The Hired Man

Chapter Seven

“It must be wonderful to be young and pretty,” Eleanor said at last. She kept her voice down so Molly and Danny in the back of the wagon couldn’t hear.

“It’s wonderful to be young, for sure,” Cord said. “Don’t know about being ‘pretty.’”

“Men don’t worry about ‘pretty.’ Women do.”

“Are you jealous of Fanny Moreland?”

Eleanor jerked. Oh, Cord could be so maddeningly blunt! No, she wasn’t jealous of Fanny. She did envy her boldness, though. She was jealous of Fanny’s youth. She acknowledged that she had squandered her own, trying to be a good mother to Danny and Molly and struggling to keep her farm going through winter storms and scorching summers that left vegetable seedlings dried up as soon as they sprouted. Now she was thin and tired and...not young anymore.

And she envied Fanny Moreland’s health.

“Cord, do you ever wish you could be young again?”

He surprised her with a harsh laugh. “Young and what, handsome? Rich? Smart?” He thought for a moment. “Yeah, I wish I was young enough to live some parts of my life over again.”

“What parts?”

He didn’t answer. She regretted her question the instant she uttered it; it was none of her business. Then after a tense minute or two of silence he surprised her by answering.

“Maybe getting married. Getting shot during the War.” He let out a long breath. “Killing a man.”

She gasped. “You killed a man?”

“I killed more than one in the War, Eleanor.”

The tone of his voice made her wish she had never asked.

Cord glanced quickly into the back of the wagon, where both Eleanor’s children were asleep. “Tell me about Fanny Moreland,” he said. He held his breath. It was obvious Eleanor didn’t like her. But he didn’t want to talk about his wife.

“Oh, Fanny.” Eleanor shifted on the bench next to him. “I guess it’s sad, really. Fanny is from the South. New Orleans, I think. She lives with her aunt, Ike Bruhn’s wife, Ernestine. And Ike, of course.”

“Why is that sad?”

“Well, Fanny has pots of money she inherited from her father. About three years ago she was jilted, left at the altar by a man Ernestine said was just after her fortune. Her father sent her out West to get her away from the city.”

Cord laughed. “Smoke River’s about as far from ‘a city’ as one can get.”

“Fanny has no use for small towns, and she is desperately looking for some man to spirit her away from here to a big city. Any big city.”

Cord made a noncommittal noise in his throat.

“Why?” Eleanor asked. “Are you interested in Fanny?”

“Not much. She doesn’t look like the type who’d be too interested in panning for gold in a California mining camp.”

“How do you know?”

He chuckled. “Too many expensive ruffles.”

Eleanor laughed out loud, and Cord shot her a look.

“You feeling better now that this school shindig is over?”

She nodded, but he noticed she was still twisting her hands together in her lap. He flapped the reins over the gray’s back and picked up the pace. After a moment he slowed the horse down again. Something had been crawling at the back of his mind for the last few days.

“You said that Mrs. Halliday’s first husband was killed in the War. Are you sure that’s what happened to Mr. Malloy?”

She didn’t answer for a long time, and before she did she checked to make sure Molly and Danny were asleep. “I—I don’t honestly know what happened to Tom. If he had been killed, you would think they would notify the next of kin.”

“Maybe. Maybe they didn’t know where to find you.”

“How could they not know? I’ve lived on this farm since before the War.”

“Or maybe,” he said with studied calm, “he’s not dead.” He shot a look at her. Her face changed, but not in the way he expected. Her mouth thinned into a straight line, and she stared down at her clenched hands.

He couldn’t blame her. “I guess you don’t want to talk about your husband.”

“And you don’t want to talk about your wife,” she replied.

“Ex-wife. She divorced me after I—did something I lived to regret.”

He sucked in a breath and let it out in an uneven sigh.

“Oh, Cord,” she breathed. “I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“Don’t be sorry, Eleanor. I’m not.”

In silence he drove up to the gate, climbed down to unlatch it, then guided the rattling wooden wagon up to the front porch. Molly popped up behind them. “Are we home?”

“Yes, we’re home,” Eleanor said. “Wake up Danny.”

Cord lifted both sleepy children out of the wagon bed and carried them up the front steps. Then he returned and reached up for Eleanor. He half expected her to stiffen up and brush past him and climb down by herself, but she let him circle her waist with his hands and swing her down to the ground.

“I’ll drive the wagon around in back of the barn, so I’ll say good-night now. It’s been an...interesting evening.”

