Fire and Rain by Elizabeth Lowell Read Free Book Online Page A

kitchen clock. Six-twenty.
     At least the vegetable part of the meal was ready. It was only canned green beans, but the bacon and onion gave the limp beans a whiff of flavor. Carla would have felt better if she had had a few loaves of garlic bread to put out on the table as well, but there was no help for it. Pasta, meat sauce, green beans and cobbler were all that was available. And she didn't even have that. Not yet.
     Worst of all, the coffee water was barely warm.
     Stifling a groan, Carla rushed into the dining room and began helping Ten distribute cutlery around the tables, which had been pushed together to make a single large rectangle. The surface of the table itself dismayed her; it was no cleaner than the kitchen counters or walls. Whoever had wiped the table in the past had rearranged rather than removed the grease.
     "Wait," Carla said to Ten. "The table needs cleaning."
     "You start cleaning now and we won't eat until midnight."
     She bit her lip. Ten was right.
     "Where does Luke keep the tablecloths?" she asked.
     "The what?"
    She groaned, then had an inspiration. "Newspapers. Where does Luke keep the old newspapers?"
     "In the wood box in the living room."
     A few minutes later Carla ran back to the dining room carrying a three-inch stack of newspapers. Soon the big table was covered by old news and advertisements for cattle feed and quarter-horse stud service. By the time she and Ten had finished laying out silverware, the hands were beginning to mill hopefully in the yard beyond the dining room. One of the braver men – an old hand called Cosy – stuck his head in the back door. Before he could open his mouth, Ten started talking.
     "I said I'd call when chow was on." The ramrod's cold gray eyes measured Cosy. "You getting hard of hearing or are you just senile?"
     "No sir," Cosy said, backing out hastily. "I'm just fine. Planning on staying that way, too."
     Ten grunted. Cosy vanished. The door thumped shut behind him.
     "They must be starving," Carla said, looking as guilty as she felt.
     "Nope. They still remember the cookies you used to bake. When Luke told the men you'd be cooking for a few days, they started drooling."
     "Tell them to relax. I'll be here all summer, not just for a few days."
     Ten shrugged. "The last woman who stayed here more than three weeks was ugly as a rotten stump and drank to boot, but what really got her sent down the road was that she couldn't cook worth a fart in a windstorm."
     Carla fought not to smile. She failed.
     The left corner of Ten's mouth turned up. "Finally we took up a collection to buy her a bus ticket to Nome."
     "Alaska?" asked Carla.
     "Yeah. She got a job scaring grizzlies away from salmon nets."
     Feminine laughter bubbled up. Soon Ten was laughing, too. Neither one of them noticed the big man who had come to the kitchen through the living room and was now leaning against the corner counter, his thumbs hooked in his belt and his mouth a bleak downward curve. He glanced at the clock. Six-forty. He glanced at the stove. Everything looked hot and ready to go. Whiskey-colored eyes cut back to the laughing couple in the dining room.
     Just when Luke had opened his mouth to say something savage on the subject of cooks who couldn't get dinner ready on time, Carla grabbed Ten's wrist and looked at his watch.
     "The pasta should be done by now, if the hands don't mind it al dente."
     "What?"
     "Chewy," she said succinctly.
     "Hell, after a day on the range, we'll eat whatever we can get, any way we can get it, including raw."
     Carla grimaced. "Yuck.Pasta sticks to your teeth that way."
     Laughing, shaking his head, Ten leaned forward and tugged gently on a shining strand of Carla's hair. "I'm glad you're back. You bring sunlight with you."
     Almost shyly, Carla said, "Thanks, Ten. It's good to be back. I love this place."
     "The place or the owner?"
     The question was so soft that Carla could pretend not to have heard it at all. So