Читать книгу Twilight - Kit Gardner - Страница 5

Twilight, Kansas

June 1882

Jessica Wynne knew she should have worn her gloves, the freshly bleached and pressed white gardening gloves she’d folded neatly in the top drawer of the pine bureau in the sunny corner of her kitchen. Sadie McGlue would never have forgotten her gardening gloves—were Sadie McGlue ever given to gardening, that is. No, indeed, Sadie McGlue, of the New England McGlues—were there others?—would have surely remembered to encase her smooth, lily-white hands in two pairs of gloves before allowing her fingers to venture anywhere near dirt. Sadie McGlue would have remembered her gloves because Sadie McGlue had very little else to ponder except for the harmful effects of sun and Kansas dirt upon her tender skin and meticulously manicured nails. Then again, Sadie McGlue would never have been found on her knees in a strawberry patch on the hottest of June afternoons, up to her elbows in bone-dry Kansas dirt.

This was because Sadie McGlue had both a New England fortune and a husband to care for her. Sadie McGlue had no children to tend to and no farm to manage all on her own. Sadie McGlue also happened to live on Maple Street, the widest, longest, shadiest street in all of Twilight, in a freshly painted white two-story wooden house with black shutters and flower-filled white window boxes made of the same imported southern Missouri wood as the house. Sadie McGlue bought her strawberries at the local market with all the rest of the upper-crust folks from Maple Street. Jessica’s strawberries. And Jessica’s beets and preserves.

Jessica shifted to another strawberry plant, ignoring the ache spreading through her lower back. Just as she ignored the sun beating upon her bonneted head and the exposed back of her neck, where her frayed collar gapped. Just as she ignored the dirt accumulating beneath her nails and the browning of the skin on the backs of her hands. Dry. The dirt sifted through her fingers, then vanished with the next hot breeze. Too dry for so early in the season. If only the frigid winds of the past winter had been accompanied by a blizzard or two, her crop would have flourished through the summer on water stored in the ground after the thaw. Then again, as it was, she’d barely survived the cold. And talk was already circulating of the snowy, even colder winter to come. Not for the first time, she wondered if she could live through another four months of howling wind and bone-shattering cold with her sanity intact, not to mention the roof and the barn.

With a gentleness she deemed only children and plants worthy of, she sank her fingers deep into the soil around one withering stalk and envisioned the pails of water she would need to haul from the well to this field. If she didn’t, if the sky remained as clear and blue from horizon to horizon, the air as hot and unforgiving, she would have no strawberries for women like Sadie McGlue to serve in fine porcelain bowls to their lady friends after church on Sundays and tea on Thursdays. There would be no strawberry preserves to sell this year, and therefore no new dairy cow, no new birch broom from New England, no additional stock of precious fuel for the winter months, and certainly no new horse to hitch to the broken-down buckboard wagon that had gathered a year’s worth of dust in the barn. And that lovely blue-gray dress with the scalloped lace collar would still be in the window at Ledbetter’s General Store long after she became Mrs. Avram Halsey in a few months’ time.

Odd that she should even waste a thought on that dress when the farm was in need of so much. Just because she’d spotted the thing in the window and briefly indulged herself in thoughts of walking down the chapel aisle on Avram’s arm, wearing that lovely dress, surely didn’t make it more important than a new dairy cow. Yet, some utterly pagan part of her soul, the part entirely unsuitable for a minister’s daughter, truly believed a woman deserved such a dress when venturing into marriage for a second time.

She sat back upon her heels and swept her forearm over her brow, uncaring of the dirt smudges she left upon her cheeks. Then, instinctively, with no thought whatsoever, just as she’d done every two minutes or so since she’d ventured into the field, she glanced toward the gray stone farmhouse and the backyard just visible through the flapping row of white sheets she’d hung out to dry.

Gray...just like the sun-baked landscape here, as if the house were born of the same dry, barren earth. Her gaze probed the gray and immediately found her son, Christian, where she’d left him, half concealed behind the tall cottonwood her own father had planted some twenty-two years before, on the day she was born, when the house was made of sod, not stone. The sunlight caught Christian’s round, blond head. It was just like his father’s, yet somehow intensely vulnerable. So unlike his father’s.

