A flurry of feathers swept through the air in tune with the chicken’s infuriated cackling. Annabel slammed the door and jumped back, losing her balance. She was halfway to the ground when Ewan caught her around the waist.
“Thank you!” Annabel said, gasping. “Do you see Peggy’s other chickens?”
“No,” Ewan said, his hands lingering at her waist. “But she has one less pail of milk than she had a moment ago.”
Annabel looked down. Foaming milk was spreading over the dusty ground. “You dropped it!”
“It was you or the milk. I chose you.”
Annabel pulled away and gave him a frown. “I was going to make that into butter. I thought I might make so much butter that Peggy wouldn’t have to worry about it for weeks.”
Ewan tried to look remorseful.
“The first thing we should do is heat some water,” Annabel said, going to the door of the house.
“For baths?” Ewan said. It was his devout wish that Annabel would find it necessary to take a bath. Of course, he would serve as her maid…
“There’s no bathtub,” Annabel reminded him. “For cooking. I’m growing hungry, aren’t you?”
Now he thought about it, he was ravenous. He followed her into the house. “What shall we cook?”
“Potatoes,” Annabel said, pointing to a box by the wall.
“We could roast the chicken,” Ewan said, thinking of how hungry he was.
Annabel looked at the white chicken. It was sitting on top of Peggy’s butter mold with its wings fluffed up. It looked very comfortable. “You’d have to kill it. We can’t do that.”
“I could do it,” Ewan said with conviction. “I’m hungry.”
“That chicken was Peggy’s wedding present from her neighbors,” Annabel said, pouring water from a bucket by the door into a pan. “Potatoes will have to suffice.” She added them to the water and hung the pot over a little hook that swung into place over the fire.
Ewan threw on another log. Annabel was trotting about the house, putting Peggy’s things neatly into their places. Then she threw open her trunk. “I know I have something in here…” She pulled out a towel and soap, and kept burrowing. Finally, with a happy noise in her throat, she pulled out a length of cloth. “Look at this, Ewan!”
He looked. It was dark red and seemed nice enough.
“This is going to be a tablecloth and a curtain!” Annabel said triumphantly. He started to laugh and she scowled at him. “No scoffing.” She rooted around some more in the trunk and pulled out a small sewing box. In a few moments she had the cloth ripped and was sitting on a chair by the fire, her head bent over a seam.
“If only the ton could see you now!” Ewan said.
She turned to the next seam. “You’d be surprised at the things I know how to do, Ewan Poley!”
“I’m more fascinated by what you don’t know,” he said, and was gratified to see a sweep of warm color rise in her cheeks.
An hour later, the lantern glow was reflecting rosy light back from a neatly stitched curtain over the one window. The chicken had gone to sleep.
Annabel was sticking a long fork into the potatoes, trying to scoop them out of the pot, when she poked a bit too hard and the support that held the pot over the fire collapsed.
Ewan jumped back, just avoiding being splashed by boiling water. With a great hiss, the fire went out. The potatoes bounced and rolled about the floor getting covered with ashes, and the chicken woke up and fluttered its wings like an eagle, screeching at them irritably.
“Oh, no,” Annabel cried, running after a potato. “Catch them, Ewan!”
“They won’t make it as far as the woods,” he said, but he started chasing them.
“My goodness, they’re filthy,” Annabel moaned, putting potatoes onto the table. “Will you get me some water?”
He walked to the bucket next to the door and then paused. It was pitch-dark outside. “Annabel, where is the water?”
“What do you mean, where—” She turned around. “You mean that you don’t know where to find water?”
He shook his head. “Mac was right. I must have lost my mind. I didn’t ask Kettle if he had a well.”
“How much water is in that bucket?” she asked. Ewan could visualize his grandmother’s reaction to this disaster. He would have deserved every moment of her harangue. But Annabel just looked rather surprised, standing there with a potato in each hand. She had pinned her hair up again, but she had a black streak of ash on her cheek.
“We have enough to drink tonight,” he said, dropping the pail and coming over to her. “As long as we drink wine with supper.”
“Wine!” she squeaked, but he couldn’t wait for a taste of her sweetness, and so he took her mouth with all the gladness of a man who deserves to be shrieked at and instead finds his future wife blinking at him in surprise. And she let him rock against her body without shrieking over that either.
There was a small thunk as first one of her potatoes dropped to the ground, and then the other. It was a while later that he let her fall away from him, once her eyes had gone all sleepy and she was limp. He was trembling with hunger for her. He felt depraved, wild—and just close enough to madness to know that they had to stop kissing. He couldn’t take this much longer.
“Wine?” Annabel asked a moment later. “Wine?”
Ewan picked up a potato on his way over to the bed. Then he bent down and pulled out a large wicker basket.
“The picnic basket!”
“It’s always full,” he told her. “In case we lose a wheel on the road.” He hoisted it onto the table, bumping a blackened, misshapen potato that fell over the edge and bounced on the floor.
Annabel was humming happily in her throat as she unpacked. “A whole chicken, that’s lovely, bread and—”
“A bottle of wine,” Ewan said, pulling out the corkscrew.
“But I needn’t have made the tablecloth!” Annabel said, an unmistakable pang of regret in her voice. “There’s a linen one here.”
“I like yours much better.” He wasn’t very good at describing things, so he just waved his hands lamely. “The house looks all red and homey.”
She looked so happy that he broke his new kissing prohibition. And then they ate supper and Ewan had four potatoes with fresh butter, and insisted they were the best potatoes he’d eaten in his life.
Annabel perched on the stool and watched Ewan eat his fifth potato. She was searching for something to say that wasn’t a question. She had a growing feeling that their kisses were edging toward some corner from which there would be no return. And she didn’t want that…or so she told herself.
But she couldn’t help peeking at the bed. It seemed to have grown twice as large in the last hour.
“Peggy doesn’t have a bolster,” she finally said.
“We’ll have to sleep without one, then,” Ewan said. He wasn’t looking at her, but his voice was rough and tender.
Desire streaked down Annabel’s legs and the breath seemed to disappear from her lungs. She opened her mouth to say—to say…? A refusal? But why? They were as married as a couple could be without saying rites before a priest. Ewan stood up and went to fetch a large armload of wood that he carried as lightly as a baby.