Bittersweet Bride

by Denise Hunter

  Her father folded his hands on his desk. “I’ve given you the facts, Wife, and we will all have to adjust to them. As for the cooking, Letitia, you will have to learn how to do that yourself—”

  “I can’t—”

  “You can, and you will! There is no choice. Sadie is not going to work for free, nor is anyone else.”

  Her mother stood and crossed to the desk. “How could you, Clyde? How could you lose all of Daddy’s money?”

  Her father’s face turned red as he replied. Mara slipped from the room, suddenly feeling like an eavesdropper. Her parents’ angry words followed her up the stairs.

  Her mind felt frozen in some thick, slushy fog. Was it true? Had her father given them an accurate picture of their situation? Was their wealth truly gone?

  She couldn’t believe it—refused to believe it. How would they manage without Sadie? Surely Mara wouldn’t be expected to cook!

  A chilling thought spread through her. If Sadie was gone, who would cook for Clay and his men? She entered her room and sank onto her bed. Sadie would have to get another job, and even the salary Clay was paying wasn’t close to what Sadie was earning now.

  She glanced at the box of chocolates on her table, picking it up and tossing the last one in her mouth. Would there be no more chocolates? No more perfumes or trinkets? Panic settled over her, threatening to smother her. What would happen when her beautiful gowns grew old and tattered? What would she wear, if not gowns from France? Surely she wouldn’t be expected to select from the homely calicoes at the mercantile! How could she face the people of Cedar Springs in such common clothing?

  It would be humiliating beyond reason! Mara flung the empty candy box to the floor. The wrappers scattered across the carpet, and the box settled in a far corner. How many times had she left things lying on her floor only to find them put in their proper place the next day? With Sadie gone, she would have to pick up after herself at the very least.

  Tears puddled in her eyes, and she gave them free rein to fall. She thought of all the times she had flaunted her wealth to the townspeople. She liked being the one who wore the prettiest gowns and being able to afford anything she wanted; she had grown accustomed to it!

  Her thoughts returned to her job at the Stedman ranch. When would Sadie be leaving? Tomorrow was Sunday, and she would not be expected to work at the ranch. Maybe Sadie would stay on awhile, at least until Clay’s aunt returned home. Otherwise she would be in trouble.

  ❧

  Mara watched as Sadie buckled her suitcase closed. She had stayed on through the week, but now she was leaving to live with her sister in Wichita. She had shown Mara how to bake a few things in the past week, but her thoughts were confused with all the information. How would she remember it all? And with Sadie gone how would she ever coax her hair into the intricate styles the woman had managed?

  “It’s not far, Child. Perhaps you can come visit me later this summer.”

  For the first time Mara considered that she was losing someone who had been around all her life. She had taken care of Mara, played with her as a child, given her advice. The fact that she had overstepped her boundaries many times now seemed inconsequential. “How will we manage without you?”

  Sadie patted her shoulder. “You’ll do just fine. Why, you’ve already learned how to do laundry, clean a house, and feed hogs! If I’ve learned anything about you, Child, it’s that you can do whatever you set your mind to.”

  Mara sucked in a breath, her throat suddenly aching with a knot. Sadie reached out and embraced her, and Mara felt the tears she had held back sliding down her cheeks. Losing Sadie meant much more than she had imagined. She was losing more than her cook and caretaker, though that was bad enough in itself. She was losing a friend.

  “Ready, Sadie?” her father called from the parlor.

  “Coming.” The woman stood back from Mara. “Good-bye, Mara. You keep up the good work at the Stedmans’. I have a feeling about you and Clay—”

  Mara straightened her back and huffed. “I’ve changed my mind altogether about that man. He’s insufferable, bossy, and stubborn.”

  Sadie laughed then winked. “Sounds like just the kinda’ fellow you need.” The woman picked up her cases and left the room, calling one last good-bye before she and Mara’s father started the drive to Wichita.

  After they left, Mara wiped her cheeks and checked the clock on the mantle. She’d better get going if she wanted to have breakfast ready on time.

  “Will!” she called to her brother.

