McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [100]
She sat up, pressed both hands to her face, waiting while the images receded, tidelike.
Outside the window, chickadees twittered.
Voices rose through the floorboards, from the kitchen below, along with the aroma of strong coffee.
Lorelei threw back the covers and scrambled off the bed, hastily donning yesterday’s clothes, which she’d shaken out the night before. As the first light of dawn crept into the room, she made out Melina’s shape in the next bed, but there was no sign of Tillie or the baby.
She did what she could with her hair and rooted through her valise for tooth-powder, a brush and her bar of yellow soap. She would use the outhouse, a facility only marginally better than the chamber pot under the bed, then perform her ablutions at the pump in the backyard. After a night of horrendous dreams, her head felt clouded, and she needed fresh air and cold well water to dispel the last of the shadows.
Holt was in the kitchen, seated at the table, with a steaming cup of hot coffee in front of him. He wore clean clothes, and there was a scrubbed look about him, too. His hair was still damp, and Lorelei felt an entirely unseemly urge to run her fingers through it.
She shifted her attention firmly to Tillie, who was stirring something at the stove. Pearl played at a safe distance, seated on a blanket on the floor.
“Good morning, Tillie,” she said, as merrily as she could, after escaping a horrible death at the hands of Comanches who had seemed all too real. She pretended Holt wasn’t in the room. “Where’s Heddy?”
“She’s out gathering eggs,” Tillie answered. “I hope she hurries up, because this cornmeal mush is almost ready.”
Lorelei headed for the back door. Had her hand on the knob, ready to turn it, when Holt spoke.
“Did you sleep well, Miss Fellows?” he asked, lending a wry note to the words. He knew she wanted to get by without speaking to him, she thought, and he enjoyed thwarting her.
“Yes,” she said, without turning around. Drat it, the doorknob might as well have been greased; she couldn’t seem to get a grip. “Did you?”
“Well enough,” he allowed.
She hadn’t heard him come in the night before. Not that she’d been listening. “Good,” she answered, and wrenched on the door again.
His chair made a scraping sound as he pushed it back, and then he was behind her, reaching over her arm, turning the knob with her hand still on it. He chuckled when she bolted through the opening.
It was embarrassing to walk down the path to the privy when she knew he was standing on the threshold, watching her, but she had no choice. She set her soap, toothbrush and powder on a block of wood near the outhouse door and dashed inside.
When she came out, Holt was still there, in the kitchen doorway, one shoulder braced against the frame while he sipped his coffee. She was careful not to look directly at him, but when she’d finished washing her hands and face and scrubbing her teeth at the pump, he hadn’t moved.
“No privies on the trail,” he said, when she got to the bottom step.
Did he think that would send her scuttling back to San Antonio?
“Thank you, Mr. McKettrick,” she replied, “for pointing out a perfectly obvious fact.”
He chuckled again, stepped aside to let her through.
“What are you planning to do today?” he asked, as if they were on the best of terms and he had every right to know her comings and goings.
Lorelei helped herself to a mug and filled it from the coffeepot on the back of the stove. “I thought I’d visit some of the shops,” she said.
“In need of a flowered bonnet? Dancing shoes, maybe?”
Tillie slopped a scoop of cornmeal mush into a bowl and handed it to her. Lorelei nearly dropped it.
“My purchases are none of your business,” she told him, sitting down at the table with her breakfast. If she hadn’t been half-starved, she’d have walked right out of that kitchen without a moment’s hesitation.
“I reckon that would be true, if you weren