As the boys raced through the door, Hallie straightened. “Mr. Brown caught me in his yard after I’d sent Liv home.” She saw her Duggy shiver. “You go on and change before you catch a chill. I’ll tell you the whole story after supper.”
Hallie bent down and pushed the sloshing tub to the back door. Well, maybe not the whole story, she thought. A girl didn’t talk about her first kiss. Besides, Dagny would want to know what it felt like, and Hallie wasn’t sure she could put it into words.
She leaned against the wooden frame with her eyes closed, trying to relive the feel of his lips on her own. They had been hard at first, pressing the sensitive inner flesh of her lips against her teeth. Then he bit her upper lip, and it should have hurt, but before she had a chance to think, his tongue filled her mouth. His tongue! Imagine that! Never in her wildest dreams did Hallie think you used a tongue to kiss. She always thought you just puckered up and pressed.
It felt good, though, once she figured out that she should breathe through her nose. She’d felt so light-headed, and when he pumped his tongue in and out of her mouth, her body started to tingle in all sorts of odd places.
She was getting all warm again at just the memory. She opened her glazed eyes and shook her head to clear it.Forget it, Hallie!That is probably your first and last kiss from Kit Howland. He calls you a kid, remember? He thinks you’re a silly child. You should be angry at his superior attitude.
She shoved the tub outside and emptied it over the side of the back steps. For the moment before his lips descended, he’d looked at her so strangely. He’s a hard man to figure out—doesn’t make any sense at all.
With a sigh, she turned to go back inside and see about supper and she heard the kids thundering down the stairs. Later, she would have to think about it. Maybe she could find a way to get Kit to see her as a grown woman. She would have to use her head. She smiled. Her pretty head.
3
The funeral parlor was empty as Kit and Lee entered its draped darkness, but a loud hammering echoed from the next room. Kit moved past the false light of a flickering wall lamp and looked through an archway into the adjoining room.
A pensive Abner Brown stood in the doorway of a workroom, watching a huge blond man drive nails into a pine box. The giant’s beefy hand repeated the motion, continuing around the edge of the wooden coffin with efficient but noisy strokes. Abner shut the workroom door and stepped back. His bony hand rummaged through the wealth of heavy, tasseled draperies until it found a gold-braided pull. He drew the drapes closed, turned and his pallid face colored with surprise.
Kit knew the minute the scrawny undertaker recognized him, for an ingratiating smile lit the man’s pinched features. As the youngest son of a prominent and wealthy family, Kit had been the recipient of that sort of smile many times; and it never ceased to annoy him. Experience taught him that the person bestowing the smile was usually what the whalemen called a windsucker—someone who attached himself, leechlike, to another in order to milk the wind from his sails.
“Mr. Howland, forgive me. I had no idea you were here.” Abner’s falsetto voice scraped the air as he rushed into the front room. “Please have a seat.” He gestured toward a pair of ornately carved chairs separated by a rosewood lamp table. The matching settee and an inlaid tea table sat upon a raised dais; and like a throne, their position allowed Abner to sit regally above whomever occupied the Moorish chairs.
Ready to hold assembly, he sat on the settee, crossing his stringy legs foppishly and looking so engrossed with his image of self-importance that he didn’t notice that Kit and Lee were still standing.
Kit and Lee exchanged a look and Kit sauntered up to the dais, where he hitched his hip nonchalantly on the arm of the settee, calmly rested an elbow on his thigh, and stared down silently at Abner.
The air chafed with enough tension to penetrate the undertaker’s self-concentration. He glanced up and found his eyes trapped by Kit’s piercing green gaze. “Wh-what’s wrong?”
Kit looked at Lee and casually nodded toward the right side of the sofa, and Lee walked over and sat on Abner’s other side. He was fairly certain Lee’s predatory stare mirrored his own. Neither of them said a word, but they didn’t take their gazes from the scrawny undertaker.
A sharp stench of fear saturated the briny air inherent to the mortuary. Abner looked back and forth at the two men. He nervously licked his thick lips.
“Business bad?” Kit said casually.He broke eye contact with his prey and surveyed the gaudy room. Looking past several dark marble bust stands, Kit found his attention captured by the ungodly amount of gilded cherubs decorating the room’s cornice.
Abner, who looked as if the red-flocked walls were closing in around him, stammered, “Why... n-no...”
Kit leaned an inch closer. “Then why are you trying to filch five hundred dollars out of a helpless young girl?”
The eyes of the sniveling undertaker darted back and forth between Lee and Kit.Like a snake coiled and ready to strike, he bit out, “She destroyed my property! I have every right to claim damages. Maybe that group of young vandals will learn a lesson. They ought to be turned over to the orphan society. Uncontrollable brats, that’s what they are! Practically abandoned by that father of theirs, and the one in charge, that chit you call helpless? Ha! She’s about as helpless as Delilah with a pair of scissors. What that family needs is a firm, male hand.”
Not more than an hour earlier, Kit would have heartily agreed with Abner’s assessment of Hallie. But hearing her described as such by this obsequious twit whose snide face made Kit crave to rearrange it, struck a protective chord in him.
Abner foolishly ranted on, “Why, the only one that’s civilized is the dark, pretty one—”
The man’s whiny tirade changed to a gurgle as Kit grasped his collar tightly in a white-knuckled fist. “Leave the Fredriksens alone.” The words clipped from Kit’s lips like shot from a rifle.
“But the fruit from that tree is worth—”
Kit lifted Abner up by his collar. “How would you like that tree to become part of your anatomy?”
Abner managed to gulp down the rest of his words.
“Leave it be, Kit,” Lee said. “He’s not worth the trouble.” Lee nodded toward the other room, where the blond giant stood, hammer in hand. Although the man’s expression was blank, his eyes were locked on his employer’s flushed face.
“You want to get out of here, or do you feel in the mood to break heads?” Lee asked.
Before Kit could answer, the front door opened and Sheriff Hayes walked in, followed by a procession of men carrying two dead bodies.
