Lynna Banning by Plum Creek Bride Page B

voice shaking. “A crazed idiot on one fool’s errand after another—arguing about creek drainage so a bunch of hotheaded, ignorant bigots can avoid an epidemic, setting Samuel’s leg so he can walk into town for another bushel of corn to feed his hungry family and get run over. Or maybe next time they’ll lynch him! You are right, I am a fool.”
    “No,” she countered in her quiet voice. “You are not. But stubborn, yes. And hurt.”
    Stung, Jonathan wanted to shake her until that maddeningly steady look in her blue eyes turned to terror. He clenched his fists. “And opinionated, I suppose,” he growled.
    “Yes,” she echoed. “Opin-ion-ated.” She pronounced the word with care.
    That did it! “Miss Scharf, you are improving your vocabulary at my expense!”
    Her eyes widened. “Oh, no, Dr. Callender. I look up all these words before.”
    And then, unbelievably, she laughed. The low, musical sound increased his anger. She was laughing at him. By God, he wouldn’t allow.
    But, he admitted deep down inside, she was right. Again. He was hurt. And stubborn and selfish and, well, even opinionated. His anger, his dissatisfactionwith his life, his unease, were misplaced. The insidious feeling of having somehow lost his center was because of Tess. The seething fury was his reaction to loss.
    A wave of desolation overwhelmed him. He’d struck out against fate the only way he knew how, but his efforts had accomplished nothing. A black pit yawned inside his soul. The anger merely kept him feeling alive, and he clung to it for that reason.
    He had to give it up. It was destroying him.
    She was destroying him. She forced him to look at himself, and he didn’t like what he saw.
    Erika spun toward the stove. Lifting the bottle of warm milk from the stove, she wiped it dry with a tea towel and moved past him.
    “I am apologizing for my words,” she said as she brushed through the hinged Dutch doors.
    Jonathan opened his mouth, then snapped his jaws shut. He’d be damned if he’d forgive her. She had an uncanny ability to strike home with a remark and then drive the blade in deeper.
    “But.” Her voice floated to him over the sound of her footsteps ascending the stairs. “You are most wrong not to care about daughter.”
    “And you, Miss Scharf,” he called after her, “are wrong to speak out to your employer about such matters!”
    She was out of hearing. He muttered the wordsover again to himself and then slumped into a hard-backed wicker chair, propped both elbows on the kitchen table and bowed his head onto his folded hands. No, she wasn’t wrong. Indiscreet, perhaps. Unwise. But not wrong.
    He wasn’t such a fool that he couldn’t see her intent. She was trying to help, trying to get him to come to terms with the fact that he had responsibilities. To the townspeople. To his daughter. To himself. The audacity, the sheer courage it took for her, a penniless, uneducated immigrant woman, to speak out to him as one human being to another made him shake his head. He wondered about her—not as a female, though she was certainly attractive in that way, but as a person.
    What kind of woman would risk speaking the truth to the man who held her purse strings?
    Uneducated or not, Erika Scharf was a woman of spiritual depth and uncommon courage. And in a place such as Plum Creek, a town full of meanness and prejudice, in the wider world such as it was today, with its falsehood and opportunism and bitter rivalries, how would she survive?
    Worse, living under the same roof with him, a man who ached with need for a woman. God help them both.
    Erika opened the front door and stepped back quickly as Tithonia Brumbaugh propelled her husbandthrough the door and into the main hall. “We want to see Jon—Dr. Callender. Right away,” the buxom woman demanded. “Don’t we, Plotinus?” She yanked on her husband’s arm.
    Erika blinked. “Good morning, Mister Mayor. And missus.”
    “Right away!” Tithonia