How to Knit a Love Song

by Rachael Herron

  He would not go into Tillie’s today. Maybe he wouldn’t even go this week.

  Cade made the coffee. At least she had good taste and liked it strong.

  Men were worse gossips than women.

  Upstairs, she was naked in his bed. Sweet, warm, generous, sexy-as-hell Abigail. He had to get these thoughts out of his mind, just for a few hours. As the coffee dripped into the carafe, he shook his head.

  She was just Abigail. Eliza had loved her. Abigail wasn’t out to get him. What had Hooper said? Strip mall. She wasn’t turning the valley into a strip mall. Her business would be more like a roadside food stand. Something to showcase the valley.

  Sure.

  He poured the coffee into his yellow mugs.

  What if they had to put up a stop sign? Or God forbid, a stoplight?

  He walked up the stairs.

  It was a yarn shop.

  Just a yarn shop.

  When Cade entered the room, he had trouble thinking a complete thought and stopped worrying about her store entirely.

  Abigail lay on her side, one hand under her cheek, the other arm lying the length of her naked body. The blanket and sheet had slipped off. She must be cold. Cade put the coffees on the nightstand and moved to pull the blanket up. Crying shame. No one should cover this, but it was a chilly morning, and she had goose bumps.

  So did he, come to think of it. But his weren’t from the cold.

  As he pulled up the blanket, she murmured something he couldn’t understand. He put his hand on her cheek and kissed the top of her head lightly. Her eyelids flickered, then half opened.

  “Cade,” she said softly. She smiled.

  He smiled back. Her eyes were so damn soft. Trusting.

  “Good morning, gorgeous,” he said. “I brought coffee.”

  “You’re awesome. Coffee…” She yawned and stretched, and then she gasped. “Yow!”

  “Your foot?”

  She nodded. “I forgot.”

  “You had a big day yesterday.”

  “A huge day,” she agreed. She scooted up, carefully, propping two pillows behind her, pulling up the sheet so that it covered her breasts. Cade handed her a mug and imagined pulling the sheet down again.

  Instead, he said, “You tracked an alpaca, fell out of a tree, went to the hospital, and got clawed by my cat. How is your stomach?”

  “And I stayed up late, too.”

  He nodded. “You must be exhausted.”

  She yawned again. “I think I am. How long have you been up?”

  “Not that long.”

  “I heard voices outside.”

  “Hooper. From Tillie’s, you met him.” Cade looked away from her eyes and out the window.

  “Mmmm. This is great coffee. Thank you. Now all I need is a blueberry muffin.”

  “Are you kidding?” How had she known?

  “Of course I am. This is perfect.”

  Cade felt an awkward weight drop onto him as if someone had draped a heavy blanket over his shoulders.

  “So,” he said.

  “So,” she smiled.

  “Um.”

  Abigail seemed to take pity on him. “So what are you doing today?”

  Relief. “I have to move some more irrigation pipes and work on some others before I can move them. What are you doing?”

  “Working on the cottage.”

  The awkwardness fell again. The cottage. The damn store. Which he didn’t want to think about, not right now. He watched her instead. She drank her coffee and stared out the window. She pushed her hair back, out of her eyes. The early sunlight hit the curve of her cheek.

  He’d never seen eyes that actually sparkled, but hers did. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but it was a pretty good trick.

  “It’s going to be fine, you know,” she said.

  “Your foot?”

  “That, too. But the cottage. The store. I’ll totally stay out of your way. You won’t even know I’m there.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I’m still skeptical. But I have to admit, the idea is easier to take when you’re talking to me dressed like that.”

  Pink flooded her cheeks. Abigail looked down at herself and then back up at him.

  “I don’t usually…”

  “Usually what? Seduce your men with the blood drawn by their cats?”

  “Definitely a first.”

  He sat on the bed next to her, careful to move slowly. “First time for everything, I guess.”

  “And this doesn’t have to mean anything.”

  Cade’s heart gave a sudden, unexpected lurch. No, of course it didn’t have to mean anything. “No, you’re right. It doesn’t.”

  Abigail blinked. “I mean, we’re adults. Just consenting adults.”

  “Who are able to have mind-blowing sex.”

  She blinked harder. “Yes. Apparently that.”

  “I like that part of being an adult.”

  “I hear you do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  What had she heard? Was it all from that Janet person? What had Eliza said to her?

  “I’m only teasing. I know you have a way with the ladies, and I can personally attest to that. Nothing wrong with it.”

  Her voice was light, and her eyes were clear as they met his. “I’m teasing you, Cade.”

  “Eliza hated that about me.”

  Abigail gave a small nod. “She might have mentioned that she wanted you to settle down.”

  “Mentioned?”

  “All right, it was one of her favorite topics of conversation.”

  “I knew it! I knew she was still stuck on that. Did she tell you about the fight?”

  “Not really. I know you had a falling out, what, eight years ago or so? After a trip she made here? But she wouldn’t tell me much about it, just that she’d pushed you too hard.”

  “She actually said that?”

  “She felt responsible for the fight, I know that. What was it really about?”

