Marrying An Older Man Part 8

7f He shook his head. ' 'Caroline, don't you realize how much we value your work around here? Why, Mom literally sings your praises. You've worked out real fine. No cause for concern."

She stuck out her chin pugnaciously, her mouth drawn into a pretty pout. "I'm not talking about that."

"No?" He threw his arms out. "Well, I can't imagine what you're talking about, then, but I a.s.sure you, everyone here is pleased with everything you've done. Okay?"

She didn't answer him, just stood there, holding him with her eyes. He made himself smile as if she'd given him just exactly the reply he'd expected. "You better get on home now. See you tomorrow."

He attempted to flip her a wave, forgetting that he held the empty milk gla.s.s, and covered his unease with a self-deprecating chuckle. He sounded like a duck choking, but he wasn't sticking around any longer to see how she was taking it. With a light-heartedness he surely didn't feel, he turned and went on his way, stopping by the kitchen to rinse out his gla.s.s and leave it beside the sink with his plate. She still hadn't left by the time he was finished, so he whistled tunelessly as he hurried down the hall to the stairs. She let him go, but he couldn't help wondering if it was going to be that easy. Just how long could he sidestep her? And just how blatant was she willing to be? He had the feeling that he might have unwittingly declared war and that she had just begun to fight.

Jesse climbed the steps to the loft, appalled with himself and the whole situation. He couldn't believe he was doing this, but what else could he do? She'd lain in wait for him more often than not lately. Mornings, afternoons, evenings, he never knew when she was going to turn up. It was like walking around waiting for an ambush, knowing it was coming, dreading it. Wondering if he could prevail.

The awful truth was that the woman, girl, scared him to death.

Even when she wasn't around, she harried him. He wished for the millionth time that she hadn't kissed him on Thanksgiving night, that she hadn't worn that tight shirt the next day, that she wouldn't smile at him with her blue-green eyes all smoky and go j

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out of her way to do sweet things for him: cook his breakfast, bring him coffee, press his no-wrinkle shirts, put extra starch in his jeans just the way he liked. He wished she wouldn't look at him with naked longing in her eyes and that her voice wouldn't go all husky and soft when she spoke. Most of all, he wished he could forget how it felt to stand close and let her mouth work against his, her small hand stroking his skin. He didn't want to think about how she smelled or how she looked with her straight pale hair falling down her slender back. He wanted to sleep peacefully again, without dreaming of a girl much too young and much too innocent for what he had in mind. What he couldn't quite get out of his mind.

Sighing, he looked around him. He hadn't turned on the over head light, and much of what he saw was cloaked in pure dark ness, but he knew this place, like every other on the ranch, as well as he knew his own face. An enormous white freezer, used for storing everything from stud and bull s.e.m.e.n to mare's milk and vaccinations, stood at the top of the stairs. Bags of feed were stacked at one end of the long room. Two large round bales of hay took up the other end, one of them more a mound now than a bale. Along the sides were trapdoors set at regular intervals in the floor. The chutes below went straight to the feeding boxes built into each stall on the ground floor of the big bam. In the center of the room stood a long metal table and a pair of mixers, operated much like oversize flour sifters, that emptied into buck ets. ^ He spent part of every day here blending feeds for his horses and dumping them down the feed chutes or, sometimes, carrying them back downstairs to hand-feed a sickly or nervous animal. This was one of his favorite places, redolent of the clean, loamy fragrance of grains and animals. It was always possible to find a warm or cool-as the case might be-corner here. Sometimes he came here just to think and look out across the property at the mountains from the big loading window that faced the house.

He went there now, unlatching and opening the heavy shutter just wide enough to see outside. There in the driveway beneath the untidy glow of a sensored lamp atop a high pole sat Caroline's tiny, decrepit foreign excuse for an auto. d.a.m.n. Didn't she ever go home? He closed and latched the shutters, shivering in the bitter breeze.

What was he going to do now? He wished he'd had the foresight to bring a book or a magazine with him, then he grimaced. Why was he hiding out here in the barn like a wayward child when a comfortable chair and a warm, cozy fire waited for him in the house? But the answer to that was all too obvious. He was hiding out here because Caroline waited for him in the house, too. He'd fled immediately after dinner, when she'd told him that she wanted to discuss something with him at his convenience. He'd hoped that "his convenience" would prove so inconvenient to her that she would just let it go, but as- usual, Caroline was nothing if not resolute. Well, she wasn't going to wear him down.. He had lots more experience at keeping himself out of involvements than she could possibly have at forcing them. Meanwhile, he was stuck here with nothing much to do.

