"Take it back," she said, pointing with a shaking hand toward the basket. "Take your flour and your bacon and your wooden toys, and get off my land. If I catch you near my window again, I will shoot you. I swear before God, Nathan, I will shoot you."
Nathan looked at the basket. Then he looked at her.
He didn't move toward the porch. He didn't reach for his horse's reins.
Instead, with a slow, deliberate movement, he reached up with his gloved hand and took off his slouch hat.
In the sub-zero wind, the gesture was absurdly, violently formal. His dark hair was matted with sweat and frost. He stood there, bareheaded under the freezing stars, looking down at her with an expression that was no longer cold or distant.
It was the look of a man who had suddenly realized he had stepped into a bear trap of his own making.
"I didn't mean to bring shame on you, Eleanor," he said softly. "I swear on my father’s grave, that wasn't what was in my head."
"Then what was?" she demanded, shivering violently now that the adrenaline was draining from her limbs.
Nathan took a breath. "I don't know how to help folks. I never have. My father was a hard man, and he taught me to keep my fences high and my business to myself. I saw you starving, and I knew if I rode up in daylight and offered you food, you'd throw it in my face out of pride."
"You were right," she said through chattering teeth. "I would have."
"Aye," Nathan said, and for the briefest fraction of a second, the corner of his hard mouth lifted in something that was almost an admiring grin. "I knew that. That's why I came before dawn."
He looked at the small, dark cabin, then back at her trembling figure.
"Put the gun away, Eleanor. You're turning blue."
"Not until you take that basket."
Nathan looked at the willow basket. Then he looked at her again, his gray eyes narrowing as an entirely new thought seemed to cross his mind.
"No," he said.
Eleanor stared at him. "What do you mean, no?"
"I won't take it back," Nathan said, replacing his hat and pulling it down against the wind. "And I won't leave you here to freeze. If you won't take charity, Eleanor Pierce, then you'll have to take work."
Eleanor looked at Nathan as if he had lost his mind.
The wind had begun to pick up again, whistling through the dry stalks of the sunflower patch near the pump. The chill was creeping into the joints of her fingers, making it difficult to keep the shotgun level.
"Work?" she echoed, her voice flat with disbelief. "What kind of work can a woman do for you that won't make the town talk twice as loud?"
Nathan took a step forward. He did not move like a man trying to disarm an opponent; he moved with the steady, measured patience of a man approaching a skittish mare in a corral.
"I need an accountant," he said.
Eleanor let out a sharp, bitter laugh that puffed white against the dark. "An accountant? On a cattle ranch?"
"I have twelve thousand head of cattle scattered across forty miles of open range," Nathan said, his voice dropping into a businesslike cadence. "I have fourteen hands wintering in the bunkhouse, eating their weight in salt pork and sourdough every two weeks. I have three ledgers in my office that haven't been balanced since my father was buried twelve years ago. Silas Rourke holds the notes on my south pasture, and every time I buy a box of horseshoe nails, his clerks find a way to charge me fifteen percent interest on credit I never asked for."
He paused, his gray eyes fixing hers with an unyielding intensity.
"David Pierce was a schoolmaster before he tried farming this alkali dirt. He taught you how to keep books, didn't he?"
Eleanor hesitated. The mention of David’s name sent a pang through her chest, but Nathan was right. David had been an educated man from Ohio. For five years, Eleanor had managed the schoolhouse accounts, kept the township tax rolls, and balanced every penny of their meager household budget. She knew arithmetic better than Silas Rourke’s high-collared bookkeepers.
"Yes," she admitted cautiously. "I can keep books."
"Then that's the job," Nathan said. "You come to the Crowley homestead three days a week. You sit in my study, you go through twelve years of receipts, notes, and bills of lading, and you tell me where my money is going. You manage the provisions so the cook stops throwing half our flour to the hogs. In return, you draw a wage."
"How much?" Eleanor asked, her instincts as a survivor immediately cutting through her pride.
"Thirty dollars a month," Nathan said without flinching. "Plus full rations from the ranch pantry: beef, flour, potatoes, and two cords of split tamarack delivered to this woodpile by noon tomorrow."
Eleanor’s mouth opened slightly.