With only the flickering light of the fire left, all the puzzle pieces took on a ghastly reddish tinge. Sharley gave a dramatic sigh.
Spence didn’t sound sympathetic. “If you’re looking for something constructive to do, you can come and stir the stew.”
“I thought this meal was your turn.” But she followed him to the kitchen nevertheless.
“Are we taking turns? I thought we were cooperating.”
The careless words tugged at her heart. She picked up the wooden spoon, intending to concentrate very hard on the stew.
Spence reached around her to get something from the cabinet above her head. The sleeve of his flannel shirt brushed softly against her hair, and he tensed as if he’d been burned.
The flickering candlelight cast strong shadows across his face, throwing cheekbones and eyelashes and the cleft in his chin into relief. If she turned just a little, she would be almost in his arms.
And then what? Sharley thought. What would that prove?
Outside the kitchen window a branch cracked, unable to bear the weight of ice it held. It seemed to break the spell inside as well. Spence moved away to mix the biscuits, and Sharley began to stir the stew, carefully scraping the bottom of the pan and trying to blink away the moisture in her eyes.
This should have been their wedding night.
Oh, Spence, she wanted to cry, what happened to us? If only I understood!
CHAPTER FIVE
But Sharley didn’t say it, for she knew what Spence had told her was true; he didn’t owe her an explanation anymore. She had given up the right to ask questions when she handed his ring back to him.
And breaking their engagement was still the only action she could have taken under the circumstances. The fact was that she’d given him every opportunity to explain, and he hadn’t even tried to do so. Why should she fool herself into thinking he would be any more capable of justifying himself now?
She turned the heat down under the stew pan and got plates out of the cabinet. The tightness in her chest returned as she began to set the tiny kitchen table, remembering the other times they had shared a meal. Usually they were at a restaurant surrounded by the public, or they were at the Hudson house, with Martin and Charlotte present; rarely had they been so completely alone. But there had been a couple of quiet dinners at Spence’s apartment, and that impromptu winter picnic when they had found a corner of the park where no one had intruded. And now there was this simple meal, with candles on the table, on what should have been their wedding night, but wasn’t...
She told herself quite fiercely that indulging in self-pity was a waste of time. Still, she had to swallow very hard to get rid of the lump in her throat.
Spence was right about the quality of his biscuits. They were light and flaky and melt-in-the-mouth delicious, and as she ate her third one, Sharley told him so.
“I learned how to make them from my mother,” he said as he buttered another one for himself.
“I’m sorry I never had a chance to meet her.” Spence seldom mentioned his mother, who had died while he was still in high school. Would he talk about her now?
“We ate a lot of biscuits when I was a kid. It was a long time before I realized they not only tasted good, they were cheap.” He tilted his head. “Listen.”
From the intentness of his posture, Sharley expected the roar of a rescue plane at the very least, but in fact she couldn’t hear a thing. Finally she gave up. “What am I supposed to listen to?”
“The wind,” he said. “There isn’t any.”
He was right. The wind had whirled around the cabin so steadily all day that she had grown used to its whine, and the sudden silence was almost deafening.
“Maybe that means there’s a warm front coming in,” Spence mused.
Perhaps it was only that the description was suggestive, but Sharley did feel warmer. “It’s a whole lot cozier in here, isn’t it?”
“As if the stove is having an easier time keeping up. The walls of this place must be like a sieve.” He reached for the stew pan on the stove and offered Sharley another serving.
She nodded absentmindedly and watched as he spooned the stew onto her plate. “Well, it was never really intended to be a winter resort.”
“You know, I can’t fathom the elegant Charlotte camping out here at all. The mere thought of it makes me want to laugh.”
“She didn’t. This is Martin’s hideaway.”
“Of course,” Spence said crisply. “Now that I think about it, that’s not such a surprise after all.”
Sharley was impatient. “Look, Spence, I know you don’t have much of an opinion of Charlotte, but you’re not being fair to her. The stroke she had a few years ago... Well, it made her a different person. She wasn’t bitter, before.”
He put up a hand. “That’s not what I meant, exactly. In any case, let’s not fight about it tonight, all right?”
Sharley poked at her stew with the tines of her fork. “All right,” she said unhappily. “But it’s not Charlotte’s fault, really. Strokes do that, sometimes — they can cause a personality shift. And no matter what, she’s been awfully good to me. Taking me in the way she did…”
“She’s your aunt, for heaven’s sake! What else would you expect? And what would people have thought if she’d turned you away?”
“Well, it would have been quite understandable if she had. That was the year she had the stroke. No one guessed, as sick as Charlotte was, that it would be my mother who died first.” She sighed. “At any rate, the last thing Charlotte needed was a loud and thoughtless teenager trampling all over her life.”
