Duncan sighed and shook his head. “I seem to suffer from a certain madness where you’re concerned.”
Maggie was annoyed and she longed for a good stout cup of tea. “Don’t be melodramatic,” she said, getting up from her chair to riffle through the various tins stored on the shelves beside the stove until she found one that contained orange pekoe. “We’ll never get all the way back to Brisbane before dark, and that means we’ll have to spend the night. It’s a fearsome bother, Duncan—Elisabeth’s at sea, Cora will be worried sick and, of course, I’ve missed my ship to Sydney—”
Duncan sank forlornly into a chair. “The driver’s taken the carriage back to Brisbane for the night anyway.” He sighed. “I’ll sleep in the barn, of course.”
“Of course,” Maggie agreed primly. With that, determined to make the best of a difficult situation, she took the teapot from the back of the stove and set out to find the pump. The kettle would require a good rinsing, having sat unused for a time. She found the wellhouse and was pumping cold water into the pot when she saw a horse and buggy careen through the whispering cane and stop in the dooryard.
Eleanor was standing in front of the seat brandishing a small handgun that glistened blue-black in the fading sunlight. “Duncan!” she screamed.
Maggie’s heart began to pound. She dropped the teakettle, ready to run, just as Duncan came out of the cabin, his thumbs tucked into his vest pockets, his attitude plainly condescending. “Now, Eleanor, don’t make a fool of yourself—”
A shot whined in the otherwise still air, and Maggie cried out in utter shock as Duncan folded to the ground and Eleanor turned toward her, holding the pistol in both hands. Maggie plunged into the cane, running as fast as she could.
To her horror, she heard Eleanor in wild pursuit; the overgrown sugar cane rustled and snapped as it fell beneath the horses’ hooves and the floor of the buggy. Maggie’s heart burned in her throat as she zigzagged this way and that, trying to stay out of her pursuer’s path. Please, God, she prayed as she stumbled on, don’t let me die. Don’t let my baby die.
Just as Maggie burst into a clearing, where a small gully had been worn away in the ground by the driving Queensland rains, she heard a shout in the distance. Reeve. The voice was Reeve’s.
She screamed his name as Eleanor’s horse and buggy crashed through the sugar cane into the clearing. The tired, frightened animal went wild with panic as it stumbled into the gully, landed on its side, and struggled to rise to its feet. The buggy held it down.
Eleanor, meanwhile, was flung free, and she scrambled to stand, her skirts and face covered with dirt, the gun still in her hand. “You,” she said, glaring at Maggie with all the hatred of hell in her face. “I’ll kill you for what you’ve done to me!”
Maggie was in the open; if she ran for cover, Eleanor would surely shoot her before she could escape. She gasped for breath and willed her heart to slow to a reasonable meter. Before she could ask what it was that she’d done to Eleanor, she heard Reeve’s voice again, heard the cane shifting as he ran through it.
“Maggie, where are you?”
“Stay away!” she called back, both relieved and terrified to know that she hadn’t imagined his presence. “Eleanor has a gun—she’ll kill you—”
Reeve didn’t listen, and everything happened, it seemed to Maggie, in a split second. He entered the clearing on her right, about twenty feet from where she stood, and Eleanor spun and fired at him wildly. Maggie screamed as he fell and lunged toward him, forgetting her own safety.
“Reeve!” she gasped when she reached the place where her husband lay, a crimson stain pooling around his right shoulder in the dirt. Maggie hurled herself on him in a desperate attempt to shield him.
Eleanor laughed like a madwoman; Maggie heard her approaching and knew that she was going to die. She looked up and saw such rancor in the woman’s once-beautiful face that she had to look away. It was then that she spotted the snake, dark and sleek, slithering over the ground toward Eleanor.
“Look out,” she choked, clinging to the unconscious Reeve, determined to absorb any bullet that was fired at him. “There’s a snake—”
Eleanor only laughed again. The sound was wicked and cold. “I was almost a McKenna once, did you know that?” she asked. “Did you know that Elisabeth is my little girl?”
Maggie could not look away from the snake. “In the name of God, Eleanor, behind you—”
“You don’t think I’m going to fall for that old trick, do you? If so, you’re sadly lacking in that ingenuity Americans are so famous for.”
There was a hiss and the snake struck, not from a coil like a rattler, but in one flying black line of vicious fury. Eleanor shrieked in pain and shots peppered the ground around Maggie and Reeve as her hand convulsed on the trigger of the pistol.
Maggie awaited pain and death and felt nothing. She watched as Eleanor sagged to the ground and lay staring up at the sky, her eyes widened and blank.
Maggie had no time for Eleanor or the snake; she was examining Reeve. She found that he was breathing, to her great relief; he’d been shot through the shoulder and the bleeding was already slowed to a trickle.
Hearing a whistling thunk of a sound, Maggie looked up to see Jamie pulling his knife from the ground, where it had severed the snake’s head from its body. “Is my brother alive?” he asked.
“He is—no thanks to you,” Maggie responded, pulling up her skirts to tear off strips of her petticoat for binding Reeve’s wound. “Where the devil have you been, Jamie McKenna?”
Jamie took his time answering. He went and freed the poor struggling horse from beneath the overturned buggy. “I was lookin’ after me mate, Mr. Kirk. He’s going to get well, by and by. Bullet barely touched him.”
Out of the corner of her eye Maggie saw that Jamie was kneeling beside Eleanor now; she didn’t want to look too closely, sensing that the moment was a private one, but she did see her brother-in-law gently close the woman’s eyes and smooth her tangled hair back from her forehead. “I’m sorry things weren’t different for us,” he said to the dead woman, his voice detached and hollow with some secret pain.
