Look to the earth, my son. She is older and wiser than little people like us. She has seen all things come and go, and she knows that our small trials will pass and fade as if they had never been.
Wise words from a wise old man. But when
John’s spirit was churning, as it was tonight, it was hard to find much comfort in them.
A cold wind whipped his unbound hair and chilled him through the long-sleeved shirt he’d worn to bed. He’d been outside long enough. After a last check from both ends of the porch, he opened the door and stepped back into the house.
“Stay right where you are!” The voice was Emma’s. In the faint light from the dying fire, he saw her to the left of the doorway. She was half-crouched for an attack, her hands gripping the heavy iron poker from the fireplace.
John stifled a curse. “Emma, it’s only me! Put that thing down!”
Straightening to her full, diminutive height, she lowered the poker. John turned on the lamp. Still defiant, she stood in the circle of light with his oversized gray thermals drooping around her legs. Her hair was a mass of tangled curls. Her eyes blazed with annoyance.
“Give me that.” He laid the gun on the table and yanked the poker out of her hands. “What did you think you were doing? I had a gun. I could’ve shot you.”
“I heard somebody at the front door. I couldn’t be sure it was you. Why did you go outside? Was somebody there?”
“Since I wasn’t sleeping, I thought I might as well check around. It was a waste of time. There’s nothing out there but rain.”
Suspicion flashed in her eyes, as if she sensed that he was holding out. Guilty as charged, he thought.
“I wasn’t sleeping either,” she said, hitching up the drawstring waist of her thermals. “Right now, I couldn’t sleep if I had to.”
She was shivering, whether from cold or from stress he couldn’t be sure. But maybe it was time for a truce.
Without a word, he picked up the blanket that lay on the back of the love seat, wrapped it around her, and guided her to a seat. She curled up in it willingly, snuggling into the blanket while he added a couple of small logs and some kindling to the coals in the fireplace.
“As long as we’re awake, we might as well be warm,” he said. “I’ve got the makings for hot chocolate. Say the word if you want some.”
“That sounds nice, as long as it’s not too much trouble.”
“No trouble. It might even make you sleepy.”
In the kitchen, he broke the seal on a can of powdered cocoa mix, added it to some milk, and heated it in a pan on the stove. He’d never cared much for hot chocolate. It was too sweet. But he’d bought the mix a few years ago, in the hope of having David over for a weekend visit. He should have known better. The visit had never happened.
When the cocoa was hot, he poured it into mugs and carried them to the fireplace. Giving one to Emma, he settled at the other end of the love seat. By now the wood he’d laid on the coals had begun to burn. A small but cheerful blaze crackled in the fireplace. Stretching his legs, he rested his feet on the hearth.
Emma sipped the cocoa. “This is perfect,” she said. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” John didn’t feel much like talking. But it was pleasant, sitting here by the fire in the middle of the night, with a pretty woman—and Emma was pretty, as pretty as the little brown birds that flashed through sunlit pine branches. There was a liveliness about her, a bright, intelligent spirit that made up for her lack of classic beauty.
Of course, he would never tell her that.
She’d been gazing into the fireplace. Now she turned toward him. “You know I’ve got some hard decisions to make. It would help if I knew more about Boone. What can you tell me?”
Her question shattered John’s brief contentment. “How much do you already know?” he asked, weighing the question of how much to tell her.
“I know that he’s handsome and charming, and that he lies through his teeth. I know that he stole my life savings, and that if I’d stayed with him in that awful place, I would’ve been raped, or worse. How’s that for starters?”
“Pretty accurate, I’d say.”
“How much do you know about his family—if he even has one?”
“Enough.” That much was true. “They’re bush people. They’ve chosen to live off the land, away from civilization, where there’s nobody to interfere with them. Where you come from, people would probably call them hillbillies.”
“You talk as if you know them.”
“Most people around here do, at least by sight. They have a homestead far up one of the canyons. Every few months they come into Ketchikan for supplies. The head of the family is the mother. Her husband, whoever he was, is long gone. He left her to raise three children—two boys . . . and a girl. All of them are grown now. Boone is her second son.”