Free After the Frost by Megan Chance Page B

off this farm, but I won't leave without her. I'll keep comin' back and comin' back until Sarah and I go together. That's a promise."
          And then she turned and walked away.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 7
     
     
          T wenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-eleven, twenty-three—" Sarah's singsong counting rang in the air over the sound of the boiling kettle and the clinking of utensils on pottery. She scraped her two-tined fork along her plate, through a mound of mashed potatoes and into a puddle of applesauce. "Twenty-six, twenty-one, twenty-two ..."
    "Sarah, please," Lillian said.
    "But I'm countin' to a hundred."
    "Count quietly."
    Rand didn't look up. He concentrated on the potatoes and the cold boiled beef on his plate, forcing himself to chew and swallow—anything to keep from looking at Belle. He couldn't stand to see her defensive expression —it was all he could do to ignore the anger already hovering between them. He didn't need to see the proof of it in her face. He slashed into his meat, drowning the bite in horseradish before he put it in his mouth.
    "Thirty-ten, thirty-eleven—" Sarah said, her voice a low murmur.
    Rand reached for the sugar and put two heaping spoonfuls into his buttermilk. The clank of the spoon hitting the cup seemed obscenely loud. He caught Lillian's nervous gaze across the table, and involuntarily he followed it to Belle, who was slowly, deliberately, opening a biscuit. She spooned apple butter on it thickly, then followed it with a lacing of maple syrup.
          "Thirty-six, thirty-seven . . ."
          Rand's eyes narrowed, and he looked away and took a gulp of the sweetened buttermilk. But the sight of her pouring that syrup wouldn't leave him. She used to do that, he remembered. Before or since, he'd never seen anyone else eat a biscuit quite that way.
          It bothered him that he remembered.
          "Thirty-eleven . . . Papa, what comes after thirty- eleven?"
          "There is no thirty-eleven," he said gruffly. "It goes thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one."
          "And then what?"
          "Pass the applesauce, please." Belle looked at him pointedly.
          Rand grabbed the bowl and shoved it toward her.
          "And then what, Papa?"
          "Thank you." Belle made a show of dipping the spoon in, plopping the sauce onto her plate so that it pooled next to those smothered biscuits.
          "And then what?"
          "Sarah," Lillian admonished.
          "Papa—"
          "What?" Rand turned to his daughter almost violently, feeling a surge of impatient exasperation. He inhaled deeply, forcing calm into his tone. "What do you want to know, Sarah?"
          "What comes after forty-one?"
          "Forty-two."
          "And then what?"
          "Sarah, that's quite enough." Lillian said. "If you want to count to a hundred, count quietly—and not until after supper."
          "Forty-three comes next," Belle said. Abrupt silence followed—so abrupt, her words seemed to echo. She looked up from cutting her meat. "Doesn't it?"
    Sarah sat up straighter in her chair. She looked at Belle with big, round eyes and then at Rand.
    His stomach tightened and rolled over. He nodded to Sarah. "Yeah. But listen to your grandma, all right?"
    She smiled and banged her fork into her potatoes. "Forty-three, forty-four, forty-eight . . ."
    Rand sighed and pushed aside his plate, no longer hungry. "I have some things to do in the barn," he said. He rose, grabbing the latest issue of The Ohio Cultivator from the sideboard where he'd left it earlier.
    It was a lie. There were always things to do, that was true enough, but tonight he'd planned to settle himself in a chair and read—read long enough and hard enough so that he couldn't think about today or yesterday or years ago. He wanted to lose himself in farming techniques and stories—hell, even the ladies' section sounded good.
    But he couldn't do that with