Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
The house itself seemed to welcome Lizbet and the children; Gabe could have sworn it expanded, as though taking a deep breath, as if to make room for them.
If he hadn’t known better—he was not a man given to whimsical ideas—he would have said the place had been as lonely as he had, every bit as full of shadows and the vast emptiness of grief.
Complete foolishness, he concluded.
John, good friend that he was, had undertaken the task of unhitching Shadrach and Abednego from Gabe’s wagon and turning them out in the pasture to “soak up some sunshine while it’s here,” as he put it.
Gabe appreciated the time to show Lizbet the house and, at the same time, wished John was there to act as a buffer between this vibrantly lovely woman and whatever it was he felt toward her. He worried that he might reveal something about his feelings that he had yet to understand himself.
Frankie and Jubal, after pausing near the kitchen stove to let Lizbet unbundle them from their many items of extra clothing, looked awestruck.
“This here is the biggest kitchen I’ve ever been in,” Jubal piped up, his blue eyes wide. “Can we look around the whole place, Mr. Whitfield? Please?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Gabe saw Lizbet open her mouth, probably to protest such eager audacity or perhaps correct the boy’s grammar, then close it again, though reluctantly.
Inwardly, Gabe smiled.
“Go ahead,” he said, then paused and glanced at Lizbet. “If it’s all right with your sister, that is.”
Lizbet sighed, but softly and with benevolent disapproval. “Mind your manners, and don’t go looking behind closed doors.”
“What if all the doors are closed?” Jubal wanted to know.
“Then I guess you’ll have to content yourselves with keeping to the corridors.”
“I’ll watch him,” Frankie promised, standing just behind Jubal and laying a gentle but still restraining hand on his small shoulder.
Lizbet merely nodded at that, and before anyone could say another word, Jubal bolted toward the door leading to the large, modestly furnished parlor and banged his way past it.
Frankie went after him, and so did Hector, but the little dickens was fast, and moments later, both Gabe and Lizbet could hear his boot soles pounding their way across the plank floor and then up the stairs.
Unlike many good- sized houses of the day, Gabe’s did not have a rear stairway leading up from the kitchen.
Lizbet closed her eyes and pressed the fingertips of one hand to her temple. “I’m sorry,” she said, with a little moan that landed in Gabe’s middle like a spark. “Our room at Ornetta’s was cramped, and I guess Jubal was bound to feel the need to bust out as soon as there was space to do it.”
“Don’t worry,” Gabe answered, grateful that the conversation was so simple and ordinary. The thoughts and images whirling around in his head at the moment were anything but, and that spark in his belly was burning hotter and sinking lower at the same time.
He moved to the stove to build up the fire, recalling too late that he should have helped Lizbet— Miss Fontaine —out of her coat, as any gentleman would have done.
“John will expect some hot coffee when he comes in,” he said, and then felt like an even bigger fool than before. To cover his embarrassment, he clattered stove lids about and made a grand hoopla rinsing out and filling the blue enamel coffeepot.
During that enterprise, Lizbet divested herself of the heavy and somewhat threadbare weight of the garment, along with her knitted gloves, which she stuffed into one of the pockets.
Then she hung the coat from one of the wall hooks next to the back door, alongside Gabe’s own and those of her brother and sister.
With a barely suppressed smile, inspired by the clatter of two laughing children and one dog running happily from one end of the upstairs hallway to the other, by the sound of things, Gabe glanced up at the ceiling as he set the coffeepot on the stove to heat up.
There was something about the plain exuberance of that ruckus that set a frozen patch at the back of Gabe’s heart to thawing. What Lizbet clearly considered an act of childish rebellion struck him as a blessing. Something he’d longed for, without realizing it.
“Shouldn’t I be doing that?” Lizbet asked.
A little startled, though of course he’d known she was there, only a few feet away, Gabe turned to look at Lizbet, one eyebrow raised in silent question.
After a heartbeat or two, he realized what she meant; she thought, since she was officially his cook and housekeeper, that he ought to leave duties like brewing coffee to her.
“No,” he said, with quiet directness. “It’s the least I can do, after that cold ride from town.”
She shivered, as if at the memory of the near-freezing winds they’d run into, and nodded her head as if conceding a point.
Then she looked up at the ceiling—the noise had not abated—and stated, “I’ll go upstairs and tell them to quiet down.”
“Let them be,” Gabe said quietly, though it wasn’t his place to tell this woman how to raise her charges. “They’re full of energy, and this is a way of letting some of it out. And that includes Hector.”
At the mention of the dog’s name, Lizbet’s tight shoulders eased noticeably. “What if they break something?”
