How to Knit a Love Song

by Rachael Herron

  Cade grinned and set down his book, the dog’s head in both his hands.

  “Who’s my girl? Who’s a good Clarabelle? Who’s a good dog?”

  Judas. Abigail scowled at the traitorous dog. Clara was too busy making love to Cade to notice.

  Abigail sighed and took a spot on the long couch. It looked antique and uncomfortable, but she should have known better. Eliza wouldn’t have had anything in her house that didn’t soothe the soul and body. Abigail sank into its depths comfortably. A good knitting spot.

  Even better would be the chair in front of the fire currently occupied by the guy who needed to go to bed. Soon.

  “Long day?” she asked, attempting for a casual tone.

  “Nope,” Cade said. His voice was ten degrees cooler when talking to her compared to her dog.

  “Well, that’s good.”

  Abigail pulled out the sleeve she was working on. She was almost done with this one, and in her mind she was playing with the idea of the next one—would she maintain the motif of this small zigzag, or would she leave it off the next sleeve? It was going to be a man’s sweater, perhaps a new design for the next book, but Abigail knew men were sometimes put off by asymmetry. It would be a risk.

  This was the kind of decision making she usually loved doing.

  She wasn’t enjoying it a bit.

  She stared at the yarn as it wound through her fingers and onto the needles.

  Wasn’t he getting the hint?

  Nope, he was still playing with the dog, who was now rolling from her belly to her back.

  “Lie down.”

  Clara lay down.

  “Roll over.”

  Clara rolled over, almost knocking over a small end table.

  “Now, sit.” She did.

  Cade pointed his fingers at her in the shape of a gun. “Bang!”

  Clara rolled her eyes in ecstasy right before she threw herself onto the ground, limp.

  Abigail stared. She’d had no idea. But she wouldn’t let him know that.

  “What else does she know?” Cade asked.

  “She knows, um…shake.” Abigail guessed.

  “Shake, Clara,” said Cade, and Clara lifted her left paw for him to shake.

  Good girl, thought Abigail.

  “You got a good one,” said Cade, and laughed as Clara tried to get in his lap like a puppy and lick his face.

  “Well, she seems to like you.”

  “I like her. I always have, even when she was Mort’s.”

  Gah. Abigail tried to put her face back into neutral.

  “You knew about her tricks.”

  He grinned. “Maybe.”

  She’d fallen for it. Time for him to go. “So, did you get up at four thirty again today?” she asked.

  Cade looked at her as if she’d grown a third arm. “Yeah.”

  “Wow. That’s a long time to be up. Huh. What time is it anyway?” She lifted her bare wrist. “I don’t wear a watch.”

  “Neither do I,” he said coolly.

  Damn. He was playing the game, too.

  Abigail spent the next half hour in a state of frustration. Oh, she wanted him out of this room. She wanted to knit. Listen to that rain: It was perfect, a perfect night for sinking deeply into the repetitive motions of knitting. She wanted to be able to think about her plans for the future, for the cottage.

  She wanted to be in front of the fire. She wanted to sit in that chair he was planted in so firmly it was as if he had grown roots that went through the leather, through the wooden floor, down into the soil beneath.

  Go to bed already.

  She yawned. Watched him.

  Nothing. He turned a page and took a sip out of the glass that apparently never needed refilling. Maybe he was faking it. Maybe he was taking false sips to out-sit her.

  But she watched intently the next time he drank, and she saw the liquid level go down incrementally. She felt stupid. Cade was obviously just sitting here, enjoying the night storm as she was.

  She should be able to do the same thing. She was a grown-up, after all, and he wasn’t a kid taking her ice cream. They were two adults in an awkward situation. They could work this out. Right?

  Right.

  Fffft. She threw her knitting down on the couch and went to the large windows. She couldn’t see anything, not a light, not the rain, nothing. Just herself looking back, strangely wide-eyed.

  She cupped her face with her hands and pressed the outside edges to the glass. Now she could see what was out there. The rain and wind whipped the trees closest to the house; the puddles that had already gathered were pummeled with raindrops. One sheet of rain followed the next.

  “It’s pouring,” she said to him, more to break the silence again than actually to speak to him.

  He nodded without looking up from his book.

  Oh, he was a stubborn one.

  And she was tired of it.

  “Isn’t it my time to be in here?”

  He shrugged and held up his bare wrist. “Don’t know.”

  “It’s nine.”

  “Already?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re trying to do here, but I’m not going anywhere. I want to knit tonight. I’m not going to sneak off to my room in order to avoid you.”

  “Neither am I. Why would I do that?”

  “But you wanted to avoid me. That’s why you made the schedule.”

  “No,” he said slowly, putting his book on his lap and looking at the fire, not at her. “I made the schedule because I thought you might be uncomfortable with me here in my house. I wanted to stay out of your way.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m over it. I figure I’m doing you a favor by letting you stay here. We can share, can’t we? We’re adults.”

  Abigail walked back to the couch.

  She didn’t want a fight, not tonight. Not here. Not where she was alone, with most of her friends far away, not where she was trapped in a house with a man who obviously couldn’t stand her, even if he had kissed her last night.

