How to Knit a Love Song Read Online Free Page B

raised, his lips pressed firmly together.
    Embarrassed. That was the strange feeling she had. But she said, “I know. She’s probably gone. But I like to hope she might be around a little bit, somehow, in a way that I can’t understand. So I have to act like she might see me, show her that I loved her.”
    He turned his head away. “Hippy-dippy crap. You going to smudge the place with incense?” He had his jerk voice back and he didn’t meet her eyes.
    She spun around and walked away from him in what she hoped was an appropriately offended manner. She didn’t stop until she was inside the cottage.
    She shut the front door behind her.
    Then she pulled back the dusty old curtain and peeked out the narrow window. He still stood in the same spot, looking down at the ground, as if lost in thought.
    Any other time, any other place, she would want to talk to that cowboy. She’d objectify his rugged good looks. She’d be attracted to his long legs, his strong, wide back. Not here.
    But she gave herself another second to look.
    Then his head came up, fast, and even across the large yard, their eyes locked through the glass. Abigail gasped and stepped back, out of his sight line.
    She took a deep breath. And then another.

Chapter Five
Always knit sleeves first. They act as gauge swatches, and you get the dreaded things over with first, so you can move on to the fun things.
— E.C.
    T his was awful. Horrible. Disgusting.
    Abigail rolled to her other side in the sleeping bag, and prayed she wouldn’t hear anything else move. She was lying on the floor next to the dusty divan, in a small body-sized space she’d cleared among bags in the upstairs cupola room. Even without curtains on the windows, it was too dark outside, with no streetlights and no moon, to see anything around her except vague outlines of stacked boxes. Not sure what the scratching noise had been a few minutes ago, she was too terrified to open her eyes.
    If she opened them and saw a pair of beady red eyes staring back at her, be they rodent or something else, she would die of a heart attack. She knew it. Hadn’t she already had enough of fear in the recent past?
    Cypress Hollow was a tourist beach town. There hadn’t been a room available within twenty-five miles. Not that she’d really be able to afford a hotel room for very long. It was an expense she didn’t need. But still. It would have been nice to have had one night in a bed before committing to this run-down, junk-filled, rusted-pipe hovel of a cottage.
    What had Eliza been thinking?
    For that matter, what had Abigail been thinking? On the drive up today, she’d allowed herself to dream, even if only briefly, about a beautiful farmhouse. Or a sweet mother-in-law addition. A hammock, for God’s sake.
    This squalor wasn’t helping. What the hell was in all these boxes? These bags? She pushed the thought of rodent enclaves out of her mind. She would not think of spiders. She would just think happy thoughts.
    A happy thought seemed far away.
    Sheep outside, grazing. That was happy. More. Tussah silk, unspun. A new pair of Addi Turbo knitting needles.
    Abigail squinched her eyes shut tighter and rolled onto her back. It wasn’t working.
    She would not open her eyes. Even with that weird scraping sound above her head.
    Damn, she was starving. Somehow, in all the excitement, she’d forgotten to eat anything since this morning on the road.
    Also, she had to pee. Of course she’d used Cade’s bathroom in the big house before she’d retired for the night. She’d taken her toothbrush out of her bag and scurried through his kitchen to the bathroom, hoping to remain unnoticed. She hadn’t seen him, a fact for which she was grateful.
    But now, with her usual annoying nighttime timing, she had to go again.
    No. She would not open her eyes. She would not make her way through this upper cupola room, downstairs through the crazy piled boxes and out. Her flashlight, although bright, only made it worse.