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After that, supper was dead quiet except for the clink of utensils against the china plates. Finally Danny broke the spell. “We got any dessert, Ma?”
“No, I’m afraid not,” she said. “I meant to bake an apple pie, but...”
“I make a humdinger of an apple pie,” Cord announced.
Three startled pairs of eyes stared at him. “Aw, you can’t neither,” Danny said.
“Don’t bet on it, son.”
Eleanor pinned him with a disapproving look but he paid no attention, just grinned.
“You all get ready for apple pie tomorrow night, all right?” He held her gaze just long enough to make her a little nervous.
Eleanor stared at him. Apple pie? Surely he was joking. After an announcement like that, she found she couldn’t stop looking at him. Well, maybe it was more than his apple pie promise. Maybe it was his way of taking over, of making her feel...cared for somehow.
She gave herself a mental shake. The man left her with an uneasy, fluttery feeling in her stomach. She watched Danny and Molly gobble down their beans, butter extra squares of corn bread and gulp down their milk. Then, without a word from her, they gathered up the plates and pumped water into the teakettle to heat for washing up the dishes.
Things were certainly different since Cord Winterman had appeared at her door. She wasn’t sure she liked it. She wasn’t sure she even liked him. Could a man like that really deliver on a challenge to bake a pie? She didn’t think so for one minute. Not for one single minute!
* * *
That night, Cord lay awake in the loft until long past moonrise, not because he wasn’t tired from fixing the screen or the porch step or the front gate, but because Mama Cat brought her wriggly kittens to curl up against his back and he was afraid to roll over for fear of crushing them. He could move them, he supposed. But after a few hours he kinda liked hearing them purr next to him.
You know what, Winterman? You are a damn fool.
Maybe. He didn’t know exactly what he’d landed in here at Eleanor Malloy’s apple farm, but he was grateful for the roof over his head, even if the barn was drafty, and three meals a day with no one prodding him to hurry up or move on or...anything else.
God, it was good to be here! It felt good to buy lumber at the sawmill, buy lemon drops for Molly and caramels for Danny. It felt especially good to talk to a pretty girl at the mercantile. What was her name? Fanny something. Even if she did giggle and flutter her eyelashes at him, it was good to know he still looked like a normal man on the outside, even if the inside was pretty much broken.
He drifted off to sleep with Mama Cat warming his backside and a woman’s face floating in his mind. But it wasn’t Fanny What’s-her-name’s face. It was Eleanor Malloy’s.
In the morning he milked Bessie, saved a saucerful for Mama Cat and the kittens, laid out the lumber to repair the rotten corral fence and ate the best breakfast he could remember in the last seven years. Molly fried up a mess of bacon, Daniel mixed up thick sourdough pancake batter and Eleanor made coffee with one hand and flipped pancakes with the other.
She looked better this morning, more rested. The dark circles under her eyes seemed less pronounced. Maybe that nap yesterday afternoon had done her some good. Or maybe he should slip whiskey into her coffee more often.
It took all day to repair the fence. Halfway through the afternoon he remembered his promise to bake an apple pie for tonight’s dessert. He was sure ending up doing some strange things on this farm, cuddling kittens and plying kids with lemon drops and caramels. And now he’d gotten himself into baking a pie. Still, any single hour of life here on this farm was better than sixty seconds of where he’d been before.
After midday dinner he shooed the kids outside and watched Eleanor nod off on the parlor settee. After a while he tiptoed out onto the porch, where Molly and Danny were arguing about what to do with the old rusted-out door screen.
“Let’s build a bird cage.”
“No! Let’s make a chicken coop.”
“We’ve already got a chicken coop,” Molly pointed out.
“Yeah,” Danny conceded. “But it’s pretty rickety. How about making a dirt-strainer.”
“A dirt-strainer!” Molly’s blue eyes went wide. “That’s a dumb idea. What’s a dirt-strainer, anyway?”
“You know. When Ma plants tomatoes ’n’ carrots she hoes the dirt real fine. A dirt-strainer would make it easier.”
They argued and discussed until their mother woke from her nap, and Cord strode into the kitchen to bake his apple pie.
Eleanor shook her head at the sight of the rangy man in her kitchen and when he tied her blue-checked gingham apron around his waist she had to smile. Danny disappeared into the pantry and emerged with a big bowl of last season’s red Jonathan apples. Cord sat him down at the kitchen table with a paring knife and showed him how to cut them in half, remove the core and peel them. He showed Molly how to slice them up fine, and while the children labored away, he started his piecrust.
She watched with misgivings. Piecrust was hard to get just right. Adding too much water made it tough; adding too little made the crust crumble into nothing when you tried to roll it out.
Cord scooped two cups of flour out of the barrel and dropped in a palm-size lump of her just-churned butter. She didn’t really believe he knew what he was doing, but his motions were decisive. He was even humming! Well, maybe he did know and maybe he didn’t, she sniffed. The proof would be in the pudding. Or the pie, she amended.
