Chapter Six
Evelyn needed to eat.
Sam had been thinking about it all afternoon while he unloaded the supplies, stabled the mule, checked the other animals, and did the dozen other things that needed doing before dark.
She'd had canned peaches and nothing else since morning, and she couldn't exactly get up and cook for herself.
He'd told her to stay in that chair, which meant the cooking fell to him.
Sam Cooper could do exactly three things in a kitchen—boil coffee, fry salt pork, and burn cornbread.
Sarah had tried teaching him more over the years, had stood beside him at the cookstove walking him through biscuits and gravy and bean soup and every other thing, and every time he'd produced something that ranged from barely edible to genuinely offensive.
He had steady hands. He could track a man across sixty miles of scrub country by reading bent grass and cold campfire ash.
He could field-dress a deer in twenty minutes and shoe a horse without getting kicked.
But something about combining flour and water and heat in the right proportions defeated him in a way he found personally insulting.
He stood at the counter surveying what they had.
The supplies from Harlow's sat unpacked on the shelf.
Flour, cornmeal, dried beans, the slab of bacon, canned goods, and lard.
In the cold cellar he'd found potatoes—small ones, a little soft but still good—a few carrots gone limp from sitting too long, and half an onion wrapped in cloth.
A jar of Sarah's dried herbs sat on the windowsill, the label written in Sarah's hand: sage, rosemary, thyme.
Stew.
He could make stew. Stew amounted to cutting things up and putting them in water and waiting, which seemed like the kind of cooking even he couldn't ruin. He'd eaten enough of it on the trail to know what it should taste like.
How hard could it be?
He pulled the big cast-iron pot from under the counter—not the skillet, he'd developed complicated feelings about the skillet—and set it on the stove. He cut the bacon into chunks with his knife and threw it in the pot.
"You'll want to render that grease down proper before you go puttin' anything else in there."
Evelyn's voice carried from the chair by the stove, maybe eight feet away.
She had her ankle propped up on a crate he'd dragged over for her, a quilt across her lap, and she faced the kitchen with a clear sightline to everything he did.
Which, now that he considered it, meant she'd been watching him stand at the counter staring at potatoes for the last five minutes.
"I know that well enough."
"You were fixin' to drop those potatoes in with cold bacon, Mr. Cooper."
He looked down. He had, in fact, picked up a potato and held it over the pot. He set it back down.
"I was just fixin' to check the size of it."
"Mhm."
The bacon started to sizzle. Grease pooled in the bottom of the pot, popping and spitting, and the kitchen filled with that smell, the good one, the one that made a cold house feel like somewhere you might actually want to be.
He let the bacon cook until the edges curled and browned. So far so good.
"Now take the bacon out and set it aside. Leave the grease in."
"I ain't of a mind to take the bacon out. It goes in the stew."
"It goes back in later. You use the grease to cook the onion and the carrots first; otherwise they'll taste like boiled nothing."
He looked at her. She looked back at him. She wore the expression of a woman who knew she stood on solid ground and had decided to be patient about it, which in Sam's experience ranked among the most dangerous expressions a woman could wear.
He took the bacon out.
"That suit you?"
"Gettin' there. Now cut that onion. Small pieces, Mr. Cooper. You ain't choppin' firewood."
Sam cut the onion. His eyes watered immediately; he'd cut a hundred onions in his life, but they got him every time, and he swiped at his face with the back of his wrist and blinked hard as he kept cutting.
The pieces came out uneven and he scraped them into the hot grease where they hissed and popped.
"Smaller than that."
"They're already in the pot, ain't they?"
"I can see that. I'm tellin' you for next time."
Next time. Like there'd be a next time. Like they'd be doing this again. He let that pass without comment, mostly because the onions had started to brown and needed stirring and partly because he kind of liked the sound of it. It wouldn’t be too bad to do this again.
"Carrots now. Same size as the onion, or tryin' to be."
He peeled the carrots with his knife—he'd never used a peeler in his life and didn't intend to start—and cut them into rounds. These came out more even than the onion. He dumped them in.
"And the potatoes. Cut 'em in quarters; they're small enough."
