Love's First Bloom by Delia Parr

promised, Mrs. Jensen helped us to find someone else. He did a fine job of repairing her kitchen steps, so you needn’t bother. We’ve hired him instead.”
    Ruth stared at the two women who had slipped into the shop so quietly, she had not even heard them. Apparently, neither had Mr. Toby, who spun around so fast he nearly lost his balance. She flushed with relief that someone had interrupted the difficult conversation she had been having with the man, even if that someone turned out to be the Jones cousins. Since the focus of their interest had shifted to Mr. Toby, she almost did not care that she had no escape from their banter, although she sent up a silent prayer that Elias would hear them and intervene.
    The man sidestepped the counter and started for the door, walking in a wide arc to get around the two women. “I’ve been feelin’ poorly… .”
    “From all we’ve heard, you’ve been plopping yourself down at the general store instead of working,” Gertie argued, her spectacles hanging precariously from the tip of her nose. “And the next time we need something fixed, we won’t be bothering you. We’ll be asking Jake Spencer to help us again.”
    Lorelei huffed so hard the brim on her sorry bonnet flopped up and down. “He won’t take a single coin from us, either. He knows how hard it is for widows like us to get by, unlike some other folks who take advantage.”
    Mr. Toby didn’t respond. He just shuffled past them and hurried out the door.
    As the women approached the counter, bantering back and forth with each other about their handsome new handyman and his easygoing nature, Ruth had a hard time believing the man they were talking about was the gruff, cranky, ill man she had met several days ago. “Good afternoon, ladies. Did … did I hear you say the man who helped you was Jake Spencer?” she asked.
    Gertie sighed and a faint blush stained her sunken cheeks. “Lovely man. Lovelier smile. Makes me wish I were just a few years younger. I’d invite Mr. Spencer to supper tomorrow night if you hadn’t put up such a fuss. I still might do just that.”
    Lorelei waved at her cousin’s arm, giving her a playful reprimand. “You’ll do no such thing. Even a child could see that Mr. Spencer is sufferin’ quite a bit with that back of his that’s still healin’. Since he already promised to repaint Mrs. Walker’s shutters tomorrow morning, I doubt he’ll be up to walking into the village twice in one day,” she quipped, without answering Ruth’s question any more directly than her cousin had done.
    Simultaneously, they paused and looked at Ruth. “Do you know him, too?” they asked in unison, as if they finally realized she was still standing there.
    “Yes, I believe we’ve met,” she replied, curious to know why the man she had encountered, who had been so preoccupied with his privacy that he had accused her of trespassing, had apparently been leaving his cabin to go into the village to work. How could he possibly have done any work as a handyman at all when he was hardly able to walk and needed to lean on a cane just to keep his balance?
    Unless Jake Spencer was not the man he had appeared to be.
    The very thought sent chills coursing up and down the length of her backbone as possibilities clashed against one another in her mind. Perhaps he had just been having a particularly difficult time of it the morning they met. On the other hand, he may have exaggerated the state of his health and demanded privacy because he had something in that cabin he did not want anyone else to see.
    Or he could be a reporter who had somehow tracked her here, which made little sense since he had practically tossed her off the property he had rented and had only reluctantly agreed to allow her to return.
    Ruth realized now that she had made a mistake by hiding upstairs for the past three days. But she had no time to waste on fear or self-indulgent pity or paranoia. She could panic and assume the worse—that