Part of her hoped he would fail, that his crust would turn out tough and the apples mushy. Another part of her admired him, a rugged-looking man too tall for her low-ceilinged kitchen, for even attempting to bake a pie. And, she thought, studying her two children absorbed in their apple peeling and slicing, Molly and Daniel were certainly learning something new! Not only that, she acknowledged, they weren’t squirming or whining to go play outside.
Cord must have threatened them with something. In just two days, this man who’d ridden in from God knows where, and about whom she knew absolutely nothing, had tamed her over-curious son and her lively daughter, and that was a miracle if there ever was one.
She trusted Cord Winterman, and she had to wonder why. She was no green girl, one who was easily bowled over by a handsome face and skill with a hammer. In all the years she’d been alone, she had never hungered for male company. She knew this was a source of gossip and speculation on the part of the townspeople, and it was definitely cause for frustration on the part of the parade of men who brought supplies and mail and news from town and dropped broad hints about staying for supper. None of them had ever set foot in her kitchen, or sat at her supper table, or anywhere else inside the house. She wasn’t interested, and until this moment she had never wondered why.
Isaiah, the old hired man she’d had for years, had rarely even spoken to her children, let alone taught them anything. Isaiah had been lazy and inept and dull-witted, but she’d been desperate for help and for all his shortcomings, she had trusted him around Danny and Molly. When the crotchety old man had moved on, she wasn’t sorry, but then she’d fallen ill.
But this man, Cord Winterman, was a different kind of fish. He made her children sit up and take notice. He made her sit up and take notice. He made her wonder about things. Why, for instance, was he content to work as just a hired man when it was plain he was capable of so much more? Where had he come from? Where was he going? She should have demanded answers to these questions, but somehow when he had appeared at her front door, all the questions had flown out of her head.
She watched him sprinkle flour over the breadboard, divide his pie dough into four equal parts and search for her rolling pin. So he was making not just one but two pies!
The man knew his way around a kitchen, and she couldn’t help but wonder whose kitchen it had been in his past.
He let Danny and then Molly try their hand at rolling out the crust. Then he took over, rolled it thin and expertly laid it in the tin pie pan. He showed Danny again how to roll out the next bottom crust, and then they all heaped in handfuls of sliced apples and brown sugar. Brown sugar? She never used brown sugar in apple pie! And then he added bits of butter and...cheese? Cheese! Whatever was he thinking?
When he slashed the top crusts and slid the filled tins into the oven, the children clapped their hands and Cord half turned toward her. A flour smudge marked one cheek and his apron was spotted with something, but he sent her a grin that curled her toes. Even from here she could see the triumphant light in those unnervingly blue eyes.
Suddenly she wished she had some whiskey in her coffee cup.
Chapter Five (#ub3a4fbdf-f875-5b82-a0cf-8c3bd12de7ef)
Cord knew she was watching his every move, assessing him, judging him. Eleanor resented his presence in her kitchen, rooting around in her pantry and in the cutlery drawers. But she wanted an apple pie, didn’t she? If there was one thing he’d learned in this life, it was that you don’t get something for nothing. No rooting around in a pantry, no apple pie.
He worked on, trying to ignore her, and trying to ignore the undercurrent of pleasure he felt knowing that her eyes were following every move he made. It made his chest feel as hot inside as he felt outside in the stifling kitchen with the roaring fire in the stove heating up the oven.
While the pies baked, the children drifted out the back door to play in the yard and Cord warmed up the coffee, poured two cups and carried them into the parlor, where Eleanor sat.
She looked up at him with a strange expression on her pale face. He sucked in his breath and waited.
“You’re not just a hired man, are you?” she said. “I mean, that’s not what you did before I hired you, is it?”
“I’m a hired man here,” he said carefully. “I’m not sure what I’d be somewhere else.”
She reached for his offered cup of coffee, then glanced up again. “Do you have plans for ‘somewhere else’?”
He gave her such a long look that she lowered her eyes.
“I was planning to go to California, to the gold fields.”
“What stopped you?”
He didn’t answer for a long time, just focused his gaze out the window on the apple orchard. “To be honest, I wouldn’t have stopped here if I hadn’t been so hungry, even though I’d seen your advert in town. But then I came up on that little hill and saw all those apple trees covered with lacy white blossoms. Kinda made my heart feel funny, so I stopped and...well, you know the rest.”
She paused with her cup halfway to her mouth. “How long will you stay?”
“It’s April now,” he said slowly. “I thought I’d give it five months, say ’til August, before I move on.”
“Very good. Doc Dougherty tells me I should be completely well and strong long before August.”
“Yeah? You gonna chop wood and hitch up the horse and drive that wagon to town and muck out your barn by yourself? You need some help out here, ma’am. Even if I’m not going to be here, you should have a hired man to help out.”
