Heartbreak Creek (50 page)

“Best sit down, missy. You’re looking right pale.”

Moving on wooden legs, she allowed Mr. Satterwhite to lead her around the back of the wagon to the chair beside the coals of that morning’s fire. As she sagged onto the cushioned seat, she grabbed at the gnarly hand on her shoulder. “Do please check, Mr. Satterwhite. I m-must know if you’ve killed him.”

“By the bones of Saint Andrew! O’ course he dinna kill me!”

Maddie gaped at the figure staggering around the back of the wagon, one hand braced against the ladder rail support, the other wiping blood from his brow. Lifting a leg, he shook it furiously, trying to dislodge her snarling dog from his boot. “And call off your rat before I snap his bluidy neck!”

“Angus, hush!”

“The hell I will, Madam!”

“No, the other one.”

“The other one?” Mr. Satterwhite looked around. “How many husbands you got?”

“Oh, dear. I-I think I’m going to faint.”

“Not until I get some answers, Madam!”

But everything was already swirling away.

 

 

Ash lunged, catching her just before she toppled into the fire. Fending off the yapping rat, he lowered her to the ground. “Tie up that damned dog,” he ordered the old man. “And get some water!”

By all the saints
, what was she thinking, fainting like that?

“Is she dead?”

“No, she isna dead! She fainted.” Or so he hoped. Uneasy with the old man hovering somewhere behind him with a loaded gun in his hands, Ash glanced over his shoulder. “Scatterwell, is it?”

“Satterwhite. Wilfred Satterwhite. Some call me Walleyed Willy, but if you do, I’ll shoot you. Maybe fifteen times, since this here’s a repeater.”

Ignoring that, Ash turned back to the woman. “What’s her name?”

“She’s your wife.”

“Her name, damnit!”

“Missus Wallace.”

“Hell, I know that. What’s her Christian name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were courting her, were you no’?”

“You were married to her. And what’s your name?”

“Angus Wallace. No, Ashby.”

“Which?”

“Both.”

“Named her dog after you. Makes sense to me.”

Realizing he was grinding his teeth, Ash made himself stop. “Get the water. And either lock up that bluidy dog or shoot it.”

The old man snatched up the wad of fur and stomped off, muttering under his breath.

Ash studied the woman. His wife. He recognized her, yet she seemed different from the woman he’d married. Older. Prettier. More . . . rounded. He sank back on his heels, distancing himself from both the woman and the disconcerting realization that even as angry as he was with her, he could still feel an attraction. A clear sign he’d been in these mountains too long.

He remembered her as being sweet and pretty. Tractable. Able to follow orders and always smiling, with round pink cheeks, good teeth, and a cheerful aspect even when his father had given her his best scowl.

But he could see time had aged her, replacing those round girlish cheeks with clearly defined cheekbones and sculpting a stronger line to her jaw. Stubborn, almost. The wide mouth was the same—he remembered that well enough—and that arch in her brows that always gave her a look of wide-eyed innocence.

Innocence?
Ash almost laughed aloud. How innocent could a woman be if she would willingly desert her husband, toss her marriage aside, and run off to some foreign country just to make tintype pictures?

Okay. That might not be fair of him. He had seen her work, and it was more art than photograph. The woman had an eye.

“Here’s the water, your majesty.” The old man stomped toward him, dribbling a trail of liquid from the long-handled ladle he held in his outstretched hand. “But I’d advise you not to throw it on her.”

Ash took the ladle, realized he couldna force an unconscious person to drink, debated disregarding Satterwhite’s advice and throwing it in her face anyway, then drank it himself. It was so cold it burned going down. “Get my horse,” he ordered, handing back the ladle.

“Get him yourself.”

“And you’ll tend her while I’m gone?”

Satterwhite went to get his horse.

“Mind the dog,” Ash called after him, then turned back to the woman, uncertain what to do. He wanted her to wake up so he could yell at her. He wanted her to stop lying there so pale and still. It worried him. Reaching out, he tapped her cheek with his index finger. “Wake up.”

She ignored him. Typical female tactic.

He tried to see in her features the young woman who had caught his eye six years ago when the Tenth Royal Hussars had ridden through her village on the way to their new posting in Ireland. She’d become a beautiful woman since then. Older, but better. Unlike him, she showed no gray in her dark auburn hair, and her face wasna marked by seventeen years of hard soldiering. Granted, he was thirty-four now, and quite a bit older than she was. Ten, eleven years, if he remembered right, which would make her somewhere in her early twenties. Still young enough to produce heirs, which, after all, was why he was here.

Duty.
Would he ever be free of it?

“Is-Is it truly you, Angus?”

Looking down, he saw that Molly, or Mildred, or whatever her name was, was awake and gawking up at him. “It is, Madam. But it’s Ashby now.” He was still having trouble getting accustomed to that change.

“Where’s your mustache?”

On reflex, he fingered his bare upper lip, which had once sported the flaring mustache that was the mark of the Tenth Hussars. “I shaved it off.”

She slapped him hard across the cheek.

Rearing back onto his heels, he blinked at her in shock. “What was that for?”

“For being a twit, among other things.” Laboriously, she pushed herself into a half-reclining posture, her elbows braced behind her.

He tried not to notice how that pose pulled the fabric of her dress tight across her breasts.
Wait.
Had she called him a twit?

“I see you’re still the vexing, high-handed man you were six years ago when you ran off like the dog you are. Oh, do move away, Angus, or Ashby, or whatever you call yourself now. You’re crowding me.”

“
I
ran off? If you’ll recall, Madam, I returned to my regiment. As ordered. What might your excuse be?”

“Desertion. Yours. Of me. Where’s Mr. Satterwhite?”

“Choking the dog, I hope.”

“Then you’ll have to do.” She extended a hand in his direction.

He could see it was shaking, and was gratified to note that she was as unsettled by this meeting as he was. He was also relieved that she was starting to get her color back. He had a low tolerance for fainting females.

“Well? Are you going to help me up? Or have you forgotten how to be a gentleman?”

He refrained from flinging her against a tree. “I dinna desert you,” he said with rigid calmness once she was back in the chair. “I left you in the care of my family at our ancestral home.”

“Ancestral home? That pile of rubbish?”

He almost reached for the saber he no longer wore. “Madam,” he managed through clenched teeth. “Northbridge Kirk has been the seat of the Earls of Kirkwell for nigh onto five generations. It is no’ a pile of rubbish.”

“They’ve repaired the skirt wall, then?”

He was momentarily struck dumb by how much he wanted to shake her, throttle her, wipe that smirk off her face. Get his hands on her any way he could.

She dismissed his silence with a wave of her hand. “As I said. A pile of rubbish. Have you come for a divorce?”

Caught off guard by the abrupt change in subject, it took him a moment to find an appropriate answer. “As appealing as that notion might be, Madam,” he snapped, “I have come to take you back.”

 

 

HEARTBREAK CREEK

 

 

PIECES OF SKY
OPEN COUNTRY
CHASING THE SUN