His Hired Bride. Susan Fox
bossier than I ever thought.”
Eadie’s brows went up. “You need bossing more than I ever thought. Good night now.”
Eadie didn’t give him another chance to delay her. Standing by Hoyt’s big bed in the soft lamplight had put enough pictures in her brain that she’d have to blot out, along with the ones of him shirtless in the doctor’s office.
She made her escape, but just outside the front door she nearly tripped over Mike and Mose, who were sprawled like roadkill just outside the front door. Eadie took a moment to bend down to give them a pat.
“So you two do set up a sentry after dark.”
Mose rolled over for a belly rub and Mike did the same.
“Some watchdogs you are,” she scoffed with a laugh as she briefly accommodated their shameless appeal. When she had, she straightened. “Back on duty, boys.”
Both dogs whined as she went to her pickup and got in, but they subsided quickly enough and went back to their usual watchdog postures. Which was to lie flat on their sides like lumpy, long-eared rugs.
Eadie did take a minute at lunch that next day to call Donovan Ranch to check on Hoyt. Miss Ed filled her in, because Hoyt had company. Eadie tried not to jump to the conclusion that his visitor was a woman, but since Miss Ed didn’t say who the company was, she’d gotten the impression that one of Hoyt’s women had dropped by. Could it be the beautiful Celeste?
News traveled fast in and around Coulter City, and the doc had seemed amused that Eadie had been with Hoyt so he might have mentioned it to his wife. Someone was sure to have noticed that Eadie was driving Hoyt around in his new pickup. Since Hoyt never let a woman drive, that would have been noticed faster than anything else.
Hoyt had also gone into the pharmacy by himself, bold as you please, wearing his ripped and bloody shirt with the white bandage peeking through the gap in the cloth, so no doubt everyone knew about that by now, too.
Clearly one of his former girlfriends or possibly some potential new one had come by to look in on him. That meant Eadie wouldn’t need to bother. She’d been the gap-girl yesterday afternoon and last night, since Hoyt was between women, but perhaps her time doing that was already done.
By the time Eadie finally finished her work and her usual evening chores, she was filthy, fatigued and famished. There was leftover roast in the refrigerator that she’d craved for the past two hours, and there was enough that she wouldn’t have to cook.
She was hot and sweaty, and she was still itching from the hay chaff that had been stirred up by the breeze coming through a loft window that had somehow come open. She’d not wanted it to keep flapping, so she’d made a quick trip up to close it, then got caught in a swirl of chaff that had gusted off the loft floor as she’d reached the top of the ladder.
But that was the least of her problems. She was greasy from a frustratingly long encounter with the tractor that had been elderly when she’d graduated high school over eight years ago. It was acting up yet again, an almost weekly occurrence, and Eadie didn’t want to think about how much it would cost to fix this time. Whatever was wrong with it now was beyond her modest mechanical abilities. She’d have to get someone out to have a look, because it was a cinch she’d never be able to make payments on a loan for a new one. Or even a used one. Since she used it regularly enough, borrowing someone else’s was out of the question so a repair was her only choice.
It was things like those and a half dozen other little problems that day that made her wonder how long she could continue on. Eadie had faced hard times before, both when her widowed mother had been alive and they’d done most of the work themselves, and later when Eadie had made a go of things alone in spite of the inheritance taxes she’d had to come up with after her mother had passed away six years ago.
That had been crippling enough for someone who was land rich but cash poor, but she’d held on with the help of a loan, though it would take another four years to pay it in full.
If she hadn’t loved ranch work and country life so dearly, she might have sold out years ago and moved to town. Eadie shunned the thought most of the time, but there were days like today when the thought was hard to reject. Particularly now, when her energy was spent and her fighting spirit felt faint, and it seemed like nothing in life would ever get appreciably better.
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