Twilight

“Of course I do, Avram. Now calm down before you give yourself indigestion.”

“Indigestion? I shall thank the good Lord if I don’t succumb to apoplexy this very night.”

“Then you must remind me to give you two doses of your elixir before you leave, Avram. Is the arrangement suitable, Mr. Stark?”

Rance didn’t spare Halsey the merest glance. Nor did Jessica. “Fine, ma’am.”

“Good heavens, Jessica. Do you realize you’re all but conducting business with a perfect stranger in your private—?”

“I’ll start supper, then,” she said crisply, brushing past Avram, with Christian clinging at her heels.

“Jessica!” Halsey bellowed down the hall, his face mottled with rage. His color only deepened when Rance ducked through the doorway. Halsey shifted his shoulders, purposely blocking Rance’s path. “And where the devil are you going, Stark?”

Rance slanted the shorter man a hooded look. “To the barn, Halsey. Or would you rather I remain here in Jessica’s bedroom? The floor is remarkably comfortable.”

Halsey shook so with his rage, a well-oiled lock of hair spilled over his forehead. “Jessica!” he yelled in Rance’s wake. “I shan’t stand for it! You shall be my wife in a scant few months. And goodly wives must obey their husbands. It’s the Lord’s word. Do you hear me, Jessica? This outlaw shall not sleep one night in my barn. Jessica? Do you hear me?”

She was staring from the kitchen window, a large potato clenched in one fist, her other hand gently stroking her son’s head. Rance could almost feel the tender loving emanating from her fingertips, the silent emotion flowing between mother and son. Rance grew acutely aware that he wished he could remember the same gentle mother’s touch upon his brow, making the world right for him.

Only when Rance bumped into the table on his way out the door did Jessica glance at him. He had to pause then, his hand clasped about the loose doorknob, when the hint of a curve softened her mouth just as the afternoon sunlight spilled over mother and child like warm honey.

He shoved the door wide. Hot sun slapped his forehead. Heat and dust wrapped around him, and he strode to the barn with a foreign sense of determination blossoming in his gut.

* * *

The back door slammed. “He’s gone,” Christian said, and poked one finger into a bowl of blackberries.

Jessica froze between table and stove and clutched a damp rag to her belly. She stared at her son’s chubby finger sifting through the freshly washed fruit and listened to the heightened thumping of her pulse. “Who’s gone?” she asked slowly.

Christian grabbed a fistful of berries and shoved them all into his mouth. “Rrvrrnnn Allseee.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Jessica said, an odd relief spilling through her limbs. Relief...that Avram had finally given up the fight for the evening, of course, and that he had managed to remove himself from the farm without pausing to engage in fisticuffs with a wounded Logan Stark.

Avram had declined her offer to stay for dinner. She’d felt it then, too, this relief, particularly when he’d given her his typical swift passing of his dry lips over her cheek. Always the same, that farewell kiss, no matter the time of day or their mood. Reliable, that was her Avram. Dependable, if a bit steeped in moral self-consciousness. A fine quality in a husband, one Jessica could appreciate only now, after experiencing the true depths of Frank’s deception.

“Wash up, Christian.” Her fingers wrapped about Christian’s tiny wrist, just as it was poised again over the fruit. “Not before supper. Where are your shoes?”

He blinked at her through his bangs. Never guilt or remorse there, just a simple stating of the facts, the irrefutable conviction that she, the female, would be left to see to the righting of things. She knew precisely what he was going to say. “I don’t know where my shoes are.”

“Find them before you step on something.”

“I can’t. I’m too hungry.”

Jessica released a weary breath and turned to retrieve a large iron pot simmering on the stove. “Then set the table for me...after you wash up.”

Christian scooted a chair to the wash pump, clambered onto it, and pumped vigorously until water splashed everywhere. “Is Mr. Stark going to eat with us? I think he’s hungry.”

“Of course he is....” She placed the pot of soup upon the table and thrust a rag at Christian the precise moment he wiped his hands dry on his dirt-smudged shirt. “Hungry, that is,” she said. Her gaze found the ladder-back chair opposite, the chair left vacant for over a year now. Her husband Frank’s chair. Avram refused to sit in it. Even Christian, who on any given day preferred to venture from chair to chair for his meals, never once gave that particular chair his consideration.

Stark’s shoulders would surely fill this small kitchen. She wondered how much a man of his size would eat, how those long legs would fit beneath this table. They’d reach clear beneath her own chair. No, it wouldn’t do to have the man dine here, with them.

The now seemingly insignificant pot of vegetable soup jarred against the table when Christian plunked three bowls next to the pot. Again she stilled his hand as it inched toward the blackberries.

“No,” she said. “I’ll take his dinner out to him. Set the table for two, Christian.”

“But, Mama—”

“Napkins on the left.”

“I know.” With his tongue curling out of his mouth, Christian folded the cloth napkins and placed them to the right of the stoneware plates. “He has a big horse, Mama. It’s black.”

“Imagine that,” she replied, repositioning the napkins on the left.

“It’s in the barn with him. I’m gonna ride it.”

“I don’t believe you will.”

“We can hitch it to our broken wagon.”

“We’ll get our own horse soon and hitch it to the buckboard, after Reverend Halsey fixes it.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“You always say that. Soon. Is that when Reverend Halsey is gonna be my pa?”

The ladle poised over the pot. “Yes, I suppose it is. Quite soon.”

Christian thrust out his chin. “Then we’ll never get a horse, because Reverend Halsey doesn’t like them. He says they smell.”

“And he’s right. They do smell. That’s why they live in the barn with the other animals.”

“Mr. Stark doesn’t smell.”

Yes, he did...like baked leather and warm male skin. Her arms went suddenly weak. The ladle banged against the bottom of the pot. “No...I mean, he...” All words left her.

Christian frowned up at her through his bangs. “So why does he have to sleep in the barn?”

The ladle stirred and stirred. Jessica sought her words from the swirling soup and found nothing but a heightened thumping of her pulse.

“He could sleep on the floor in your room, Mama. He’s too big for the bed.”

“Stop it, Christian,” she snapped suddenly. Too suddenly, her voice brimming with an odd agitation. Regret flooded through her even before she could reach out a hand to caress that blond head. But Christian seemed to shrug off her mood in his typical fashion. In another instant, his finger inched toward the blackberries. This time, perhaps because of her regret, she didn’t stop him, and directed all her thoughts to ladling the steaming soup. She watched the characteristic scrunching of Christian’s nose as he glowered at the soup and then his gaze darted to the stove, seeking. Would this ritual never cease?

“Mama—”

“You’re eating the soup, Christian.”