glanced at it. “That’s what Miss Chastain grabbed to fight the fire she started.”
She gave him a disgruntled look. She thought she’d done pretty well to find something to use.
Rocky held it up and she could see that it was an old quilt, streaked now with dirt and mud, and with long scorch marks running its length. “But isn’t this…?”
Jace’s direct gaze swung back to Alexis. “The heirloom quilt my great-grandmother made out of her wedding dress,” he said.
When she shut the guest room door behind her five minutes later, Alexis’s face was still burning with embarrassment.
How could she possibly have known that quilt was an heirloom? And what on earth had it been doing lying on a chair on the front porch if it was so important? Her family certainly never left such things thrown around, she thought self-righteously. Not that it would be easy to do so with one of the fifteenth-century tapestries that filled her family home.
Still, Alexis felt terrible about the ruined quilt and she knew she’d need to make up for it somehow, along with any other fire damage she had caused.
This was not an auspicious beginning to her new job.
She was too tired to think about that right now. Reaching up, she rubbed her temples with her fingertips, then looked at the room which was hers for the night.
Like the rest of the house, it was decidedly masculine. The bed had an old-fashioned iron bed frame and a high mattress covered with a black-and-blue plaid bedspread. A fifties-style lamp with a tiered shade in Chinese red stood on a rickety table that had been painted a cheerful yellow. A faded rag rug much like the one in the living room covered an oval section of floor beside the bed.
The riotous color scheme didn’t matter to her. Cleanliness was the most important thing and this room definitely looked clean. Stark, she thought with a grim smile as she set her suitcase on the bed and flipped it open, but certainly clean.
Delighted with the luxury of a private bathroom, Alexis quickly prepared for bed, then climbed gratefully between the covers. Even as she drifted off to sleep, she pictured Jace McTaggart’s face as he’d told her she didn’t belong in Sleepy River.
Tomorrow she would prove him wrong, she thought as she drifted into exhausted sleep. She appeared to be on some kind of quest to prove a number of people wrong. She might as well add him to the list.
Alexis thought of his snapping dark eyes, firm jaw, and emphatic statement that she didn’t belong. In fact, she would put him at the top of the list.
Chapter Two
Pounding on the bedroom door and a loud male voice announcing, “Breakfast in ten minutes,” had Alexis springing upright as if the palace guards had shot off a cannon over her head.
Hand clutched to her throat, she looked around wildly for Esther before she realized that her lady-in-waiting wasn’t there and she wasn’t in her own apartments in the palace.
It was several more seconds before her mind cleared enough to tell her that she was in Sleepy River, Arizona, where she had run for a temporary refuge from family tensions and responsibilities.
Exhaling a relieved sigh, she looked around and was pleased to see that the room didn’t seem quite as dauntingly colorful as it had the night before. In fact, the furnishings held a somewhat eclectic charm. The cheerful August sun streaming in the east-facing windows helped a great deal, sending a warm glow across the foot of the bed, the wooden floor and the cozy rug.
Alexis yawned, stretched and stared at her bedside clock. Even though she’d barely had six hours of sleep, she felt refreshed. More than that, she felt eager. She would begin preparing for her new job today—as soon as she had convinced her reluctant host/school board chairman that her presence there was no mistake.
She slipped out of bed and walked over to the window. Blinking in the bright morning sunlight, she gazed out at the view, and was pleasantly surprised to see an open pasture dotted with cattle in the distance. Towering pine, aspen and spruce trees covered the upslope of the nearest mountain and a fruit orchard grew nearby.
It was a lovely, pastoral scene marred only by the faint, lingering stench of burned grass from last night’s fire.
Wincing at the memory of her clumsiness, Alexis pulled away from the window and wondered how she was going to make up for that fiasco. Half-smiling, she remembered what her mother used to say, “Sometimes, all one can do is hold the head high and keep going, saying nothing.”
Somehow, Alexis didn’t think that Jace followed that philosophy.
What had he said? Ten minutes? Alexis glanced at the clock again. And she’d already wasted three. She scurried out of bed, grabbed some clothes from her suitcase and dashed for the bathroom.
Jace looked dubiously around the breakfast table. Rocky and Gil had arrived earlier than usual. Since Jace was the best cook of the three of them, he cooked breakfast while Gil and Rocky did some outside chores, then came in, unshaven, grizzled and already dusty, to eat eggs, toast and bacon and slurp coffee while they discussed the day’s work.
This morning, though, they hadn’t been able to make it outside for any chores because they’d been busy fighting over use of the bathroom. Jace had heard the unaccustomed weekday sounds of a couple of buzzing electric razors. He was then treated to the sight of his two hired men arriving in the kitchen with slicked-down hair, clean shirts, jeans and boots, wearing enough aftershave and cologne to knock over a nine-hundred-pound steer.
“You two boys going somewhere?” he’d asked, staring first at one, then the other of them.
“Nah,” they’d answered in harmony, then shuffled their feet and sat down. In unison, they turned to stare, unblinking, at the new schoolteacher’s bedroom door. They reminded him of a couple of coyotes waiting outside a prairie dog’s den for the tasty morsel to appear.
When her bedroom door did open and she emerged, Alexis jumped back immediately, alarmed by the rush of two large male bodies in her direction. The cowboys bowed before her and she threw Jace an alarmed look over their bobbing heads. He fought a grin, pleased to see that for all her boldness, these two hired hands could perturb her.
“Morning, Miss Chastain,” Gil said, grinning like a fool as he rose from his sweeping bow.
“Did you sleep well, miss?” Rocky asked, elbowing his brother aside.
Gil placed his booted foot in front of Rocky’s, reached out with his own elbow, and gave his brother a poke in the ribs that had Rocky’s eyes bugging from their sockets as he made a strangled sound.
“F…fine,” she stammered, looking at Jace’s two crazed cowboys and then at him as if trying to figure out which way to run.
“Boys,” he said mildly, strolling across the kitchen to take charge. “Quit crowding the lady. Let her sit down and have some breakfast.” He looked at her and nodded toward the table.
She gave him a wobbly smile that had him focusing on her. Last night, he had been too caught up in his surprise and annoyance to notice much beyond her knockout looks and her insistence that she had come to stay.
Now, he saw that she had
