The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn (34 page)

After a token protest, Kincaid accepted his decision, paid him out of his dwindling reserves, thanked him and wished him well, then strode off to put himself into order and find accommodation. Parrish lingered in the tavern yard, gazing in the direction the Trimbles had ridden. Then he looked at Charlie.

“You suspect it too. They know more than they told.”

Charlie saw no point in denial. “They’d shifty eyes, for a fact. Could be they’re hiding something about your girl.”

“
Could be
is enough. You mean to head toward Sycamore Shoals?” Parrish’s gaze was hard, determined. The man had toughened over the weeks in ways Charlie hadn’t expected. Cold and discomfort didn’t seem to daunt him now.

“I mean to. Directly.”

If Parrish had ever smiled in all the time he’d known the man, Charlie could not recall it. He did so now.

It wasn’t a cheering sight.

Thunder-Going-Away’s settlement was small, but the few families who’d left Chota for the secluded cove had raised their lodges and cribs for the harvest from their old fields. Some had constructed winter houses, partially dug into the earth, kept warm for those whose bones ached in the late autumn chill. The council house, newly roofed, was ready for White Shell’s marriage and the feast to take place within.

Standing beneath the arbor of Thunder-Going’s lodge, watching dawn pearl the sky above the hills, Jesse smelled snow coming, yet beneath the bearskin draping his shoulders, his flesh radiated the sweat of bad dreams. He gripped the arbor’s sapling support as the first flakes sifted down, brushing cold against his forearm and face. A flurry was all it would amount to. He knew by the clouds, brightening as dawn approached.

He’d gone to sleep missing Tamsen—as he’d missed her every moment since pausing his horse for a last sight of her heading up the ridge on Janet’s heels. She’d turned back as well, her gaze drilling into him as if it were no distance at all. As if he still held her in his arms.

“You been awfully quiet since yesterday,” he’d told her at their parting, standing with a stride’s space between them. Keeping his proper distance. Aching as if it were a mile. “Is it Bears? He give you more of a fright than you let on?”

“No.” She’d stared at the base of his throat where the layers of his shirts lay open. “I like Bears. He’s funny.”

He’d put the questions to her standing in the dooryard, with Janet Allard down at the stable talking with Cade and Bears, waiting on him to mount their horses for the journey to Thunder-Going’s town. It was just
past dawn. Though she’d dressed, Tamsen’s hair was down loose, a dark cloud still mussed from sleep. Her skin was golden smooth, her lashes lying soft and long against her cheeks.

“What is it, then? You know if anything worries you—anything at all—you’re to go to Tate and tell him. He knows everything now.”

More than she knew herself.

“I will.” She still did not look up.

“You got the pistol, plenty of ball and powder …” His heart was tearing out of his chest at thought of leaving her even for a fortnight, though she’d practically ordered him to go. Still he couldn’t help saying it one more time. “I’ll bid them go alone if you want me to stay. Cade will make my apologies to White Shell.”

“Jesse, you are a man of your word.” She paused, swallowed. “I’ll be fine with the Allards, but … I’ll miss you.”

He felt the breath go out of him. “You will?”

Finally those dark eyes lifted full to him. Drowned him. How they’d gotten within a few inches of each other he didn’t know. Still he didn’t touch her. His breath came deep as she dropped her gaze to stare at his throat again. She nodded.

“Tamsen.” Her name came out a croak. “Would you mind it if I was to kiss you?”

“I do so wish you would.” Her answer came on a rush of a breath flowing warm against his neck. He reached for her at last, fingers burying in her hair until they cupped the back of her head. He raised her face and touched his lips to hers.

The jolt that went through him was a wild and reckless thrill. Still he started to pull away, afraid to ask too much.

Her arms came around his neck. She drew him down and kissed him back, making him forget how much was too much, or anything but the beating of their hearts together, the softness and the sweetness of her.

Bears, whooping at them down at the stable, brought him back to
himself. They broke apart, a noise between a laugh and groan catching in his throat. “You’re making it nigh impossible to leave you, woman.”

She slipped her bottom lip between her teeth, searching his face, drinking him in. Making his heart leap like a running buck.

“I’ll be here when you get back.”

“You better be.” He thought his chest was going to break open for joy, and yet he wanted more. Wanted to tell her the words.
I love you
. And then … marry
me
. He bit them back, fearing to spook her. There was time. They had their lives before them. He stroked her face, reveling in the long-awaited freedom to do it. “Promise me one thing more?”

She leaned her cheek into his hand. “What’s that?”

“That we’ll talk about what comes next for us, the minute I get back.”

Gone the troubled brow. Gone the averted gaze. She radiated happiness like the sun coming up over the hills, making a fire of the few leaves still clinging to the trees along the creek. “That’s a talk I’ve wanted to have for a while now.”

He held her, kissed her deeply again, then all but floated down to the stable, mounted his horse, and rode away along the creek with Cade and Bears.

Somewhere on the trail, before Sycamore Shoals even, his heart turned from cloud to lead, and with every step his horse took from that point, it grew heavier. He’d slept poorly on the trail, waking nights to think of her, pray for her, long for her.

The night just past was the worst. Twice he’d dreamt of her, exact in every detail. It was a dream of the rain-swollen creek, true to how it happened when he left her to find the wagon party—except he came too late to save her. He’d stood on the bank, bereft and shattered, as her body flowed past him down the draw, streamers of hair trailing leaves and debris. In the dream he could see as the eagle sees. He’d watched her body flow on and on, out of the mountains. Forever gone out of his reach.

