By the time everyone sat down to breakfast, Ethan had been fed, bathed, and dressed in clothes Willow had made for him. He sat next to Willow in a highchair that Caleb had carved from an old fir tree. Shannon sat on the child’s other side.
The habits learned while tending to her stepcousins quickly came back to Shannon. When Ethan became fretful for his mother’s attention, Shannon gave him a bit of biscuit to mangle or a sip of warm milk from the small cup in front of him. Sometimes she dipped a spoon in the stewed fruit and let him lick the naturally sweet juices.
The kitchen was warm and rich with the scent of food. Small dishes of jam studded the wooden table like rubies. Whip had brought in bright yellow wildflowers and put them in a canning jar in the center of the table. Blue-and-white-checked napkins wrapped the biscuits and covered the laps of everyone but Ethan. The mugs for coffee and tea were a thick, cream-colored ceramic that held heat for a long time. The plates were of the same creamy ceramic, glazed to a high sheen. The knives and spoons and forks were all made from the same plain metal whose patina came from daily use and vigorous scrubbing.
«Shannon? Aren’t you hungry?» Whip asked.
She started and looked at her plate. It was empty. Whip was patiently holding a basket of biscuits out to her.
«I was just trying to remember the last time I saw a matched set of dishes and flatware and napkins,» Shannon said. «It all looks so pretty I almost hate to eat.»
«Eat anyway. You’re too thin.»
«I’ve done nothing but eat ever since you showed up,» she muttered.
«Good thing, too. When I first saw you, you were skinnier than a bitch nursing twelve pups.»
«How could you tell?» she challenged. «I was wearing a man’s jacket and trousers!»
«I could tell.»
The raking, sideways look Whip gave Shannon ended the argument by stopping her breath in her throat. The silver smoldering of his eyes told her that his hunger for her hadn’t abated one bit.
Caleb looked down at his plate, hiding his amusement. Clearly Whip had a powerful male interest in Shannon. It was equally clear that Whip hadn’t bedded the slender girl who might or might not be a widow. They lacked the ease with one another that lovers enjoyed.
But they certainly didn’t lack the fire. The air fairly burned when Whip watched Shannon with hungry silver eyes. It was the same when she looked at him, a hunger that was almost tangible.
Whip had told Caleb that he believed Silent John was dead. Shannon hadn’t spoken of her missing husband at all.
Caleb hoped it wasn’t lack of proof of Silent John’s death that was keeping Whip and Shannon from the affair each plainly wanted. Many a man had died in the West with no one to know of his passing but God — particularly when the man was a loner and man-hunter like Silent John.
«Whip tells me you have a cabin up above Echo Basin,» Caleb said.
«Yes, on the north fork of Avalanche Creek,» Shannon said.
«I remember chasing Reno through there a few years back,» Caleb said. «Pretty place, once you get used to the altitude.»
Shannon smiled. «That’s all I remember about the first month or two I lived there, being breathless and feeling like I was carrying a fifty-pound sack of flour around on my back.»
«Hard to grow much food up there,» Caleb said.
«It’s worse than hard,» she said. «Sometimes there are only six weeks from the last frost of spring to the first frost of winter.»
«It must be lonely for you, being the only woman,» Willow said.
Shannon hesitated, then continued spreading bright red jam on a biscuit.
«To be lonely,» Shannon said slowly, «you have to have someone to miss. I didn’t leave behind anyone I cared about when I came west.»
«But you spend so much of your time alone,» Willow said.
«I have Prettyface.»
«Prettyface?» Willow asked.
«The biggest, meanest, ugliest quarter-breed wolf you’ve ever seen,» Whip said dryly. «He was still healing up from indigestion, so we left him with the shaman.»
Caleb snickered, for Whip had told him about the Culpeppers.
«Indigestion, huh?» Caleb asked mildly. «Is that what you call it?»
«Yeah,» Whip said. «The Culpepper he tried to eat would have gagged a skunk.»
«Honestly, Rafael,» Willow said. «How can you make a joke out of it? They had you at gunpoint!»
«Not when I jumped them. They were no more expecting my Chinese fighting tricks than they had expected the bullwhip.»
Shannon made an odd sound. «If you had seen Whip move, you wouldn’t have worried about him. He had them down and out cold before I could blink.»
«All the same, big brother,» Willow muttered, «one of these days you’re going to bite off more than you can chew all by yourself.»
«He already did,» Shannon said, «in a place called Grizzly Meadow.»
Caleb turned swiftly toward Shannon. His uncanny speed had been one of the first things she had noticed about him. She had thought no man could be quicker with his hands than Whip, but she no longer doubted that Caleb was faster.
«What happened?» Caleb asked Shannon.
«Whip took on a grizzly with a bullwhip.»
Caleb turned on Whip. «A grizzly? Judas Priest! I thought you had better sense!»
«It wasn’t exactly my idea,» Whip said wryly. «I was having a bath quiet as you please, and then Prettyface went on the warpath and I turned around and there that damned bear was reared up on his hind legs. All I had was the bullwhip, so I used it.»
«You drove off a grizzly with a bullwhip?» Caleb asked, astonished.
«No. Shannon came running up and shoved her rusty old shotgun —»
«My shotgun is cleaner than your bullwhip,» Shannon cut in.
«— up against the grizzly’s heart and let him have it with both barrels,» Whip said, ignoring her interruption. «Killed him deader than a stone.»
Caleb looked back at Shannon with new interest in his odd, whiskey-colored eyes.
«That took a lot of courage,» Caleb said.
«Courage?» Shannon asked, and laughed curtly. «I was plain scared, but I’m such a bad shot I knew I had to get in close to do anything useful. Just wounding the grizzly would have been the death of us all.»
«So you ran right up and blew that grizzly to kingdom come,» Caleb said, watching her with unblinking amber eyes.
Shannon looked at Caleb rather warily.
«Are you going to yell at me too?» she asked.
Caleb smiled, making his black mustache shift and gleam in the lantern light.
It struck Shannon that in a dark, hard kind of way, Caleb was every bit as good-looking as Whip.
«Is that what Whip did?» Caleb asked. «Yell at you?»
«Yes.»
«No,» Whip said simultaneously. «I merely pointed out that Shannon was a triple-dyed idiot for racing in where she had no business and nearly getting herself killed. Prettyface and I about had that grizzly on the run.»
Caleb snorted. «Did the grizzly know it?»
Whip shot his friend a hard look and then concentrated on demolishing the pile of biscuits on his plate. It still bothered him that Shannon had risked her life for him and never once had hinted that he owed her anything for it. Not even so much as a thank-you or a hug.
Instead of thanking her, he had yelled at her. That bothered him, too.
No surprise there, Whip thought sardonically. Everything about that girl bothers me.
«If my brother doesn’t have the manners to thank you,» Willow said, «I do. You’re welcome to come to our ranch anytime, and to stay for as long as you like.»
«Amen,» Caleb said. «Much as I hate to admit it, I’d miss the sound of Whip’s flute calling up the dawn when he comes visiting.»
«And just who accused me of stampeding the cattle with my ‘spirit pipes’?» Whip asked instantly, grateful for the change of subject.