“Think they might rescue us today?” she asked as she filled her plate.
“Nope. All that cracking noise we’re hearing is more limbs breaking from trees. They’ll be down everywhere, blocking the roads and probably even the lane from the road up to this place,” he answered, but he didn’t turn around. “No coffee this morning?”
“If you can stand to drink it, you can make it. I can’t bear the thought of swallowing any more of that stuff.” She took a bite. “This hash needs some onion and Worcestershire sauce.”
Cody went to the workbench, picked up a plate, and filled it with the meat-and-potato mixture. He took his first bite and said, “I miss salt and pepper.”
“Me too, and you’re going to miss potatoes after this meal,” Stevie said. “I used the last of them, and there’s only one package of meat left in the refrigerator, so we’ll be trying to figure out how to use canned tuna and chicken. What’s in the fridge is unmarked, so I have no idea what it is. We’re down to six cans of beans. What’s the first thing you’re going to eat when we get rescued?”
“Food is food,” he muttered.
“Who pissed in your cereal this morning? I know you were having a nightmare when you woke up. It might help to talk about it rather than ignoring what happened,” she said. “If you’ll remember, it helped me to talk about my mother, and I’m all ears if you want to tell me what’s going on in your head or in your nightmares.”
“Just leave me alone,” he said.
Stevie recognized his expression as the same, rather cold one she had seen when he broke up with her. At the time it was devastating, but now she wondered just exactly what Cody was hiding.
“Talking about it won’t help,” he grumbled.
“Coming from the man who told me something different about my grief for my mother,” Stevie said.
“That’s different.” He cleaned off his food, washed the dish and fork out in the bathroom sink, and set it back on the worktable.
Leave him alone, Stevie warned herself, but she just couldn’t do it.
“What’s so different? Is it because I’m a woman and we need to talk, but you’re a big, tough cowboy who can keep his feelings inside?” she asked.
Cody shot a mean look toward her. “I’m not having this conversation with you, Stephanie. I’m going out in the barn to work for a while. I’m going to clean out the stalls, and split all the wood that’s out there. I need something to do.” He grabbed his coat from one of the nails on the wall beside the door.
“If you’re going out to work, then by damn, I’m going with you. You don’t have to talk to me, but I’m not staying in this tack room all day by myself. I can split wood or muck out stalls right along with you,” she declared.
“Suit yourself,” he said as he went through the door. Dolly, all three kittens, and Dixie paraded along behind him.
Our first fight, Stevie thought, and I don’t even know what it’s about. But I’m pretty damn sure there won’t be makeup sex when it’s over. Not that either of us would want that right now after three days with no shower. Thank God it’s wintertime, or we would really be smelling ripe by now.
Stevie slipped her coat on and buttoned it up the front. She hadn’t realized just how warm the little stove kept the tack room until she stepped out into the cold barn. The aroma of hay and what was just the scent of every barn she’d ever been in was different from the smells of the tack room. She took a deep breath, the cold almost burning her lungs, and went straight to her van, where she rustled up two stocking hats and a couple of pairs of work gloves. Cody had been an old bear all morning, but if he caught a cold or pneumonia, he could be even worse. She found him in the last stall with an ax in his bare hands.
“Put this on!” She laid the cap on the rail and went back to the tack room.
“I’ve got my cowboy hat. I don’t need that,” he said.
“If your stupid ears get frostbitten and fall off, how are you going to keep your reading glasses on when you pass forty? You’re getting pretty damn close to that age right now,” she said, “but have it your way.”
He removed his cowboy hat, hung it on the post of a nearby stall, and shoved the stocking hat down over his ears. “Happy now?”
“Frankly, darlin’, as Rhett Butler said in Gone with the Wind, I don’t give a damn, but I imagine your ears appreciate the warmth. And here’s something else that your hands might say thank you for.” She held out a pair of work gloves. “They’re pretty well worn, but they’re better than nothing.”
“I don’t need them, and they probably would be too small anyway?” he said.
“In case you didn’t notice, I’m a tall girl. I have big hands and big feet, and if you will remember my sweatpants were long enough for you too. The gloves will fit you, and you are a doctor. Your hands are important, but hey, if your ears are as much as you want to protect from frostbite—not to mention blisters on your hands from swinging that ax—then again, it’s your business,” she said.
He took the gloves from her and shoved his hands down into them. “Is there anything you don’t have in that van?”
“Not much, but this fiasco has taught me to put a box of emergency candy bars and some of those packages of instant coffee in the van before I take it out again,” she said.
Cody picked up the ax and started splitting wood again, but he didn’t have anything else to say. Stevie went to work shoveling out the three remaining stalls and putting down fresh straw in each one. The barn would be clean for whoever leased or bought Max’s ranch.
At noon Cody had finished splitting and stacking all the wood. Stevie was done with the stalls and had even swept up the barn floor. And neither of them had spoken a single word to each other. Dixie had come out to romp around in the few bales of hay stacked against the far wall and play hide-and-seek with the cats.
“Time for your dinner, little girl,” Stevie said as she picked up the cria and took her into the tack room that seemed too warm now. She changed Dixie’s diaper, fixed and fed her the noon bottle, and still Cody hadn’t come in.
“Let him stew out there in the cold,” Stevie muttered as she added a can of corn and one of crushed tomatoes to the leftover hash and made a reasonable facsimile of soup. Then she added milk to a few cups of the flour she found in the cabinet and a little of the leftover bacon grease for cooking oil. “I’m having hoecake and soup for dinner. If he wants to starve, that’s his business.”
“Something smells good,” Cody said when he came through the door.
“He speaks,” Stevie said. “We’re having soup and hoecakes. You might know them as campfire biscuits. I had to cook it right on the top of the stove, but I did clean it as best I could.”
“You used all the rest of the bacon drippings?” He raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, I did, but if you don’t want to eat the hoecake, that’s fine by me. I’ll put some of that jelly in the refrigerator on what’s left over and call it dessert,” she told him.
“You’re awfully prickly.” Cody asked.