Stray blond tendrils tossed wildly by the wind blocked her view for a moment, and she stuffed them into her bonnet as she struggled to her feet. Yes, there he was, only he wasn’t playing beneath that tree, as she’d instructed him. He was shaking his head, vigorously, as though talking to someone, and he was backing away from...

She squinted beneath the glare of the sun and the dust billowing into her face.

The wind parting the tree branches or perhaps some slight movement, a rippling of shadow there beneath that tree, caught her eye and prompted her fingers to curl with a sudden white-knuckled intensity about the handle of her basket. And then she saw him, a man, crouched low, yet deeply shadowed and immense. A man she’d never seen before, reaching a hand toward her son...as though moments from snatching him up. Her tiny five-year-old child, helpless. And she too far away. A stranger.

The basket fell at her feet. She nearly tripped over it and the tangle of wind-whipped muslin skirts between her thighs. A cry managed to escape her constricting throat, only to be seized by the wind and tossed out over the prairie.

Run.

She stumbled over a strawberry plant and crushed it beneath her thick-soled shoes, clawing at air, then at crumbling dirt to regain her balance. Her vision blurred, and all air compressed in her chest, trapping her voice. Her limbs refused her commands. She couldn’t run fast enough.

The bonnet fell from her head, and hair whipped about her face, blinding her. Again she stumbled. Her chin snapped against dry earth, and one foot caught in her petticoat. She barely heard the cotton tear for the terror thundering in her ears when the man moved closer...closer. This stranger. So big, even crouched, and her Christian so tiny, too tiny even to flee on his thin legs.

Willard Fry, tending his farm a mile to the east, would never hear a rifle shot, much less a scream for help. Twilight was another mile farther. To the west swept nothing but endless arid prairie.

The rifle...get the rifle...

She surged from the field and ran blindly through a tangle of sheets that seemed to deliberately ensnare her in their flapping folds. Into the barn she ran, arms and fingers outstretched in the sudden pitch. The rifle sat in a back corner of the barn, though she should have kept the thing nearer at hand, she, a woman alone on a farm for over a year now, with a young son to protect. But she’d fired it only once, accidentally, and she’d put a hole in the roof of the kitchen. She dimly remembered Avram removing the rifle to the barn for her protection. Her fingers wrapped around cold steel. She hoisted the rifle and spun about.

Please, God, let it be loaded.

The sun still shone with a peculiar mocking brilliance when she dashed from the barn. Another strangled cry spilled from her throat when she spotted Christian...and the stranger. He still crouched low, his back toward her, as broad as her strawberry patch. A godsend, that massive expanse, a target even she would be hard-pressed to miss. Her feet skidded in the dirt, and she heaved the gun onto her shoulder and took aim at a spot just below the fall of his blue-black hair over his collar.

“Stand slowly and turn about, or I’ll put a hole in your back, mister.”

The bulk that was this man seemed to turn to stone. His black hat angled but a fraction toward her and she glimpsed a shadowed, beard-stubbled jaw. With a surge of uncommon female prowess, she glanced at Christian and battled a sudden desperation to fling her arms about his narrow body. His eyes, wide, filled with unmistakable fear, had never looked so blue, his cheeks so downy soft and tender, sun-kissed like a ripe peach. Her arms ached to hold his slight body close enough for her to hear his shallow breaths, to smell his skin, his hair. No, she could have none of that maternal gushing if she was to dispatch this stranger. A strong, self-assured front was required. No weaknesses. No emotion. “Christian, come stand behind Mama here.”

Christian’s enormous blue eyes darted to the stranger, then to the ground, before he frowned at the rifle. “Why do you have the rifle, Mama?”

She peered down the long barrel, her aim wavering upon the back of that black head. “Get behind Mama, Christian.”

Her son hesitated several teeth-grinding moments, then dragged his bare toes in the dust and moved slowly toward her. “But you don’t know how to shoot it, Mama. Reverend Halsey told you to keep it in the barn so you don’t put no more holes in the roof. Remember, Mama?”

