The Temptress Read online

  “Yet you left it all to run away to New York to become a newspaper reporter. But now you’re back.”

  “Not by choice. I plan to return to New York as soon as I get back to my father’s house.”

  “Ah, I see. Somehow, I thought you had other plans.”

  “Such as?” she asked, turning to look at him. “Did my father tell you that I had other plans?”

  “Only that you were ready to settle down, that you were still young enough and he had hopes that you—”

  “Young enough for what?” she interrupted.

  “Why, to start a family I would imagine.”

  Chris bit her lower lip to keep from replying hastily. “No, I don’t think I’m over the hill yet, even at my advanced age. I assume women can still bear children at my age.”

  “I didn’t mean to give offense.”

  Quickly, Chris looked at him and a wave of guilt ran through her. Here she was walking in the forest with a handsome young man who was trying to be polite and she, because of some imagined infatuation with a man she barely knew, was being almost rude to him. She smiled at Asher. “I’m sure that you didn’t, Mr. Prescott. How did you meet my father?”

  Asher returned her smile. “He and my father were friends and did some business together. I saw you once when you were a little girl. You were with your mother. I thought she was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen.”

  “So did I.”

  He began to gather firewood from the ground, making a stack of it at her feet.

  “And why did my father choose you to go on this rescue mission?” She also picked up a few pieces of wood and added them to the pile.

  “I think he took who he could get. There aren’t many men my age who have no business, and, after working for myself for so many years, I can’t seem to settle down to just being an employee.”

  “I know how you feel. My father continues to tell me what to do and how to do it, even sending men after me when I don’t obey him.”

  “Yes, but you’re a—” Asher took one look at Chris’s sparkling eyes and stopped. “I almost put my foot in it that time, didn’t I?”

  She cocked her head to one side. “Would it matter if you alienated me?”

  Asher gave her a big grin. He really was quite pleasant-looking, not anything like Tynan, of course, but very handsome. “I’m alone in the woods with a beautiful woman and you ask if it would make any difference if she’s angry with me? Why, Miss Mathison, this time and place is a dream come true and I would as soon die as ruin it.”

  She laughed at his pretty speech as he picked a tiny purple flower from a bank of moss and gave it to her with a little bow. Chris stuck the flower behind her ear and smiled at him.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “I guess we’d better get back.” He picked up an enormous pile of wood. “Put the rest on top of this.”

  “No, I’ll carry my share.”

  “Miss Mathison, while I am around, no woman shall ever carry firewood. Now do as I say and put the rest of that on this pile.”

  “You sound just like my father,” she said with a sigh.

  “Thank you very much. I admire and respect your father and I take it as a high compliment that you consider me like him in any respect. Now, lead the way because I can’t see a thing.”

  Laughing, pleased that he’d said that he liked her father and didn’t complain about him as most people did, Chris led him back to camp. Asher said that not only could he not see but he couldn’t understand her directions, so Chris “had” to hold two fingers of his left hand to guide him back to camp.

  When they entered the camp, Tynan was bending over the fire frying fish dipped in cornmeal. He looked up when a laughing Chris and a laden Asher arrived, but put his head down again quickly.

  Chris suddenly felt ridiculously happy. Holding the divided skirt of her habit out, she began to hum.

  “I don’t guess you’d care to dance, Mr. Prescott,” she said, holding out her arms. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Tynan but he didn’t even look up.

  With obvious happiness, Asher took Chris’s extended hands and began a quick dance about the little clearing. It was a cross between the Virginia Reel and a square dance that was exuberant and happy. Chris followed his lead and no matter how fast he led her in the dance, even when her feet barely touched the ground, she stayed with him.

  “Watch out!” she heard Tynan shout just before she and Asher tumbled into a foot-deep depression filled with ferns.

  They lay there together, Asher’s arms around her protectively, Chris’s skirts around his legs, while Tynan stood looming over them. “Are you two all right?” he asked, his brows drawn together in a scowl.

  “Never been better in my life,” Asher said, then planted a hearty kiss on Chris’s cheek.

  Still grinning, she turned to see Tynan looking at her oddly.

  “I think we can eat now,” Tynan said before turning away to return to the campfire. “That is, Miss Mathison, if you are finished with your dancing.”

  “For the moment,” Chris said and went to take a place by the fire.

  Chapter Six

  Asher was in rollicking good spirits after their impromptu dance and he did his best to entertain Chris, even singing to her. She joined in and they made an enthusiastic duo.

  Tynan sat to one side of them, head down, whittling on a stick, not participating but not leaving them either. Once, as she was singing with her cheek close to Asher’s, it occurred to her that maybe Tynan didn’t know how to participate.

  It was midafternoon before anyone thought of leaving and then it was Chris who stopped the laughter and suggested that they clear up and go.

  Tynan tossed his stick away, put his knife in his pocket and slowly started toward the horses. As Chris was tightening the straps on her bedroll, he stopped beside her.

  “That was nice,” he said. “Real nice.”

  “Where did you grow up?” she asked quickly.

  “Not where people sang,” he answered just as fast. “You like the man?”

  “Of course. You’ve pointed out what a fine man he is, haven’t you? And you’ve told me to stay away from you so I should be pleasing you now.”

  He looked at her in a way no man had ever looked at her before. His eyes seemed as if they could burn her. “You do please me.” Abruptly, he turned on his heel and walked away, almost crashing into Asher.

  “What was that about? He looked angry. Is something going on that I don’t know about?”

  “Mr. Prescott, I have no idea what you know and what you don’t.”

  “Chris, I must give you some advice. Tynan isn’t the sort of man…well, I mean, a girl like you…I don’t like the interest he’s taking in you.”

  “Interest in me?”

  “Your father told him you were a Montgomery and he asked what that meant.”

  “And did you know to tell him?”

  “No, I didn’t, except that they are your mother’s people. People like him don’t have relatives, they don’t even have names.”

  “Mr. Prescott,” she said icily. “You and I will get along a great deal better if you keep your opinions about Mr. Tynan to yourself. After all, I’ve known the both of you an equal length of time so I see no reason to trust you over him.” With that she mounted her horse, and all the rest of the day, she felt Asher Prescott’s eyes looking at her thoughtfully.

  For two days they traveled hard. Three times the men had to cut away small logs across the trail, and once Tynan and Asher had to lead the horses across a log as wide as some boardwalks. Another time they spent hours on either end of a crosscut saw hacking a way through a tree down across the trail. At night they fell into their blankets and slept hard—at least Chris assumed Tynan did too since he slept apart from the camp.

  On the evening of the second day, Asher kissed her again. They’d ridden together for a while during the day and he’d asked her more questions about her newspaper career. He also apologized for what he’d sa