A Family For Carter Jones
10TH ANNIVERSARY Carter Jones had plans… big plans And free-spirited Jennie Sheridan didn't figure into them. Courting a woman with a houseful of misfits was an invitation to disaster. But when Jennie got that soft look in her big brown eyes, courting disaster seemed very inviting.Jennie knew she could support herself, and her family, without the help of Carter Jones. Being the district attorney didn't mean he had all the answers… so why did the circle of his arms around her have to feel like such heaven?
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10>TH ANNIVERSARY
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“Perhaps it’s just the brandy,” Jennie said aloud.
Carter looked down at her in surprise. “Perhaps what is just the brandy?”
She made a little twist with her mouth. “Nothing.”
“Oh.”
In a minute they would be at their rooms. He would open her door and say good-night like the gentleman he promised to be. Suddenly she blurted out, “I was wondering if it was the brandy that was making me remember the night you kissed me.”
She could feel him stiffen beside her. It was a relief to have let it out. Now he’d probably laugh and tell her that she was perhaps a little tipsy, and then they could part and get some sleep.
Instead he said in a voice that had grown slightly hoarse, “I haven’t needed brandy to remember it, Jennie…”
Vermillion, Nevada
May 1881
Unlike most girls who blossomed into womanhood at the same sedate pace they used to walk across the room at their first adult social, Jennie Sheridan reckoned that she’d pretty well completed the process at a gallop within the space of six weeks.
Sitting on the porch swing with a lump in her throat the size of a rolled-up pair of socks, she looked away from her sister and counted backward. Six weeks. The first snowdrops had already started appearing on the hills outside of town the week they’d lost first their mother, then their father two days later. Her entire world had turned itself inside out within six short weeks. And now this.
“When?” she asked Kate, forcing the word out and avoiding her sister’s eyes.
Kate’s voice was almost inaudible. “Well, it’s nine months, right? That would make it sometime around Christmas.”
“Some Christmas present, huh?” Jennie tried a smile, but her lips threatened to quiver, so she tightened her mouth again.
“Oh, Jen, I’m so very sorry,” her sister murmured.
Jennie’s unshed tears drained back down her throat as she looked up to see Kate’s eyes filling. Jennie reached to take her younger sister’s hand, then changed her mind and slid across the wooden slats of the swing to enfold her in her arms.
Kate put her head down on Jennie’s shoulder and began to sob. “I never thought I could be so wicked, Jennie,” she said, taking big gulps of air. “It almost makes me glad that Mama and Papa are gone.”
Jennie straightened up at that and took a firm grasp of her sister’s shoulders. “That’s nonsense. You’re not wicked and you’re certainly not glad that our parents are dead.”
Kate gave a little jerk at the harsh sound of the last word. “Can you imagine what they would have felt, Jen? What would they have said to discover that their unmarried daughter was about to have a child? I was always supposed to be the perfect one, you know.”
Jennie gave a sympathetic nod. Her sister’s bright blue eyes were full of anguish. And she was right. Their parents would have been devastated by this news. Jennie had always been headstrong, allowed her stubborn ways and occasional childish tantrums. But Kate had been the perfect one.