  Cade sighed. “She said she wanted me to marry someone. Anyone. That she wouldn’t let me buy the land from her, even though I had secured the backing for the loan by then, until I found the one. That’s what she said. The one.”

  “Like her Joshua.”

  “Like Uncle Joshua. Only a girl, I’d suspect.”

  Abigail sipped her coffee and kept watching him with those amazing eyes. He was glad she was distracting him with this topic; otherwise he’d be hard-pressed not to launch right back into bed with her for a repeat of last night. He still might.

  “The fight really came down to her calling me a slut.”

  Abigail choked on her coffee, then coughed for a minute. “No way. She did not.”

  “Okay, maybe it was ‘man-whore.’”

  “Now, no matter what, I’m not going to believe a word you say.”

  “Catting around? Will you buy ‘catting around’? That’s what she actually said.”

  “I totally buy ‘catting.’ That’s an Eliza word.”

  “She had this stupid idea that it was all about my mom or something. That since she never stuck around, I couldn’t trust women, and I had to learn how. She said I had to quit doing it. Catting.”

  Cade thought Abigail might break into laughter, but even though her lips twitched, she held it together. “And what did you say?”

  “I told her it was insulting to say that to me when I just liked dating. And my mother had nothing to do with my love life. And okay, at that point it so happened that I was dating a few people, but it was none of her business. I told her that, too.”

  “How many people?”

  “What?”

  “How many women were you dating then?”

  “Maybe four. Or five.”

  “At once?”

  “I don’t remember. Probably,” Cade said.

  “Wow. I’d never be able to keep that straight in my head. How did you remember which was which?”

  “It was kind of hard sometimes.”

  Now Abig
ail really was laughing at him. “Is that normal for you?”

  “Of course not. Not really.”

  “Not really! That means yes! What about now? How many girls are you dating at the moment?”

  “Not even one.”

  Abigail went silent. She looked into her coffee cup but didn’t drink from it.

  Crap, should he have said something else? “I mean, yeah, last night…”

  “No, not me, of course,” she said.

  “Um. No. I mean, we’re not really…dating.” Cade felt like an ass.

  “Yeah.” Abigail set down her coffee cup and sat up straighter. “Well, I should probably…”

  “No, don’t.” Cade, still sitting next to her, put a hand on her leg. “I don’t cat around. Whatever that means. I have friendships with girls and it never gets serious. That’s what Aunt Eliza hated. I don’t think she ever cared what I did with a girl, as long as it meant something.”

  “Does it ever mean anything to you?”

  “No. Not usually.” Cade tried to put his meaning into his voice, into his eyes, but she was looking down again. “It’s not usually like last night.” It was the most he could say. His heart beat traitorously fast.

  “You don’t have to say that. It’s all right.”

  “The fight had ended with her saying I wouldn’t ever get the land that I wanted unless I fell in love. I thought she was being stupid, and I told her so. She didn’t come to see me for a while after that. We talked on the phone, but we didn’t say much. Then she started driving up twice a year, bringing those bags and boxes with her. We never spoke about the fight, and she didn’t ask about my love life ever again. But oh, my God…” Cade paused, hit with a flash of insight. “She was meddling with my love life, even then.”

  “What?”

  “Think about it. I just figured it out. I can’t believe it took us this long to catch on. Aunt Eliza and I had that fight, she goes home, and a year later starts to stock your store up here.”

  “My store?”

  “She was hooking us up. Planning on it, even back then, seven years ago.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I’d only just met her not that long before…” Abigail looked at him, her eyes wide. “Do you think she’d really be that…”

  “Manipulative? She was the sweetest person in the whole wide world, until she got a burr under her saddle. My love life was a burr, I know that much. She meets you, she starts to make plans.”

  “Why on earth would she think you wouldn’t find someone else in the meantime? Or for God’s sake, that I wouldn’t? I dated. I dated a lot, thank you very much.” Abigail glared at him.

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “And if that was her plan, why not just bring me up here with her on one of her trips?”

  “Did she invite you?” Cade asked.

  “Yeah, but I kept having to say no. I never seemed to have the time.”

  “And I was too busy to go see her. I put it off, always.” Cade rubbed his hand against his eyes.

  “So if she couldn’t make us meet in life, she’d throw us together after death.”

  Cade said, “That’s the bossiest thing I ever heard.”

  Abigail laughed, but the laughter stopped as soon as it started. “Don’t worry about it though. Keep up with your ladies. When’s your next date?”

  Cade smoothed the sheet and didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, I see. Tonight?”

  He nodded.

  Abigail sighed. “Okay, cowboy. That’s all good. But hey, I’ve got a lot of work to do today, and I’m going to have to hobble around to do it, so if you wouldn’t mind”—she cleared her throat—“passing me my robe over there, I’d appreciate it.”

  “I didn’t mean—” Cade started.

  She held up her hand. “There’s nothing wrong, Cade. Mind-blowing sex is mind-blowing sex. But I still have to figure out where stuff is going to go in the store, and you’ve got to work on some water thing for your sheep. Life goes on.”

  Cade handed her the robe. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The yoke is like February: it’s not really that long, but it takes forever.

