Read Online Home by Nightfall by Alexis Harrington - Free Book Online Page B

feeding wet laundry through a wringer while she turned its crank. But her mind was not on her task. Despite his promise, Tanner had stopped coming to the dinner table after that first night. He always sent the boys in with one excuse or another. He made them come in but they gobbled down their food and left as quickly as she would let them. The household was in turmoil.
    She missed the warmth of Tanner lying beside her at night, the sleep-scent of him that was both comforting and arousing. Though he was a man of few words, he had let his tenderness and passion speak for him when they made love. Now all she had of him in her room was the lamp he’d given her. That and the question that always lingered at the back of her mind: had he simply retired from his role as her husband? The fact that he seemed to be avoiding her wore on her heart and made it ache.
    She also missed the man that Riley had once been, a banked fire that smoldered but raised gooseflesh on her with the brush of his hand.
    Now she slept alone, tied to one man in her heart by obligation and memories, and to the other in her soul. Until that division—heart from soul—was closed again, she would be alone.
    Just then, she heard the sound of horse’s hooves and looked up to see Tanner riding out of the yard. He didn’t stop by the porch to talk to her or to tell her where he was going, as he would have before. She followed his form until she pinched her finger in the rollers of the wringer.
    She sucked in a breath and put her fingertip in her mouth.
    When she looked up again, he was gone.
    • • •
    Emmaline Bauer wore a faded blue dressing gown that somehow complemented her faded red hair. She gestured Tanner into a chair at her small, oilcloth-covered kitchen table and spoke through a thin cloud of cigarette smoke that encircled her head. “No offense, Tanner, but you look like hell.”
    He hung his hat on a finial on the chair back and slumped into the seat, propping his elbows on the table. He gave her a wry look and shrugged. “I guess I might.”
    She sat across from him and studied him. “How are things going?”
    “I can’t complain.”
    She huffed out a wheezy chuckle. “You could, but you won’t. It ain’t your way. There’s not too much I don’t hear about, you know. And I heard that Riley Braddock is back from the grave.”
    Tanner sighed slightly. “Yeah. That’s not the kind of thing a person expects. But he doesn’t know any of us, or even himself.” He glanced around Em’s little house, a onetime hunting cabin nearly hidden by trees and weeds up on Butler Road. She’d fixed up the place in the last couple of years. At least it had a ceiling now instead of bare rafters, and she’d gotten a piece or two of new furniture and painted the walls.
    There had been a ruckus a couple of years ago after the women in town learned of her business here out in the woods. They’d wanted Sheriff Whit Gannon to shut her down, and he’d been presented with a petition from huffy residents in Powell Springs. But Em was firmly under Whit’s protection and he pretty much ran his part of the county the way he wanted to. Tanner knew this wasn’t work she wanted to do, but after her husband abandoned her years earlier, she hadn’t found a lot of options.
    She toyed with the package of Lucky Strikes on the table. “I heard he’s not in his right mind. What’s Susannah going to do?”
    “Hell, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, much less a week or a month from now. He has some kind of fits, like bad dreams about the war. Except he’s awake. Other times he has temper explosions that no one understands. I’m worried that if he got his hands on a gun, he might shoot us all.” He sat up and rubbed the back of his neck with his hand.
    She took another pull on her cigarette. “That’s a comfort.”
    He shook his head in baffled wonderment. How had this happened—and why to him? He felt Em’s gaze fixed on