in and correct a few of Elyn’s little white exaggerations. But one moment before he could open his mouth and say what needed to be said, Elyn seized the moment, and offered an olive branch—of sorts.
    “When I arrived in Mill City, there was a sign posted at the stage office. About a dance,” she announced breathlessly. “Tomorrow night, at the Cattlemen’s Association Hall, in town. I thought it might be nice if we all went, together, so I bought two pairs of tickets, in case Amelia wants to invite her beau—if she has one.”
    Later, of course, when it was too late, Griff recognized the peril to be faced in escorting two women who detested one another to a dance where breakable objects were going to be in abundance.
    * * *
    The pleasant side of escorting two beautiful women to one dance was the envious glances he got when the three of them walked in together. Single women of any age or description were in short supply in Mill City, which meant that most of the town’s social events were crowded with gossiping farm and ranch wives, grateful for an evening away from a hot stove and squalling children. The woman were usually outfitted in their Sunday best, which ranged from frumpy to almost—but not quite— what had been in fashion two or three years earlier.
    Amelia, as Griff had expected, had