  A moment later he stepped into the room. “Stop your bellowing, would you? I’ve rigged up the wagon like I said. It’s waiting out front.”

  She rushed out the door and climbed into the buggy seat, snapping the reins. In her mind she rehearsed all Sadie had shown her. She would fix biscuits today with sausages and eggs. With Beth feeling better now, maybe the girl could lend a hand. She undoubtedly knew more about cooking than Mara did.

  Her hands, clutching the reins, shook in anticipation. She had to pull off this meal. After all, Clay thought she had been cooking all along. And even if she wasn’t interested in pursuing him anymore, she didn’t want to earn his ire. She wanted to stay and care for Beth. The girl had won a spot in her heart.

  When she arrived at the ranch, she was relieved to see that Clay was doing his morning chores. Beth had gathered the eggs and was feeding the hogs at the moment. How glad Mara had been to turn over that chore!

  Checking to make sure the stove was good and hot, she set out the ingredients to make dough. After putting the sausages on to fry, she turned her attention to the biscuits. She poured flour, salt, and baking soda, hoping she’d guessed right at the amounts. Next she pumped water into a cup and poured it in slowly, stirring until it reached the proper consistency.

  By the time she had cut the biscuits and placed them on the pan, she was feeling pretty good about herself. It was then that she smelled something burning. Oh! She turned and looked at the sausages. Without thinking she grabbed the handle.

  “Ooww!” She dropped the pan, and the grease splattered. “Ohh!” She snatched up a fork and quickly turned the sausages.

  Her heart sank when she saw the charred skin. Fiddlesticks! Well, she would just have to serve them burnt-side-down. Maybe no one would notice.

  Turning back to the biscuits, she slid the pan into the oven, reminding herself she would need to turn them over halfway through. How long had Sadie said? Six or seven minutes? It was impossible to remember all the details the woman had given her. And it didn’t help that the stove was notorious for cooking unevenly.

  She set the table for fifteen and then retrieved the butter, jelly, salt, and pepper. What else? The drinks! With the milk set on the kitchen table, she began straining it the way Sadie had shown her. She had poured half the glasses when she remembered.

  “The biscuits!”

  She ran back to the oven and opened the door. “Oh, no!” She pulled the pan from the oven, this time careful to grab a towel first. Tears pooled in her eyes at the sight. There was no getting around the fact that they were burnt. She blinked back the tears. Where was Beth? She needed help! Clay would be in soon, and she still hadn’t fried the eggs.

  The screen door slapped shut behind her. “What’s that smell?” Beth asked.

  Mara turned to see the girl’s wrinkled up nose. “Quick, Beth—open the windows! And bring me the eggs!”

  Mara scooped the sausages onto a platter, hoping they had cooked long enough. She grabbed an egg from the basket and tapped it on the side of the skillet, as she had seen Sadie do. The egg slid into the grease, popping and sizzling. She cracked open four more, enough to fill the skillet, then breathed a sigh.

  “Uh-oh,” Beth said over her shoulder. “The yolks broke.”

  Mara looked at the eggs, and sure enough, the orange yolks oozed into the white of the eggs, swirling until they set and began solidifying. Not the eggs too.

  In the background she heard the men arriving in
the next room. Chairs grated across the floor, and boisterous laughter floated into the kitchen.

  As she scooped the last eggs from the skillet, she let herself feel proud that two or three of the eggs had remained intact. So what if some of them had broken open? They were still edible, after all. She straightened her back as she carried the platter to the table. Beth followed her with the sausages. She heard someone at the table mention the room’s acrid odor as she returned to the kitchen for the biscuits.

  ❧

  Clay attempted to slice through the sausage with his fork. The blackened skin was tough as leather. When he finally managed to slice off a bite, he speared it with his fork and brought it to his mouth. On its way his eyes caught sight of the pink insides. He held the piece away and saw that, indeed, the meat wasn’t cooked through. He looked around the table; the other men were eyeing the food with disgust.

  Well, he would have only biscuits and eggs. He reached for the biscuits and noticed that they, too, were burnt. He cast an annoyed glance toward the kitchen door. What in the world had happened to Mara’s good cooking this morning?

