A Lawman's Christmas_ A McKettricks of Texas Novel - Linda Lael Miller [33]
Snow rasped at the windows and the small cookstove seemed to strain to put out more heat.
“And how would you know a thing like that, Edrina Nolan?” Dara Rose asked, arching one eyebrow, her spoon poised halfway between her mouth and the bowl of soup sitting in front of her.
“She takes it out and looks at it, when she thinks nobody’s looking,” Edrina explained nonchalantly. “Sometimes, she gets tears in her eyes, and her lips move like she’s talking to somebody.”
Clay’s gaze connected with Dara Rose’s.
“Are you going to fight in the war, Mr. McKettrick?” Edrina asked, without missing a beat.
“No,” Clay answered. The armed forces would need beef, and plenty of it, and like his granddad said, some body had to raise the critters. “But my cousin Gabriel thinks he might join up, if things don’t simmer down some over the next year or two.”
A sad expression flickered across Dara Rose’s expressive face; he figured the war was a subject she tried not to think about, since there was nothing she could do to change it.
After supper, Edrina and Harriet cleared the table and set the dishes in the sink, without being told.
Dara Rose crossed the room to take her cloak and bonnet down from their peg near the door. She clearly dreaded whatever she was about to do, and Clay found himself beside her before he’d made a conscious decision to move, reaching for his hat and duster.
Dara Rose looked up at him, and he caught the briefest glimpse into the shimmering vastness of her heart and mind and spirit. There was so much more to her than just her flesh-and-blood person, he realized, with a start akin to waking up suddenly after a long, deep sleep.
“The chickens—” she began, and then went silent.
“I’ll see to them,” Clay said, very quietly. “You stay here, with the girls.”
She considered the idea briefly, then shook her head no. She meant to go out to that chicken coop and that was that. He’d be wasting his breath to argue.
“I’ll heat water to wash the dishes when I get back,” she told the children. “Don’t get too close to the stove, and no scuffling.”
“Oh, Mama,” Edrina said, with a roll of her eyes. “You’ve told us that a thousand times already.”
A smile quirked at one corner of Dara Rose’s mouth. Like the rest of her, visible and invisible, that mouth fascinated Clay out of all good sense and reason. “Well,” she said, “now it’s a thousand and one.”
After a glance at Clay’s face, she opened the door and stepped right out into that blizzard.
Clay followed, and the wind was so strong that it buffeted her back a step, so they collided, her back to his torso. He put his arms out to steady her, and a powerful jolt of…something…shot through him.
Since it was too cold to dally, they recovered quickly and advanced toward the rickety coop.
The chickens had taken refuge inside and, with the exception of the rooster, who squawked indignantly as he paced the floor of that shed, as though fussing over the pure injustice of a snowstorm, the birds huddled close to one another on the length of wood that served as a roost.
There was a visible easing in Dara Rose as she looked around. “At least none of them have frozen to death,” she said, and she might have been addressing herself, not him, trundling over to lift the lid off a wooden bend and lean inside to scoop out feed. Judging by how far she had to lean—Lordy, she had a shapely backside—the supply was starting to run low.
Like a lot of other things in her life, probably.
Clay watched, offering no comment, as Dara Rose filled a shallow pan with feed and set it out for the hens to peck at. That done, she picked up a second pan, went to the doorway and shoveled up some snow. The stuff was already melting around the edges, cold as that chicken coop was, when Dara Rose waded back into the center of the noisy flock to set the second pan down beside the first.
They fought their way back to the house, side by side, heads down, shoulders braced. Clay wanted to put an arm around Dara Rose’s waist, so she