  That kiss.

  She blushed, remembering it. She’d done such a good job of pushing it out of her mind though she was sitting so close to him. Until now.

  Cade cleared his throat and shifted in his chair.

  She blushed harder. She prayed he wouldn’t look at her right now, not until the color left her face.

  The only sound in the room now was the crackle of the fire and the pouring rain outside. The low whoosh of the rain was punctuated by metallic clanks as big drops landed on something outside.

  What was wrong with her? And why wasn’t she knitting? Abigail sat back down.

  Knit through everything, that was her motto, as it had been Eliza’s. Always knit. Knitting was Abigail’s meditation, her entertainment, her solace. Knitting was everything. Her needles talked to each other, and with that tiny sound, she felt better.

  She breathed.

  Cade turned pages.

  She picked up the chart she’d drawn on graph paper, studied it, and then knit some more.

  The rain came down.

  Abigail grew so used to the silence that when Cade spoke, she jumped and lost a stitch off the end of her needle.

  “Did she teach you to do that?”

  “Hang on.” Abigail poked at the work, pulling at the stitch that threatened to make a break for it. “Okay, I caught it. What?”

  “My aunt. She teach you?”

  “How to knit? No. My mother taught me.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She died when I was ten.”

  “Who raised you?”

  It felt blunt—she’d never been questioned about her parentage as if she were being challenged.

  But she answered him. “My dad, mostly, when he wasn’t at work. But we moved around for his job, and I was home alone most of the time. I knitted a lot.”

  “That must have made you super cool.”

  Was that humor in his tone?

  “Coolest kid ever. Big
coke-bottle lenses, knitting. Kids called me ‘granny’ from the time I was about seven.” She smiled. “But I kept knitting. The best gift my mother ever gave me.”

  “Where’s your dad now?”

  “He died about five years ago. Fell off a ladder on a roofing job, landed on his head.”

  “Damn. I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too. He was all I had left, except for Eliza.”

  “Don’t you have friends?” Cade looked startled by the way it came out of his mouth. “I mean, wasn’t it hard to leave?”

  Abigail laughed. “Don’t worry, I have plenty of friends. But besides Janet, I have no friends that I call my family, now that Eliza’s gone. But now I’m near Janet.”

  “But didn’t you have a home down there? Roots?”

  “I’ve never really had roots anywhere. Dad moved us a lot, and I kind of kept it up. I stayed in San Diego the longest, and that was because of Eliza. She became home to me.” Abigail touched the seat of the sofa with her fingertips. She wouldn’t tell Cade that’s why she felt at home here, as if her roots were already growing, that it was because of Eliza and how present Eliza felt here on this land. He wouldn’t understand.

  She looked at Cade. He was still staring at the fire with his eyes half closed. “Do you knit?” she asked.

  He barked a laugh. Clara, who had been snoozing at his feet, jumped and pulled her ears back, then closed her eyes again. “No, I don’t knit. Eliza always threatened to make me learn, but she never got to me.”

  “That’s sad. You must wish now that she had.”

  “Nope, I can’t say that I do.”

  “Your great-aunt was a knitting genius. Beloved by generations. Her books are in print in dozens of languages. She was a legend.”

  “She was just my aunt.”

  “Wow.” Abigail couldn’t understand how anyone could have known Eliza as “just” anything.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he went on, “she was incredible. She was one of my favorite people. She could do anything she put her mind to here on the ranch. She could drop a pole in the ground and string barb wire and birth lambs and fell trees by hand. When she remembered something needed doing, she did it. Otherwise she was knitting.”

  Abigail smiled. “I love imagining that.”

  “What do you remember about her?”

  Abigail sighed. “I remember everything. I remember how we met. It was maybe seven, eight years ago. I was knitting in a café, not caring that everyone was looking at me. It was before knitting was cool again, and no one knitted in public. Some people seemed annoyed by it, and I wondered if I should put it away. But I didn’t.

  “Then this woman came up to me, this tall, striking woman, with the most amazing long gray hair I’d ever seen, and I thought for sure she was going to ask me to stop. Instead she reached a hand out and felt the drape of the fabric and said, ‘Wool and angora?’ Then she sat down and pulled out her needles and we started talking.” Abigail took a breath. “She was one of the best friends I’ve ever had.”

  “Did you see her a lot?” Cade’s face was softer than she’d seen it before. She would bet that he didn’t know it.

  “Every single day. She introduced me to the craft world, told me I could sell my patterns. She was basically the one responsible for me being able to leave my desk job and write knitting books for a living. Once I could do that, I had time every afternoon. I’d drive to her apartment and tell her about what I’d worked on in the morning.”

  “It was a residential-care home, not so much an apartment, right?”

  “That’s what she called it. But she had her own place, she was autonomous and always made sure people knew that.” Abigail shot him a look. “So I cared enough to listen and call it what she wanted. It’s not like a nurse was in there with her—they only checked on her and made sure she was okay and that she’d taken her meds.”

  “Nursing home.”

  “Nothing like it. You’d have known if you’d visited.”

  “She told me she was fine making the trip to see me and the house twice a year.”

  “You believed her.”

