When Adelyn rushed into the front room, every young man automatically stood to attention. Firstly, to see a young woman whose wildly delicious hair proved her energy and health, tresses red and golden brown, much like the leaves the South brings to November. Secondly, her shiny and beautiful dark eyes seized every one of them in mid-sentence. They fell over their own words and one another’s. Their guffawing and joking ceased. They became very gentle, solicitous even, and Garnett saw and would forever remember Innis’s one step toward her. In that one step he saw it all as though he possessed Momma Sorrow’s crystal ball. In that one step he never saw Innis the same again. Always close to one another, that one step separated them. It didn’t stop them from talking to one another in the most genuine or caring manner. Two boys always freely sharing their minds about anything or anyone had simply changed about one person: Adelyn.
“Charles, who is she?” Garnett ran his hand nervously through his wavy hair as he whispered to his friend.
“Come now. You don’t remember Mrs. Cooperthwaite’s tea dances when we were all sophomores in high school? That’s Adelyn Jackson, Captain Jackson’s older daughter. She was just fourteen back at those dances. But I swear I could tell she’d be the death of all of us some day.” Charles looked around and then bent closer to his friend and added, “And I think she already is.” He gestured to Garnett to see Innis approach her.
Garnett’s eyes rested on her figure; how could they not? She wore jodhpurs and they accentuated her frame admirably. Girls just didn’t do that, he told himself. Not good girls, not decent girls. Yet he knew she possessed nothing bad nor indecent about her.
He moved next to his brother in a second, seemingly transported, never having experienced his own walking.
“She’s a bit young for you, brother,” he said impetuously, all he could find to say.
“Maybe too young for you, brother.” Innis spoke so only Garnett could hear the retort, and closed in on his quarry. “It’s a pleasure.” He cocked his head to one side with a sly smile, “Are you lost, Miss Jackson?”
Adelyn looked closely at Innis then smiled. “Lost? Charles, are your friends from someplace outside of Tulip Junction or Savannah? I think I know you all. No, not lost. I was expecting to see Delia but I guess she’ll be upstairs?” She turned with her question to Charles, who nodded like a puppet on a string and pointed to the graceful flight of stairs where Delia waited. “Well then, I’ll leave you boys to it.”
Garnett watched as his brother followed Adelyn till both had moved out of earshot of the rest. A fire burned in Garnett that surprised even him for its ferocity. What the hell’s the matter with me? He ached to hear their interchange; he hated to see Innis so close to her, could tell his brother breathed in her perfume, and the clean scent of soap and water from her bath, he somehow knowing she’d bathed before jumping on a horse to ride over here.
He turned toward the stairs and glimpsed Adelyn taking leave of Innis. With a smile she took possession again of her hand, which Innis had continued to hold. Garnett knew Innis’s gesture to introduce himself to her would come with a handshake. One riding glove remained, on her left hand. Something resembling resignation engulfed Garnett. So he touched you first.
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