maybe I had walked over some very rough terrain?”
“Yeah, that’d do it, but not if it was only a short walk. Then, too, these could be old shoes. They might have walked many miles before last night.”
Hope had no grounds for disagreement, although she somehow felt that the condition of her shoes was immutably connected to whatever had brought her here in the night.
She began looking through the pieces of wet fabric, and almost immediately noticed something strange. “It’s terribly snagged.”
“I told you it was tattered and torn.”
“Yes, there’s a tear right here. But there are so many snags.”
“Like what?”
“Look at the piece I’m holding. See all those little—uh, bumps, I guess you’d call them, where a thread has been pulled by something?”
Matt bent over for a closer look. “Do those snags mean anything to you?”
“If you’re asking, do I remember how my clothes got so badly snagged, the answer is no, they don’t mean anything to me. But what would cause such devastating wear and tear on one’s clothing?”
Matt shrugged. “Beats me. Unless you fought your way through a bunch of prickly mesquite brush.”
“Is there some of that around here?”
“Lots of it. Also scrub cedar and oak, and both of those can scratch the living daylights out of a person dumb enough to tangle with them.”
She shot him a dirty look. “Other reasons beside stupidity might have caused me to tangle with some prickly plants, you know.”
Her flare of defensive temper surprised him. “I wasn’t even talking about you,” he retorted.
“Who were you talking about then, the man in the moon? Let me ask you this. Wasn’t I wearing underwear or were you too squeamish to bring it back inside with the rest of this mess, which I might add, was mostly caused by your scissors?”
“Women’s underwear does not make me feel squeamish,” he said coldly. “For your information, I took a brassiere and a pair of panties off your wet, shivering body, and once you were bathed, dressed in my sweats and warming up under the best blankets in the house, I rinsed the mud out of your delicacies and hung them in the laundry room to dry.”
Hope’s jaw dropped. “You bathed me?”
“Don’t you dare use that indignant tone on me, lady. You were covered with mud. I suppose I should have put you to bed in that condition?”
Heat suffused Hope’s face. “Bathing someone is just so—so intimate.”
“Under this morning’s conditions, it wasn’t even close to being intimate.” It was a lie but Matt managed to sound totally and innocently sincere.
Hope tried to steer this uncomfortable conversation in another direction. “I knew these huge sweats I’ve got on had to belong to someone very tall.” And very handsome? He was handsome; it was simply a fact of her present limited life. Not that she wanted to expand on that fact. Goodness, she could be married, or engaged, or living with a man she loved madly.
“I rolled up the legs, but I could cut them off, if you prefer,” Matt said.
“I wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Suit yourself, but I can see that you’re swimming in loose material.”
“Which is just fine for now.”
“Are you finished with those pieces of cloth?”
“I guess so. Oh, wait a sec. I see a label.” Hope studied the label of a hunk of fabric, then sighed because it meant absolutely nothing to her. “I was hoping…” she said in a husky little voice.
“Look, I’m going to go down to the bunkhouse and see how the men are making out. I’d feel better about leaving you alone if you were in bed again.”
“Fine,” Hope said dully. Matt was instantly at her side to help her up from the chair, and he held her arm all the way back to the bedroom and the bed. She told herself to forget that he was a tall, deliciously sexy, good-looking man—who seemed to get better looking every time they talked—but his big hand clasped around her arm made that impossible to do. She was glad when she was finally under the covers again and Matt had left the room.
She heaved a long, helpless sigh. This was not a game, and she really must be demented to be noticing a man’s good looks under such trying circumstances.
But then, maybe that was the kind of woman she was. Maybe she slept around. Maybe any sexy guy was fair game. Maybe she was a—a tramp!
Tears rolled down her temples. Matt McCarlson had not only undressed her, he’d given her a bath. Maybe she should be worrying about what kind of person he was. After all, she had been unconscious and entirely at his mercy!
Matt stayed away from the house for a couple of hours. He talked to the men at the bunkhouse and they weren’t a bit shy with their complaints.
“Danged if we ain’t out here trapped like rats in their hole.”
“We can’t hardly stand to look at each other anymore, Matt.”
“Hell, I’d take backbreaking work over being stuck in this bunkhouse with these yahoos any day of the week.”
“Matt, have you been listening to the radio for weather reports? The radio out here ain’t working worth a damn. We’ve been getting mostly static, probably because of the storm.”
“It’s the same in the house, Joe, but I did manage to catch one weather report and it looks like we’re in for more rain.”
The grousing went on, and Matt drank a cup of strong bunkhouse coffee and let them vent. They had a right, he felt. Cowboys were used to being outdoors. The bunkhouse probably felt like a prison to them, just as the house would’ve felt to Matt if his time and thoughts hadn’t been so taken up by Hope LeClaire.
It occurred to Matt then that no one had said anything about her. There’d been no teasing comments and no tongue-in-cheek innuendo, which wasn’t at all like a bunch of cowhands, particularly cowhands with nothing to do but gripe about the weather.
He caught Chuck’s eye and could tell then from the foreman’s expression that there’d been no conversation between him and any of the men about the ranch’s unexpected guest. Giving his head a slight nod at Chuck, he indicated appreciation of his reticence. Chuck nodded back, and that was the end of it.
The bunkhouse had a kitchen and a bunch of tables and chairs. Most of the men could cook a little—a pot of chili or beef stew, red beans and rice, fried steak and potatoes—plain fare but filling, and there was a big pan simmering on the stove today. Matt rinsed his cup at the sink and noted that the men might be edgy as a hive of bees, but they planned to eat well that evening.
That thought raised the question of what he would feed Hope for dinner. Alone, he would come out here and eat whatever the men had cooked in that big pot,