Again he glimpsed that half-amused expression on her pale face. “Good night, Cord. I’m making French toast for breakfast tomorrow, so don’t be late.”

French toast? What in blazes is that?

She herded the kids through the front door screen and he heard them clatter up the staircase. He waited, but he didn’t hear the click of the lock on the front door. Was she crazy? Way out here with two kids and a revolver she didn’t know how to fire and she didn’t lock her front door at night?

He shook his head and climbed back onto the wagon bench. He’d argue it over with her tomorrow morning while eating her “French toast.”

* * *

Somehow Eleanor guessed Cord wouldn’t know what to make of French toast. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing a man like Cordell Winterman would eat, and she was certain sure it would never have been served on trail drives in Kansas. If, she thought with a dart of unease, that’s how he’d spent his time after the War. He’d never really said.

Molly and Danny waited patiently while she dipped the slices of day-old bread in the milk-and-egg mixture and plopped them onto the hot iron griddle. Before the first slice was ready to turn, she heard Cord tramp up the front steps.

But when he stepped into the kitchen she could tell something was wrong.

Chapter Eight

“Good morning,” Eleanor said.

“Morning,” Cord grumbled.

Well! That wasn’t like Cord at all! Usually he grinned at Molly and ruffled Danny’s shaggy hair.

“Morning, Cord,” her children sang in unison. “Hurry up,” Danny added. “We’re about to starve.”

He sat down heavily and tilted the chair back. “Eleanor?”

Her stomach turned over. He sounded angry about something, but what? She flipped the French toast slices onto a platter and set it down before him. “Yes, Cord? What is it?”

“Your front door,” he said tersely.

Danny pounced on the platter, speared a slice with his fork and flopped it onto his plate.

“What about the front door?” she inquired as she laid three more slices onto the griddle.

“Ma, we got any syrup or honey?”

“What? Oh, yes. In the pantry, Danny. Why don’t you fetch it? It’s on the middle shelf.” Maybe Cord would forget about the front door. She watched him stab his fork into a slice of nicely browned French toast.

Or maybe not.

“Your front door...” He paused to dribble the honey Danny had found over his plate.

“Yes? What about my front door?” Her appetite was fast fading. The expression on his face was... Thunderous was the only way she could use to describe it. Like clouds before a storm. A bad storm.

She couldn’t stand this suspense one more minute. “Just what is wrong with my front door, Cord?” It came out sounding more strident than she’d intended, but it certainly got his attention. She sat down across from him, folded her hands on the table and waited.

“The door...” he said between bites of honey-slathered French toast “...should be...” He chewed and swallowed and cut another bite.

“Should be what?” she said, her voice tight.

He looked up from his plate with narrowed blue eyes. “Should be locked at night.”

“Locked! Why, I’ve never locked the door in all my years on this farm! Nobody locks their door out here in Smoke River.”

“Eleanor,” he grated. “I’m asking you to lock the door at night.”

“Why? Give me one good reason and maybe, maybe, I will consider it.”

Cord sent her a hard look. “Molly and Daniel,” he said. “That’s two good reasons. And you. That’s three reasons.”

Eleanor stared at him like he had green cabbages for ears.

“That’s ridiculous,” she shot out.

“No, it isn’t,” he shot right back. “We’ll continue this discussion after the kids finish breakfast.”

Danny straightened up in his chair. “But we gotta stay and do the dishes!”

“I’ll do the damn dishes!” Cord shouted. Danny and Molly gaped at him, their eyes widening. Eleanor’s eyes narrowed. He reached out his fork for another slice of French toast and found his hand was shaking. Yeah, he was het up about her front door, but maybe he was madder than he thought. Very rarely did he allow any anger he might feel to show on the outside. It was one of the hard lessons he’d learned in prison.

Maybe that was why he’d just drifted when he got out. He hadn’t wanted to get involved with anything that made him feel anger or desperation or...anything much at all. There was safety in being numb.

“Very well,” she said primly. She pointedly removed his empty coffee cup from the table.

He pushed back his chair, stood up and grabbed the speckleware coffeepot off the stove. Then he grabbed his cup out of her hand, sloshed it full and sat down again.

Eleanor’s frown etched deep lines into her forehead. “Cord, what is wrong with you this morning?”

Cord caught Danny’s eye. “Kids?” He tipped his head toward the back door. “Outside.”

“C’mon, Molly. Let’s go find the kittens.”

“No! I wanna see what’s gonna happen.”

Danny blinked at his sister. “Molly,” he whispered. “What do you think’s gonna happen?”