He figured he might as well check on each of the horses personally once more and moved across the floor to the stairwell, unaware that his heavy footsteps clumped loudly enough to be heard below or that anyone was there to hear them. He was halfway down the bare wood steps when she spoke.

"There you are."

He nearly jumped out of his skin, but the instant after that he was angry.

"d.a.m.n it, Caroline!"

"Sorry," she said contritely. "Didn't mean to startle you."

Suddenly he felt like a heel, but he wasn't about to apologize. Instead, he said gruffly, "What are you doing here?" Only belatedly did he realize mat he'd just opened himself up to conversation. In order to discourage an answer, he pushed by her and went straight to the first stall, letting himself in with the horse. She followed him.

"I told you I wanted to talk to you about something."

"I'm busy, Caroline," he said brusquely, peering into the feed bin. He ran a hand lightly over the bay's sleek back, watching the animal shiver, as if it was the most important thing he'd seen all day. Caroline stood patiently. When he couldn't bear it any longer, he demanded, "Can't this wait?"

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"No, it can't wait," she told him softly but firmly, hanging her elbows over the stall gate. "I'm busy, too, Jesse. I have a schedule to meet every day, and tomorrow, along with putting three meals on the table-"

' 'Two," he retorted without thinking.' 'You don't have to cook my breakfast every morning, you know."

' "That's beside the point. Breakfast or not tomorrow, I still have to do the shopping."

Shopping on Friday. That's right. He'd forgotten all about her system. Laundry on Mondays, floors on Tuesdays, bathrooms on Wednesdays, dusting on Thursdays, shopping on Fridays. The house seemed to stay effortlessly spotless and the pantry fully stocked all the time since she'd come. "What's that got to do with me?" he snapped, uncomfortable suddenly with her surprisingly sophisticated organization of her duties.

"I want to discuss doing the shopping in a different way."

He finally had to stop pretending to work on the horse and give her his attention. "You'll have to explain that."

She gathered her thoughts and did so succinctly. "The first Friday of every month your mother and I sit down and make out menus for every day. Then once a week we go through the pantry to see what we have on hand, make a shopping list, and go to town. Sometimes we have to hit three or four stores to get the best prices, and it's usually too much for your mother. She winds up shivering in the car while I try to finish up at hyper-speed."

"So what's your solution?" He had no doubt that she had one.

"A warehouse store has opened up not too far away. They have a good reputation, excellent products, the very lowest prices, but you have to buy in bulk. Also, they require a membership fee every year. So the initial outlay would be like three times the weekly grocery budget, but I've done the figures repeatedly, and I'm convinced we could get at least a month of meals for the cost of those three weeks, even figuring in the extra meals while your brother's family is here for Christmas and Christmas dinner itself. Now we have the storage s.p.a.ce for buying bulk, and it would mean very nearly one-stop shopping but at a greater distance, and the grocery budget would have to be disbursed differently. And before you decide, I should point out that the weather may some- times rule out the trip, which is just under fifty minutes, meaning mat we could find ourselves winging it through the local grocery stores at times, and that could-probably won't but could-negate the savings. So, what do you think?"

He had to mull it over. She'd certainly done her homework. Frankly, he'd had no idea food shopping was such a ch.o.r.e. Hadn't given it much thought, really, but now that he did, he realized that she'd been providing all those rich, abundant meals on die same budget on which his mother had been operating with a good deal less results. Obviously his mother couldn't manage the shopping with the same efficiency as Caroline-either because of her infirmity or because she just hadn't thought of doing it Caroline's way or both. He put his mind to the thesis with which she had presented him and came up with a question.

"Could we maybe buy for, oh, two or three months in advance? That way the weather wouldn't be such a big factor."

She bit her bottom lip, giving his question some thought "Two maybe, but not three. We'd have to have a good deal more freezer .s.p.a.ce, and also, we'd need to run into town every so often for fresh vegetables and such."

"Won't we have to do mat, anyway?"

"Yes, you're right. We will."

"So, if we had a bigger freezer in the house we could buy in bulk maybe once a quarter and augment that with fresh goods from town, say once a week."

She nodded. "You'd sure save a bundle on your grocery budget that way, and your mother wouldn't have to endure the weekly shopping marathon. I've tried to get her to let me handle it alone, but she knows it's really a two-person job."

"But this way you could handle the weekly shopping by yourself?"

"I don't see why not."