He quartered the potatoes, scraped them into the pot, and stirred everything together with a wooden spoon. The mixture popped and sizzled in the bacon grease, and the smell had gotten genuinely good, better than anything he'd produced in a kitchen in recent memory or possibly ever.
"Now water. Fill it up about three-quarters. And the herbs, that jar on the sill, put in a good pinch of each."
He filled the pot from the water bucket and opened Sarah's herb jar and pinched out what he figured constituted a good pinch of sage, rosemary, and thyme. He dropped them in.
"That ain't a pinch. That's a fistful."
"You said a good pinch."
"A pinch, Mr. Cooper. Not a harvest."
Something happened to his mouth. The corner of it went up before he could stop it, and he turned away toward the stove so she wouldn't see, but he caught her reflection in the window glass, and she'd already spotted it. Her own mouth twitched.
"Salt. Just a little. And put the bacon back in."
The stew started to bubble, slow and steady, and the steam that escaped around the lid smelled like something Sarah would have made. Something that belonged in this kitchen.
"Now you just let it go. An hour at least. Stir it now and again so it don't stick."
Sam leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. "Anything else, or d'you reckon I might stand in my own kitchen a minute without bein' told what to do?"
"You can stand wherever you like, Mr. Cooper. I'm just tryin' to make sure supper don't kill us both."
He snorted. Actually snorted, which startled him because he couldn't remember the last time he'd made that sound. She grinned at him from the chair, a real grin that wasn’t polite or careful, and for about two seconds the whole tangled mess of the last few days just sat somewhere else.
Somewhere that didn't matter for the length of that grin.
That unguarded smile of hers made his chest fiddle. He'd spent his whole adult life preferring the quiet of an empty cabin—well, quiet other than Sarah—but having Evelyn sit there, matching his stubbornness stride for stride, didn't grate on his nerves the way company usually did.
As the hour passed and their banter shifted from cooking instructions to easier things, Sam had the sudden, unsettling realization that he actually liked having her in his kitchen.
***
The stew turned out good. Better than good.
Sam ate two bowls and considered a third.
He decided against it only because he didn't want to give her the satisfaction.
Evelyn ate at the chair with her bowl in her lap and her ankle still propped on the crate.
She ate steadily and thoroughly and didn't leave a drop, which told him she'd been hungrier than she'd let on.
"So." Evelyn set her empty bowl on the table beside her. "Bounty huntin'."
Sam looked up from his second bowl. "What of it?"
"Sarah writes about it some. Says you're gone more'n you're home. Says she worries."
"Sarah worries about everything. She'd worry about the weather if she thought it'd listen."
"How long you been at it?"
He leaned back in his chair. For whatever reason, he answered. Maybe it was the food, the warmth, or the fact that this woman had just talked him through cooking a stew without once making him feel stupid about it. This placed her in a category of person he didn't encounter often.
"Since I was about nineteen, I reckon. Started helpin' the sheriff in town, trackin' down men who'd skipped on warrants. Found out I had a knack for it. Then I figured freelancin' paid better, and Sarah and I needed the money, so." He shrugged. "It stuck."
"You like it?"
Nobody had asked him that before. Not Sarah, not the sheriff, nor any of the marshals or lawmen he'd worked with over the years.
They all assumed—correctly, mostly—that a man did bounty work because he had the skills for it and needed the pay, and liking had nothing to do with it.
But the way she asked it, straight and curious, like the answer actually mattered to her for no reason he could figure, made him chew on it a moment.
"I'm good at it. That ain't the same as likin' it, I reckon, but it's close enough.
" He turned his spoon in the empty bowl.
"Some jobs sit right. Man did something bad, you bring him in, justice gets done.
Clean. Other jobs—some of them are just sad.
Desperate folks who made a bad choice. Bringin' them in don't feel like much of anything worth feelin' good about. "
"And yet you keep on doin' it?"
"It keeps a roof over this here house. Keeps Sarah fed." He glanced at her. "She thinks highly of you, by the way. In case you didn't know. Talks about you plenty. Evelyn this, Evelyn that. Evelyn wrote the funniest thing. Evelyn's too smart to be stuck in that town."
She chuckled.
"Got to the point where I reckoned I almost knew you before you turned up in my kitchen brandishin' a skillet."
