lost his balance and tumbled onto the dusty street. Quiet laughter tittered from one end of the restaurant to the other.
Matt stomped back inside and sat down at the table.
“I reckon old Bart needed a good mouth cleaning,” he declared.
It looked to Emma as if Matt hadn’t truly minded giving it to him.
Even Billy, coming to stand beside the table, seemed pleased. Sarah stood next to him, fingers lightly on his arm. At least she had the good sense to look concerned.
“Emma,” Billy said. “I was just telling Sarah that we ought to have a party as soon as the house is finished, to show it off to the neighbors. What do you think?”
She thought it was a wonderful idea, but Matt looked as if someone had just added lemon to his whiskey.
Chapter Seven
One, two, three…one, two, three…slow, quick, quick. Emma waltzed about her new bedroom with her arms spread out wide and her head flung back. She closed her eyes to better savor the scent of new wood.
Right now the room was empty, the floor bare and the windows not yet sealed in glass. With her eyes closed, though, she saw it come to life. The rug she had ordered would be a cloud under her feet. The curtains would ride in on the breeze. The bed would be big and soft with a fine feather mattress.
Behind her eyes Matt lay on the mattress. One, two…trip, one, two, three. A lamp with the wick turned low sat on a bedside table. The imagined glow flickered over his bare chest and glimmered gold flames in his hair where it fanned out over a pillow.
He lifted his arm, his muscles flexed, beckoning her to join him.
One, two…stop. Emma lowered her arms, but her heart beat as if she’d danced all night without a break. She didn’t dare open her eyes for fear of losing the vision of Matt nearly nude on her soon-to-be-delivered bed.
A horse’s whinny and a pounding hammer threatened to bring her back to her empty room, but she clamped her eyelids tight and reached for Matt’s outstretched hand.
“Darlin’, you look as pretty as a daydream,” Matt said.
Just when she felt her thighs bunch up for a leap to the bed, the very real voice snapped her back to the here and now.
“Mercy! You ought to give a body warning if you mean to go peering through windows.”
“I’ll remember that.”
The brash grin slashing across his face along with the laughter glinting in his eyes promised that all he would remember is to sneak up more quietly.
With a tip of his hat and a salute with his hammer, Matt strode the length of the front porch.
Lord help her, summer would end long before she got the picture of him inviting her to bed out of her mind. It might plague her the rest of her days unless she did something about it.
Emma shook herself, flinging off the image as a dog would shake water off its fur. There were plenty of dreams in the kitchen that would keep her insides on a steady keel. She’d go in there now and enjoy a few draws on the new pump. She’d ponder the joys of baking biscuits and pies in her new, thoroughly modern oven.
Just like the bedroom, the kitchen smelled of new wood. The space was large and wonderful. The long table she had ordered from Bean’s Carpentry should be nearly finished. In a few more days it would be in the middle of this room ready to seat a dozen hungry people.
Not that she wanted a dozen hungry people at her table. That was far from her dream, and yet once again Matt invited himself right into her imagination. He sat at her table sipping coffee and grinning. And where had his shirt gotten to?
“That would have been a thing to see, Lucy.” Red’s voice rose through the window frame. “Billy says Pa grabbed old Bart by the pants seat and tossed him right in the horse trough.”
“Is Bart bad?”
“Bad and smelly.”
“Fluffy would bite him.”
“If it was me, I’d have shot him through for the thing he said to Emma.”
Mercy, but Matt was right to be worried about the boy. He seemed to think he could set the world to rights by a quick shot from the hip. It was a good thing Matt allowed the boy to carry a weapon only when he was on the homestead doing chores far from the house.