Gift Of The Heart

But to her dismay she felt Billy begin to shuffle and tug at her skirt. “Mama?” he began, unable to contain himself any longer, “Mama, why—”

Instantly she crouched down to the child’s level, praying that her voice alone could silence the damning question. “Hush, now, Billy,” she said urgently, resting the musket in the crook of her arm as she brushed her fingers across his cheek. “Mama’s talking with Uncle Alec.”

“And she’s not done talking to me yet.”

Before she realized it Alec was beside her, seizing her arm and dragging her to her feet so roughly that the musket slipped free and fell with a soft swoosh into the snow. She gasped with surprise, but didn’t fight him or struggle to free herself, instead going perfectly still. She wouldn’t give Alec that satisfaction, nor did she wish to frighten Billy any more than he already was, his fists locked tight around her knee.

“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing, Alec?” she said as evenly as she could. Lord, how had she let herself be so careless? “This is ridiculous!”

“Not as ridiculous as you pointing that damnable musket at me,” he said, his face near enough to hers that she could smell the rum and stale tobacco on his breath. “Perhaps next time you’ll remember that I don’t like to be kept out in the snow at gunpoint like some gypsy tinker.”

“There 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, but regardless I want you up there directly.”

The boy’s chin sank lower, into open rebellion. “Don’t wanna go. Wanna stay here.” He pointed at the man near the window. “With him.”

“Billy,” 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 back stiffened, but she didn’t turn to face him. “I told you already that I don’t heed what Alec says.”

“I didn’t ask you what you believed. I asked how much he told you.”

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 of Friends, I was a birthright member of our Meeting, too. But—now I’m not much of anything.”

“Ah.” Solemnly she nodded again, and with her fingertips smoothed her hair around her ears. She could understand that. There were days—too many days, and nights—when she believed she wasn’t much of anything, either. “I suppose I believed you were a Friend because I wanted you to be. It made you easier to help if you didn’t belong to either side. Not that it matters now, of course.”

He shrugged his uninjured shoulder, volunteering nothing more. Though she could understand his reticence, she wasn’t used to it in men, especially not after William, and it made her uncomfortable.

“My grandmother was turned out of her Meeting,” she said, determined to fill in the silence. “For marrying a man who wasn’t a Friend. It was quite a scandal at the time, mostly because she wasn’t the least bit contrite.”

“If she was anything like you, then I’m not surprised she was turned out of her Meeting.”