“I’ll put a pot of soup on for lunch and then I’m going to have a hot shower to warm up my bones.”
“You are changing the subject. Besides, the meat is frozen and the microwave runs on electricity so you can’t thaw anything out that way,” she reminded him.
“I took hamburger out of the freezer yesterday when I heard about the storm moving in. And yes ma’am, I am changing the subject. I don’t like to argue and fight. I got plenty of that growing up with a house full of brothers.”
“Why do you cook?” she asked.
“Why don’t you?” he fired back at her.
She frowned. “Because Grand does a good job of it and I didn’t need to learn. Your turn.”
“Because Momma said so. Seven boys make for a lot of work. So she made us all learn to cook and we had to do our own laundry and ironing after our twelfth birthday.”
“Seven!” She carried the easel to the living room and set it up close to the window beside the fireplace.
He sat down in the rocking chair nearest the fire and shoved his feet toward the warmth. “You heard me right and I didn’t stutter. Seven boys. She really wanted a daughter, you see. But she got three boys in about four years right after she and Daddy married. She waited a few years and tried again and got another boy, Ace. Waited a few more years and decided to give it another try. And got three more boys for her efforts. Me, Dalton, and Blake. She spoils her daughters-in-law and her granddaughters these days.”
“I always wanted a brother or sister,” she said.
The words were out and she couldn’t put them back, but she wished she hadn’t said them. She didn’t want to share anything with Creed. That just led down a pathway that only ended in pain.
She chose a sixteen-by-twenty-inch stretched canvas. That would be the perfect size for a window painting. She looked at the kitchen window and her gods smiled on her that morning. For the briefest moment the snow blew in circles creating an angel in the upper part of the window.
Sage was known for her Western paintings that portrayed hidden animals in the rock formations of the canyon. She painted in earthy tones of umber, sienna, and ocher. But today she’d been given a new path: an angel looking down on a little red cardinal who studied three pieces of mistletoe lying on the sill just inside the window. She wanted to capture the cold and the way the bird eyed the mistletoe. She could hardly contain the excitement of something new and original as she set up the canvas and unlocked the paint box.
“What did you see?” Creed asked.
“What makes you think I saw anything?”
“You looked at the window and something changed in your face. All I saw was snow and mistletoe, but you saw something more,” he said.
“I saw a cardinal,” she said.
It was the truth. She had seen a cardinal earlier.
“Must’ve blinked at the wrong time. I didn’t see it.”
Sage could feel his eyes on her as she sketched and it created an itchy feeling like she’d been too close to poison ivy. She knew the very minute that he went to sleep. Trusting soul, he was, sleeping when she could easily get to the shotgun hanging over the fireplace or to the knives in the kitchen drawer.
The picture she was about to paint was etched firmly in her mind and she’d sketched in the beginning lines. So she stopped, sat down in the chair next to Creed, and stared at him.
Know thy enemy, is it? Grand’s voice whispered.
She whipped around to look behind her and set the rocking chair in motion. She expected the squeaking rocker to wake Creed, but he didn’t move.
That’s right. I’ll get to know him and find the very weakness that will run him off this ranch. You will not go through with this deal, Grand, she argued.
Thick, dark lashes fanned out on his angular cheeks that sported a day’s worth of black scruff. He was one of those men who had to shave every day and twice if he was going somewhere that night. He reminded her of her friend, Lawton Pierce, who owned the biggest spread in the whole canyon. Like Creed, Lawton had dark hair and long lashes and a beard. They could have easily been cousins, but Sage didn’t give a rat’s ass if he was Lawton’s long lost younger brother and they’d been cut from the same tanned leather cowhide. She still wasn’t going to like him.
Creed wiggled and sighed. She sure didn’t want him to catch her staring at him, so she stood up so fast that she got a head rush. Her chair sounded like a bird chirping as it flipped back and forth several times. But then he settled back into a deep sleep and she sat back down. She had the strangest urge to run her fingers through all that dark hair and see if it was as soft as it looked. Would he be a tender lover or a demanding one? Would his kisses build a fire in her or would they turn her completely off?
Now where did that come from? I’ve only just met him and I’m determined that he won’t be here more than three weeks, so there will be no kisses or sex. Besides, Grand would have a pure old hissy if she found out I’d slept with a man in this house, she thought.
“I couldn’t face her,” she whispered.
“You talkin’ to me or the dog?” he asked without opening his eyes.
“I was just muttering while I decide how to paint that picture over there,” she said.
His eyes opened slowly and he sat up straight. “Guess I’d best put the soup on if it’s going to be done by dinnertime. That and a skillet of corn bread should do for dinner and supper both, right?”
“I’ll make the corn bread,” she said.
“You don’t cook,” he reminded her.
“I lied. I can cook. I just don’t enjoy it. Grand made me learn enough to survive, and I make a mean skillet of corn bread and the best Christmas sugar cookies in the whole canyon.”
“You lied! What else did you lie about?”
Dammit! Was it a real lie if a person just omitted details?
“I saw the cardinal, but it was earlier in the day,” she said.
“That all?”
She squinted at him and set her mouth in a firm line. “Did you tell any lies this morning? About that dog, maybe?”
“I did not. Your grandmother didn’t say a word about a dog on the place and mine are registered redbone hounds. Two of them, Reba and Wynonna. They sure don’t look like that mutt. So one more time, darlin’—that animal did not come from my neck of the woods.”
She giggled. “Did you really name two bitches after the red-haired country singers?”
“You got it. They sing real pretty when they tree a coon or track a coyote.”
She looked at the sleeping dog. “Think they’ll like Noel?”