Fire and Rain

4

Luke set the last of Carla’s baggage just inside the door to the small upstairs suite that would be hers for the summer. Standing on tiptoe, staring over his back, Carla looked at the room and made a small sound of astonishment.

"What incredible furniture! Where did you get that headboard? And the dresser," she added, looking away from the queen-size bed. Without thinking, she crowded against Luke so that she could touch the satin surface of the wood. ‘The design is perfect, all curves, like running water or granite smoothed by rain. Where on earth did you find – "

"Leave your stuff for now," Luke said, all but pushing Carla out of the room and closing the door behind himself. The last thing he wanted to do was to talk about the furniture he had made three years ago in an effort to exorcise or appease the yearning within himself for the life and the girt he could not have. "I’ll show you the kitchen next, then I’ve got to check on one of the mares."

Carla started to point out that she had seen the kitchen before, then shut her mouth. She had demanded to be treated like any other employee, and that’s what Luke was doing. What she hadn’t realized was that he would treat her like a stranger as well, refusing to answer even such relatively impersonal questions as where he had found the beautiful bedroom set.

Without a word Carla followed Luke down the stairs. The muscular ease of his walk fascinated her. Her glance lingered on the width of his shoulders beneath his blue work shirt and the powerful lines of his back as it tapered to a worn, wide leather belt encircling a lean waist. His jeans were faded in patterns determined by sun and sweat rather than by commercial acid washes. His boots were scarred by stirrups, spurs and brush.

The stairs ended in a hall whose floor was covered by earth-colored, unglazed Mexican tiles. Mentally Carla noted that a lot of that earth color might come off with a mop and a bucket of soapy water. The kitchen floor was of the same unglazed tiles.

Make that several buckets of soapy water.

With an inaudible sigh Carla noted the abundant signs of months of indifferent house cleaning. Windows were streaked where they weren’t smeared. The counters, cupboards, drawers and appliances in the kitchen and adjoining laundry room had the dull shine of grease rather than the subtle shine of cleanliness.

Luke followed Carla’s glance to the far corner of the kitchen, where chunks of spring mud still clung to the baseboard even though spring had passed. Tomato sauce or gravy – or both – made an uneven pattern down the bank of drawers to the right of the sink. On the floor, distinct paths crisscrossed from the back door to the sink to the stove and into the big dining room.

"The last four cooks weren’t much on housekeeping," Luke muttered.

"Really? I thought it was just your wallpaper."

Luke glanced at the walls and grimaced. They were worse than the floor. He tried to remember die last time the walls had been scrubbed. He couldn’t.

"I'll have one of the men wash them down."

"Don’t bother, unless you plan to keep eating off them."

Unwillingly, Luke smiled. "It does look sort of like we’ve been serving dinner off the walls instead of the table, doesn’t it?"

"Mmm," was the most tactful thing Carla could think of to say. "Do you want a late or early dinner?"

"Six and six."

"What?"

"Breakfast at six and dinner at six. The men who need a cold lunch packed for them will tell you at dinner the night before. Otherwise just see that the bunkhouse kitchen stays stocked with snacks and sandwich stuff."

Luke ran a finger lightly over the huge, six-burner gas stove and came up with a greasy fingertip for his trouble. He muttered something and wiped his hand on his jeans.

"What?" asked Carla.

"I’ve been so busy working on the ranch that I didn’t realize the house had gone to hell."

"Nothing a little soap and water won’t cure," Carla said with determined cheerfulness.

Or dynamite, she added silently, looking around. When she looked up again, Luke was studying her.

"If any of the hands bother you, let me know," he said.

"I don’t mind them coming around and asking me to bake cookies for them," Carla answered, remembering other summers. "I could live without king snakes in the pantry, though."

Luke’s lips twitched as he remembered the incident when an ambitious king snake had followed mice into the pantry. The snake had set up housekeeping among the sacks of rice and flour. At least, that was what each and every hand had solemnly sworn when Luke had heard Carla’s scream and come running. He had caught the snake and taken it to the barn, where its predatory efforts would be more appreciated. Then he had begun questioning the hands very closely.

The shadow of a smile faded from Luke’s mouth.

"I wasn’t worried about that kind of snake. It’s the two-legged variety I had in mind. If one of my men makes you uncomfortable, let me know."

