mouth with his tongue and she’d not only allowed it, she’d responded, no question about it.
He’d said it was inevitable that they’d make love. Dared her to ride up the mountain with him, to that cursed, enchanted meadow where heaven and earth seemed to converge as their bodies converged.
Stop it, she told herself sternly.
“I made the biscuits,” Madison was saying to Hutch as he turned away from the sink, drying his hands on a towel. “Well, I helped, anyway.”
Opal chuckled. She’d gotten out a rolling pin and a biscuit cutter. “Get back up on this chair, young lady, and I’ll show you what to do next.”
Madison scrambled to obey.
Opal gave the child’s hands another going over with a damp cloth.
Together they rolled the dough out flat, used the cutter to make circles, placed these on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
Hutch crossed to the oven and reached for the handle on the door.
“Don’t you open that oven,” Opal immediately commanded. “You’ll let out all that good steam.”
For a moment Hutch looked more like a curious little boy than a man. “Whatever it is, it sure smells good,” he said.
“It’s my special tamale pie, like I said I’d make,” Opal replied briskly, “and I’ll thank you not to go messing with it before we’ve even sat down to say grace.”
Hutch grinned, spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Far be it from me to mess with supper.”
“And don’t you forget it,” Opal said, evidently determined to have the last word.
It was a mundane exchange, but Kendra enjoyed the hominess of good-natured banter between people who cared for each other as if they were family. When she was growing up, meals had been catch-as-catch-can affairs, and if her grandmother did bother to cook, she slammed the pots and pans around in the process, letting Kendra know it was an imposition. That she was an imposition.
Those days were long gone, she reminded herself. She’d come through okay, hadn’t she? And she was a good mother to Madison, at least partly because she wanted things to be different for her.
“I’d sure like to know what’s going on in that head of yours right about now,” Hutch said, surprising her. When had he crossed the room, come to stand next to her, close enough to touch? And why did he have to be so darned observant?
“I was just thinking how lucky I am,” she said.
He grinned, watching as Madison “helped” slide the biscuits into the extra oven built into the wall beside the stove. “You definitely are,” he said, and there was something in his voice that took a lot of the sting out of things he’d said earlier.
That was the thing she had to watch when it came to Hutch.
He could be kind one moment and issuing a challenge the next.
Most of the time, he was impossible to read.
Soon enough, they all sat down to supper, Opal and Madison, Kendra and Hutch, and it felt a little too right for comfort. After struggling so hard to regain her emotional equilibrium, Kendra was back on shaky ground.
She was hungry, though, despite her jumpy nerves, and she put away two biscuits as well as an ample portion of Opal’s delectable tamale pie.
Madison had had a big day, and by the time supper was over, she was fighting to stay awake. “Mommy said I could say good-night to Ruffles,” she insisted, yawning, when the table had been cleared and the plates and silverware loaded into the dishwasher.
Hutch lifted the child into his arms, though he was looking at Kendra when he spoke. “And your mommy,” he said, “is a woman of her word. Let’s go.”
What was that supposed to mean? Was there a barb hidden somewhere in that statement?
Kendra decided not to invest any more of her rapidly waning energy wondering. She thanked Opal for supper and for letting Madison help with the preparations, and followed Hutch, Madison and the ever-alert Daisy out the back door. They crossed the yard, headed for the barn, and Madison, half-asleep by then, rested her head on Hutch’s shoulder.
Hutch flipped on the light as they entered, and carried Madison to Ruffles’s stall.
Kendra watched, stricken with a tangle of bittersweet emotions, as Madison leaned over the stall door to pat the pony’s head.
“Good night, Ruffles,” she said, keeping her other arm firmly around Hutch’s neck. Solemnly, she instructed the little horse to sleep well and have sweet dreams.
Kendra’s heart turned over in her chest and her throat