“Shush, Christian.”

“But, Mama—”

“Shush. Go sit on the back stoop.”

“But, Mama, you scared him away and—”

“On the back stoop, Christian. Now.” Something in the shifting of the stranger’s shoulders flooded her with a profound chagrin, as if even he had taken ample notice of the battle of wills she constantly endured with her son. And then the stranger unfolded his crouched body, slowly, warily, though she sensed he wasn’t the least bit intimidated by her or her gun.

Jessica didn’t realize she’d taken a step back until her foot struck an exposed tree root. She blinked a trickle of perspiration from her eyes. Dust and fear—yes, fear—clogged her throat. This man loomed like the devil himself, his head skimming the tree branches a good eight inches above her own. His legs were long and heavily muscled, snugly encased in those faded denims common to thieves and all manner of coarse menfolk. His shoulders looked capable of filling any doorway, and his arms hung potently at his sides, fists unclenched, long fingers curling, as if moments from snatching some concealed weapon from his waistband.

“Turn around,” she said, her voice cracking strangely even as he complied. The eyes struck her first, like an invisible blow, and again her foot faltered over the tree root. The rifle wavered, then fixed squarely on his chest, though her limbs seemed to suddenly quiver beneath the weight of the firearm.

His eyes were gold, as she imagined a lion’s would be, and deep-set beneath a vicious slash of black brows and the shadow of his hat. Yet his gaze was empty. A prairie savage, he was, his skin weathered and creased like worn, deeply tanned leather, his jaw all beard-stubbled hollows and angles. His mouth compressed, tight and unyielding. His eyes reflected nothing but sunlight and then emptiness, cold emptiness, even as they hooded and moved slowly over the length of the rifle.

An outlaw. In her backyard.

“Who are you?” she said, her voice uncharacteristically quavery.

“Stark.” His lip barely curled with the word. His voice was like the sound of distant thunder, ominous, chillingly deep and rasping. Yet his speech was not the typical slow and deliberate heavy twang, but measured, as if his words were carefully chosen, yet simmering with a distinct undercurrent of impatience. “Logan Stark. I meant your boy no harm, ma’am. Or you. Put down the gun.”

She ignored this, having expected it, of course. Any man who looked like this man had but one thing on his mind: no good. She jerked the rifle when one bronzed hand lingered near his pocket. “State your business, Mr. Stark. And be quick about it.”

The wind ruffled through his hair, yet there was nothing innocent even in this on such a man. Perhaps because Jessica felt oddly disconcerted when those transparent eyes seemed to probe right through her, as if he were memorizing her.

“You advertised for a farmhand,” he said.

“You’re mistaken.” In spite of herself, she flushed when his eyes swept the farm and the house, in dire need of repair. One side of the barn bowed and sagged. A crumbling excuse for a stone fence encased one mangy cow lazily chewing her cud. The ravages of one year spent without a man’s hand. Yet what more could a woman do, alone, her funds so depleted when those gambling debts had been called that she could barely afford to feed and clothe her son? She was lucky she still had the house and any semblance of a barn. Had she let them, they’d have taken nearly all her land, all that her father had built his dreams upon, all that he had died for.

Jessica’s nose jutted upward when that golden gaze lingered on the field of wilting strawberry plants.

His eyes shifted back to her.

She jerked her chin to the east. “Next farm up the road. But I’ll save you a walk. Willard Fry hired on his new hand several months back.” A nagging suspicion blossomed to life within her, and she squinted at him through a spray of dust. “That’s an old paper you were looking at, Mr. Stark. Where are you from?”

That jaw angled to the west but his eyes held her. “Just passing through, ma’am. Looking for work.”

“Mama—”

“Shush, Christian.”

“But Mama—”

That old, uncomfortable feeling of maternal ineptitude flooded through her, bringing a tightness to her tone. “Christian, mind me.”

And then Mr. Logan Stark appeared to bunch all his muscles and loom toward her, like a massive black thundercloud that would swallow her up. “Ma’am, don’t move,” he rasped.

