The refrigerator held beer, apple juice, horseradish, ketchup, a chunk of butter, four eggs, a slab of unsliced bacon and an open package of baloney that had quietly curled up and died. The big freezer opposite the stove was more rewarding. It held enough meat, mostly beef, to feed half the state of Colorado. As long as the propane held out, they wouldn’t starve. All she had to do was thaw a few roasts in the microwave.
"Oops," Carla said, glancing around. "No microwave. Not enough time to cook frozen roasts, either."
She went to the pantry, hoping for inspiration. "Canned stew, canned chili, canned chicken…yuck. No wonder Luke is short-tempered. Eating out of cans is enough to sour the disposition of a saint" The other side of the pantry was no better. She was confronted by a solid wall of cans as big as buckets – tomatoes, peas, green beans, corn, pitted cherries and coffee. There were also half-empty fifty-pound sacks of flour, sugar, rice, cornmeal and dried apples. The bread bin held four wizened crusts.
"So much for hamburgers," she said unhappily, "and I doubt if anyone delivers pizza this far out"
A burlap bag bulged with potatoes. Another bag was full of onions. Pinto beans dribbled out of a third bag. She grabbed that bag with both hands and lifted. It weighed at least ten pounds. That was enough beans to make real chili or frijoles refritos or any number of dishes. She could feed an army – but not in the next two hours.
Behind the bag of beans Carla spotted a cardboard box that had been shoved aside and forgotten. Inside the box was package after package of spaghetti. Each package held two pounds of the slender, dried pasta. The fragile sticks had been broken but were perfectly edible otherwise.
"I sense a spaghetti dinner on the horizon," Carla said.
She grabbed two packages, hesitated, and grabbed two more. When she cooked for Cash and herself, a pound of dried pasta fed both of them with enough left over for several of her lunches. But then, she always served fresh salad, garlic bread and dessert with the spaghetti. Bread and salad were out of the question, so she grabbed an extra package of pasta, bringing the total to ten pounds.
"My God, it will take an army to eat this much. I’ll be making cold spaghetti sandwiches for weeks and the hands will riot and Luke will tear a strip off me big enough to cover the south pasture."
Carla frowned at the last package of pasta, then decided she could always take the leftovers to the bunkhouse for the hands who wanted a midnight snack. Arms bulging with packages of spaghetti, she went back into the kitchen. There she dumped the pasta on the counter and went back to the freezer. The hamburger came in five-pound freezer packages that were frozen as solid as a stone.
She unwrapped a brick of ground meat and dropped it into a cast-iron frying pan that was so big and heavy it took both hands for her to lift it up onto the stove. A box of wooden matches sat on the stove itself. She lit the burner beneath the frozen meat, covered the pan and went to work on the sauce. Several forays to the pantry resulted in a can of tomato sauce the size of a bathroom sink, an equally intimidating can of whole tomatoes, and ten fat onions.
After rummaging in the cupboards near the stove, Carla found a kettle the size of a laundry tub. She set it aside for cooking the noodles and found a slightly smaller cousin to hold the sauce. She nearly had to turn the kitchen inside out to find a handheld can opener that worked. As she wrestled with the awkward can and poured a river of tomato sauce into a big pot – too quickly – she discovered how the kitchen walls had gotten their splatter patterns. She wiped up what she could reach, lit the burner under the sauce and went to work peeling and chopping onions. Between bouts of crying she prodded the hamburger, prying off bits of meat as the frozen block slowly loosened.
By the time the hamburger had thawed and was browning with the onions in the huge pan, nearly an hour had passed. A determined search of the kitchen had turned up no oregano and no whole garlic. A geriatric bottle of garlic granules was available, but she had to hammer the plastic container on the counter to knock loose a little of the contents.
"What on earth have the cooks been feeding everyone?" Carla asked in exasperation. "No herbs, no spices, no – " The clock caught her eye. "Uh-oh. I’d better get dessert going or there won’t be any of that, either."
Carla ran up to her bedroom suite, tore through four boxes until she found her cookbooks, and raced back downstairs. The recipe for cherry cobbler said it fed eight She doubled it, spread it into the smallest baking pan she could find – which was half the size of a card table – and discovered that the pan was way too big for the contents.
"Oh well, men always like dessert. I’ll put it in their lunch along with the cold spaghetti sandwiches."
She mixed up two more double batches of cobbler, poured them into the pan with the first batch and lit the oven. Even after doing six times the normal recipe of cobbler, she still had half of the huge can of cherries left over. She set it aside, saw that time was getting away from her and went back to the spaghetti sauce.
The meat and onions were browned and the pot of tomato sauce and chopped tomatoes was finally coming to a boil. The size and weight of the frying pan made draining the meat and onions an awkward process – especially using a kitchen towel as a pot holder – but she finally managed it. Next she had to dump the meat and onions into the pot of sauce. In doing so, she discovered another way to decorate the walls. Muttering, she mopped up and told herself that she would have to learn to manhandle a heavy pot and a gallon or two of sauce without making a mess.
"Speaking of gallons, I’d better get the spaghetti water on," she muttered, pushing back her hair with her elbow because her fingers were only slightly less messy than the walls.
By the time Carla filled a huge pot with water and lugged it to the stove, she finally understood why men rather than women chose careers as chefs; you had to be a weight lifter to handle the kitchen equipment. She turned the fire on high and mopped up the floor where she had spilled water on the way to the stove. The places she left behind were relatively clean, making the rest of the floor look much worse by comparison.