“I think he’s gonna spank Mama!”

Eleanor made an involuntary jerk, shooed both children out the back door and moved toward the sink. When the door slammed shut, she sat back down and stared at her folded hands, waiting until Cord looked at her.

“It’s not the door, is it? It’s something else.”

He clamped his jaw shut. “Well,” he said after a long minute, “it is and it isn’t.”

“All right,” she said as patiently as she could manage. “What is and isn’t it?”

Cord swallowed a double gulp of coffee and pushed the cup around and around in a circle on the table. “I think...”

He made an effort to keep his voice calm. Stay rational. Don’t let too much show. “I don’t care what people in Smoke River do. I think you should lock your front door at night.”

She just stared at him, her eyes looking more like hard agates every second.

“And the back door,” he added. “You’ve got no way of knowing who might come snooping around, Eleanor. You’ve lived a very protected life.”

“This is something you learned at some point from people who weren’t exactly honest.”

“That’s partly true. The rest I learned just living somewhere that’s not a little town like Smoke River. This place is...well, it’s like a little bit of heaven. Peaceful and quiet. Nothing much goes wrong here unless it’s some mercantile store getting painted pink. Most places aren’t like this.”

She sat without moving for so long he thought maybe she hadn’t heard him. Then she absentmindedly reached for his coffee cup and downed a big swallow. “All this upset is about locking my doors?” An unexpected little spurt of laughter escaped her. “The children think you’re going to spank me!”

He chuckled at that. “Maybe I would if I thought I could catch you.”

He rescued his cup from her fingers and stood up to pour some coffee for her. Before he set it down in front of her he reached for the brandy bottle she kept on the top shelf of the china cabinet and dolloped some of the liquor into her cup.

* * *

Monday morning Cord decided he needed to go into town for another pound of nails and some hinges, and he timed his trip so he’d be riding back when Danny would be walking home from school. He had an idea. He knew Eleanor wouldn’t like it, but it was a good idea anyway.

Sure enough, half a mile after he left the mercantile he spied the boy trudging along the dusty road, his satchel slung over one drooping shoulder.

“Hold up, Danny.” Cord reined up his bay mare and waited. The boy looked up and his dusty, heat-flushed face broke into a tired smile.

“Didn’t know you was comin’ to town today, Cord. You see that Miss Fanny lady at the mercantile?”

“Nope. Wasn’t looking for Miss Fanny. Bought some nails and some sugar for your ma. Glad I ran into you, though.”

“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?”

Cord leaned down and spoke quietly. “Thought you might fancy a ride on Sally here.”

Danny’s eyes lit up. “Oh, boy, would I? You mean it?”

“I never say things I don’t mean, son. Now just hold on a minute, all right?” Before the boy could say another word he slipped out of the saddle and was unbuckling the cinch.

“You ready to ride her?”

“Can’t. Ma won’t let me.”

“Maybe your ma won’t know about it.”

Danny frowned up at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Like I said, Dan, I never say things I don’t mean.” He lifted his saddle off and hefted it onto his shoulder.

“Golly, Cord, I don’t know.”

“Thought you wanted to learn to ride,” Cord said.

“Oh, I sure do, but—”

“No buts.”

Danny bit his lower lip in exactly the same way Eleanor bit hers. “How come you took the saddle off?”

“Because first you’re gonna learn to ride bareback. The saddle comes later.”

The boy dropped his book satchel in the dust and reached up to touch the mare’s nose. “H’lo, Sally. Gosh, you’re real handsome, and...” All at once he looked doubtful. “How am I gonna get up there without a stirrup?”

“Indian boys don’t use saddles or stirrups. How do you think they do it?”

“They... I bet they stand on something so’s they can reach.”

Cord shifted the saddle so he could make a foothold with his hands. “Step here,” he ordered. “Now, grab some of the mane and haul yourself up.” He watched the boy hold tight to a fistful of mane and clamber onto Sally’s broad back.

When he was sitting upright, he sent Cord a triumphant smile. “What do I do now?”

“Squeeze your knees right around her belly and let go of her mane. Then pick up the reins. You won’t fall off if you keep your knees tight.”

“O-okay. My knees are squeezin’ like anything and I’m gonna let go of all this hair.” He lifted one hand a scant inch from Sally’s thick mane, then gingerly freed the other and grabbed the leather lines.

“Now,” Cord said, “give her a little nudge with your heel.”

“Can’t,” Danny announced.

“Why not?”

