A Lawman's Christmas_ A McKettricks of Texas Novel - Linda Lael Miller [57]
Clay merely nodded, as though she’d confirmed something he already knew, and went out again.
Dara Rose got out Parnell’s coffeepot, rinsed it at the sink and pumped fresh water into it. Then she had to ferret out the grinder, with its black wrought-iron handle.
She was wiping the dust out of the contraption with one corner of a flour-sack dish towel when Clay and Mr. Bickham came in again, both of them carrying boxes.
Edrina and Harriet were, of course, consumed with curiosity.
Harriet, though puffy-eyed, had long since stopped crying.
“Sugar,” Edrina cataloged, joyfully examining each item. “And flour. And lard. And raisins. Mama, you could bake a pie.”
“Perhaps,” Dara Rose agreed, afraid to say too much because she wasn’t sure she could control all the contradictory emotions welling up inside her. Her pride stung like a snakebite, but in some ways, she was as jubilant as the children.
Tea. Sugar. Flour.
A whole ham, big enough to feed half the town of Blue River.
They’d been doing without such things for so long that it was impossible not to rejoice, at least inwardly.
Firmly, Dara Rose brought herself up short. She squared her shoulders and poured coffee beans into the grinder and began turning the handle, enjoying the rich aroma. “Mr. McKettrick has been very generous,” she said, not looking at Edrina and Harriet. “But we mustn’t come to expect such things—”
“Why not?” The voice was Clay’s.
Dara Rose kept her back to him, spooning freshly ground coffee beans into the well of her dented pot, setting it on to boil. “Because we mustn’t, that’s all,” she said. She bent and opened the stove door and pitched in more wood. Jabbed at the embers with the poker.
“There’s some stuff for the Christmas tree in the box I left on the settee,” Clay said quietly, sending the girls scampering with chimelike hurrahs into the front room.
Dara Rose, thinking Mr. Bickham must be within earshot, taking it all in, turned to look for him. He was as big a gossip as Heliotrope Ponder and, running the only general store in town, he got plenty of chances to tell everything he knew and then some.
But there was only Clay, filling the doorway, watching her. Philo Bickham must have been outside, fetching another box from the buckboard.
“It’s almost Christmas,” Clay said gruffly. “Just this once, Dara Rose, let yourself be happy. Let your daughters be happy.”
Her face burned, and she couldn’t help remembering all the times Parnell had splurged on some little treat for the girls, running up an account at the mercantile that had taken her months to pay off.
“Did you go into debt for all this?” she asked, keeping her voice down so the girls and Mr. Bickham wouldn’t hear. Nobody knew better than she did how little the marshal of Blue River actually earned.
Clay smiled, though his eyes remained solemn, and then he shook his head, not in reply, but in disbelief. “I paid cash money,” he said, turning to walk away.
By the time the coffee was ready, the kitchen and part of the front room were jammed with boxes and crates and brown parcels, tied shut with twine.
“Where’s Mr. Bickham?” Dara Rose asked, when Clay returned to the kitchen, squeezed past her to wash his hands at the sink pump. “I thought he’d stay for coffee.”
“He has a store to run,” Clay said quietly.
In the next room, the girls giggled and Chester barked and the noise was pleasant to hear, even though Dara Rose was uncommon jittery.
She put away the cup she’d set out for Mr. Bickham and filled the remaining one, returned the pot to the stove.
“Mr. McKettrick?”
“What, Mrs. McKettrick?” Clay countered wearily, as he drew back a chair, sat down and reached for the steaming cup of coffee.
Dara Rose brought out the sugar bowl, long unused, filled it from the newly purchased bag and set it on the table, along with a teaspoon.
“Thank you,” she said meekly, not looking at him. “For all these groceries, I mean—”
That was when he pulled her onto his lap. His thighs felt hard as a wagon seat under her backside, and that realization started all sorts of untoward