Lori Benton (30 page)

He had prayed. Since the moment they paused on the ridge, spotted smoke rising from the field, and the first clench of dread had gripped him, he had prayed. While they raced Seamus back to the cabin, grabbed spade and hoe and buckets and ran to save the crop, he had prayed. But he hadn’t prayed with such faith to warrant this glorious summer shower now doing the work he and Willa and the boy couldn’t have accomplished. The crop was saved, minus a blackened half acre.

They stood at the field’s edge, gulping moist air as the rain’s drumming eased to a patter, as drenched now as they had been scorched with the fire’s heat. From the cabin, they could hear Cap’s muffled barking—Owl had shut the collie inside before racing to the spring—but over the three of them had settled a stunned silence.

Willa broke it, turning to Owl. She brushed rain-plastered hair from his face, then took up his hands to inspect them. “Let me see you. Are you hurt anywhere?”

Looking embarrassed, and pleased, by her attention, he said, “No. I’m not hurt.”

He wasn’t. Not physically. But his eyes told of another kind of hurt, and Neil recalled with an inner lurch what other devastation had been wrought in their absence. The rainfall swept away as abruptly as it had come, leaving behind a silence unbroken by birdsong or insect hum. It was then they heard it, a sound Neil sensed had been issuing for some while, masked by the drumming of the rain. A child’s grief-stricken wail.

“Ach, no. I didna mean her to see. There wasna time to do aught about it, not with the fire.”

Willa looked at him, dread reemerging on her rain-slick face.

Owl took off running down the track toward his sister’s cries. Willa stared after the boy, her body straight as a sapling, but one storm-battered and swaying. It was all Neil could do to keep from wrapping his arms about her, to shelter her from the next blow.

Instead, it was left to him to deliver it.

“The goat, Willa. ’Tis been slaughtered.”

Maggie was inconsolable. They’d told the children it might have been a wolf, come prowling while they were away. Owl had shot them a narrowed stare. A wolf would have dragged off the carcass or left considerably less of it to find. A wolf wouldn’t have made a straight slash across the animal’s tender throat.

“Aye,” Neil said as they stood alone by the pen. “ ’Twas done by a wolf, right enough, but one that goes on two legs.” He studied Willa as she gazed at the sodden carcass. Her own hair straggled wet about her shoulders, and the bones of her face looked high and stark.

“It will make a meal or two. If you could hang it to bleed, I will see to the rest.”

“I’ll do that,” he said.

She started to move away, but hesitated. “I saw your plant press and desk on the porch. Did you find what you sought?”

His brief outing with the boy might have happened days ago. “I made a few new sketches. Let the lad try his hand at it too.”

Instead of softening, her features hardened further. “It was foolish of me to leave the fields and yard unguarded. It will not happen again.”

“Willa.” He moved toward her, but she stepped away, leaving him only words to offer. “ ’Tis going to be all right, ken. Most of the crop was saved. ’Tis a pity about the goat, but I’ve coin enough to—”

“Thank you, but no, I do not need your coin,” she said, rebuffing the offer before he could make it. Her eyes flicked up to his, almost pleading—for what, he wished he kent—then she tore them away and strode to the cabin, took up a cloth and soap she’d left on the porch, and headed toward the spring.

He let her go. There was the goat to see to and the children. He did both, then changed his shirt and breeches. But even after a cursory ablution in his room, Willa hadn’t returned from the spring.

Maggie had cried herself to sleep. Owl lay unconscious beside her, spent from their early rising and the fire. He left them sleeping, Cap curled nearby, and went outside.

The sun was setting, streaking the sky above the hills to the west with banners of fiery gold. The startling beauty of it after such a harrowing few hours struck in him a chord of longing—not the old longing to be roaming those hills, eyes to the ground in hope of spying some as-yet-unnamed
floral specimen. It was a longing to remain precisely where he was, with this view before his eyes, this land under his feet. And Willa Obenchain beside him.

He’d glimpsed the mother Willa had been when she looked to Owl’s welfare in the fire’s aftermath, and later, still rain soaked, sitting cross-legged beside the pallet where Maggie lay crying, stroking the girl, comforting her in murmurs. He wished he’d been close enough to hear what she’d said. There was a strength in her like no woman he’d known, yet there was also as great a capacity to embrace and console, though she let herself show it so rarely.

“Burning Sky,” he whispered as the sunset blazed before his eyes, and for the first time wondered, was it this for which the Mohawks had named her? She could be as incandescent. Perhaps they’d been quick to see it and simply called her what she was.

Aye, she was still that daughter of the Wolf Clan, as much as she was Willa Obenchain, daughter of Dieter and Rebecca. If he could, if she’d let him, he would help her see she didn’t have to choose. With him, and perhaps with these children, she could be both.

It felt like scales falling from his eyes, for what was only half-glimpsed before was now as clear as the sun’s blazing glory. He could see now how the Almighty had led them each to this solitary cabin, had set them like the fragments of a shattered bone, knitting them into what Willa and the children had lost. Family. A gift he hadn’t asked for, but one more precious than all the accolades he could receive from his peers. What matter that he’d never presumed himself anything but a temporary interloper on the frontier. Never seen himself as strong enough, hardened enough, that the notion of permanency in such a place should have ever crossed his mind.

