Pieces of Dreams Read Online Free Page A

him a reassuring smile. An instant later, her gaze dropped to his mouth, and she remembered the kiss he had given her two evenings ago as he said good night. It had been brief, circumspect, pleasant enough. The contours of his mouth had been smooth and gentle. But her heart had not tripped into a hammer beat, her head had not spun or her body shivered as if with fever.
    “What's this?”
    It was Conrad who spoke from the other side of the quilt, leaning toward one corner where Lydia had been making arabesques of stitching around the square she had inscribed. With a long, brown finger, he touched the small motif that Lydia had embroidered there.
    “It's a ship, of course!” Lydia answered with a glance of mock indignation. “Can't you tell?”
    “Indeed I can, but it seems a bit unusual.” His smiling glance held inquiry.
    Lydia gave a small shrug, even as she sent a quick look at Melly. “It's just to remember me of when Melly and I used to fancy ourselves taking a steamer down the Mississippi to New Orleans, then sailing away on a fine, tall ship, maybe living in places with strange, foreign names like Tahiti.”
    “I've been there,” he said softly.
    “Oh, I know—we both knew because you wrote about it to Caleb. Which is what brought it on, I expect.” Her lips curved in a faint, disconsolate smile. “It was just silly make-believe to pass the time. Of course we outgrew it.”
    “Too bad,” he said, and looked straight at Melly.
    She wanted to look away, to deny that she had ever thought of him while he was gone, that she had ever indulged in make-believe.
    It was impossible.
    She was not quite that good at pretending.

 
    Chapter Three
     

     
    The trees shading Good Hope's Main Street made islands of coolness on either side of its arrow-straight length that stretched from the church at one end to the riverboat landing at the other. Great oaks and elms had been left standing when the town was laid out soon after being established by French trappers and traders. The searing heat of the last two days had made their leaves droop, sucking the moisture from them so they rustled in the warm wind.
    It was not a particularly good evening for a box social at the church. But that didn't matter much, since it was also too hot for anything else.
    The basket Melly carried was heavy. A large part of the weight was Aunt Dora's fault; she kept offering additions, such as a jar of pickled peaches to go with the pound cake and yeast rolls that accompanied Melly's basic fried chicken and potato salad. But Melly had added things as well, as she intended to feed two men instead of one.
    The idea was silly beyond words, of course. Conrad was perfectly capable of finding another young woman to feed him. In any case, she wasn't sure her future husband would be there tonight, much less his brother.
    Across the street, Biddy and Lydia emerged from the mercantile and started toward the church. They waved and called, then began to pick their way across the dusty street to join her. Like her, each had a basket on her arm. Lydia's, done in bronze straw, was a nice match for the flamboyance of her iridescent bronze-green twill. Biddy’s basket, like her widow’s clothing, was perfectly simple, being of woven white oak covered by a black-and-white checked cloth.
    “Your mother and father aren't coming?” Melly said to Lydia as the two women gained the sidewalk.
    “Mother will be along as soon as she decides what to wear. Daddy isn't feeling well this evening, so he won't be able to make it.”
    Melly made sympathetic noises, though she was not at all surprised. It was understood that any excuse of ill health on the part of Mr. McDougall was to be taken as an indication that he had been drinking. As for Lydia's mother, that fading, dithery lady was always late, being congenitally unable to make up her mind about anything until the last possible second. Though the polite fiction was that the older couple ran the mercantile store that