Читать книгу Longshadow's Woman - Bronwyn Williams, Bronwyn Williams - Страница 10

It was dark as pitch in the hayloft. And dusty. Carrie sneezed, swore, and sneezed again. “All right, you might as well show yourself, I know you’re up here.”

She waited. No response. But of course, if he was sprawled out in a corner, dead drunk, he wouldn’t answer. Couldn’t answer even if by some miracle he was sober enough, as he barely understood plain English. “Speak up, else I’ll go off and leave you here to fall down and break your miserable neck!”

For two beans and a straight pin she would do just that. Save the county the cost of hanging him. Save herself the aggravation of watching him walk behind her plow, with his dark hair shining in the sun, pulled back so that it was neater than her own. With his narrow little behind and his wide shoulders and his hands, so square and steady on the splintered wooden handles.

She should never have peeked that first day at the creek. She had tried so hard not to think about the way he’d looked standing there in the morning sun, strip, stark naked. But the harder she tried not to think about it, the more she thought about it, the image stuck in her mind like a cocklebur in a sheep’s pelt. The only other man she had ever seen naked from head to toe was her husband. It was hard to believe they were the same species.

Evidently, they had something in common after all. Drink.

Disgusted, disappointed and thoroughly out of sorts, Carrie stood there, uncertain of what to do next. She told herself that soon he’d be going back to jail, where they would probably hang him. She couldn’t allow herself to think about him as a man—as a real person. It hurt too much. “Then stay there,” she muttered, turning back to the ladder. “Drink yourself into an early grave. Fall down the ladder and break your fool neck, see if I care!”

“Aah-choo!” The loud sneeze was quickly followed by three more. One hand on the ladder, Carrie froze. Hearing a brief scuffling sound, she squinted in the darkness and saw—or at least thought she saw—something moving in the small pile of hay that had been scraped into a corner to make room for Darther’s jugs of moonshine.

Whispering.

Whispering? He was talking to himself when he couldn’t even spare her so much as a single word?

“Damn your sorry hide, if you can still crawl, then you’d better get yourself down this ladder! If I have to come after you—!” She’d give him one more last chance, and then she was leaving him to his fate. She had run plumb out of patience. And bellyache or not, she had a full day’s work planned for tomorrow. “You listen here, I don’t care how sick you are come morning, you’re going to be out in that field at first light, you hear me? I paid for your services, and I’m damned well going to have them!”