She gave him a half smile and sipped her coffee for a full minute before she spoke. “I chopped wood and mucked out the barn before I fell ill, Mr. Winterman. I have been on my own here for almost seven years, ever since Molly was born.”
Cord studied her. Her cheeks were getting pink. “It’s too hard for a woman alone. That’s most likely why you got sick.”
“That is pure nonsense. I got sick because I fell in the creek while I was chasing the cow and took a chill. A week later it turned into pneumonia.”
He stood up suddenly. Dammit, he didn’t want to concern himself with her well-being. He didn’t want to like her kids, and he didn’t want to like her. But he did. And he had to admit it scared the hell out of him.
“Think I’ll check on the pies,” he growled. He moved into the kitchen and bent over the oven door, and when he returned he brought the coffeepot and filled her cup. He didn’t look at her. But he did ask the question that had been niggling in the back of his mind.
“Do you and your husband own this place free and clear?”
“I own it. I removed Tom’s name from the deed when he...when he left home to go off to war. It’s been seven years now, and he is considered legally dead.”
“You said you had a hired man before you hired me.”
“Yes. Isaiah. As I told you, he didn’t do much.”
“Why’d you keep him, then?”
“He needed a place to stay and I needed someone to help about the farm. Molly was just a baby then, and Danny was too little to be much help.”
“How’d you manage after this hired man, Isaiah, left?”
“I managed,” she said in a quiet voice.
“And then you got sick,” he observed dryly.
She took a swallow of her coffee. “Well, yes I did. Doc Dougherty came, and he sent a woman out from town, Helen, I think her name was, to nurse me and take care of Molly and Daniel. She stayed until I was strong enough to get out of bed. I am growing stronger with every day that passes.”
“Mrs. Malloy. Eleanor,” he amended. “Seems to me you’re just hangin’ on by a thread. You’ve got two kids. You owe it to them to take better care of yourself. That means no more milking and no chopping wood.”
She pressed her lips into a thin line but said nothing.
Cord studied the rigid set of her shoulders and the white-knuckled grip she had on the handle of her china cup. “I get the feeling you don’t take orders too well.”
She gave him a wobbly smile. “You are most likely correct. I was a great trial to my parents.”
That made him laugh out loud. “I bet you’re still plenty stubborn when it comes to doing things your own way.”
“Oh, maybe just a little.” Her cheeks turned an even deeper shade of rose.
“Maybe you’re more than a little stubborn,” he said. “Maybe a lot stubborn.”
“Oh, all right, maybe I’m a lot stubborn.” By now her cheeks were flushed scarlet. “Now that you’re here, I will take better care of myself. Especially,” she said with a little bubble of laughter, “since you can bake an apple pie. Which,” she added with an impish grin, “you have quite forgotten is still in the oven.”
Instantly he wheeled away from her and strode into the kitchen. The pies were not burned, as he had feared, just nicely baked. He grabbed potholders and lifted them out of the oven. Oh, man, they looked just right, golden brown on top with rich juice bubbling out the vents he’d slashed in the crust. They smelled wonderful! He was damn proud of them.
Eleanor followed him into the kitchen, cup and saucer still in her hand. “Who taught you to make a pie? Your mother?”
“No,” he said shortly.
She looked at him with another question in her eyes, but he ignored it. Best not to dig around in those long-past years. No good ever came from opening a wound that had healed over.
He set both pies on the open windowsill to cool and stacked the mixing bowl and the paring knives in the sink for the kids to wash up after supper. Eleanor returned to the parlor, where she curled up on the settee and gazed out the front window.
“You don’t like talking to me, do you?” she asked suddenly.
Whoa, Nelly. How’d she figure that?
“Why is that?” she pursued, her eyes on his face.
“Guess I haven’t been around many ladies lately.”
“Silence is perfectly all right with me,” she went on. “I spent years and years not being talked to.”
She closed her eyes against the late-afternoon sun’s glare, and that gave him a chance to really look at her. Her lids were purplish with blue-black smudges shadowing her eyes. She might not be sick anymore, but she was obviously exhausted.
So even if she was as stubborn as three ornery mules, now she had a hired man to help her. He drew in a long, quiet breath. For the first time in longer than he could remember he felt needed.
And that, he thought with a silent groan, made him nervous.
* * *
The kids raced through their supper of biscuits and something Eleanor called bean stew, which as near as he could figure out was last night’s baked beans with cut-up carrots and potatoes added. Tasted good, though.
His apple pie was received with oohs and aahs. Even Eleanor wanted a second piece.
“Ma, Miz Panovsky says we’re gonna have Student Night at school on Saturday.”
Eleanor looked up from the table. “Oh?”
“You gonna come? You were too sick the last time.”
“Well, yes,” she said quickly. “Of course I’m going to come, Danny. I’m much stronger now.”
Cord thought the boy looked somewhat unsettled at that.
