Kady awoke to the smell of frying fish. Smiling, her eyes still closed, she yawned and stretched and thought she must be in heaven. When Cole kissed her softly, it seemed perfectly normal when her arms went about his neck and she kissed him back in a sweet, closed-lip kiss.
“Good morning, Mrs. Jordan,” he said softly against her lips. “I loved sleeping with you in my arms. I have never en
joyed a night more.”
Kady just kept smiling, still not opening her eyes, her hands clasped about his neck. When his hand touched her hip, then moved upward, she let out a little sigh against his lips.
It was Cole who pulled away, frowning down at her.
“Oh!” Kady said, looking up at him. No doubt she had reminded him of what he could not do. Reminded him of—
“Breakfast is ready,” he said, turning away, his frown gone, and his good humor seeming to be restored.
It took Kady a few moments to recover herself, and Cole laughed at her when she found she was stiff from sleeping on the ground. He offered to comb the tangles out of her hair, but Kady refused to let him touch her.
“You look like a woman who is enjoying her honeymoon,” he said as he handed her two beautifully fried trout.
Kady almost said that she was enjoying it, but that statement might have been traitorous to Gregory.
Since they hadn’t really made camp, it was a quick matter to pack before they started walking toward the ruins that Cole had yet to tell her about. They hadn’t walked more than a couple of hours before the skies opened up and a freezing mountain rain came pouring down on them.
Though they took only minutes to get the tarpaulin up, Cole shouting orders over the noise of the rain, when they crawled under it, they were drenched. Wet and cold, they huddled under the tarp, a blanket draped around them.
“I’m hungry,” Cole said.
As though those words were a clarion call to Kady—which they were—she tossed back the blanket and prepared to go out into the rain to gather greens. With no fire, she couldn’t bake biscuits or roast anything.
Cole caught her arm, frowning. “You don’t expect much from men, do you?” he said with anger in his voice. “I am the provider. I will get the food.”
With that he grabbed his bow and arrows and slipped out into the rain. “And where are we going to build a fire?” Kady muttered as she watched the rain pour down around her.
Within minutes Cole returned with a couple of rabbits and set about building a fire under the tarp. Kady pointed out that the smoke from the fire would blow back on them and suffocate them, but Cole, with great patience, told her that if a man was a good woodsman, he knew how to position the fire so the smoke would blow into the rain.
His theory worked perfectly for about fifteen minutes; then the wind changed and the smoke blew back on them. To escape it, they tossed the blanket over their heads and hid under it. When Kady started telling him, “I told you so,” he began kissing her until they tumbled backward, their bodies entwined.
Kady, trying to remember where she was and who she was with, made attempts to push him away while keeping her body stiff.
When Cole’s kisses did not make her relax, he threw the blanket back, then rolled away from her, his hands clenched at his sides. “What can I do that would make you forget that man? Kady, do you love him so very, very much that you can see no other man? What did he do to earn every morsel of your love?”
Kady opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it. It wasn’t right to compare Cole to Gregory, but, truthfully, there had never seemed to be time enough with Gregory. Phones were always ringing, people always knocking on the door. And she was always so tired from standing on her feet all day that most of the time she didn’t care about romance. If Gregory gave her a kiss on the back of the neck while she was cooking, that was enough for her.
“All right,” he said, “don’t answer me.” She could see that he was still angry as he sat up and began to tend to the fire. The wind had shifted again, so the smoke was blowing away from them. In spite of herself, Kady thought with regret, No more huddling under a blanket.
As she looked at Cole’s broad back, bent over the fire, preparing food for them, Kady felt bad for the way she was treating him. He had been so good to her, taking care of her, even marrying her when she could find no way to support herself. If it hadn’t been for him, she’d have starved to death in that ungenerous town. Her mind raced over all the nice things he had done for her: arranging a bath at the hot springs, always protecting her, risking his life when he thought she was hurt. And, as he’d said, this was the only honeymoon he was going to have.
“I like you too much,” she said softly to his back. “I have never had a man pay as much attention to me as you have. You spoil me, and I’m afraid that I like it.”
For a moment she didn’t think he’d heard her, but when he turned, a piece of rabbit in his hand, he was smiling at her as though she’d just given him the greatest compliment of his life. Feeling embarrassed, Kady looked down at her lap and not at him. Did he have to be so very good-looking?
When Cole had his own food, he stretched out under the tarp, propped himself up on one arm, his long legs seeming to curl around Kady; then he looked up at her with a bit of a smile. “I want you to tell me everything there is to know about you.”
At this statement Kady laughed, but when she saw Cole’s face, she knew he was serious. “I have led a very boring life, and it would probably put you to sleep.”
“I can’t imagine that anything you have to say would bore me. I want to know everything about you, and I want to listen.”
Maybe it was his sincerity or maybe it was that she wanted to sort out her thoughts and try to understand why what had happened to her had, but she started to talk and tell him about her life. She told him how she always knew she wanted to cook, that she had studied food instead of the other subjects at school. She didn’t know who the kings and queens or presidents were, but she knew the food from each time period, and who the famous chefs were. She went to college to study food, then on to New York on scholarship to study at Peter Kump’s Cooking School.
She told Cole how her goal was to open a small restaurant so she could experiment with food, and she wanted to travel and write cookbooks. When she was twenty-five, Gregory’s mother came to her at school and told Kady of her family’s steak house in Alexandria, Virginia. Mrs. Norman told how the restaurant was a dinosaur in the food world and she needed someone to turn it around. This appealed to Kady, so she set herself the goal to work at Onions for three years, even signing a three-year contract.