As he did, he reached up to thump the stacked wood. The solid feel of sawed lumber beneath his hand never failed to make the success of his mill feel twice as real. Twice as enduring.
Twice as secure.
The pine boards shifted at the motion. One slid sideways, and something fell from beneath it to the floor below. It rolled, then struck Marcus’s boot.
Frowning, he bent to pick it up. About the size of the baseballs used in the new Morrow Creek league, the object was dense and light brown in color. Marcus raised it higher. Just as Smith paused and turned to see what had delayed his boss, Marcus realized what it was.
A cinnamon bun.
Undoubtedly from Molly’s bakery.
What was it doing rammed amongst the railroad tie shipment?
“Uh, sorry ’bout that, boss.” Smith edged nearer. “Can’t reckon how that got there.”
He grabbed for the cinnamon bun. Marcus held firm.
“Never mind,” he said, scooping up the plain white napkin that had fluttered to the floor alongside the sweet. He wrapped the cinnamon bun inside it and shoved the bundle into his suit coat pocket. Better there than here in the main work area. If the stale bun had fallen from a greater height, it might have brained a man. “How are the sharpeners you hired coming along?”
On the way to their work area, Smith shared a few details about the recently hired men. Just around the corner from where the sharpeners labored to hone the various axes and saws used by the loggers, Marcus spied something else. He stopped. Frowned.
Yes, he’d guessed correctly, he saw as he pried out another napkin-wrapped bundle from between two freshly peeled logs. Another cinnamon bun.
With a disapproving glare around the room, Marcus stowed the rocklike bundle in his pocket alongside the first, then went on with his daily inspection.
“I think the new equipment is working out just fine,” Smith remarked a short while later. They stood side by side, watching thoughtfully as two men directed logs into the splitter Marcus had had shipped in by rail from back East over the summer. “Real nice.”
“Yes.” Burdened by a worrisome feeling he didn’t understand and didn’t much like, Marcus fiddled with the wrapped bundles of cinnamon buns—and a few tea cakes—lining his pockets. By now, his suit was filled fair to bulging with the abandoned sweets. “It’s fine. What about the shipment that came in last week? Jack Murphy might be in the market for some of those pressed-tin ceiling forms for his saloon.”
“Ain’t many of ’em left,” Smith said. Outside, they walked together through the shade of the pines clustered around the lumber mill building, then entered the main work area again. “I reckon we could get some fair quick, though.”
“Good.”
With a distracted feeling, Marcus examined the building and its furnishings. The men all appeared to be working as usual—with the exception of the pair near one of the muley saws. The two bearded mill hands hadn’t noticed Marcus in their midst, which probably explained the fact that one of them was juggling.
Marcus’s frown deepened. Here was proof that letting down his guard—and letting a female into his place of business—had been a mistake. Now the men thought they had leave to indulge in frivolous behavior at all hours. Why had he agreed to join the damned matchmaker search in the first place?
He silenced Smith’s questions about the new work schedules Marcus had been working on, then stalked toward the juggler. Halfway there, he realized the man was not juggling rocks or dirt clumps or any of the other things he’d assumed…he was juggling an assortment of Molly’s molasses cookies.
If she caught wind of this, she’d never be back. He’d never uncover her secrets. With new determination, Marcus crossed the remaining distance between him and the laggard worker.
“I understand,” he said, snatching the cookies from midair as they fell, one by one, from the startled man’s hands, “that you have a pile of logs waiting to be peeled before lunchtime. Isn’t that right, Jameson?”
“Y-yes, sir.” Caught, the man backed up, his mouth agape.
“Then I suggest you cease these childish games. Unless you relish the notion of peeling those logs with your bare teeth, and eating the bark for your noontime meal.”
Jameson clapped his mouth shut. He nodded and, with a mumbled apology, sped toward his usual post with his companion in tow. Ramming the cookies into his pocket along with everything else, Marcus turned to see Smith hurrying to meet him.
“You can make the men buy ’em,” he said, looking dour, “but God’s own angels couldn’t make them eat ’em.”
Marcus glared toward the departing men’s backs. “I paid the men good money to buy these sweets. Money out of my own pocket, damn it! Why won’t they eat them?”
Smith shook his head, as though remembering the plan Marcus had struck upon to bring Molly Crabtree to the lumber mill each day—and deciding upon its foolhardiness, once and for all.
“Have you tried ’em, sir?” he asked.
That was beside the point, Marcus thought in frustration. He needed regular contact with Molly to find out if she was the matchmaker the men’s club members sought. Bringing her to his mill—by whatever means possible—had been the most efficient way to accomplish that. But it wasn’t enough.
“She is a professional baker,” he reminded his foreman. “Surely the sweets aren’t that bad.”
“Hmm.” Sadly, Smith shook his head. Into Marcus’s hand, he pressed a napkin-wrapped bundle he’d confiscated somewhere between the mill’s back door and its center work area, then released its petrified weight. “I reckon you’d better try some yourself.”
For a man who spent his working days surrounded by rough-hewn loggers, Marcus Copeland was a surprisingly well-mannered man, Molly decided on her seventh day visiting the mill. She’d finished selling her basketful of baked goods within minutes of arriving there, and was now being given a tour of the business at Marcus’s side.
“That’s where the skidders drop each load when it’s ready to be milled,” he said, pointing toward a stack of logs waiting to be taken inside.
“My goodness!” Shading her eyes from the noontime sun, Molly looked toward the neatly piled stack. “Look at the size of those logs! You could drive a wagon right over top of that one on the right.”
“Or down the middle, if it was hollow.”
“It must be quite a challenge, cutting all those down. However do your men manage it?”
Marcus shrugged. “Hard work. Teamwork. It’s their job, just like baking is yours.”
Molly couldn’t help but brighten at his words. At last! Here was someone who took her and her ambitions seriously. That Marcus respected her business aspirations encouraged her greatly, even as she struggled more each day to see him strictly as a professional associate.
He was, after all, a very fine-looking and personable man.
He