One hand reached for her, long fingers outstretched toward her...no, toward the rifle, as if he meant to yank it from her arms. With his other hand, he slowly drew a long, black-handled blade from his waistband. This outlaw, Logan Stark, meant to kill her, take her son, her only cow, burn her house and all her strawberry plants. She could see it in his eyes...in the flash of sunlight upon that blade. The world tilted beneath her feet.

“Stay!” she shrieked, taking wavering aim upon the expanse of his chest. Her fingers stumbled over the trigger when he advanced toward her, as unstoppable as a locomotive. He murmured something she couldn’t decipher. Her focus blurred upon his fingers curled about that black handle, an instant away from plunging it into her throat. She should pull the trigger...now...now!

“But, Mama, the snake! The one you scared! He’s by your foot there! You’re gonna step on him, Mama!”

A mind-numbing terror engulfed her, prompted by Christian’s warning or by her inability to stop Logan Stark, she would never know. Snake or no snake, she could not tear her eyes from this man, certain that he was the more lethal of the two. She felt the heat radiating from him, the icy resolve in his eyes, and she retreated, God help her, one step. Only, her foot snagged on the exposed root, twisted, and her other foot tangled in her torn hem. Her knees buckled, and the rifle angled crazily skyward as her burning arm muscles turned traitor on her. And then Christian’s terrified howl rang out—or was that her own scream torn from her throat when sunlight flashed upon the blade, as Logan Stark flexed his wrist? The knife stood poised like a viper.

She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. The world became a deafening roar of flame and smoke, and then she was falling through sunlight and dry, hot wind, until cool darkness pressed in around her, cradling her like the arms of the mother she’d never known.

* * *

Jessica blinked at the blue sky overhead. Waves of pain radiated from the back of her head. She closed her eyes, expecting at any moment to come to the full realization that she lay dying in the dust from a knife wound. But where? She uncurled her stiff fingers from the rifle and wiggled her toes. She shifted her shoulders and bent her knees. Nothing, save the relentless pounding in her skull.

“Mama.” Christian’s smudged face appeared a scant inch above her, framed by brilliant blue skies. He sucked in swift breaths. “Mama, you shot Mr. Stark.”

Jessica chose to overlook the marked disbelief in his voice and her resulting chagrin and pushed herself up on her elbows. She found herself staring at the soles of a pair of very long black boots. Motionless black boots.

“I shot him,” she whispered, struggling to her feet. She stared at a very still Mr. Logan Stark.

“Mama!” Christian shoved a stubby finger at the ground. “Don’t step on the snake. Look, Mr. Stark killed it. With his knife. I saw him.”

There it lay, not inches from the dirt-stained, sagging hem of her gown—a fat brown rattler, pinioned to the dust by the blade protruding from its throat. Its jaws still sagged open.

Jessica stared at the dead snake, then at the man lying in a gathering pool of blood, eyes closed, mouth slightly parted. The man who had more than likely saved her life, and her son’s. “My God, I killed him.”

Christian frowned at her. “No, ya didn’t, Mama. He fell and hit his head, just like you. An’ he’s sleepin’. But ya got him real good. He’s bleedin’, Mama. See, Mama?”

“I see,” she whispered, dropping hesitantly to her knees beside Stark. The dark cotton covering his chest expanded, stretched taut, then relaxed with his every breath. Slow, even breaths. Despite the full measure of her relief, her fingers wavered over the gaping wound oozing a warm flow of blood from his shoulder. The bullet seemed to have cut a narrow path clean through the outer curve of sinew where his shoulder met his upper arm.

Jessica forced the bile back into her parched throat. Her fingers pressed gently around the wound until the feel of rock-hard muscle prompted her to snatch her fingers back. A peculiar feeling washed through her as her gaze drifted hesitantly over him. Here he lay, silent, still, and intensely vulnerable for so fearsome a man. His mouth in repose seemed oddly prone to a pleasant curve, the creases all but vanished from his face. And his impossibly long, dark lashes rested upon his cheeks like those of a young child.

