Jodi Thomas - WM 1 Read Free Page B

as much as he loved campfires and night skies. Here, among the many volumes, he felt near his parents. Andrew McMurray had cherished books. When he came west, half the weight of his luggage had been reading material. He met their mother, Autumn, at a mission where he’d gone to teach reading. Both were seventeen—too young to care about their differences but old enough to recognize true love. According to Autumn, she’d fallen for Andrew the moment their fingers touched beneath a book they both held. After they married and settled Whispering Mountain, Andrew made the journey to the Austin Colony twice a year to pick up supplies shipped from New Orleans. He’d trade a horse for a wagonload of goods and always packed within the necessities would be the latest books from back East.
    Travis ran his hand over the leather-bound copies on every subject from law to ranching. He also noticed the stack of new novels piled on the desk and wondered if his brothers ever had time to read them. When Sage was in school, her teacher, a widow named Mrs. Dickerson, always sent home lists of books the boys should buy each year. She might not have taught them, but she made sure they were well read.
    He pulled a book called The House of the Seven Gables from the stack and dropped into the nearest chair. Anything would be better than listening to Sage plan her husband-hunting trip to the dance.
    Hours passed. He was lost in the book when Sage tapped on his shoulder.
    “You’d better get dressed. We need to leave before it starts raining again.”
    Travis stood, reluctant to pull away from the fiction. “All right. Hitch the wagon while I change into the clothes Martha ironed for me this morning.” He might as well stop dreading the evening and start getting it over with.
    Sage folded her arms. “I can’t. I’m all cleaned and pressed.”
    He looked at her. True. She wasn’t just clean, she was spit and polished. For a moment he wondered where his sister was beneath all the ribbons and ruffles. The brothers had tried not to make her into a boy, but they may have gone too far. She looked as if she were wearing a bushel of lace.
    “Hurry up.” She pushed his leg off the arm of the chair. “I don’t want to be late to the year’s only dance.”
    There she was, he thought, bossy as ever. He remembered when she’d been five and Teagen had ordered her a china tea set for Christmas. She’d made them all sit down and have tea every night for a month. The conversation was always the same. They drank lukewarm tea, and she threatened to kill the first one who broke a piece of her set.
    Travis took the stairs three at a time wishing either Teagen or Tobin had shown up to take his place. He’d made it to twenty-eight without ever having attended a barn dance and dreaded this one more than any gunfight he’d ever experienced. The folks around, even the upstanding ones, had never been too friendly toward him, and he guessed nothing would change just because they set the meeting to music. But Sage seemed to have her heart set on going.
    Thirty minutes later he waited beside the buckboard while Sage stood on the porch and tied a scarf around her hair as if it were the most important thing she’d done all day. “I don’t see why we can’t ride horseback,” he mumbled. “We could make it in half the time.”
    She didn’t answer.
    He studied the sky while he waited. Rain still lingered far off along the horizon. He’d lived outside for so many years, he could feel the weather as if it were a part of him. When he noticed Sage still standing on the porch, he got the hint and tromped through the mud to carry her to the wagon.
    “Don’t drive too fast,” Sage said as she settled on the bench. “I don’t want to lose all the curl I burned into my hair.” She pulled her skirts around her knees. “And don’t get those muddy boots within a foot of me.”
    “You’re welcome,” he said after he circled and climbed up on the other