Free Mary Connealy by Montana Marriages Trilogy Page B

directly to the stove to cook.
    Red must have chickens and pigs. There was butter, and a pail of milk hung on a nail on one wall. A milk cow, too? She found potatoes, carrots, onions, and beets. There was flour, salt, sugar—both brown and white—honey, and cakes of yeast. She couldn’t begin to search through all of the crates and barrels packed in that room.
    She had lived in a beautiful home with Griff, but food had sometimes been a problem. There was the spring near their home and he’d had good luck fishing. But they’d eaten a lot of trout. Griff wouldn’t let Cassie help in the garden, although as a child she’d enjoyed working by her mother’s side. Griff had helped her understand how crude her mother had been to do man’s work. She wondered how long Red had been here to be so established. Then she realized how much time she’d spent dreaming over the food and hurried to work on supper.
    The main room of Red’s home was small. The fire blazed cheerfully now and cut the chill in the kitchen. The sink was simply a hollowed-out log split in half, with a hole in the center of the bottom and a bucket under the hole to catch draining water. A small but well-built table with two sturdy chairs sat near enough to the fireplace to make a meal cozy even on a cold night.
    The floor was dirt and a handmade broom stood in one corner. Cassie wasn’t sure how she’d know when she was done when she swept a dirt floor. She looked around the room and realized that except for a few pots and pans, there was nothing in the house that wasn’t handmade. Red had created this strange house with nothing but his bare hands. Cassie wondered at the pride a man would have if he could care for himself like Red did.
    She started a rising of bread. They would have fresh-baked bread for breakfast. She warmed the ham in a cast-iron skillet and hung it from a hook in the fireplace. She pared potatoes, careful to waste as little white flesh as possible, put them in the covered pot full of water, and tucked the pot into the corner of the fireplace. She made biscuits. The heat was uneven and she feared things would burn, so she kept a careful eye on everything. Ham, potatoes, and biscuits. If she could get a good gravy from the ham, it would be a simple but tasty meal. She wished she could figure out an excuse to fry eggs with the meal. She’d do it for breakfast, she promised herself.
    The bread had risen. She’d punched it down and shaped loaves which were rising again. The table was set with one tin plate and one chipped china plate, the only plates she could find. The food was done. Even the mashed potatoes were whipped high with butter and milk and set in a pan of warm water, waiting for when Red came back.
    The door swung inward and Red entered, looked at her, and smiled rather abruptly.
    Cassie had the impression he’d forgotten he was married.

C HAPTER 6
    R ed hadn’t been able to think about anything all day except that he was married.
    Married!
    He’d left here yesterday a single man with too many chores and too many goals and not a second to spare for anything else. Now there was a woman in his house. He looked at Cassie and saw the most beautiful woman on earth.
    She turned from his fireplace in his kitchen, and he thought back to how he’d held her in his arms all the way from town. He’d loved every minute of it.
    “H–Hi, Cassie. I see you’re cooking.” He felt like some kind of monster to marry a woman standing on the freshly dug grave of her husband. But he’d seen no way out of the marriage. The crowd wasn’t even going to allow them to move out of the cemetery.
    Cassie nodded and didn’t speak. Which gave Red a moment to remember why he’d married her—to save her. And why he shouldn’t have—because she wasn’t a believer.
    Marrying Cassie was a sin, the greatest sin of his life.
    But he’d had to help her.
    But he could have thought of
something
short of marrying her.
    Except he couldn’t think