Dust billowed about her, catching at her skirts and swirling about Stark and his wound. She leaned slightly over him, wondering dimly why she still felt an odd compulsion to keep a safe distance, as if at any moment he might rear up and swallow her whole.

“Mr. Stark?” she said. No response, save his even, deep breathing. “Mr. Stark, can you hear me?” Her hands pressed against his chest, then quickly retreated. “We have to get him inside,” she said, getting to her feet.

Christian gave her a wary look, then crouched and lifted Stark’s dark head, now bereft of his hat. “I can help, Mama. See?”

“I see,” Jessica murmured distractedly. Stark was too blasted big. Bigger, wider, longer, and no doubt heavier, than any man she’d ever seen. How the devil would she and a five-year-old child move him?

She eyed the distance to the house, judging it to be no more than ten feet. Yet the space yawned like an unbreachable chasm. She should run for Doc Eagan, or at least to Willard Fry’s for help. A woman couldn’t possibly do this sort of thing alone. A woman couldn’t tend a farm alone, or raise a child alone, for heaven’s sake, or so the townsfolk, and Avram in particular, were wont to remind her on a daily basis. So how the devil could she move what had to be a two-hundred-pound beast of man, alone?

She set her teeth. She’d shot him, she’d take care of him, blast it. After all, she’d tended wounds before. How difficult could a superficial gunshot wound be to clean and bandage? Stark looked more than capable of surviving it. Besides, she didn’t quite feel inclined to present a full account of her shooting abilities for the local gossips to banter about for months to come, a sure penance to pay if she summoned Doc Eagan or Willard Fry to help.

Furthermore, Avram would no doubt see this as a prime opportunity to resume his lecture on keeping herself to gentle, womanly pursuits and insist all the more vehemently that she marry him this very day, sell this bothersome farm, and come live with him in his small house within the safe limits of Twilight. Yes, best that she tend to this matter herself. She’d devise some explanation for Avram if it became necessary, of course. But how did one hide a two-hundred-pound strange man from one’s fiancé?

“No, you get his feet, Christian.”

Without hesitation, Christian let Stark’s head fall with a dull thud into the dust and scrambled to those black boots. “He’s heavy, Mama,” he said, his tongue curling out of his mouth as he managed to hoist those boots a fraction of an inch from the ground.

Jessica bent and stuffed the sagging hem of her gown into her waistband, then hooked her elbows beneath Stark’s armpits. A breath wheezed through her bared teeth when her arm muscles bunched and rebelled against the weight of him. She planted her feet and attempted to pay little attention to the dark head lolling against her breasts. The pounding in the back of her head intensified. “I’m going to drag him, Christian. Don’t stop until we get to the back door.”

Christian nodded vigorously. “I’m helpin’, aren’t I, Mama? Aren’t I?”

“You’re helping.” Jessica braced her legs wide and felt her thighs strain. “Now—now.”

Jessica didn’t release her breath until they’d reached the back door, and then she all but collapsed against the sagging door frame. She stared at the trail of blood in the dust, at those motionless black boots, then shoved the back door open. “Hold this, Christian.”

“But I want to hold his feet.”

Her teeth ground in her ears as she again hooked her arms beneath Stark’s shoulders. A sharp pain sliced through her lower back. Breathing was a labor in itself. “Christian, do as I say.”

He blinked at her, thrust out his lower lip, and didn’t move. “But I’m not helping, then.”

“Hold the door,” she snapped into billowing dust, feeling the burn of hot tears at the backs of her eyes. No, she would not lose control. Not now, not ever. She couldn’t. A woman alone, raising a headstrong child, trying her best...

“You don’t have to yell at me,” Christian grumbled, flattening himself against the door.

“Listen to Mama and I won’t yell at you.” She hauled Stark through the open doorway and into her immaculate kitchen, with its spotless, lye-scrubbed pine floor that she was immensely proud of. She didn’t pause, even when she crashed into a high-backed wooden chair, even when Christian let the door slam on Stark’s leg.

“You didn’t take off your shoes, Mama. Look, you’re getting the floor all dirty. You’re mad, aren’t you, Mama? See, he’s bleeding all over.”