For a moment Carla was tempted to slop a little tomato sauce on the sort-of-clean spots to even things up, thereby delaying the hour of reckoning when she had to clean the floor. She loved to cook but hated housework. She knew her own weakness so well that she worked twice as hard at cleaning, making up for her own dislike of the job.
But it would look really nice with a few dollops of tomato sauce. Nobody would even notice.
Carla managed to avoid the temptation only because she remembered the green beans, which should have been on the stove ten minutes ago. Another trip to the pantry yielded a gallon can of green beans. While they heated, she sliced bacon, fried it and sliced more onions to saute in the bacon fat From time to time she checked the spaghetti water.
"I know a watched pot never boils, but this is ridiculous," she said beneath her breath, lifting the lid and testing the water with her fingertip.
Dead cold.
From the barn, corral and bunkhouse came the sounds of men wrapping up tasks in preparation for dinner. Two pickups came in from opposite directions, pulling horse trailers behind. Four men got out and stretched, tired and hungry from a long day of checking cattle on land leased from the federal government The horses being unloaded from trailers neighed to the horses that were already rubbed down and had begun to tear great mouthfuls of hay from the corral feeding rack.
The men would be just as hungry.
Anxiously Carla listened as the bunkhouse door slammed repeatedly, telling her that the men were going in to wash up for dinner. Laughter and catcalls greeted a cowboy whose jeans showed clear signs of his having landed butt-first in the mud. He gave back as good as he got, reminding the other men of the time one of them had slipped in a fresh cow flop and another had been bucked off into a corral trough.
Carla couldn’t help smiling as bits of conversation drifted through the open window. For the first time she realized that she hadn’t heard a human voice since Luke had vanished into the barn. The thought went as quickly as it had come, pushed aside by the fact that the spaghetti water was barely lukewarm. At this rate dinner would be at least half an hour late and Luke would be thinking he had gotten the bad end of the bet.
Hurriedly Carla tasted the tomato sauce, added more garlic and checked the spaghetti water again. Nothing doing. The outside door into the dining room squeaked open and then closed. The room, which adjoined the kitchen, was more like a mess hall than a formal dining room. There were two long tables, each of which could seat ten comfortably and fourteen in a pinch, twenty chairs, a wall of floor-to-ceiling cupboards and not much else.
It occurred to Carla that the tables were bare of plates, cups, utensils and napkins, not to mention salt, pepper, ketchup, steak sauce, sugar and all the other condiments beloved by ranch hands. Groaning at her forgetfulness, she dumped the half-cooked onions and bacon into the pot of green beans and frantically began opening cupboards, searching for plates. She was so busy that she didn’t hear the door between the kitchen and dining room open.
"Smells good in here. What’s for supper?"
"Spaghetti," Carla said without turning toward the male voice.
"Smells more like cherry pie."
"Ohmygod, dessert."
She raced past the man who had walked into the kitchen. A fast look in the oven assured her that the cobbler had survived her neglect. All she had to do was maneuver the big pan out of the oven to let the cobbler cool. The kitchen towel wouldn’t stretch to do the job of handling the pan.
"Pot holders," she muttered, straightening from bending over the oven.
"Looks like cobbler from here."
The voice came from about a foot away from Car-la’s ear. Her head snapped around and she looked at the man for the first time.
Long, lean and deceptively lazy-looking, Tennessee Blackthorn was watching Carla with an odd smile on his face.
"Ten! Is it really you?" Carla asked, delighted. "The last time I heard, you had a phone call in the middle of the night, went into Cortez and never came back."
"Never is a long time." Smoke-colored eyes swept appreciatively from Carla’s oven-flushed cheeks to her ankles and back up. "Guess we can’t call you nina anymore. You finally grew into those long legs and bedroom eyes."
She laughed. "I love hungry men. They’ll flatter the cook shamelessly in hopes of an early dinner. You’re out of luck, though. The watched pot isn’t boiling."
"He’s out of luck, period," Luke said from the back door, his voice cold.
5
Carla didn’t realize how much her expression changed when she turned toward Luke, but little escaped Ten’s eyes. He measured the complex mixture of yearning and distance, hope and hunger in her look, and he knew that nothing had changed.
"Still chasing moonlight over black water, aren’t you?" he asked softly.
If either Carla or Luke heard, neither answered. They were looking at each other as though it had been years, not hours, since their last meeting.
"The pot holders are over there," Luke said in a clipped voice, gesturing toward a drawer near the stove, never looking away from Carla’s vivid blue-green eyes.
"Pot holders," Carla repeated, absorbed by the arching line of Luke’s eyebrows, the clean curves of his mouth, the shadow of beard lying beneath his tanned skin.
"Pot holders," repeated Luke.
"Still smells and looks like cobbler to me," Ten said to no one in particular.
"Don’t you have something to do?" Luke asked pointedly, finally looking away from Carla.
"Nope. But if you give me a cup of coffee I’ll find something."
Luke eyed the man who was both his friend and the ramrod of the Rocking M. Ten returned him stare for stare…and smiled. Luke barely controlled his anger. He knew he had no reason to be angry with Ten; of all the ranch hands, the ramrod would be the least likely to hustle Carla into bed. But hearing Ten talk about Carla’s long legs and bedroom eyes had made Luke savagely angry. The fact that his anger was irrational, and he knew it, only made him more angry.
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