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“Of course I do, Avram. Now calm down before you give yourself indigestion.”
“Indigestion? I shall thank the good Lord if I don’t succumb to apoplexy this very night.”
“Then you must remind me to give you two doses of your elixir before you leave, Avram. Is the arrangement suitable, Mr. Stark?”
Rance didn’t spare Halsey the merest glance. Nor did Jessica. “Fine, ma’am.”
“Good heavens, Jessica. Do you realize you’re all but conducting business with a perfect stranger in your private—?”
“I’ll start supper, then,” she said crisply, brushing past Avram, with Christian clinging at her heels.
“Jessica!” Halsey bellowed down the hall, his face mottled with rage. His color only deepened when Rance ducked through the doorway. Halsey shifted his shoulders, purposely blocking Rance’s path. “And where the devil are you going, Stark?”
Rance slanted the shorter man a hooded look. “To the barn, Halsey. Or would you rather I remain here in Jessica’s bedroom? The floor is remarkably comfortable.”
Halsey shook so with his rage, a well-oiled lock of hair spilled over his forehead. “Jessica!” he yelled in Rance’s wake. “I shan’t stand for it! You shall be my wife in a scant few months. And goodly wives must obey their husbands. It’s the Lord’s word. Do you hear me, Jessica? This outlaw shall not sleep one night in my barn. Jessica? Do you hear me?”
She was staring from the kitchen window, a large potato clenched in one fist, her other hand gently stroking her son’s head. Rance could almost feel the tender loving emanating from her fingertips, the silent emotion flowing between mother and son. Rance grew acutely aware that he wished he could remember the same gentle mother’s touch upon his brow, making the world right for him.
Only when Rance bumped into the table on his way out the door did Jessica glance at him. He had to pause then, his hand clasped about the loose doorknob, when the hint of a curve softened her mouth just as the afternoon sunlight spilled over mother and child like warm honey.
He shoved the door wide. Hot sun slapped his forehead. Heat and dust wrapped around him, and he strode to the barn with a foreign sense of determination blossoming in his gut.
* * *
The back door slammed. “He’s gone,” Christian said, and poked one finger into a bowl of blackberries.
Jessica froze between table and stove and clutched a damp rag to her belly. She stared at her son’s chubby finger sifting through the freshly washed fruit and listened to the heightened thumping of her pulse. “Who’s gone?” she asked slowly.
Christian grabbed a fistful of berries and shoved them all into his mouth. “Rrvrrnnn Allseee.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Jessica said, an odd relief spilling through her limbs. Relief...that Avram had finally given up the fight for the evening, of course, and that he had managed to remove himself from the farm without pausing to engage in fisticuffs with a wounded Logan Stark.
Avram had declined her offer to stay for dinner. She’d felt it then, too, this relief, particularly when he’d given her his typical swift passing of his dry lips over her cheek. Always the same, that farewell kiss, no matter the time of day or their mood. Reliable, that was her Avram. Dependable, if a bit steeped in moral self-consciousness. A fine quality in a husband, one Jessica could appreciate only now, after experiencing the true depths of Frank’s deception.
“Wash up, Christian.” Her fingers wrapped about Christian’s tiny wrist, just as it was poised again over the fruit. “Not before supper. Where are your shoes?”
He blinked at her through his bangs. Never guilt or remorse there, just a simple stating of the facts, the irrefutable conviction that she, the female, would be left to see to the righting of things. She knew precisely what he was going to say. “I don’t know where my shoes are.”
“Find them before you step on something.”
“I can’t. I’m too hungry.”
Jessica released a weary breath and turned to retrieve a large iron pot simmering on the stove. “Then set the table for me...after you wash up.”
Christian scooted a chair to the wash pump, clambered onto it, and pumped vigorously until water splashed everywhere. “Is Mr. Stark going to eat with us? I think he’s hungry.”
“Of course he is....” She placed the pot of soup upon the table and thrust a rag at Christian the precise moment he wiped his hands dry on his dirt-smudged shirt. “Hungry, that is,” she said. Her gaze found the ladder-back chair opposite, the chair left vacant for over a year now. Her husband Frank’s chair. Avram refused to sit in it. Even Christian, who on any given day preferred to venture from chair to chair for his meals, never once gave that particular chair his consideration.
