A Lawman's Christmas_ A McKettricks of Texas Novel - Linda Lael Miller [50]
Dara Rose didn’t get a chance to respond. The food arrived, heaped on steaming plates, the children’s first, and then Clay’s and Dara Rose’s.
The family of strangers, meanwhile, had finished their meal, and the man was settling the bill. The mother and the child rose from their chairs, and then the little girl walked right over to Edrina and Harriet and put out one tiny, porcelain-white hand.
“My name is Madeline Howard,” she said. With her long, shining brown hair, deep green eyes and fitted emerald velvet dress, she bore a striking resemblance to the doll in the mercantile window. “What’s yours?”
“I’m Edrina,” answered Dara Rose’s elder daughter, barely able to see over the mountain of food before her. “And this is my sister, Harriet.”
“We’re going to live in Blue River from now on,” Madeline said. “Mama and Papa and me, I mean. Papa’s going to build an office, and we’ll have rooms upstairs.”
The woman approached, laid a hand on Madeline’s shoulder, offered a pained smile to everyone in general and no one in particular. “You mustn’t bother people when they’re eating, darling,” she said.
Clay stood, put out his hand, and the woman shook it, after the briefest hesitation. “Clay McKettrick,” he said. “This is my wife, Dara Rose.”
This is my wife, Dara Rose.
No words could have sounded stranger to Dara Rose, and she had to swallow a ridiculous urge to explain, all in a rush, that theirs was a marriage of convenience, not a real one.
She merely nodded, though, and the woman nodded back. Like her daughter, she wore velvet, though her gown and short cape were a rich shade of brown instead of green. Not only that, but the pile on that fabric was plush, not worn away in places like most of the velvet one saw in Blue River, Texas.
The man had reached the table by then, and smiled as he and Clay shook hands. “Glad to meet you, Marshal,” he said. “I’m Jim Howard, and my wife is Eloise.”
Another stiff smile from Eloise. “My husband is a dentist,” she said. “Most people address him as ‘Dr. Howard,’ of course.”
Dara Rose, who had been trying to decide whether or not good manners required that she stand, like Clay, decided to stay seated.
“We could use a dentist around here,” Clay said, with a grin dancing in his eyes but not quite reaching his mouth.
Madeline smiled broadly at Edrina and Harriet. “You both have very good teeth,” she said admiringly. Her own were like small, square pearls, perfectly strung. Jim Howard—Dr. Howard—chuckled at that. “We’ll let you finish your meal in peace,” he said, steering his womenfolk gently away, toward the hotel’s modest lobby and then the stairs beyond.
Clay sat down. “Nice people,” he said.
Madeline, Dara Rose noticed, kept looking back, her expression one of friendly longing, as though she would have liked to stay and chat with Edrina and Harriet.
“The lady is snooty,” Edrina announced, holding a dinner roll daintily between a thumb and index finger. “But I like Madeline, and her papa, too.”
Dara Rose was keenly aware, in that moment, that Edrina was following her lead. Hadn’t she disliked Mrs. Howard almost immediately, and returned coolness for coolness instead of making an effort to be neighborly, offer a welcome to the newcomers?
It was tremendously difficult sometimes, she thought glumly, to be the sort of person she wanted her daughters to be, when they grew up. And she’d fallen far short of that standard tonight.
Unexpectedly, Clay reached over and gently squeezed her hand, just once and very briefly, but the gesture raised Dara Rose’s flagging spirits.
It also sent something sharp and hot racing through her, a fiery ache she had to work very hard to ignore.
“Perhaps when we get to know Mrs. Howard better,” she told Edrina, somehow managing a normal tone of voice, “we’ll discover that she’s a very nice person.”
“Perhaps,” Edrina agreed doubtfully.
The girls were practically nodding off in their chairs by the time the meal ended.
Clay took the leftovers out to Chester on a borrowed plate, while Roy packed the O’Reillys’ supper into a large wooden crate, carefully