“I’m scared she’ll move!”

Cord chuckled. “That’s what you want her to do, Dan. Try it.”

The horse moved ahead a single step and Danny yelped. “Hell, Cord, she’s moving!”

“Watch your mouth, son. There are some things I will tell your ma about.”

“S-sorry.” He patted the mare’s neck. “Sorry, Sally.”

Cord bit back a grin, turned away and headed down the road. “You know how to make her go,” he called over his shoulder. “If you want her to stop just pull back on the reins and say ‘whoa.’”

“Hell—Golly, Cord, I don’t know...”

But after a moment Cord heard the unmistakable clop-clop of Sally’s hooves on the road behind him. He dropped back to walk alongside the mounted boy and tried to remember how he’d felt the first time he’d ever felt a horse move under him. Scared. Proud. All “growed-up,” as Danny put it.

Well before they reached the turnoff to the farm, Cord raised his hand and the boy brought the mare to a halt and slipped off. “You gonna mount up like you just rode in from town?”

“Nope.” He grasped the reins and walked alongside Danny until they reached the farm. He motioned the boy to open the gate and walked the horse through.

“Won’t Ma think it’s strange, you walkin’ and carryin’ your saddle like that?”

“Probably. But your ma thinks a lot of the things I do are strange, like wanting her to lock the doors at night.”

Danny chortled. “And baking pies.”

They both laughed all the way into the barn.

Chapter Nine

The sound of insistent hammering stopped conversation on the porch, for which Eleanor was extremely grateful. Red Wilkins looked up from the glass of lemonade she had just poured. “Whazzat?”

She always made sure Red had a full glass; he talked less when he was guzzling his lemonade. “My hired man is repairing the barn roof.”

Silas Maginnis nudged his spectacles down and peered over the thick lenses at the barn. “Hope he knows what he’s doing, Miss Eleanor. Can’t be too careful about hired help these days.”

She gritted her teeth. “More lemonade, Silas?” Silently she prayed the hammering would resume and the conversation with her two unwanted callers would stop. She could hardly wait.

“He’s workin’ on the Sabbath, too,” Red observed. Mighty un-Christian-like.”

Silas nodded his shiny bald head. “Mighty unhelpful, too, makin’ all that clatter while we’re out here on your porch tryin’ to be sociable.”

At that, Eleanor almost laughed aloud. Please, she silently begged Cord. Make some more clatter. Lots more. She settled back into the porch swing and pushed it into motion with her foot. She hated being sociable.

For the hundredth time this spring she wondered why Silas and Red and the half dozen other young men from town bothered to bring her supplies or her mail or the town gossip or come calling, since for all they knew she was a married woman. Since she had never received word of Tom’s death, in many ways she considered that she was still married, even though Judge Silver in town said that technically she wasn’t.

She had never given even one hint of encouragement to the stream of male visitors from town, and she often wondered why they didn’t give up and stop coming. They couldn’t possibly be interested in her. Or maybe, she thought with sudden misgiving, it was not her they were interested in, but her farm?

She checked the lemonade level in their glasses and tried to close her ears to the debate about whether goats were easier to raise than sheep. Reciting the multiplication table would be more interesting than this conversation!

Her gaze drifted up to the barn roof, where Cord was pounding nails into a long piece of wood. It was hot this afternoon, the sun relentless and the breeze absent. Bees hummed in the lilac bush, and somewhere a mockingbird trilled and twittered an ever-changing song.

Eleanor is bored, it seemed to sing. Bored, bored, bored!

From his vantage point on the barn roof Cord had a bird’s-eye view of the activity on the front porch. He flipped the new board over and paused to study the two visitors Eleanor was entertaining. Town types. Pressed creases in their trousers, boots polished to a shine, shirts starched so stiff they could stand up by themselves. The fellow with the spectacles had brought the mail out from town; the other gent had brought a tin of fancy chocolates, which he was devouring along with his lemonade.

Molly had fled to the barn to play with the kittens. Danny had groomed Cord’s bay mare and was now lounging around the yard playing marbles with himself. Cord positioned another two-by-six to replace a rotted plank and set a nail in place. He had just raised his hammer when Eleanor’s suddenly upturned face made him check his motion.

She picked up the lemonade pitcher, pointed her forefinger at it and raised her eyebrows at him. Did he want some lemonade?

Sure he did. But she was down there on the porch and he was up here on the roof, so he shook his head. A look of resignation crossed her face, and she turned her attention back to her visitors.

