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the ground.
    Keith’s eyes were damp now, and he brushed the moisture away with a motion of one arm. He wouldn’t think about the wedding. He wouldn’t think about Amelie. And he wouldn’t think about making love to Tess Bishop, either. She wasn’t like the women he’d used in recent months.
    She wasn’t. She couldn’t be. That talk about free love was just that, talk. Talk designed to convince him that she wasn’t a child.
    Keith shrugged into a dark suit jacket, freshly brushed by a solicitous Derora Beauchamp, took out his wallet, and counted the bills inside. If the patent medicine business didn’t pick up soon, he was going to have to find himself a job. Lord knew, he couldn’t risk wiring the bank in Port Hastings again. His brothers might be onto that tactic by now, and tracing him to Simpkinsville would be easy if they were.
    He sighed and tucked the wallet back into his inside pocket. Life would be so much simpler if Adam and Jeff could be counted on to leave him alone until he’d worked things out, but he knew they couldn’t. The private detectives that had been dogging him for the last year were proof of that.
    With a grin, Keith took his bowler hat, also freshlybrushed, from the top of the bureau. He put it onto his head with a flourish. Time enough to think about his brothers and their hired goons later. Right now, he needed a drink and a woman. Or maybe several drinks and several women.
    He opened the door at the rear of the converted car and went out, unaware that he’d left Amelie’s wedding ring behind for the first time since that tragic day in Wenatchee.
    Tess was careful to sit at the back of the parlor, in a shadowy corner, lest Derora see her and order her away before she could hear Mrs. Hollinghouse-Stone’s lecture. That wasn’t likely to happen, it was true, because there were far more people in attendance than anyone could have dared hope, many of them strangers.
    “Did you hear?” whispered Emma Hamilton, Tess’s friend, as she sank into a chair nearby.
    “Hear what?” Tess countered, craning her neck to see if Joel Shiloh—if indeed that was his name—was anywhere in the crowd.
    Emma was about to burst, her pink cheeks glowing with excitement, her red curls bobbing. “I can’t believe you don’t know! Tess, there’s a showboat at anchor—a real showboat—in our own river! See that man over there—the tall one with the chestnut hair? He’s an actor!”
    Tess looked at the man in question and observed to herself that he wasn’t half as handsome as Joel Shiloh. There was something too studied about his smile, and his features were too even, too perfect, to be at allinteresting. Still, he was an actor, a rare enough bird in Simpkinsville, Oregon, and, as such, he was a curiosity.
    “Does my aunt know?” she asked.
    Emma giggled behind one glove as Derora zeroed in on the gentleman. “She must. Look at her fuss over him!”
    Tess experienced an odd sense of relief. Perhaps a friendship would bloom, however brief, and distract Derora from Joel Shiloh. After all, wasn’t an actor more interesting than a peddler?
    “Isn’t he wonderful?” marveled Emma. “I could perish!”
    “Do you know his name?” asked Tess, without much interest. There was still a chance that Joel would come in and see her with a free love lecture program in her hands, and she didn’t want to miss his reaction.
    “Roderick Waltam. Roderick!” Emma fairly crooned the name. “It’s so much more romantic than everyday names like Joe or Bill, isn’t it?”
    Before Tess had to respond to this inanity, Mrs. Hollinghouse-Stone took her place at the podium Derora kept for just such occasions and cleared her throat. An immediate silence fell. All eyes were on the unprepossessing woman in her dramatic, flowing white robe.
    “Mercy,” observed Emma, in a stage whisper. “She only has one eyebrow!”
    Tess bit down hard on her lower lip because she couldn’t afford to giggle and attract her