"Okay, let's do it."

She stared at him in obvious surprise. "Just like that? But what about die freezer?"

"I'll trade with you," he said. "There's a freezer upstairs about half-full of various stuff. If it's suitable for your purposes, I'll have it switched with the one in the house."

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She shrugged happily. "Let's take a look at it."

"Okay."

He let himself out of the stall and led her up the stairs to the top. This time he flipped on the overhead light "It's not real attractive, I know. Pretty scratched up. But it works fine. It's actually newer than the one in the house."

She shook her head.' 'n.o.body goes in the pantry but your mom and I and sometimes your dad. I can't imagine that they'd mind. I sure don't. Can I look inside?"

He fished a key out of his pocket and fitted it into a tiny, round lock beneath the handle. The lock clicked softly, and Jesse nodded. "Go ahead."

She opened the door and poked her head inside. "Shelves are all intact. I like these two big pullout bins here. The door has really deep, keeper s.p.a.ce." She straightened and closed the door. "I only see one problem."

"What's that?"

"The freezer in the house doesn't have a lock."

He shrugged even as he put the key in and turned it. "I'll get a padlock. This one really isn't enough to stop a determined thief, anyway."

She lifted her arms and smiled. "Works for me."

He felt rather pleased with himself. "I'll have them switched tomorrow."

"Terrific."

They stood there smiling like idiots for a moment before Jesse remembered that he was supposed to be keeping his distance. He was just about to suggest that she go on her way and let him get back to "work," when she turned away and'took a look around the loft.

"Oh, this is great!" she said. "Just like a barn is supposed to be. What are those things in the floor?"

He heard himself answering before he'd even thought about it. "Those are feed chutes. The traps slide open so you can pour feed down the chutes straight into the feed bins in the stalls downstairs. That way you don't have to carry everything up and down the stairs."

"Clever." She beamed him a smile mat seemed to say she Sf credited him with the idea. He had, indeed, thought of it. She pointed at the mixing table. "What's that for?"

"Mixing special feeds. Some cattle have special needs, usually it's horses, though."

"And you do very well by your horses," she said, a touch of something that sounded very like pride in her voice. She walked into the center of the room, trailing one hand along the edge of fee table. "What is it about a pile of hay that makes you want to jump in and roll around?" she asked rhetorically.

He chuckled. He couldn't help himself. "I don't know, same thing about a pile of leaves, I guess."

She whirled around to face him, her gestures exuberant. "Did you play up here as a child?"

He shook his head. "No. It wasn't built then. We had a big old tumbledown barn with a loft we weren't supposed to play in because it was too rickety, but did sometimes, anyway. I built this place about seven or eight years ago."

"It must be wonderful here in the summertime with that great big window open," she said dreamily. "I always fantasized about playing in a place like this with my brothers and sisters."

"You don't have brothers and sisters," he said thoughtlessly.

. "But I always wanted them," she said. "Aren't you glad you have a brother?"

"Sure. Even when he was a smart-alecky little pain in the b.u.t.t, I always kind of liked having him around. Frankly, I don't see nearly enough of Rye now."

She nodded, as if she'd expected him to say those very words and did another slow perusal of the loft. "This place needs kids," she said, "a whole bunch of them, running around and playing hide-and-seek, throwing hay all over the place." She looked up at the beams overhead. "You could hang a tire swing from the center of the roof, and they could play out here even in the winter. It wouldn't be nearly so neat as this, though. Kids aren't neat, not usually. But what fun they'd have!"

Something about the way she said it made it come alive for him in that moment Suddenly he could see a boisterous trio jumping and running and swinging around the room. At least two of them were boys, but the ringleader was a little girl, her long

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blond hair streaming out behind her as she shrieked and streaked around the room. His heart turned over. Hie fiercest longing he'd ever known seized him. It knocked him back, staggered him.. Children. His children.

But he would never have children. Never.

All at once, he knew who to blame for this dangerous fantasy, this gut-wrenching realization of a loss he'd never allowed himself to ponder. He glared at Caroline. d.a.m.n her! Even when she wasn't enticing him with her silent invitations, she was still a needle under his skin, reminding him every minute of what he couldn't have and shouldn't want. Somehow the loft had grown too small for the two of them. He pulled at the neck of the plain white T-shirt he wore beneath his chambray work shirt and coat, feeling the need for a deep breath that he couldn't quite seem to catch. And Caroline, who was entirely too perceptive for his good, noticed.

"Jesse, is something wrong?"