He had to laugh. It was plain she wasn’t enjoying this social call, but he had to wonder why the men lounging on her porch didn’t take the hint.

In the next minute he figured it out. They wanted something. Cold lemonade on a hot day? Female attention? The goodwill earned by bringing offerings of mail or chocolates or spools of thread from town?

His hammer slowed. Or maybe they wanted her?

He drove the waiting nail home in a single blow. When he positioned the next one, he purposely shifted his body around so his back was facing the front porch and he couldn’t see her. But he could still hear the continuous drone of the two male voices. Made him clench his jaw.

Eleanor didn’t seem to be saying much, and that was kinda odd. Wasn’t an afternoon social call an occasion for give-and-take conversation? As far as he could tell, this afternoon was all “take” by the two gents but no “give” from Eleanor.

He stopped pounding in nails and strained his ears to hear her voice. Nothing. Either he was going deaf or she wasn’t saying anything. What, exactly, was going on down there?

It’s none of your business, Winterman.

True. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t interested. He thought that over for a full minute, then corralled his thoughts and addressed himself once more to the barn roof.

By the time he finished the repairs and climbed down the ladder, the two gentlemen visitors were gone. Eleanor had disappeared into the house and Molly and Daniel were squatting in the front yard playing marbles.

Cord spent the rest of the afternoon mucking out the horse stalls and oiling the cracked leather saddle he’d found in the barn. If Danny was going to ride the three miles to school instead of walking in all kinds of weather, he’d eventually need a saddle of his own and some instruction on how to take care of it.

That night at supper an oddly quiet Danny ate his beans and corn bread in silence, and when it came time to wash up the dishes he stomped over to the sink and carelessly dropped all four plates into the dishpan at once. Soapy water splashed out onto the wooden counter.

Eleanor jerked upright and spilled half her coffee. “Daniel! Whatever is the matter with you tonight?”

Danny said nothing, but his rigid back told Cord something was definitely wrong. He rose, snagged the dish towel out of Molly’s grasp and mopped up the spilled coffee. Then he used the same towel to mop up the dishwater on the counter. As he did so, he leaned in close to the boy.

“Something on your mind, son?”

Danny lifted his chin but said nothing.

“Okay, have it your way,” he intoned. “Just thought you might like to have a man-to-man chat.”

At the words man-to-man, the boy’s stiff shoulders drooped. “I don’t like that guy.”

“Who?”

“The one with the glasses. He’s always bragging about...” He closed his lips tight and shook his head.

“About what?” Cord pressed.

After a long silence, Danny twisted his neck and shot a glance at his mother. “About Ma,” he murmured. “About how he’s gonna marry her and...”

Eleanor sent him an inquiring look from where she sat at the table, and Cord picked up the coffeepot from the stove and refilled her cup. “Your boy’s got a thistle up his—Uh, got something bothering him,” he said quietly.

“Shouldn’t he be confiding in his mother?” she whispered. She started to rise from her chair, but Cord laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Not this time. It’s, um, man talk.”

“Oh.” She studied Danny’s back for a minute and then shrugged. “I suspect I wouldn’t be much help with ‘man talk.’” She took her coffee into the parlor and settled on the settee. She could still see into the kitchen, but she couldn’t hear what was said.

Cord dug a clean dish towel out of the linen drawer and ambled back to the sink. “Okay, the one with the glasses says he’s gonna marry your ma and...what?” he reminded Danny. “Marry her and what?”

“Be my pa.”

“Nope. He won’t do that. First of all, nothing any man does will ever make him your pa. And secondly, he’ll never marry your mother.”

Danny eyed him with doubt written all over his face. “How come?”

“She doesn’t like him.”

The boy’s eyes widened. “Huh? How do you know that? She feeds him cookies an’ lemonade every Sunday afternoon.”

“Cookies and lemonade don’t mean diddly, son. That’s just a woman’s way of being polite.”

“If she doesn’t like him, how come she has to be polite?”

Cord rolled his eyes. “Darned if I know. Sometimes there’s no comprehending why a woman does what she does.”

A relieved-looking Danny turned toward him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Look at it from her point of view, Dan. Let’s say she gets all frosty and the gent with the glasses doesn’t come around again. There’s gonna be five more guys lined up right behind him, wanting cookies and lemonade and female attention, so then she gets rid of another one.”

“Good riddance,” the boy muttered.

“You’re missing the point, son. Your ma’s real pretty. There’s always gonna be some man mooning around her, drinking up her lemonade and taking up her time.”

“You don’t moon, Cord.”

