One Heart to Win

  “How did both families end up here?”

  “Elijah was trying to get us as far from Mariah as it was possible to get. Mariah’s husband, Richard Warren, had died early in their marriage. He gave her three children, but only Frank survived to adulthood, and she raised him to hate us, too. They followed us here . . . well, she did. To be fair, Frank didn’t know that’s what his mother was doing. She was a little crazy by then, she had to be, to come all this way just to finally have it out with Elijah.”

  “An actual confrontation? How did that turn out?”

  “As might be expected. They couldn’t live together but they died together.”

  “Indians?”

  “Goodness, no, the Indians in the area weren’t at war with the white man yet. They were mostly friendly or we never would have built here when there was only a fur-trading post nearby.”

  “Then how did Elijah and Mariah die?”

  “They shot each other.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THE STORY OF MARIAH and Elijah might be old news to Mary Callahan, but it was a fresh tragedy to Tiffany. She had trouble getting the tale out of her head. They shot each other. How could anyone get so angry they’d want to shoot—well, obviously, that happened all the time. Duels, war, gunfights here in the West. But to leave that legacy to your children and their children? How dumb was that? And now she was supposed to pay for her grandmother’s lunacy?

  She felt bad now, since it sounded as if her family was ultimately to blame. Or was it? She’d only heard one side of the feud today, the Callahans’ side. Yet to hear the other side, she’d have to talk to her father. No thank you. Besides, what else could he add? That Elijah wasn’t eloquent enough to make Mariah see reason? Or that Mariah was a little crazy to begin with to keep that fury alive for so many years?

  Tiffany hadn’t expected to like Mary Callahan. She didn’t want to disappoint the woman by admitting she couldn’t cook and asking for help. She decided to give it a try on her own first. So she spent the rest of the afternoon reading her little cookbook, which didn’t take long as thin as it was, and making a list of the ingredients she would need. She went through the pantry thoroughly and discovered the ice cellar next to it. It was packed with large chunks of pond ice and a lot of salted meat. None of the ice was melting yet, with summer only just beginning.

  She couldn’t find a few of the ingredients mentioned in the cookbook.

  “What’s wrong?” Andrew asked as he came in the back door.

  Tiffany realized she must have been frowning. She held up the cookbook she was reading. “Several of these recipes call for eggs and I can’t find any in the ice cellar.”

  “I think I heard some chickens when Jakes was getting me settled in the bunkhouse.”

  “Really? Let’s go find out.”

  They found the henhouse behind the barn. It held quite a few adult birds, but she didn’t see any eggs lying around. There were also dozens of chicks, some perched on the planks where the nests were lined up, others picking at seeds on the ground. She was fascinated. She’d never seen live farm animals before, or dead ones ready for cooking either.

  “Get away from there!” Jakes barked at her, coming around the corner of the barn with a basket on his arm. “Those gals belong to me.”

  “I wasn’t going to disturb them,” she assured the trail cook with a smile, while she was thinking, such a grouch!

  Jakes wore a full beard, brown streaked with gray, but he wasn’t that old, maybe in his forties. He was skinny, bandy-legged, short, and obviously cantankerous. But he could probably give her tips on cooking, so she didn’t want to get on his bad side.

  “I was just curious about eggs,” she said.

  “I bring two dozen to the house each day. If you need more, just tell me. But by no means do you ever bother my hens. They don’t like strangers. Upsets them. Then they don’t produce.”

  That was fine with her, since she didn’t know how to get an egg out of a hen anyway. “What about cows for milk?”

  “Two dairy cows are kept in the barn. The hens and Myrtle are mine, the cows ain’t, so you’re on your own with them.”

  Oh, no, she wasn’t! “Andrew?”

  “Be glad to, ma’am.”

  She beamed at the boy for reading her mind. He was already earning his keep, but his quick reply made her wonder, “How are you acquainted with farm animals?”

