Only 05 - Autumn Lover

heart and the sudden, vivid color of her cheeks, her voice was cool and controlled when she turned to introduce Hunter.
    “Penny, this is Hunter, the new foreman,” Elyssa said. “Don’t bother calling him mister. He doesn’t believe in formality. Hunter, meet Miss Penelope Miller.”
    “A pleasure, Miss Miller,” Hunter said, bowing very slightly, his voice gentle.
    Penny smiled suddenly and dropped a small curtsy.
    “Please call me Penny,” she said. “Everyone else does.”
    “For a smile like that, and a cup of coffee, I’ll call you the Queen of Sheba.”
    Penny laughed out loud, delighted.
    “I’ll hold you to it,” she said. “Welcome to the Ladder S.”
    Elyssa stared, unable to believe that the polite, soft-spoken, gently teasing man in her kitchen was the same rude gunfighter who had called her a flirt and all but caressed her breasts in the silence of the barn.
    And I let him .
    I can’t forget that part of it. I let him !
    Unhappily Elyssa looked from Penny to Hunter. He was taking a cup of coffee from Penny, smiling at her over the rim, and complimenting her on the strength of the brew.
    For all that Hunter noticed Elyssa, she might as well have been a grease stain on the floor.
    Is this what Penny meant ? Elyssa asked herself. Is this how she felt when some idiot male couldn’t see past Mother to her ?
    Elyssa looked again at Penny, seeing her in a different way. At thirty, Penny was as fresh and appealing as a daisy. She had an honest face, a generous mouth, andfaint lines of life and laughter around her wide brown eyes.
    Most of all, in any man’s book, Penny had passed beyond the age of girlhood. She was a woman who had grown strong on the frontier of a wild land.
    Elyssa thought of Hunter’s cutting words— If I marry again, it will be to a woman, not to a spoiled little girl who doesn’t know her own mind .
    The thought that Hunter might just have found his woman was a chill moving beneath Elyssa’s skin. Even as she told herself that she shouldn’t begrudge Penny whatever happiness she could find, the nasty taste of envy soured Elyssa’s tongue.
    In that instant she understood just how deeply she was attracted to Hunter. Thinking of him with another woman was like having the ground cut out from beneath her feet, leaving her with no support.
    My God .
    Is this what it was like for my mother, this sudden, overwhelming desire for just one other person on earth ?
    Is this why an English aristocrat left her solid gold luxury and disgraced her family and abandoned her country…all for a man who was only slightly less wild than the land he loved ?
    In the end, though, Mother got the man she loved .
    Am I going to be like Penny, an old maid who wants only the man who didn’t want her ?
    “What do you think?” Penny asked.
    With an effort, Elyssa focused on the other woman.
    “About what?” Elyssa asked.
    Penny smiled. “Wool-gathering about ballrooms and carriages again?”
    The faintly scornful look Hunter gave Elyssa put the world right back under her feet. She straightened her spine and returned the cool look.
    “You think more about England than I do,” Elyssasaid crisply to Penny. “My thoughts are about problems closer to home.”
    “Hunter suggested that we bake enough bread for several weeks,” Penny said.
    “It will go moldy.”
    “Better moldy bread than none,” Hunter said succinctly. “I’ll hunt antelope and deer every chance I get. Can you jerk meat?”
    “Of course,” Elyssa said. “I can hunt, too.”
    Hunter’s black eyebrows rose, but he said nothing.
    “But the men prefer to eat beef,” Elyssa said.
    “We can’t spare any more steers until we know how many you have,” Hunter said bluntly. “In any case, you should have enough rations on hand to withstand a siege.”
    “We aren’t going to war.”
    “Yet,” Hunter said in a clipped voice. “But we will, Sassy. Bet on it. I put Mickey to work making some water barrels. Seems he was apprenticed to a cooper before he ran away from Boston.”
    Elyssa barely heard. She was still hearing Hunter’s certainty that it would come down to a range war in order to hang on to the Ladder S.
    Ever since Mac had been murdered by the Culpepper gang, she had been afraid of just that.
    “You should have given that spotted stud to the army,” Hunter added, seeing Elyssa’s dismay. “Then they might have worried about protecting the Ladder S as well as the immigrant trains.”
    “The stud wasn’t