Morrow Creek Runaway by Lisa Plumley

Author:Lisa Plumley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Rosamond glanced up just as Bonita Yates carried in another cool compress for her twisted ankle. She couldn’t help grinning.

“I declare, Miss Yates. You’re going to spoil me rotten with all this mollycoddling you’re doing.” Rosamond set aside her account book along with her financial worries. She waved for her friend to come forward in the lamplight and give her the compress she’d brought. “It’s a hurt ankle, nothing worse.”

“Humph. At least you finally agreed to prop it up the way I told you to do. But you still don’t have enough pillows there.” Helpfully, Bonita provided another cushion. “That’s better.”

“Thank you. But it’ll be fine in a day or two.”

“That’s what you said after you came back from town...four days ago.” With an ease borne of their long-standing friendship, Bonita took a place on the chair nearest to Rosamond’s settee. Suspiciously, she asked, “Are you sure you only tripped?”

“Of course I tripped. What else would I have done?”

Darkly, Bonita looked away. Rosamond remembered her friend’s calamitous past—remembered how Bonita had come to be included in Elijah Dancy’s unlikely cadre of “entertainers”—and felt awash in commiseration. For Bonita, joining up with Mr. Dancy had been a step up from the “businessman” who’d profited from Miss Yates’s former work in Boston’s red-light district.

“I don’t trust that Mr. Callaway of yours.” Bonita wrung her hands with concern. “I know you said you knew him—”

“I do know him.” Rosamond also knew that her imagination had likely gotten carried away with her on the day of her outing in town with Miles. She couldn’t have spotted Arvid Bouchard. She’d merely conjured up his likeness out of fear. She’d turned some unknown mustachioed, thickset stranger into the spitting image of the man she feared most. She’d run from a specter.

Even Miles had bolstered her theory when they’d talked later.

“—but in my experience, men cannot be trusted,” Bonita was saying. “Especially men who are willing to care for puppies.”

Fondly, Rosamond smiled, reminded of the nighttime visits she and Miles had shared over the past week or so. She’d expected him to abdicate his duties on the evening of their disastrous outing, but Miles hadn’t. He’d arrived promptly, carrying a paper-wrapped package from Mr. O’Neil, the butcher.

“For me?” she’d gushed, knowing full well it wasn’t.

“If you want it,” Miles had said doubtfully. “It’s yours.”

The meaty bone he’d brought for Riley had been almost as big as she was. The puppy had been delighted, all the same.

Rosamond had found herself softening even further as she’d watched Miles playing with the mutt afterward, too. As silly as it was, his gentleness and patience with her puppy—and his willingness to engage in the charade of comforting it days after the tiny critter had quit whining at night—endeared him to her.

“Mr. Callaway would disagree with you about that supposition,” she told Bonita, distractedly tracing circles over the leather-bound face of her account book. “He has several theories about puppies and the people who care for them.”

“I’ll just bet he does.

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