Patchwork Bride by Jillian Hart Page B

disappeared into the lean-to where the washtubs were kept.
    “Out!” Cook commanded with a straight-armed point. “I have work to do.”
    “Sorry.” Tilly and Meredith together backed out of the kitchen. Pots clanged and banged, the sound chasing them through the dining room.
    Against her will, her shoes skidded to a stop at the wide windows. She could not say why as she looked over the garden and glimpsed at the barns. Ice clung to everything, sheeting the glass panes, dripping from exposed tree branches and varnishing the great expanse of snowy ground. Shane was out there, lost to her sight. She didn’t know why her thoughts returned to him now, but thinking of him made quiet joy whisper through her. She was Just Meredith to him again.
     
    He caught glimpses of her through the rest of the afternoon. When he hauled buckets of water from the pump behind the main barn, the windows of the house glowed golden through the gray, catching his attention, a haven of light and shelter in the freezing storm. Ice beat against his face as he caught sight of her sewingindustriously while Minnie paraded around the parlor with her slate in hand, perhaps practicing her spelling homework.
    Later, after nightfall and several trips with the wheelbarrow to clean the stalls, he saw Meredith at the dining-room table, bent over her schoolbooks. The ice-glazed glass made the scene ethereal, as if out of a dream. The way she sat, spine straight, arms folded primly on the table before her, made her endearing, an image he carried with him back into the horse stables when he took up his pitchfork.
    “Tomorrow we start working with the yearlings in the morning. The two-year-olds in the afternoon.” Braden sauntered up to fling forkfuls of clean straw into the newly mucked-out stall. “We’ll be up and at work by five to get a full twelve-hour day in. I want to get our work done as fast as we can. The missus paid a visit to me today, and I’m already eager to be outta here.”
    “Can’t blame you there.” He could well imagine what the woman had told a rough-and-ready like Braden. All he had to do was to imagine what his own mother would have said. She looked down on anyone who performed manual labor. According to her last letter twelve months ago, she looked down on him, too. “Some folks put a lot of importance on the wrong things.”
    “That’s why I work with horses.” Braden shook the last of the straw free from the tines and backed down the breezeway. “Horses make sense to me. People don’t.”
    “Some people,” he agreed. He forked soiled bedding from the adjacent stall into the wheelbarrow, and theyearling filly he’d tied in the aisle watched him curiously as he worked.
    “I’ll have this done in a jiffy, girl.” He kept his voice low and friendly. Tonight she was interested in him, someone fairly new. The sweet little thing had been well-treated. She didn’t shy when he’d approached and she showed no fear now of the pitchfork or his swift movements as he tossed the last of the bedding into the barrow. “Are you going to let me teach you all about a bridle tomorrow, pretty filly?”
    Her brown eyes sparkled, liking the sound of his voice. He leaned the pitchfork safely against the wall out of her reach and curled his hands around the worn wooden handle of the wheelbarrow.
    “At least you’ve been well-treated here,” he told her as he puffed on by. A full load of dirty straw was a heavy one. “I have a feeling that’s the only reason Braden and I are staying.”
    The filly nickered once as she reached out with her nose to try to grab the hat off his head. Her whiskery lips clamped on his brim, but he was quicker, dodging her just enough that his Stetson escaped any teeth prints.
    “That’s the truth,” Braden called out, his boots pounding closer, and fresh straw landed with a rustling whoosh in the filly’s stall. “Any serious trouble from that woman and we’re gone. So don’t get too attached to this