The tips of his ears turned red. “Ah, not exactly at home, no.”
“I don’t think they can be saved,” she managed over her laughter, all while shaking her head. “I mean, I can mend the seam, but you’d probably just split it again the next time you…”
“Bend over. I know, I know.” He looked away, his cheeks now pink with embarrassment along with his ears. “How long will it take you to make a new…?”
His words trailed off as he turned toward the window again, then frowned.
She peered around him. Was something going on across the street? He seemed to be watching the bar rather closely, but nothing looked out of place.
“Has anyone been bothering you lately?” His voice turned low and dark. “I know some of the loggers and miners who drop off clothes are rowdy. I want to make sure no one’s giving you trouble.”
There was, in fact, someone giving her trouble, but he was standing beside her, not loitering around The Rusty Wagon.
“No one’s been bothering me, unless you count the girls moving my buttons on me, or me somehow sticking my bridesmaids’ dress sketch in my collection of shawl sketches.” She still hadn’t figured out how she’d mixed up those two sketches, but at least Lindy had found the bridesmaids’ sketch for her. “But thank you for asking.”
He reached out and touched her chin, prodding it up until his eyes met hers. So many emotions lingered there. Tenderness, anxiousness… love?
Could he still love her after all this time?
He cleared his throat and let his hand drop back to his side, where he stretched his fingers and then relaxed them. “You’ll tell me if they do?”
She blinked. “What?”
“If someone bothers you. You’ll tell me.” He spoke it as a statement this time, not a question.
“Of course.” She wasn’t so hard toward him that she’d turn away his offer of protection.
Just hard enough to turn down his money for Olivia’s surgery.
She winced, even though the surgery was different. Ever since he left, she’d worked to build something she could be proud of, something that could support not just her family, but other women and their families. How much could she expect to help other women if she was incapable of paying for her own daughter’s surgery? She shouldn’t turn to another person for help when she was perfectly capable of providing for her daughters on her own.
“How many pairs of trousers did you need?” She lifted the basket of buttons, then headed around Thomas and back toward the table with the mackinaw coats. Better to think about buttons than ear surgeries.
“Three should do it. I still have the pair I’m wearing now, the one from when I was rescued.”
“Stop by the shop tomorrow morning.” She set the buttons by the coats, then sifted through them, looking for five large black ones.
“You’re open on Thanksgiving?”
Was Thanksgiving truly tomorrow? How could she have forgotten? The days were slipping by faster and faster, each one ending before she got half her work finished. She glanced up at the first bridesmaids’ dress she’d completed last night, the emerald green fabric catching the light and shimmering in her otherwise dim shop.
“You’re in need of pants that won’t tear. I’ll get at least one pair done, but there’s no need to stop by. I’ll have one of the girls run them over to Isaac’s as soon as they’re ready. If things go well today, they might even be done by tonight.” She pulled two matching black buttons out of the basket, then searched for three more.
“Don’t you want to measure me first? The tailor in Deadwood always does.”
She dug deeper into the basket. His body hadn’t seemed to change since she’d last measured him five years ago. He was still tall, thick, and muscular. Still straining the seams of any shirt he bought. His chest still so wide she wouldn’t be able to touch her hands together if she wrapped her arms around him. But if she lowered her arms and wrapped them around his waist, then her fingertips would brush. His legs would still be long and powerful too, his trousers encasing well-muscled thighs the size of tree trunks.
“Jessalyn?”
She dropped a smattering of unmatching buttons back into the basket and reached for one of her measuring tapes that happened to be sitting on the table atop a stack of socks that needed darning.
Because taking his measurements somehow seemed easier than explaining she’d once memorized his body and hadn’t been able to forget it. “Step over here, where there’s some room.”
He glanced around the cluttered shop, then raised his eyebrows.
Well, there would be room just as soon as she moved the stack of shirts. She bent and gathered them in her arms, then placed them on the table between the socks and mackinaw coats, which of course sent half the pile of socks plopping to the floor, but at least they took up less space than the shirts.
She measured his arms first, from wrist to wrist, never mind that his reach spread wider than the table where she’d just stacked the clothes. Then she did the length of his torso, from his shoulder seam down to his waist, ignoring the hard muscles beneath his shirt as she stretched the tape down him—or at least trying to. But when she wrapped the tape around his chest, much as she did when measuring one of their daughters, her breathhitched, and she stilled. Of course her left hand didn’t reach the tape she’d stretched behind him with her right. She’d known her hands couldn’t touch. So why had she measured him this way? Habit?