She ignored all this, the burning in her arms, the pounding in her head, the lurking sense of doubt in the wisdom of her actions. Through a short hall and into her room she dragged him, finally dropping him beside the mahogany four-poster on the cherished hooked rug she’d beaten for hours not three days past. She didn’t even glance at the bed. No sense in attempting that. She wondered if four burly men could heave Stark from the floor.

“Take the bucket and get Mama water from the well,” she called toward the door, where she knew Christian lingered.

“He’s bleeding on your rug, Mama.”

“I know.” She bit her lip, stared at Stark, then stuffed a feather pillow beneath his head.

“You’re mad, aren’t you, Mama?”

She dropped to her knees and set her fingers to fumbling over the buttons of Stark’s shirt. “Get the bucket, Christian.”

She listened to the sound of shuffling little feet, then to the rush of her own releasing breath. Her throat seemed to close up as her fingers ventured farther down the row of buttons. A rather intimate task, it suddenly seemed, this unbuttoning of a man’s shirt while he lay in a deep sleep on the floor beside her bed. She hesitated. His hand lay upon his stomach, blocking her path, and she found herself staring at those long, thick brown fingers, at the breadth of his palm and the length of his forearm. So disturbingly masculine a forearm, corded with muscle and rope like veins beneath its furred and bronzed veneer. Fleetingly she wondered at the profound disquiet all this aroused in her, a disquiet having nothing to do with the rifle shot she’d seen fit to deliver him. Gingerly she wrapped her fingers about his and lifted his hand aside. With a peculiar hesitancy, she slipped her palms inside the cotton, against warm flesh, and spread the shirt wide.

For some reason Jessica couldn’t have explained, her breath compressed in her lungs at the sight of him. Not that she’d never seen a man’s chest before, though that had been in the dusky privacy of her bedroom, with all shades drawn. Yet she remembered her husband Frank’s chest as smooth and flat and hairless, not jutting, bulging even, and densely covered with smooth black hair that reached clear to his beard-stubbled throat. He was a beast, this man, and this had to be fear, unparalleled fear that quivered deep in her belly and weakened her limbs. And concern, yes, that was it, nothing but concern for the man who had saved her life, now bade her to press a quavery palm against his chest to seek the rapid beating of his heart.

Her lips parted. His skin radiated heat that leapt into her hand and seeped up her arm, through her torso, pooling in her belly and in the tightening peaks of her breasts.

Her fingers curled of their own accord, then splayed slowly through that dense hair. She watched her hand moving over the expanse of his chest. His flesh curved into her palm, as if seeking her touch. The smell of him was like that of leather and warm baked flesh, oddly pleasant.

“I got it!” Christian announced, suddenly materializing at her side.

Jessica snatched her fingers to her mouth as if they were suddenly ablaze. She glanced up at Christian, then felt her cheeks flame and quickly averted her gaze. “A cloth...I need a cloth,” she muttered quickly, too quickly, her eyes finding the tapering line of black hair that disappeared into Stark’s waistband. His belly was as ridged as a washboard. “A—a cloth t-to clean his belly. I—I mean...his wound. In the kitchen cupboard. Get me one of those.”

“But those are the cloths you use on the dishes, Mama. Remember?”

Her teeth met, and she glared at her son. Again he hesitated. Then the bucket thumped against the floorboards, sending water sloshing all over Jessica’s skirt and her precious hooked rug as Christian finally obeyed. Jessica plunged her hand into the cool water. Sunlight filtered through the lace curtains, heating her, heating the room, so that she could barely catch her breath. She pressed cool, wet fingers to her brow, to the heated length of her neck, and attempted not to look at Stark, save for his wound and the dried blood caked around it.

Again she dipped her fingers in the bucket, then drew them to her lips. The water, so cool, soothed her parched throat.

Her fingers found the water again, then quivered over Stark’s brow. Tiny droplets spilled onto his forehead and wove erratic paths into his loosely curling black hair. Those heavy black brows seemed to tighten, then ease from that permanent scowl—a softening, if there were such a thing on such a man. She dipped her fingers and smoothed the skin above his brows, her fingertips playing gently over his temples, then venturing warily where burnished skin met with thickly curling hair.