Stark’s shoulders would surely fill this small kitchen. She wondered how much a man of his size would eat, how those long legs would fit beneath this table. They’d reach clear beneath her own chair. No, it wouldn’t do to have the man dine here, with them.
The now seemingly insignificant pot of vegetable soup jarred against the table when Christian plunked three bowls next to the pot. Again she stilled his hand as it inched toward the blackberries.
“No,” she said. “I’ll take his dinner out to him. Set the table for two, Christian.”
“But, Mama—”
“Napkins on the left.”
“I know.” With his tongue curling out of his mouth, Christian folded the cloth napkins and placed them to the right of the stoneware plates. “He has a big horse, Mama. It’s black.”
“Imagine that,” she replied, repositioning the napkins on the left.
“It’s in the barn with him. I’m gonna ride it.”
“I don’t believe you will.”
“We can hitch it to our broken wagon.”
“We’ll get our own horse soon and hitch it to the buckboard, after Reverend Halsey fixes it.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“You always say that. Soon. Is that when Reverend Halsey is gonna be my pa?”
The ladle poised over the pot. “Yes, I suppose it is. Quite soon.”
Christian thrust out his chin. “Then we’ll never get a horse, because Reverend Halsey doesn’t like them. He says they smell.”
“And he’s right. They do smell. That’s why they live in the barn with the other animals.”
“Mr. Stark doesn’t smell.”
Yes, he did...like baked leather and warm male skin. Her arms went suddenly weak. The ladle banged against the bottom of the pot. “No...I mean, he...” All words left her.
Christian frowned up at her through his bangs. “So why does he have to sleep in the barn?”
The ladle stirred and stirred. Jessica sought her words from the swirling soup and found nothing but a heightened thumping of her pulse.
“He could sleep on the floor in your room, Mama. He’s too big for the bed.”
“Stop it, Christian,” she snapped suddenly. Too suddenly, her voice brimming with an odd agitation. Regret flooded through her even before she could reach out a hand to caress that blond head. But Christian seemed to shrug off her mood in his typical fashion. In another instant, his finger inched toward the blackberries. This time, perhaps because of her regret, she didn’t stop him, and directed all her thoughts to ladling the steaming soup. She watched the characteristic scrunching of Christian’s nose as he glowered at the soup and then his gaze darted to the stove, seeking. Would this ritual never cease?
“Mama—”
“You’re eating the soup, Christian.”
“But, Mama—”
“Sit.”
“Can I eat with Mr. Stark in the barn?”
“Mama wants you to eat with her. Here. Now sit.”
He thrust out his lower lip and slid half on, half off the chair. One bare foot kicked belligerently at the table leg. He scowled into his bowl and pushed his spoon around with his thumb. “It’s too hot. I can’t eat it.”
“Blow on it.” Jessica eased into the chair next to his and felt the blood drain from her legs. She hadn’t been off her feet since sunup. Her dress hung heavy with dust and a day’s perspiration. Even muscles she’d had no idea she possessed cried out for a long soak in a warm tub of water. If only she wouldn’t have to haul it from the well, and heat it, and haul it again to her wooden tub.
“Aren’t you going to take Mr. Stark his dinner?”
“Oh.”
Christian sprang from his chair before she could move. “I’ll do it!”
“Sit.” Jessica curled her son’s fingers around his spoon and glared at him over her pointed index finger. “Eat. I’ll tend to Mr. Stark.”
“I wanted to,” Christian grumbled into his soup.
“I don’t believe Mr. Stark is the sort a young boy like you should be tending to, Christian.” Carefully she arranged the soup and utensils on a wooden platter. “We know very little about him, after all.”
“He’s a stranger, isn’t he, Mama?”
Her gaze slid to the window and beyond, where the barn crouched in dusky shadows. Somewhere within, Stark lurked in the shadows, as well, with his horse, his knife, perhaps a gun.
“Strangers are mean.”
“Not all strangers,” Jessica replied.
“Mr. Stark’s not.”
“No, I don’t suppose he is.”
“He’s gonna stay because you shot him, right, Mama? And you shouldn’t have shot him, right?”
A frown quivered along her brows as she sought the best possible explanation.
“I think you just wanted to make Reverend Halsey mad. Because he won’t help us fix our barn and our wagon, right, Mama? That’s why, right?”
