Marry Me by Susan Kay Law Page A

aren’t you?”
    “Maybe I am.” A trait he’d learned well and painfully, Jake thought.
    He half expected her to take her peace offering and dash on home. Hell, he would have; he’d deliberately been a far sight less than friendly. She’d have to be desperate for company to find his desirable.
    But she didn’t seem desperate about anything. More like unnaturally cheerful. She sang—badly—as she fetched water. She whistled as she attempted to tack the loose tar paper back on the walls, even when it took three tries. And, always, she smiled, the same sunshiny smile she bestowed on him right now.
    Her permanent and extreme cheerfulness had to be the oddest form of mental deformity he’d ever run across. There was no other explanation for it.
    Accepting the plate seemed a bigger surrender than it should, softening their uncompromising antagonism. He really should show her on her way. Make her understand that he couldn’t be bribed by something as cheap as biscuits. But damn, they smelled good, and he was getting awful tired of cold beans.
    So he grabbed the plate and figured he owed her something back. “You been busy. Lots of visitors.”
    She blinked in surprise. “Was that a conversational gambit?”
    “Hey, miracles happen sometimes.”
    Her smile dimmed a bare fraction. He figured it had to go away once in a while, but this was as close to solemn as he’d ever seen her. “Do you believe in them?”
    Had he ever believed in miracles? The concept was as foreign to him as flying to the moon, the word he’d mouthed a meaningless combination of random letters. “No.”
    How’d she do that? he wondered. Make her smile brighten while her eyes went soft and sad with sympathy?
    “Did you ever?” she asked.
    “I can’t recall.”
    “But—”
    “You’re not the sort to leave something well enough alone, are you?”
    She laughed then, rich and raucous. How odd that there was nothing at all ladylike about Emily Bright’s laugh. “No. You’d do well to take note of that, too.” She gestured at the plate. “You should eat. Before it gets cold.”
    “Eat right in front of you, when you’re not? That wouldn’t be too polite of me, would it?”
    She plopped her fists on her hips, tried to scowl at him. “You’re not trying to get out of tasting it, are you? I didn’t poison it, I swear.”
    He picked up the biscuit, tore into it, and nearly groaned aloud in pleasure. “It’s good,” he said in outrageous understatement. “When you give up homesteading, you can get a job as a cook, no problem.”
    Her eyes narrowed.
    “If you’re trying to look threatening,” he told her, “you’re failing miserably.”
    She squinted further before giving up with a laugh. “I know. It’s a curse; try as I might, I look as innocuous as a kitten.”
    “You just look harmless?”
    “Only look. I’ve got nasty claws, and don’t you forget it.”
    “Uh-huh.” He popped the rest of the biscuit in his mouth. “Heck, I’ll hire you, if everything you make is as good as this.” Now why hadn’t he shooed her on her merry way by now? he wondered. He was not given to small talk. Not given to talk, period, when you got right down to it. Even if he were, she wouldn’t be the one he’d be small-talking with. “But for all I know you’re running a restaurant already, for all the people trotting in and out.”
    “Hmm.” Speculation lit her eyes.
    “Oh no you don’t,” he said warningly.
    “Thanks for the suggestion. I was getting worried about scaring up enough cash before I proved up.”
    It should have infuriated him. But hell, who could take her seriously? Playing frontier girl might be all fun and games right now, but the instant winter grabbed hold, she’d be begging to get out of Montana. And if it didn’t happen that way, well, he’d just have to give her a nudge.
    “But I doubt very much you’ll be able to run a restaurant with an obviously dangerous maniac capering outside your front door,”