Lori Benton Read Online Free Page A

sheathed in beaded leather. It was the most rustic costume he’d yet seen on the frontier—on a white woman.
    “He found you, did ye say?”
    “Near the laurels. With you.”
    Images skittered at the edges of his memory. A laurel thicket … and ahawk in flight. A red-tailed hawk. It had circled up and over a curious stone on a ridge. A thin stone that rose to a point like a scalpel’s blade. Wanting a closer look, he’d led the horse around to it by an easier ascent, made a sketch, then slipped the book into his satchel and unlaced a saddlebag. A canteen had fallen. He’d grabbed for it …
    Next he kent, he was lying in the laurels with Cap’s frantic barking driving spikes into his skull, his vision occluded, and his wrist screaming in pain. At some point he’d roused and found the laudanum in his coat pocket, the glass thankfully unbroken. Black draft for the black spells. He hated the stuff. Hated worse his need of it.
    So the woman had found him there, still in the laurels. “Ye dinna mean to say you brought me here, on your own?”
    The woman’s deep-set eyes narrowed, but she nodded.
    “How? Oh, aye, the travois,” he said, answering his own question. How had she gotten his horse to pull the contraption? Too distracted for the moment by a fresh stab of pain to ask, he ran light fingers over his swollen wrist, hissing in a breath.
    The woman’s moccasins drew near, and he saw that it was beads, not quills, that adorned them. Very pretty they were, though, where mud did not obscure the designs.
    Her braid swung down in the firelight, the russet of autumn in its brown coils, as she reached for a gourd cup set by the hearth. She had capable-looking hands, long and shapely, but work roughened.
    “Drink. It will help some. Your arm is broken?”
    “Aye. I’m all but sure.” He looked up as he accepted the gourd, and nearly spilled its contents into his lap. It was the first close look he’d had at her features. While his initial reaction was one of concern—the wide cheekbones, the deep hollows of her eyes, the line of her jaw, were sharply jutting in what was clearly a half-starved face—what caused the heat to rise to the roots of his hair was the thrill of recognition that shot through him.
    He’d taken her for an angel when he opened his eyes to her the first time, thinking himself about to step through heaven’s door.
    Well, so. He wasn’t dead. And she was no angel. Only striking in the remote and daunting way he’d imagined angels to be, with her straight back and long limbs and thick hair drawn back from those fiercely sculpted bones. And those eyes. He thought them green. Maybe hazel. With the firelight behind her, he couldn’t tell for certain.
    She pulled back from his scrutiny, the wide curve of her mouth pressed flat.
    Disconcerted in his own right, Neil raised the gourd cup to his nose and sniffed.
Salix
 … willow bark. The woman had some knowledge of herbs. He found that reassuring. He sipped the bitter tea, grimacing reflexively as his ministering angel backed away.
    “Would ye be so kind,” he ventured, “as to bring in my saddlebags? I’ll be needing some things out of them if I’m to deal with this arm proper-like.”
    That got him another blank stare. “Saddlebags?”
    “Aye. The ones on my horse.”
    “Horse?”
    For an instant, he wondered if this—the woman, the cabin, the cup in his hand—was a laudanum-induced dream he was having. Why else would she commence to parroting his words as though she didn’t comprehend them, when they’d been having reasonably fluent discourse a moment ago? Was it his accent? He’d taken pains to tamp it down some in recent years, but it did come creeping back thick as Highland mist if he didn’t watch it.
    “Did you not see a horse where you found me? A bay roan. Answers to the name of Seamus.”
    “There was no horse.”
    Her certainty was unfeigned, and he felt too wretched to be anythingbut full waking. Dash it all, his