Mateo continued. Said some of the other buyers were talking that Gideon keeping a woman with your your history under his roof was making people question his judgment. Question his honesty. The fat crackled in the pan. What did Gideon say?
She asked. Matteo was was quiet for a moment. He told Bellard to take his contract and his opinions back to Laramie 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-conuming, 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 and the boys. He ate without talking, but differently than usual, like a man eating something that required his attention. Halfway through the meal, EMTT said very casually, looking at his plate, Matteo said the Bellard man came today.
Gideon looked at him. Did he? He said, "You told him off. " Mateo talks too much. EMTT kept his eyes on his plate. Was it because of Rosalie?