The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn (13 page)

The third stone wobbled worse than the first. Her arms flailed as fear shot up the backs of her knees, but she steadied herself—in time to see the thicket above her on the bank erupt with a shedding of leaves. A bear, big and black, stood up among the berry shrubs and looked at her with its small, startled eyes.

With a cry she stepped back. Her foot landed in the creek, shot from under her, and she pinwheeled over the edge into the pool.

It was deep and shockingly cold. Her head went under before her foot touched bottom. She kicked up from pebbly silt, thrashing, and broke the surface. She choked on water that rushed straight into her mouth and was dragged under again.

The current swept her into something hard. Her fingers clawed it, but the surface refused her a hold. She pushed off from it, hoping she was propelling herself up and toward the bank, not into deeper water.

Her shin struck stone. She scrabbled for it with her toes, finding purchase enough to launch herself out of the sucking, swirling hole. Still in water above her waist, she floundered for something to catch hold of.

A shape loomed above her. With the bear still lurking at the edges of her panic, she screamed and flailed. Something closed over her wrist, clamping hard.

“Tamsen—take hold of me!”

“Mr. Bird!” She gulped down water as she cried his name and came out of the creek retching it back up as he hauled her to safety.

Flat on his back and half-soaked, Jesse sprawled on the creek bank while Tamsen Littlejohn coughed up half the mountain’s runoff. His hands and knees shook with the aftershocks of finding her gone, tracking her to the creek and hearing her cry, hurtling up the stony draw to find her thrashing in the pool. Had he been seconds later …

He sat up and faced her, nigh as angry as he’d been scared. “Didn’t I tell you to stay put?”

Creek water spiked her lashes and streamed from the hair clinging in black tendrils to her waist. His eyes raked lower. Below the stays her wet shift molded to her hips and thighs and … He saw her shin, scraped and bleeding.

“You’re hurt.” He clasped her leg, meaning to get a better look. She jerked out of his grasp.

“Let me be!”

Anger sparked again through the fear and concern still shuddering through him. “Good thing I didn’t let you be a minute ago. What in the nation were you trying to do?”

A possibility hit him square. Had she been escaping again, from him? Why? Had she lost all confidence in him? Lord, had he got this all wrong?

No. He was meant to help her. That much he knew. And he sensed that something more was there between them. Or might be. Could be. But what had she been thinking, taking off barefoot in her shift?

He tried not to let it—he did try—but his gaze went over her again, down to her bared, comely ankles.

She was raw voiced as she said, “I was crossing the creek just fine when it startled me. I lost my footing.”

His gaze snapped to her face. “What startled you?”

“A bear.”

That jarred him. He raised himself, looking up and down the draw. If there’d been a bear, she’d spooked it with her flailing. “You sure?”

Her dark eyes were stones. “I’m sure.”

“All right,” he said, hands raised. “But answer me. Why were you trying to cross back over in the first place?”

“I was looking for the key.”

The pulse in her neck beat as crazily as his own. He could see it. “Key?”

“To my mother’s box. It’s gone—and I didn’t know if you were coming back.”

Now he was just plain insulted. “You thought I’d ride off and leave you stranded on this mountain? What sort of man d’you take me for?”

“I don’t know what sort of man you are.”

The unfairness of it stung. Jesse drew breath to retort, then realized she had a fair point. She didn’t know him. She’d barely looked past her own misery to see him as anything other than a means of escape. It had taken her days to ask his name.

As if by mutual impulse—the better to square off perhaps—they got to their feet, but when she started for the creek again, he grasped her arm. “What’re you doing?”

She yanked free. “I told you. I need to find the key.”

She needed no such thing. He could smash the fool box to get at whatever was so all-fired important inside it but thought it best not to say so just now. What he said was “All right,” which didn’t help, for no sooner had he said it than she was clambering up a boulder, sopping wet and stubborn as a mule. A mule with the sweetest wet-shift-molded curves he’d ever seen … Lord help him. He had to think.

“Think for moment. When’s the last time you mind seeing the key?”

That checked her. She turned to meet his gaze. “I put it in the lock before we left Mrs. Brophy’s house. It might have fallen out anywhere.”

In that clinging shift, perched on the rock, hair streaming wet as pond weed, she looked like a nymph stepped out of a tale.

Again he forced himself to think. The key … to her box … which had tumbled over the trail-side that first time he caught her pitching out of the saddle, barely out of Morganton. He knew what had happened to the key but said, “You can’t go looking for it sopping wet. Let’s get you dry—me too—then we’ll talk about what to do. All right?”

He waited, eyes fastened on her face and not an inch lower. Finally she nodded. Relieved, he held out his hand. She hesitated, then took it.

But she couldn’t keep up. The going wasn’t that steep climbing out of the draw, but he heard her breath shortening, the pull on his hand increasing with every step.

“Mr. Bird,” she gasped, a thin and strangled sound.

He turned in time to catch her in his arms, a tangle of wet hair and linen and clammy skin, and eased her down on a stone beside the muddy trail. “What’s wrong?”

No more’n a trickle of blood seeped from the scrape on her shin, but her color—or lack of it—alarmed him. When her head came up, he drew his arms away, leaving a hand on her shoulder to steady her.

“My stays. They hardly … let me … breathe.”

“Then take ’em off.” He spoke sharper than he’d meant to but couldn’t fathom why she’d torture herself wearing a garment made for fancy gowns, not crossing mountains. “Wearing ’em seems foolish. Can’t you—”

“My mother tied them.”

