Choices of the Heart (24 page)

Neither of them released her. “You wouldn’t shoot kin,” Jake or Jeb said. “Not over a stranger.”

“She’s not a stranger to me—to my family.” Griff shifted the bell-shaped barrel of the gun. “I’m taking responsibility for her. Now let her go.”

“We was just havin’ some fun,” the third man objected. “We wouldn’t have harmed her.”

Perhaps he wouldn’t, but Esther was too close to Jake and Jeb not to know otherwise.

She twisted her shoulders, then her hips, trying to loosen their combined hands on her waist and neckline. Both tightened their grip. Fabric tore.

And Griff fired.

Leaves and twigs showered down on them.

“Are you crazy?” the man behind Esther bellowed. “That nearly got me.”

“The next one will.” Griff shifted the gun. “If you remember how to count, you have until three. One. Two. Th—”

Cursing, the men released her and scooped up a jug from the ground, and all three hightailed into the trees.

Esther dropped to her knees, gagging, fighting the urge to retch to clear her mouth from the taste of the man’s hand—salt and spirits and grime. Her hair tumbled around her face, her pins gone. It seemed to reek of smoke and sweat and whiskey. And her fear. The ripping, tearing terror of knowing exactly what would have happened if Griff hadn’t come across her.

“It’s all right now, Esther.” He stooped before her, and with the same kind of gentleness that plucked music from the dulcimer, he brushed the hair away from her face. “They’re gone.”

She grasped his hand like a line for a drowning man. She should shove it from her, tell him she’d had enough of men taking liberties with her person. Except they weren’t liberties if she allowed it, if she wanted it.

She clung to his fingers, pressed them against her cheek, and began to tremble as though the temperature had dropped to freezing.

“Shh. Hush now.” He knelt and gathered her against him, holding her close, stroking her hair down her back, murmuring, murmuring over her keening wails. “Hush now. Hush.”

“I”—she gasped—“can’t.”

“Yea, you can. You don’t want nobody else finding us like this. They’d have us before the preacher by morning.” His tone was light, teasing.

It worked. Her shuddering diminished. She managed to swallow the wailing sobs. If he released her, she wouldn’t tumble over or be sick. She would get to her feet and start walking.

He didn’t release her. He slid his hand beneath the fall of her hair and cupped the back of her head, tilting her face up toward his. Too close to his. His breath brushed her lips. His eyes gazed into hers. He was going to kiss her. She must stop him. It was wrong. They weren’t even courting. If the mere touch of his hand made her insides quake, how much more would his kiss do to her body, her heart, her soul?

His lips covered hers before she worked that out, and then she couldn’t think. She could only feel—warmth and excitement. She could only taste—lemons sweet and tart on his lips. Despite her head saying,
No, no, no
, she wound her fingers through his ragged curls and held him near for the first closeness she’d allowed herself in nearly six months, a closeness she thought she feared, believed she didn’t want.

Knew she shouldn’t have.

She tensed and dropped her hands to his shoulders.

He raised his head only enough to break the contact. “I expect that was a right foolish thing to do.”

She nodded.

“Should I apologize?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t stop you.”

“I’m right glad about that.” He brushed his lips across hers. “I’ve been wanting to kiss you practically since I met you. But you’ve been running from me since you got here.” He cupped her face in his hands. “Why?”

“I . . . I’m . . .” She jerked away and grabbed for her torn neckline. “Please. Please forget this happened.”

“Forget?” He smiled. “If you think I can forget that, you don’t know noth—anything about men.”

“I know too much about men, like the intentions of your cousins. They thought they could—they thought I was the kind of female they could—”

It came to her then, the full impact, the irrepressible nausea. She scrambled to her feet, tripping over and tearing her gown further, and darted into the bushes.

She might have crawled beneath a convenient rock and stayed there until Griff gave up on her and went away. She couldn’t face him again. She’d let him kiss her. Aching for arms around her, she accepted his touch and too much more. And she didn’t want to pull away this time. She wanted to stay, kissing him again and again.

