Page 13 of Something Has To Give

Please don’t come back here.

He didn’t. His clumping footsteps carried him back upstairs instead, and staggeringly-unexpected disappointment sunk into her like an impaling rod. She had the most absurd urge to cry again and that made her angry.

She shoved back off the kitchen counter. “Get a hold of yourself!”

She threw herself into her morning routine instead. She took care of her eggs, she made her cheese, and then because the snow made it unlikely that she’d be getting customers today, she took advantage of being alone on the lower floor to catch up on a little housekeeping.

Just before noon, Quint wandered back downstairs with his army duffel bag of dirty laundry slung over his shoulder and they passed one another without a word. He headed for the laundry room. She took her cleaning upstairs. She made up the bed that was their battlefield and then, because there really wasn’t much else to clean, sat down on the foot of the mattress to think. There were two other rooms up here. One looked a little like an office with a couch that folded out. One looked like it might once have harbored hope of becoming a nursery. There were stars, moons and teddy bears all along the border paper that wrappedthe walls along the ceiling. The rest of the room was stacked with boxes. She’d looked in some of them. It was mostly crafts, blankets and old clothes. There was probably enough bedding in those boxes to make up the sofa couch, but in the back of her mind she knew the first to leave this bed would be the one to lose the house.

It wasn’t going to be her.

Chapter Six

Elsie’s influences were all over the house. He could see her everywhere, in damn near every room he went. Of Maydeen, he could barely find any hint at all. It was the strangest thing. His ex-wife’s clothes were all over the house, but when he looked at them, he saw Elsie. Elsie was in the goats that came up to the porch for milking and in the warbling crow of that cussed the rooster out back. She was in the wax-dipped rolls of cheese hanging from the rafters in the cellar, along with the dozen or so pint jars of honey and about four shelves stacked with a variety of canned vegetables. He went outside and found the remains of a summer garden, bedded down under a mound of mulch, manure and leaves for the winter. All of that had to be Elsie. As far as he knew, Maydeen had never gardened a day in her life. She’d never canned either. She’d barely cooked.

Speaking of cooking, what was that smell wafting out from the kitchen? Elsie must be making dinner. It smelled heavenly. His feet began to move him back through the house, following the smell although he knew this certainly had to be yet another of Elsie’s war-shots. It was a good one, too. Whatever shewas making smelled so good that his stomach had no trouble remembering it had not eaten since breakfast. At the same time, he also knew he wasn’t going to get a bite of it. Oh, the cruelties of war.

He got as far as the dining room, but froze when he noticed the table was set for two—albeit at opposite ends—with plates positioned as far apart as possible.

Quint stared at the twin settings. Ooo…Elsie was really good at cruel.

The smell of supper cooking tantalized his senses with every deeply indrawn breath. His mouth was watering, his stomach was rumbling, and against his better judgment, his hopes were rising. Yet, in the back of his mind he knew the second he stepped through the kitchen archway, she was going to dash those hopes with little more than a crusty look and maybe—maybe, if he was lucky—an unspit-upon peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

He braced himself—for combat, he firmly told himself, but his heart was racing and his body humming in the way it did only when beautiful women were involved—and rounded the corner.

Elsie was standing at the stove, alternately shaking and stirring a sizzling pan of steaming potatoes, green beans and corned beef. The sight of that simple homemade hash was enough to cramp his empty stomach. A bowl of grated cheddar cheese rested on the stove within easy arm’s reach. Next to it was another bowl stacked with a handful of clean, white eggs.

There was definitely enough food in that pan to serve two, three, maybe even four people.

Elsie stubbornly kept stirring, turning the browning potatoes over and over and shooting him nervous sidelong looks out of the corner of her eye. She said nothing, but he could already see her back stiffening and her defensive hackles rising.

“Looks good,” he said, fully expecting her to lash back, verbally at the very least.

She didn’t. She shot him another sideways look, one that didn’t quite rise far enough to meet his eyes, and then flipped the potatoes again. “Thanks.”

Well…hell. She was actually going to feed him.

“Anything I can do to help?” he asked, painstakingly neutral.

Another sidelong look. She started to say no, but then he saw her pause. “You can put the glasses and water on the table.”

“Do you want a beer?”

“No,” she said shortly. “But I don’t care if you do.”

“All right.” He went to the fridge and got a beer, then made a brief search of the cabinets until he found a pitcher. He filled it partway with ice and then water from the tap. As he waited for the pitcher to fill, he kept glancing back at her, watching surreptitiously while she added first the eggs and then the cheese to the hash, covered the pan and let it cook. She didn’t look at him. She made a point of not looking. That she wasn’t comfortable with what she was doing was plain, and that began to make him think.

When the pitcher was half full, he shut off the water and took both it and his beer out to the table. He set the ice water beside one setting and sat down to wait at the other. Hands resting on his thighs, he watched the condensation building on the side of his beer and thought until she emerged from the kitchen with the pan in one hand and a plastic spatula in the other. She came to his chair, already cutting out a square of cheesy hash.

“I’m still evicting you,” he said, wanting there to be absolutely no mistake in where he stood.

For the first time, she looked at him, her eyes flashing, the spatula trembling ever so slightly. She spooned a square of hash onto his plate. “More?” she asked, flatly.

“Yes, please.” Snapping out his napkin, he laid it across his lap and leaned back to watch as she added to what was already on his plate, then spooned up a helping for herself. The hash was thick and heavy, bending the flimsy plastic spatula and leaving multiple strands of yellow cheese trailing from pan to plate. “You should have used a wooden spoon. They’re sturdier…as you probably remember well.”

Winding the cheese around the spatula until the strands broke, she avoided meeting his eyes. “I burned them.”

He paused in the midst of taking his first bite. “Did you really?”

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