Carla looked perplexed. "I’ve never had any trouble with the hands before."

"The last time you spent a summer here, you looked more like a boy than a girl," Luke said bluntly. His gaze went from Carla’s gold-streaked chestnut hair to her slender feet and back up again, silently cataloguing each lush curve. "No such luck this time. My men aren’t blind. So if anyone crowds you, don’t try to take care of it yourself. Come running to me or Ten and come fast. Got that?"

"I don’t dress to catch a man’s eye," Carla said matter-of-factly, indicating her summer uniform of jeans and one of her brother’s old shirts with sleeves rolled up and trailing ends knotted to one side. "There shouldn’t be any problem."

Luke’s left eyebrow climbed as he followed Car-la’s gesture. "Maybe. But if you swipe another one of my shirts, I’ll take it out of your soft hide."

"This is my brother’s shirt," she said indignantly, holding up a black shirttail in her hand.

Luke shook his head. "I got oil on it working on Cash’s balky Jeep, so he loaned me a clean one for your birthday party."

"Figures," she muttered. "It’s so comfortable I’ve been tempted to use it as a nightgown. Nylon is too cold or too hot. Your shirt was all soft and perfect."

Abruptly Carla’s mouth went dry. The thought that the cloth draped so intimately around her body had once been wrapped just as intimately around Luke’s sent an arrow of sensation glittering from her breastbone to the pit of her stomach. She swallowed and looked away from his clear, penetrating eyes.

"Don’t worry," she said huskily. "I’ll give it back to you as soon as it’s washed."

"No hurry. I’ve still got Cash’s shirt"

Silence stretched and then stretched some more, leaving Carla feeling breathless, uncertain. She looked back at Luke, only to find him watching her with unnerving intensity, as though he were measuring precisely where the disputed shirt fit her differently than it fit him.

"How do you want to arrange your time off?" he asked.

"What?"

Slowly Luke lifted his eyes to Carla’s face.

"Your time off. Do you want to work six days and have one off, or do you want to work right through, or do you want to save up some days and take a little vacation?"

"I’ll save them up," Carla said promptly.

"That’s what the women all say at first, but after a few weeks they can’t get to West Fork fast enough."

"Cash will be coming up in early August I’ll wait"

Luke’s smile told Carla that he didn’t believe it.

He turned toward the back door. "If you need anything, holler. I’ll be in the barn."

With a mixture of relief and disappointment, Carla watched Luke leave. The relief she understood; the disappointment she ignored. She looked around the kitchen, wondering where to begin. Everywhere she looked, a task cried out to be done. Fortunately she had the ability to organize her time. She didn’t always use that ability, but she had it just the same.

"The cleaning will have to wait," Carla muttered, looking at the clock. "In two hours, twelve hungry hands will descend. Thirteen, counting Luke. Call it fourteen. Luke is big enough for two men. Then there’s me. Dinner for fifteen, coming right up."

The number she had to feed seemed to echo in the silent kitchen. Fifteen. My God. No wonder all the pots and pans are so big.

The thought of feeding that many people was daunting. Carla had never cooked whole meals for more than herself, her brother and, when she was on the ranch, for Luke. The three of them had eaten in the old ranch house, whose small rooms were famous for mice, drafts and dust in equal measure.

Looking around, Carla gave each black sleeve another turn upward to make sure the cloth didn’t get in the way. Then she went to the refrigerator and began taking a fast inventory of what was available.

The refrigerator held beer, apple juice, horseradish, ketchup, a chunk of butter, four eggs, a slab of unsliced bacon and an open package of baloney that had quietly curled up and died. The big freezer opposite the stove was more rewarding. It held enough meat, mostly beef, to feed half the state of Colorado. As long as the propane held out, they wouldn’t starve. All she had to do was thaw a few roasts in the microwave.

"Oops," Carla said, glancing around. "No microwave. Not enough time to cook frozen roasts, either."

She went to the pantry, hoping for inspiration. "Canned stew, canned chili, canned chicken…yuck. No wonder Luke is short-tempered. Eating out of cans is enough to sour the disposition of a saint" The other side of the pantry was no better. She was confronted by a solid wall of cans as big as buckets – tomatoes, peas, green beans, corn, pitted cherries and coffee. There were also half-empty fifty-pound sacks of flour, sugar, rice, cornmeal and dried apples. The bread bin held four wizened crusts.