“No,” he said carefully, “I don’t.” Mooning wasn’t exactly what he was doing around Eleanor, but he guessed it might come close. He liked Eleanor Malloy. He didn’t want to like her, but he sure as hell did.

Daniel listlessly pushed the dishrag over a dirty plate. “Don’t you like Ma?”

Cord almost laughed out loud. Like her? Eleanor Malloy was getting stuck so deep in his thoughts he couldn’t sleep nights.

“Sure, I like her. But a man doesn’t have to ‘moon,’ as you put it, over a woman to show his...uh...regard.”

“You think Ma likes any of those guys that come around here?”

Cord swished the clean plate through the rinse water, automatically dried it off and set it on the counter. “I don’t know, Dan. A woman is real good at keeping her feelings to herself. But if you watch close, you might be able to figure it out.”

“Gosh, thanks, Cord. And,” he added, eyeing the growing stack of plates Cord had run his dish towel over, “thanks for drying the supper dishes. Molly ran off to the barn to feed the kittens ’stead of helping me.”

At that moment Eleanor appeared in the kitchen, the empty coffee cup and saucer in her hand. “What about the kittens?” She plunked the cup into the dishwater.

“Molly’s feedin’ them,” Danny said quickly. “Again. Pretty soon they’re gonna be bigger than Mama Cat.”

“No, they won’t,” Eleanor said. “Mama Cat’s pretty small.”

“What about the papa cat?” Danny pursued.

Eleanor frowned. “What about him?”

“Well, he’s real big.”

“How do you know that? How do you know who the father cat is?”

“Aw, I heard that old tomcat Isaiah used to feed yowlin’ real loud one night, and I figured...well, that’s how they do it, isn’t it? The papa cat makes a bunch of noise, and after that...”

Eleanor turned scarlet. Cord wanted to laugh so bad his jaw ached. “Yeah,” he said, his voice tight, “that’s how they do it, all right. But it takes more than—”

“Cord!” Eleanor sent him a look that could freeze ice cream and pressed her lips together.

“Yeah?” Danny said with sudden interest. “They yowl real loud and then what?”

“Cord...” Eleanor said in a warning tone. She busied herself stacking the clean plates on the china cabinet shelf.

Cord cleared his throat. He thought about escaping into the pantry or out the back door, but that would be a coward’s way out. “Well,” he said after thinking a moment, “Mama Cat and Papa Cat...uh...kinda lie down together and...” He cleared his throat again.

“Yeah? Then what?”

“Daniel!” Eleanor interjected. “It’s time for bed.”

“What? No, it ain’t, Ma. It’s still light outside.”

Cord busied himself hanging the damp dish towel on the hook near the stove. He couldn’t see avoiding the boy’s question. Danny had a normal boy’s curiosity and a right to ask about such things. He touched his shoulder.

“Mama Cat,” he said quietly, “and Papa Cat touch each other in a special way.”

“Gee,” the boy breathed. “That’s nice. That’s real nice. I’m real glad you told me about it, Cord.”

Eleanor’s face was a study, part embarrassment, part relief and part...he hadn’t the faintest idea what.

Whistling, Danny folded the dishrag, laid it on the counter and wrestled the dishpan out of the sink. “You want the dishwater poured on your roses, Ma?”

At her nod, he tramped out the kitchen door and Cord heard his boots clomp down the back steps. After a moment there was a splashing sound.

A silence thicker than valley fog descended over the kitchen. Cord racked his brain for what to say and finally decided to change the subject. “What kind of roses do you have, Eleanor?”

“Pink ones,” she said tightly. “Cecile Brunner.”

“Pretty,” he said. He lifted his hat off the hook by the back door. “’Night, Eleanor. Sleep well.”

“Surely you’re not leaving! Why, it’s still light out!”

He couldn’t help grinning at her. “I’ve dried all the supper dishes so there’s nothing left for me to do tonight. Unless,” he added with a chuckle, “you want to talk about Mama and Papa Cat?”

She turned an enticing shade of raspberry and he found himself staring at her lips. A wave of heat flooded his groin.

Oh, no, Winterman. No! Not interested.

Well, heck yes, he was interested. He just wasn’t going to do anything about it. He’d had enough Mama Cat, Papa Cat experience in the past to know that he didn’t want to follow where thinking about a woman’s lips might lead. Never again.

He tore his gaze away from Eleanor’s mouth and moved toward the back door. “Think I’ll, uh, check on Molly and the kittens out in the barn.”