Chapter Nineteen #2
“I know what you mean,” Amelia said. “My sister had a voice like you wouldn’t believe. Men would line up to hear her. They’d always ask her to sing sad ballads, which I never understood. When we were hungry and desperate, we knew that we could always earn a few pennies on the stage.”
“I didn’t know you’d been on the stage,” Cody said flatly as he moved to the last hoof. “Nearly done,” he said to Cherry, who promptly thanked him by lashing him with her tail, causing him to sputter a little.
“Well, I mean, it wasn’t like it was regular employment or anything,” Amelia said hurriedly.
She tightened her hand reflexively on Cherry’s rope.
The last thing she wanted was to give Cody the wrong impression about her past, which was checkered enough as it was.
“It was just something we did. And I never sang,” Amelia continued. “I don’t have an ear for it.”
“What’d you do then?”
“Read, mostly,” Amelia said. “Most people can’t read out here, especially in the smaller towns. They seemed to like that well enough.”
“What’d you read?”
“Oh, anything, really. Passages from the Bible, poetry, sometimes letters from home,” she listed.
“Letters from home?” Cody inquired.
“Theirs, not mine,” Amelia clarified. “There was one man in some little nowhere-town in the Oklahoma territory, who had this letter he wanted me to read out. It was from a woman that he’d had to leave behind in Virginia.
He’d come west to find his fortune to marry her, but she couldn’t wait and…
Well, by the end of it, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
I still can’t think of it without getting sentimental. ”
Cody straightened and looked at her over Cherry’s back. He looked vaguely puzzled. “I didn’t have you figured as a romantic.”
“Why?” she demanded. “Don’t these surroundings just scream ‘romance’ to you?” She gestured with her free hand to the cow shed, which was not exactly fragrant.
Cody blinked and automatically looked around.
He blinked slowly, and then the strangest thing happened: a slow, boyish smile spread across his face.
The creases at the corners of his eyes lifted for a moment.
Amelia sucked air in through her mouth at the expression, wholly unprepared for it.
When he smiled, he lost all the gruffness that she’d come to expect from him. He looked soft and approachable.
“Well, I don’t hear Cherry complaining,” he offered.
Amelia subtly shook herself, trying to regain her equilibrium.
“I know I may not be a grande dame, but I’d like to think I have slightly better standards than a cow.
” She untied Cherry from the ring and then slid the halter from her head, patting her neck again for a job well done.
“And the truth of it is that women out here have to be hard, no matter how much we might long for softness.”
Gently, Amelia nudged Cherry into a turn and out of the shed and into the small pen.
Cherry was neighbors with the chickens, who liked to scratch around under her feed bucket in hopes of dropped grain.
This occasionally ended with a few indignant squawks, but it seemed to work out well for everyone in the end.
“I didn’t know,” Cody said softly, coming to stand next to her as she absently watched the chickens come fluffing up to the cow. “About your situation, that is,” he clarified. “Never really thought to ask.”
It would have been easy for Amelia to bristle at him, to snap and demand how he would have expected to learn anything about her if he didn’t take the time to ask, but she didn’t.
The Amelia of a few years ago may have, but her sister’s death and the ensuing chaos of her life had softened her in some ways, just as they had hardened her in others.
Though she still found Cody to be a curmudgeon, it was easy to see that it was largely a defense mechanism.
Prickly old porcupine, she thought with a good deal of amusement. She favored him with a gentle smile.
“I’ve learned a great deal about you today, too,” she said. “You don’t talk about yourself much, or your past.”
Cody shifted uncomfortably. “Don’t see much point in it. You know me as I am, or you don’t.”
“That’s fair,” Amelia allowed. “But it also helps to understand how to avoid putting salt in wounds.”
Cody hummed a low rumble in his chest. He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and stared into the distance again. “I should get back to work,” he said at last.
“Thank you again for your help,” Amelia said.
Cody nodded without looking at her. “Happy to do it—just ask.”
Without any further leave-taking, he ambled off in the direction of the barn.
Amelia watched him go, still feeling a little amused.
She suspected that he would get out there and stand around until he found something productive to do, not having a real goal in mind other than leaving a conversation that was far too emotionally intimate for his tastes.
The new honesty between them left Amelia feeling a little lighter.
She’d been so focused on solving the immediate problem that it hadn’t really occurred to her how long marriage could be for.
She’d have to spend the next thirty or forty years with this man, longer than she’d been alive thus far.
It was nice to know that he wasn’t a complete ogre; there was a softness to him that she hadn’t seen yet.
But it’s not real honesty, is it? a part of Amelia’s brain asked pointedly. A frown pulled at the corners of her mouth.
The sturdy fences of safety that her impromptu marriage had put up didn’t feel entirely impervious.
Dean was still out there, after all, and there was nothing to really stop him from making trouble for her.
If he couldn’t have her, Amelia wasn’t really sure what he’d do.
He’d been entirely too close for comfort if he’d tracked her to Arizona.
She shook her head hard and slipped out of Cherry’s pen, snatching up a water bucket on her way. There was no point in worrying; it was like being afraid of a thunderstorm on the horizon that she couldn’t even see yet.