Books by Regina Jennings

  THE JOPLIN CHRONICLES

  Courting Misfortune

  Proposing Mischief

  Engaging Deception

  THE FORT RENO SERIES

  Holding the Fort

  The Lieutenant’s Bargain

  The Major’s Daughter

  OZARK MOUNTAIN ROMANCE SERIES

  A Most Inconvenient Marriage

  At Love’s Bidding

  For the Record

  LADIES OF CALDWELL COUNTY

  Sixty Acres and a Bride

  Love in the Balance

  Caught in the Middle

  NOVELLAS

  An Unforeseen Match (from the collection A Match Made in Texas)

  Her Dearly Unintended (from the collection With This Ring?)

  Bound and Determined (from the collection Hearts Entwined)

  Intrigue a la Mode (from the collection Serving Up Love)

  Broken Limbs, Mended Hearts (from the collection The Kissing Tree)

  © 2022 by Regina Jennings

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  Minneapolis, Minnesota

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2022

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4934-3908-9

  Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

  Poem in chapter 13 is from William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.

  This is a work of historical reconstruction; the appearances of certain historical figures are therefore inevitable. All other characters, however, are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Cover design by Dan Thornberg, Design Source Creative Services

  Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and post-consumer waste whenever possible.

  To Lori,

  the co-founder of our mutual admiration society,

  the genius behind our mutually assured destruction compact,

  and the best second double-cousin a girl could hope to have.

  (I expect a dedication in return.)

  Contents

  Cover

  Half Title Page

  Books by Regina Jennings

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  The Kentworth Family

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  A Note from the Author

  About the Author

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  CHAPTER

  1

  Oh, the indignities of death.

  Olive Kentworth dipped her horsehair brush into the jar of water and scrubbed the cold granite of the tombstone. Her mother had been gone for nearly a year, but Olive was still plagued by the emptiness in her days, in her home, in her heart. She tried to keep busy, and today that meant coming to the cemetery to wash away the bird droppings that marred her mother’s gravestone. After rearranging her skirt to better pad her knees, she scrubbed with vigor. If only the birds would stop eating the mulberries. The purple was nearly impossible to erase, but she couldn’t abide the idea that her mother’s headstone looked untended. Not when she’d tended her so well in life.

  “I thought I’d find you here,” Maisie called from the far side of the shortleaf pine that shaded the family plot.

  “Shh . . .” Olive said. “You’re in a graveyard. You shouldn’t be so buoyant.”

  But Maisie was striding toward her, swinging a berry basket high with a hatchet tucked into her waistband. Her cousin Maisie was buoyant wherever she went, just like Olive was cautious.

  “Aunt Myra was an admirer of my spirit. She wouldn’t mind.” Maisie spotted a hard-shelled bug climbing up the tombstone and flicked it away. “What would bother her is her daughter spending too much time alone at her grave.”

  “Of course I’m alone. Mother’s gone. Who else am I supposed to take care of?” Olive started in on another blotch of purple.

  “Take care of yourself.” Maisie said it like it was a reasonable course of action.

  “I do take care of myself.” Olive glared at her over the gravestone. “I have a lot of things planned. In fact, Willow invited me to go traveling with her and Graham to see the country.”

  “Welp, are you going?”

  Olive dropped her gaze back to her work. “I would if it wasn’t for Father. It’s too soon to leave him alone.”

  “You spent the last eight years looking after your mother. Now you’re going to look after your father?” Maisie set her basket down with force. “I’ll tell you what you’re doing. You’re hiding from life, Olive, and that’s why I’m here. I’m going to break you free.”

  Putting one hand to her side, Maisie extracted the hatchet from her waistband. This wasn’t done easily, with the handle getting twisted in her skirt and requiring tugging and squirming to free it. Olive had time to pick up her jar and take a step back, as one could never be sure what her farm cousins were capable of. When Maisie grabbed the finial atop the grave marker and propped her foot against it, Olive gasped.

  “Get down from there.” She looked around, afraid someone in Fairview Cemetery would observe Maisie’s outrageous behavior. “This isn’t the place for climbing.”

  “I’ve come to free you, and that’s what I’m going to do.” Standing on Myra Kentworth’s grave and stretching to her full height, Maisie caught the branch of the pine above her. With skill, she pulled it closer, then began hacking at it. “This tree looks mighty pretty, but you ain’t going to keep the tombstone clean as long as the birds can sit above it.”

  “We chose this site because of the shade,” Olive protested. “It’s a pretty spot.”

  “Ain’t nothing pretty about those bird droppings. The only thing worse is a smart girl like you hiding her light under a bushel.” Maisie grunted with each strike. The bend in the branch showed that it was nearly cut through. Maisie dropped her hatchet, took the branch in both hands, and worked it until it snapped. She tossed the branch down, then hopped to the ground. “Olive Kentworth, your ma is dead, but you ain’t. It’s time to get to moving.”

