The meat and onions were browned and the pot of tomato sauce and chopped tomatoes was finally coming to a boil. The size and weight of the frying pan made draining the meat and onions an awkward process – especially using a kitchen towel as a pot holder – but she finally managed it. Next she had to dump the meat and onions into the pot of sauce. In doing so, she discovered another way to decorate the walls. Muttering, she mopped up and told herself that she would have to learn to manhandle a heavy pot and a gallon or two of sauce without making a mess.
"Speaking of gallons, I’d better get the spaghetti water on," she muttered, pushing back her hair with her elbow because her fingers were only slightly less messy than the walls.
By the time Carla filled a huge pot with water and lugged it to the stove, she finally understood why men rather than women chose careers as chefs; you had to be a weight lifter to handle the kitchen equipment. She turned the fire on high and mopped up the floor where she had spilled water on the way to the stove. The places she left behind were relatively clean, making the rest of the floor look much worse by comparison.
For a moment Carla was tempted to slop a little tomato sauce on the sort-of-clean spots to even things up, thereby delaying the hour of reckoning when she had to clean the floor. She loved to cook but hated housework. She knew her own weakness so well that she worked twice as hard at cleaning, making up for her own dislike of the job.
But it would look really nice with a few dollops of tomato sauce. Nobody would even notice.
Carla managed to avoid the temptation only because she remembered the green beans, which should have been on the stove ten minutes ago. Another trip to the pantry yielded a gallon can of green beans. While they heated, she sliced bacon, fried it and sliced more onions to saute in the bacon fat From time to time she checked the spaghetti water.
"I know a watched pot never boils, but this is ridiculous," she said beneath her breath, lifting the lid and testing the water with her fingertip.
Dead cold.
From the barn, corral and bunkhouse came the sounds of men wrapping up tasks in preparation for dinner. Two pickups came in from opposite directions, pulling horse trailers behind. Four men got out and stretched, tired and hungry from a long day of checking cattle on land leased from the federal government The horses being unloaded from trailers neighed to the horses that were already rubbed down and had begun to tear great mouthfuls of hay from the corral feeding rack.
The men would be just as hungry.
Anxiously Carla listened as the bunkhouse door slammed repeatedly, telling her that the men were going in to wash up for dinner. Laughter and catcalls greeted a cowboy whose jeans showed clear signs of his having landed butt-first in the mud. He gave back as good as he got, reminding the other men of the time one of them had slipped in a fresh cow flop and another had been bucked off into a corral trough.
Carla couldn’t help smiling as bits of conversation drifted through the open window. For the first time she realized that she hadn’t heard a human voice since Luke had vanished into the barn. The thought went as quickly as it had come, pushed aside by the fact that the spaghetti water was barely lukewarm. At this rate dinner would be at least half an hour late and Luke would be thinking he had gotten the bad end of the bet.
Hurriedly Carla tasted the tomato sauce, added more garlic and checked the spaghetti water again. Nothing doing. The outside door into the dining room squeaked open and then closed. The room, which adjoined the kitchen, was more like a mess hall than a formal dining room. There were two long tables, each of which could seat ten comfortably and fourteen in a pinch, twenty chairs, a wall of floor-to-ceiling cupboards and not much else.
It occurred to Carla that the tables were bare of plates, cups, utensils and napkins, not to mention salt, pepper, ketchup, steak sauce, sugar and all the other condiments beloved by ranch hands. Groaning at her forgetfulness, she dumped the half-cooked onions and bacon into the pot of green beans and frantically began opening cupboards, searching for plates. She was so busy that she didn’t hear the door between the kitchen and dining room open.
"Smells good in here. What’s for supper?"
"Spaghetti," Carla said without turning toward the male voice.
"Smells more like cherry pie."
"Ohmygod, dessert."
She raced past the man who had walked into the kitchen. A fast look in the oven assured her that the cobbler had survived her neglect. All she had to do was maneuver the big pan out of the oven to let the cobbler cool. The kitchen towel wouldn’t stretch to do the job of handling the pan.
"Pot holders," she muttered, straightening from bending over the oven.
"Looks like cobbler from here."
The voice came from about a foot away from Car-la’s ear. Her head snapped around and she looked at the man for the first time.
Long, lean and deceptively lazy-looking, Tennessee Blackthorn was watching Carla with an odd smile on his face.
"Ten! Is it really you?" Carla asked, delighted. "The last time I heard, you had a phone call in the middle of the night, went into Cortez and never came back."
"Never is a long time." Smoke-colored eyes swept appreciatively from Carla’s oven-flushed cheeks to her ankles and back up. "Guess we can’t call you nina anymore. You finally grew into those long legs and bedroom eyes."
She laughed. "I love hungry men. They’ll flatter the cook shamelessly in hopes of an early dinner. You’re out of luck, though. The watched pot isn’t boiling."
"He’s out of luck, period," Luke said from the back door, his voice cold.
5
Carla didn’t realize how much her expression changed when she turned toward Luke, but little escaped Ten’s eyes. He measured the complex mixture of yearning and distance, hope and hunger in her look, and he knew that nothing had changed.
"Still chasing moonlight over black water, aren’t you?" he asked softly.
If either Carla or Luke heard, neither answered. They were looking at each other as though it had been years, not hours, since their last meeting.
"The pot holders are over there," Luke said in a clipped voice, gesturing toward a drawer near the stove, never looking away from Carla’s vivid blue-green eyes.
"Pot holders," Carla repeated, absorbed by the arching line of Luke’s eyebrows, the clean curves of his mouth, the shadow of beard lying beneath his tanned skin.
"Pot holders," repeated Luke.
"Still smells and looks like cobbler to me," Ten said to no one in particular.
"Don’t you have something to do?" Luke asked pointedly, finally looking away from Carla.
"Nope. But if you give me a cup of coffee I’ll find something."
Luke eyed the man who was both his friend and the ramrod of the Rocking M. Ten returned him stare for stare…and smiled. Luke barely controlled his anger. He knew he had no reason to be angry with Ten; of all the ranch hands, the ramrod would be the least likely to hustle Carla into bed. But hearing Ten talk about Carla’s long legs and bedroom eyes had made Luke savagely angry. The fact that his anger was irrational, and he knew it, only made him more angry.
"Coffee?" Carla asked, feeling a sinking in her stomach. "I forgot to make coffee!"
"How the hell can you forget coffee?" Luke demanded, turning on Carla, glad to find a rational outlet for his anger. "Any ranch cook worth the powder to blow her straight to hell knows that the first thing you make in the morning is coffee and the last thing you clean at night is the coffeepot!"
"Well," drawled Ten, "I guess that sure settles that. Carla isn’t a ranch cook and we’re going to starve to death opening cans with our pocketknives. Sure you wouldn’t like to think it over, boss? Wouldn’t want you to go off half-cocked and shoot yourself in the foot."