He rubbed his suddenly damp palms along the tops of his thighs. His every instinct screamed for him to bolt from his seat and race out the building’s open door. Had he lost all reason? Why had he allowed the genial preacher and his wife to secure his promise to attend Sunday worship service here? Worship service. At the last moment, he managed to stifle a snort. He had no interest in worshipping a God who’d done nothing but take from him. Seven years ago, God had taken Brock’s parents, leaving the sixteen-year-old orphan to bury his mother and father alone. And now fate—or God—had played a fiendish trick on Brock, stripping him of his second family, the army.
It seemed incredible that three short weeks ago, Brock had honorably held the rank of sergeant in the army of these United States and territories.
The events of the fateful evening that brought that life to an end for Brock played again in his mind like a recurring nightmare: Lieutenant Driscoll’s arrogant sneer and the moonlight flashing on his sword as he lunged at Brock with the weapon. Brock falling backward onto the ground and instinctively lifting his six-inch sheath dagger in defense. Then the stunning swiftness of the next horrifying moments. Driscoll smashing his foot into a pile of horse manure, falling forward, and impaling himself on Brock’s upturned dagger.
Willing himself not to shudder, Brock squeezed his eyes shut, trying to expunge the terrible vision of the lieutenant’s stunned expression and wide, lifeless eyes staring into Brock’s face. Brock might have remained there, frozen by shock, if a soldier hadn’t happened upon the grisly scene and raised the alarm.
Never a favorite of his commanding officer, who was the dead man’s uncle, Brock’s choices were clear—flee or face a firing squad at dawn. So he’d fled. And the army, which had been his home and family for the past seven years, was now Brock’s enemy.
Desperate for an ally to help him cheat the hangman and maybe even salvage his military career, Brock had sought out his war hero uncle for solace and counsel. But again, God had yanked that hope away as well. So why was he still here?
The answer strolled through the garrison house doorway, quickening Brock’s heart to triple-time cadence. With her riot of mahogany curls, bright agate eyes fringed by long, sooty lashes, and alabaster skin decorated by beguiling freckles, Annie Martin simply took his breath away. He’d thought her fetching yesterday in her faded calico frock and bonnet with the spring wind playing through her lovely curls. Though pretty as a spring blossom, she’d appeared more child than woman as she struggled to hoist the brown Bess. Not today. Her black dress hugged her appealing curves, leaving no doubt it clad a woman grown. Her lively cinnamon eyes sought Brock, and her freckled cheeks tinted pink, causing a deep ache to burrow beneath his breastbone.
His mouth went dry. Yes. He knew why he would sit here through a sermon he didn’t want to hear, risking capture should a troop of soldiers happen by. She flashed him a smile, and his mind went to mush. Answering with what he feared looked more like a silly grin than a smile, he knew he’d happily risk his life to spend a Sunday with Annie Martin.
Maybe today I’ll get some answers.
Annie entered the garrison house knowing it wasn’t answers she wanted from Brock Martin. What she wanted was exactly what she was receiving—smiling admiration from his handsome, now clean-shaven face. Her own face warming, she shot him a quick return smile and crossed the puncheon floor of the log structure.
With a nod of greeting to Bess Dunbar, Annie silently slipped into the rough-hewn pew beside her on the ladies’ side of the room. For the next hour, with her open Bible on her lap, she strove to follow along with Obadiah’s chosen sermon text.
She stared at God’s Word, brightened by a beam of sunlight shafting through an open window, and felt ashamed. Normally, her spirit eagerly drank in Obadiah’s sermons. But this morning, her attention kept drifting from the preacher’s words.
Thoughts of Brock Martin made focusing on the scriptures difficult. She couldn’t help wondering if he was a Christian. Glancing across the room at him, she noticed how he fidgeted in his seat, clearly uncomfortable in the gathering. Obviously, he was not used to attending worship services. The thought saddened her.
After Obadiah pronounced the benediction, Bess lifted her head and turned to Annie. “You comin’ for Sunday dinner, Annie?”
Annie dragged her gaze from Brock, who now stood talking to Obadiah, back to Bess. “Yes.” She hoped her bright tone didn’t sound too eager. “If I’m not a bother.”
