Pot roast. How many years had it been since he’d had good old homemade pot roast? His diet over the last few years had tended toward hamburgers or a taco grabbed on the fly—that, or the native cuisine of whatever country he was working in. Pot roast took a long time. Mothers made pot roast. It was the sort of dinner that had love cooked right into it—along with Sunday afternoons and going to church with the family.
He twitched. Where the hell had that picture come from? It didn’t sound like any sort of life that he’d ever led. What happened? Were you born with some sort of stereotype in. your head that you tried to live up to your entire life? Tried, and failed. Kind of a great eternal joke on humanity.
“I didn’t realize that was such a hard question,” she commented.
He looked up, at a loss for a moment. Then he remembered what she’d asked. “Uh...sure. I like pot roast.”
“Good. I’m making plenty. You can have all you want.”
It seemed he was expected to stay for dinner. Suddenly the prospect of a homemade meal was overwhelmingly seductive. He sat back and contemplated his luck. He knew he should go. But one good old pot roast dinner wouldn’t hurt. Would it?
“You know,” she said, coming out of the kitchen. “I really think you should go to the hospital.”
He grimaced, shifting his leg. “What for?”
“They’ll fix you right up, put you in a cast, make sure you’re on the road to healing...”
He was shaking his head. “No. I’m not going to the hospital.” He’d already spent too many weeks in the hospital this year. “I’ve had worse than this before. The human body has a capacity to heal all sorts of things on its own. And mine’s had a lot of practice at it.”
She gazed at him curiously, but didn’t respond to what he’d said. “Okay, I guess I can’t force you.” Starting toward the door, she called back, “You’ll have to hold the fort I’ve got to go get Robbie. He gets out of school at three and....”
As though she knew this part by heart, Sabrina came running out of the back of the house to join her mistress. Charlie stopped at the door, her hand on the knob. “You’ll be here when I get back, won’t you?” she asked.
He looked at her. Her lips were curved into a slight smile and her eyes were alight with the question. Tiny wisps of blond hair flew around her lovely face. It was a good thing he’d learned to harden himself over the years. A weaker man wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptingly engaging picture she presented.
“Sure, I’ll be here,” he told her gruffly. “Where the hell would I go?”
Her face changed and she straightened her shoulders, taking a couple of steps back toward where he lay. “Okay, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. When my son is around, I’d appreciate it if you would watch the swearing. You seem to do an awful lot of it, and I don’t like it.” She paused. “On the other hand, it’s a free country. You can swear all you want. Only not around Robbie. That I won’t allow.”
She’d caught him off guard again. He hadn’t realized he’d been getting that careless—like some mountain man who didn’t know how to behave in civilized society. Great. Now he was so far gone he was swearing around a woman. He’d lived a tough life. He’d sworn a lot in his time. But he still had some old-fashioned values. He never used to swear around women and children. He was going to have to relearn that.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ll watch it.”
Her smile was back, as though she were glad he’d taken criticism so well. “I’d appreciate it,” she said breezily, spinning back toward the exit. “It takes twenty minutes to get to Robbie’s school. Twenty minutes back.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, and he didn’t give one. He only stared after the closing door, wondering how he’d managed to end up here when all he’d come for was rest and relaxation. Something told him rest was going to be hard to find with Charlie around.
Three
Charlie left her cabin and started toward town. Smoke was coming out of the chimney at Margo’s place, so she was home. Charlie had a moment’s unease, of wondering what the neighbors would think about her visitor, but she brushed it away. That was old thinking, from her past. She was a different person now.
She was a little late and she walked quickly, buoyed by some sort of sparkling in her veins. She didn’t know what it was, but she had energy to burn today.
“Could it be because I’ve got a man on my couch?” she muttered to herself, then laughed aloud, making Sabrina run back and dash about her ankles to see what was so funny.
A man—a pretty common item for most women to have around. But not her. She’d avoided men for so many years now, she hardly knew how to handle one now that she had him. She’d had a man in her life once before. He’d fathered her son. For that, she would always be grateful. But he’d also made life even more miserable than it had been before he came along and she’d run as far and as fast as she could to get away from him.
Some women were not meant to have a man. She’d decided that must be the case a long time ago, and that maybe she was one of them. Her experience with marriage had been such a disaster, she knew she would have a hard time risking it again. She’d been lucky to have gotten away, lucky that no one had found her in all these years. She and her son Robbie were together, and that was all she needed. She couldn’t imagine being any happier than she was right now.
So why had she brought the man home, like some wounded puppy who needed ministering to? She wasn’t sure. She’d thought at first, just for a moment or two, that he looked familiar. But that couldn’t be. The life she’d lived before she’d moved here hadn’t included men like Denver. Still, there was something m his face—something slightly familiar and yet not. Something that made her trust him, even though he’d given her no real reason to do anything of the kind.
She knew that if she ever did pick a new man to marry, it wouldn’t be a man like Denver. If she got to that point, she would be looking for a professional man, someone solid and reassuring. Denver was too rough, too... well, dangerous was a good word for it. There was something a bit intimidating about him. She had the feeling that he would do just about anything for someone, if he cared enough.
And those scars on his body! Good grief. She shuddered, thinking about them. She’d seen enough at the hospital to know those weren’t football injuries. The man had been knifed and shot and who knew what else? At some point in his life, he had obviously been involved in something very dangerous.
And then there was that moment when he’d taken hold of her wrist and pulled her close. She’d felt so strange—as though she’d almost been waiting for him to do it. She’d seen the raw hunger in his eyes and her heart had beat so loudly, she could hardly breathe. She’d thought he would kiss her. But it didn’t happen, and she caught her breath now, thinking about it. Did she want that? Did she? Shaking her head, she pushed it away. She couldn’t let herself dwell on that. It brought up too many conflicting emotions.
And the school was just ahead, a little wood frame building nestled in a clearing rimmed with ponderosa pine. The children were just coming out and she waved at Robbie, nodded and called greetings to a few friends, then he came barreling toward her and she reached down and caught her son up in her arms. She held him tightly, smelled his hair, felt the spirit that filled him, and thanked God for him one more time. Sometimes, life was good.
“We had worms,” he told her happily.
“Worms?” She eased him to the ground and gazed at him in trepidation, hoping it wasn’t a meal he was talking about.
He nodded, his eyes sparkling. “Big ones. They wiggled.”
“Oh.” Charlie was laughing again. “They wiggled, did they?”