watching the rise and fall of her breasts, full and glistening with the rain and her heavy breathing.
No one had ever accused him of being a saint.
He might have touched them, he might have quieted her fluttering heart with a stroke of his fingertips if he hadn’t heard Red and Billy yelling and running toward the smashed orchard.
Emma’s clinging nightgown might be fit for a husband’s eyes, but he’d be damned if Red or Billy would get a glimpse of it.
“Nothing to be done here tonight, boys. Go back inside and mind Lucy.”
Billy waved his arm in acknowledgment and yanked on Red’s sleeve, making sure that the boy followed.
Evidently Emma didn’t agree that there was nothing to be done. She slid off Thunder’s back, apparently unaware that her gown hadn’t slid with her. The glimpse of a gleaming thigh and the curve of a pearly nether cheek nearly knocked him off Thunder’s back.
Emma knelt in the mud and dug her fingers in deep. She found a ball of roots with a trunk still attached to it.
“What are you doing?” Matt scooted off Thunder and stood over Emma’s bent back. Rain beat down and washed the sapling’s trunk, revealing the damage.
“Planting what I can of these trees.”
She tried to dig a hole, but it filled with water nearly as fast as she could dig. Matt knelt beside her.
“Not now.” He caught her hands to hold them still. He felt the anger and the cold shaking her fingers. “Tomorrow we’ll go to town and order new trees.”
She slipped free of his grasp and snatched up the tree with the roots still on. “These are my trees. Lucy and I named every last one of them. No low-down no-good is going to take them from me.”
“That’s just not reasonable, Emma darlin’. They won’t live with being trampled on. Besides, we’ll catch our deaths out here.”
“Let the boys know that breakfast might be late.”
If God had ever created a more stubborn woman, he hadn’t heard tell of her. She lifted a mud-caked hand to wipe the hair out of her face. A brown smear streaked across her cheek. The rain washed it down the constricting muscles of her throat.
She wanted to cry—it was plain as anything—but instead she plopped the wounded tree into the ground, then plunged her hands into the muck in search of another.
Blamed if his wife didn’t have the grit of a dozen men.
Matt took off his shirt and settled it over her shoulders before he plunged his hands into the liquid sod in search of a battered, hopeless tree.
Chapter Six
Emma hung a wet pair of jeans on the line to dry. A drop of wash water rolled down her wrist, sparkling in the August sunshine. Nearly two weeks had passed since Matt had knelt in the mud beside her, replanting trees that he knew good and well would not survive.
What had survived from that night was the memory of Matt squatting bare chested in the mud with rain washing over his skin. Lands, if she hadn’t wanted to toss her tree aside and run her fingers across his glistening back.
Good common sense had been no more than a lightning bolt away from being dumped in the mud. Indeed, she had been reaching toward him ready to trace his flexing muscles with her mud-caked fingers when lightning had flashed a shocking blue-white glare over her ruined field.
She’d reined in that honey-slick impulse before Matt had known what she was about, but for the past two weeks she’d been wondering what might have happened if she hadn’t.
“Mama Emma, lift me up.” Lucy waved a small wet calico dress that she had taken from the laundry pile. “I want to hang up my own.”
“Okay, sweetie—jump high when I lift you.” The leap took a considerable bit of weight off the task. “Hook the pins right at the shoulder…there, good girl.”
“Let me do another one.” Evidently, to Lucy, laundry hanging was a morning game.
“Just once more.” Lucy jumped, Emma lifted. “I swear you get bigger each time I pick you up.”
As soon as her tiny boots touched the ground, she wrapped her arms around Emma’s thigh and hugged tight.
“I don’t want to get a new ma someday.” She gazed up past Emma’s apron with eyes so solemn they looked like the sky with a storm gathering. “I want you to be my mama till I’m all grown up.”
Lordy, how she wished she could fall on her knees and hug that child up tight to