A Lawman's Christmas_ A McKettricks of Texas Novel - Linda Lael Miller [32]
“All right,” he said, finally realizing that her statement called for some kind of response, however mundane. “Whatever you’re cooking, it smells good.”
She smiled at him, briefly, distractedly, and all but set him back on his heels by the doing of it.
“Edrina, you go in and change into dry clothes,” she told the child.
Edrina hesitated, then left the room. Harriet, after trying in vain to get Chester to come along on the jaunt, followed her sister, chattering about the walk home from the mercantile.
It was a heady thing, being alone with Dara Rose in that steamy little room.
And Clay, a quiet man but not a shy one, couldn’t come up with a single thing to say.
Dara Rose tightened the bands on her apron, a reach-back motion that made her shapely bosom rise and jut out a little. “If the chickens survive this,” she said, with an anxious glance toward the room’s one opaque window, “it will be a miracle, and I sure hope some of the men in town give a thought to the O’Reillys, like they generally do at times like this….”
Her voice fell away, and she gnawed fretfully at her lower lip, likely pondering the fate of the poultry, the family she’d just mentioned, or both.
“The O’Reillys?” Clay croaked out, grabbing hold of the rapidly sinking conversational lifeline with the first thing that jumped off his tongue.
Dara Rose sighed again, turned away from him to stir whatever was cooking in that pot. The scent of it made his stomach rumble, and it came to him that, except for Miss Krenshaw’s whiskeyed-up coffee, he hadn’t had anything since breakfast.
“Peg O’Reilly’s no-good excuse for a husband,” she said quietly, after a glance in the direction of the doorway the little girls had hurried through earlier, “ran off with some…some…woman he met at the Bitter Gulch Saloon, and left a wife and three children behind to fend for themselves!”
For a moment, Clay was taken aback—not by the story, which unfortunately was not an uncommon one, especially with the war in Europe picking up momentum—but by Dara Rose’s apparent failure to draw any correlation between Mrs. O’Reilly’s situation and her own. Except for one obvious variable—Parnell had had the bad fortune to die, while the long-gone Mr. O’Reilly was presumably still alive—the two women had essentially been dealt the same bad hand of cards.
Dara Rose seemed to sense that he was looking at her, and she turned to meet his gaze, colored up again and looked quickly away. The girls returned to the kitchen just then, before anything more could be said, Harriet going on about that doll she meant to name Florence, and Edrina replying in lofty, big-sister fashion that Harriet ought to wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one got full faster.
Clay went to the sink, rolled up his shirtsleeves and commenced to washing his hands with the harsh yellow soap Dara Rose kept in an old saucer wedged behind the pump handle.
He felt a combination of things while he was at it, but mainly, he realized, he was glad. Glad just to be where he was, right there in that kitchen, out of the cold wind, with a lovely woman, two kids and a dog for company.
For the first time since he’d left the Arizona Territory, Clay didn’t have to fight down a hankering for home, didn’t second-guess his decision to strike out on his own instead of making a life on the ever-expanding Triple M with the rest of the family.
Be sure you’re leaving because it’s what you really want to do, Clay, his pa had counseled him, and not because Annabel Carson broke your heart.
It made Clay smile a little to remember that conversation, and others like it, with various members of the home outfit, and he reckoned now that Annabel hadn’t broken his heart at all—she’d just sprained it a little.
The stuff in the pot on the stove turned out to be some kind of mixture of canned venison and leftover vegetable preserves, and it was better, in Clay’s opinion, than a big steak at Delmonico’s.
“Miss Krenshaw keeps a picture of a soldier in her