Regan’s head came up. “Is she out there?”
Brandy grimaced. “Everyone feels as if they’re involved now, and…most of them are out there.”
“Who is not there?” Regan asked bleakly.
“Mrs. Ellison’s grandmother, who had the stroke last year, and Mr. Watts still had milking to do, and…,” she trailed off apologetically because she could think of no other missing townspeople.
“Mrs. Brown’s sister is visiting, came in yesterday, and she’s dying to meet you. Brought all six kids over, too.”
Regan put her arms on the desk and buried her face. “Can a person die by will, just by wishing it? How can I face all those people?” She looked up at Brandy, her face horribly distressed. “How could Travis do this to me?”
Brandy knelt beside her friend and touched her hair. “Regan, can’t you see that he just wants you so badly that he’ll do anything to get you back? You don’t know the hell he’s been through since you left. Did you know that he lost forty-five pounds when you first left him? It was a friend of his named Clay who talked him out of giving up on life.”
“Travis told you all of this?”
“In a roundabout way. I did some prying, and it took a while to piece together all the facts, but I did. Right now the man is past any sense of pride. He doesn’t care what he has to do to get you back. If he can enlist the whole town to help him, then he will. Maybe his tactics are a little…well, maybe he’s not exactly subtle, but would you rather have one rose and a man like Farrell or, what was the final count, seven hundred and forty-two roses and Travis Stanford?”
“But does he have to do all this?” Regan pleaded, flipping the thread leading to the note that had been under her desk.
“You’ve told me repeatedly how Travis never asked you anything, but only told you what to do and how to do it. If I remember correctly, at the ceremony you said no to him just because he hadn’t asked you to marry him. I don’t believe you can accuse him of not having asked you now. And, too, you said you wanted to be courted.” Brandy stood, smiling. “This courtship may go down in history.”
Regan, in spite of herself, began to smile. “All I wanted was a little champagne and a few roses.”
Eyes wide, Brandy put her fingers to her lips. “Please don’t mention champagne. You may start a flood.”
A giggle escaped Regan. “Will he ever do anything on a normal scale?”
“Don’t you hope not?” Brandy said seriously. “I’d give a lot to be in your shoes.”
“My shoes are all packed full of notes,” Regan
said, deadpan.
Laughing, Brandy started toward the door. “You’d better prepare yourself. They are waiting eagerly for you.”
Brandy laughed at Regan’s heartfelt groan before leaving the room.
Taking a moment to calm herself, Regan thought about Brandy’s words. Everything about Travis was overscale, from his body to his house to his land, so why did she expect his courting to be any different?
Carefully, she retrieved the ribbon from the trash and tenderly folded it. Someday she’d show this to her grandchildren. With resolve, shoulders straight, she left her office and went toward the public rooms.
Nothing could have prepared her for what was awaiting her. The first person she saw was Mrs. Ellison’s grandmother enthroned in a chair, smiling at her with one side of her face, the other side paralyzed by her stroke.
“I’m so glad you could make it,” Regan said graciously, as if she’d issued invitations to this party.
“Seven hundred and forty-two!” a man was saying. “And the last one was made of glass, all the way from Europe.”
“Wonder how he got it here and didn’t break it?”
“And wonder how he got up to my loft? The ladder broke two days ago, and I ain’t had time to fix it. But there it was, just as pretty as you please, a ribbon around a bale of hay and asking Regan to marry him.”
There was a man painting a vine of roses on the wall behind the bar in her taproom, and beside it were numbers—5:00 A.M., 1 rose; 5:30 A.M., 2 roses, all the way down to 38 roses at 11:30 P.M. and one rose at midnight and the total at the bottom. She didn’t bother to ask who the painter was or who had given him permission to paint on her wall. She was too busy fending off questions.
“Regan, is it true this man is Jennifer’s father yet you’re not married to him?”
“We were married at the time Jennifer was born,” Regan tried to explain. “But I was underage and—.”
Someone else’s question interrupted her.