Small Town Cinderella. Caron Todd

knelt beside her and peered in. “Great place for hide and seek.”

      “My father was firm about that.” It was one of the few things Emily remembered about him, he’d warned her so often. “He told me I’d crash right through to the room below.”

      “Scary thought.”

      “I hid things, though. Notes to Susannah and Liz. Or Halloween candy once. That was a mistake. A whole family of chipmunks moved in that time.”

      Matthew laughed, and she immediately wanted it to happen again. It made his face so warm and open.

      “Mind if I take a closer look?”

      “It’ll be dusty.”

      Brushing past her, he leaned deeper into the crawl space. It was a long time since she’d been so close to a man who wasn’t a relative. How did her body know? There was quite a divide between its point of view and her own. It was always tingling and softening and perking up when he was around. She couldn’t seem to impress on it how short a week was, and how quickly it was passing, or the fact that she didn’t know anything about him, not even if she liked him.

      No, she knew that much. The question was whether she should like him.

      As his head and shoulders came back into the light his knee knocked against hers. She edged away. He was out of place in her room, with her old teddy bears staring from the shelf. Through the warm air grate in the floor she could hear her mother working. What she was feeling didn’t belong here. John had called it her nun’s cell.

      She stood up quickly. “You wanted to see outside? The barn, you said? The outbuildings?”

      “If you don’t mind.” He went around to the other side of the bed and pushed it back into place.

      BETWEEN THE TIME he stuck his head under the roof and pulled it back out, something had changed Emily’s mood. Did thinking about her father upset her? Or was she worried about having someone snoop around the house?

      As helpfully distancing as the name was he hadn’t been able to think of her as Ms. Robb for very long. Only until the third or fourth time her mother had asked which relative had made the quiche or the salad or the chicken and she’d looked as if one word of appreciation would go a long way. Then she’d become Emily in his mind.

      He followed her downstairs and out the kitchen door. The dog, back in the shade of the hedge, gave him another baleful stare. No growling or biting so far. That was good.

      The yard was like a forest. It looked as if long ago someone had felled just enough trees to make room for a house and left the rest. Emily and her mother barely kept up with it. A closer inspection was confirming yesterday’s first impression. Inside and out, there was no sign of big spending—except for the books and not even those if the collecting was spread over the years.

      No gems, no Group of Seven paintings, she’d said. It was the kind of joke people might make when they were covering something. He didn’t think that was the case here. Liars usually gave themselves away with tics and avoidance gestures or expressions so blankly innocent alarm bells went off. Emily had been five or six when the gold had disappeared. Not involved, obviously. That didn’t mean she wasn’t drawn in later. He had to remember that.

      THE OUTBUILDINGS WERE all well past their prime, with moss on their shingles and scampering sounds overhead. There was a single-car garage to check, a pump house, a henhouse, a storehouse, a granary and a barn.

      “I suppose all this would have been typical of the Rutherford place.” Emily was still looking for connections to Matthew’s family history. He had been quiet since they’d come outside and she wondered if he was losing interest in the tour. “Working farms have updated their buildings.”

      “This isn’t a working farm?”

      “Not since my father died. Martin and Tom—two of my cousins—use the land for grazing.”

      Matthew swung the storehouse door back and forth. “No lock. You don’t care if your friendly neighborhood thief comes in?”

      “He’d be welcome to anything he found in here.”

      She led him between moldy saddles and dusty buckets and out the back door into a meadow. One step, and they were knee-high in prairie grasses. Here and there were spots of color—deep-yellow black-eyed Susans and pale-yellow buttercups, orange tiger lilies and purple Russian thistles. Beyond the meadow were poplar woods dotted with darker green oak and spruce.

      “Do you mind a walk? There’s a spot I’d like to show you.”

      “Good. I was hoping to see the woods.”

      “We can take a roundabout path to the place we’re going, or a shortcut through a marshy area.” As soon as she mentioned the marsh she knew she didn’t want to go that way. “It wouldn’t be wet now and the woods on the other side are beautiful, almost all oaks and elms.”

      “Whatever you prefer is fine with me.”

      She smiled. “You’re easy to get along with.”

      “Always.”

      She chose the longer way. He was full of questions as they went. How big was the farm, had they sold any parcels of land, were any other buildings found on the property? Emily couldn’t remember anyone being so interested in her home.

      Cattle traveling in single file had worn a narrow path through the bush. They followed it to a more densely wooded area, mostly thin poplars too close together, with an undergrowth of highbush cranberry and hazelnut. Not far off, they heard water bubbling.

      “The three creeks?”

      “One of them. The biggest one.”

      The woods thinned again and they entered a small clearing where daisies grew almost as thickly as grass. Large, smooth rocks—lichen-spattered granite—rose out of the ground at the edge of the creek.

      “It’s beautiful, Emily. From the road you’d never know it was like this.”

      “Your uncle taught me to fish here. That’s why I wanted to show it to you.”

      Matthew climbed onto the stones. “It looks too shallow for that.”

      “You can get jackfish or suckers in the spring, when the water’s high.”

      “Suckers. Yum.”

      She laughed. “And then in the winter Daniel played hockey with us here—with Sue and Liz and me. Three Creeks can be such a guy-ish place. Daniel is different.”

      Matthew cocked an eyebrow. “Not guy-ish?”

      They both smiled at the thought.

      “He made time for us when we were kids, not just for the boys. He helped us if our horses weren’t behaving or had a problem with their hooves, he knew more about making snow forts than anybody. He taught us how to whistle.”

      “Sounds like a father. Or an uncle.”

      “Maybe not.” Daniel was never like the other grown-ups. “When we were little, he used to give us coffee. No one else let us have coffee. And while we drank it—hating it—he’d tell us stories about his Army days or about chasing criminals. He always called them ‘dumb clucks.’”

      Matthew smiled at that.

      “So if I seemed…impatient or anything when we met it was because I was afraid something had happened to him. I didn’t think he’d voluntarily miss Liz’s wedding.”

      “You weren’t impatient—or anything. He’ll be sorry to hear he worried you.”

      “Don’t tell him.”

      She climbed up beside Matthew on the rocks, then stepped onto the next stone and sat down, her feet dangling above the water. Remembering the purpose of the afternoon, she began to tell him what she knew of the first settlers’ arrival, how the Robbs, the