Chapter Eleven
“Look, Uncle Aidan!” Bella demanded.
Aidan was seated at the kitchen table, going over the ranch ledgers and trying desperately to come up with a bit more money. As it was, he was going to have a time of it even paying the few remaining hands their wages.
I may have to let some of them go, he thought grimly. Brendan’s debts always seemed to be lurking just around the corner.
“You’re not looking!” Bella whined, stretching the last word out.
Aidan tossed down his pencil and turned to stare at Bella, his irritation plain on his face. Bella didn’t seem the least bit fazed; she held up what looked like a small circle of paper with string on it.
“That’s nice,” he said, not really looking and not particularly caring.
“You didn’t really look!” Bella protested. She thrust the item into his face, insistent.
He sighed and pushed back from the table, realizing that he wasn’t likely to get any peace (or work done for that matter) until he complied with Bella. “Fine,” he said. He glanced over the item in question and realized there was a picture on it. “That’s a very nice… necklace?” he tried again.
Bella gave him a dour look that would have done credit to a schoolmistress. “It’s not a necklace,” she explained slowly as if Aidan were too simple to understand. “It’s called a thaum-a-trope,” she said, enunciating the word carefully. “It has a secret!”
“Does it indeed?” Aidan said, taken aback by Bella’s knowledge of such a large word.
“Watch!” she said. She held up the disc of paper for Aidan to see.
There was a coyote, skillfully drawn, sitting on its haunches.
With great concentration, Bella took up the strings on either side and twisted them in her fingers quickly.
As she did so, the image flickered, and the coyote raised its head, crying up at an invisible moon.
“Well, now,” Aidan said appreciatively. “That’s a good magic trick.”
“It’s not magic,” Bella informed him haughtily. “It’s, um… it’s called optics.”
“Optics?” Aidan repeated. “And where did you learn about that?”
“Mrs. Alexandra told me,” Bella said, turning her attention to the strings, which were attempting to knot up. “She helped me make it during tea.”
“She did, did she?” Aidan muttered. He could feel his face creasing into a scowl. I’m so pleased she has time to waste on silly games, he thought sardonically. “Don’t you have chores to do?”
Bella looked up at him, her face quickly morphing into a pout in answer. Aidan held out his hand, and Bella reluctantly put the thaumatrope into it. “You can have this back after you’ve swept the porch,” he told her.
Bella shuffled off, dejected, to do as she was told—no argument, no outright refusal, which frankly took Aidan by surprise. He lifted the simple toy and looked at it again. It seemed strange to him that something like that could motivate Bella to work, but he wasn’t about to question it.
I wonder if the ranch hands would let me pay them in thaumatropes? A bitter smile pulled one corner of his mouth up.
He was about to toss it onto the table when he stopped and looked at it properly.
The drawings were simple, just outlines, but there was great care and precision put into them.
In his mind’s eye, he could see Alexandra working on it, hunched over the table, her curls falling over her forehead as she leaned forward.
She had a tendency to poke her tongue out of her mouth when she was concentrating, and Aidan couldn’t help but smirk at the mental image.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled. He had always been the funny one, quick with a joke; Brendan had been the responsible one, or so he had thought.
His good mood evaporated as quickly as rain in July. The loss of his brother was hard enough; learning the truth about him felt like losing him all over again. He set the thaumatrope down.
Outside on the porch, through the open windows and door, he could hear the scrape of Bella’s broom as she swept.
Then another sound, one he hadn’t heard since before Brendan died.
The girl was singing as she worked. He couldn’t make out the words.
He sat where he was, the thaumatrope in front of him, and thought about the silly games he had just finished sneering at.
Aidan stood from the table, unable to settle. He looked out behind the house, to where Alexandra and Lisa were a distance off. They were hanging the white-colored laundry over a prickly bush to bleach it brighter in the sun. They seemed determined to refresh every room, including the bed linens.
He stood at the back door, arms folded and a shoulder against the frame, watching them as they worked.
They were an efficient team, their movements practiced as they stretched the large pieces of fabric between them.
As Aidan watched, he could see Lisa pause after hanging a sheet, one hand braced on her knee and her shoulders working.
Alexandra put a hand on her aunt’s shoulder and said something that Aidan couldn’t hear. He frowned, concern pricking at him.
Aidan straightened up. Alexandra was coming nearer the house, likely to fetch more of the wet laundry.
He could see it in a large basket, waiting to be collected.
He had no idea how she meant to carry it on her own, but clearly she meant to.
He bit his lip for a moment, then stepped out of the doorway to meet her at the laundry lines.
“Is there something you need?” she inquired in clipped tones when she saw him making his way toward her.
He opened his mouth to respond in kind, bristling at her tone. She folded her arms and waited, her face and posture defiant. This rankled him—how dare she be so irritable when he only meant to help her?
Well, what else would she expect from you? a more logical part of his brain asked. He paused, considering all of their interactions up to this point, and had to suppress a wince. Outwardly, he clamped his mouth shut and tried to keep his face neutral.
He nodded toward the large laundry basket and cleared his throat. She followed his gesture.
“Oh!” she said, sounding genuinely surprised. “You wish to help me?”
Aidan nodded again, shuffling over to the basket.
Her surprise had completely disarmed him.
Alexandra was already there and lifted one side of it, waiting for him to do the same on the other side.
Rather than take the handle so they could lift it together, Aidan hoisted the basket entirely, placing it on his shoulder, his long arms easily reaching around it.
Alexandra let out a tiny squeak of alarm as he did so, which made him grin for just a moment behind the safety of the basket. She scurried around him, her round eyes made rounder still. She stared at him openly, her hands fluttering slightly.
“Are you all right with that? I can help if it’s too heavy,” she said.
Aidan snorted. “Lighter’n a hay bale,” he said gruffly.
Alexandra nodded slowly, her eyes flicking over him again for just a moment. “If you insist,” she demurred, turning to walk next to him back to the bushes where Lisa was waiting.
“How kind of you,” Lisa said as they approached, wiping some sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. “I’m afraid the heat was rather getting to me.”
Aidan grunted in response. He started to slide the basket down, then checked himself; he couldn’t just fling it down like he did a hay bale.
Alexandra reached up to help him balance the basket, and their fingers brushed.
Aidan’s heart did a strange little flip, and his eyes met Alexandra’s for the barest of seconds.
There was something unguarded in Alexandra’s face that made him freeze.
He looked away quickly, settling the basket onto the sparse grass.
“Figured I’d give you all a hand, seeing as how this was apparently more important than keeping up with your regular chores,” he snipped, completely ruining his chivalrous air.
Lisa gave him a look that seemed to ask, “Are you actually a fool?” Alexandra, too, leveled a calm gaze at him that still managed to be withering.
“Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be,” she said in a tone as cool and smooth as ice, “but someone allowed the house to deteriorate to such a state that it’s necessary. That is, of course, assuming you don’t want to attract mites and other pests.”
The women stared at him, fairly daring him to contradict them. He shifted under their gazes for a moment, the memory rising of being a boy and getting chastised for chasing chickens instead of doing his own chores.
“Garden still needs weeding,” he muttered before turning and walking away, his hands in his pockets and trying to convince himself that he was right.
The most annoying part of the encounter was that he couldn’t stop thinking about how it had felt when his fingers brushed hers. He had no business feeling anything of the kind, least of all about a woman as exasperating as that one.