She turned her coffee mug around and around in her hands. “How long will I be laid up like this?”
His dark eyes met hers, an unnerving glint of amusement in their depths. “Long enough. Longer than you’re going to like. Your bone has to knit before you put any weight on it.”
Her fork clunked onto the plate. “How long?” she repeated.
He settled his rangy form back into the rocker, stretched out his legs and crossed his boots at the ankle. “I’d say you need a hired hand for the next few weeks.”
Ellen choked on her coffee. “Weeks! I can’t stay bedridden that long. My vegetables will shrivel up in this heat. The cow will go dry. The hens…” She had to keep the farm going, but he’d never understand her desperate need to do so.
He gave her a speculative look. “You want your leg to heal crooked? Have a limp the rest of your life?”
“Well, no.” A sudden curiosity seized her. “Is that what happened to your leg?”
He said nothing.
“Mr. Flint? I asked you a question.”
“I heard you. Could be I’m not going to answer it.”
Irritation tightened her jaw. “And why is that?”
“Because it’s none of your business,” he said quietly.
Ellen bit her lip. “You’re right, of course. I shouldn’t have asked.” But lordy-Lord, she couldn’t lie here being an invalid, even for a few days. How would she water the vegetables and bake bread and churn butter and…all the other things that demanded her attention?
She set the mug aside and knotted her fingers together. “I can’t pay you wages.”
Mr. Flint’s gaze met hers, his eyes hard as sapphires. “Didn’t ask for any. I was thinking about meals and a place to sleep in your barn.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think—” The memory of the last wayfaring man she’d hired still made her stomach churn. But how would she manage without help?
“For how long?” She made her tone as crisp as she could.
The oddest look flitted across his face, instantly replaced by a carefully impassive expression. “Let’s say for as long as it takes.”
As long as it takes? Something about the way he said that made her uneasy. “I can ask the Gundersen boy to help out. He’s chopped wood for me in the winter and last summer he helped bring in the hay.”
“I’ll be better than the Gundersen boy.” Mr. Flint said it without apparent pride, just stated it as if he were saying, “Today is Tuesday.”
“Besides,” he added, “I want to stay.”
Ellen opened her mouth without thinking. “Why?”
The rocking motion stopped abruptly. “You’re one nosy woman, Miz O’Brian.” He looked at her for a long minute, his eyes so stony she caught her breath.
“I know,” she said with a sigh. “I guess it comes from being alone. I question everything. It is nosy, but I need to be, well, careful. I don’t much trust men, ever since Dan…”
“Yeah.” He nodded once, downed the last of his coffee and set the mug on the floor beside him.
Ellen studied his face. He hid his feelings cleverly. Dollars to doughnuts there was something he wasn’t telling her.
“Mr. Flint, you have not answered either of my questions.”
“You’re right.” He rose, scooped his coffee mug off the floor, stacked her empty plate on his. “Maybe I’m tired of traveling. Maybe I want to stop somewhere and rest awhile.”
He didn’t look at her when he spoke.
Maybe. And maybe I’m the Queen of Sheba. Ellen smoothed out the sheet covering her lower torso.
“Anyway, Miz O’Brian, might be smart to say thanks, and wait till you’re on your feet again. Right now you’re in no position to run me off.”
Ellen blinked. Was that a threat? She listened to the irregular rhythm of his footsteps going down the stairs. He was right about one thing: she did not want her leg to heal crooked.
It would make it even harder to hold on to the farm for when Dan returned. And if she had the child her heart yearned for, how would she tend it if she was crippled? It would be impossible to chase after a toddler if she couldn’t walk right.
Ellen closed her eyes against the pain of her longing. It was foolish to hope for a child when her husband might be dead.
Downstairs, dishes clattered. The hand pump squeaked and water trickled into the sink. The back door opened, shut, then opened again. Later a rhythmic thonk-thonk carried on the still air, like an ax biting into a tree. She let the noises wash over her.
When she woke the sky was a milky lavender. Almost twilight. The curtains had been pushed back and the sash raised to catch the breeze. The soft squawks of her chickens drifted up from the yard. Bullfrogs croaked down by the creek, and the still, warm air smelled of dust.
She loved this place with its earthy smells, the warm, peaceful evenings and the mornings alive with inquisitive finches chattering in her apple trees. Her life moved forward in an ordered sequence of events, guided by the rising and setting of the sun. It was predictable. Safe.
It didn’t matter that chores filled every hour between dawn and dark. The cow needed to be milked, the horse fed and the stall mucked out. The vegetables weeded, apples picked and cooked into applesauce… Oh, Lord, the drudgery never ended. Sometimes she felt as if she were suffocating.
But it would be worth it in the end. Dan would be so pleased when he returned, so proud of her. Something unforeseen must have happened to him that day he left for town. An accident, perhaps. Whatever it was, when he came home he’d find the farm prospering and his wife waiting with welcoming arms.
With a wrench she turned her mind away from Dan. She wouldn’t allow herself to brood. She’d think about how peaceful it was just lying here in her bed, listening to the quiet noises she never had time to stop and enjoy—twittering finches in the pepper tree, Florence lowing across the meadow.
No sound came from downstairs. Maybe Mr. Flint had absconded with her horse and her cow, after all?
Don’t be an idiot. If that rambling man had wanted either, he would have taken them this morning and not returned. True, he did take the horse, but he’d brought him back. Even so, it was hard to trust him. Even if he could set a broken leg.
By late afternoon Jess still tramped the perimeter of Ellen’s farm. His shadow lengthened, but he had to learn the lay of the land. Stopping under the same spreading oak he’d climbed earlier, he knelt, unfolded a rumpled sheet of brown grocer’s paper and wrestled a pencil stub out of his jeans pocket.
“Here, and here,” he muttered. He marked the points with an X on the makeshift map, then sketched in the barn, the house, the creek and the pasture beyond it, the apple trees at the back of the property, even the tree under which he sat. Chewing the tip of the pencil, he studied the layout, then bent to draw a grid over the landmarks. Each square represented maybe five long strides. He’d start at the upper left boundary and methodically work his way across and then down. He’d cover every goddam inch of this ground before husband Dan came home.
By suppertime, Jess had milked Florence and locked the hens in their shelter. For the evening meal he boiled up an armload of sweet corn he’d picked, and heated a can of beans from her pantry. He dished up two plates, piling his own high with ears of corn, and clumped upstairs to Ellen’s bedside.
He also carried with him the oak limb he’d cut and shaped this afternoon. By God, he was more nervous about what she’d think of that bit