Gift Of The Heart. Miranda Jarrett

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СКАЧАТЬ said Rachel sternly, desperate to forestall the tantrum she felt sure was brewing. “Please go to the loft so I can speak to Mr. Ryder.”

      “Don’t wanna go, Mama!” The little boy’s voice shrilled higher, almost to a wail. “Don’t wanna!”

      “Of course you don’t, lad,” said the man softly, so softly that Billy immediately stopped arguing so he could hear. “Why should you want to go up there when everything that’s interesting is down here?”

      Billy’s brow stayed furrowed, unconvinced, and for extra emphasis he stamped his moccasined foot. “Don’t wanna.”

      “Billy Lindsey!” Mortified by the child’s behavior, Rachel took a step forward to haul him bodily up the ladder before he did anything worse.

      But before she could the man bent down on one knee, leaning heavily on the rifle, to be closer to Billy’s level. “You don’t want to go, Billy, and I can’t say I blame you. Well and good. But there’s plenty of things in this life that we must do that we don’t want to. While your pa’s away, you’re the man here, aren’t you?”

      Miraculously the stubbornness vanished from Billy’s face, replaced by the same unabashed worship that Rachel had noticed earlier. “I’m a big boy,” he announced proudly. “I’m Mama’s best boy, an’ I help her!”

      “I reckoned you are,” said the man, nodding wisely as if he’d expected nothing less. “That’s why you won’t want to hurt her the way your uncle Alec tried to.”

      “Not Mama!” Anxiously Billy glanced at Rachel. “I’ll never hurt her!”

      “You’re hurting her now,” said the man mildly. “Hurting her by being so thickheaded about going to the loft the way she asked. She wants to be proud of you, but instead you’re making her sad and shamed.”

      Without stopping to answer, Billy raced to the table to grab his toy horse, threw his arms around Rachel’s knees for a moment of reassurance and apology, then clambered up the ladder to the loft overhead, disappearing with one final grin over his shoulder for the man who’d explained everything so neatly.

      “You have a way with him, Mr. Ryder,” said Rachel grudgingly, her arms folded tightly over her chest. She told herself again that she didn’t wish to see Billy become too attached to his new hero, especially since he had a price on his head. But if she was honest with herself she knew she was also a bit jealous of how swiftly Billy had listened to someone other than her. “Though as I told you before, I’d rather you had as little to do with Billy as you can.”

      He sighed, glancing up the ladder to where the boy had disappeared. “By my lights, you needed a bit of help.”

      Rachel bristled. “I assure you Billy’s not usually so ill-mannered.”

      “Ill-mannered or high-spirited, it’s all the same to mamas, isn’t it?” he said. “I was a boy once myself, and it doesn’t take too much to remember how it was.”

      He was still leaning on his rifle, kneeling at her feet in a way that she found oddly unsettling. Because she had taken his own shirt to clean and mend, he was wearing an old shirt of William’s, the too-short sleeves turned up over his thick-boned wrists, and that disconcerted her, too. The shirt belonged to her husband, she reminded herself fiercely, yet still she noticed how the worn cambric strained to cover the unfamiliar shoulders beneath it, and tried not to look at the triangle of dark, curling hair framed by the shirt’s open throat.

      “You haven’t been a boy for a good long time,” she said, and immediately flushed guiltily, realizing too late how she’d as much as confessed her indecent observations. Lord, how bold would the man think she was? “That is, Mr. Ryder, I meant there’s a world of difference between you and Billy.”

      He nodded, saying nothing more. Beneath the ragged growth of beard he might have been smiling up at her, and at her expense, too.

      “You don’t have to stay there on the floor, you know,” she said stiffly, her cheeks still on fire. “You can stand now.”

      “I’m not sure I can.” What she’d feared was a smile turned into more of a grimace as he tried to push himself back up to his feet. “Seems I’m fit for little more than impressing boys.”

      “Oh—oh!” Rachel hurried to his side, slipping her shoulder beneath his arm to help guide him across the room to the bed, then darted back to bring him a cup of water.

      “How thoughtless I’ve been!” she said contritely as she watched him drink. “You must forgive me, please, for—”

      “Ask yourself for forgiveness, not me,” he said sharply, his eyes suddenly snapping despite the pallor of his face. “Consider what your brother-in-law must have told you about me. Your sympathy could have cost you your life, coming so close to me like that. You should have kept your musket until I’d given up my rifle.”

      “Oh, bother and fuss! As if I put any stock in what Alec tells me!” Rachel tossed her head indignantly. “I decide my own mind. You’d never have walked two steps without my help.”

      “And that’s two times this day alone that your deciding’s made you careless,” he said relentlessly. “If you want to go on living by yourself out here, you’ll have to do better.”

      “While you, sir, would do better to learn gratitude to those who help you.” With an angry flurry of her skirts, Rachel turned her back to him and returned to her neglected baking. Left so long, the dough on the table had begun to rise into a lopsided lump toward the warmth of the open hearth, and with her fist she smacked it down.

      Watching her, Jamie swore softly and leaned back against the headboard. He hadn’t meant to be so hard on her like that, but she had been dangerously trusting, both with him and the man she said was her husband’s brother. He’d rather make her angry than keep silent.

      Absently he ran his fingers back and forth along the rifle’s barrel. He wondered how she’d come to this little log house, where she was as out of place as the gilded bull’s-eye mirror hanging over the crude stone fireplace. Her speech, her self-assurance, even her cheerfully ignorant trust, belonged in some elegant city parlor, not here. He remembered the wealthy daughters and wives of merchants he’d seen riding in their carriages through the Philadelphia streets—beautiful, expensive women in rich imported silk and kerseymere. She’d been born one of them; even the rough linsey-woolsey skirts she wore now couldn’t hide that. But what kind of fool of a husband would bring a gently bred lady like her to the wilderness?

      She was putting her whole body—and her anger—into thumping the dough, bending over the table far enough to give him a clear view of her ankles, neat and trim even in woolen stockings. Humiliating though it had been to ask for her help, he’d learned again how softly curved her body felt against his, how readily she fit against him, and he’d learned that she found him attractive, too. He’d seen that shy but eager interest in the eyes of women enough times before to recognize it, though the devil only knew how she’d feel that way when he must look like a scarecrow complete with a mouth full of straw. Perhaps, he thought wryly, she had been alone too long.

      But was that reason enough for her to have shielded him from her husband’s brother the way she had?

      “How much did your brother-in-law tell you?” he asked softly.

      Her СКАЧАТЬ