Oh, the people of Seabourne were right. She was a conscienceless woman leading men astray. Oglevie and Zach, the Tolliver cousins and Griff. Griff, who drew her to him like a full moon drew the tide up the sand. She couldn’t run fast enough or far enough to get away from him, the first man who made her feel as others had said she made them feel. And if she gave in again, if they gave in to temptation again, if someone like Zach caught Griff touching her, a lifelong friendship—the slender stem of hope for peace on the mountain—might shatter.

She must get back to the Tollivers’, gather what of her things she could carry, and leave.

She started to push her way through the trees.

“Esther.” Griff reached her before she had gone two yards. “You can’t get back by yourself. You’ll be lost in half a minute.”

“Downhill to the river?”

“Downhill into a holler full of Gosnolls.”

“Oh.” She scrubbed at her lips, wishing she still tasted lemon. “They wouldn’t harm me, would they?”

“Like those Tolliver cousins wouldn’t.”

“Oh.” She hung her head. Her loose hair seemed to weigh down her scalp. “You wouldn’t have truly shot them, would you?”

“Nowhere it would have done any harm. Well, not much anyway. They’re a lot of lazy varmints hoping to get their hands on the lead mine, or some of the profits.”

“By killing off Brookses.”

Griff’s hand closed over her shoulder, and he turned her toward him. “What did you say?”

“I heard them making some jokes about doing away with Brookses and Gosnolls.”

“Well, that’s right troublesome.” He released his grip and slipped his arm around her shoulders.

Make him stop.

She rested her head on his shoulder, too weak and weary in body and spirit to remain upright, forthright, create distance between them.

“Come along.” He urged her forward. “We need to get you home.”

He led her back into the clearing, where he paused to scoop up his shotgun.

She shuddered at the stench of spent powder. “How did you get that so fast?”

“I had it with me in the things we brought down for the picnic. Wasn’t about to go through the woods at night without it.”

“But I was.”

“Not too wise of you.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders again. “C’mon. Those rascals might take a notion to come back.”

That was enough of a threat to get her going. They entered the blackness of the woods and started uphill on a path too narrow for them to walk abreast. Griff took up a position behind her, his hand on her shoulder, guiding her as though he were a cat and could see in the dark. Up, up, up they climbed. Perspiration ran down her spine and beneath her hair. Breath rasped in her throat, and the sole of one shoe flapped loose. Just when she thought she couldn’t go on, they crested the ridge, and the bubbling splash of tumbling water greeted her like a blessing.

He had brought her to the waterfall.

20

Hands clasping the gun barrel, Griff stood with his back to the waterfall pool. The rush of water drowned out any sounds Esther made. She could be simply splashing water on her face, or she might have gone for a swim. He’d asked her if she could swim.

“Like a dolphin,” she replied.

He understood that to mean yes, but he had no idea what a dolphin was. Not that he could admit that to her. It only emphasized the gulf between them—her education and his only passable ability to read; her respectable family background and his disreputable family, fallen sister, vengeance-seeking father, and his own bleak future regardless of how much money the mine might bring the Tollivers.

He had taken too much of a liking for a woman he had declared he wouldn’t pursue. He had gone further, too far. He had held her close and kissed her. What might be worse, she had kissed him in return. Weeks of her darting away from him like a minnow in a pond racing from larger fish, then welcoming his nearness with glances from beneath those ridiculous eyelashes, followed by abrupt evasions from catching his eye, had ended like a thunderstorm concluding with a cliff tumbling into the river—disaster and repercussions yet to be known.

“I only meant to give her comfort, Lord.” Griff spoke to the night, knowing only God could hear him above the plunging cliff of water. “I lost control.”

And then some. Her scent like those tiny purple flowers that grew in dim places in the spring, her softness save for where she wore one of those corset contraptions, her willingness to let him hold her—all served to break down the will he’d worked to strengthen when around her. And once his lips touched hers and she didn’t resist, he was lost to reason that tried to tell him she had just had two men assault her and didn’t need a third manhandling her.

