Away in Montana (Paradise Valley Ranch Book 1)

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Away in Montana (Paradise Valley Ranch Book 1) Page 12

by Jane Porter


  And then she saw movement on her roof, and the horse tethered to a tree, and she didn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe it. It was Sinclair. The one person she didn’t want help from, and how was it that he’d already arrived? She’d only left town an hour ago.

  She marched across the field, hands knotted, but before she could speak he rose, straightening to his full height. He dwarfed her roof, broad shoulders silhouetted against the sky. “You should have told me,” he called down to her. “Why didn’t you send word to me? Why go to Bottler?”

  His curtness put her teeth on edge, and any conciliatory thing she might have said was gone. “It’s my stove, and I will ask for help from whomever I want to help me.”

  “It’s not your stove. I gave it to the school district, for future teachers, not you.” He knelt down, hammered a nail into a shingle. “And nobody but me touches my stove.”

  “Well, your stove is in my house—”

  “The school district’s house.”

  Her face flushed. Her temper blazed. “You’re deliberately picking my words apart. Did you come all this way to fight with me?”

  He hammered another nail before looking at her. “No. I came all this way to fix my stove.”

  “You’re infuriating, Sinclair Douglas.”

  “I’m infuriating? How do you think I felt hearing that Bottler was looking for someone to send to the school teacher’s house to fix a stove I installed?”

  “This has nothing to do with you!”

  “Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it should.” He rolled up his sleeves higher on his arms before giving her a nod, dismissing her.

  Entering her house, McKenna paced the floor. She didn’t know what to do with herself while he worked. The noise was deafening. The hammering made her lantern rattle and the framed photo on the mantle danced forward and then back.

  McKenna took the silver framed picture off the mantle and put it on her table, and glanced down at the photograph of her with her father and Mary on the deck of a great ship on their first trip abroad.

  In the picture, Father stood in the middle, his arm around each of them, and they were all wearing hats and smiling for the camera. Well, Father didn’t smile for the camera, but he stood with his big chest puffed out, and proud gleam in his eye.

  McKenna’s hair was loose—something Mother wouldn’t have liked—but Mother was in Butte, recovering from influenza and she’d sent them all off so she could recuperate properly. McKenna had always been close to her father, but on that trip they became friends. Father would talk to her about his business and politics and ask her opinions and she felt so grown up. Mary, on the other hand, was ten, and spent most of the trip complaining, either seasick or homesick. Mary never went overseas again and McKenna couldn’t wait for the next adventure.

  McKenna looked up from the photograph, realizing the pounding on the roof had stopped. She waited a moment and there was just silence.

  Opening the door she stepped out. Sinclair was off the roof and putting his tools away in his horse’s saddlebag.

  “All done?” she asked.

  “Yes. All should be right now. But I’d like to fire up the stove and check just to be sure.”

  She stepped aside, inviting him. “Would you like tea? Or something to eat?”

  He rolled his sleeves back down, covering his corded forearms. “Did you buy food while you were out?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have nothing here. Your cupboard is empty—”

  “You looked in my cupboards?”

  “I came inside first to examine the stove.”

  “And my cabinets, too, from the sound of it!”

  “I worry about you.” He went to the stove and built a quick fire. He turned to face her once the flames latched onto the wood. “You’ve always been thin, but you’re bordering sickly—”

  “Sickly?”

  “I’m not the only one to have noticed. Bottler’s clerk noticed today. He mentioned it to Bottler as well. People are worrying. They know how harsh the winter can be. You need to eat more, and you need to eat better, or you won’t be strong enough to survive the cold, or a bout of the influenza.”

  “You are so full of cheer.”

  “Better I be honest now then have to apologize to you when you’re on your deathbed.”

  “If this is your idea of sweet talk—”

  “I’m not courting you, no need for sweet talk. And if you had some friends, I would hope they’d tell you the same. That you need to eat better food, and more of it, and not just that crackling bread or shortening bread or whatever it is I understand you live on.”

