Eternity (Montgomery/Taggert 17)

“ ’Ring never lies, cheats, or as far as anyone can tell, has any human weaknesses. He can do anything better than anyone else. The only bad thing that can be said about him is that he’s my ugliest brother.” This made Carrie smile. “ ’Ring isn’t human.”

Josh rolled his eyes. “Why should the appearance of this angel-on-earth make you unhappy?”

Carrie put her hands over her face. “I don’t know. He won’t like what I’ve done. I’m sure he’s very upset if Mother has told him about the papers I had Father sign.” Sniffling into Josh’s handkerchief, she told him the entire story of how she’d sneaked the proxy documents into a pile of business papers her father was signing.

Josh was aghast. “And when you told your parents what you had done, they didn’t just destroy the papers and lock you in your room?”

Carrie blew her nose. “Oh, no, of course not. My parents and my brothers always give me what I want. Only ’Ring…” She started crying again.

Josh took a few moments to digest this glimpse into her family. The spoiled baby, always given anything she wanted. If she wanted to travel alone across the country into the wilds of Colorado because she’d illegally obtained a signature on some papers so she could marry a man she’d never met, then that was all right with them. Whatever their darling wanted. And look at what had happened, Josh thought. Carrie had come out smelling like a rose. She had a man and two children who loved her as much as they loved sunshine and air.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I think perhaps your brother ’Ring has the right idea about you.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say! You sound like ’Ring. He’s always telling Father to send me to a nunnery, and we’re not even Catholic.”

Josh coughed to cover a laugh, but Carrie wasn’t fooled. She started to get off the couch, vowing to never speak to him again.

Pulling her onto his lap, he began to kiss her. She was rigid at first, but then relaxed against him. “All right, sweetheart, tell me what you’re afraid of.” When she didn’t answer right away, he paused in stroking her hair. “It’s me, isn’t it? You don’t want him to know your husband is a poor farmer who can’t even give you—”

“Shut up!” she screamed in his face as she got off his lap. “I am sick unto death of hearing about money. This has nothing to do with money. I have lots of money.”

“Your family’s money,” Josh said grimly.

“For your information, I have money I have made.” She stopped shouting at his look of disbelief. “Did you by chance happen to notice any difference in this town since the last time you were here? And you don’t have to tell me you haven’t been here in weeks because I know. Everyone in town has told me how you and those poor, darling children—which I might add you don’t deserve—have become hermits. Tell me, did you?”

“Which question am I to answer? About the town or the children?”

She ground her teeth; he was teasing her. After turning her back to him, she looked back at him with a smug smile. “You’ve said that I’m useless. You said that because I can’t cook and have no ambition to learn to clean, but you know what I can do?”

“Yes,” he said in a way that made Carrie blush and lose her train of thought.

“I can…oh yes, I can make money.”

“Out of tin? Or do you use a spell cast with frogs’ tongues and such?”

“No, much simpler than that. I made it by working. If you laugh at me again, Joshua Greene, I swear on my family’s name that I’ll never go to bed with you again.”

Josh didn’t laugh. In fact, with such a punishment facing him, he didn’t feel any inclination to laugh—none at all.

Taking her seat again, Carrie told him about opening her store. She told of staying in Eternity’s nasty little hotel after he left her at the stage depot and how she’d spent two days doing nothing but writing letters. She wrote to the wife of every important man in Denver. The people of Eternity supplied her with the names and vague addresses of anyone they’d ever heard of in Denver who had any money.

“What did you write to these women?” Josh asked, genuinely curious.

Carrie told him that she’d written to the women that her brothers had recently returned from Paris and brought back far too many clothes for her to wear. And, furthermore, her brothers were such blockheads that they had brought her clothes that were in the very widest range of sizes imaginable, as well as in every color that could be found in Paris.

“A cry of help if ever I heard one,” Josh said, but he was definitely not laughing at her.

She told the rest of her story quickly, telling of her first customers, of hiring seamstresses, of not allowing the idiot women to wear what was unflattering to them. “You should have seen them. Two-hundred-pound women in white chiffon ruffles and thin, bosomless women in black. I began to supplement the fronts of the gowns with cotton. You know, ‘For what God has,’ etc., etc.”

“No, I don’t think I do know.”

“ ‘For what God has forgotten, He supplied cotton,’ ” Carrie quoted.

Josh didn’t laugh, but he had to drink brandy to keep from doing so. “What is the name of this shop?”

“Paris in the Desert.”