"So much for hamburgers," she said unhappily, "and I doubt if anyone delivers pizza this far out"

A burlap bag bulged with potatoes. Another bag was full of onions. Pinto beans dribbled out of a third bag. She grabbed that bag with both hands and lifted. It weighed at least ten pounds. That was enough beans to make real chili or frijoles refritos or any number of dishes. She could feed an army – but not in the next two hours.

Behind the bag of beans Carla spotted a cardboard box that had been shoved aside and forgotten. Inside the box was package after package of spaghetti. Each package held two pounds of the slender, dried pasta. The fragile sticks had been broken but were perfectly edible otherwise.

"I sense a spaghetti dinner on the horizon," Carla said.

She grabbed two packages, hesitated, and grabbed two more. When she cooked for Cash and herself, a pound of dried pasta fed both of them with enough left over for several of her lunches. But then, she always served fresh salad, garlic bread and dessert with the spaghetti. Bread and salad were out of the question, so she grabbed an extra package of pasta, bringing the total to ten pounds.

"My God, it will take an army to eat this much. I’ll be making cold spaghetti sandwiches for weeks and the hands will riot and Luke will tear a strip off me big enough to cover the south pasture."

Carla frowned at the last package of pasta, then decided she could always take the leftovers to the bunkhouse for the hands who wanted a midnight snack. Arms bulging with packages of spaghetti, she went back into the kitchen. There she dumped the pasta on the counter and went back to the freezer. The hamburger came in five-pound freezer packages that were frozen as solid as a stone.

She unwrapped a brick of ground meat and dropped it into a cast-iron frying pan that was so big and heavy it took both hands for her to lift it up onto the stove. A box of wooden matches sat on the stove itself. She lit the burner beneath the frozen meat, covered the pan and went to work on the sauce. Several forays to the pantry resulted in a can of tomato sauce the size of a bathroom sink, an equally intimidating can of whole tomatoes, and ten fat onions.

After rummaging in the cupboards near the stove, Carla found a kettle the size of a laundry tub. She set it aside for cooking the noodles and found a slightly smaller cousin to hold the sauce. She nearly had to turn the kitchen inside out to find a handheld can opener that worked. As she wrestled with the awkward can and poured a river of tomato sauce into a big pot – too quickly – she discovered how the kitchen walls had gotten their splatter patterns. She wiped up what she could reach, lit the burner under the sauce and went to work peeling and chopping onions. Between bouts of crying she prodded the hamburger, prying off bits of meat as the frozen block slowly loosened.

By the time the hamburger had thawed and was browning with the onions in the huge pan, nearly an hour had passed. A determined search of the kitchen had turned up no oregano and no whole garlic. A geriatric bottle of garlic granules was available, but she had to hammer the plastic container on the counter to knock loose a little of the contents.

"What on earth have the cooks been feeding everyone?" Carla asked in exasperation. "No herbs, no spices, no – " The clock caught her eye. "Uh-oh. I’d better get dessert going or there won’t be any of that, either."

Carla ran up to her bedroom suite, tore through four boxes until she found her cookbooks, and raced back downstairs. The recipe for cherry cobbler said it fed eight She doubled it, spread it into the smallest baking pan she could find – which was half the size of a card table – and discovered that the pan was way too big for the contents.

"Oh well, men always like dessert. I’ll put it in their lunch along with the cold spaghetti sandwiches."

She mixed up two more double batches of cobbler, poured them into the pan with the first batch and lit the oven. Even after doing six times the normal recipe of cobbler, she still had half of the huge can of cherries left over. She set it aside, saw that time was getting away from her and went back to the spaghetti sauce.

The meat and onions were browned and the pot of tomato sauce and chopped tomatoes was finally coming to a boil. The size and weight of the frying pan made draining the meat and onions an awkward process – especially using a kitchen towel as a pot holder – but she finally managed it. Next she had to dump the meat and onions into the pot of sauce. In doing so, she discovered another way to decorate the walls. Muttering, she mopped up and told herself that she would have to learn to manhandle a heavy pot and a gallon or two of sauce without making a mess.

"Speaking of gallons, I’d better get the spaghetti water on," she muttered, pushing back her hair with her elbow because her fingers were only slightly less messy than the walls.