  “My oldest sister married a farmer. I got to spend one summer with her in the country before I came West. I liked it. Even thought about taking up farming myself, till I got the notion to find my pa. So here I am instead.”

  “If you’re done admiring my gals, take your jabbering elsewhere,” Jakes grumbled.

  Tiffany grit her teeth to keep from berating the fellow for his rudeness. “Are there any other cooking resources I should know about?”

  “The lake’s got fish, but cattlemen don’t fish. If you want any, you’ll have to do the fishing yourself like Old Ed did.”

  That actually sounded interesting. She wouldn’t mind visiting that pretty lake again, so she didn’t delegate that chore to Andrew yet. But with the ice cellar so well stocked, she didn’t need to try fishing right away.

  However, she did want to make sure she didn’t trespass on Jakes’s domain, so she said, “You mentioned Myrtle was yours?”

  “Her you can meet. Come along, I’ll introduce you.”

  She blushed. She’d misunderstood and thought Myrtle was an animal! Did the man have a wife? If he did, the woman must have the temperament of a saint to put up with him. But it made her wonder if any of the cowboys had wives, too. Were there other houses on the property for employees’ families?

  Jakes wasn’t waiting for her to follow him, so she had to hurry to catch up. But he stopped next to the pigsty on the back side of one of the sheds.

  “Myrtle’s the sow,” he said proudly. “Won her in a poker game. Kept her to dispose of food scraps. Beats the heck out of digging daily holes to bury the stuff so it don’t lure in wild animals. Mrs. Callahan figured to make even better use of her and bought her a mate. This new batch of piglets will taste good later this year.”

  Now Tiffany was blushing for thinking Myrtle might be Jakes’s wife! The two adult pigs were huge in comparison to the little piglets running about. So Myrtle was a pet . . . well, maybe not, since Jakes was practically smacking his lips over the thought of eating her young when they were grown. She tried not to feel disgusted at the thought, reminding herself the piglets had been bred to end up on the dinner table—at Mary’s suggestion, too! But they looked so cute! One piglet had even squeezed under the lowest plank on the pen fencing and was sniffing at her boots.

  She was not going to think about their being dinner someday and said to Jakes, “Shouldn’t they be better contained?”

  “They don’t wander far, and don’t be throwing them no rotten food, neither, just fresh scraps. You can pick him up and set him back inside if you’re worried ’bout it.”

  Pick up a pig? She stared at him aghast. “I wasn’t worried, and thank you for giving me the information I needed.”

  She hurried back to the house with Andrew, who was full of surprises. He couldn’t cook other than to roast meat over a campfire, but he did know how to grow vegetables. The garden behind the house was already fully planted, but she assigned the task of tending it to him and thought she might ask him to teach her about gardens until she saw him dig his hands into the dirt. She was willing to cook food but not to grow it.

  She was sitting at the table reading when Degan came in the back door of the kitchen and dropped a large sack next to her on the table. “Start with something simple to go with this,” he suggested.

  The word FLOUR was stamped on the front of the sack, yet she knew from the delicious aroma what was inside it and gave him a delighted smile. “You brought bread from the bakery!”

  “Sorry about the sack, but most people who go to the bakery bring their own baskets. Just dust the e
xtra flour off the loaves.”

  She was so pleased she actually teased him with a grin. “You expected my first meal to fail?”

  “I wasn’t going to bet on it. But there’s one thing I do know about bread. If you want any, you have to start it the night before you eat it. Maybe you’ve already learned that from your cookbook.”

  She shook her head. She hadn’t, but she had selected a recipe for a simple meal for that night, chicken soup—she’d just have to substitute beef for chicken—which would go quite well with the bread he’d brought.

  He continued on to the bathing room. “I’ll clean up now before the brothers show up. We’ll be heading back to town tonight.”

  She was surprised. He’d told her today that the cowboys rode to town for hell-raising, but she hadn’t expected the Callahans to be included in that group. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe just Degan was.