  Leave it to Maisie to boil down all life’s problems to a matter of will. “Moving for the sake of moving without any purpose or intent is futility. Maybe Granny Laura will put me on the board of some rich miner. Then my life would meet your qualifications.” Newlywed Maisie couldn’t expect everyone to up and marry a complete stranger, could she?

  “I don’t recommend doing what I did, but how about Willow? She would’ve never met Graham if she’d stayed home and not been a Harvey Girl. Or Calista? She went and became a Pinkerton agent. Look what come of that.”

  Olive did not possess Calista’s love of adventure or her sister Willow’s steely determination. Olive wanted to be safe at home with her drafting pencils, architect books, and her birdhouses. The challenges she sought were figuring out a floor plan or how to support a balcony. Something the other Kentworths didn’t understand. They expected everyone to be brave and outgoing. Olive was a disappointment.

  But she’d come to do a job, and she was going to finish it. Despite Maisie’s groan of disapproval, Olive knelt and resumed scrubbing.

  “You can’t ignore me forever.” Maisie snacked on some blackberries from her basket. “I think we should enlist Calista’s help. She’s always matching up jobs with the people who need them. Don’t you reckon she can do the same for you?”

  “What if I don’t want a job?” Olive asked. “What if I’d be happier at home?” Or what if she didn’t have a choice, because no one would trust a woman in architecture?

  There were two buildings in Joplin that bore her designs though not her name—the Lighthouse Center for Miners and the visitors’ center at the Crystal Cave. Because of her bedside vigil, she’d been unable to spend much time at the construction sites when they were built. Instead, Maisie’s brother Amos had been her representative. In fact, Amos, with his gift for gab, had convinced everyone that he was the designer behind the plans. Which was fine with Olive. She wasn’t looking for credit.

  “You stop it, Olive. You used to be the most courageous one of us. You were so brave that you tossed everything aside to take care of your ma. That took gumption. But now you’re stuck in a rut.” Maisie twisted her mouth to the side as she sized Olive up. “If you want to stay cozy at home, we can go that route. Calista will get you gussied up while I corral a herd of eligible bachelors for your inspection. Either way, we aim to get you some prospects before suppertime.”

  If Olive wasn’t kneeling by her mother’s grave, she would’ve laughed. Her with a herd of eligible bachelors? She touched her messy blond hair pulled into an uneven knot and tried to imagine what Calista would have to do to get her up to snuff. But it didn’t matter. Maisie wouldn’t understand. Olive’s insistence that she enjoyed solitude was mocked, her guarantee that she wouldn’t regret staying home rejected, and her demand that Maisie mind her own business ignored.

  As Maisie continued on with her arguments and plans, one thing was becoming clear—according to her family, the only unacceptable thing was for Olive to remain as she was.

  Olive was home from the cemetery with plenty of time to clean up and make her father’s dinner.

  Time, she had plenty.

  Early on, when her mother required tending, passing the time had been difficult. As she listened to her mother’s wracking cough, trying to keep up a brave face so her mother wouldn’t see how much her illness troubled her daughters, the hands of the clock seemed permanently set in place. When her sister, Willow, took her turn to spell her, Olive felt like a prisoner released from her sentence.

  But over the months, time became something that slipped by unnoticed. Olive found herself acclimated to the bedside watch. When Willow left for employment to help pay for her mother’s treatments and medicine, the full responsibility for her mother’s care fell on Olive. By then, she preferred the solitary but predictable routine.

  She never thought about what came next.

  The roast that was stewing on the stove was left over from the night before. So were the rolls. With only two of them eating, there wasn’t a reason to cook every night. Olive rinsed some blackberries and set them aside for after dinner. She stepped into the parlor to look at the clock hanging on the wall. Still time to kill.

  The pendulum wagged its finger at her. Waste was a sin. Having grown up with a chronically ill parent who required expensive treatments, Olive had learned thrift from an early age. You didn’t throw out something that had a use. You saved what you could in case you needed it tomorrow. But time got spent whether you used it wisely or not. You couldn’t wrap it up in paper and set it in the icebox. It expired immediately, whether for good or ill.

  Olive turned the corner and opened the door of the room that she used to share with her sister. Now Willow’s bed held a straightedge, protractor, and right angle nestled among the wadded-up papers full of her mistakes. On the floor were hatboxes full of receipts from her two building projects. She knew the records were important to keep but didn’t have anywhere to file them. As long as the amount in her father’s checking account—which is where she cleared all expenses and income—continued to go up, she knew she was doing well.

