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“What’s going on between you two?” Empty wandered over to the stove.
“What do you mean?” She slid him a brief, uncommunicative glance.
“I heard you two arguing just now.”
“We weren’t arguing. Just disagreeing.” Dallas turned on the burner underneath the cast iron skillet. “We worked it out. Everything’s fine now.”
“Good.” He nodded in satisfaction. “The Rutledges are giving him enough grief without you pouring more on him.”
Dallas knew that better than he did, but she chose not to say so. “Did you know Quint is a grandson of the Calders?” she asked instead.
“Is that a fact?” Empty murmured, eyebrows raised. “Says something about the Calders, that they’d send one of their own.”
“How?” Dallas gave him a puzzled look.
“When they’ve got trouble, they don’t send somebody else to deal with it; they handle it themselves. You don’t see that too often nowadays,” he added thoughtfully. “It’s kind of nice to know there are still people like that around.”
A faint smile curved her mouth. His words were an echo of one of the old codes of conduct that decreed a man should fight his own battles. Considering how strongly rooted her grandfather’s beliefs were in the old traditions, Dallas wasn’t surprised that this decision of the Calders to send Quint had found favor in his eyes.
After adding a final strip of bacon to the skillet, Dallas started to reseal the package. Empty peered over her shoulder.
“Don’t be so stingy with the bacon.”
Dallas stared at the six strips in the skillet and frowned. “Six isn’t stingy, unless you plan on having some.”
“I already had my breakfast,” he reminded her. “But Quint’s got a man’s appetite. He’d probably eat the whole package if you fried it.”
She added two more slices to the large skillet. “How’s that?”
“It’ll do,” Empty declared.
The aroma of frying bacon filled the kitchen, banishing the smoke smell, when Quint returned to it, a blue chambray work shirt tucked inside his jeans and a belt fastened around his middle. A smile edged the corners of his mouth at the sight of Dallas standing at the stove, her long coppery blond hair flipped forward to fall over one shoulder, baring the curve of her neck.
The urge was strong to walk up behind her, slide his arms around her waist, and nibble along that curve. It was only Empty’s presence in the room that prevented Quint from taking such a liberty. It was enough that he knew Dallas would have welcomed it if he had. The knowledge brought a deep contentment that warmed and buoyed him. The shine of it was in his eyes when he met her over-the-shoulder glance.
“Excellent timing,” Dallas said. “Your eggs will be ready in a minute.”
“Good. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I smelled that bacon.” After pouring a fresh cup of coffee, Quint carried it to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down.
Empty occupied the chair across the table from him, his gnarled and sun-leathered hands clasped around an empty cup. “Dallas tells me that all the firemen pulled out except for a handful. I gotta admit I’m not looking forward to going out there and surveying the extent of the damage.”
Earlier Quint had been dreading it, too. But the prospect no longer bothered him in the least. Those moments with Dallas had changed that—and the brief taste they’d given him of the glory a man and woman could know, the kind that evoked an emotion older than time. It was something he had unknowingly sought for years.
It wasn’t a man’s way to question that it was too soon or too sudden for such certainty; he simply accepted it as fact.
“The fire accomplished one thing.” Quint took a sip of his coffee. “I planned on doing some winter seeding to improve the graze. And the fire provided a clean slate for that.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.” But Empty’s view wasn’t as positive. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we could have stopped those flames if the fire trucks hadn’t shown up when they did. A hundred years ago we wouldn’t have had a prayer of halting it.”
“There might have been a way,” Quint said. “I remember a story my grandfather told me about a prairie fire that threatened to sweep across hal
f or more of the Triple C range back in the ranch’s early days. To stop it, they killed a couple of steers, skinned them, and used ropes to stretch the carcasses between two riders, then dragged them over the fire until they smothered it.”
“How gruesome,” Dallas said with an expressive little shudder and transferred the fried eggs from the skillet to a plate.
“I never heard of doing such a thing…but I can see how it could work,” Empty declared with a slow, affirming nod of his head.
Dallas crossed to the table and set a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast in front of Quint. A smile accompanied his upward glance, the warm light in his eyes conveying more than mere gratitude.
