Ana Seymour Read Online Free

Lyle,” she said, her voice subdued.
    “Me?” Jennie said, her hands on her hips. “I suppose you could go talk to him.”
    “Jen, you know I can’t do that.”
    “Criminy, sis. Someday you’re going to have to talk to people again. It doesn’t make much sense for us to go through all this effort to hold on to this place if you’re going to shut yourself away in here the rest of your life as if you’d been buried right along with Mama and Papa.”
    Kate clasped her hands over her big stomach and looked down. “I can’t see Lyle, Jennie. Please don’t ask me.”
    Jennie gave a little huff but didn’t pursue the matter. “I think I will tell the silverheels that those old biddies are trying to shut us down. Maybe they’ll have some ideas.”
    “And maybe you should talk to that Mr. Jones again. He’s a lawyer, right? At least he should be able to tell us what our options are.”
    Jennie stared straight ahead as another quick memory of Carter Jones’s striking face flashed in front of her like the image from a stereopticon. How odd, she reflected. Perhaps it was somehow connected to her impending headache.
    “I’ll go see him in the morning,” she agreed finally. “Tonight I’m going to let Barnaby help you with the dishes while I nurse one of my megrims.”
    Carter Jones sat in his small office and stared at the bookshelf on the opposite wall as if willing one of the leather tomes to magically open up with the answer he sought. He’d been at it much of the afternoon,more time than he could afford to spend on a matter that, after all, was not even his concern.
    Zoning ordinances were so new that it didn’t appear that there was much body of law on them. And, though he’d read the court’s decision half a dozen times, he’d been unable to come up with any ideas as to how to render it null. He had no doubt that the self-appointed moral guardians of the town, Mrs. Billingsley, Miss Potter, Lucinda Wentworth and their cronies, would be back tomorrow in full force when they learned that nothing had been done to change the situation at Sheridan House.
    Carter threw his pencil down on the desk and pushed back his chair. His stomach was rumbling its disapproval of his decision earlier in the day to skip lunch. He hadn’t felt much like eating after his encounter with Jennie Sheridan. The prospect of one of the Continental Hotel’s shoe-leather steaks was not thrilling, but it would at least fill the hole in his middle.
    He leaned back toward his desk to straighten the piles of work. No matter how hungry he was, he wouldn’t leave an untidy office. A cluttered desk meant a cluttered mind, he’d always believed. The pencil he’d thrown in disgust was carefully retrieved and put in its tray—on the used side of the tray, not to be confused with the freshly sharpened ones that he put there every morning.
    He ran his hand over the neatly arranged writing instruments with a certain satisfaction. At least it was possible to inject order into a certain portion of his world. He didn’t want to admit how unsettled he’dbeen by his trip to Sheridan House. He still wasn’t entirely sure why. The girl was pretty. The young boy was engaging. But none of it was his problem.
    There was a soft knock at the door. He jerked his hand away from the pencils and said, “Come in.”
    It was the temporary sheriff’s deputy, Lyle Wentworth. Carter wasn’t particularly pleased to see him. Though they were both eligible young men in town, the two had not become friends. Carter found him overbearing and petulant. He’d seen Lyle kick back a chair and stomp out of the bar over a two-bit poker game. Of course, as the only son of the town banker and the pretentious Lucinda, Lyle had probably been raised to believe he was a cut above the rest of the world. Carter, on the other hand, had known at a young age that he’d better start climbing, because he was starting life at the bottom rung.
    “Evening, Lyle,” he greeted his