Sutton's Way

“I’ve got to earn my keep somehow.” She sighed. “I can feed the calves and help with the housework, at least. I’m not used to sitting around doing nothing,” she added. “It makes me nervous.”

He hesitated. An odd look rippled over his face as he studied the neat stitches in his shirtsleeve where the rip had been. He held it for a minute before he laid it gently back on the sofa. He didn’t look at Amanda as he led the way out the door.

It didn’t take her long to get her things together. Elliot wandered around the cabin. “There are knives all over the counter,” he remarked. “Want me to put them in the sink?”

“Go ahead. I was using them for drumsticks,” she called as she closed her suitcase.

“They don’t look like they’d taste very good.” Elliot chuckled.

She came out of the bedroom and gave him an amused glance. “Not that kind of drumsticks, you turkey. Here.” She put down the suitcase and took the blunt stainless-steel knives from him. She glanced around to make sure Quinn hadn’t come into the house and then she broke into an impromptu drum routine that made Elliot grin even more.

“Say, you’re pretty good,” he said.

She bowed. “Just one of my minor talents,” she said. “But I’m better with a keyboard. Ready to go?”

“Whenever you are.”

She started to pick up her suitcase, but Elliot reached down and got it before she could, a big grin on his freckled face. She wondered again why he looked so little like his father. She knew that his mother had been a redhead, too, but it was odd that he didn’t resemble Quinn in any way at all.

Quinn was waiting on the sled, his expression unreadable, impatiently smoking his cigarette. He let them get on and turned the draft horse back toward his own house. It was snowing lightly and the wind was blowing, not fiercely but with a nip in it. Amanda sighed, lifting her face to the snow, not caring that her hood had fallen back to reveal the coiled softness of her blond hair. She felt alive out here as she never had in the city, or even back East. There was something about the wilderness that made her feel at peace with herself for the first time since the tragedy that had sent her retreating here.

“Enjoying yourself?” Quinn asked unexpectedly.

“More than I can tell you,” she replied. “It’s like no other place on earth.”

He nodded. His dark eyes slid over her face, her cheeks flushed with cold and excitement, and they lingered there for one long moment before he forced his gaze back to the trail. Amanda saw that look and it brought a sense of foreboding. He seemed almost angry.

In fact, he was. Before the day was out, it was pretty apparent that he’d withdrawn somewhere inside himself and had no intention of coming out again. He barely said two words to Amanda before bedtime.

“He’s gone broody,” Elliot mused before he and Amanda called it a night. “He doesn’t do it often, and not for a long time, but when he’s got something on his mind, it’s best not to get on his nerves.”

“Oh, I’ll do my best,” Amanda promised, and crossed her heart.

But that apparently didn’t do much good, in her case, because he glared at her over breakfast the next morning and over lunch, and by the time she finished mending a window curtain in the kitchen and helped Harry bake a cake for dessert, she was feeling like a very unwelcome guest.

She went out to feed the calves, the nicest of her daily chores, just before Quinn was due home for supper. Elliot had lessons and he was holed up in his room trying to get them done in time for a science-fiction movie he wanted to watch after supper. Quinn insisted that homework came first.

She fed two of the three calves and Harry volunteered to feed the third, the little one that Quinn had brought home with scours, while she cut the cake and laid the table. She was just finishing the place settings when she heard the sled draw up outside the door.