Eileen Wilks - The Loner And The Lady

Apparently Sophie had no intention of letting him ignore her that way today. The sun was bright, the sky was blue, and she wanted out.

At lunchtime Seth gave in. The blasted woman wasn’t going to stay still and rest, and he couldn’t have her scaring him again like she had yesterday. So he helped her out onto the porch, where they had sandwiches.

Of course, after they finished eating, she was still convinced she wasn’t sleepy.

Rocky lay on her scrap of blanket at the south end of the porch. Seth sat on one side of the old table he’d found in an abandoned shack near Ridgemore last year. Sophie sat on the other side in the big rocker he’d brought out for her, a pillow beneath her bottom and a smaller one behind her head. A quilt covered her legs, at his insistence. The scabbed-over stripes on her cheek faced him when she glanced at Rocky. This afternoon she wasn’t smiling at Seth. She was grinning.

And winning. “Gin,” she said, laying her cards down on the weathered table, where she had been trouncing Seth at cards for the past two hours.

Fool woman, getting all excited about a game of cards. He made a disgusted noise. “You’re an obnoxious winner. I should have insisted on Scrabble.”

“You didn’t want to take advantage of me,” she said smugly. “I have a head injury, after all. Scrabble might be too hard on me.” She tipped her head, trying to see the scores he was adding up. Sunlight tangled in the different shades of blond in her hair. “How much do you owe me now?”

“Sixty-seven thousand, five hundred dollars,” he said dryly. “But wait until you see the medical bill I’m sending you. I hope your insurance is paid up.”

“No problem.” Her smile tilted some before she got it straightened. “We’ve agreed I’m rolling in money, right? My clothes, my watch, all my possessions look pretty high dollar.” Her hand went to her throat, where the locket gleamed, golden. “Even if my insurance isn’t paid up, I’ll take care of my debts.”

Maybe she wasn’t as unfazed by her lack of memory as she seemed. She kept touching that locket. “I’ve got a clumsy tongue, haven’t I?”

“You can’t watch every word you say. Almost everything, I’m learning, has ends trailing back into the past.” She patted the cards into a neat stack. “My deal.”

“It’s been your deal since you grabbed that deck of cards out of my hand.”

“Yeah,” she said, her slow smile striking sparks in her green eyes. “But you’ll go on humoring me, because I’m convalescing.” She shuffled the cards, bridging their corners between her busy hands like a card shark, and began dealing. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about those big sticks you’ve stuck in the ground over there.” A bob of her head indicated the construction he’d begun on the level ground roughly south of the cabin.

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