Josh saw that gleam in her eyes. “You’d never make an actress, you know,” he said in the softest, silkiest voice she’d ever heard. “Your face is too readable.”
“Don’t you come near me!” she said, as he bent forward and kissed the corner of her mouth.
“I plan to come a great deal closer to you than this. Carrie, my love, I came to tell you that I love you, love you with all my heart, and I’d ask you to marry me if I hadn’t already had that privilege.”
She wanted to punish him, wanted to play hard-to-get, wanted to make him feel as miserable as he’d made her feel. Instead, she put her hands over her face and began to cry.
Josh looked at her in consternation as he handed her a handkerchief. “I thought you’d like the idea.” When she kept crying, he took her damp hands in his. “Carrie, there isn’t someone else, is there? I thought, no, I hoped that when I saw that you were still here that maybe you had stayed because…well, because you…”
Sniffing, she looked at him. “I stayed because I didn’t have enough money to get home.”
At that Josh began to laugh, and Carrie joined him. As he was laughing, he took her head in his hands and began kissing her face. “Tell me there’s no one else. Tell me. Oh, God, Carrie, I’ve missed you. I think you took my soul away when you left. How could anyone come to love somebody so much in so few days?”
He was leaning over her, almost on top of her, and kissing all of her skin that he could reach. “I fell in love with you from a photograph,” she said softly as he kissed her lips.
Behind them, the parlor door opened. “I just wanted to see how—Oh, excuse me,” said the storekeeper as he closed the door again.
Josh looked at Carrie and smiled. “We’d better get you home. I’ll finish this tonight.”
Carrie, dazed with happiness, began to sit up, but then put her hand to her forehead. Instantly, Josh pushed her back down and held the glass to her lips again.
“You’re not well,” Josh said.
Carrie smiled at him, for he made it sound as though she were about to die at any second. “I’m—” Carrie cut herself off as she saw her letter lying on a table, and she remembered what had so upset her to make her faint. Her eyes widened; she was speechless.
Frowning, Josh picked up the letter. After Carrie had fainted and he’d carried her to the storekeeper’s house, while the man’s wife was passing smelling salts under Carrie’s nose, Josh had read the letter. For the life of him he couldn’t see what was in the letter to upset her enough to make her faint. One of her precious, perfect, unreproachable, rich brothers was coming to visit her.
Carrie drained the brandy, then the water and lay back against the pillows. “When does he say he’s coming?” she asked softly.
Josh scanned the letter. “October the twelfth.” He looked up at her. “That’s tomorrow.”
Carrie looked as though she were going to faint again so Josh poured more brandy and handed it to her.
“Look on the bright side,” Josh said, smiling. “The stage hasn’t run on time in all the years it’s been coming to Eternity so there’s no reason to believe your brother will be here for weeks yet.”
Carrie’s voice was glum. “If my brother ’Ring says that he’s going to be here on the twelfth of October, then that’s when he’ll be here. If he has to carry the stage, he’ll be here when he says he will.”
“Would you mind telling me why the impending visit of one of your perfect brothers makes you turn the color of rice powder?”
“And what do you know about rice powder? And, besides that, how do you know so much about corsets and other parts of women’s garments? And, furthermore, I hate you for leaving me alone for six weeks and two days while you made up your mind whether you loved me or not. If I’d taken the stage back to Main
e, I could have been killed by Indians by now for all you knew. I could—”
He kissed her to make her be quiet. “You are not going to get around me by starting an argument. What has upset you about your brother?”
“I shouldn’t tell you anything. You’ve never yet told me anything about yourself.” Crossing her arms over her chest, she set her mouth in a thin line.
“But then you’re not a secretive person, are you?”
She glared at him. “Is that the same as not being mysterious?”
“Carrie, you are stalling.”
Carrie dropped her arms. “All right,” she said. “It’s not just any of my brothers who’s coming, it’s ’Ring. It’s my eldest brother. It’s my perfect brother.”
Josh looked at her as though she’d explained nothing. “As far as I can tell, you consider each of your brothers to be the very essence of all the manly skills.”
Carrie took a deep breath. How to describe ’Ring to someone who’d never met him? “ ’Ring is actually perfect. My other brothers, well, they have flaws.” At the way Josh lifted his eyebrows in mock disbelief, Carrie made a face at him. After he’d kissed her three times, he sat back on his chair and waited for her to continue.