  “I’ve become quite good at baking.” She nodded at the small bag of flour on the counter, next to the pinch of salt and cup of sugar.

  “You need meat, and eggs, and milk, too. Vegetables. And more of everything.”

  “I can’t afford meat, but the Hoffmans—”

  “Yes, they send eggs and cheese and such on occasion.” He picked up his coat and slid it back on. “But those occasional gifts aren’t going to sustain you. You need more eggs and milk, cheese and butter, along with meat.”

  “I’m sure you know that if I could afford all of that, I would eat it.”

  “Maybe you need to stop relying on the generosity of others, and learned to provide for yourself. Learn to hunt, and you could have rabbit or squirrel stew—”

  “Oh, no. No. That sounds positively horrendous.”

  “Rabbit stew is delicious.”

  “I don’t know. And squirrel?” She grimaced, a hand going to her throat. “Never. And I’m not going to hunt. I can buy what I need at the butcher.”

  “There is no butcher in Emigrant.”

  “Then Marietta.”

  “This isn’t Butte. You are not your mother, or your mother’s housekeeper. You can’t afford to send for meat, and the butcher isn’t going to carve you pretty steaks. You’d be lucky to buy an oxtail now and then. So, I’m going to do what someone should have done months ago. I’m going to show you how to survive on what’s around you. Get your coat—”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Besides, I think all the squirrels just went into hiding.”

  “We’ll get something, and then you’ll prepare it.”

  “I’ll prepare it?”

  “I’ll show you how to skin it.”

  She felt dangerously light-headed. “No, thank you.”

  “You can’t be such a princess.”

  “I’m not a princess. I’m extremely practical. Which means I know my limits. I’ll learn Greek and Latin—useless languages for someone like me—but I’ll do it because I can. Skin an animal? Never. I didn’t even like dissecting frogs in biology.”

  “You could eat a frog.”

  “I will not.” Even in Paris she hadn’t eaten frog’s legs. It didn’t matter how much butter and wine they were simmered in. She looked through the window and glanced up to the sky. It had grown darker, the clouds gathering, hanging low, hiding the mountain peaks. “Is it going to rain?”

  “I don’t care. I’m not leaving until we have something you can roast for supper.”

  “Well, I do, and I will not be hunting with you, Sinclair. If you must go shoot things, go do it on your piece of land, not on mine.” And then to distract him she smiled at him, a dazzling bright smile. “But I will make you tea. I make very good tea.”

  “Tea for ladies, or tea for a man?”

  Her lips curved. “I’m sure I can manage to make a manly cup. So take your coat off and please have a seat by my fire.”

  They spent the next hour sipping tea and sharing toasted bread.

  It was the simplest of meals and yet to McKenna it felt like a feast. It was so nice having company. There were a lot of things she’d missed since arriving in Emigrant last August, but the dearth of company was the worst.

  There were so many nights when she longed to hear another voice. So any nights when she longed for someone to sit across from her an
d just look up sometimes and give her a smile—

  As Sinclair had done just now.

  A ripple of pleasure coursed through her. She loved his smiles. She loved him.

  It was suddenly very quiet, and the quiet became increasingly intimate. Her body warmed and her lips felt sensitive. “More tea?” she asked huskily.

  He shook his head. “I’m good. And you do make a manly cup. Thank you.”

  “Thank you for fixing my stove’s chimney.”

  His blue eyes held hers. “Not your stove,” he teased softly, a warmth in his deep voice that reminded her of nights long ago when he’d been there at her side during the darkest point she’d known.

  He hadn’t been afraid of her grief.

  He hadn’t been afraid to let her feel.

  He’d just loved her through it all.

  Her eyes burned and her chest seized. He’d been her rock. He’d kept her stable and strong.

  No wonder she’d turned to him, for comfort. And then the comfort became passion, and their first kiss had turned her world upside down.

