Astonishment widened her eyes. “After all that’s happened to me… I thought… surely you don’t except me to fix a meal after I was almost burned to death!”
“Well, ma’am, if you’re hinting that I should wrassle up the grub, I ain’t about to.” He stuck out a whiskered chin and stared at her. “You’re the cook, and I’m the wrangler. You don’t mess with my ponies, and I don’t mess with your chuck, and that’s how it is.” Anger glinted in his eyes. “Ain’t that always the way? Offer a woman a helping hand and pretty soon she wants your whole body for doing her work. Well, I got a job, Miz Mills. I don’t have time to do your job, too.”
Blinking with disbelief, fresh tears welling in her eyes, she watched him stomp away. She could not believe what was happening to her. If ever there was a lady in distress who needed assistance, she was that lady. Yet four able-bodied men stood within sight and not one was willing to lift a finger to help her.
Pulling a handkerchief out of her cuff, she wrung the water from it, then blotted her face and wiped tears from her eyes. She took her time pushing strands of wet hair up beneath her wet hat, hoping that Grady would reconsider and return to cook the noon meal. He couldn’t really expect her to go on wearing a skirt that was ripped up the back and burned full of holes, or ignore the fact that she was drenched to the skin from the top of her head to the tip of her boot.
She waited a full five minutes before she accepted that Grady would not return. Then, teary with self-pity, she forced herself to consider the noon meal. Last night, which seemed like a decade ago, she had planned to cook a roast for the noon meal. But there wasn’t time now, so she decided on bacon stew, an uninspired throw-together that she’d been told cowboys actually liked.
Once upright on her crutch, she found the knives and cut a slab of bacon into small squares. The puncture on her wrist opened and bled on her work surface, so she took a minute to wrap her handkerchief around the base of her hand. The wrapping made it awkward to work, but she was beyond caring. She hurled the squares of bacon into a deep pot, hung the pot over the flames, then, being careful not to set herself on fire again, she poured water into the pot, before returning to the worktable to peel what seemed like a million potatoes and slice an equal number of onions. At home she would have insisted that the early carrots be peeled because that was the right and civilized way to do it. But here she just whacked the carrots in pieces and dumped them in with the other vegetables that she would add to the pot when the bacon was half-cooked.
She wasn’t up to making biscuits, so she threw together some dough for dumplings. The secret to dumplings, she’d been assured by Se?ora Calvos, was to roll the dough very very thin before cutting it into squares to drop on top of the boiling stew. Well, today that was not going to happen. If she hurried this chore along, she might have time to change her clothes and do something with the wet hair that kept dropping in her face.
There was no point whatsoever in having standards if a person didn’t live up to them. Alex Roark Mills was not a woman who served a meal looking as if she had just crawled out of a burning building. She was a person with superior standards. She would find time to repair her appearance.
But shortly after she dumped the vegetables into the greasy stew water, she glanced up and spotted an enormous dust cloud rising on the horizon. With a despairing heart, she stared at the haze and frantically counted the tasks she had to do yet. There was not going to be a spare minute to fix her hair or change her ensemble.
The herd was coming. And her standards were going.
Chapter 10
“What in the hell happened to you?” Dal demanded, climbing down from his horse and handing the reins to Grady. He examined Alex with a hard stare. Her hair hung down in frizzy loops and her skirt had turned into a wrinkled black rag with charred holes that exposed scorched petticoats. A bloody handkerchief wrapped her hand. Picking up a mug, Dal walked behind her to the coffeepot and noticed that her skirt was ripped up the back.
She balanced a hip against the worktable and narrowed her eyes. There was no ice in her gaze today, just fury. “Don’t let the fact that I almost died delay the enjoyment of your coffee.”
Actually, he wasn’t enjoying the coffee. It had that weak, clean-pot, new-grounds taste.
“Cowboys want their coffee first thing.” It was hard not to smile. He hadn’t imagined she could look this disheveled. She told him what had happened, waving the hand without the crutch, furious tears glittering in her eyes. “I don’t see why you’re still upset,” he commented at the end of her tirade. “You didn’t get injured, and a drenching never killed anyone.”