  She asked, “Who is we?”

  He paused before closing the door. “All the men who aren’t married. That would include the brothers.”

  “To raise hell, as you put it? What exactly does that mean?”

  “Drinking, poker . . .” He started to add something else, but finished with merely, “More drinking. Drunks tend to get in fights, and saloons get busted up. Just ordinary Western fun.”

  “So you’re babysitting again? Keep a better eye on Hunter then. It looked, and sounded, as if those miners wanted to kill him today.”

  “Sounded?”

  “They said he’d be carried home. I think they meant dead—as a message for Zachary to give in and give them what they want.”

  “Are you sure you haven’t let your anxiety over what you witnessed spark your imagination?”

  “You said the miners don’t carry guns, but one of them pulled a gun on Hunter. Or maybe he wasn’t really a miner, only pretending to be one. That would be one way to get rid of the Callahans, to kill them off one by one in gun challenges.”

  “An interesting conclusion.”

  She had a feeling he would have laughed if he ever laughed. But at least she’d stated her concern. “Will you keep it in mind?”

  “I keep all possibilities in mind, Miss Fleming. It’s my job. But please don’t let Hunter hear you call me a babysitter. He already dislikes my tagging along.”

  “Then why does his father feel it’s necessary?”

  “Because he’s actually trying to keep the peace with the Warrens until the wedding. And while Hunter might be a charmer with the ladies, he can get a bit aggressive when it comes to the Warrens. I temper that.”

  “You hold him back?”

  “No, my presence stays his hand.”

  “How?”

  “I was hired to protect the Callahans. He won’t start any fights with the Warrens if he thinks I’ll draw my gun and start shooting them. He enjoys a good fistfight but he’s not out to kill anyone.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that. “Would you shoot the Warrens?”

  “Hasn’t come to that.”

  “But would you?”

  He closed the door instead of answering. She hoped he simply hadn’t heard her repeat the question rather than refusing to give a direct answer. Then she got so busy making her soup that she didn’t even notice when Degan finished his bath and left the room.

  Fortunately, she did notice when Hunter showed up for his bath, or else she might have burned herself when he pressed himself against her back as he leaned over her shoulder to sniff what she was stirring. She stiffened her posture in an effort to push him away.

  “Smells like I’ll be eating in town tonight,” he teased.

  “Would you have gotten this close to your previous cook?” she demanded.

  “I couldn’t lean over Old Ed. He was too tall.”

  “Don’t do that again.”

  Unrepentant, he said, “Don’t take away my excuse to do this.”

  This was his placing a kiss on the side of her neck. Then another, and one more even lower. She gasped and tried to ignore the gooseflesh his kisses were causing but couldn’t, since now her skin tingled so deliciously all the way down her back. She closed her eyes, fighting the pleasurable sensations rising inside her that she’d never before felt. It would be so easy to turn around and . . . oh, God, what? Put her arms around him? Encourage him? Was she insane?! That was no way to deal with a fiancé she wanted to get rid of.

  Instead, she swung around with her spoon raised like a weapon, but he’d already jumped backward, his grin wide.

  “Besides,” he added before he disappeared into the bathing room, “you smell better than what’s in the pot!”

  She didn’t smile, but she didn’t get angry either. She simply picked up her cookbook and walked out of the kitchen to the porch, where she intended to stay long enough to avoid seeing Hunter when he came out of the bathing room. The incident made her realize she had to do or say something to make him stop treating her in such a cavalier, playful manner. Innocent flirtation or not, not only was it inappropriate for the son of the house to be taking advantage of one of the servants, but he was so charming and handsome that she was beginning to worry he might succeed. Did he even care how many hearts were going to be broken when he married his intended?