  Each evening the goodnight kiss became longer, the desire growing hotter, but he never let it go too far. Sinclair had integrity. He showed restraint, respect, determined to protect her reputation.

  Awareness crackled between them now, the energy between them nearly as bright as the fire. She wanted him to kiss her again. She wanted to know if his kisses would still melt her. She suspected they would…

  McKenna forced herself to speak. “How do you know how to fix everything?” she asked, her voice soft and unusually breathy.

  He knew, she thought. He knew how he was affecting her. She wasn’t surprised. He knew her so well.

  His blue gaze held hers. “How do you know how to teach math and science and reading?”

  She felt his scrutiny all the way through her. “You learn how.”

  “Exactly.”

  Her head spun. Dizzy, she drew a slow breath. “What about when you left school for the mines? Wasn’t that quite difficult? You weren’t even sixteen yet.”

  “Do you really want to talk about me working in the mines?”

  “You’ve never said much to me about those years.”

  “Those were long years.”

  “So tell me about them. Tell me about you. Weren’t you scared when you went to work underground the first time?”

  The fire cast a gold flickering light over his profile. “I don’t know if I was scared. But I didn’t like it. I also didn’t have a choice. It was my job.”

  And he always did what he was supposed to do. He was that man. He was that dependable.

  Her chest grew tight. She exhaled slowly. “If I were your mother I wouldn’t have wanted you down there.”

  “If you were my mother, you’d be grateful I had a job. She was grieving my dad and afraid of losing the house. I kept the roof over our heads. We were all grateful for that.”

  She felt sudden shame. She had no worries compared to him.

  He must have read her discomfort because he smiled crookedly. “It wasn’t all bad. I made friends, and we looked out for each other. They became my second family.”

  “Was everyone that close?”

  “I think it depended on your shift, and your team, and how they treated you. The men I worked with knew my dad, and they adopted me, just as later I adopted the younger lads when they hired on.”

  “Hopefully there weren’t that many young boys down in the mines.”

  He shifted, extended his legs, one boot over the other. “Do you know how the copper is mined? Do you know anything about a miner’s life?”

  “I read things, newspaper articles and so forth, but you never said anything and my father never talked about it at all.”

  “I deliberately said little, wanting to shield you as much as I could from the reality.”

  “Why?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t think you have any idea how hard men really do work. Not men like your father, but rather, the men employed in his mines to provide you with the luxuries you took for granted.”

  She winced. “Ouch.”

  “You were innocent. I wanted to protect you. And I suppose I wanted to be like your father, and keep you from knowing what the world was really like.”

  “I know the rudimentary facts of mining. The objective being to follow the ore vein and get the ore to the surface. I know that in Father’s larger mines, he had bigger equipment, and in the smaller mines, his men would use more hand tools, along with a bucket and small steam hoist for carrying both the laboring men and ore to the surface.”

  “Those laboring men. Do you know anything about their shift? Did you know they had daily and weekly quotas?”

  She shook her head.

  “Those men—”

  “Men like you,” she interrupted.

  “They worked ten hours a day, seven days a week. Most of the men I worked with in Butte worked twenty-six to twenty-eight days a month. The only time we received time off was if big equipment needed repair. Most workers couldn’t even take time off for Sundays. I did, but I was an exception to the rule as my father was gone and the foreman knew I was the only man left in my family.”

  She just looked at him.

  “We started work at seven am and, after changing into work clothes, we’d gather around the shaft collar and wait for our bucket down. The bucket wasn’t very big—it could hold just two or three of us at a time—and we’d be lowered into the shaft by the hoist. Every couple of weeks the bucket would come crashing down, or tipping and miners would fall three hundred feet to three thousand feet down. We’d lose miners regularly in those buckets. You always said a prayer before you went down, knowing one of these days it’d be your turn and you’d never make it back up.” He paused, studied her face. “Have you heard enough?”

