Only 04 - Only Love

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 stepcousinsquickly 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 Shannonended 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. “Sometimesthere 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