Blackstone's Bride. Bronwyn Williams

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to stand on a stump and loudly recite poetry to keep her brain from drying up like a rattling gourd.

      She was just plain lonesome, dammit. And growing just a wee bit strange in the head.

      Fighting a sense of hopelessness, she licked her fingers, greasy from eating fried chicken. “Miss Eleanor, your manners are shocking,” she said dryly. “Simply shocking.”

      She shrugged and stared out at the hazy blue ridges in the distance. “Miss Eleanor, you can take your blasted manners and go dance with the devil, for all the good it will do you.”

      She shook her head. “Talking to yourself, Eleanor?”

      “And who else would I talk to? Oh, I do beg your pardon—to whom would I speak, if not myself?”

      Lord, she missed the sound of another human voice. Days went by between the briefest exchanges. After nearly half a year of living alone, she would even have welcomed Devin’s constant carping again.

      From the day a few weeks after they were married when he had rushed in all excited, claiming to have struck a tiny new vein of gold, all pretense of being a loving bridegroom had disappeared. Gone was the handsome, charming young man who had come down from the mountain in search of a rich wife. In his place was a taciturn stranger who came up from his precious mine only when hunger and exhaustion drove him above ground. He even…stunk! No time to bathe, he’d claimed. No time to do more than gobble down whatever food she had cooked and look around for something else of value that he could sell in order to buy more equipment.

      She would see his measuring eyes light on the slipper chair that had belonged to her mother, or the little desk where she had once graded papers. Then, in a day or so, one of the Millers would roll up to the front door with a wagon, and Devin would apologize so sweetly.

      “It’s just an old chair, Elly Nora,” he’d said when the slipper chair had disappeared. “A few more months and I’ll be able to buy you a whole set of chairs and a table to match. We’ll drive right up to the front door of that factory over in Hickory and you can pick out anything you want. If it don’t fit, we’ll build us another house to hold it all,” he promised.

      Soon she discovered just how worthless his promises were. Convinced he was only days away from the vein his grandfather had found and then lost, he had worked day and night. Too tired to eat, drink or sleep, he had soon ceased even pretending to be polite to Eleanor.

      Eleanor was convinced that his exhaustion had contributed to his death. Hector said he’d miscalculated the length of fuse. For whatever reason, he hadn’t made it out of the drift in time. In a single moment, Eleanor had gone from being a disillusioned bride to being a destitute widow.

      They needn’t worry about her marrying an outsider. Having once been married for her tiny savings account, a small house and a few pieces of old furniture, she would wither up and blow away before she considered marrying another man.

      Wiping her fingers on a square of gingham that had been torn from one of her old aprons, she stood in the doorway and tossed the chicken bone outside. “You’re welcome, my friends,” she said, knowing that sooner or later some creature would come creeping out of the woods to snatch up the bounty.

      In the distance, the dog barked again. Someone was firing a rifle. She’d heard several shouts earlier, but couldn’t tell what they were yelling about. Drinking again, no doubt. Run a few traps, plant a few rows of corn, pan for hours and dig more holes in the ground—that was the daily life of a Miller of Dexter’s Cut. After that, they would take out the jugs of white lightning and celebrate whatever it was such people found to celebrate.

      Evidently they were celebrating now. Perhaps someone had actually discovered a few grains of gold, although the noise sounded as if it were coming from higher up on the hill rather than lower down, where most of the panning was done.

      Curious, Eleanor sat and watched the shadows lengthen, watched the lightning bugs come out. She listened to the sounds of the dying day, to the bird that always sang just at dusk, whose name she could never remember. To the sound of some small animal thrashing through the underbrush.

      Thrashing through the underbrush?

      Not her animals. They crept. They clucked and scratched or browsed. They hopped or flew, and a few even slithered. None of them ever thrashed.

      Swinging her bare feet, she continued to watch the edge of the laurel slick, searching for whatever had made the odd noise. It sounded almost like…a groan?

      And then her eyes widened and she was on her feet. “Oh, my mercy!” Racing toward the edge of the clearing, Eleanor reached out to catch the battered creature that stumbled through the rhododendrons and staggered toward her. A few feet away, she stopped, suddenly wary.

      Chapter Three

      He wasn’t one of the Millers. Eleanor didn’t recognize the man as anyone she’d ever seen before. Barely even recognized him as a man, the way he was slumped over, his arms cradling his body as he broke through the laurel slick and lurched shoulders first into the clearing.

      She reached him just as he collapsed, nearly carrying them both to the ground. Bracing her feet, she managed to lean her weight against his in a manner that supported them both until she could regain her balance.

      “Steady, steady,” she murmured. “I’ve got you now—don’t try to move.” Oh, God, oh, God, what do I do now?

      In the dusky light his hair appeared black. Or wet.

      Blood? That wasn’t water dripping across his face. It was too dark. “Are you hurt?”

      Of course he was hurt! This wasn’t the waltz they were doing!

      “They— I—” Clutching her, he swayed, tried to speak and broke off. He tried again. “Damn,” he muttered.

      Eleanor replanted her feet and braced herself to support his full weight. “Shh, don’t try to talk, just lean on me. Can you walk at all?”

      If he collapsed she could probably roll him uphill to the cabin, but getting him inside would be another matter. Tie him in a quilt and drag him up the steps? Was it physically possible?

      It might finish him off. Whatever had happened to him, he didn’t look as if he could survive much more punishment. Both his eyes, his mouth…his entire face was battered and swollen beyond belief. Dear Lord, it hurt just to look at him.

      “What happened to you?”

      “Mm.” It was more groan than answer.

      “That’s all right, you don’t have to talk now. Let’s just rest a bit.”

      “Mm!” There was urgency in the single utterance, enough so that she sensed his meaning. He wanted her to…

      Hide him? “All right, we’ll try to get you inside, but if you have any broken bones, walking isn’t going to help,” she told him, reduced to stating the obvious. “Lean on my shoulder—steady now. That’s it.” He was a good half a foot taller than she was, and must outweigh her by fifty pounds. Hard as a rock, but a dead weight. “Don’t try to hurry—that’s it, one step at a time.”

      Who on earth could have done this awful thing? One of the Millers? God in heaven, she hoped not, СКАЧАТЬ