Chapter Three
Sleep did not come back.
Evelyn lay in the loft with the quilt pulled to her chin, her eyes fixed on the ceiling boards, and her heart still going at a pace that had no business continuing this long after the danger had passed.
Because the danger had passed. He'd put the gun down.
He'd read the letter. He'd told her to stay.
Everything had resolved itself in a perfectly reasonable manner, and she could stop shaking any time now.
Any time.
She pressed her hands flat against her stomach and made herself breathe.
In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way the matron at the orphanage used to instruct the younger girls when they woke from nightmares.
Evelyn had never found it particularly useful then, and she didn't find it particularly useful now, but it gave her something to do besides rewatch the last twenty minutes in her head.
The gun. That kept coming back. The way his hand had moved to it before anything else. Just moved. A reflex built from years of needing it, and what sort of life produced that?
Sarah's letters had mentioned Sam plenty.
My brother's gone again, off chasin' some fool across the territory. Sam sent money, enough for the roof but not the fencing. Sam came home Tuesday, stayed four days, fixed the barn door, left again before I could get a proper meal into him.
Always in motion. Always leaving.
Evelyn had built a picture from those letters: an older man, weathered, grizzled maybe, the sort of rough-edged frontier type who spoke in grunts and smelled like campfire smoke and had a beard down to his chest.
She had not pictured what had actually been standing in that kitchen. The shoulders. The scar along his side, that long pale line running from his ribs to his hip. The way he'd looked at her with those gray eyes while she stood there in her nightgown holding a skillet like a—
No. Enough of that.
Evelyn rolled onto her side and faced the wall. The log chinking had cracked in one spot and cold air leaked through in a thin stream that hit her forehead. She focused on it. Cold air. Cracked chinking. Practical things.
Sam Cooper shared blood with her dearest friend.
He'd be living under this same roof for the next two weeks.
And Evelyn Granger had sworn off men. Sworn off them completely, thoroughly, and with prejudice, because the last time she'd let herself get tangled up in a man's attention, she'd ended up the subject of public humiliation.
David Morrow had taught her exactly one useful lesson, and the lesson went like this: You did not hand someone the power to unmake you. Not twice.
So, it didn't matter what Sam Cooper looked like without his shirt. It didn't matter that his eyes had been gray, steel-gray; she'd clocked that even while terrified and gripping a skillet. None of it mattered. He came attached to the one person on earth Evelyn refused to complicate things with.
Two weeks. She'd cook his meals and clean his house and tend his animals. Then she'd get on a train and go back to Springfield and put all of this behind her.
She pulled the quilt tighter. The cold air kept coming through the cracked chinking. Outside, the coyote had started up again, or a different one, or maybe a whole pack of them.
Evelyn closed her eyes. Two weeks.
She could endure anything for two weeks.
***
She woke before dawn because the cold wouldn't let her stay under any longer.
The stove downstairs had burned down to almost nothing overnight, and the loft had gone frigid—the kind of cold where your fingertips ache, and your nose runs, and the bottoms of your feet cramp against the floorboards when you swing out of bed.
She dressed fast. Chemise, drawers, corset cover.
Not the boned corset—Lord no—not for farm work.
She'd wrestled herself into that contraption exactly twice since arriving, and both times had questioned why women agreed to such foolishness.
She put on her petticoat, her heavier wool dress, stockings, and boots.
She pinned her hair in a low knot that would hold through work, and splashed water from the washstand basin on her face.
The water had gone so cold overnight it might as well have been snow, and she sucked in air through her teeth.
Downstairs, she rebuilt the fire in the cookstove, feeding kindling and blowing on the coals until the firebox caught.
Then she got the coffee going, grinding the beans in the hand-crank mill and boiling water in the tin pot the way she'd done yesterday.
Except today she made twice as much, because, apparently, she'd be feeding a man who looked like he could split a cord of wood before noon and still want supper by three.
She found flour and lard in Sarah's supply crate and started on biscuits, cutting the lard into the flour with a fork the way the staff at the orphanage kitchen had taught her. She worked the dough with her hands. The kitchen warmed as the stove heated up and her fingers thawed.
She had the biscuits in the oven and bacon starting to spit in the skillet—she'd found a slab of salt pork in the cold cellar, wrapped in cloth, and had sliced it thin with Sarah's butcher knife—when Sam came through from his bedroom.
He was dressed. Thank the Lord for small mercies.
He was wearing a clean shirt, wool trousers, and suspenders hanging loose at his sides, like he hadn't quite finished putting himself together.
His hair stuck up on one side from sleeping on it wrong, and the dark stubble along his jaw had gone well past shadow into something that needed a razor's attention.
He went straight for the coffee. Poured it into a tin cup, drank it standing at the counter, and didn't look at her.
Evelyn set the table. Plate, fork, knife. She pulled the biscuits from the oven—golden, split-topped, the one thing besides cornbread she could make reliably—and arranged them on a cloth next to the bacon.
Sam drank his coffee at the counter. He remained standing.
"There's biscuits."
He glanced at the table. Then back at his cup. "I don't generally eat in the mornin'."
"You don't take breakfast at all?"
"I eat when I get hungry."
"The biscuits are fresh."
"I can see that, ma'am."
