Loner's Lady. Lynna Banning

maybe five long strides. He’d start at the upper left boundary and methodically work his way across and then down. He’d cover every goddam inch of this ground before husband Dan came home.

      By suppertime, Jess had milked Florence and locked the hens in their shelter. For the evening meal he boiled up an armload of sweet corn he’d picked, and heated a can of beans from her pantry. He dished up two plates, piling his own high with ears of corn, and clumped upstairs to Ellen’s bedside.

      He also carried with him the oak limb he’d cut and shaped this afternoon. By God, he was more nervous about what she’d think of that bit of wood than about his cooking.

      Ellen heard him coming up the stairs, a clump and a pause, clump and pause. Balancing two steaming plates in his hands, he walked to the chiffonier and set them down next to the water basin.

      “Got something for you,” he said in a gravelly voice.

      “Supper, so I see. That is good of you, Mr. Flint.”

      “Something besides supper.” He unhooked an odd-shaped length of tree limb from his forearm and presented it for her inspection. “It’s a crutch. I made it this afternoon.”

      Ellen stared at it. The wood had been cleverly shaped using the natural curve of the limb to fashion an underarm prop, padded with one of her clean dish towels. Her throat tightened.

      She appreciated his gesture more than she could say.

      She tried to smile, but her lips were trembly. “How very kind of you, Mr. Flint.”

      “It’s a necessity, the way I see it. You need a way to get around, even if it’s only as far as your wardrobe and the commode. Which, I assume, is under the bed?”

      Her face flushed with heat. “It is.” Surely they should not speak of such an intimate matter as her commode? It made her feel uneasy, as if he knew things about her she wished he didn’t.

      He laid the crutch at the foot of the bed and turned to the plates on the chiffonier. “You can try it out after supper.”

      He settled two pillows under her shoulders and laid another across her lap, pulled two forks out of his shirt pocket and handed her one. Her plate he settled on the lap pillow. Two ears of corn swam in a puddle of melted butter, and suddenly she was ravenous.

      “I cannot imagine why I should be so hungry! All I’ve done is lie in bed all day.” She lifted the corn and sank her teeth into the tender, sweet kernels, watching Mr. Flint settle into the rocker and begin to eat as well.

      “Healing uses energy, just as much as baling hay. That’s why you’re hungry.”

      Ellen tipped her head to look at him. “You really are a doctor, aren’t you?”

      “Was one once, yes, as I told you. Sounds like you didn’t believe me. I served four years, until—” He stopped abruptly.

      “Until?”

      “Until I stopped believing I could save anyone.”

      “Sometimes I don’t know what I believe,” Ellen heard herself say. She gnawed another two rows of kernels to hide her embarrassment. Butter dribbled down her chin but she didn’t care. Corn on the cob had never tasted so good.

      He sent her a penetrating look. “Why is that, Miz O’Brian?”

      “It was clear once. Before Dan left. I believed in him. I believed in the farm, the land. In myself. I knew what my duty was as a wife.”

      She shouldn’t be telling him this! But she’d kept the fight between her duty and her feelings inside for so long she would burst if she didn’t let out just a little bit of it. “Now, I…well, of course I still believe in the land.”

      Jess stopped rocking. “But not in yourself?”

      She shook her head, then started on the second ear of corn on her plate. “Not so much anymore. Sometimes I have to ask myself…” She stopped, surprised at her need to talk about it. Surprised by the feelings she had kept locked up inside her.

      He tipped the rocking chair forward. “You ever ask yourself what you will do if Dan doesn’t come back? Why a woman like you is wasting her life waiting for a man who’s been gone all these years?”

      Her eyes widened. “Well, yes. I keep thinking one of these days he’ll just walk in the gate, but it’s been almost three years. I don’t know how to stop waiting for him.”

      Jess nodded. “I wondered the same thing about my own life once. Nobody walked through my gate, so one day I got the bit in my teeth and walked through it myself. Left the army and came north.”

      With Callie. That’s where everything started to go sour.

      “I expect I am talking too much,” Ellen said. Her cheeks grew pink as she forked up her beans. “I always talk to myself when I’m frightened or worried about something.”

      “Long conversations?” He didn’t have the vaguest idea why he asked that, other than he was taken with the idea of her talking to herself. What did an almost-dried-up farm wife say to herself?

      “Oh, not always. Sometimes I talk to Florence while I’m milking her. And the chickens, although they are terrible listeners.”

      Jess choked back a snort of laughter. Chickens. And Florence.

      “Sometimes I even talk to my carrots and tomatoes. I tell them how proud I am that they grow so nicely.”

      Jess fastened his gaze on the plate of food in his lap. Her guileless confession was like a sharp stick poking at his heart.

      “I’d say you’re lonely, Miz O’Brian.”

      She said nothing for a long while. Finally she pushed her empty plate to one side of the lap pillow and laid her fork down alongside the two well-cleaned corncobs. “Mr. Flint, could I trouble you for a glass of water?”

      Jess grinned. She sure could. He’d thought about his surprise most of the day. That is, when he wasn’t busy mapping the property. Tipping the two corncobs from her plate onto his, he went downstairs, returning in a few moments with two glasses of cold liquid.

      “Lemonade!” she exclaimed at the first taste. “Where did you—?”

      “At the mercantile in town.” The look of wonder and delight on her face pricked his chest in a way he hadn’t expected.

      She took two big swallows, sighed with pleasure and then skewered him with those eyes of hers. “You didn’t steal the lemons, did you?”

      “On the contrary. You paid for them.” He waited for her to object, but she said not one word, just wrapped her hands around the cool glass and smiled.

      “You don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve tasted lemonade.”

      He could guess. About as long as it had been since she’d cranked up a batch of ice cream or had a new dress or danced at a social.

      Or made love with a man.

      Where had that come from? Ah, hell, it was obvious. She didn’t have the look of a woman who ran loose; she tied up her hair at her neck and made do with chickens and a broken-down horse for company.

      And then there was his own hunger, Jess admitted. The human male was simpleminded in some very basic ways. But he couldn’t let that get in his way.

      “You ready to try out the crutch?”

      She drank the last of the lemonade and set the glass on the night table. “I guess I’m ready.”

      Jess studied her splinted right leg. “You’ll have to sit up and swing your legs to the edge of the bed. Let your right one stick straight out, and don’t try to bend it.”

      He settled his hands on her shoulders and pulled her up off the pile of pillows, then gently pivoted her body and eased her legs into position. He tried to shut out his