Lori Benton (31 page)

She pulled her hands away and stared, her eyes lost in shadowed hollows. “You do not wish to go away? You want to keep those children and … what? Raise them here with me?”

“Aye.” She wasn’t reacting to his offer of marriage as he’d hoped, nor
as her embrace had convinced him she would. His head was still half-full of thoughts of things forbidden him—her taste, her scent, the feel of her bare skin—at least until they were wed proper. “Aye and amen to both. With all my heart. And with all my heart, I love you.”

He barely had the words out before she bolted off the ground, leaving him kneeling at her feet, staring up at the long white flow of her shift, her damp hair swinging, the pale oval of her face. He stood more slowly, feeling a heaviness weighing him to the earth. Silence stretched with no break but the distant hoot of an owl.

A tightness built beneath his breastbone. He’d long since realized she was struggling with their nearness, that she feared to let him, the children—anyone—into her heart after all she’d lost. She clenched that grief to herself like a shield, keeping any risk of loving again at arm’s length.

But she didn’t know how much he knew.

“Willa,” he said, as the tightness coiled in his chest. “I ken about the children.”

“The children?” she asked, clearly confused.

“Your children. The daughters you had with your Mohawk husband.”

Her arms came up, linking across her ribs. “How do you know?” She wielded the question like a weapon, meant to ward him off.

“Joseph told me, the day he brought us Owl and Maggie.”

She stared at him, her face white in the near dark. “He wouldn’t.”

“He thought I kent or he’d not have spoken of them, or your need to let yourself grieve them. But he was right, Willa. You need to grieve, only let me be here while ye do. Let me help bear your burdens, give ye time to heal. And when you’re ready, to love—”

She lunged for her clothing on the ground so abruptly he broke off. When she started to move past him, he tried to step in front of her. “Wait, Willa.”

“No. Please. Get out of my path!” Dodging his grasp, she hurried down the footpath their feet had worn, returning to the cabin.

He lingered at the spring after she vanished, hardly mindful of the mosquitoes descending about his ears, whining, seeking his blood. They might’ve bitten him raw; it wouldn’t have compared to the rawness within. Darkness gathered beneath the trees. Through their lacing branches, stars pricked the inky blue where the clouds had broken.

She’d have gone to skin the goat, to hang it in the smoking shed. Probably she’d put some of the meat to stew on the hearth, while the children were asleep and couldn’t ask what sort of meat it was. Keeping herself too busy to think. Too busy to feel.

Hiding away her heart again, so he couldn’t reach it.

He walked at last to the cabin yard still sparking here and there with fireflies. He raised his eyes to the glittering stars blazing a cloud-crossed trail toward the wilderness he had come to set down in paint and ink. And maybe that was what he was meant to be doing. Maybe he had heard wrong, there on the porch as the sun set. But the sight could not hold his heart. It was the solitary cabin under the stars and what it contained that drew his gaze, his soul, his prayers.

“I tried. You saw how it went, aye? What more would Ye have me do?”

He waited in the insect-humming dark until an answer came, and it wasn’t the one he’d expected.

Stay
.

“All right. But we’ve some convincing to be doing, then, aye?”

Because she couldn’t bear to stay inside the cabin feigning sleep, Willa was crouched in the garden pulling weeds with barely light enough to distinguish them from healing plants. Hearing a rustling beyond the fence, she assumed it the collie, which had come out with her, and went on with her work, sore hands digging into moist earth as the darkness lifted, head and eyes and heart aching.

“Willa?”

How long Neil MacGregor had stood in the gate behind her she didn’t know—perhaps it had been him, not his collie, she heard.

She raised her head but didn’t turn. “Yes?”

“I’d speak to ye before the children wake. May I come in?”

His voice washed over her as it had done that first day she found him awake on the travois, catching at her heart with that way he had of turning the simplest speech into lilting music, while underneath beat a rumble like distant drums.

“If you wish.”

On the path between the aromatic beds, she stood to face him. The light was gray now, the garden a world of scent and shadow. She brushed her hands gingerly together, avoiding the burn, searching for words to undo what she’d done the previous night.

The fire, the goat, the children’s distress, his kindness and strength, it had been too much all at once. It had weakened her, peeling back the layers she had built around that raw, wounded part in her soul. She had let down her guard against him when he found her at the spring, against the feelings he stirred in her despite all her efforts to keep them, and him, at bay. But she was past it now. She was strong again. She would tell him …

He came toward her along the garden path, but he didn’t stop a pace away, as someone who wished to talk. Or listen. A glimpse of his eyes, blue shadowed in the dawn, was all she had before her face was between his hands and his mouth was on hers, tender and honest, and it was as if she hadn’t lain awake the night long fighting the pull to go to him. The roughness of his whiskers against her chin. The smell of him. The warmth of his hands, his mouth. She was back at the spring.

When he pulled away, she stifled a groan. He had done it again, so easily. Broken through her defenses as if they weren’t even there.

“You didna answer me last night,” he said. He still held her face between his hands. She didn’t have the strength to pull away.

“You will make me say it?”

“That’s generally what’s expected of a woman when a man proposes marriage.”

