Lynna Banning - Printer In Petticoats

He ran his hand across his stubbly chin. He needed one more verbal jab to draw blood.

“Only a coward would skulk in his jail-cell office instead of getting out and campaigning among the good voters of Smoke River.”

“Noralee,” he called. “Set this up right away, will you?”

* * *

Tuesday night rolled around. Cole rode back into town after delivering the last of his papers to his outlying subscribers, hurriedly sponged off, ate a quick supper at the restaurant and made it to the choir rehearsal with five minutes to spare. He hoped Jessamine had read his editorial.

The new music school smelled like fresh paint and new wood and had ample seating for the twenty-seven-member chorus now drifting in for rehearsal in twos and threes. Good acoustics, too, Cole noted as their chatter reverberated around the room.

The morning rain had eased off, and outside the air smelled of frost. Felt like it, too. Women were bundled up in wool fascinators and fur muffs, and men lumbered in wearing sheepskin coats or wool mackinaws and leather gloves.

Jessamine Lassiter entered, stamping her feet and blowing on her fingers. He knew she’d already read his latest edition when she sidled past him and hissed a single word at him. “Snake.”

She took a seat next to the potbellied stove in the corner and glared at him with eyes like green jade. Her nose and cheeks were reddened from the cold.

They all stood to warm up their voices, and then the director arranged them by vocal part, basses on the left, then tenors, baritones, sopranos and altos on the far right. The piano accompanist, Doc Dougherty’s wife, Winifred, struck a chord.

Cole could hear Jessamine’s clear, sweet soprano soar above the others, and a shiver went up the back of his neck. Anger sure made her voice sound beautiful.

Then Ellie Johnson dropped her arms. “I want to mix up the voices more, to get a better blend.” Instead of standing in vocal sections, she arranged them in quartets—one soprano, one alto, a tenor and a baritone, all grouped close together.

Cole ended up standing beside Jessamine. She held herself rigid, as if her corset stays were made of iron, and he fancied he could see sparks pop off her body.

The choir la-la-la’d up and down a scale, and now he was quite sure fury was affecting her voice. Her enunciation was so crisp her tongue could cut paper, and the tone... Jehosephat, it was so clear and beautiful it stopped his breath.

“Jer-i-cho-Sil-ver-is-not-a-co-ward,” she sang up and down for the next scale. She glared at him for emphasis.

He cleared his throat. “He-is-too-a-coward,” he sang.

Her cheeks flushed as she attacked the next scale, this time in a minor key. “Just-you-wait-you-snake-la-la-la-la.”

The rehearsal itself wasn’t near as much fun as the warm-up scales and the la-la-la battle with Jess. Then the words of the Messiah took precedence over the insults they were passing back and forth. Cole was halfway disappointed.

But what almost did him in was standing next to her, catching the scent of her skin as the room warmed up, smelling her hair as that tangle of wild curls bobbed near his shoulder. He groaned without thinking.

Watch out, Sanders. After Maryann you swore you’d never have thoughts about another woman. Well, hell, he wasn’t having thoughts. He was having feelings. Normal male feelings. Feelings of the most basic variety. Feelings of just plain wanting.

But, he assured himself, his mind was in full control. A man could look, couldn’t he? Just as long as he didn’t let Jessamine Lassiter mean anything to him beyond admiration for a pretty rival newspaper editor. Just as long as she didn’t matter to him.

Maybe he should just crawl onto his cot tonight and forget about watching her silhouetted form against the window blind across the street.

At that moment she tossed her shiny dark hair back over her shoulders and he sucked in his breath. Or maybe not. Damn, she smelled good.

Ellie had the sopranos sing the next section by themselves. Standing next to Jessamine, Cole tried to keep his mind on the music instead of surreptitiously watching her.

“‘For unto us a child is born...’”

He worked hard to screen out Jess’s lilting soprano voice, but with little success. He heard every single syllable, felt every indrawn breath she took until he found himself unconsciously breathing right along with her. It was a bit like making love, he thought. Instantly he wished he hadn’t thought it.

She moved unconsciously when she sang. Just enough to bring her body an inch or two closer to his. He began to sweat.

Too close.

Not close enough.

Despite the chill in the rehearsal room, his body began to grow warm. He fought an urge to rip off his flannel shirt, but he settled for rolling his sleeves up to his elbows.

Big mistake. As she swayed beside him, the hair on his forearms rose as if reaching toward her. The urge to feel her skin brush against his was overpowering.

Move toward me, Jessamine. Touch me.

Shoot, he was going nuts. Another hour of this would make him crazier than a wolf in heat. He sidled away from her, and tried to control his hammering heartbeat.

What he couldn’t control was his groin swelling into an ache. He wanted to toss her over his shoulder and take her...where?

He suppressed a groan. To bed.

Oh, God.

That night he didn’t sleep at all.

Chapter Six

Jessamine headed across the street, her footsteps crunching against the frost-painted boardwalk; it was so slick she had to concentrate to keep her balance. Mercy, it was cold this morning! She saw no sign of life at the Lark office, so she bent and carefully laid the Wednesday edition of her Sentinel against Cole Sanders’s door.

Back in her own office, she turned her backside to the potbellied stove in the corner and rubbed her frozen hands together.

“Cold out, huh, Jess?”

“You know it is, Eli. The temperature outside is below freezing.”

“Gonna be a lot hotter when Sanders wakes up and reads yer editorial.”

She ducked her head to hide her smile. “Cole Sanders is a grown man, Eli. Sticks and stones and so on.”

“Yep, reckon so. Names ain’t never hurt you, huh?”

Jess sobered instantly. Names had hurt her. When she was young and just starting out to help her papa and Miles on the newspaper, her schoolmates had teased her mercilessly about her ambition to be a journalist. “What d’ya wanna do that for? Too ugly to get a husband? Boys don’t like brainy girls, smarty-pants!”

And it was names in an editorial her brother had printed that had cost him his life; that had hurt even worse. After Papa died, she and her older brother had moved out West and Miles had taken her under his wing.

She had been just a young girl, but he had begun teaching her about operating a newspaper, things her father had never let her do such as cleaning the ink off the rollers and setting type. Miles had also let her try her hand at writing stories, and he instructed her in the basics of journalism—being accurate and objective.

Then Miles had been killed, and now she was struggling to carry on the newspaper he had established in Smoke River.

Jess didn’t really think Cole Sanders would shoot her for writing an inflammatory editorial. But she would wager he might want to. She bit the inside of her cheek. This morning she couldn’t help wondering what the no-nonsense editor of the Lake County Lark would do about the editorial she’d published.

She kept one eye on the front windows of the Lark office across the street and set about planning her Saturday issue. She’d write a feature story about the new choir Ellie Johnson would be directing, and another article on the children’s rhythm band the music school director, Winifred Dougherty, was starting, together with the director’s plea for a violin teacher. Maybe she’d add an interview with the sheriff’s wife, Maddie Silver; what it was like being the mother of twin boys while also a Pinkerton agent?