“You know better than that, Annie.” Bess’s rosy cheeks pushed up, and her eyes glinted merrily as she bent to tie four-year-old Ruth’s bonnet.
“It’ll give you and Jonah’s young kinsman a chance to become better acquainted. He seems a fine young man.” Sending off her little daughter with a playful swat to the child’s behind, Bess tilted her head up at Annie and gave her a teasing grin. “We thoroughly enjoyed his company last evening. I haven’t seen Obadiah’s spirits so lifted since before Jonah’s death.”
Annie’s already warm face grew hotter. Bess considered herself something of a matchmaker. Although she’d voiced her concern about the thirty-four-year age difference between Annie and Jonah, in the end she endorsed their marriage. But for reasons Annie never fully understood, the preacher’s wife had actively discouraged her friendship with nineteen-year-old Ezra Buxton, Annie’s previous beau.
Bess glanced over at Brock, and her look grew pensive. “He seems a wanderer, though.” Her teasing smile returned. “You ask me, he’s just lookin’ for a reason to put down roots.” Her pointed look kept the fire stoked in Annie’s face.
Though unable to deny her attraction to Jonah’s nephew, Annie had hoped it didn’t show so plainly. On the other hand, having always valued Bess’s motherly advice, she found an odd comfort in the woman’s attitude. The man had spent the night at the Dunbars’ home and had obviously won their approval. Annie resisted asking Bess what she and Obadiah had learned of him, assuming his past would be shared later over the Dunbars’ dinner table.
Bess clasped Annie’s hand, and her eyes took on a look of entreaty. “If you could hurry ahead and check the dinner on the hearth I’d be much obliged. I promised Abbey Graham my croup remedy for her babies. I fear before I’m able to get home, that venison ham may be burned on one side and undone on the other.”
“Yes, of course.” A quick smile lifted Annie’s lips. She was always glad to repay in some small way the charity Bess and Obadiah had lavished on her since Papa’s and Jonah’s deaths.
When Bess bustled off to coo over the Grahams’ two-year-old twins, Annie turned toward Obadiah and Brock. She would give Obadiah a word of appreciation for his sermon, then hurry on to see about the dinner.
Across the crowded room, her gaze linked for a moment with Brock’s. He sent her a smile that scared up another swarm of butterflies in her stomach. Their beating wings fanned the flames in her cheeks as she again felt a flash of attraction.
Espèce d’imbécile! The French words leaped to her mind as she called herself an idiot. Bess had said he seemed a wanderer. By tonight he will be gone. And good riddance. The last thing she needed was for him to stay and join the chorus of those trying to convince her to sell her land.
She turned away to hide her blush and found herself staring into Ezra Buxton’s scowling countenance.
“Ma says you’re welcome to Sunday dinner.” Ezra glanced at Brock then back to Annie. His stormy features cleared a bit. He shifted his slight frame and brushed a straggling lock of sandy hair from his face. “She’s fixin’ to fry up a passel of spring rabbits me and Pa snared.”
Annie had always liked Polly Buxton. Once, she had happily anticipated becoming Polly’s daughter-in-law. She looked over at the slight woman whose pinched features seemed to disappear within her gray bonnet.
When Annie turned back to Ezra, it was the prospect of his mother’s disappointment that tinged her voice with genuine regret. “Tell your ma thanks, but I’ve already accepted an invite from Bess
Dunbar.”
The thunderclouds returned to Ezra’s lowered brow. He glanced in Brock’s direction, then turned back to Annie. “Ma said she reckoned you might want to visit with yer kin.”
His shoulder lifted in a quick shrug. But despite his attempt to show indifference, Annie saw disappointment flicker in his light blue eyes. “I understand he’s jist passin’ through. Reckon me and you’ll be spendin’ plenty of Sundays together soon enough.”
Annie’s back stiffened at Ezra’s self-assured tone. It rankled her that he assumed they would take up their relationship where they’d left off at Annie’s marriage to Jonah. Though she didn’t understand exactly why, her feelings for Ezra had decidedly cooled.
She lifted her chin and gave him a chilly stare. “Monsieur Martin is Jonah’s kin, not mine. And how I spend my Sundays is of my own choosing.” Ezra needed to know he was not entitled to her affection. He’d have to win it. Whirling away, she stomped toward the front door. But before she could step outside, Brock’s bright voice halted her.