  Olive opened her notebook to a blank page and fished around in the wrinkled quilt to find a pencil. Her daily walks to the cemetery carried her through the newest neighborhoods being built. Joplin’s mining boom had hit the region like a wildcat, but it took time for fortunes to accumulate and for the first seeds of society to bloom. Now the city was filling up with beautiful buildings for every industry, every organization, and every family. And just like someone might walk through a flower garden, drawing peace from the lovely scents, Olive walked the city streets, absorbing the beautiful intricacies that were going up around her.

  After wetting the pencil tip with her tongue, she started to sketch the west elevation of the house that James Dennis was constructing. Dennis was newly come to Joplin, having already earned his fortune elsewhere. From the frame that was going up, it looked to Olive as if the house would have a porte cochere. Her pencil moved swiftly as she allowed her imagination to fill in the gaps between what already existed and what she’d want to place on that lot.

  As if anyone would ever give her, a woman with no formal training, a chance at building a home.

  The curtains on Olive’s opened window swayed when the front door opened. Olive dropped her sketchbook and tidied her hair. Despite it only being herself and her father, she always felt that one should look their best at dinner.

  “I didn’t think you were home.” Her father hung his suit coat on the rack beneath his hat.

  “Where else would I be?” Olive lifted on her toes to give him his daily kiss on the cheek. Her father had suffered terribly at her mother’s death—a death he’d known was pending even before he married her. But now, day by day, Olive was seeing his strength return. In a way, he seemed less burdened than the father she’d known her whole life.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere.” He smiled. “Surely you have places you’d rather be than sitting here in this empty house.”

  Her gaze darted to the floor as his words stung. She spun toward the kitchen to flee from answering. He didn’t understand. It’d been so long, she didn’t want to change now. She felt comfortable where she was.

  The stovetop rattled as she dragged the pot off. After setting the roast on the table, she reached in the warmer for the rolls. Maybe the pots were clattering more than normal, for rather than coming in and taking his seat, Oscar Kentworth leaned against the doorway and watched her with a father’s concern.

  “You take such good care of me without complaining, without fuss. Most young women your age are looking ahead.”

  Olive wiped her hands on a dish towel before motioning her father to his seat. “I only made leftovers. I should’ve made something fresh, but I was at the cemetery. I went to wash Mother’s headstone. The birds keep befouling it, and I can’t bear . . .” She sniffled. “We have blackberries for dessert. Maisie brought them from the farm.”

  He looked her offering over before saying, “I brought you something too.”

  “For supper?” Olive took her seat, crossing her ankles beneath the chair.

  “It’s not berries, but maybe an opportunity. Let’s pray first.” Her father bowed his head and spoke simple but sincere words over her, himself, and their food. Then he started eating. Just as Olive had begun chewing a mouthful of roast, he said, “Mr. Blount has decided to make an addition to his house. He’s looking for an architect.”

  Olive’s jaw stopped. “Clydell Blount?” She spoke around the chunk of meat despite her training. Chomping it quickly, and washing it down with milk, she dropped both hands on the table and leaned over her plate. “His house is only a few years old. What could he possibly want to change?”

  “Far be it from me to try to read the mind of a man like Mr. Blount. All I know is that he wants a sizeable addition and is going to request plans from different architects in the area.”

  “That’s nonsense. He has a Maxfield Scott house. How could he want anything else?” Olive drummed her fingers against the table. Making an addition to a Maxfield Scott house would be like painting another smile on the Mona Lisa. One didn’t mess with perfection. Being that Clydell Blount was her father’s boss, she’d watched the house’s construction with interest. In fact, she’d attended the company Christmas party there as her father’s guest when her mother had been too ill to do the honors. Walking through the halls, appreciating the flow of the floor plan, being delighted with unexpected nooks was the best Christmas present she could’ve received. And now, scarcely two years later, Blount wanted to change it?

  Who would work for a madman like that?

  Olive speared another piece of roast with her fork. “How was work today? Did you find hires for the ore jiggers?”

  Her father began his answer. Olive tilted her head and listened as well as she was able, but beneath her messy blond bun, other thoughts intruded.

  Who would Blount hire? Obviously Mr. Scott wasn’t an option. Not if Blount wanted to tamper with his work. Austin Allen? He was another skilled architect in the area, but Olive doubted he had the time to take on home additions. Not when he could be constructing another church or apartment building. Besides, taking this job would probably put him at odds with Maxfield Scott. Professionally, it would be a bad idea.

  Mr. Blount’s best option might be an unknown designer with nothing to lose.

  “Dan Campbell’s claim is starting to produce,” her father continued. “We’re having trouble finding cokeys because he’s hiring the newcomers. I’ve had to send word to a few that we’ve laid off before. Of course, it’s nice to give a man a second chance, but it’s not . . .”

 

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