Perhaps he didn’t need to be.

“ ‘And God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty,’ ” he said, and laughed softly at the irony of it.

He might be weak, even foolish. He was also sure.

With a prayer on his lips, he stepped off the porch and crossed the cabin yard, headed for the spring.

Stripped to her shift, kneeling by the spring, Willa rocked herself and let the tears flow like the rivulets streaming from her hair. She had tried so long to contain this grief, but it was clawing down the walls she’d built around it like a wild, caged thing, shredding its way out of her, raw in her throat, flooding from her eyes.
She-Goes-Singing. Sweet Rain
.

Mixed in with the faces of her daughters as she grieved were the faces of Pine Bird and Owl, her parents, Oma, Joseph … and Neil MacGregor.

She wanted to go back to the cabin, but whether to take Neil into her arms or simply to hold Pine Bird and weep and weep and maybe never stop, she didn’t know. If she did the last, it would only frighten the child. If she did the first—that she was even having the thought terrified
her
.

She had to get hold of herself, to pull this grief back in, to cast down branches across the path to her heart before Neil came looking for her, before he found her like this. He would offer comfort, and she would be so tempted to let him give it …

No,
no
. She’d made her decision before ever she came back to this place. She would live alone. A solitary life. To consider weakening, allowing anything else—the love of a man, children—made her want to huddle there by the spring and pray never to get up again. It was too much pain to risk. Too much.

Oh, but to feel Neil MacGregor’s arms around her, just for a moment … A sob escaped her as she snatched up the cloth to dry her hair.

Her hair hung down her back in a dripping mass, dark against her shift. She’d washed it, which explained her tardiness in returning from the spring.
Neil paused on the footpath while she knelt among the ferns edging the runnel, his heart both full and wrung at the sight of her. While he hesitated, she made a sound that carried above the spring’s trickle. A sob?

Almost angrily she snatched up a cloth from the ground and yanked her wet locks forward to rub them dry—only to drop the towel with an indrawn hiss of breath.

He was at her side, kneeling in the rain-wet ferns, taking gentle hold of her hands to turn them palm up. Like his, they were rubbed almost to blisters. Unlike his, a reddened streak crossed her right palm at the base of all four fingers. A burn. A slight one, but obviously painful.

“What …? Did ye grab a burning stalk?”

She looked at her hands as though they belonged to someone else. “I don’t remember.”

She averted her face, letting the long wet curtain of her hair fall between them. He took up the cloth. “Let me.”

The amber glow of sunset had cooled to shadow beneath the trees. The air around them hung warm, still, save for the tiny bright pulses of fireflies at the edge of the cabin yard. He took up her hair and squeezed the strands with the cloth. She didn’t protest, but closed her still averted eyes and made another noise, this one of pleasure.

He felt a jolt through his belly as her hair slipped wet through his fingers. “ ’Tis the color of winter oak leaves, your hair.” His hand brushed her throat. “So beautiful.”

He felt her shiver at the touch. She turned her face to him. There wasn’t light enough to distinguish the disparate colors of her eyes, but he could read the softening of her mouth.

“Willa.” It was all he had time to say before she raised a hand to his face and drew his mouth down to hers.

For a second, he didn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Then he dropped the towel and took her in his arms, his fingers tangled in the cool of her wet hair.
A groan rose from within her, a sound of surprise, and need. She slid her hand inside the open neck of his shirt, down the slope of his shoulder, her fingers cool on his skin, her mouth slanting more fully to his, at once hungry and yielding.

His thoughts were in chaos, fragments of reason beating against the tide of joy and desire sweeping over him, beating it back until he could grasp one shining thread. He wanted her, but not like this—not yet. Soon—
God Almighty, let it be soon
—but not now.

He thrust out a hand, landing it palm flat against the earth. “Willa—,” he spoke against her lips. “Let me stay with ye.”

“Yes.” She strained to pull him closer. “Stay.”

“No.” He took her wrist. “I dinna mean now—this—though I want it.” He let go of her wrist to touch her face, thrilled that her eagerness seemed to match his own. Groaning with the effort of restraint, he cradled her cheek.

“Willa, you’re so like your eyes, the brown and the green. ’Tis like you’ve two souls in ye. Sometimes you’re as wild and remote to me as if you were born Mohawk. Other times it seems I’ve kent ye my life long, and you’re as near to me as my own heart. But whatever you’ve been, whatever else ye will be, I want you to be my wife.”

Beneath his hands she went completely still. For an instant, even her breathing ceased. Then she choked out, “What?”

Twilight had engulfed them. He could no longer see her face as clearly as he longed to do. He ran his hands down her slackened arms, cupping her upturned hands in his. He raised her fingers to his lips, kissed the tips of them gently. “ ’Twas no coincidence, your finding me as ye did, no coincidence these children came to us. ’Tis the Almighty’s doing. Can ye not feel it?”