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said, speaking as charitably as she could.
    “I do need something,” he told her quietly.
    Piper took another step back. The lantern light wavered slightly, and she renewed her grip on the handle. “What?” she asked cautiously.
    “Company,” Sawyer replied. “Somebody to talk to while I wait for this bullet hole in my shoulder to settle down a little—it feels like somebody dropped a hot coal into it. Why don’t you take a chair—if there is one—and tell me what brings a proper lady like you to a rough town like Blue River.”
    Was he making fun of her, using the term “a proper lady” ironically?
    Or was she being not only harsh, but priggish, too?
    She set the lantern back on the night table and drew her rocking chair into the faint circle of light, sat down and folded her hands in her lap. For the moment, that was all the concession she could bring herself to make. And it seemed like plenty.
    “Well?” Sawyer McKettrick prompted. “I can tell by the way you talk and carry yourself that you’re an Easterner. What are you doing way out here in the wilds of Texas?”
    “I told you,” Piper said distantly, primly. “I teach school.”
    “They don’t have schools back where you came from, in Massachusetts or New Hampshire or wherever you belong?”
    “I’m from Maine, if you must know,” she allowed, suppressing an urge to argue that she “belonged” wherever she wanted to be. “Dara Rose—Clay’s wife—is my cousin. She persuaded me to come out here and take over for the last teacher, Miss Krenshaw.”
    “Dara Rose,” he said, with a fond little smile. “Clay’s a lucky man, finding a woman like her.”
    “I quite agree,” Piper said, softening toward him, albeit unwillingly and only to a minimal degree.
    He studied her thoughtfully in the flickering light of the lantern. “Does it suit you—life in the Wild West, I mean?” he inquired politely. She saw that a muscle had bunched in his jaw after he spoke, knew he was hurting, and determined to ride it out without complaint. Like Clay, he was tough, though Clay wore the quality with greater grace, being a more reticent sort.
    Piper paused, considering her reply. “It’s lonely sometimes,” she admitted, at last.
    “Everyplace is lonely sometimes,” he answered.
    This was a statement Piper couldn’t refute, so she made one of her own. “It sounds as if you speak from experience,” she said carefully.
    He grinned a wan shadow of a grin, lifted his right hand in a gesture of acquiescence. “Sure,” he replied. “Happens to everybody.”
    Even in his weakened state, Sawyer McKettrick did not strike Piper as the kind of person who ever lacked for anything. There was something about him, some quality of quiet sufficiency, of untroubled wholeness, that shone even through his obvious physical discomfort.
    “I do enjoy spending my days with the children,” she said, strangely flustered, sensing that there was far more to this man than what showed on the surface.
    “I reckon that’s a good thing, since you’re a teacher,” he observed dryly.
    A silence fell, and Piper found herself wanting to prattle, just to fill it. And she was most definitely not a prattler, so this was a matter for concern.
    “I might be able to handle some food, after all,” Sawyer ventured presently, unhurriedly. “If the offer is still good, that is.”
    Relieved to have an errand to perform, however mundane, Piper fairly leaped to her feet, took the lamp by its handle. “There’s bean soup,” she said. “I’ll get you some.”
    When she returned with a bowl and spoon in one hand and the lantern in the other, she saw that her visitor had bunched up the pillows behind him so he could sit up straighter.
    She placed the lantern on the night table again and extended the bowl and spoon.
    He looked at the food with an expression of amused wistfulness. “I’ve only got one good arm,” he reminded her. “I can feed myself, but you’ll have to hold the