Chloe looked at the men. Jared, Kane, Damon, Sebastian, Lucien, and Thor all exchanged perplexed looks and looked at Reuel again. He nodded. Kane blinked at him, but caught the prompt. “I have been thinking along those lines,” he said. “I would want to stay close and guard my … our woman so that she would feel safe.”
He beamed at Chloe when she glanced at him. She looked away almost at once, but she smiled.
The others, he discovered, were glaring at him.
“I was thinking that a salvage operation would not be a bad idea since the colony will have need of things that may not be readily available here,” Jared volunteered. “That would require a good bit of space andalsoallow me to stay close to guard our woman most of the time.”
“I will also be a planter,” Damon offered.
The other three looked uncomfortable and vaguely angry.
“Well! There is plenty of time for everyone to find their niche within the colony!” Reuel said bracingly. “If we are talking planting and salvaging, this suggests a rural setting.” He fixed Chloe with a questioning look. She gulped, glanced around uneasily, and finally met Reuel’s gaze again. “Something not too far out in case … the natives?”
Reuel nodded. “Good thinking. Fortunately, we are wide open. Let us examine the view and terrain. I am thinking a castle perched upon the side of the hill—close in to the city for safety and yet apart for privacy and then the working part of the plantation could fall below and away.
Chloe had become so tired by the time they had traveled a third of the distance that she’d lost most of her nervousness. She didn’t complain. She wasn’t comfortable enough to want to draw attention to the fact that she was human and tired far more quickly than they did. She had reason to be glad she hadn’t begged off. They finally reached a point where the view was so beautiful that she stopped abruptly and stared at it with a sense of awe. It seemed to be an older section of forest, for the trees that grew there were much taller and thicker around the trunks. The fall was gentle and more rolling and she could see a narrow ribbon of a stream flowing across it. “This is so pretty!”
The men looked it over with interest.
Reuel, Jared saw when he glanced at him, looked triumphant. “The only questions to be settled now are the design of the structure and the plot size to be allotted to each settler. I think we can safely agree that the plantations must be large enough to allow each grower room to supply a healthy percentage of the food to be produced. In any case, there is no reason to delay clearing and beginning the structure. You did mention that you were interested in a design that would be ‘castle-like’. How many will there be in the family?”
“Seven,” Jared said promptly.
He frowned at the look Reuel gave him, trying to figure out what he seemed to be trying to convey and abruptly remembered that Reuel had said Chloe would expect off-spring. He did not knowhowhe was to provide that, gods damn it, if Reuel said that they were not capable of it, but he thought that was what Reuel was trying to suggest. “For now,” he added uneasily.
Reuel smiled.
Jared frowned, looking away, but he saw something in Chloe’s expression that gave him pause. Her cheeks were pink, but she looked … happy, not uncomfortable, and he was glad he had added that last.
Hestilldid not know how he was to manage it, but he decided he would think of something.
“Good!” Reuel said. “My suggestion would be to examine all of the data available to you—from the castles of the ancients to the most modern structures that utilize all known conservations, consider the needs of the family—for instance, you may want a very large hall in which to gather—and then you can begin to work on the design. Feel free to consult with me if you like. I have done a good deal of research on the subject already. In the meanwhile, you are excused from working on the barracks since you will have need to construct your personal abode.”
Jared was more than a little disappointed when Chloe excused herself and left with him, but since she asked Reuel if she could return to the ship to rest, he thought it was not altogether to avoid them.
Feeling a little less miserable, in fact, more than a little cheered that they had made some progress, he turned to survey the site Chloe had picked out and felt an even greater lift in his spirits. She was right. It was a very nice site.
“We should get tools to work with.”
“I think that we should go down and study the area very carefully before we begin,” Sebastian said.
“She said here,” Jared said tightly.
“But she did not point to a specific site,” Damon seconded Sebastian.
Jared frowned but realized they were right. “It will need to be a place where she would see this from the windows,” he pointed out, gesturing at the view.
“We may need to remove a great many trees,” Kane said thoughtfully.
“It is the trees she was looking at!” Lucien snapped.
“How do you know what she was looking at, gods damn it!”
“There is nothing here to see but the trees!”
“He has a point, but I can also see a stream and the sky,” Damon said.
“Well, if she only wanted to see the gods damned sky, she could see that from anywhere!”
