“I’ll have a look,” he said as he got to his feet.
“Stay here.” He knew there was no point in trying to open the barn door. The drifts would be too high against it. He climbed the ladder to the loft and opened the loft door. The sky was a silver-gray. A few snowflakes fell in lazy circles toward the earth, the fury of the storm spent. In the west, strips of blue showed between breaks in the clouds. Tall pines lifted emerald arms above a world of ivory-white. Smaller trees and brush bent low beneath the heavy weight of snow. As he gazed toward the house, the door opened. Dru, wrapped in a fur-lined coat and a thick scarf, appeared in the opening.
“We’re all right,” he called to her.
“Stay there.” She looked up at him, and he could see the relief on her face even from that distance.
“We can’t get the barn door open yet.”
“I’ll get the girls. We’ll dig out a path for you.”
“No,” he called back.
“Stay inside. We’ll come down from here. I’ll dig it out later. Dru lifted an arm to acknowledge that she’d heard him.
“All right.” Gavin returned the wave and watched as the door closed. Guilt, like a thick cloak, weighted his shoulders. She was a good woman. She was the first and only woman he’d known since boyhood that he’d felt he could trust. She didn’t deserve the flash of resentment he’d felt when he knew the storm was over. He ran his fingers through his hair as he turned from the door, his thoughts jumbled and confused. All his points of reference, all his firm beliefs, had been shaken and many of them discarded. He didn’t seem to know right from wrong anymore. Worse yet, he didn’t seem to care. With quick strides, he moved to the edge of the loft and glanced down at Rachel. She stood in the middle of the stall, her skirt primly back in place. She was staring up at him with a strange look on her face, a look that made his heart twist in his chest.
“Put out the lantern and come on up. We’ll have to go out from up here.” She didn’t move, only continued to look up at him with wide eyes of blue.
“Hurry up,” he growled as he turned away, unable to bear the look any longer. Her reply was nearly inaudible.
“I’m coming, Gavin.”
Chapter Thirteen
No matter what she had to do, she had to stop this insanity before it went any further. She couldn’t allow herself to go on feeling this way about Gavin. And if she was right, if he knew what she was feeling, if there was any chance he might respond to her attraction to him, she had to make sure it ended now. If that meant making him hate her, then that was what she must do.
“It never snows this early in Boise.” Rachel emitted a long sigh as she stared out the window for the third time in the last half hour. Darkness and silence had fallen early over the snow-coated basin.
“I missed the Horace Clive ball again this year. The weather’s almost always warm for the ball.” She turned away from the window, casting a wistful gaze at the two girls seated at the table.
“Do you know what a ball is? It’s a dance, and all the women are dressed in beautiful gowns and the men in fine suits.” She sighed dramatically. Sabrina and Petula gazed over the top of their school
books, waiting expectantly for her to continue . “Tell us more,” Sabrina encouraged.
“Mr. Clive is a very respected man in the Boise Valley. He was there when we first arrived in Idaho, and my sister, Maggie, got to go to the ball that year. In fact, it’s where Tucker, my brother-in-law, proposed to her and she said yes. I was only six, but I remember just how she looked that night. Her gown was silvery-blue and there were little puffed sleeves on her arms right here.” She pointed to the spot on her upper arms.
“The dress had a big skirt, held out by lots of stiff petticoats. Well, maybe they weren’t petticoats. Maybe she had a hooped skirt. Dresses were so different back then.” Rachel crossed the room and sat down across from the children. She closed her eyes, resting her chin in the palms of her hands, elbows on the table.
“My first ball gown was very different from Maggie’s. It was apple green and embroidered with red poppies, and it had a square neck, edged with white lace. I wore long white gloves that had gold bands at the wrists. The vogue was for long trains then, and my first ball gown had a very long one, indeed. I felt so grown up in it, especially when I was dancing. A lady held those long trains in one hand as she danced. It looked very elegant. I danced and danced and danced that night. Mr. Clive had an orchestra up in a loft above the ballroom, and they hardly ever stopped playing. You can’t imagine how wonderful that first ball was for me. It was magic.” She’d gotten so caught up in the telling of the story she nearly forgot why she’d told it. She opened her eyes and glanced around the room, her gaze briefly meeting both Dru’s and Gavin’s. Then she looked back at the two girls across from her.
“Every year is wonderful. The men are so gallant, so debonair. And there are so many of them, all wanting to dance with you.” She sighed again.
“All those years I was back East, attending school and living with the Fieldings, I looked forward to going to Mr. Clive’s ball again. I wish I could have been there this year.” Sabrina leaned forward.
“Do you suppose, when I’m old enough, if I was to be in Boise City, I could go to the ball? Do you think anybody’d want to dance with me?” Rachel wasn’t prepared for Sabrina’s question. Her purpose had been to let Gavin think she was terribly homesick, not to make his daughter long for things she couldn’t have. She looked at Sabrina’s long, narrow face. The girl would never be truly pretty. But she had a generous, loving heart—like her mother—that carried a beauty of its own. She reached a hand across the table and clasped Sabrina’s.
“If you lived in Boise, you would most assuredly be invited. And you would be the belle of the ball, too.”
“I don’t know how to dance,” Sabrina confessed in a whisper, her hazel eyes wide with worry.
“Oh my,” Rachel responded with a frown.
“That is a problem. We must fix it immediately. Put your book down and stand up.” Moving briskly around the room, Rachel shoved chairs back against the walls, clearing a wide space in the middle of the room. Satisfied with her accomplishments, she turned toward Sabrina.
“Come here.” In moments, she’d instructed the child how to stand, how to hold her partner’s hand, how to follow the man’s lead.
“You must always smile while you’re dancing, as if you know a secret that your partner doesn’t know,” she ended, then began to move to the imaginary music, drawing Sabrina along with her.
“Just relax and enjoy. That’s the most important part.” Sabrina gripped Rachel’s hand as if it was a lifeline. She kept stumbling over her own feet. Rachel laughed.