She found herself again before her dressing table, smoothing the flyaway curls escaping her neat and tidy chignon, a coiffure she never managed to accomplish with any ease. Perhaps this was why she lingered here before the glass longer than usual. Yet she was journeying to town today, and this did require some care with her appearance. The proper hair, the best of her muslins, perhaps even her straw hat with the pressed pale blue ribbon.
Her fingers suddenly trembled upon the frayed lace at her collar. She pressed a hand to the twittering in her belly and grabbed the two-inch excess of fabric there at her waist. In the gray light of dawn reflecting off her looking glass, her cheekbones seemed to poke through her skin, and purple shadows dusted beneath her eyes. The ravages of time...and she not yet twenty-three. Was this what Stark saw when he looked at her?
She watched the color blossom through her cheekbones. Avram, not Stark. Avram. If a woman was so lax as to find herself preoccupied with thoughts of a man, that man should be her betrothed. Though, now that she gave it some thought, she’d never once felt the least bit conscious of her appearance with Avram, nor had she ever felt compelled to seek her looking glass for his benefit. Then she was indeed doing right by marrying him. She certainly couldn’t bear to be all fidgety for the remainder of her life. Yes, that was it. She’d been far too fussed up and fidgety to suit anyone.
Her own hollow eyes stared from her reflection. Where indeed had the sparkle of youth flown? What had responsibility and widowhood done to her?
She forced her gaze from the glass and found herself staring at the framed photograph of Frank. Then again, anger and bitterness of this magnitude certainly could not content itself with eating only at her insides. It had to leave its mark upon her face and body, ravaging her so that no man would find comfort in looking at her. Her husband’s dying gift to her, as if he hadn’t left her with enough burdens to bear. His perfidy had been the very least of it.
Her fingers coiled around the gilt frame, and she battled, as always, the urge to fling it across the room, to crush it beneath the sole of her shoe, to lay waste to him as he had done to her. But, no. Christian must forever remember his papa lovingly. He deserved that far more than she deserved some sort of violent recompense, one that was certain to leave her just as bitter, and her son nothing but confused.
Christian. Good heavens, consumed with her own thoughts, she’d allowed him to wallow away in his bed until past sunrise. Laziness could insinuate itself into a five-year-old in the span of one quiet morning.
She spun from the dressing table and headed directly for the narrow flight of stairs leading to her son’s bedroom. She found his bed empty, the pillow cool.
Feeling the first stirrings of annoyance, she marched down the stairs and through the kitchen, yanking open the back door with more fervor than she would have ever wished to display. She nearly tripped over the full pail sitting on the stoop.
She lifted it and scowled. She should be pleased. She should be delighted. She wasn’t. After all, she’d never gotten that much milk from any cow, much less her miserable excuse for a bovine. The pail met solidly with the stoop once more, and then she was off, stomping toward the barn. Upon passing the paddock, she directed a scowl at Maggie, her dairy cow, chewing her cud with a certain mocking disdain.
“Traitor,” she grumbled. Blasted outlaw, and damned and blasted cow. Far too much cheek to display for an animal who seemed incapable of fathoming that she could, with very little effort, escape that crumbling excuse for a fence.
Jessica lengthened her stride. Arrogant man, thinking to disrupt her household, her farm, her cow, her life, what little success she’d made of it, thinking to prove her inadequate of managing the place. The pins tumbled from her chignon, her hair spilled with its own version of mockery about her shoulders, and she only cursed him more.
She entered the barn, hands on her hips and a dozen or more truly inspirational words of warning itching upon her tongue, only to stop short when she spied her son. He stood, in his nightshirt, no less, with thin legs braced wide, atop what she knew well to be the broken seat of a buckboard wagon long left to disrepair. In his fists he held the reins to a monstrous black horse who looked just moments from plunging through the sagging side of the barn.
Those inescapable talons of maternal instinct gripped her. “Christian, good God, get down! Now!”
The horse blew furiously and pawed the hay-strewn floor, casting her a dubious sidelong glance. And her son made no move to comply with her order. Instead, he did the inconceivable.
Her son looked at her blankly for a moment then twisted about and glanced over his shoulder into the shadows on the other side of the buggy. The movement caused his bare feet to slip on the leather seat, and he teetered precariously upon his perch. “Logan, it’s okay if I stay up here, isn’t it? You fixed the seat and you said I could climb up here...”
Jessica could stand it no longer. In three huge strides, she reached the buggy, hoisted her skirts to midthigh and launched herself up. She snatched her son from the jaws of danger, clutched him painfully close, and would have executed a smooth descent from the thing...somehow...only she found herself grasped about the waist and lifted from her feet. Intimately, actually, too intimately, or perhaps it was simply her knowledge of the strength required of those arms to perform the task so effortlessly. And one of those arms injured, at that. Then again, her terror had sapped all air from her lungs long before her feet again met with the floor.
Releasing Christian, she spun about, only to hear her mouth snap closed with an undeniable click. He stood so close she had to crane her neck, her gaze enduring an interminable path from his chest, which was graciously covered in an expanse of butter-colored cloth, past the red kerchief knotted at his throat, over the arrogant thrust of his jaw and that annoyingly deep cleft in his chin...
Her insides compressed, forcing what was left of her breath from her lips in one long, hideous sigh. He’d shaved. And bathed. And combed his hair. He smelled of clean leather and spice.
And he looked absolutely marvelous. Not the least bit like an outlaw. For one brief moment.
And then he grinned, a flash of startling white that set the sun ablaze in his golden eyes and set Jessica’s anger to boiling.
How dare he stand there and look so god-awful smug, as though he’d enjoyed a restful night of sleep?
She opened her mouth and...
“Good morning, ma’am.”
Jessica sucked in a hissing breath, feeling frustration like a clamp about her chest. “I should say not, Mr. Stark. How dare you allow my son to clamber about on that broken-down—?”
“He fixed it, Mama.”
“I don’t care if he birthed it this very morning. You could have been killed, and that animal—”
“His name is Jack, Mama.”
“A true misnomer if there ever was one. He looks like a Hades to me, entirely untrustworthy, capable of eating you alive and—”
“We’re gonna go to town in the buckboard, aren’t we, Logan? We don’t have to walk ever, ever again.”
There it was, that undeniable reverence in her son’s voice, something so entirely recognizable because Jessica had never heard it before in Christian’s voice. Damn and blast this outlaw, thinking to point out her shortcomings, to outdo her, her, the inept female. His job was simply to help.
She glared up at him. “Mr. Stark—”
“Logan.” How infuriating the smooth mellowness of his voice, just as infuriating as the mocking serenity of this morning. “You’re awfully angry, ma’am, and the sun not yet risen.”
“As if a woman’s emotions are governed by the simple rising of the sun.”
“No, that would