In the snowy dawn, with that image clenched around his heart,
telling himself she was safe with the Allards held as much weight as ice skim on a pond would hold.

Behind him the door hide brushed aside. He turned to see Bears, who grinned and started to speak. Something in Jesse’s face silenced him. He came to look out at the snow sifting down, his breath frosting on the air. They stood in silence several moments, before Bears said, “Creator’s mercies are new every morning. So Cade is fond of telling my father. You look in need of them.” Bears bent close and sniffed, flaring his nostrils. “And a visit to the creek. Or have you grown too white living among those Wataugans to stand the cold?”

“Never that white.” Jesse shrugged the bearskin onto a bench beneath the arbor. Clad in breechclout and moccasins, they strode through the village down to the creek, raising brief interest from dogs curled outside of doorways.

After sluicing water from their stippled limbs, Bears looked askance at Jesse, still subdued by his dreams. “Is it that you do want my sister, after all?”

Jesse, in no frame of mind for jesting, answered in all seriousness. “I’ve chosen a wife,” he said, calling Tamsen what she’d always been in his heart. “I mean to keep her.”

If the rest of the world would let him. Tate Allard was dependable, but he was only one man. Counting that trapper, three men hunted Tamsen. Why hadn’t he sent his regrets to White Shell and stayed?

You are a man of your word
. It had filled him with strength, knowing Tamsen saw him so, and maybe this longing that troubled his sleep, his peace, was merely that of his heart and loins. Just the natural ache to get back to her that any man blessed with such a woman would feel. But what if it was something deeper? What if holding to his word was running crosswise to what the Almighty was trying to tell him to do?

He’d seen Tamsen tested in so many ways, seen her failures, her triumphs, learned her weaknesses and strengths, and he was as sure of her
now as he’d been on that street in Morganton. What was he doing away west while she was waiting on him to get back so they could make this fragile bond between them a solemnized and witnessed union?

Timing. It was a thing they hadn’t mastered yet.

“It is about my wife,” he said.

Bears nodded. “You feel the want of her. She is easy to look at, for a white woman.”

“She is so, brother. I will never deny it. But no. It is not that.” He laughed softly. “Not just that. I have had a dream of her. Two times in the night, I had the dream, waking between them.”

Bears’s plucked brows rose. “The same dream twice? Will you tell me the dream?”

Jesse did so as they walked back to the village, goose flesh rising on their damp skin. Others were stirring now, passing on the path with murmured greetings, including White Shell and the warrior she was to wed, their glow of content defying cold and snow. At Thunder-Going’s lodge, the smell of wood smoke and the murmur of voices welcomed. Beneath the arbor Jesse reached for his bearskin. Bears put a hand to his arm.

“If you tell this dream to my father,” he said, conviction taut across his face, “I know what he will tell you. He will tell you to heed it. He will tell you to go back to your woman, and be quick about it.”

Tamsen pushed the cabin door open. The air within was chilled, motionless after the leaf-blown breeze that had swept her over the ridge. The smells of old grease and wood ash, Cade’s kinnikinnick, and the mustiness of hides hung in the shuttered space. Leaving the door half-open for light, at first she simply relished the silence.

Not an hour ago they’d all been in the barn, she and the entire Allard clan, plucking a brace of geese, sorting feathers for quills and ticks and pillows. In the midst of laughter and sneezes and floating feather-down, she’d been pierced with a longing for her quiet home—and for Jesse—so acutely that she’d slipped away to the loft she shared with Bethany.

But a brief spell of solitude, all she was liable to get, hadn’t been what she needed. She’d loaded the pistol Jesse insisted she keep, on impulse retrieved her mother’s box—tied shut with cords—from under Bethany’s bed, put on her fur-lined cloak, and made fast for the ridge path, knowing had she told anyone where she was bound, she’d never have gotten away.

She’d brought the box with the notion of reading over her parents’ secrets again, but here in the cabin, it was the future her thoughts swirled around, not the past. She set box and pistol on the table and crossed to the hearth. It was swept clean as she’d left it at their parting just over a week ago—a day alive in her memory, every word, every touch.

She hadn’t known a kiss would be like that, that it could make her ache for wanting more. Awaiting Jesse’s homecoming was a torment, but there was a sweetness to the blade of anticipation that sliced through her, morning, noon, and night. It was easy to pretend the shadow that pursued them had vanished, blown away on a freeing wind, leaving behind clear
skies and sun. She let herself believe it as she wandered the cabin, touching books, spare clothing on the walls, the table where they’d shared meals—most of them hardly edible at first. She’d never cook as well as she sewed, but she was getting better, learning her way. She remembered the squirrel, and laughed.

It was a lonely sound in the chilled cabin, but it made her decide to check their stores in the loft, to be sure no varmints had come raiding. She climbed the ladder. All was as she’d left it, but she didn’t climb down directly.

Crouched under the roof, among casks and sacks, Tamsen closed her eyes and filled her mind with Jesse, how the firelight played over his sun-streaked hair, how his golden eyes and lean, angled face contrived to make him seem hawk wild, forbidding even, until a smile would come like sunlight and soften his edges, melting all of hers.

She was going to spend the rest of her life letting him know how thankful she was God brought him to her, as Reverend Teague once said, at the very moment she needed him. But the Almighty had done so much more. He’d given her her heart’s desire before she knew she wanted it or had the eyes to see the treasure standing in front of her. Before she’d come to love Jesse Bird.