“Annie, it’s nice to see you again—especially without a musket in your hands.” A grin parted his lips. The twinkle in his eyes suggested he found her agitated demeanor amusing.
Still perturbed by Ezra’s earlier self-assured arrogance, she blurted, “Since men are so pigheaded, a loaded musket may be the only way a woman can get their attention.”
His gray-green gaze seemed to melt into hers. “Annie Martin, you’ll never need a musket to get a man’s attention.”
The quiet reply set her insides quivering. Flustered, she turned and hurried through the garrison house door without stopping to compliment Obadiah on his sermon. She almost wished she’d taken Ezra up on his offer of Sunday dinner. At least she knew how to handle Ezra, and he didn’t do funny things to her stomach.
The Dunbars’ two-story cabin sat only a few hundred yards outside Fort Deux Fleuves. Piney Branch, the same little creek that meandered through the stockade, rippled along the cabin’s westerly side. The Dunbars laid claim to fifteen acres—not much on which to support a family of eight. But in payment for his preaching, Obadiah’s faithful flock never allowed the family to want for anything the settlement could provide.
Annie lifted the leather latchstring affixed to the cabin door and pushed the heavy barrier open. Inside, a delicious bouquet of rich aromas, including roasting venison, corn bread, and a mixture of spiced apples and sassafras, greeted her. Her stomach growled, reminding her of the breakfast she’d decided to forgo.
As always, she was struck by the roominess of the Dunbars’ cabin, nearly twice the size of her own. A great fireplace seven feet wide and nearly five feet tall surrounded by a cat-and-clay chimney dominated the back wall.
She swept the tidy domicile with an admiring gaze. Bess, with help from her thirteen-year-old daughter Dorcas and nine-year-old daughter Lydia, kept a remarkably neat home. Since her marriage, Annie had striven to achieve the same degree of domestic order in her own cabin. Once again, she felt the familiar stab of guilt-laced sadness. She wished she’d had the time to prove to Jonah she could be a good, industrious wife.
She stepped to the hearth and gave the spit holding a large venison ham a half turn. Juices dripped from the sizzling meat, sending up tiny puffs of gray ash as they hit the glowing coals below. A mess of dandelion greens and pork hocks bubbled in a kettle hanging from the crane built into the fireplace. A telltale hiss told her the kettle’s contents were dangerously close to boiling dry.
On the floor near the hearth, she spotted a bucket of spring water with a dried-gourd dipper floating atop it. She ladled several gourd-fulls of water into the kettle, then began stirring the contents with a long-handled paddle.
The sound of voices outside pulled her attention to the front door. In a wave of chaotic merriment, Obadiah and Bess, along with their six children and Brock Martin, spilled through the cabin’s doorway.
Brock gave Annie a smiling nod that sent her heart thumping, then joined Obadiah and the two older Dunbar boys at the maple table in the center of the room.
Bess bustled to the hearth, trailed by her three daughters and youngest son, Isaac.
“Oh, thank you for seeing to the dinner, Annie.” She puffed out the words as she snatched a wooden paddle and raked the hickory coals from the lid of the footed spider skillet. Then, grabbing a scrap of linsey-woolsey from a hearthside hook to protect her hand, she lifted the skillet’s lid and gingerly tapped the golden-brown corn bread. “This looks perfect,” she said, shooting Annie a pleased smile.
Throughout the meal’s preparation, Annie inclined an interested ear toward the conversation between Obadiah and Brock. But when they all gathered around the table, she realized Brock had said very little about himself. Instead, he’d chosen to share stories his father had told him of Henry’s and Jonah’s boyhood escapades. And as entertaining as the stories were, Annie realized they shed no light whatsoever on the man seated opposite her.
Well into the meal and still with no answers forthcoming to any of the questions buzzing around in her brain, Annie’s curiosity at last broke free of its constraints.
As she drizzled honey onto a piece of steaming corn bread, she glanced over at Brock. “Monsieur Martin, you never said for what reason you came to seek out Jonah after all these years.”
