"Julian," Elizabeth said quietly to her brother's back. "You promised."

Rather than watch her brother check his gun and take sight, Elizabeth turned and walked away. She had just pushed her way free of the crowd around the shooting stand when Julian's first shot went afield. Clutching her skirt in her hands, she turned back to see her brother throwing another coin to Billy Kirby.

"Again," he said, and he traded the rifle for one freshly loaded and cocked. "He must tire of ducking soon, the bloody great monster."

"That's the spirit!" called Billy Kirby gleefully.

With a sense of dread, Elizabeth turned and caught Hawkeye's gaze. Nervously, she beckoned him toward her. Nathaniel and Hawkeye came away from the shooting stand to where Elizabeth stood near the bonfire.

"Please," Elizabeth said. "Won't one of you have another try?"

"Elizabeth, it's just sport," Nathaniel said kindly. "Let your brother have his fun."

Julian had missed again, and he turned to the crowd. "This next shot will be the one, I feel it. Anyone care to lay odds?"

Hawkeye and Nathaniel exchanged glances.

"I've got a shilling here for a gentleman who would be willing to champion me," she said in a voice as calm as she could manage. Elizabeth felt as though Hawkeye were looking straight through her, into the panic curling into a fist in her stomach.

"Why, that would be me," said Hawkeye. He turned toward the shooting stand, where Julian was in the process of negotiating the borrowing of yet another rifle. "Hold up there, Billy Kirby, letting one man have all the fun. I've got a shilling here and I claim a shot. I got a lady to champion myself."

The crowd closed around Hawkeye, who took up his place at the shooting stand and set to checking his rifle. Elizabeth felt Nathaniel's questioning gaze settle on her face.

"Can he make the shot?"

"Don't want your brother and this turkey on familiar terms, it seems," he said dryly.

"I'm determined to keep my brother solvent," she corrected him in a low voice. "But if he starts in again waging bets, I may not be able to."

Julian stood to Hawkeye's side, eyes narrowed, as the older man took aim. There were hectic splashes of color on his cheeks, his eyes narrow but flashing nonetheless.

"He has trouble staying away from the betting tables?"

"You could say that." Elizabeth nodded. "He had to be bought out of debtors' prison and put directly on the boat to New—York."

Nathaniel's frown put a crease between his eyes; Elizabeth was taken with a strong urge to run a finger down that crease to the point between his brows, to smooth it away. The urge to touch him was surprisingly strong, so she wound her fingers in her skirts once again, and she met his gaze as evenly as she could.

"But surely the judge can cope with your brother's gambling debts," he said quietly.

Elizabeth forced herself to look up into Nathaniel's face. "I'm sorry to disappoint you," she said. "But my father is cash poor. That's why there's this great hurry to marry me off. A better loan guarantee than a daughter with property is hard to come by." She knew she sounded bitter, and that she was telling too much, offering too much. She knew too that he would take what she offered. She wanted him to.

Hawkeye fired; the crowd was silent for a fraction of a second, and then began to shout in triumph.

Chapter 8

In the weeks after Christmas, Elizabeth began to dream of Nathaniel, so that she grew both anxious before she fell asleep, and reluctant to wake in the morning. While the rising sun touched the frost on her windows and shattered into rainbows, she would lie half conscious in the warm nest of her covers and relive what she had dreamt, blushing and slightly breathless, confused and strangely discontent. She might pretend, in the day, that Nathaniel had not tried to kiss her, or that his interest was unimportant, an aberration, but at night her dreaming self took that almost—kiss and spawned from it a multitude of dream kisses, of growing warmth and intensity.

So Elizabeth began her days with a lecture. She would comb her hair out before the mirror and chide herself for a silly, weak, foolish creature. Every morning she was determined to make a new start in the name of reason and good sense. But still she caught herself staring at the curve of her lower lip. This lack of self—control soon began to wear on her usual placid good humor; Elizabeth went down to breakfast in a contrary mood.

The first of the new year came, and she was without a place to hold school. Her father refrained from pointing out to her that she had failed in the resolution she had put forth so forcefully at the first dinner in Paradise. Julian would not have been so sensitive as to spare her from teasing, if she had not had his behavior at the turkey shoot to hold over his head.

He had been avoiding Elizabeth since that event. At that moment when Hawkeye had killed the bird, Julian had sent her one sharp look and then stalked away toward home, leaving a surprised and worried Katherine Witherspoon behind. The other men had thought it was just bad sportsmanship on Julian's part, but Elizabeth had seen the old fever springing up in her brother, the compulsion which had cost him his fortune. She thanked Providence once again that they were so far from a real city where he might find other men as fond of cards and as careless with their resources.

To keep her mind off the delays in her plans and—although she did not voice it to herself so clearly—Nathaniel, Elizabeth spent her mornings organizing a work space in her room, putting her books in order, and writing teaching outlines. After lunch she would go for walks, if it wasn't snowing too hard; she made it her business to visit the children in the village and speak to their parents, hoping to get them used to her presence and accepting of the idea of her school before too long. She came to know many of the villagers well enough to talk to them comfortably. Martha Southern, a shy young woman married to a man old enough to be her father, especially sought out Elizabeth's friendship and encouraged her to come to the village. Martha had a daughter whom she wanted to send to Elizabeth's school, and a son who would soon be old enough.