Spence shook his head.
“What does that mean?”
“Not loud and thoughtless. Not you, Sharley. Not ever.”
The tone of his voice — low, with an almost imperceptible tremor — caught at Sharley’s heart. He sounded so very sincere.
“Thank you,” she managed. “I think.”
Spence smiled, and the candlelight made his teeth gleam white and sent sparks dancing in his eyes. “Oh, I meant it.”
He had always had a beautiful smile, Sharley thought. No, she corrected, he had a whole inventory of them — ranging from a mischievously charming grin to a slow and sultry smile which could make a girl’s heart turn over in her chest...
Her breath was doing funny things, like sticking in her throat and making her lungs ache.
She pushed her chair back. The sudden screech of the chair legs against the wood floor shattered the quiet intimacy of the moment. “I’ll clean up,” she said briskly. “The biscuits really were wonderful, Spence.”
He didn’t protest. He helped to clear the table and then rebuilt the fire while she straightened up the kitchen.
But as Sharley washed the dishes, she found herself almost wishing that he had said, “There’s no hurry. Let’s just sit here and talk for a while instead...”
*****
The wind did not pick up again overnight. The silence outside would have made the little cabin seem even more isolated, Sharley suspected, if it had not been for the tiny noises Spence made in the big room.
“If it wasn’t for the sheer discomfort of having him around,” she told herself while she was in the shower on Sunday morning, “I’d be almost glad he’s here.”
In fact, she found herself hurrying to get dressed, and not entirely because of the chill in her bedroom. She was concerned about Spence, she told herself. His cold had seemed better at dinner last night; he hadn’t sneezed even once through the whole evening. Yet he had been up for hours after she had gone to bed, and she knew, even though she hadn’t been fully awake herself, that he had been moving around since early this morning. Was he feeling worse?
She was growling a little herself as she emerged from her room, rubbing her still-wet hair with a towel. At least the hot water was holding out so far, but how could she have managed to forget that a hairdryer didn’t work when there was nothing to power it? She’d no doubt have a head cold
herself by the time her hair stopped dripping.
“Sneaky stuff, electricity,” she began. “It creeps into our lives so insidiously that we don’t even realize how much we rely on it until—”
Her gaze fell on Spence, who was working on the jigsaw puzzle again, and she caught her breath. Yesterday morning when she walked in on him he had looked half-ill and entirely rumpled; nevertheless, he had still been appealing. Today his skin was back to its usual healthy color, and yesterday’s untidy stubble was beginning to look like an intentional attempt to start a beard. Even the frightfully-bright red plaid pajamas which peeked out from under his brown terry bathrobe couldn’t make him look less wonderful.
She felt her muscles tighten just a little in appreciation of the picture he made, and perhaps even in anticipation; it was as if her body still hadn’t quite gotten the message from her brain that she wasn’t supposed to react to him like this anymore.
Spence stopped tinkering with the puzzle and looked up. The very beginnings of a scowl crossed his face, as if he found the way she was looking at him to be disgusting.
That’s torn it, Sharley thought. Damn it, she didn’t even want the man, so why was she drooling over him like some star-struck adolescent? The last thing she needed was to give him the idea that she felt any regret.
“Maybe it would be a good thing if you got dressed,” she snapped.
He turned a puzzle piece over and over, but he seemed to be considering her words instead. “What’s likely to happen if I don’t?”
Sharley felt herself flush scarlet. It had sounded almost like a warning, as if she had said, Put some clothes on or expect to be attacked! “Nothing,” she said crisply. “It’s just not good taste to sit around in your pajamas.”
He put the piece into place. “Don’t nag, Sharley. Be grateful I have pajamas and a robe. If it hadn’t been for Martin warning me about unheated bedrooms, I wouldn’t have bothered.”
That sent a flood of color over Sharley’s face. She dropped to the floor in front of the fire and bent her head so her hair cascaded over her face. By the time it was dry, she figured, she’d have a great excuse for bright-red skin. In the meantime, she didn’t have to talk to Spence at all.
He didn’t seem to notice the omission. The only sounds in the room were the soft whisper of Sharley’s brush passing through the long golden strands of hair, the crackle of the flames consuming another oak log, and an occasional snap as a piece of the puzzle went into place.
After a few minutes, Spence got up and went back to his bedroom.
I won, Sharley thought. She had outlasted him. But there was little sense of victory.
Her hair was almost dry. She sat there for a little while longer, running the brush slowly through each lock till the whole mass of hair lay gleaming and golden against her pale blue sweater. Then she put the brush down and stared into the fire and tried to calculate how long this was likely to go on.