Brock visibly squirmed. His gaze refused to meet hers, and he seemed to study the hunk of pork hock nestled in the pile of dandelion greens on his plate. “Reckon I just thought it was time to mend some family fences,” he murmured.
To Annie’s ears, his answer didn’t ring entirely true. But neither did it ring entirely false. That he was orphaned as a youth, something Annie had learned some years ago from Jonah, was the only tidbit about himself Brock readily volunteered.
“And in what sort of work have you employed yourself since?” Getting information from the man was like boning a minnow, slippery and tedious to the point of exasperation.
“Oh, a little of this and a little of that, I suppose.” With the unsatisfactory answer, he avoided her gaze and forked a chunk of venison into his mouth.
Unlike Annie, Obadiah and Bess Dunbar seemed perfectly happy with whatever crumbs of information the man cared to offer. Annie had always admired the Dunbars’ willingness to accept all who crossed their path, regardless of their pasts. But at the moment, she wished their curiosity more closely resembled her own.
When all had eaten their fill and the children were excused from the table, Obadiah’s attitude turned quietly thoughtful. Without saying a word, he rose and crossed to the wall-peg bed nestled in a corner of the room. He knelt down, reached beneath the bed, and pulled out a small, wooden box, then raised his robust frame with a soft groan.
As he carried the box to the table, Annie couldn’t guess what it might contain.
Obadiah removed the box’s lid and lifted out a folded square of yellowed paper. His expression somber, he unfolded the paper and regarded first Annie and then Brock.
“I’m glad you are both here, because I have something you need to see.” Obadiah handed the paper to Brock.
Brock’s eyes widened and his face paled as he scanned the document. After a long moment, he held the paper out to Annie.
Curious beyond endurance and a little frightened, Annie snatched the missive from Brock’s frozen hand and began reading.
“I, Jonah Martin, being of sound body and mind, do bequeath my lands and earthly goods to my surviving wife, Annie Blanchet Martin. And equally, if he yet lives, to my nephew, Brock Martin.”
Chapter 3
The chimney will need to be fixed.” Annie’s tone was matter-of-fact as she led Brock into the tiny trapper’s cabin.
Her chilly demeanor hadn’t thawed one iota in the three days since they’d read Jonah’s instructions concerning the land. The realization saddened Brock, but he had no idea how he might remedy it.
After getting past the initial shock of learning he’d co-inherited his uncle’s land, Brock’s first incli
nation was to turn his back on the bequest. But a barrage of emotions, some he understood and some he didn’t, kept him here.
Leaving a helpless girl alone to tend land that was half his responsibility didn’t sit well with him. Besides that, he had no clear idea of where else he might go.
He could probably head west, disappear beyond the Mississippi River and take his chances in the wilderness as a mountain man. Since Lewis and Clark returned from their expedition into the Unknown half a dozen years ago, many men had done just that to escape a bad marriage, the law, or, as in Brock’s case, the army.
But Brock had no intention of spending the rest of his days branded as a deserter. All he needed was a little time to figure out how to prove his innocence. And Deux Fleuves settlement seemed as good a place as any to do the figuring.
Obadiah Dunbar had suggested Annie move in with them while Brock stayed in his uncle’s cabin to tend the crops. A grin tugged at Brock’s mouth as he remembered Annie’s reaction to the notion.
Stiffening to her full height of barely five feet, she’d planted her hands firmly on her trim hips and glared at both Brock and Obadiah. Her agate eyes flashed dangerously, and even the honey-colored freckles marching across the narrow bridge of her pert little nose seemed to stand at attention. After a volley of caustic-toned French that Brock only partially understood, she declared, “Monsieur Martin may stay wherever he likes except my cabin. Jonah may be dead, but I’m still his widow, and I am not leaving my home!”
Obadiah Dunbar had, from their first meeting, impressed Brock as a wise man. His surrender in the face of Annie’s immovable stance only bolstered Brock’s initial opinion. The preacher had rushed to calm Annie, who’d looked for all the world like a bantam hen with her neck stretched and feathers flaring angrily. Obadiah had then cautiously ventured an alternative suggestion. Perhaps Brock could stay in the little trapper’s cabin Gerard Blanchet had built about a half mile from Jonah’s place.
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