She didn’t consider his touch manhandling this time.

“Why this time, Esther Cherrett? Why did you let me kiss you?”

“I’ve been asking myself the same thing.” She appeared beside him.

He started. “I didn’t hear you over the water. Some watchman I am.”

“You were being a gentleman.” She smiled at him, automatic brilliance like something she practiced on all men and not just him. That her hair hung in sodden hunks around her face and over her shoulders, and she stood in a tattered cotton gown, did not detract from her beauty. It was a face and form a man could happily wake up to every morning and see passed along to his children.

The skin-deep beauty was there and then some, but what of the spirit of the woman inside?

Uncertainty about that was all that kept him from drawing her to him and kissing her again. If he kept telling himself that she flirted with all men, or most of them, and that she had led Zach to believe he could pay her compliments and then had run from him as though he’d insulted her—a coy act if ever there was one—he could talk himself out of caring for her. He was nothing to her. She had probably returned the embraces of many men.

“It wasn’t the first time for you, was it?” He sounded accusatory but didn’t care.

She shook her head. “I’ve been kissed before. I’m . . . I’ve been . . .” She took several quick steps forward, then caught the toe of her slipper in a crevice between two rocks and stumbled to a halt, her back to him, her hands gripping her upper arms. “I shouldn’t have done it. But those men were so rough, and you were so gentle. And they smelled so bad, and you—you tasted—that is . . .” Her voice dropped so low he couldn’t hear the rest of her words over the waterfall behind them.

He should move closer to her, yet with her talk of how he tasted to her, he dared not close the distance. He ached for no distance between them. But being there on their own in his favorite place, being near her, might prove more disastrous to them both at that moment.

“We should go,” he snapped out. “We’ll be missed if we’re gone much longer, and the others will want to know I found you.”

“I disrupted the party,” she exclaimed. “I am so sorry.”

“Zach disrupted the party. He shouldn’t have been making advances to you when you said no.” Griff had to close the distance between them now. He strode past her, then held out a hand to help her over the rocky climb to the top of the gorge.

She laid her fingers in his, hers ice-cold on that warm night, and a jolt came, an impact to his belly, his heart. At that moment, nothing would please him more than to warm her hands between his. She should never be cold when he was near.

He gazed down at her. “I think I’d have kissed you sooner if not for Zach. I thought you wanted him to court you with all that book learning you’re giving him.”

“I think everyone should learn who wants to. If I can help, I will.”

“And the dancing?”

Even in the minimal light, he saw her glare at him. “You never asked.”

“I didn’t dare. I think you know why now.”

“You don’t want to upset your cousin or fight with him.”

“Especially not over a female who is likely to run off without saying a word about it.”

Her silence was enough of an affirmative response for Griff.

He released her hand as soon as they reached the path down the mountain. Over the ridge, the gurgle of the waterfall diminished and the intermittent night sounds of the forest took over.

“I’ll tell you when I go. I’ll leave in the morning,” she said into the stillness. “If you all will lend me a horse, I’ll hire someone to bring it back once I reach a town.”

If she felt the same pull toward him as he did toward her—and her kiss suggested she did—then her decision was best. Yet the hoofbeats of her riding away already seemed to pound into his chest, crushing it, interfering with his breathing.

“You can’t ride off alone,” he said. “And the children need you here.”

He needed her there. But so did Zach.

“I’ll stay away from you if you stay,” he added. “I promise not to touch you.”

She walked beside him for a hundred yards or more, the crunch of their footfalls doubly loud, her gown swishing, brushing against his legs, before she asked, “Can you?”

His lips formed the word
yes
—silently. It was a stupid vow he couldn’t keep.

“I’m not certain I want you to, and that’s the trouble,” she answered for him. “Zach thinks he has some kind of claim on me, and if I stay, I’ll make trouble between you.” She stumbled again and caught her breath. “I’m afraid I gave him too much reason to.”