LITMIR.BIZ

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I hope for to—

      There, she’d heard it again. Swiftly she moved the milk bucket aside and caught up the lantern. She smacked Juno’s angular hip to make her move away from the wall, and then knelt in the straw with the lantern held low. The scuffling sound was definitely there now, like something digging against the wooden wall, searching for a loose deal. Rats or squirrels, most likely, starving from the snow cover and desperate for the grain in the barn.

      Scowling, Rachel rose and grabbed her musket. She’d had to pay dearly for that grain from Alec, too dearly to let it be nibbled away by rats. She stormed out the door with her skirts flying, ready to teach the thieves a lesson.

      She slipped once on the ice and swore impatiently. She’d left the lantern inside, but with the door ajar a narrow beam of light slid across the snow. She peered into the shadows where the scratching sound had come from, trying to see as her eyes adjusted to the lack of light. Something moved, something low and dark, and she kicked the door open a little farther.

      The pale light washed farther over the snow, down to the corner of the barn and the stone wall beyond. The low, dark shadow rose up from the snow, startled by the light, growing larger by the second. A long tail, the sharp triangles of ears and yellow eyes glowing in the lantern’s light. No scratching now, no digging, only the deep rumbling growl as the wolf drew back on its haunches to face her.

      There had been something in the dark. She hadn’t been imagining things. But a wolf, God help her. Not a rat after corn, but a wolf.

      He crouched there in the snow, cornered between the barn and the wall, his lips curled from his teeth and the hair bristling on the back of his neck like some mongrel guarding a stolen bone. But the wolf was bigger than any dog she’d ever seen, and she didn’t think he was going to run off if she stamped her foot and shook her apron.

      Slowly, so slowly, she raised the musket to her eye and released the lock. Her hands were shaking, making the sight tremble, and she took a deep breath to steady herself. She had to make this single shot count; it could take her a full minute, sixty seconds at least, to reload the musket, and she wasn’t sure she’d have that time.

      The wolf angled sideways, closer, testing her, the yellow eyes bright and hard.

      She had to do this, shoot him now, before he came any closer. She told herself she couldn’t miss at this range. She couldn’t afford to, anyway. She swallowed hard, whispered a terse little prayer and squeezed the trigger.

      She heard the hammer click, the little sizzle of the pan and the bright flash, she smelled the familiar acrid puff of gunpowder, and then—

      And then nothing.

      No thump as the butt kicked back against her shoulder, no crack from the ball flying from the barrel. Only the flat, worthless silence of a gun that had misfired.

      Somehow the animal seemed to know Rachel had lost her advantage and began inching closer. His nails clicked softly with each footfall on the frozen snow, his breath gathering in white puffs around his bared teeth.

      With a muffled cry of dismay and fear Rachel dropped the musket from her shoulder, her forefinger tangling clumsily with the trigger as she fought her panic. Eight feet away, maybe six. There was no time to dear the fouled gun, no time to reload, not even time to run back into the barn, not now that the wolf was closer than she to the open door. If she turned and tried to run for the house, the wolf would surely head for the open barn and poor Juno.

      Or he could choose instead to chase after her. Forty paces uphill, across a frozen path in the dark where the animal could see so much better than she, chasing after her to seize her ice-heavy skirts in his jaws and drag her down, down.

      Suddenly the wolf lunged across the snow and Rachel staggered back, barely keeping from the animal’s reach. Gasping, she slid her hands down the musket to the end of the barrel and swung it as hard as she could. She felt the impact of the butt striking the wolf, and heard the startled yelp of pain. But the same sweep of the musket through the air threw her off-balance, her feet sliding out from under her on the ice, and she pitched forward hard, the musket flying from her hands to spin across the crusted snow.

      “No,” she gasped as she tried to scramble away on her hands and knees. “Dear God, no!”

      She saw the white fur of the wolf’s underbelly as he whirled through the air, a blur as white against the black sky as the snow she lay upon. The scream she knew was her own, shrill with fear. But the sharp crack of the rifle’s shot made no sense, not even when the wolf dropped lifeless to the snow before her. No sense, she thought, her heart pounding wildly as she crouched on the snow, it made no sense at all.

      “Are you hurt, Rachel?” Jamie pulled her to her feet, his voice harsh from concern and strain. “Look at me, lass. Are you hurt?”

      She stared at him, uncomprehending, her eyes still wide with terror and her breath coming in short little gasps. Her braid had come unraveled, her hair hanging half-loose around her face, and when she lifted her hand to brush it back he saw the raw scrape across her knuckles where she’d fallen on the ice. But nothing worse, thank God.

      He glanced again at the lifeless body of the wolf, then slung his rifle on its strap across his back and set his hands gently on her shoulders. “You’ll be fine, Rachel,” he said, forcing her to look at him and listen. “The animal’s dead, and can’t harm you.”

      “Yes,” she said hoarsely, nodding her head even as she searched his face for reassurance. “Yes, I’m quite fine. Quite.”

      It was Jamie Ryder, of course, Jamie who had saved her. With the light from the open door behind him, his face was dark in shadow, but she would have recognized his voice anywhere. And who else, really, could it have been?

      Yet even as she realized what he’d done, she wished it hadn’t been so. She wanted to be like all the other women in her family, her grandmother and her mother and her older sisters. She wanted to be strong, independent, able to take care of herself and Billy, and this winter, before this man had come, she’d thought she was. But then she remembered how the wolf had sprung toward her, and she didn’t feel very strong or brave at all. What she felt was weak and weepy, and if he said one more kind word to her she knew she’d shatter at his feet.

      Instead she drew away from him, smoothing her hair from her face as if her fingers still did not shake, and bent to pick up her musket.

      “It misfired, you know,” she explained, almost grudgingly, as she peered at the flintlock, poking the bits of snow away from it. “Else I would have made the shot myself.”

      “True enough. But ‘twas a good thing my rifle didn’t suffer the same ill.”

      Frowning, she glanced up at him without raising her chin. “How far were you from—from me?”

      “Not far.” He shrugged carelessly, but Rachel saw how he favored the wounded shoulder. “I’d just stepped outside the house.”

      “That’s forty paces, and in the dark, too.” She was impressed, as much by his modesty as by what he’d done. She’d never known another man who’d have been able to resist such an opportunity to boast. “You said you could shoot the seeds from an apple, and you weren’t bragging.”

      She heard his smile without seeing it. “That old wolfs a sight bigger than an apple.”

      For the first time Rachel forced herself to look at the dead animal. The sky was beginning to pale with dawn, and the gray shape of the wolf was clear against the snow, framed by the darker puddle of its own blood. Only luck and Jamie had saved her from lying there instead, stiffening on the snow, in the blood. She looked, and could not look away, any more than she could stop the trembling that suddenly racked her or the tears that blurred her eyes, and this time when Jamie reached for her, she crumpled against him, her musket slipping forgotten from her hand.

      “There now, lass, I told you you’d be fine,” he murmured as he folded his arms around her. “I’ll grant you it was a close thing, but you’ll be fine.”

      And

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