“And your great-aunt is . . . ?”
“Fit as a fiddle,” she answered. A telltale pink stained her features, confirming his suspicions.
Best say it outright. “And bent on a little matchmaking.”
Tessa gave an aggrieved nod. It wasn’t hard to figure. Hester Swan had left a trail of bread crumbs to her niece since she’d cooked his very first meal.
“Tessa is a hand with her garden. Her quince preserves are second to none. She can knit a pair of stockings nearly as fast as I fry an egg. Ever since she was small, my niece has been a wonder digging ginseng. Fleet of foot too. She may not be fancy as a town-bred girl, but she steps a fine reel . . .”
Tessa turned her back on him, retrieving a rasher of bacon. Molasses and butter were already before him, including his usual pewter plate and cup. Eyes down, she set the meat on the table. In the ensuing quiet came a noisy growling. Her stomach?
“Let’s give Hester some satisfaction, aye?” Forking two hoecakes off the stack onto his plate, he added meat and the neatly turned eggs she’d almost forgotten, then reached across the crude table and plunked down the plate.
Their eyes met, hers befuddled. Already she’d begun backing out the door.
“Nay, Miss Swan. Stay.”
A slightly sheepish smile and a blush graced her face. “Is that an order, sir?”
He nodded and started to rise to fetch a second plate, but she’d already whisked it from a shelf. “Overmountain tea or coffee?” he asked.
She sat, eyeing both. “Tea.” Slowly, she reached for the jug of cream yet bypassed the sweetening. “No trouble during the night, I reckon.”
“False alarm, mayhap,” he said, taking coffee with plenty of cream, the fragrant steam rising. “Or a close call.”
Fork mid-mouth, he stayed his hand when she said without a flinch, “I’d be obliged if you’d bless breakfast.”
Tarnation. Suddenly at sea in his own fort, Clay simply stared at her like the heathen he was. Her earnest gaze was violet-gray in the morning shadows, reminding him of polished silver in a shop window.
“We always hold hands doing it,” she said, reaching across the bountiful plates between them.
Humbled and caught off guard, he took her warm, callused fingers in his as she bowed her head reverently and waited. The words that lodged in his throat were so dusty, so tarnished, he had to reach to the uttermost to grasp but a few.
“We thank Thee, Lord, for this our food for life and health and every good . . . By Thine own hand may we be fed.” He swallowed, still groping. “Give us each day our daily bread. Amen.”
Somehow she looked satisfied. He felt he’d successfully run the gauntlet. They released hands, returning to their blessed breakfast, the finest the frontier had to offer. Closing her eyes, she took a sip of fine English tea from Morris and Willing of Philadelphia. Her childish delight tickled him. She was used to making do with nettles and sassafras, likely. City tea was a luxury.
This morn she’d exchanged her pretty party dress for plain homespun. The linen fichu about her shoulders was spotless and smooth, tucked into a striped bodice of common frontier weave, her skirt indigo blue. Covering her dark hair was a linen cap, the barest ruffle at the edge, its strings untied and dangling.
Bare of foot, she accidentally brushed his boot beneath the table. Mercy, but she made it hard for a man to mind his meal. Despite the heavy aroma of fried meat and the more delicate fragrance of hyson tea, he detected clean linen. Herbs. Something else he couldn’t name. Thankfully, he didn’t reek of the trail and was clean-shaven to boot.
She ate slowly, pinching off a bite of hoecake, then taking another sip of tea. A caution for him to slow down, rein in his plans to clean up the common and meet with the settlement men before the sun was three fingers high.
She chewed on a piece of bacon. “Maddie and Jude don’t eat with you?”
“Sometimes.”
“How’d you make their acquaintance?”
He swallowed a last bite, washing it down with more coffee. “In the last war. Jude was a hostler and Maddie a laundress with the army under Braddock.”
“And you?”
“Spy. Scout. Sharpshooter.”
“How’d you come to talk Indian?” Unlike some, she asked carefully, her voice respectful. Free of distaste.
“I was taken as a boy by the Lenape.”
