A slender woman with warm bronzed skin dropped her washing cloth into the dish tub in the far corner of the kitchen. Wiping her hands on her apron, she approached Jane. Her dark hair was plaited in a thick braid that coiled far down her back. She wore a long skirt that looked to be made of very fine leather, and a bright red shirtwaist embroidered with tiny colored beads in an intricate design.
Beside the area where his wife had been working, Caleb Kincaid sat in a big wooden armchair upholstered with leather. A rugged-faced man with shaggy blond hair, he slowly lit a pipe without speaking a word.
Mrs. Kincaid shot her husband an odd, searching look, then she caught sight of Jane’s face. “What happened to you, kâse’ee’he? Did you fall off the horse on your ride out here? No, these bruises have begun to heal.”
Jane took a deep breath, ready to launch into the contrived explanation for her injuries. At the last moment, she faltered. What if she got confused and told Mrs. Kincaid a slightly different story than she’d told the foreman? Might he trip her up in the lie?
To her surprise, John Whitefeather came to her rescue. “Some cars on her train got derailed back in Chicago. She lost all her bags in the accident, too.”
Ruth Kincaid shook her head and made a crooning noise of sympathy. “You must be hungry and tired, dear. Sit down and eat, then we’ll talk. Before you go to bed, I’ll put a poultice on your cheek. It might draw that bruise. And you need some salve for the scrape on your chin.”
Gratefully Jane sank down onto one of the plain, solid chairs ranged around the big kitchen table, and took off her hat and gloves. Eking out her last few crackers on the train, she thought she’d grown accustomed to the vague biliousness of constant hunger. It had gnawed at her stomach like a toothless old dog worrying a bone. Now, as she inhaled a savory blend of meat and onions, her appetite suddenly grew the fangs of a wolf.
Mrs. Kincaid set a plate of stew in front of Jane and another in front of John Whitefeather, who had taken a seat opposite her. Years of strictly minding her manners, and the consciousness of her new employers’ eyes upon her, kept Jane from falling on her supper like a starving beast.
Nothing could stifle her groan of pleasure upon sinking her teeth into a tender morsel of richly flavored meat.
Mrs. Kincaid smiled as she set a plate of biscuits and a crock of butter on the table between Jane and the foreman. “Is this the first time you’ve tasted venison, Miss Harris?”
Jane abruptly stopped chewing. She swallowed hard to work that mouthful down. “Deer meat?”
She reached for a biscuit at the same moment as John Whitefeather. His large, brown knuckles swiped across hers, making them look smaller, softer and paler. She suddenly had a vivid flash of memory—Emery’s sallow, bony fist flying toward her eye. With a gasp and a start, she jerked her hand back, as though she’d touched a red-hot stove.
“Don’t worry, Miss Harris.” The foreman glanced at Mrs. Kincaid, his dark brows raised. “There’s plenty of biscuits here for both of us.”
Jane caught the rancher’s wife returning John Whitefeather’s dubious look. A sense of impending trouble ambushed her again.
Caleb Kincaid smoked in watchful silence as Jane and John Whitefeather finished their meal. Only when his wife had removed the plates from the table did he speak.
“I’m afraid we have a problem, Miss Harris.” The rancher stared hard at the kitchen floor, as if suddenly finding its wood grain of absorbing interest.
Here it came. Jane’s insides constricted into a tiny little lump, heavy as lead.
“Problem?” She almost gagged on the word.
Three thousand miles from home, with nothing. There couldn’t be a problem with her only means to earn a living. There just couldn’t.
The rancher was a big man. Not quite as big as his foreman, but still tall and powerfully made. Having broached the subject, he now cast a helpless glance at his wife, who looked every bit as ill at ease.
“Did you not read the letter we sent you, kâse’ee’he?” Ruth Kincaid set the dishes in the washtub, then stood beside her husband’s chair.
“Of course I read it,” blurted Jane, then she hesitated. What if the Kincaids asked her to quote particulars? “I mean…not with my own eyes. It…arrived on a rainy day…and the ink ran.”
Oh dear, why could she not invent a more plausible explanation for coming all the way to Montana without actually having seen the Kincaids’ offer of employment? After all, she’d had years of practice lying about the injuries Emery had done her.
She toyed with the notion of telling them the humiliating truth, but firmly rejected it. Better to let the Kincaids turn her out on the empty grasslands, with wolves howling in the distance, than have to admit her fiancé had burned their letter before her eyes, then beaten her insensible for trying to escape him.
“I just assumed you must be writing to offer me the job.” Though she struggled against it, her voice rose, shrill and plaintive. “No one writes all the way from Montana to Boston to say they don’t want you.”
Neither Caleb Kincaid nor his wife would meet her eyes, so she addressed her hopeless question across the table, to the only person in the room who did not flinch from her imploring gaze.
“Do they?”
For the first time since she’d come face-to-face with him that afternoon, John Whitefeather’s sternly handsome features softened in a look of sympathy. He cleared his throat.
“We can’t do anything about this tonight.” He addressed his words to the Kincaids. “Miss Harris is here and she can’t go back to Whitehorn until morning. Maybe after a good night’s sleep we’ll all see our way clearer.”
Jane wasn’t certain what to make of a hired man advising his employers with such authority. She couldn’t picture herself bidding Mrs. Endicott to do anything.
After spending so many nights dozing fitfully on the upright seat of a jolting railway carriage, she yearned to lie flat on her back to sleep. As John Whitefeather had said, the situation couldn’t help but look a little brighter in the morning. At the moment, her problem seemed insurmountable.
Unfortunately, nothing was going to make it disappear overnight.
“Why…?” Her lower lip began to quiver. She drew a breath to steady herself, only to exhale a humiliating sob. “Why don’t you want me? You need someone to look after your baby, and I’ve looked after Mrs. Endicott since I was twelve years old. She’s not a baby, I know, but sometimes when she won’t take her pills like the doctor orders, and when she rings the bell for me half a dozen times in the night, she’s every bit as much trouble. And she doesn’t smell sweet like a baby or hold out her arms and smile like babies do to let you know they…”
The forlorn little words love you were lost as Jane shielded her face with her hands and fought to compose herself.
Suddenly she felt a pair of strong arms warm around her shoulders. Her breath caught in her throat and she jerked back from the comforting embrace. She relaxed slightly when she found it was Mrs. Kincaid, not John Whitefeather, holding her.
Ruth Kincaid crooned some words Jane could not understand before easing into English. “It was not you we turned down, Jane Harris. I asked Caleb to make that plain in his letter. There must have been a mix-up. We didn’t even run our notice in any newspapers so far East.”
Jane remembered. She’d read the Kincaids’ advertisement in one of the newspapers Mrs. Endicott’s cousin had sent her from Saint Louis. Wanting to get as far away from Emery as possible, Jane had scoured the western papers for employment opportunities. Of several inquiries she’d sent, only the Kincaids in distant Montana had answered.
To say they didn’t want