She looked down at her hands in her lap. "Sarah's too kind by half."
"Sarah's honest. That's different." He set his bowl aside.
"So, what brought you all the way out here, then?
And don't tell me it's just on account of the house exchange.
A woman don't haul herself fifteen hundred miles through rough country to mind chickens for a fortnight unless she's runnin' from somethin'. "
The color in her cheeks changed. Shifted from pleased to something else, something that pulled her mouth tight at the corners and made her hands go still in her lap. She looked at the fire.
"It's… I just had a mind for a change of scenery, is all."
That covered about as much of the truth as a handkerchief covered a horse.
Sam could read a lie the way he read trail signs—not by what showed but by what had been stepped around.
Whatever Evelyn Granger had left behind in Springfield, she'd packed it tight and buried it deep, and had no intention of digging it up for him.
Fair enough. He understood that. He had whole territories inside himself he'd posted No Trespassing signs on years ago and never looked back. A person had a right to their own fences.
"Well, I reckon a change of scenery's as good a reason as any."
She looked up at him. Something crossed her face, quick, and he couldn't quite read it. Gratitude, maybe. Or relief. Or just surprise that he'd let it go without pushing.
Seeing the tension drain out of her shoulders tugged at his ribs.
Sam found he actually liked being the reason she looked relieved, even if it meant letting her lie stand.
A sudden urge hit him to ride east and beat the tar out of whatever fool had put that guarded look in her eyes to begin with, but he shoved the thought aside. She had her fences; he'd respect them.
He gathered up the bowls and started washing them. Outside, the wind had died down to a low moan, and the snow had eased to a steady, quiet fall. He checked the fire, added a log, adjusted the damper.
"It's gettin' late. You'd best get some rest."
"I don't reckon I can make the stairs on my own, Mr. Cooper."
He'd been thinking about that. Had been thinking about it since he'd set her in this chair hours ago, actually, the question of how she'd get upstairs with a sprained ankle, and he'd arrived at the only answer that existed and had kind of been looking forward to.
"I'll tote you up."
"I figured you might say that."
"You fixin' to fight me on it this time?"
She considered. "I believe I'll permit it. On account of the stew."
"On account of the stew."
"You fed me a proper supper. I'll suffer the indignity."
He crossed to her chair, crouched down, and gathered her up the same way he had on the porch. She came easier this time. No fighting, no pushing against his chest, no demanding to be set down. She put one hand on his shoulder to steady herself and the other in her own lap. That covered it.
Except it didn't quite cover it, because on the porch, she'd been angry and scared and in pain and he'd been too busy managing the situation to notice much beyond the logistics of getting her inside.
But now the kitchen sat warm and quiet, and the stew smell hung in the air.
She'd just spent an hour teaching him to cook. She’d laughed at him when he got it wrong and called him hopeless in a voice that didn't sound like she meant it.
Carrying her up a narrow flight of stairs in that context turned into something different than carrying her off an icy porch.
He took the stairs slowly because they were steep and narrow, and because he told himself the steepness and narrowness required care.
At the top, the loft opened up into the small room with the bed, the washstand and the window, and he crossed to the bed and set her down on the edge of it, being careful with her ankle.
He straightened up, and she let go of his shoulder.
"Thank you, Mr. Cooper. For the stew. And for…" She gestured at her ankle and the stairs.
"Ain't nothin' to mention."
He made his way downstairs.
The warmth of her hand remained stamped into his shoulder muscle. Lavender soap and woodsmoke drifted down the stairwell in her wake. She sat up there in his bed right now. Under his quilt. Pulling the last pins from that heavy chestnut hair.
A bounty hunter lived out of saddlebags and slept on frozen dirt.
He traded in cold trails, rusted iron, and gunpowder.
Softness belonged to men who stayed put, not men tracking killers across the territory.
He had no business lingering on the curve of her neck or the fierce, stubborn set of her jaw.
He drove the iron poker into the stove coals. Sparks spat against the grate. Yet her sharp, impolite laugh still bounced off the log walls, driving out the dead quiet that usually smothered this cabin. She filled the empty spaces right up to the rafters.
He dropped the latch on the front door and retreated to the spare room, pulling the door tight against the glow of the stove.