Jane picked up her spoon and slipped it into her oatmeal. She tasted it, relishing the slightly nutty texture of the oats. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
Morgan tore his eyes away from her mouth and drizzled syrup around the melting pat of butter dead center on his hotcakes. He cut a neat triangle from the three-stack and observed that Jane was watching him out of the corner of her eye. He wondered if her thoughts about his mouth were as darkly erotic as his had been about hers. Hunger put him on notice, but he wasn’t certain that food could satisfy it. His lips parted and he closed them around a forkful of hotcakes.
He tasted the syrup first, but then…oh, but then the hotcakes all but dissolved on his tongue. Light, airy, with just a hint of crispness at the edge, these were splatter dabs worth coming to town for. He could imagine lingering at the breakfast table. Morgan cut another triangle and speared it and had it halfway to his mouth before he saw Jane was studying her oatmeal with an intensity that oatmeal never deserved.
His eyes crossed slightly as he stared at the bite on his fork before he took it in his mouth. He swallowed and then tapped the tines of his empty fork against the side of Jane’s bowl. That garnered her attention.
“Yes?”
Now Morgan pointed to his plate of hotcakes. “You made these.” It was more accusation than question. He already knew the truth.
“I made the batter,” she said. “Mrs. Sterling made the cakes.”
“That’s why Miss Ross was winking at you. She knew.”
“I still think she might have had something in her eye.”
“All right. I’ll let that go. Why?”
“Why?”
“Why did you do it?”
Jane set down her spoon. “It would have been insulting for you to test me, Mr. Longstreet, but I realized that if I showed you what I can do, I might persuade you I am not without some skills.”
“Huh.” He cut into the stack of cakes again, took another bite. “It was a risk. What if I didn’t like them?”
“Then I would know one of two things to be true: Either the coffee scalded your taste buds or food is merely fuel to you and you take no particular enjoyment in a satisfying meal.”
“You’re surely confident about these cakes.”
“With good reason, don’t you think?”
“All right, yes. They’re excellent.”
“Did it pain you so terribly to say so?”
“Not nearly as much as letting them grow cold on the plate.” He watched Jane’s emerald eyes brighten with her expression of mischief and satisfaction. “Eat,” he said. “Cold oatmeal’s good for caulking pipes and mending fences but not for eating.”
Jane picked up her fork and dug in.
After breakfast Jane asked Morgan if he would escort her along the main thoroughfare so that she might see the town. When he asked her why she wanted to do that, she told him, “So the four or five people who don’t know that I’m with you are not kept in the dark any longer.” He made a noise at the back of his throat that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle choked off. “If I am not to live at Morning Star,” she explained, “then it is merely prudent for me to learn more about Bitter Springs. There might be opportunities for employment.”
Jane had no difficultly reading his response this time. Both his expression and his grunt were disapproving. Still, he put his objections aside, reminded her she would need her coat and hat, and then waited for her at the front entrance of the Pennyroyal while she retrieved them.
The wind nearly lifted her hat from her head when she stepped onto the porch. Morgan stood by while she secured it but intervened when she looped the scarlet scarf only once around her neck. He picked up one of the tails and made a second loop, giving it a little tug at her chin so that it nearly covered her mouth. When they turned onto the sidewalk and were buffeted head-on by the wind, she was glad for his interference.
It was a good reminder of how much knowledge he had at his fingertips and how much she had to learn. She smiled gamely, and when he offered his arm, she did not hesitate to accept it.
Morgan did not have much to say along their walk. He dutifully read the signs on the storefronts. Barbershop. Johnson’s General Mercantile. Bakery. Land Office. Leather Goods. Hardware. Feed Store. Taylor’s Bathhouse and Laundry. Jane let him go on that way. It struck her that he was isolated at Morning Star and perhaps preferred it. If he knew details about the druggist or the milliner or the blacksmith, he kept them to himself. She realized that he had told her more about the former marshal of Bitter Springs than about anyone else, and Benton Sterling was dead.
They passed Ransom’s Livery, the corrals where cattle were herded to wait transport on the trains, and stood near the platform at the station but never stepped onto it.
“What is the next stop west?” Jane asked.
“If you mean a town, that’d be Rawlins. The train has to stop for water and fuel before then, but it’s mostly grass on top and coal below. It’s rough country. There aren’t many women.”
Jane nodded, thanked him for the information. They were on the point of turning when a youthful and, in Jane’s mind, a vaguely familiar cry stopped them in their tracks. Jane turned her head toward the station. Beside her, she thought she heard Morgan mutter something under this breath. Jane laughed under hers. The rascal she had met at the train yesterday was bearing down on them.
