Wolf Creek Widow (Wolf Creek, Arkansas Book 4) by Penny Richards Page A

not?”
    “What?” Meg looked at Nita sharply. What had she asked?
    “I was asking why you said you weren’t sure you wanted to be your old self,” Nita explained.
    Meg couldn’t believe she’d spoken her thoughts aloud, but since she must have, she felt obligated to provide an answer. “The old me put up with a lot of things I shouldn’t have.”
    “Did you have a choice?”
    “Not much of one,” she conceded.
    “I suppose I’m being nosy, but I’ve been wondering if you knew how your husband was when you married him.”
    Meg’s burst of bitter laughter had no place in the sweet tranquillity of the morning. She gave a negative shake of her head and kept her eyes glued to the shirt in her hands. “I didn’t have a clue. All I knew was that he was handsome, and he told me I was beautiful and I believed him. He bought me presents and said he’d love me forever.”
    Seeing the sympathy on Nita’s face, Meg gave a helpless shrug. “I knew he drank a little, but before we married I never once saw him lose his temper. He was always so sweet and gentle.”
    “So you fell in love with him.”
    “Love?” A sigh trickled from Meg’s lips. “I’m not even sure what love is. I thought what I felt was love. Maybe it was. Or maybe I just liked the notion of loving someone. Whatever I felt, it didn’t last long after we said our ‘I dos.’” She shot Nita a quick embarrassed look. “I’m sure you’ve heard around town that I was expecting Teddy when Elton and I married.”
    “There are always those who like to gossip,” Nita said. “I don’t pay much attention to it.”
    “In this case it was true.”
    Nita offered her another of those kind smiles. “At least he had the decency to do the right thing and give the child his name.”
    “Yes, well, we’d all have been better off if he hadn’t,” Meg said in an acerbic tone.
    Nita Allen might be shocked by the bold confession, but Meg didn’t care, and she made no offer to explain. How could she tell this giving woman who’d come through so many trials herself about her fears for her children? How could she explain that she was afraid that her sweet Teddy would grow up to be like his father, or that somehow the inability to see a man’s true colors had been passed down from Georgie to her and on to her precious Lucy at the moment of her conception?
    She couldn’t. Nita Allen might be easy to talk to, and she might be as good as gold, but there was no way Meg could share her deepest fears with someone who was little more than a stranger.
    Fearful that Nita would comment on the rash statement, Meg took a final stitch in Danny Gentry’s shirt, bit off the thread and scooped up her sewing basket. “We’d better see to those fires.”
    By the time Ace returned with a wagonload of dirty linen, fires were burning hotly beneath both of Meg’s cast-iron kettles. She’d shaved a cake of lye soap into the boiling water while Nita carried more from the well to fill two galvanized rinse tubs.
    As if they’d worked together before, the two women set about sorting the clothes as Ace brought the baskets to them. Nita allowed Meg to help as they rubbed the cake of soap into the stains and scrubbed them on the washboard before punching them down into the boiling, sudsy water.
    Overriding Nita’s protests, Meg insisted on tending one of the kettles. It didn’t take but a few moments to realize that though her ribs had more or less healed, she was not up to the work. Weeks of inactivity had left her as weak as a kitten. She might not like relying on strangers, but there was no doubt that she couldn’t do things on her own just yet.
    * * *
    Catching the look of concern in his mother’s eyes, Ace made fast work of adding more wood to the fires. Then he went to take Meg’s place. Their gazes clashed, headstrong green to cool, determined blue. He held out his hand for the stick she was using to transfer the clean tablecloths from the hot water to the rinse tubs.