  He turned over a biscuit. Though the top was burnt, the bottom was just short of doughy. He bit into it anyway. His teeth connected with the stony exterior and stopped. Trying harder, he finally bit through the biscuit. By the time he had chewed and swallowed the piece, his jaw ached. He dropped the biscuit on his plate and started on his eggs.

  Around the table he heard whispered grumbles.

  “This ain’t fit to et.”

  “These biscuits are hard as your head, Ike.”

  “I’ve seen finer slop in a hog’s pen.”

  Clay clenched his jaw. Whatever had gone wrong in the kitchen this morning, he hoped it was fixed soon. His men worked hard and needed a good meal to start their day. They didn’t like bad food. And neither did he. As he choked down the eggs, he decided he wouldn’t confront Mara about one ruined meal. After all the fine meals she’d prepared, it was unfair to bellyache over one gone wrong.

  ❧

  Clay took one look at the supper table and set his jaw. He’d never seen slices of bread that looked like that. They had holes the size of walnuts and a crust as thick and dark as his morning coffee. The greens looked like the muck floating on his pond. The only thing that looked decent was the pot of chili in the center of the table.

  The house stunk of burnt crust and garlic. His stomach churned—whether from hunger or revulsion, he wasn’t sure.

  They took their places and joined hands.

  “Your turn, Clay,” Beth said.

  Clay bowed his head. “Thank You, God, for this—food You’ve provided.” His nostrils filled with the garlic-laced air. “We pray that You would bless it to the—nourishment of our bodies.” And help us not to expire from food poisoning. “Amen.”

  They began the meal in silence. Clay bit into the bread, relieved that it was edible after he peeled away the crust. He couldn’t bring himself to try the vegetable that was cooked beyond recognition.

  He dished out a huge bowl of chili. Thank the good Lord for something decent to eat at the table. He was half starved.

  Silence reigned. The kind that reeked of strained tension. What was going on around here? Beth kept casting wary glances at him. Mara hadn’t looked up yet, with her eyes trained on the food as if she ate alone.

  He took a big spoonful of the soup and slipped it in his mouth. A few seconds later he spewed it out into the bowl. The sound seemed to echo through the house. He took a big gulp from his glass of tea, trying to wash away the biting taste. He may as well have bit into a garlic bulb.

  Anger rose up inside him. One meal was one thing, but something was obviously going on here that he needed to know about. A man couldn’t work all day on food like this. He was paying the woman, and he expected edible meals.

  Clay tossed his napkin down, glaring at Mara, who still stared at her plate. “Beth, go to your room.”

  “But I—”

  “Now.” His tone left no room for argument.

  The room was so silent that he heard each step she took on the stairs. When he heard her door click shut, he turned and looked at Mara.

  Eight

  Mara had jumped when Clay spit the chili back into his bowl. Even then, though, she didn’t look up. She knew he was angry and had sensed it even before the meal began. The silence only made things worse. Beth had helped with dinner, but she was only a child. Neither of them had ever fixed a meal on their own before this morning.

  After they had surveyed the mess that made up dinner, Beth had clung to Mara.

  “I don’t care if you do cook bad, Miss Lawton. I don’t want you to go.”

  Mara embraced her, patting her shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere, Honey. Maybe most of the dinner is ruined. But look—doesn’t the chili look perfect?”

  As Mara sat across from Clay now, she could feel the hostility aimed at her. So much for the chili. She gathered her composure as Beth left the room, taking steadying breaths but not daring to meet Clay’s gaze.

  “Suppose you tell me what’s going on?”

  Mara’s gaze flitted by Clay’s. The quick glance was enough to see that his handsome features were knotted in anger.

  “What do you mean?” She tried for innocence and bit into the string beans. She made a valiant effort to keep the revulsion from her face. Land’s sake! What had she done to these things?

  “I can accept that a body might ruin one meal. But this is two meals in a row, and something tells me more is going on here than meets the eye!”