He stared at her trembling mouth, her quivering chin, started to say, “Why does that matter?” when it dawned on him why it mattered. He held his peace a moment, then said, “I’m sorry for it, Tamsen. But it’d make things easier if you could draw a full breath.”

She didn’t fall to crying, but the look on her face wrenched his heart. “Nothing can make this easier.”

She didn’t mean trudging up and down mountains. “I know it. But you’d be able to breathe, at least.” He waited, not knowing what she meant to do next, what he was meant to do.

She looked at him, chewing at her lip. “Will you help me?”

She scooted forward on the rock, put her back to him, then gathered up her mass of dripping hair and pulled it forward over her shoulders. The nape of her slender neck was whiter than her face now, the skin so smooth he longed to touch it. More than touch it.

“What do I do?” The words might’ve been a prayer.

She turned her head, giving him a view of her graceful jaw, long sooty lashes brushing her cheek. “The laces tie at the top. I think they’ve knotted.”

A tide of pink rose up her neck. If he’d never been presented with a pair of stays to unlace, he reckoned she’d never asked a man to unlace them. His heart beat hard again.

Perched behind her on the rock, he put his hands to her. The rigid garment was only slightly darker than the bleached shift beneath it. Against it his hands looked big and brown as bear paws. With the point of his knife, he worked loose the knot. The wet lacing took some doing to pull through the tiny holes, but he’d tackled swollen rawhide more stubborn.

He’d reached the center of her back before her shoulders curled forward. He felt her shaking, though she made no sound as she wept. Feeling wretched for her, he loosened the stays to her waist.

“Lift your arms.” When she did, he pulled the stays over her head, resisting the urge to toss them down the draw into the creek.

She bent over, crying into her hands. Jesse sat behind her, wanting to hold her while she grieved for her mother, who would never lace her stays again. He put a tentative hand to her shoulder.

She sat up stiff. “Don’t touch me!”

He sprang off the rock. She set her hands to her ribs and smoothed them down her shift, then yanked at the fabric where the stays had molded it to her sides. Jesse watched, pulse hammering, as her hands went to the small of her back, fingers groping upward, seeking to soothe.

“How’d you stand it so long? You must’ve been in torment since the night we left Morganton.” He hoped she never put the wretched things on again.

She didn’t answer, but his words seemed to distract her. With her back to him still, she said, “You keep saving me.”

The words were thick with tears.

Thinking how much she’d been through in the past few days, thinking how close he’d come to finding her drowned just now, Jesse came around to crouch beside her, looking up into her tear-swollen face, framed in wet tangles.

She looked back at him, desolate. “I thought I was going to die.”

“I know it. I think you scared ten years off of me.”

Wordless, she raised a hand to his face and held it there, cupping his rough-bearded jaw. He was so startled by the gesture that he couldn’t breathe, much less speak. Their gazes held, hers welling with gratitude.

He was the one drowning now.

Around them the birds, quiet since the storm, broke into song again. At last he choked out, “I wish I could’ve stopped what happened to your ma, but I’m not about to let you die.”

She took her hand away, still holding his gaze, eyes red from weeping but clearer now than they’d been since fleeing Morganton. “I believe you mean it.”

“I do. But it’d be a help to me,” he added shakily, “if you don’t try crossing another creek—or taking on any more bears—at least while I’m not by to lend a hand.”

It was some sort of wheaten loaf. Baked by whom, Tamsen didn’t ask. Nearly drowning had quickened her appetite. With her mouth stuffed full of bread, she looked up to see Mr. Bird poking a stick at their small fire, watching her across the flames.

“You’re enjoying that a sight more’n you did my corndodgers. Ought I to take offense?”

She could tell he was teasing her, was pleased to see her eating; still she flushed as she swallowed her mouthful.

She’d had plenty cause to blush since Mr. Bird pulled her from the creek. With her shift soaked and her petticoat and jacket in little better state, she’d let him talk her into draping them to dry on the shelter he’d constructed above the draw, meantime donning his spare clothes. A makeshift belt of leather whang cinched a pair of homespun breeches that fell nearly to her ankles. His linsey hunting shirt—taken warm off his body—was so voluminous that she’d had to roll the sleeves half their length to keep them above her wrists. Her nakedness under the shirt had mortified her at first, but Mr. Bird, dressed in a buckskin shirt and those scandalous leggings, took her appearance in stride.

He smiled at her now. “I ain’t offended ’bout the bread. Cade got it back at the settlers’ camp, so ’course it’s better’n any vittles I’d cobble together.”

She’d been about to pop the last of the bread into her mouth. Now she lowered the morsel, wondering what her mother would say to see her sitting on a mountainside wearing a man’s clothes, moccasins on her feet,
damp hair drying in the fire’s warmth. Would it shock her, or would the sight have made Sarah Parrish laugh?

Tamsen closed her eyes, grief swelling thick in her throat. She didn’t want to cry in front of Mr. Bird again. She looked up from the bite of bread. “Who is Cade? You’ve mentioned his name …” She flushed, feeling she ought to know the answer.

“Cade’s my pa.”

That surprised her. “Your father was in Morganton? Did I see him?”

“You fell into his arms, first time I laid eyes on you.”

“Oh.” Memory of the man she’d collided with in the street had fragmented until only scraps remained. A tall, hard shoulder; startling eyes netted with creases; tawny skin and sculpted bones and rather alarming black brows. She searched Mr. Bird’s features for an echo of those looks, some indication of mixed blood. Then she met his gaze.