She sorted the items.
Then looked toward him.
“You've been doing your own mending?”
Harlon nodded.
“Usually.”
She held up one shirt.
The stitching along the shoulder was uneven.
She raised an eyebrow.
“Did you repair this?”
He looked embarrassed.
“Maybe.”
Amily stared.
Then laughed.
“Harlon, these stitches look like a frightened spider tried to escape across the fabric.”
He burst out laughing.
“Held together, didn't it?”
“Barely.”
She smiled.
“I'll fix it.”
He watched her for a moment.
Then returned to checking the door.
Amily worked beside the fire.
The familiar movement of needle and thread calmed her.
It reminded her of childhood.
Her mother sewing late at night.
The small oil lamp.
The quiet scrape of scissors across fabric.
For years, she'd resented the work.
She was good at it.
But wealthy women often treated her skills as though they were evidence that she belonged beneath them.
Now she found pleasure in the simple act of repairing something useful.
By afternoon, the shirt was beautifully mended.
Harlon examined it.
His eyebrows rose.
“That's better than when I bought it.”
Amily smiled.
“You're welcome.”
Harlon turned the shirt over in his enormous hands, studying the neat line of stitches along the shoulder as though Amily had performed some extraordinary feat of engineering.
“That's better than when I bought it,” he repeated.
Amily smiled from her chair beside the fireplace.
“Then perhaps you should stop purchasing clothes from men who sew with their eyes closed.”
Harlon laughed, a deep, wonderful sound that seemed to fill every corner of the little mountain cabin.
“Careful, Miss Ward. A man might grow accustomed to having you around.”
The smile faded slightly from Amily's face.
She lowered her eyes toward the needle resting between her fingers.
“Would that be such a terrible thing?”
Harlon stopped laughing.
For a moment, he stared at her.
The afternoon light filtered through the frost-covered window, catching the loose chestnut curls around her soft face. The oversized flannel shirt he had given her fit comfortably across her full figure, and the wool skirt lay in heavy folds around the sturdy chair he had built years earlier.
She looked warm.
Alive.
And so unexpectedly beautiful that Harlon found himself struggling to remember what he'd intended to say.
“No,” he answered quietly.