Cowboys and Kisses by Karin Kallmaker

Author:Karin Kallmaker [Kallmaker, Karin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Romance and Chocolate Ink

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“WOULD YOU LIKE some tea and bread? I’m famished.” Violet dropped a chunk of wood into the stove and uncovered the slotted grill directly over the flames so she could set the filled tea kettle on it.

“Yes, thank you.” I accepted not because I was hungry but because I didn’t want to leave. It was only when I took the first bite of her wonderful bread, this time smeared with farmer’s cottage cheese, that I realized I wasn’t sure when I’d last eaten. “You’ve been very kind to me.”

She smiled. “I was merely trying to be Christian, but it’s easy to be kind to you.”

Not sure what she meant by the last bit, I focused on the first. “There’s many Christians here who would not feed me, let alone allow me inside their door.”

“This place makes people hard.”

“Yes. Yes, it does.” I thought of my long-ago home with a life surrounded by plentiful food, water, and books. Soft bed sheets, water closets, and fine woolen scarves. What had made my parents so hard?

“But not you. You’re not hard, least not the way that woman is.” Her nod in the direction of Cherry’s indicated who she meant, but her gaze was on me, and her lips curved into a smile.

I looked at her across the table, not sure what it was I felt. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said she was flirting with me. There’s a particular cant to the head, a look in the eyes — I knew these gestures from men, and from Connor, who had been no more subtle about her desire than a man. Violet was…nearly…looking at me the same way. “It has made me hard, and I don’t want to be that way.”

The kettle whistled and she got up to pour the boiling water over the leaves in an ironstone tea pot painted summer-corn yellow and decorated with small green leaves. “This isn’t a place where softness lasts long.”

“I’ve been here closing in on five years.”

I watched her do the math in her head, then swallow hard. “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t want to tell her why I had ended up far from home and nowhere to go. “I chose to live. Suicide’s a sin, you know.”

She matched my wry tone with a lift of her eyebrows. “Choosing life can’t ever be wrong. It’s what you do with the life.”

“Maybe not so much what you do, but how you do it. I’ve only recently realized the only choice I have is over how, not what.”

“Somewhere you had some good schooling.”

“Not enough to be a teacher here.”

Her hands were strong and capable as she poured the tea. She asked, “One or two? Milk?” and I murmured, “One, no milk, thank you,” in a ritual of normalcy that was so far from my real world that I felt I’d fallen into one of my stories.

“I don’t mean to pry,” she said slowly. “But you’re pretty and smart. Why didn’t you marry?”

“I wasn’t yet fourteen. I had to

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