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Chase glanced at his watch. “It’s two o’clock now. By the time we get back and get the horses loaded, we should pull in here a little after four.”
“I’ll watch for them,” Cat promised.
She waited until they drove out of the yard before she turned back to the house. A chipped cement block propped the screen door open. As she started to shove it aside, the telephone rang in the house. Leaving the block in place, she hurried to answer it.
“Circle Six Ranch.” Silence followed. Frowning, Cat tried again. “Hello. Hello?” There was a click on the line. A moment later she heard the distinctive hum of the dial tone.
Shrugging it off as a wrong number, Cat hung up the kitchen extension and went back to the living room. Her glance fell on the pile of hangered clothes draped across the platform rocker. Another stack lay on the sofa. Since it was an obvious and easy place to start, she grabbed up a handful of Quint’s shirts and pants, carried them into his room, and hung them in the closet.
From there, she made a detour into the spare room to make sure its closet was empty. It wasn’t. There were a dozen shirts, an equal number of jeans and slacks, three suits, and two sets of uniforms hanging on its rod.
“Aren’t you the clotheshorse, taking up two closets,” Cat muttered under her breath. “I can fix that.”
She snatched the shirts off the rod and charged into the hall straight to his bedroom. She yanked open the closet door, determined to cram the shirts in with his other clothes.
The closet was empty.
Dumbfounded, Cat stared at the bare shelves and clothes rod, every inch wiped clean of dust. She turned slowly from it, her glance straying to the walnut-stained bureau. Crossing to it, she pulled out a drawer. Empty.
Still carrying the shirts, she went back to the spare room, skirted the neatly stacked boxes and stopped in front of the oak dresser. Almost hesitantly she opened one of the drawers and looked inside at the folded undershirts and white briefs. A second drawer held socks and two sets of thermal underwear. Sweaters and sweatshirts were in a third.
Cat didn’t bother to look any farther. There could be only one reason Logan had moved all of his clothes in here—he planned to sleep in this room. Which meant he had intended for her to have the other bedroom.
She remembered the vase of flowers—and promptly sat down on the nearest box. Had the bouquet been nothing more than a thoughtful gesture on his part? More than that—why had she been so ready to think the worst? Cat shied away from the answer to that.
Very carefully, she hung his shirts back in the closet, taking pains to shake out any folds so they wouldn’t end up wrinkled, then left the spare room, closing the door behind her. Still mulling over the implications of the discovery, she walked slowly back to the living room. She looked thoughtfully at her clothes, hesitated, then gathered up an armful and carried it into the bedroom she had previously regarded as Logan’s.
After hanging up the clothes on hangers, Cat tackled the luggage and boxes, separating hers from Quint’s and carting them to their respective rooms. Before unpacking any of them, she stopped to fix the roast for their evening meal.
In the kitchen, she opened the refrigerator door, then noticed the radio on the counter next to it and flipped it on. Ten minutes later she was standing at the sink, peeling potatoes and absently singing along with the radio.
“She ain’t only purty to look at, she can sing, too.”
Startled by the drawled comment, Cat whirled around. Alarm shivered through her, turning her dry-mouthed when she saw Lath Anderson lounging in the kitchen doorway, an arm idly braced against the casing, his hat tipped to the back of his head.
Recovering, she demanded, “How did you get in here?”
“The door was standing open. I took that as an invitation to come in,” he said with a taunting grin. Too late Cat remembered she had left both doors propped open. “That ain’t a very smart thing to do. It tends to let the flies in.”
One buzzed around him. He watched it a moment, then his hand flashed, snaring it out of the air. The lightning speed of it carried a warning all of its own.
“See what I mean?” He dropped the dead fly on the floor and ran his hand down the side of his jeans in a cleaning motion.
“What is it you want here, Lath?” She had a partially peeled potato in one hand and the paring knife in the other. She tightened her hold on the knife.
“Someone told me you had married Echohawk.” He sauntered into the kitchen. “But I had to see it for my own eyes. Kinda sudden, wasn’t it?”
“It happens that way sometimes.”
“It was one of them—your eyes meet and before you know it, you can’t keep your hands off each other—was it?” His leisurely pace kept bringing him closer.
“More or less.” Cat wondered whether Lath knew that he blocked her from both the living room and the side door to the utility room. She had the uneasy feeling that he did. She was suddenly furious with herself for not moving away from the sink when she first saw him, instead of allowing herself to be trapped.
His glance wandered around the kitchen. “Where’s the kid?”
“With his grandfather. They should be pulling in any minute with another load of our things,” Cat lied, well aware it would be a good hour or more before they returned.
Lath’s eyes laughed at her, as if somehow he knew the truth. “How’s he like his new daddy?”