  She had, but she wouldn’t tell him. “No.”

  “Once you arrived at your work level, you’d leave your station and head into the drift—a tunnel that follows the ore—and your only light is a torch or candle. It was dark as hell and smelled damp and felt like a grave. Every single day. For ten hours a day. Seven days a week.”

  “When I first started, I was a mucker. It’s the lowest of the low jobs. Anyone can muck. It’s just shoveling waste or ore down a chute. And then gradually I worked up to tramming, and blasting. Like most men in Butte, I was paid by the amount of rock I was able to send up to the surface each day. You get the ore out by drilling holes six to eight feet deep in the granite, and then filling the holes with dynamite. You drill the holes by hand with a partner. One of you turns the steel and the other has the sledge. I was the one with the sledge. Why? Because I was the biggest and one of the strongest and I could hammer at granite all day, ten hours a day, six and seven days a week.”

  “Sinclair,” she whispered, her chest squeezing tight, pain filling her.

  “I never told you that the tunnels were sometimes so low that I could never stand straight. I never told you that I spent virtually my entire day in darkness, leaving the shaft only when night had fallen. I never told you that the temperatures would get so high we’d have to strip—daily—to our waists because it was as hot as the desert in summer. Suffocatingly hot, and humid, the air so thick that you couldn’t breathe. You’d feel as if you were choking to death on the moisture and dust.”

  She looked away, eyes burning.

  “As Johanna told you, my father died from the dust. The dust kills men eventually. You can only work down there so long before your lungs fail.” He was silent a long moment. “That’s why my goal from the beginning was getting promoted. I had to prove that I was better than the others, and that I didn’t just work harder, but I worked smarter. I didn’t want to spend my life underground. I wanted to be one of those foremen on the surface, and that was just the first step.”

  “You succeeded.”

  “I did. I became a foreman on the outside, and then I came here as the superintendent. And I owe my success to you.” />
  “Me? How?”

  “You gave me purpose, and meaning. And even though I did it for you, it was also good for me.”

  *

  It was true, he thought, looking at her. She’d changed his life for the better.

  He’d enjoyed tonight, too. It was an almost perfect night. He didn’t want it to end.

  How could life be better then this?

  He had a fire and good conversation and the company of a beautiful woman, and not just any beautiful woman, but his.

  When McKenna smiled, she glowed, her face lighting up, her eyes sparkling. She’d had the same mischievous sparkle as a girl. Her eyes were the things he remembered best. Her eyes were what caught his attention. He’d turn his head and discover her watching him with those dark, curious eyes and then he’d wink at her and she’d just shine.

  Not many women shined the way she did.

  He didn’t know at what point his protective instincts turned to love, but one day he looked at her and realized she was it. She was the one for him. And from then on he lived for her, knowing he’d give up everything for her. That he’d do anything to defend her. That she was his heart and soul.

  “I should go,” he said gruffly, getting to his feet.

  “Must you? It’s not that late,” she answered even as she rose.

  “I’m sure my horse would argue that point.”

  She laughed and he felt as if she’d just rewarded him with a prize. Her smiles were rare and she didn’t laugh enough these days.

  She needed a man to make her smile, a man who understood that her laughter was like rain to thirsty fields. She needed to laugh, and laugh often.

  “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” he asked.

  “I think the Hoffmans—”

  “Not the Hoffmans again.”

  “They are very kind to me.”

  “Fine. But let me be kind to you, too. Join us for Thanksgiving. I will pick you up on the way.”

  She gave him a long look. “That does not sound like much of a holiday for anyone.”

  “There’s no feud with my family.”

  “Ha!”

  “They care about you. And they know I care about you. They also know I’m not going to dinner if you don’t come. I’m not going to leave you alone on Thanksgiving—” He held up a hand, stopping her. “And the Hoffmans can barely feed all those boys, so politely decline their offer and join me instead.”

 

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