Jessica glared at her son, then snatched up the bowl of blackberries and several cloth napkins, wondering at the unease stirring within her. “Mr. Stark is seeking work, Christian. I’ve hired him on. He’s going to fix our barn and the house, and then he’s going to leave.”
Twin blue saucers blinked at her. “So he’s not a stranger.”
“I still don’t want you bothering the man, Christian.”
“You like him, don’t you, Mama?”
A disturbing heat spread through Jessica’s cheeks. “I don’t know him well enough to like or dislike him, Christian, or to trust him. And neither do you. Now eat.”
Christian gave a shrug, plunged his spoon into his soup and gobbled it down. “Good dinner, Mama.”
She gave her son a last glower that couldn’t help but dissolve into a weary smile. And then she turned and headed for the barn.
* * *
Rance watched her from the moment she stepped foot from the house. Concealed by the lengthening shadows, he sat propped against a bale of hay in one corner of the barn. The air hung thick and heavy with a day’s worth of dust and the smell of his horse and his own sun-baked flesh. Through a four-inch gap in the barn’s wall planks, he’d watched the sun set over a bleak and barren horizon and listened to the sounds of dusk as would one who’d grown accustomed to the peculiar comfort the trill of a cricket provided. Comforts were few, after all, for a man on the run, a man alone. It had been that way for him for so long now, eighteen years long. His past had become one long, dusty tableau. Crickets had come to be enough on most nights, when light proved insufficient for reading.
But now, watching Jessica Wynne moving toward him, a reed-slender, womanly shadow, he knew a stirring so deep his fists balled, sending a stab of pain through his left shoulder and a reminder that he was crushing Frank Wynne’s gold locket in his other fist. Some sound must have escaped him, for she paused just as she entered the barn. It was an indecisive pause, as if she feared something here.
No, he didn’t want that. Never that.
He stuffed the locket into his watch pocket. “Ma’am—” He lurched to his feet, out of the shadows and into the arc of soft light emitted by the kerosene lantern she held.
She didn’t retreat a step, though she looked like she wanted to when her gaze widened and drifted over his bare chest. He imagined her back drew up as rigid and brittle as a dried-up twig. Thin fingers clutched at the platter she carried, and her breath seemed trapped in her chest. Her breasts pushed full and high against worn gray muslin.
He swallowed, his throat thick and bone-dry. Damn him for coming here, for every twisted fool’s reason he’d given himself to stay. Beneath it all, and not too far beneath it, he was a man, and as any man’s would, his body responded to hers, to the heat and the darkness and intimacy of this desolate farm, before conscience could tell him otherwise.
“I brought you supper,” she said, her fingers still gripping the platter as though she dared not let it go.
“Soup,” he said. He watched the steam rise from the bowl. Hot soup on a hot, dry Kansas evening. He knew he’d eat it all and sweat the night away on his thick bedroll. All that was left in his saddlebags was stale bacon wrapped in cheesecloth, and coffee. “Thank you, ma’am.”
Her eyes flickered to his bandaged shoulder. “I should see to that.”
“Can I eat first?”
“Oh, yes, yes, of course.” She glanced about, apparently unsure which bale of hay was best to serve as a table, until he reached for the platter. His fingers brushed over hers and curled securely around the wood. Their gazes locked.
He arched a brow. “Care to join me?”
She released the platter into his hands as if it were suddenly aflame. Color bloomed in her cheeks, and he wondered how many men she’d known in her lifetime. Not many, judging by her discomfort. Her fists suddenly took a death grip on her skirts.
“I...” She waved a hand in a vague direction and seemed incapable of looking him in the eye.
“Ah. You don’t regularly dine in the barn with men you shoot.”
That prompted a glare. “I’ve never shot anyone.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Have you?”
He set the platter upon two stacked bales and straddled another. He glanced at her, aware that her heavy-soled shoes shuffled nervously upon the hay-strewn floor. “An odd question, ma’am, given that you’ve hired me on and fixed me a fine dinner. What is it you’re curious about? My ability to defend you and your son, or my evil intentions here? I thought we were beyond that.”
She jutted her chin at him. “A woman can’t be too careful when she lives alone. Indeed, one can’t help but cringe at the tales of horror and pillaging common to the taming of the frontier. I’m still not quite used to it, even after twenty-two years.”
“You should have asked if I owned a gun, then.”