So, that covered that. Evelyn picked up her own biscuit and buttered it with the back of her knife, because Sarah didn't own a butter knife, and apparently, this household just used whatever came to hand.
She ate. Sam drank. The stove ticked. Outside, one of the horses let out something that might have been a whinny or a grievance.
Sam set his cup down. "I'll be out workin'. Barn roof needs patchin' before the next snow comes through."
He pulled on his duster, his hat, his gun belt. Even for barn work, the gun belt came along, which said something about the man, Montana or possibly both—and he went out through the front door.
Evelyn sat at the table with her half-eaten biscuit, her coffee, the empty chair across from her, and the plate she'd laid out for a man who hadn't touched it.
Well, this would be a fine two weeks.
She cleaned up. Washed the dishes in water she heated on the stove, wiped down the counter and the table with a rag, and swept the plank floor because it needed doing.
Working with her hands also kept her from thinking too hard about the fact that she'd traveled fifteen hundred miles to escape one difficult man and had landed directly in the kitchen of another.
Through the window she could spot Sam near the barn, hauling split lumber from a stack beside the corral.
He moved with that easy, practiced way of a body that knew the work so well the mind could go elsewhere.
He had the first boards up on the roof already, driving nails with a steady rhythm that carried clear across the yard.
Evelyn dried her hands on her apron. She'd told him she'd earn her keep.
Cook and clean, he'd said. But cooking and cleaning only filled so many hours, and she'd go half mad in this house by noon with nothing to do but stare at the walls.
Besides, she could help. She'd done plenty of hard work; the orphanage had seen to that.
She could carry boards or hand up nails or do something—anything, besides standing at a window.
She grabbed her coat and went outside.
The cold hit hard. Whatever warmth the stove had built inside dissolved in about three steps, and the air tasted like iron and pine and snow that hadn't fallen yet but planned to. Sam crouched on the barn roof with a hammer in one hand and nails clamped between his teeth.
"I figured I'd lend a hand."
He glanced down and took the nails out of his mouth. "And what d'you reckon you'd help with?"
"Whatever needs doin'. I can hand up boards, hold things steady, whatever you need."
"You ever patched a roof before, Miss Granger?"
"I've done plenty of work in my life, Mr. Cooper."
He studied her for a second and then jerked his chin toward the far side of the barn. "There's a stack of cedar shingles 'round back. Bring 'em over here, if you would. And mind your footin'. Ground's gone to ice."
Evelyn rounded the barn. The shingles sat in a rough pile against the back wall, cedar splits, each one about two feet long and heavy with moisture from sitting in the snow.
She grabbed an armload—too many, but setting some down now would prove him right about something she didn't want him to be right about—and started back.
The ice got her on the third step. Her boot hit a patch of frozen mud hidden under a skim of fresh snow and her foot went sideways.
The shingles scattered across the ground in a clatter that probably carried clear to town, and Evelyn went down hard on one knee and caught herself with both hands in the frozen dirt.
"Tarnation—"
"Hellfire! What'd I tell you about mindin' your footin'?" He came down the ladder fast and crossed to her in about four strides. "You hurt?"
"I'm all right."
Her knee throbbed and her palms stung from the frozen ground. Her pride had taken damage it wouldn't recover from any time soon, but she started gathering shingles because what else could she do?
"Leave 'em be."
"I can manage—"
"I said leave 'em be." He crouched and took the shingles right out of her hands. He wasn’t rough exactly, but he wasn’t asking either.
He was simply done. "You don't know what you're about out here, and I ain't got time to work and mind after you both.
I don't mean nothin' by it, but that's the way of it. "
Evelyn stood up and brushed the dirt from her palms. "I'm tryin' to be of use, Mr. Cooper."
"I can see that. But I ain't in need of help that makes more work than it saves." He stacked the shingles in one quick armload, easy, like they weighed nothing at all, and nodded toward the house. "Go on back to the house, now. I got this well in hand."
"Mr. Cooper—"
"Ma'am. I'd be obliged if you'd go on, now."
She stood there. He'd already turned back to the shingle pile, and the dismissal landed as complete and thorough as if she'd never come outside in the first place.
And what burned—what got into her and sat there like a hot coal in her chest—was that he'd looked at her the same way people in Springfield had looked at her.
As if she'd overstepped. As if she'd wandered into a space that had no room for her, and the kindest thing anybody could do about it involved sending her back where she came from.
Evelyn turned and walked back to the house. She didn't slam the door. She had more self-respect than that. But she closed it with intention.
Inside, she stood in the kitchen with her coat still on, her knee still aching, and her palms still raw. She let herself have about ten seconds of hot, tight, and furious rage.
The man had dismissed her. Dismissed her like a child who'd wandered into the yard and knocked over a bucket.
Go on back to the house, now.
As if the house belonged to her, the rest of the world belonged to him, and the line between them had been drawn long before she'd arrived.
It sat so close, so close to how David Morrow had made her feel—Evelyn, you're in the way, Evelyn, go back where you came from, Evelyn, this isn't your place—that for a second, she couldn't tell which man she was angrier at.
She hated herself for the comparison because Sam Cooper hadn't earned it. He'd been rude, not cruel.
There was a difference. Probably.