Though the wind had died, she didn’t have to look far for evidence that the temperature had not risen much; the windows were still ice-coated. Back in Hammond’s Point, she knew, the road crews would have been spreading sand and salt as soon as the storm started, and by now the streets would be almost back to normal. But out here, there were too many roads and too few residents to make that sort of program cost-effective. With the closest neighbor a mile away, and the cabin closed up entirely during most winters, it would be a wonder if they saw a maintenance truck before spring. Of course, the ice would come off naturally long before that. The first time the sun began to shine, it would start to melt...
She didn’t hear Spence come back, and she didn’t even know he was in the main room until a blast of cold air swirled through the front door and wrapped itself around her. “Damn it,” she said, craning her neck in an effort to see what he was looking at, “you’re letting all the heat out.”
“I’m trying to see what shape the road is in.” He shut the door with a bang.
Sharley told herself that she shouldn’t be surprised to find him just as eager for escape as she was. “Don’t get your hopes up. I heard Joe Baxter say once that they use the religious system of snow removal up here.”
Spence’s eyebrows rose quizzically. “What’s that?”
“As he defined it, ‘The good Lord put it there, and the good Lord will take it away in his own time.’ I suspect it’s even more true when it comes to ice.”
Spence shrugged. “Let’s go out and see what it’s like.”
“Feel free.” Sharley picked up her brush again.
He came to stand over her, feet spread, arms crossed. “It might be a good idea to use the buddy system.”
“Why? So we can fall down together?”
“The fresh air and exercise would do us both good.”
She looked up at that. “What about your cold?”
Spence shrugged. “I’m fine today. It must not have been a full-fledged head cold, just exposure to the wind and damp.”
“So as soon as you’re feeling better, you want to go get another dose of it.”
“What are you, anyway? Lazy?” He bent over her and seized her wrists, and before Sharley realized what he was doing, she was on her feet. “A little walk will do you a world of good. You’ll appreciate your food, too.” He guided her toward the back door and wrapped a scarf around her face.
“I already do.” Sharley’s voice was muffled; she pushed the scarf down.
“That’s true. You’re one of the few women I know who isn’t always sighing about how many calories something contains.”
“Thank Charlotte for that.” She submitted to having her coat put on. “She told me once that since the entire subject of weight-watching is excruciatingly boring for everyone except the dieter, a lady doesn’t discuss it.”
“Hurray for Charlotte.” He zipped his own parka and pulled the door open.
Sharley shivered and pulled a pair of furry earmuffs from her pocket. The wind might have died, but there was still a blast of cold, and after the cozy warmth of the cabin, the shock was downright unpleasant.
Her feet were unsteady on the icy porch, and she braced herself with one hand on the woodpile. With the number of trips Spence had made out here for firewood, it was a wonder he hadn’t fallen. She could scarcely walk even though she could see exactly where she was going. How had he managed in the dark, with his arms full of logs?
Sharley picked her way down the steps and stopped to look around.
Heavy clouds still hung low in the sky, and without the brilliance of sunshine, all the color seemed to have been drained out of the landscape. It looked like a stark monochrome photograph, with everything in black and white and infinite shades of gray. And it was just as still; she could see no sign of animal life or birds or humans...
“Great place to park a car, Collins,” Spence called, and she turned a little too fast and had to fight for her balance. She slid a couple of feet and smacked into the passenger door.
Spence was leaning against the front fender, arms crossed. “Didn’t it occur to you that it might be wiser to leave the car on a solid surface,” he asked politely, “instead of driving it down a hill and onto a patch of grass?”
“That’s humorous, coming from someone who left his car in a ditch.”
“I didn’t do that on purpose. And I want you to know I made it considerably farther than the average driver would.”
“The average driver would probably have been smart enough to turn around.”
“There was no place wide enough,” Spence said calmly, “or I would have.”
And then she would have been alone out here... But there was no sense in pursuing that line of thought.
She studied the angle at which the car sat. Spence was right about the hill; why hadn’t she considered that fact the night she had arrived? “It doesn’t have ice underneath,” she pointed out. “I can get a run.”
“What good do you think that will do? Unless you can get up enough momentum within twenty feet
to get over that hump, your car is here to stay for a while.”
Sharley thought about trying to push it out, and concluded that it was a lost cause. She shrugged. “All I could think of that night was getting my supplies inside without drowning.” Her voice was apologetic. “It never occurred to me it was going to freeze.”
Spence sighed. “Well, it’s done now. Let’s go see how bad a spot mine is in.”
Sharley didn’t have the heart to protest. She was hardly in any position to criticize his crazy ideas; if she’d been a bit more sensible, they would at least have had a hope of getting out soon. Besides, perhaps Spence’s car wasn’t in as bad a situation as he had thought. Everything looked worse in the dark, didn’t it? Maybe they could get it out of the ditch and go back to town right now.
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