Reeve was just coming around. “What the hell—” he muttered.
Maggie smiled with relief and with love. “My hero,” she said, bending to kiss his furrowed forehead. She paused and drew a deep breath, then rushed on. “I want you to promise me that you won’t hurt Duncan for abducting me. He was carried away by passion, that’s all, and he’s quite sorry.”
Reeve sat up, wincing a little at the pain in his shoulder, and his aquamarine eyes took in Maggie’s thickening waistline, her tumbledown hair, her dirtsmudged face. “Passion, is it?” he reflected, and then he chuckled hoarsely and shook his head. Maggie would have boxed his ears if he hadn’t already been injured.
Jamie was utterly silent. He lifted Eleanor gently into his arms and started back toward the cabin. Maggie watched him go with a feeling of sadness as she helped Reeve to his feet.
“How did you know where to look for us?” she asked.
“Cora told me that Duncan had tricked you into getting into his carriage and she guessed that he was headed here because she’d heard him making arrangements to buy the place.”
Maggie looked at the carcass of the snake and winced. “I hope there aren’t any more of those around,” she said.
Reeve leaned on her slightly, his flesh pale as death from the pain as they made their way out of the cane field in the direction Jamie had taken. He said nothing.
“Eleanor was Elisabeth’s mother,” Maggie said, because she needed to make conversation.
Reeve nodded. “Jamie never knew there was a child until today, when I told him.”
“Why do you suppose a woman would abandon her own daughter that way, and let everyone believe that she was dead?”
“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know exactly,” Reeve answered quietly. “She obviously wasn’t the motherly sort. Maybe that’s all there was to it.”
<
br /> “Jamie sent her away, didn’t he? Eleanor, I mean?” Reeve nodded. “Found her in a compromising situation, you might say.”
A horrible thought struck Maggie. Now that Jamie knew Elisabeth was his daughter, maybe he would want to take her back to New Zealand to live. Maggie would be devastated if he did that, for she’d come to cherish that child with her whole heart. “Is he going to—will he want to—”
Reeve looked down at Maggie and smiled despite the set of his jaw that plainly said he was in severe pain. “Elisabeth stays with us,” he assured her. “At least until she’s old enough to decide for herself. After all, I’m the only father she’s ever known, and she’s taken to calling you Mama, hasn’t she?”
Maggie nodded, her eyes brimming with tears of weariness and relief and a thousand other emotions. She remembered Reeve’s coldness that morning in the hotel room, and her feeling that he didn’t love her anymore. “Are you going to dismiss me from your life, Reeve McKenna,” she dared to ask, “the way you did Loretta?”
Reeve stopped there in the cane that rose all around them and turned to face Maggie. “I married you, Yank. For me, that means a lifetime of loving you. I’ll never send you away, and I’ll never leave you.”
Maggie stood on tiptoe to kiss her husband. “Promise?” she asked in a whisper.
Reeve kissed her passionately. “I promise,” he answered, and Maggie knew he meant it.
Seven Sisters—November 1887
“HE’S FUNNY-LOOKING,” SAID ELISABETH MCKENNA, peering into the face of the new baby Reeve held so carefully in his strong arms. “What’s his name?”
Maggie watched fondly as Reeve looked down at the tiny, wrinkled infant, his handsome face alight with joy and pride. “His name is James,” he said. “James Chamberlin McKenna.”
“Can I take him outside and show him my new pony?”
Maggie, still confined to her bed even though she felt strong and healthy, smiled and patted the comforter. Elisabeth came and sat beside her, gazing up into Maggie’s face with an expectant expression.
“James will have to be just a bit older before he can properly appreciate anything so wonderful as your pony,” Maggie confided.
“Oh,” replied Elisabeth with an air of importance. Satisfied, she scrambled down from the bed and dashed out of the room, bored with babies.
Reeve put his newborn son carefully into the cradle and then stretched out on the bed beside Maggie. Sighing with contentment and smiling up at the ceiling, he said, “I wish I could make love to you, Yank. Then everything would be perfect.”
Maggie laughed and bent to circle his lips with her tongue. “Perhaps you can’t make love to me,” she whispered, “but I can make love to you.”
Reeve looked at her in shock. “Good God, woman, what are you saying? You just had a baby—”
Maggie was kissing his jawline. “I know,” she answered in a throaty voice. “It’s an experience that’s almost impossible to overlook.”
Reeve chuckled. “That it is. Stop that!”
Maggie continued to kiss him, unbuttoning his shirt, trailing the path of her fingers with her lips. She delighted in the shivering groan he gave. “I think you’d better lock the door,” she said.
“I think you’re right,” Reeve replied, moaning as Maggie’s tongue traced the circumference of his nipple. He got up, locked the door, and came back to the bed, where his wife immediately began loving him again. “Woman,” he implored hoarsely as she tugged his shirt free of his trousers, “will you have mercy on me?”
“No,” Maggie answered. And she was true to her word.
LINDA LAEL MILLER
has written more than twenty-four novels, including the
New York Times bestsellers Princess Annie, The Legacy,
Yankee Wife, and Daniel’s Bride. With more than six million
copies of her books in print, she is considered to be one of
the finest romance authors writing today. Ms. Miller
sides in the Seattle area, where she is hard at work on an
exciting new series for Pocket Books.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Linda Lael Miller
Back Cover
Moonfire Page 35