Heart in Hand: Stitches in Time Series #3 by Barbara Cameron

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    Gideon reached for his jacket and handed Sarah Rose hers. “I’ll go hitch up the buggy. You ladies get your jackets on and join me when you’re ready.”
    Sarah Rose giggled. “ Daedi called me a lady.”
    “He called me one, too,” Anna told her with a grin.
    Gideon walked out to the barn and set about hitching up the buggies, thinking about what she’d said. He didn’t know what to think of her reaction, not having much experience with women. After all, he and Mary had fallen in love almost before they had left school, and they’d married when they were barely twenty. Now he was twenty-eight and looking at starting all over, and he didn’t know how to do that.
    Not that there was a shortage of women. They approached him and struck up conversations at church services and Sarah Rose’s school activities and social events and shops. They brought food. He and Jacob had discussed how often unmarried young women and sometimes widows showed up with casseroles and cakes and pies and desserts and bread still warm from the oven.
    Well, that had stopped some time ago at Jacob’s house. When he was a bachelor, his mother and sisters had worked out a schedule to keep him fed so that the single young women would stop coming. And then, Jacob had thoughtlessly let it slip to one of his sisters that really, cooking couldn’t be that hard. She’d handed him a saltshaker to season the foot he’d put into his mouth and told him he better learn because she and the women of the family weren’t feeding him anymore.
    After they talked about their mutual experience with ladies bearing food, Jacob gave Gideon a couple of recipes. The macaroni and cheese tonight was one of them. He’d found Mary’s recipe box and worked on making some of his favorites from it as well.
    Sarah Rose ran down the back stairs, followed by Anna. As usual, she hadn’t buttoned her jacket, and one side of her collar stood up and the other was tucked inside the jacket.
    “Can I ride with Anna on the way to her house?”
    “Long as you don’t ask to ride back with her.”
    “What?” she stared at him, then she laughed. “Oh, you were being silly.”
    He started to help her into the passenger side of the buggy, but she’d already climbed into it with the agility of a monkey.
    Once again, he wondered if Mary would want him to work more on making sure Sarah Rose wasn’t a tomboy.
    He followed Anna’s buggy and wondered if his daughter was talking Anna’s leg off.
    The trip to Anna’s didn’t take that long, and soon they were saying good-bye to Anna and traveling back to their own house. Sarah Rose began to wind down by the time they pulled into the drive.
    He sent her inside while he put the buggy and horse in the barn. After he gave the barn one last look, he picked up the lantern and headed out the door.
    Outside, the night was crisp and cool. The wind blew a rag of a cloud away and stars began winking on.
    When he stepped into the kitchen, he saw Sarah Rose standing before the freezer, staring longingly at the little plastic baggies of leftover ice-cream sandwiches she’d made for dessert after tonight’s supper.
    She turned when she heard him enter. “ Daedi —”
    “One,” he said. “And you eat it quickly so you can study your spelling words before you go to bed.”
    “I still get a bedtime story,” she said, sounding like she expected an argument.
    “Of course. But a short one. It’s almost bedtime.”
    He watched her compare several of the sandwiches before choosing one she evidently decided was the biggest. She reminded him of Mary so much at that moment with her determination to get what she wanted—he’d teased her once that she’d done that with him and she’d laughed and agreed.She had a quiet way of getting her way, but she always got it. Sarah Rose was smart like her mother had been about that.
    There wasn’t much of himself he could find in his daughter unless you considered that she was a tomboy and wanted to