Читать онлайн «Sutton's Way»

Sutton’s Way

Diana Palmer

Contents

The noise outside the cabin was there again, and Amanda shifted restlessly with the novel in her lap, curled up in a big armchair by the open fireplace in an Indian rug. Until now, the cabin had been paradise. There was three feet of new snow outside, she had all the supplies she needed to get her through the next few wintery weeks of Wyoming weather, and there wasn’t a telephone in the place. Best of all, there wasn’t a neighbor.

Well, there was, actually. But nobody in their right mind would refer to that man on the mountain as a neighbor. Amanda had only seen him once and once was enough.

She’d met him, if their head-on encounter could be referred to as a meeting, on a snowy Saturday last week. Quinn Sutton’s majestic ranch house overlooked this cabin nestled against the mountainside. He’d been out in the snow on a horse-drawn sled that contained huge square bales of hay, and he was heaving them like feather pillows to a small herd of red-and-white cattle. The sight had touched Amanda, because it indicated concern. The tall, wiry rancher out in a blizzard feeding his starving cattle. She’d even smiled at the tender picture it made.

And then she’d stopped her four-wheel-drive vehicle and stuck her blond head out the window to ask directions to the Blalock Durning place, which was the cabin one of her aunt’s friends was loaning her.

The tall rancher turned toward her with the coldest black eyes and the hardest face she’d ever seen in her life. He had a day’s growth of stubble, but the stubble didn’t begin to cover up the frank homeliness of his lean face. He had amazingly high cheekbones, a broad forehead and a jutting chin, and he looked as if someone had taken a straight razor to one side of his face, which had a wide scratch. None of that bothered Amanda because Hank Shoeman and the other three men who made music with her group were even uglier than Quinn Sutton. But at least Hank and the boys could smile. This man looked as if he invented the black scowl.

“I said,” she’d repeated with growing nervousness, “can you tell me how to get to Blalock Durning’s cabin?”

Above the sheepskin coat, under the battered gray ranch hat, Quinn Sutton’s tanned face didn’t move a muscle. “Follow the road, turn left at the lodgepoles,” he’d said tersely, his voice as deep as a rumble of thunder.

“Lodgepoles?” she’d faltered. “You mean Indian lodgepoles? What do they look like?”

“Lady,” he said with exaggerated patience, “a lodgepole is a pine tree. It’s tall and piney, and there are a stand of them at the next fork in the road. ”