The gentle humor in his voice almost undid her. She risked a look at his eyes, with their strong brows that gave them such expression, and saw what he’d said in the dark was true in the gray of dawn. He was offering her everything she’d lost, and more. He was offering her his heart in a way Kingfisher had never done, as good a husband as Kingfisher had been to her, and she knew that if she took it, she would be giving hers in exchange, in a way that she had never known. And because of that, she stood before him, more terrified than she had ever been, knowing only one thing she could do to save herself.

Despite the lightness of his speech, his eyes held a hope as deep and wide as the pearly sky above them. It was far too late to spare him hurt, even if she could spare herself.

“You have not had one of your headaches in weeks,” she said. “Your wrist is healed. Pine Bird’s leg is healed. There is no more reason for you to be here.”

She found the will to step back from the warmth of his hands, but saw she hadn’t rebuffed him.

“Setting aside for the moment my feelings—and yours—d’ye expect me just to go, to leave ye and the children unprotected? After yesterday?”

“Joseph—”

“Isna here,” he said. “I ken he means to come back for the children, but, Willa, you do ken he’ll ask ye again to go with him. Dinna tell me that’s not what he still wants.”

She couldn’t meet his searching look. “It is what he wants.”

“And will ye tell him no? Will ye force him to go and take the children away with him?”

“I will. And then I will be alone.”

He flinched at that. “What will you do, God forbid something like that fire should happen again?”

“Whatever I must do.” She met his gaze, hardening her resolve so that she could get the words out. “I do not want the children to stay, and I do not want you here.”

She couldn’t have made it plainer, but oh, his eyes. They were the only color in her landscape now. So blue, so filled with disappointment, bewilderment, hurt.

“What was that about, then, last night?” he demanded of her. “
You
kissed me, Willa. There’s no pretending ye didna. Was it that you just needed a man’s arms to hold you, and mine did for you, being most convenient?”

She couldn’t stem the tide of heat rising in her face or pretend she did not feel the ache in her chest, the urgent need to tell him no, it had been his arms she wanted. Only his. But she said the word, knowing it would wound. “Yes.”

“ ’Twas naught to do with me, then?”

“No.”

The skin went taut across his cheekbones. Pain cut across his eyes. Still he said, “I dinna believe ye. Willa, dinna drive away the people who care for you.”

She couldn’t bear this. Not his words. Not his eyes. Not his heart, offered to her with such terrifying abandon. She turned her back, bent her knees, and resumed pulling weeds.

She went on pulling them as the silence stretched, bleeding out between them.

When he spoke again, the hope was gone from his voice.

“You’ve tried verra hard not to let me, but I’ve seen deeper into your soul than ye ken. You’re frozen as ice. But ice canna last, Willa. ’Tis either going to thaw or shatter. And a life of solitude doesna guarantee you’ll never feel grief or pain again. But if you want me to leave, then I canna force ye to let me stay.”

Another pause, another wounding silence, then his footsteps on the path. Leaving her.

The rising sun speared light through the treetops. It struck her face, but she didn’t feel its warmth. The sun that might have melted her was setting fast behind her, leaving a chill hardened around her heart, and the image of his eyes, ravishing as the snowbound memory of a summer sky.

She left the garden after he’d cleared his things from the cabin and saddled his horse in the yard, and came down barefoot into the sound of his voice.

“No—listen to me. Dinna hold my leaving against her. She has every right to bid me go. ’Tis not fitting, my staying longer. Besides, I made promises to people back east. I must keep my word, aye?”

“Take us with you!” It was Owl imploring, sounding not the almost-man he wanted them to think him, but the child he was.

Neil’s voice caught. “I would do—lad, I would was I bound westward. I’m headed east, back into the mountains, then down the Hudson where ye came from. I’m not likely to come this way again.”

Willa halted at the end of the porch. In the yard Seamus stood bearing
bags and canvas-wrapped burdens tied behind the saddle. The sight left her hollowed.

Then she saw Neil, on the porch, on his knees before the children, their hair and clothes still mussed from sleep. He had an arm encircling each, and they clung to him as if they wouldn’t let him go. But gently he put them from him, never taking his eyes from their anguished faces.

“I’ll pray for ye every day. Dinna be afraid, but trust the Almighty. For if I love you, being only human, then He does all the more. And because He loves you, He will keep you in the shelter of His hand. Will you remember that?”

Owl said he would. Pine Bird bobbed her chin, though it dripped with tears. Neil placed a hand upon each of their heads.

“Then may the Almighty Lord bless and keep thee, Owl and Maggie. May He make His face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. May the Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”

The ache in Willa’s chest was unbearable.

“Do you have all you need?” The words came out like crow squawks, shattering the moment, startling the children.

Neil stood and stepped off the porch. “Willa, I wish you’d take—”

“I will not.”

He’d been reaching into his coat as if he meant again to offer her coin. He withdrew his hand. “What provisions I need I’ll get in Shiloh.”

“Good,” she said.

“Do you mean to send us away too?”

Though she’d anticipated resentment toward her, anger even, over Neil’s leaving, Willa was taken aback by Owl’s question.

“That is what you want,” she said, turning to the children who stood with brown toes curled over the porch’s edge, stricken faces lifted to her. “For Joseph to take you west to Niagara. To the People. Is it not?”