Sugar Plums for Dry Creek. Janet Tronstad

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СКАЧАТЬ needed a few more students to do the ballet, but surely three or four more would come. “No one knows how many people will answer the flyer I put up. But I need to start the classes anyway if we’re going to perform the Nutcracker ballet before Christmas.”

      Lizette figured the students who came later could do the parts that involved less practice.

      “Christmas is only five weeks away,” Judd said and frowned. He knew when Christmas was coming because he figured his cousin would surely come for the children before Christmas.

      Judd had gone ahead and ordered toys for the kids when he’d put in a catalog order last week, but he thought he’d be sending the presents along with them when their mother picked them up. Thanksgiving was next week, and it was likely the only holiday he’d have to worry about. He figured he could cope with a turkey if he could get Linda to give him some more basic instructions. She’d already told him about some cooking bag that practically guaranteed success with a turkey.

      “I don’t suppose you have a real nutcracker in that ballet?” one of the older men asked hopefully. “I wouldn’t say no to some chopped walnuts—especially if they were on some maple doughnuts.”

      “You know there’s no doughnuts, so there’s no point in going on about them,” Charley said firmly as he frowned at the man who had spoken. “There’s more to life than your stomach.”

      “But you like doughnuts, too,” the older man protested. “You were hoping for some, too—just like me.”

      “Maybe at first,” Charley admitted. “But I can’t be eating doughnuts if I’m going to learn this here ballet.”

      Lizette smiled as she looked at the two men. “Well, I do generally make some sort of cookies or something for the students to eat after we practice. I guess I could make doughnuts one of these days.”

      “You mean you can bake doughnuts?” Charley asked. “I didn’t know anyone around here could bake doughnuts.”

      Lizette nodded. “I’ll need to get a large Dutch oven, but I have a fry basket I can use.”

      “Hallelujah!” Charley beamed.

      “And, of course, I’d need to have some spare time,” Lizette added.

      “And she’s not likely to have any time to bake now that she’s starting classes,” Judd said, frowning. It would be harder to guard the kids if every stray man in the county was lined up at the ballet school eating doughnuts.

      Judd told himself that it was only his concern for the safety of the kids that made him worry about who was likely to be visiting the ballet school. He’d been in Dry Creek long enough to know about all the cowboys on the outlying ranches.

      A woman like Lizette Baker was bound to attract enough attention just being herself without adding doughnuts to the equation.

      Not that, he reminded himself, it should matter to him how many men gawked at the ballet teacher. He certainly wasn’t going to cause any awkwardness by being overly friendly himself. He was just hoping to get to know her a little better.

      She was, after all, the kids’ teacher, and he was, for the time being, their parent. He really was obligated to be somewhat friendly to her, wasn’t he? It was his duty. He was as close to a PTA as Dry Creek had, since he was the almost-parent of the only two kids in her class right now. If Bobby and Amanda were still with him in a few months, he’d have to enroll them in the regular school in Miles City instead of homeschooling them. But, until then, it was practically his civic duty to be friendly to their ballet teacher. And he didn’t need a doughnut to make him realize it.

      Chapter Five

      Lizette worried there was something wrong with her. She thought she had been working through the grief of her mother’s death, but maybe she was wrong. After all, she hadn’t had that much experience with mourning, and the chaplain at the hospital had talked about going through different stages of grief.

      Lizette wondered if one of those stages of grief was twitching.

      Here she was wrapping up the day’s dance lesson, and her mind wasn’t concentrated on the three people who were her students or the five more students she needed if she was going to pull off even a modified version of the Nutcracker ballet. Instead, she was all jumpy inside, and her gaze kept going to the window, where she could see Judd sitting on the steps of her school and looking out to the street with a scowl on his face.

      If she didn’t get a firm hold on herself, she’d be actually twitching when she looked at that man.

      Lizette had had three days of lessons now, and for the better part of all of those days Judd had had his back turned toward her and the students. The first day she didn’t notice his silence and his scowls. The second day she noticed, but she didn’t feel the need to do anything about it. Today, she felt obsessed by the man.

      She kept fighting the urge to go out and talk to him—and that was after she’d already been outside five times today to ask him questions. She didn’t have much to talk about either, except for the weather, and how many times could she ask if it looked like it was going to snow? He’d think she was dim-witted. There wasn’t even a cloud in the sky anymore.

      She kept expecting each time she went out and asked the man a question that she would then be able to move on with her lessons with a focused mind.

      She was still waiting for that to happen.

      The really odd thing was that nothing had changed in those three days.

      She didn’t need to see his face to know he wore the same scowl he’d worn every day so far. Every time today she’d found an excuse to slip outside and ask him a question, she’d known he’d have the same fierce look on his face even before she opened the door.

      Lizette wondered if Judd thought his look would keep strange cars off the street in front of the school. Actually, he might be right about that one. That scowl of his would stop an army tank from approaching him.

      With all of the frowning, Lizette knew there was no sane reason she should feel drawn to go up and talk to him. But she was.

      She thought it might be his shoulders. For as hard as his face scowled, his shoulders told a different story. It wasn’t anger he was feeling, but worry. Anxiety hung on his shoulders. It was there in the way he angled his head when he heard a sound and the way he stood to take a look down the road every half hour or so.

      Judd was taking his duty seriously, and he was worried.

      That’s it, Lizette thought to herself in relief. She found him compelling because he was protecting the children. She’d just lost her mother, and the man was obviously doing everything he could to guard the children in his care. That made him an unconscious picture to her of her mother, she told herself. She’d be as attracted to a chicken if it sat there guarding its eggs. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was a man. He was simply a concerned parent.

      Lizette felt better having figured that out. Not that she would have been opposed to finding the man attractive as a man, she just didn’t have time for that kind of distraction right now. She only had three students—Amanda, Bobby and Charley. She needed to worry about getting more students instead of thinking about some man’s shoulders.

      And, yet, she СКАЧАТЬ