"Humph. He'll come. He does everything else he can to make me mad."
"Renny, enough!" she said more sharply than she meant to. The boy stared at her with surprised, hurt eyes.
"Renny," Ash attempted to begin again. "I understand how you feel about the horses, and about... well, Mr. MacQuade's temper. But this hostility between you can only make a difficult situation worse."
She looked up at the boy, saw his face turned pointedly away from her.
Surrendering to the knowledge that it was futile to discuss it further until Renny simmered down, Ashleen attempted to shed her own gnawing irritation and started with long strides up the hill toward MacQuade.
The high prairie grasses brushed against her skirt, sweet-smelling blossoms rippling in gusts of wind that swept down the hillside.
Ash shoved her sunbonnet back until it dangled by its strings against her shoulders, letting the sunshine warm her face, wishing it could melt away the unpleasantness with Renny, the stiffness of muscles cramped from sitting in one position too long, and her gnawing dread of speaking to Garret MacQuade.
Sister Agatha had often told Ashleen a strong will was the best cure for almost everything. Ash resolved to will into herself the brightness, the warmth of the meadow around her.
Her hand swept out to pluck a fragile wild rose, tucking it behind one ear. The scent filled her, soothed her, and she gathered more of the blossoms that sprinkled the rise. Blue and butter-yellow, purple and orange, tiny white flowerets and garish red ones, each more perfectly beautiful than the last one.
A flock of birds darted up nearly beneath her nose, taking wing in high dudgeon, scolding in their cackling voices.
Shielding her eyes against the glare, Ash watched the bright-hued birds scatter up into the vast cerulean sky like jewels spilled from a duchess's trunk, and she wished for but a moment that she could fly with them.
Garret watched her from his perch atop the paint gelding, his eyes hungry, a dull twisting in his chest. His fingers tightened their grip about the bit of charcoal he held, but for once he couldn't make it whisk across paper, couldn't seem to capture the outlines of the image he would labor to finish later.
He had painted majestic mountains garbed in mantles of snow, had done portraits of Indian maidens far more beautiful than the woman wandering toward him, knee-deep in flowers. But never before had he felt this trembling of inadequacy deep in his gut, this strange certainty that if he worked the rest of his life, he could never catch the perfection, the magic of Ashleen O'Shea drenched in sunshine.
There was something fey and innocent about the wide blue eyes that delighted in every beauty the prairie had to offer, something so tender in lips that parted with pleasure and ready laughter while she observed the antics of her brood.
She seemed scarce older than Shevonne sometimes, seemed to have all of Liam's dreamy-eyed wonder, and yet was possessed of an inner strength far greater than anything Garret had ever known.
A devastating combination. An enchanting one.
She confused him. Unsettled him. Made the endless nights pure hell, tormented as he was by the memory of how she had looked with moonlight turning her nightdress into shimmering silver, the most fragile of veils over coral-tipped breasts so lush they would fill his hands, legs so long, so supple, even now he could imagine their soft, silky lengths twining with his, drawing him deeper, insistently deeper.
Garret cursed at the painfully clear image, shifting uncomfortably in his saddle as his loins hardened with fearsome need.
"Stop it, MacQuade," he ground out, dragging his gaze away from her by force of will. "The woman's a nun, and you're not a man to be riding around defiling virgins. Women like Five-dollar Nell are more your sort—women who know what they want and aren't afraid to take it."
Garret tried again to picture Nell's lush body, powdered and scented to perfection, her lips and hands so skillful they could make a man break out in sweat even before she'd unbuttoned his shirt. He'd shared her bed a dozen times in the past five years, anticipated their liaisons with pleasure during those long stretches when he had roamed about the west, immersed in his art.
They had always understood each other, he and Nell. Understood that life was often bitter, that people could be cunning, cruel, and that surrendering one's heart left one vulnerable to a torture more merciless than anything the Comanches could devise.
Yet when he had gone to the room above the Double Eagle the night before the wagon had left West Port—the night he had stood in the shadows and seen Ashleen O'Shea wreathed in moonlight—Nell's hands upon his skin had seemed as detached as those of the sawbones who had set his broken leg when he was eight. And her eyes had seemed so hard, empty—lifeless as Garret's own.
With every practiced movement of her hands upon his skin Garret imagined the achingly sweet, hesitant touch that would be Ashleen O'Shea's. Garret's mind filled with the whisperings of surprised, awe-filled gasps, words vibrating with wonder in the musical lilt of Ashleen's voice as he initiated her into a magic she'd never known existed.
It had sickened Garret, unsettled him, that the Irish woodsprite of a woman could insinuate herself so deep into his consciousness that he could not escape her, even in the arms of another.
And though Nell had urged Garret to stay, he'd left her without finishing what they’d started. He'd spent what remained of that endless night sitting on the cold ground beside the mound of Kennisaw's grave, feeling a chill stirring in the pit of his belly that was something akin to fear.
He had soothed himself by latching on to the certainty that Ashleen would be wailing and whining by the time they were two days on the trail. That the moment things got dirty or hot or the work gruelingly hard she would lose that enticing, sunshiny optimism, and her eyes would haze with gritty, hard acceptance of the ugliness of life.
She would be raging at the children, drooping about exhausted, blaming him for everything from the bugs to the weather to the unforgiving terrain.
But he'd never been so wrong in his entire life.
Garret couldn't stop his eyes from seeking her out time and again, drinking in the sight of her, as refreshing to the spirit as ice-cold mountain water in the midst of hellish heat.
He’d not heard a word of complaint from her, or from any of her brood. They seemed to revel in the adventure, exploring each new facet of the journey with an enthusiasm that made Garret want to swing down out of the saddle and point out to them the discomforts they were enduring. The dust griming their clothes, the sunburn and windburn searing their skin, or the fact that he was rousing them from bed at an hour that would make most sane people blanch.