Yes, there was no denying that she soothed him. His dry lips parted and emitted a soft breath, and before she could think, she brushed her wet fingers over his lips. Still, he slept, even when she jerked her hand to her breast and listened to the hammering of her pulse.

Moments later Christian returned. “Is this the rag?”

“Yes,” she replied briskly, without the favor of a glance. She applied herself to the task of cleaning the wound as would one grateful for distraction.

The wound. Tend the wound. You owe him your life.

No matter that simply leaning over him was proving far more unsettling than the sight of flesh ripped open, that his warm breath seemed to play through her hair, teasing her cheek, that his chest seemed to push up against her breasts far too deliberately for a man flat upon his back with a rifle wound. For some blasted reason, she couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment those massive arms would envelop her and pinion her flat against him.

“How come ya shot him, Mama?” Christian asked, perching himself close at her side.

Jessica blew an annoying curl from her eyes and leaned closer to examine the clean wound. “Mama thought he was a bad man, Christian. He was a stranger. Mama has told you about strangers, hasn’t she?”

“Is he going to stay?”

“I don’t think so. No, no, he’s not.”

“But he has to get better, Mama. So he has to stay. He killed that snake. He told me it would bite me. It was a rattler, Mama.”

Jessica’s teeth slid together. “Mama knows what it was, Christian. Hasn’t Mama told you about snakes? That they bite, and that you must stay away from them?”

She could almost hear the indignant dipping of his chin. “Yes...but I just wanted to touch it, and Mr. Stark said I shouldn’t.”

Jessica glanced sideways at her son. “Why don’t you believe what Mama tells you, Christian?”

He stared at her, eyes enormous pools full of guilt and suspicion. Because you have to prove everything you tell me. “I don’t know,” he said slowly.

“Listen to Mama, Christian.”

“Is he going to stay and fix our barn?”

Jessica glanced sharply at Christian, then shook her head. “Reverend Halsey is going to fix our barn...and the house...as soon as he finds the time. He’s very busy at the church.”

“No, he’s not. He doesn’t like the barn or our house. He told me, Mama. He told me I was gonna live in his house soon. He told me that, Mama.”

“That must have been before he talked to Mama.”

Christian’s blond brows quivered as he stared down at Stark. “He’s big, Mama. He could fix our barn good.”

A shiver took up residence in Jessica’s belly when her eyes skittered over the muscled plains of chest. “We’ll see.” She sat back on her heels and surveyed the clean wound. “I have to get bandages.” She pointed her index finger at her son. “Stay here. And don’t touch him.”

Christian gave her a look that bordered on patronizing. How like his father he looked at times like that. “I can touch him. He doesn’t bite, Mama. And I want him to stay.” His tiny voice crept after her as she ventured into the kitchen in search of bandages. “Did you see how he killed that snake, Mama? Did you see? I want him to stay. Can he, Mama? Can he? He could sleep in the barn and teach me how to throw a knife.”

Jessica shuddered and slammed the cupboard doors.

“Couldn’t he, Mama? Say yes, Mama.”

“We’ll see.” She entered the bedroom with bandages in hand. Yet, try as she might, there was no denying the peculiar thrill that shot through her at the thought...of a repaired barn, of course. Avram wouldn’t get to it by September, if then—if he ever would, stubborn man. And the house, yes, the house required so much. After all, the further it sank into disrepair, the more fervently Avram would insist she rid herself of it. Perhaps if these bedroom walls were sporting a fresh coat of white paint to rival that of Sadie McGlue’s, if the barn weren’t threatening to collapse at any moment, if she could prove her strawberry patch a worthwhile endeavor...perhaps then Avram would cease this nonsense about selling the farm.

Her eyes drifted over the undeniable bulge of Stark’s biceps, the sinewed length of forearm, those large, capable hands and long, long legs. Even with a shoulder wound, he looked quite able, even more so than a sulking Avram on a good day. And he was awfully tall, tall enough, it seemed, to accomplish just about anything.

“We’ll see” was all she said.