Mountain Laurel Read online

  “Don’t touch me,” she whispered.

  “Shhh. There’s nothing wrong with you that some rest and food wouldn’t cure.”

  “Rest and food,” she murmured. All the food in the world wouldn’t make Laurel safe.

  “Now, Miss LaReina, no, be quiet and rest. I have something to say to you and I mean to say it. First of all, it’s true the army has ordered me to escort you, and I have always meant to fulfill those orders. Lie still.” He said it as though it were an order but his voice was quiet and didn’t anger her as it usually did. She closed her eyes and he adjusted the cloth on her head, then lightly touched the hair at her temples.

  “At first I just wanted to get you to leave, to go back east where you belong.”

  She wanted to say that she had no choice but to remain in the gold fields, but she didn’t. Better to let him know as little as possible.

  He touched her other temple, then, very gently, he put both hands on her head and his thumbs began to make little circular motions on her temples. She could feel herself relaxing all the way to her toes. “Where did you learn to do that?” she whispered.

  “One of my sisters has headaches. I learned to soothe them away.”

  She could feel tension slipping from her shoulders and her back. “How many sisters?”

  “Two.”

  She smiled. “I have two sisters as well. Gemma is a year older and Laurel is…” She took a breath. “Laurel is just twelve.”

  “That’s a coincidence.” His big hands were massaging the back of her head. “My little sister is just fourteen.”

  “The family pet?”

  “More than you can know. With seven older brothers, it’s a wonder she isn’t a monster.”

  “But she isn’t?”

  “Not in my eyes,” he said softly.

  “Neither is Laurel. She smiles all the time. She used to follow me around when she was a baby and she loved to hear me sing.”

  “She’s in Lanconia now?”

  For a moment, Maddie couldn’t remember who or what Lanconia was, then she opened her eyes. “Yes, she’s at home in the palace now,” she said flatly, and the moment was broken.

  “Thank you for the…the cloth, Captain Montgomery, but now, if you don’t mind, could you please send Edith to me?”

  “Of course,” he answered, then looked at her for a moment. “What happened to the brooch you were wearing?”

  She put her hand to her throat. “I—I lost it when I was hurrying up the mountain.”

  “And didn’t stop to search for it? It looked old.”

  She looked away from him. “It was my grandmother’s,” she said softly, then turned on him. “Would you please leave me? Get out of my tent and go away? Would you just go back to your army post and leave me alone?”

  He didn’t seem in the least bothered by her outburst. “I’ll see you in the morning, ma’am,” he said pleasantly, and left the tent.

  Two hours later he was bedded down near Toby on a rise not far from the coach. When he’d left the tent he saw the others standing outside and unabashedly listening to what had been going on inside. ’Ring hardly noticed them as he chose a place to camp, a place near enough that he could hear if there was any danger. Toby had snared a rabbit and he put it to roast over the small fire that ’Ring built, and then he insisted on looking at the cut on ’Ring’s arm, so ’Ring took his shirt off and Toby rather roughly doctored the four or five cuts on ’Ring’s upper body.

  “She’s somethin’, ain’t she?” Toby said.

  “If you like liars.” ’Ring sipped the hideous concoction Toby called coffee and stared into the fire. “As far as I can tell, she hasn’t told me the truth once.”

  “Sometimes people have reasons for lyin’.”

  “Hmph!” ’Ring snorted.

  “We can’t all be as pure as you,” Toby said, pouring whiskey on a cut. “If you think she’s so all-fired bad, why don’t you just leave her here and go back to the fort?”

  “She’s not bad,” ’Ring snapped, then looked away at Toby’s grin. “I have no idea what she is. Hell, getting any information out of her is like…like…”

  “Fightin’ Blackfeet?”

  “Almost as bad.” He stood up and stretched. “I’m going to get some sleep. With this woman I need all the strength I can get.” He put his shirt back on, then sat on his blanket spread on the ground to remove his tall moccasins. “Toby?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You ever hear the term sleep-insider?”

  “Can’t say as I have. Where’d you hear it?”

  “From our little—” He paused and smiled. “Traveling singer.” When he’d called her that he certainly hadn’t meant to offend her. Not that he hadn’t meant to be offensive that day, he had, but he’d also meant to scare her. So far he’d tried tying her up, dressing like a savage, jumping down from a tree in front of her, wrestling her to the ground, and even demanding that she go to bed with him. He’d made her angry, he’d annoyed her, but he hadn’t come close to frightening her. Yet today, when she’d come down from that mountain, she’d been very frightened. And later when he’d walked into her tent she’d been fighting tears.

  He smiled as he remembered the two of them in the tent. He’d certainly succeeded in stopping her tears. She’d gone from tear-filled eyes to eyes filled with hatred. When she looked at him like that he was glad she didn’t have a weapon in her hand. If she had a weapon, could she use it? She could certainly ride a horse. She could ride down the side of a mountain, across streams, under tree branches. She hadn’t learned to ride like that in a park on a ducal estate. She—

  “What’s that?” Toby asked, interrupting ’Ring’s thoughts.

  ’Ring looked absently at the arrow he’d taken from his moccasin. “An arrow. Crow, don’t you think?”

  “How would I know? One Injun’s like all the others. Where’d you get it?”

  ’Ring held it out and looked at it. “It was sent to me, I think, perhaps, as a warning.”

  “Warnin’ you about what?”

  “I don’t know exactly.” He thought over the time he and the woman were rolling about on the ground. The Indian hadn’t seemed to mind that. “I think perhaps he’s her guardian.”

  “How can a duchess from…”

  “Lanconia.”

  “Yeah, right. How can a foreign lady have an Indian guardian?”

  ’Ring laughed and lay down on the blanket. “That’s the least of my questions about that little lady. Tomorrow I’m going to start finding out some answers. Good night,” he said, and closed his eyes.

  Maddie sat on the hard horsehide seat inside the coach and glared out the window. She utterly refused to look at the man sitting across from her. This morning Captain Montgomery had told her he was going to ride in the coach with her. Not asked. Told. He said he’d like a break from horseback, but she knew he planned to try to get information out of her.

  This morning, after she’d awakened from a restless night, her first thought had been that last night, when she’d been so tired and he’d used his hands to relax her, she’d almost told him something about Laurel.

  What if she’d let something slip? She could just hear him saying “My orders, ma’am, are to take into custody any man, woman, child, or animal that is trying to interfere in the freedom of this country.” She imagined pleading with him for her sister’s life and hearing him say that duty and orders mean more than one insignificant little girl’s life.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said as she became aware that Captain Montgomery was speaking.

  “I asked if LaReina was all there is to your name.”

  “Yes,” she said, looking into his eyes. She’d tried once to tell him that LaReina was a stage name and he wouldn’t listen then so she wasn’t going to make a second effort.

  “That’s odd, then, that Miss Honey calls you Maddie and your trunks all have the initials MW on them.”

  “If you must know, LaReina is my middle name.