“This is a farmhouse, Miss Fontaine. Not a mansion. Anything that gets broken can be replaced—or done without.” This wasn’t entirely true, as it happened, since Gabe still kept some of Bonnie’s porcelain figurines and other delicate treasures in the bedroom they’d shared, and he would have been devastated to lose them.
There was little chance of that, because he’d locked that particular door before driving into town to meet with John and collect the newcomers to the household from Ornetta’s place.
He had another reason for keeping the room locked as well. Frankie’s dollhouse was finished now, and mostly furnished, and the sled he and John had built at the blacksmith shop was there, too.
He didn’t want the children—or Lizbet—to see the things he’d made for them until Christmas morning. And that included the hinged jewelry box he’d fashioned for Lizbet.
Maybe it wasn’t a suitable gift for a man to give his housekeeper, but that was of no great concern to him at the moment. He wanted to give Lizbet something she would enjoy.
“Still,” Lizbet said, picking up the conversational thread and then hesitating as though torn between rounding up the marauding children and remaining in the kitchen within the radius of the cookstove, “I don’t want you thinking I’m going to allow those two to behave like reckless scoundrels.
” When their eyes met, Gabe saw real worry in hers. “I need this job, Mr. Whitfield.”
Yet again, Gabe longed to lift Lizbet to her feet and pull her into his arms, hold her tight against him, stroke her beautiful hair and murmur words of comfort and reassurance into her ear.
All of that. And more.
Heat was surging through the water in the enamel pot, and Gabe took care reaching for the tin of ground coffee beans on the counter nearby and measuring in a few heaps.
He liked his coffee strong, and so did John.
He hoped Lizbet did, too. Pity he hadn’t thought to ask first.
Before Gabe could find the right words to assure Lizbet he wasn’t about to withdraw his offer of a job on account of two noisy children, the back door swung open and John Avery stomped in, grinning widely as he removed his hat and coat and kicked off his boots.
There were holes in his socks, Gabe noted, oddly grateful for the mundane distraction. The man needed a wife, that much was sure.
John wasn’t above darning his own socks, any more than Gabe was, but his friend packed so much hard work into his days, between running the blacksmith shop and laboring over his sermons, that he was too tired to do much of anything when he was done.
“Is that coffee about ready?” the big man boomed, nodding at Lizbet. “I’m sure ready for some.”
“Almost,” Gabe said, amused. And grateful to have such a friend as John Avery. During the darkest days of Gabe’s life, the steadfast warmth of that preacher blacksmith’s friendship had been like a ray of pure light falling into Gabe’s dungeon of sorrow. “Just waiting for the grounds to settle.”
“Good,” John said. Overhead, Hector and the kids were still playing loudly. He smiled again, his attention on Gabe. “Must be nice, hearing a fine noise like that after such a long time.”
Gabe felt a jab of sadness, remembering when his own little Abigail had chased Hector—or been chased by him—all over the house and yard.
As if John knew what Gabe was feeling, he sighed quietly, then pulled back a chair at the table.
“May I?” he said to Lizbet, all courtly, like a man who lived in a castle instead of a narrow closet of a room off Ornetta Parkin’s upstairs hallway.
Was it wrong, Gabe wondered, that his moment of grief was pushed aside in that instant by a distinct flash of plain old ordinary jealousy?
Yes , it was wrong, and Gabe shook it off, busied himself pouring coffee into three clean mugs. He didn’t have any claim on Lizbet Fontaine’s affections, he reminded himself sternly, in the privacy of his own mind.
In any case, John was in love with his childhood sweetheart, Mabel Dunsworthy, and soon she’d be traveling out to Montana to stay for good. She and John would be married, right and proper.
The clatter upstairs subsided presently, and Frankie and Jubal and Hector arrived back in the kitchen in a cluster.
Gabe’s heart lifted at the sight of them.
“Where are we going to sleep?” Jubal demanded. “We looked in all the rooms, except the one that’s locked, and there are beds in all of them, so we can’t make out which ones are for us.”
“There are a lot of rooms in this house,” Frankie put in.
“Which one is Hector’s?” Jubal asked innocently. “I want to sleep in his room.”
John laughed.
Lizbet tried to hide a grin.
And Gabe, seated at the table with the two adults by then, smiled a genuine smile. He was glad he had, too, though it had hurt the muscles around his mouth a little, stretching them in ways they weren’t used to being stretched.
“I reckon that would be the one on the front right-hand corner of the house,” Gabe replied, after some thought, which was mostly pretense, because mentally, he had al ready assigned them rooms, Lizbet included. “You can see the barn and the cottonwood trees lining the driveway from there.”
Jubal punched the air and crowed with delight.
“You don’t want to share a room with your sister?” Lizbet asked the boy, looking mildly surprised. “I thought you didn’t like sleeping alone.”
“I won’t be alone, silly,” Jubal informed her, jubilant. “Hector will be with me!”