Читать книгу A Funny Thing Happened... - Caroline Anderson - Страница 9

CHAPTER THREE

THE dawn, when it came, was glorious. The wind had gone, the sun sparkled on the snow and if she hadn’t been so phenomenally tired Jemima would have loved it.

Sam, for all his bucketing, seemed full of energy this morning, and she wanted to hit him for it. She’d listened to him whistling cheerfully as he brought the water up from the stream—seventy-five times, or thereabouts—and now he was shovelling snow away from the barn doors and making paths from the house to the hens, the calves and the stream.

Still, she wasn’t surprised. As a boy he’d never sat still for a minute. ‘There’s some sand somewhere you can put down on those paths,’ she told him, sticking her head out of the hen house.

He looked round at the farmyard. Snow had come straight off the field across the road and dumped itself on the yard, and Jemima took one look at his expression and hid a grin.

‘Any helpful suggestions where I should start looking?’ he said mildly.

‘Ah.’ She gave up and grinned. ‘How about ash from the bottom of the Rayburn?’ she offered.

His expression cleared. ‘Good idea. Got a metal bucket?’

‘By the back door—it’s got ash in it. If you’re going in, could you take these?’

She handed him a basket of eggs and he peered at them and cocked his head on one side with a quizzical grin. ‘I wonder what’s for breakfast?’ he murmured.

She laughed. ‘Put the kettle on, too. We’ll do the paths together in a minute.’

She ducked back inside the hen house, collected and packed the last of the eggs and checked the water, then shut them up and went across to the house. She wondered when he’d remember who she was, if he ever did, and decided to let it go on a bit longer before saying anything. It made the day more interesting, waiting for the penny to drop, she thought as she kicked off her boots.

The warmth wrapped itself round her like a blanket as she went in, and she dropped into a chair by the Rayburn and propped her feet on the front edge. ‘Oh, bliss,’ she groaned, and shut her eyes.

A hard, lean, masculine hip nudged her ankles. ‘Come on, out of the way. I’m trying to cook.’

She cracked an eye open. ‘Cook?’ she said disbelievingly.

‘Cook. Put some handcream on and keep out of the way. Is there any butter?’

She got up and found butter, then milk, then cut some bread and put it in the toaster.

‘When did you intend to have breakfast?’ he asked drily, and she muttered and flipped the bread back out of the lifeless tool and plopped back into the chair.

‘We’ll have bread,’ she suggested, and he. laughed, turning those astonishing navy eyes on her so her heart hiccuped. Wow, she thought, if he really set out to be charming he could be a real stunner—

‘How do you like your eggs?’

‘Soft and creamy.’

‘Ditto. Right, up you get.’

She was suddenly ravenous. The heap of rich, golden scrambled egg was cooked to perfection, and she stabbed her fork into it, forgetting all about Sam and his gorgeous dark blue eyes.