  Mara let the silence hang. She moved the green beans around her plate. Her chair squeaked as she shifted her weight. What could she say? If only she could explain that she’d had a bad day. It would work, if she didn’t know tomorrow would be the same. Try as she might—and she had tried very hard—she was no cook. She was going to have to tell him the truth.

  She arched her back, squaring her shoulders, and met his gaze. “All right. I had some help with the cooking before. Today I didn’t have any help, so things were a little off—”

  “What kind of help?”

  “There’s no need to interrupt! No wonder Beth has atrocious manners—”

  “Don’t change the subject! Who’s been helping you in the kitchen? I can’t afford to pay anyone else.”

  “Who asked you to?” she said, her own anger seething beneath the surface. “Sadie was helping me, and my father paid her for it. Things would’ve been fine if we hadn’t lost all our—” She stopped abruptly. The last thing she wanted was for the whole town to find out her family was no longer wealthy.

  “Lost all your what?”

  “None of your business!”

  “It’s my business when the meals around here taste like hog slop.”

  “Well—I never—!”

  “I can tell you never—never baked a batch of biscuits, never fried a pan of eggs, never made a loaf of bread, and never made a pot of chili! What did you do, use every garlic bulb in the cellar?”

  Fury and hurt welled up inside her in equal amounts. The two emotions teetered back and forth like two sides of a scale. She had worked so hard to learn everything. She had acquired calluses on her perfect hands and freckles on her flawless skin. She had even sliced her hand while cutting up those bulbs he had just mocked her about. That chili had taken her half the afternoon to make, and in one sentence he had taken all her hard work and thrown it in her face.

  Her lips trembled. She tried to speak, but her emotions whirled in her head in a frenzy of war. In one motion she stood and spun away to the kitchen.

  “I’m not finished yet!” Clay called from the table.

  Mara let the door shut behind her and began pumping water into the basin. With the sound of the gushing water she didn’t hear him approaching until he stood behind her.

  “I can see where you’d need help, what with cooking for so many. Why didn’t you tell me Sadie was giving you a hand?”

  Her anger go
t the best of her. She turned to face him. The truth shot from her mouth with the force of bullets from a gun. “Sadie didn’t help. She did it all. Every breakfast, every dinner, everything! She made the pie I brought you weeks ago and the sweet potato casserole I brought to the spring. I can’t cook a lick, Clay Stedman—so there!”

  ❧

  Clay watched Mara as she turned on him, wrath spilling from her eyes. Her face was flushed, her perfect mouth clamped tight—until she unleashed her anger. He blinked at the force of it. He heard all she said, confusion rising inside him.

  Why would she have tried to pass Sadie’s cooking off as her own? Even the pie she’d brought him wasn’t her own. He frowned as she finished her tirade with crossed arms. Her chin tilted up, and fire shone from her eyes. The anger he had felt, the confusion her words had wrought, drained from him.

  His gaze caressed her heated face. How could a woman look so beautiful with anger gushing from every pore? Her eyes were the clearest blue, like spring water flowing from the mountains. Her skin was creamy perfection, the heated flush giving her cheeks a rosy glow. His eyes fell on a faint smattering of freckles on her nose.

  They gave her an air of vulnerability. She looked adorable, and despite all reasoning, he wanted to kiss her.

  Her eyes met his, her expression softening as the gaze drew out. Probing. Questioning. Her lips parted then shut. They drew closer, and Clay wondered if he was leaning or if she was. He didn’t care. All he cared about was the woman who was inches from him.

  “Clay?” The door to the kitchen snapped open, and Clay jerked upright.

  Beth stood at the threshold. “Can I finish eating now?” Her gaze darted questioningly between him and Mara.

  Clay cleared his throat. “Yeah, yeah, go ahead.”

  She slipped from the room, and Clay cast a furtive glance in Mara’s direction. He could feel the flush climbing from under his collar.

  Mara sniffed, her chin hiking up, her posture drawing an impossibly straight line. She turned back to the basin and began washing a pan. “If you’re going to eat, you’d best get to it. I’m not sticking around all night waiting on you.”