  —E.C.

  Two weeks later, Cade drove up the county road, toward the house. He’d been over at Landers’s, helping him with his all-terrain vehicle. Landers needed the ATV to work so he could easily cart his feed around, and Cade enjoyed working on the engines. The fact that Landers’s wife made excellent brownies didn’t hurt.

  He hadn’t seen Abigail in almost two weeks. It was like she’d disappeared into thin air. She must be working on the cottage, he knew, but he also knew she was avoiding him.

  Hell, just because they’d had sex didn’t mean that he was tied to her. It didn’t mean anything. He was sorry her feelings were hurt, but he couldn’t see much of a way around that.

  He drew closer to his property line.

  He saw smoke.

  On his land.

  Black smoke. Vegetation fires put up white smoke and that would have been bad enough. Black was worse.

  Cade’s accelerator hit the floor.

  Cell phone already in hand, Cade fishtailed around the turn that led to his driveway. He was up the small hill in a matter of heartbeats. What the hell was on fire? Not the barn, please God, not the barn. Or the house.

  Or her cottage. Not the cottage either, dammit.

  One more heartbeat and he was at the top of the drive. Gravel scattered as he shot up past the house. The house and the cottage were fine—the smoke was coming from behind the barn. The only thing back there was the old purple shack that he used for storage, the one Abigail had asked about when she got the alpacas.

  He gunned the truck up and around the barn.

  Flames roared out of the shack, shooting straight up through the roof, which already looked annihilated.

  Abigail stood thirty feet away from the fire, directing a garden hose toward it.

  “MacArthur Ranch!” Cade yelled into the cell phone. “Structure fire, fully engulfed storage shack!” It would take the fire department at least eight or ten minutes to get here, and it was obviously too late to save the shed. But the sparks…

  Jesus.

  The tanks of propane.

  He stored the propane in there. Abigail wasn’t far enough away from the shack.

  Abigail.

  He dropped his cell phone, threw the truck into park, and launched himself out of the truck and hit the ground running.

  “Move! Drop the hose!”

  But the noise of the fire drowned out his words. Abigail hadn’t even heard the truck pulling up. She kept directing the stream of water at the fire, but the heat was so intense that the water evaporated before it even got anywhere close.

  Oh, God.

  “Abigail!”

  He’d never, ever felt this kind of fear before. Cade poured every ounce of every muscle in his body into racing toward her. He wrested the hose from her hand. She screamed.

  “Move!” He grabbed her arm and pulled. He didn’t care if he hurt her. “Run!”

  “I’m trying to help!”

  “Propane!” He dragged her behind the truck and ducked down, taking her with him.

  As he did, the tanks blew. The roar of the fire doubled. The noise was deafening.

  Burning parts of small bottles flew out of the shack. Spray-paint and lubricant cans halved by the heat, flying like missiles. One blown-apart can hit the side of his truck, and when he looked under the chassis, Cade could see it there on the ground, still smoking.

  After long seconds, the rain of metal stopped. The fire still roared.

  Cade wrapped his arms around her. Safe. She was safe. He held her more tightly and she clung to him in return. He could feel her heart racing. Or was that his?

  All of those pieces shooting out like shrapnel could have done serious damage, at the very least. Not to mention the blast when the fire doubled as the propane blew. How close ha
d he come to losing her?

  “I have to…” he started.

  “Don’t let me go,” said Abigail in a low, shaking voice.

  “Then hold on to me. I just have to get my phone.” While Abigail held tightly to his arm, he reached into the truck with the other and found his dropped phone. He called 911 again and warned them about the propane.

  “They’re just around the corner, sir,” said the dispatcher.

  Cade heard the sirens as he put the phone in his pocket.

  “They’ll be here in a minute. Did you see what happened?”

  Abigail shook her head. Her teeth were chattering.

  “Are you hurt? Burned?’”

  She shook her head again.

  “Get in the truck. I’ll move it out of the way.”

  Abigail, still silent, climbed in. Cade started it up and backed it farther away from the fire. Sure enough, the grass around the shack had caught fire already, the flames rolling up the paddock, being pushed by the wind. But that field was empty; he’d moved the flock that had been in it into another more than a week ago.

  And the flames were rolling away from the barn.

  “It’s a small-enough grass fire that they’ll be able to put it out easily enough,” said Cade.

  Abigail’s eyes were huge.

  Cade said, “The wind isn’t strong, and we just had that rain a couple weeks ago. The grass is short. This is what the fire guys love to do. And sparks are flying away from us, into the field.” He wasn’t sure if he was reassuring her or himself.

  She still didn’t speak, just stared at the inferno that had been his storage shed.

  “What happened?” Cade asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I looked out and saw smoke. Then I ran, thinking I could put it out. Oh, God. And I hadn’t even called 911. Once I got the hose out, I was just waiting for the fire department to arrive. I have no idea why I didn’t think of calling.”

  “You didn’t call 911?”

  Abigail shook her head.

  Cade parked the truck by the barn. The fire at the shack raged on, but there had been no more explosions.

  “Where the hell is Tom?” asked Cade.

  “I haven’t seen him.”