“Sounds like she’d be real happy there. As for me, there are cows, hogs, chickens, and when there is electricity there’s good country music to listen to. And now Noel is here and there will be puppies.”
“What happens when her owner comes to take her home?”
Creed looked at the poor skinny dog. “No one is coming to claim her, Sage. She’s a castoff that someone tossed out before the storm hit. She’s probably been living on field mice for a week and sleeping in barns. She’s too skinny to have been thrown away just before the blizzard hit. She’s found a home and a friend in you. Darlin’, she ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
Sage laid her brush down and scratched Noel’s ears. “Stop callin’ me darlin’. I’m not and I will never be your darlin’.”
“It’s just my way and I’m not changing,” he said.
As if Noel understood that men were strange creatures who couldn’t be reasoned with, she wagged her tail so hard that it sounded like a drumbeat on the hardwood floor.
“Look, Creed! I swear she smiled.”
“Dogs do that when they’re happy, just like humans.”
Sage rubbed her fur and said, “You’re a good girl. I bet you were raised on Venus with the rest of us girls and not on Mars with a bunch of mean old boys.”
“I read that book,” Creed said.
Sage turned her head so quickly that her neck cracked. “Why would a cowboy like you read that book?”
“Because my brother’s wife mentioned it and because I wanted to understand why women are the way they are.”
“Did you learn anything?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Not much. Just that y’all are temperamental. That y’all approach things you can’t change with anger or tears. And that to really understand a woman is impossible.”
He changed the subject abruptly. “Wonder what the puppies will look like? Maybe they’ll have some old redbone in them.”
“Not a chance. Noel wouldn’t fall in love with a huntin’ hound. She’s going to have Irish setter puppies or maybe even beagles, but not an old coonhound, are you, baby girl?” Sage kissed the dog between the eyes and went back to her painting.
It was nearly time for chores and the storm had gotten even worse. Sage finished what she was working on and cleaned her brushes. She went to the kitchen and put a pan of milk on a burner to heat for hot chocolate, took down the cocoa and sugar and marshmallows, and then reached for two mugs.
She lit two oil lamps, carried one to the end table beside the sofa, and put the other one in the middle of the kitchen table. That brought precious little light into the room, but it beat trying to do anything in the darkness. After supper she’d scrounge around in the pantry for candles or more lamps so they could have one in each bedroom and the bathroom.
And matches! She’d need to put them beside the lamps so they could reach them without fumbling around and knocking off the lamp. Grand would be really mad if they wasted expensive lamp oil.
Creed looked up from his book when she set the mug of hot chocolate on the table beside him and said, “Thank you. That looks good.”
“I thought we’d need a warm pick-me-up before we went out to feed. I’ll gather the eggs and feed the hogs if you’ll milk the cow. I hate milking and I’m so slow the milk will freeze in the bucket before I ever get the job done,” she said.
“It’s not in the contract that you have to help with chores,” he said.
“You helped cook. I’ll help with the outside work.”
“I don’t turn down willing help.”
Willing or otherwise, she would help him because it was fair. It wasn’t fair at all that she had an almost instant attraction to the very man she had been determined not to like at all.
Sage was not innocent. She was twenty-six and she’d had a couple of relationships. There was Victor, a fellow art student in college that lasted at least six months before he accused her of being afraid of commitment. Then there was Justin who’d worked for Lawton four years ago and had accused her of the same thing. True, it had been a long time since she’d been to bed with a man, but she wasn’t a casual sex woman. If there wasn’t something there beyond a one-night romp in the hay, she wasn’t interested. But the honest truth was that she could never remember any man in her past that had created the stir in her heart like Creed had that day.
She finished her chocolate and Noel followed her to her room.
“You ready to go back out, are you? Well, you wear your fur coat. I have to get my insulated coveralls on before I can go,” she said.
Sage removed her sweat suit, pulled on long thermal underwear, and then put her sweats back on, along with two pair of wool socks and a mustard-colored coverall much like Creed’s. She zipped it up the front, jammed her feet down into work boots, and picked up her face mask and gloves.
When she reached the kitchen, Creed was putting on his boots.
“Ready to brave it?” he asked.
“I’m ready,” she answered.
Noel barked and danced around the back door.
“Oh, no, young lady. You can’t go out in that kind of weather,” Creed said.
“You’d best let her go if she wants to. She’s been inside all day. I bet her bladder is about to explode. Don’t you know that pregnant women have to go a lot?” Sage said and then stopped before she opened the door. “You don’t think she’ll run away, do you?”
“She knows where the food is.”
The minute she could get out, Noel disappeared in the snow, chasing around like a puppy.
Sage bent into the wind and went straight for the barn. She filled two buckets with feed for the hogs and carried them to their trough. It was easy to fill without going into the lot. Just open up a trap door on the back of their shed and pour the feed in. That done, she braved the biting snow back to the barn.
“Hey, give me a hand here. I’m thinking if we leave the back door of the barn open, we can shove one of these big round bales into it and it will stay dry longer. The lean-to will keep the snow from drifting up against it. If the barn was bigger, I’d just open it up and bring the cattle all inside.”
“Poor old cows, but they are better off in the lot than they’d be out in the canyon,” Sage said.
“At least this way their hay will be dry. Open the doors when I get close.”
It was an ingenious idea. The hay was wedged into the space so the cows couldn’t get into the barn. The lean-to kept the snow from blowing into it so the cattle at least had dry hay, even if it was cold. If they had Dutch doors they could shove a big round bale of hay in the bottom and shut the top doors. She’d have to remember to talk to Grand about that when she got home.