By the time Carla filled a huge pot with water and lugged it to the stove, she finally understood why men rather than women chose careers as chefs; you had to be a weight lifter to handle the kitchen equipment. She turned the fire on high and mopped up the floor where she had spilled water on the way to the stove. The places she left behind were relatively clean, making the rest of the floor look much worse by comparison.

For a moment Carla was tempted to slop a little tomato sauce on the sort-of-clean spots to even things up, thereby delaying the hour of reckoning when she had to clean the floor. She loved to cook but hated housework. She knew her own weakness so well that she worked twice as hard at cleaning, making up for her own dislike of the job.

But it would look really nice with a few dollops of tomato sauce. Nobody would even notice.

Carla managed to avoid the temptation only because she remembered the green beans, which should have been on the stove ten minutes ago. Another trip to the pantry yielded a gallon can of green beans. While they heated, she sliced bacon, fried it and sliced more onions to saute in the bacon fat From time to time she checked the spaghetti water.

"I know a watched pot never boils, but this is ridiculous," she said beneath her breath, lifting the lid and testing the water with her fingertip.

Dead cold.

From the barn, corral and bunkhouse came the sounds of men wrapping up tasks in preparation for dinner. Two pickups came in from opposite directions, pulling horse trailers behind. Four men got out and stretched, tired and hungry from a long day of checking cattle on land leased from the federal government The horses being unloaded from trailers neighed to the horses that were already rubbed down and had begun to tear great mouthfuls of hay from the corral feeding rack.

The men would be just as hungry.

Anxiously Carla listened as the bunkhouse door slammed repeatedly, telling her that the men were going in to wash up for dinner. Laughter and catcalls greeted a cowboy whose jeans showed clear signs of his having landed butt-first in the mud. He gave back as good as he got, reminding the other men of the time one of them had slipped in a fresh cow flop and another had been bucked off into a corral trough.

Carla couldn’t help smiling as bits of conversation drifted through the open window. For the first time she realized that she hadn’t heard a human voice since Luke had vanished into the barn. The thought went as quickly as it had come, pushed aside by the fact that the spaghetti water was barely lukewarm. At this rate dinner would be at least half an hour late and Luke would be thinking he had gotten the bad end of the bet.

Hurriedly Carla tasted the tomato sauce, added more garlic and checked the spaghetti water again. Nothing doing. The outside door into the dining room squeaked open and then closed. The room, which adjoined the kitchen, was more like a mess hall than a formal dining room. There were two long tables, each of which could seat ten comfortably and fourteen in a pinch, twenty chairs, a wall of floor-to-ceiling cupboards and not much else.

It occurred to Carla that the tables were bare of plates, cups, utensils and napkins, not to mention salt, pepper, ketchup, steak sauce, sugar and all the other condiments beloved by ranch hands. Groaning at her forgetfulness, she dumped the half-cooked onions and bacon into the pot of green beans and frantically began opening cupboards, searching for plates. She was so busy that she didn’t hear the door between the kitchen and dining room open.

"Smells good in here. What’s for supper?"

"Spaghetti," Carla said without turning toward the male voice.

"Smells more like cherry pie."

"Ohmygod, dessert."

She raced past the man who had walked into the kitchen. A fast look in the oven assured her that the cobbler had survived her neglect. All she had to do was maneuver the big pan out of the oven to let the cobbler cool. The kitchen towel wouldn’t stretch to do the job of handling the pan.

"Pot holders," she muttered, straightening from bending over the oven.

"Looks like cobbler from here."

The voice came from about a foot away from Car-la’s ear. Her head snapped around and she looked at the man for the first time.

Long, lean and deceptively lazy-looking, Tennessee Blackthorn was watching Carla with an odd smile on his face.

"Ten! Is it really you?" Carla asked, delighted. "The last time I heard, you had a phone call in the middle of the night, went into Cortez and never came back."

"Never is a long time." Smoke-colored eyes swept appreciatively from Carla’s oven-flushed cheeks to her ankles and back up. "Guess we can’t call you nina anymore. You finally grew into those long legs and bedroom eyes."

She laughed. "I love hungry men. They’ll flatter the cook shamelessly in hopes of an early dinner. You’re out of luck, though. The watched pot isn’t boiling."

"He’s out of luck, period," Luke said from the back door, his voice cold.