He told Bellard to take his contract and his opinions back to Laram, and that Blackthornne Ranch would find another buyer. She turned from the stove. Matteo met her eyes. Bellard wasn't bluffing, Miss Hartwell. That contract was a third of the ranch's income.
The weight of it settled into the room. He lost a third of his income, she said. Today, she turned back to the stove. The fat was ready. She took it off the heat.
She stood at the counter for a long moment, looking at the wall, at the window with its mostly repaired draft. At the kitchen, she had spent 3 weeks making functional. Then she opened her mother's recipe book to the page she'd been considering for days and hadn't let herself attempt yet. A long recipe, time-consuming, expensive in ingredients she'd been saving a roast beef with vegetables, dark gravy, and a crust pastry lid. Supper.
Her mother had signed the kind of when she wanted to tell someone something, she couldn't put in words. She wasn't going to put it in words either. She was going to cook it. She started the pastry first because it needed time to rest. When supper was on the table that evening, Gideon came in and stopped the way he always did.
But this time, what he was looking at was different. Not just a hot meal, something she had clearly spent the afternoon building. He sat down. He served himself in the boys. He ate without talking, but differently than usual, like a man eating something that required his attention.
Halfway through the meal, Emmett said very casually, looking at his plate, Mateo said the bell man came today. Gideon looked at him. Did he? He said, "You told him off." Mateo talks too much. Emmett kept his eyes on his plate.
Was it because of Rosalie? The kitchen was very quiet. Gideon looked across at Rosalie. Gideon looked across at Rosalie, and neither of them did anything in particular, but something passed between them in that look that she could not have named and wasn't going to try to. Eat your supper, Gideon said to Emmett.
Emmett ate his supper. Later, when the boys were upstairs and the kitchen was clean, and the house had settled into its nighttime quiet, Rosalie was at the counter covering the leftover pastry when she heard the front door and then Gideon's boots in the entry. She thought he was going upstairs. Instead, he stopped in the kitchen doorway. You heard about Bellard, he said.
Mateo mentioned it. It's not your problem, he said. I want to be clear about that. It was my decision, and it doesn't change your position here. She folded the cloth over the pastry.