  Cade looked down at his book and fiddled with a bent corner. “Didn’t cross my mind not to.”

  “She told me that you were the busiest person she knew, which was funny, because I’ve never known anyone more busy than she was. She’d be up at dawn to sit with her coffee and knit. She’d write letters. She’d sketch out ideas for her next book, and maybe write a little, and then she’d get in her little VW and trundle down to either her yoga class or the local yarn store.”

  “She did yoga?”

  “She was good. She got me into it.”

  “Wow.”

  “If she was at the yarn store, it never failed, someone would enter the place, recognize her, and start babbling. She never felt comfortable around those people, the people who thought she was a hero, that worshipped her.”

  Cade frowned. “Seriously? I mean, I knew her books were popular, but really?”

  “They stuttered. They couldn’t talk. I saw one woman leave the store in tears after getting her autograph.”

  “She was a knitting rock star?”

  “A knitting rock star. That’s it exactly.”

  “And you were a groupie.”

  Abigail nodded, knitting her cables, trying not to stare at him. His face, when listening to her, was mesmerizing. His green eyes were gorgeous, glinting in the fire’s dancing light. She looked down, focusing harder on a difficult decrease.

  “I was, at first, and then I stuck around. Then I was her friend.”

  “Because you wanted an inheritance?”

  The words were like a blow.

  Abigail dropped her knitting into her lap. “You win. You get the parlor tonight.”

  She had given it her best shot, but she was done.

  “I’m sorry,” said Cade, quickly.

  Abigail put her knitting into the fabric carrying bag she had next to her.

  She paused. Then she said, “I cried for two days straight when she died. I couldn’t get out of bed. I made myself physically ill. Besides my mother, I’ve never loved anyone as much as I loved her. And she loved me. That’s what I know, and I don’t care what you think.”

  He stood, the book dropping to the floor. “I didn’t mean…”

  “I know what you meant. I can’t change your mind. Good night.”

  “Don’t…”

  “Don’t what? You’re getting what you want. Excuse me.”

  He moved, stepping sideways so that he blocked the door.

  “Excuse me,” she repeated.

  He didn’t move.

  She wanted out of his parlor.

  He wanted her out of his house.

  Abigail looked up into his eyes, and saw that what he really wanted was to kiss her again.

  Crazy as it was, as angry as she was at him, she knew she’d succumb to his desire if she stood here even one more second.

  She knew her cheeks were flushed, that her eyes held unshed tears.

  “Would you please move?” Her voice was breathless. He leaned toward her to hear it.

  Then he leaned just a little more, and brushed the softest of kisses over her lips.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, against her mouth. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

  Then he stood back. She knew this was her moment. He would let her walk by, he wouldn’t take advantage of her. This was all the apology she was going to get.

  But she looked up at him and stepped forward the last short few inches, closing the gap between their bodies, drawn toward him as if there was a string pulling them together.

  His eyes were greener than she’d ever seen them, suddenly warm. With what? Lust? Friendship?

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she said.

  “Me, neither,” he said.

  She put one hand on his chest, went up on tiptoe, and kissed him, her turn this time to brush her lips against his.

  “Good night,
” she whispered.

  But instead of stepping away, she kissed him again.

  As soon as she did, she knew it was a mistake. What had started out as a low rumble in her body, a dull heat, flared up into raging flames that she knew she wasn’t going to be able to put out with just one kiss.

  She could actually feel his body temperature rising along with hers. She had one hand on his arm, and she felt both her hand and his skin flush with heat, a sudden slickness under her palm.

  She struggled to breathe, to regain control. His arm went around her, and he slipped his hand under her shirt, touching the small of her back where she was suddenly damp with heat.

  He breathed as raggedly as she did. Their mouths moved, licking, tasting, tongues commingling, touching, and when she drew her head back to look at him, his green eyes had gone dark. His mouth was wet and slightly parted.

  “You don’t want me living here.”

  He groaned and pulled her back to him, “No, I don’t. But I do want you.” Then he kissed her again, and led her hand down to the front of his jeans where the fabric strained. Abigail gasped. Desire flooded her brain in a way she’d almost forgotten.

  He took a few steps forward, leading her, guiding her backward. His mouth never lifted from his.

  She wanted him, too. It was just sex, her body needing release in this stressful situation. She could choose when and where she received that release. Nothing wrong with that.

  A tremor rocked her body.

  She closed her eyes and saw Samuel. Smelled him for a moment.

  No.

  The back of her calf hit the edge of the sofa. She could do this.

  Abigail sat, and Cade followed, kneeling in front of her. She leaned forward, both hands going to his face, leading him in for another kiss. He placed kisses on every inch of her cheek, down her jawline, and farther.

  His hands went to the hem of her shirt.

  She gasped. Her hands moved to still his. Wait. She couldn’t. The fear rose up in her throat. Cade’s mouth against hers was suddenly too rough, too harsh. She stiffened under his touch.

  “Stop.”

  Cade’s reaction was instant. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” Abigail’s breathing was ragged, and she wasn’t sure if it was from Cade or from the feeling inside she was trying to push down. Trying to smother.

  “Something happened,” he said.