  Her plan was working better and more quickly than she’d expected. She was finding out what kind of man Hunter was—and not liking it one bit. All signs indicated he would make a lousy husband.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  HER FIRST ATTEMPT AT making dinner, and no one was going to be there to eat it. Tiffany was surprised that she felt disappointed about that—until she actually tasted her soup. It was watery and the meat she’d added was too tough to chew. She almost threw the cookbook away until Andrew suggested she might have missed something in the recipe. She read it again and found the part about letting soup cook all day. A few hours simply wasn’t enough.

  But at least she could serve Zachary and Mary, who were staying home for dinner, some of the best bread she’d ever tasted, thanks to Degan. Andrew brought out some canned beans to go with it and carried the large pot of soup down to the ice cellar, where it would keep overnight so she could continue cooking it tomorrow. Thank goodness for Andrew. She would have just thrown the cookbook away if he hadn’t suggested she reread the recipe. She mentally patted herself on the back again for hiring the boy. He’d even offered to get the bread started for her tonight after she’d read in the cookbook that you had to let bread dough rise overnight. Degan had been right about that. It was supposed to magically puff up and be ready to bake come morning. She’d believe it when she saw it.

  She went out to the front porch for a break before she finished cleaning up the kitchen. She was so surprised by what she saw that she stood transfixed for a moment. The sky nearly made her gasp. The tree line was far enough back from the house that she had an unobstructed view of bright oranges and reds filling the sky. Now this was something she’d never see in a city of tall buildings.

  She sat down on the long swing that hung from the porch roof. She didn’t even think to dust off a spot first before she did. She was going to have to make a habit of coming out to enjoy the sunset each evening—while she was there. She wouldn’t be seeing things like this when she went home.

  A group of the hired hands rode past the house on the way to town. She didn’t see Hunter with them. Another group came around the other side of the house. Degan and Hunter’s brothers. He wasn’t with them, either, but they had his horse, Patches. They stopped to wait for him, and in unison they tipped their hats her way. Then the door opened next to her and she turned to see Hunter looking at her with his powder-blue eyes.

  “Wait up for me, Red?”

  She stiffened at the sensual tone he’d just used, a clear indication of what he wanted her to wait up for. More teasing or was he serious this time?

  “No.”

  “I promise to make it worth your while.”

  “No.”

  He shrugged and was soon riding off with his bro
thers. She wished she could follow them to see how cowboys truly raised hell, since she was sure Degan had left out a few particulars. No, that wasn’t entirely true. She wanted to spy on Hunter. She had no doubt he was heading straight back to Pearl.

  “Am I really supposed to take bread and beans up to Mary for dinner?”

  Tiffany winced. She’d forgotten about serving dinner to the owners of the ranch. Zachary was standing in the front doorway. He didn’t look disappointed, but he certainly sounded it.

  “Mr. Callahan, I warned you. I know as much about cooking as you do. Actually, you probably know more. I am determined now to learn, but today’s effort failed because I didn’t read the fine print. I’ll prepare a tray—the bread is delicious, by the way—for you and Mrs. Callahan. If I can’t do better by the end of next week, I’ll fire myself so you won’t have to.”

  His lower lip quirked upward a little. “I saw the book you left on the table. You’ll figure it out.”

  Famous last words, she mumbled as she went to the kitchen, where she served up the Callahans’ meager dinner and handed the tray to Zachary.

  She went back to the porch for a few more minutes, enjoying the last of the bright colors on the horizon before they all faded to dusk. But she nearly screamed when she felt something move against the back of her ankle, just above her shoe. Thinking of snakes, she yanked her legs up so fast the swing swayed under her. It took a moment for her to get up the nerve to bend over to look under the seat. Then she laughed when she saw the little, chubby, white body with the flat, pink nose and big ears.

  “So you don’t wander far, huh?” she said aloud, remembering Jakes’s earlier remark. “And I bet you missed your dinner, too. Jakes would have already gotten rid of his slops, and we didn’t exactly have any today. Come on, I’ll get you a bowl of beans, but you can’t have any of that delicious bread when we’re going to be eating every last crumb of that.”