Gift Of The Heart. Miranda Jarrett

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      She swung around, her black brows drawing downward at being challenged. “He told me, Mr. Ryder, that you are one of the Tory Rangers serving under Colonel Walter Butler.”

      His expression didn’t change. “As I recall, your husband fights with the rebel army. I’ll warrant that makes me your enemy as well as his.”

      She raised her chin with the same stubbornness he’d seen in the boy. “At present you are a man who needed my assistance. You’ve trouble enough without me turning you away into the snow on account of your politics.”

      “I’m caught in my enemy’s territory with the wind whistling through the hole in my shoulder.” His mouth twisted bleakly. “Oh, aye, that’s trouble enough.”

      “Not quite.” Rachel leaned closer, lowering her voice so Billy, doubtless eavesdropping overhead, wouldn’t hear. “It’s worse than that. Somehow you’ve managed to cross your Colonel Butler badly enough that he’s offering a bounty on your scalp. Twenty dollars, according to Alec.”

      “Twenty dollars?” Jamie’s heart plummeted. He’d never dreamed Butler would offer such a reward. Twenty dollars would set every penniless rogue in the land on his trail.

      Rachel nodded. “Twenty it was. Where money’s concerned, I’ve never had reason to doubt Alec.”

      “But you doubt the rest?”

      “I make my own decisions. I told you that already, too.” She noticed how he’d neither denied nor confirmed Alec’s story, and she wondered uneasily whether she’d been wrong to trust him as much as she had. As he’d told her himself, he was her enemy. “Whether it’s twenty dollars or forty pieces of silver, Mr. Ryder, I’m not in the habit of putting a price on any man’s life.”

      “Thank you.” It didn’t seem enough for what she’d done, but he was afraid that anything more would sound false. “And the name’s Jamie Ryder, without the trappings. You can save the ‘sirs’ and ‘misters’ for the next gentleman who wanders into your barn.”

      But Rachel didn’t smile, considering instead the easy familiarity he was proposing as she turned back toward her work table. There were already too few barriers between them, crowded together like this in her home’s single room, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to give up the fragile formality of that “mister.”

      He waited, puzzled by her silence. “There, now,” he said gruffly. “I’ve handed you leave to call me by my given name, but it seems instead I’ve offered you some sort of offense.”

      “Oh, no, it’s not that,” said Rachel hastily as she moved to the hearth to lift the iron pot with their supper closer to the coals. She lifted the lid of the pot to stir the contents while she thought, brushing her hand briskly before her face against the rush of fragrant steam. His insistence on no formal title might have another, very different explanation. She could know for certain, if she dared risk making a fool of herself.

      And it was, she decided, a risk worth taking. With a brief, nervous smile, she glanced back at him over her shoulder.

      “Does thee believe that thy appetite could be tempted by a plate of stew?” she asked as cheerfully as she could. “To me thee seems well enough for heartier fare.”

      He relaxed and set the rifle in his lap to one side, his mouth watering already from the smell alone. “Thee couldn’t keep me from thy table now, as thee knows perfectly—”

      He broke off, realizing too late how neatly she’d tricked him. Butler must have described him in every detail when he’d posted his blasted reward.

      “Thee’s a clever woman,” he said dryly. “Thee knew to use stewed rabbit and onions as bait to catch a poor feeble invalid weary of gruel.”

      “There’s nothing feeble about you that time and stew won’t cure.” She concentrated on spooning the hot stew into a pewter bowl, avoiding the reproach that she knew would be on his face. She had tricked him, true enough, but now she had her answer, too.

      Carefully she wrapped a cloth around the bowl to hold in the heat, and brought it to him in the bed. “Don’t eat so fast that you burn yourself,” she cautioned. “And mind you don’t spill. I don’t want to consider what sort of hideous mess that would make on the coverlet.”

      “My, my, but your concern’s alarming,” he said as he took the bowl and balanced it on his knees. “I think I liked the plain speech better.”

      She dragged a chair closer to sit at his bedside to keep him company while he ate. “My grandmother was a Friend, and I always liked to listen to her talk. She could make even a scolding sound special. While you were ill, you often spoke that way, too.”

      He stared at her, mute with horror, while the stew turned tasteless in his mouth.

      God preserve him, what else had he babbled to her? Had he told her of the dull whistle that a tomahawk makes as it whips through the air, the sickening thud when it buries deep in its mark? In the grip of the fever had he raved about the smoke from the burning houses, the screams of the dying or the last frantic wails for mercy that had filled the early-morning air? Had he confessed to her what he’d seen, what he’d done in the empty name of his king, and failed to do for his own conscience?

      To Rachel it seemed his face shuttered in an instant, closing her out as his eyes turned cold and empty. Her curiosity had done this, she thought with an inward shiver, her infernal curiosity had driven away the man who’d so gently teased Billy, and left her instead with another whose face was as hard as if carved from the same granite as the cliffs in the valley.

      A face that belonged to one of Butler’s Rangers, to one of her enemy, to a man who, weak though he was, could still load and aim a rifle with terrifying accuracy.

      “It wasn’t what you said, but how,” she said, struggling to explain herself. “I didn’t mean it as an insult, you know. In this part of New York, there are so few Friends that I found your words remarkable.”

      “And you thought I might have a Quaker grandmother, too?” He forced himself to make his manner light, to lift the carved horn spoon dripping with gravy again and again to his lips as if nothing had changed.

      If she knew the truth, she could not sit here with him, not this close. No decent woman could. Butler’s reward would be nothing compared to her horror if she knew the truth. With luck, she never would, at least not until he was gone from her life.

      She shook her head, her carnelian earbobs swinging. “I thought you were a Friend yourself,” she said, almost wistfully. “Even with you dressed as you were, and carrying the rifle and a knife.”

      “You’re right enough there,” he said wearily. “No decent, godly Friend would carry a weapon of any sort to be used against another man.”

      “My grandmother wouldn’t allow guns anywhere in her house, not even for hunting game. Not that there was much to shoot on an island, anyway.” She tried to smile in the face of his still-grim expression. “So I misjudged thee, and thee has no Quaker grandmother after all?”

      “Nay, she’s there in my past. Grandmother and grandfather, father and mother, and all manner of cousins.” He stared down at the bowl in his hands, sorrowfully remembering too much of a life that was forever gone. “Because my whole family belonged to the Society СКАЧАТЬ