Gift Of The Heart. Miranda Jarrett

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СКАЧАТЬ won’t be a next time, not if I can help it!”

      “But there will, Rachel.” For a moment that was endless to her, Alec’s grasp seemed to turn into a caress that burned through her sleeve before his fingers tightened once again. “I swore to William I’d look after his pretty little wife, and look after you I shall.”

      “I never asked you for that!”

      “You took my food and my firewood when I offered it, didn’t you?”

      “Because you were my husband’s brother!” she cried, her bitter anguish still fresh after so many months. “You were all the family I had for hundreds of miles, and I trusted you!”

      “Then I’ve every right to be here, haven’t I? You can’t order me away, Rachel, not for wanting to offer you advice and comfort.” He let his gaze slide boldly down her throat to her bodice, and chuckled as Rachel self-consciously clutched the front of her cloak together. “The whole county knows what I’ve done for you and the boy. I’ve made quite certain of that. And if in return I ask some small favors, some little indulgences, why, there’s none but you who’d begrudge me that.”

      “‘Small favors’!” Unable to bear his touch any longer, Rachel finally jerked her arm free, rubbing furiously at her forearm as if to wipe clean some invisible stain. “What you ask, Alec, what you expect—William would kill you if he knew!”

      “We’re discussing my brother, Rachel,” he said with insolent confidence, “and I’m not so convinced that he’d mind at all.”

      And neither, thought Rachel miserably, was she. With William, she never did know for certain. In humiliated silence she watched as Alec fished her musket from the snow where she’d dropped it. Slowly he brushed off the snow that clung to the stock before he held the gun out for her to take.

      “I’ll be back, Rachel,” he said softly. “Be sure of that. And mind you keep your eyes open for Ryder. I wouldn’t want the talk to start about my brother’s wife.”

      Rachel snatched the gun away from him, her eyes blazing with shame and anger. “Just leave, Alec,” she said. “Leave now.”

      He laughed and lifted his hat again with mocking gallantry, then turned away to retrieve his horse, his boots crunching heavily through the snow. Rachel wasn’t sure which hurt her more: that parting laugh, or the way he was so infuriatingly confident that she wouldn’t shoot him in the back.

      She felt Billy’s grip on her leg beginning to relax as he peeked around her to see if his uncle had left. She pulled him up onto her hip and with a trusting little sigh he snuggled against her body for warmth and reassurance.

      “I hate Uncle Alec,” he muttered into her cloak. “He’s bad.”

      “I don’t much care for him, either, love,” she confessed, pressing her cheek against the little boy’s soft curls. When she held him like this, wrapped up in the quilt with his bands curled against her breast, she could imagine he was a baby again, when she was all of the world he knew or needed. But sorrowfully she knew in her heart that that time had already come to an end. Now it would take more than a hug and a kiss and a spoonful of strawberry jam on a biscuit to make things right in a world that included both Alec Lindsey and a violent war that had suddenly come to their doorstep.

      She watched Alec’s horse pick his way through the snow, her brother-in-law’s red scarf the single patch of color in the monochrome landscape. Without mittens, her fingers were growing stiff and numb from the cold, and she shouldn’t keep Billy outside any longer.

      Ryder, that was the name Alec had mentioned, and she sighed unhappily. That was the name—J. Ryder—elaborately engraved on the brass plate of the stranger’s rifle, and the hem of his checked shirt had been marked with the same initials in tiny, flawless crossstitches. She had tried so much to distance herself from the stranger, to keep herself apart from whatever had brought him here. She hadn’t wanted to know his secrets any more than she wished to share her own. Now he had a name, a past and a price of twenty dollars on his head, while she’d lost every notion of what she’d do next.

      “I’m cold, Mama,” said Billy plaintively, “an’ I want t’go inside.”

      That at least would be a start, and with another sigh she wearily headed back to the house, the musket tipped back over her shoulder. She pushed open the door, already framing what she’d say to the wounded man waiting in the bed.

      Except that now the bed was empty.

      Frantically her gaze swept around the house’s large single room, from the bed with the tangled sheets past the stone hearth and the flour-covered table and Billy’s blocks and the tall mahogany chest with the shell-front drawers that had come with her from Providence. There was no other doorway but the one she stood in, and the ladder to the loft was still neatly hooked on its pegs. But how could a man of his size disappear?

      “Mr. Ryder?” She set Billy down but kept the musket. “Mr. Ryder, are you here?”

      She swung the door shut, and gasped when she found him there on the other side, braced against the window’s frame. He was sickly pale and his face glistened with sweat, but the rifle in his hands never wavered as he kept it trained on the last dark speck that was Alec’s retreating figure.

      “I would not have let him hurt you,” he said softly when he looked at her at last. “Not you, not the boy. Not for all the world.”

       Chapter Three

      “That—that would not have been necessary,” stammered Rachel, her heart thumping almost painfully within her breast. She didn’t doubt for an instant that he would have killed Alec if she’d struggled or screamed for help, and it terrified her to think of how unwittingly she’d risked Alec’s life. “My husband’s brother can be a bully, true, but nothing more.”

      “Nothing?” Slowly the man lowered the rifle, his unflinching gaze never breaking with Rachel’s. “That wasn’t how it appeared to me.”

      “Appearances aren’t always what they seem,” she said quickly, too quickly. In all the foolish fantasies she’d woven about this man to pass the hours at his bedside, she’d never imagined him with this kind of deadly, intense calm that came from deep within. “I don’t believe Alec would ever do either Billy or me any real harm.”

      “No, Mama, he would hurt us! You said!” piped up Billy indignantly. “Uncle Alec’d hurt you an’ me an’—an’ him! You said!”

      “Hush, Billy, no one’s going to hurt anybody,” scolded Rachel, secretly thankful to have a reason to look away from the man near the window. Now, she thought with dismay, if she could only find one for Billy, as well; she’d never seen his face shine with such endless admiration and awe as it did now for this wonderful new champion. She hung the musket back on its pegs and pulled down the narrow ladder to the loft. “You’ve had adventure enough for one day. Now please take Blackie upstairs and play there until supper.”

      Billy ducked his chin stubbornly. “Don’t have stairs.”

      Rachel sighed with exasperation. “Oh, I know, it’s only a ladder, not a staircase, СКАЧАТЬ