AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella(26)
When next she awoke, she could make out Adam’s powerful dark shadow with its billowing sleeves projected on the cavern wall by a small, smokeless fire he had started with twigs and branches. Judging by the darkness without, she figured that no more than a couple of hours had passed.
He hunkered in front of his saddlebags. His heat that had encompassed her during the night had settled into a fiery pulse in her lower regions. Weakly, she pushed upright, clutching the blanket against her chest.
With a rueful grin, he pivoted toward her. A day-old shadow of a beard smudged his jaw. His hair streamed wildly about him, and his eyes were shadowed. He looked haggard, but unquenchably virile. In his extended hand. he held out a short length of sugar cane stalk. He had cut away its leafy sheath. “Dinner, milady – or, mayhap I should say breakfast.”
Famished, she snatched it from him, and he warned softly but with a voice that contained the thunder of the sea. “Chew – don’t swallow – the pulp.”
He went back to repacking his saddlebags’ contents. Feeling shy, she studied him over the shoot she gnawed carefully. The rational, logical Evangeline reminded her that Adam Sutcliff was a mercenary, who would do whatever it took to further his aims. And gaining his heart’s desire, his family’s estates, meant using her to seal the land purchase with the Lenape.
Yet, in all fairness, the fanciful dreamer that was another Evangeline, could do no less than acknowledge her admiration of such determination – a determination that some might described as ruthlessness. Aye, she was powerfully attracted to Adam Sutcliff; an attraction that had intensified with all that had passed between them, compacted into such a brief time.
But fall in love with him, she would not. She was no foolish village lass.
“You left a stalk of sugar cane on the bed . . . your bed . . .” she said, “back at the Virgin Queen Tavern. The sugar cane, it is engraved on your saddlebags. Why?”
“Because it is a reminder. Fear, like the cane’s sharp leaves, keeps the sweetness of life hidden.”
“No, I mean why did you leave it in the bed?” She could not bring herself to dignify it as the bed they had shared. Despite his tender care of her that night, she must not forget tales of his hedonistic court exploits that covered a range not of a single night but years.
He looked over his shoulder at her and considered her through a sweep of sooty lashes. “Like, I said – as a reminder.”
She swallowed her mouthful of sweet juice in one gulp. “For you – or for me?”
“For us both.”
Bemused, she watched as he stood, buckling his rapier scabbard and tucking his dirk and pistol into his belt.
“Listen, we need to be ready to strike out at first light. We’re keeping off the warpath and cutting our own way through the underbrush.” He held up what looked in the fire’s half-light to be a sickle.
“Despite my experience with the machete in Barbados, the going will be slow,” he continued, “but I am anticipating Catamount and his curs to have followed either the warpath or our mounts – at least, for a while, which just might buy us some time.”
She recalled now his earlier reference to Barbados. She had been too fraught with extremes to follow up on that inadvertent opening he had given her. “Why had you gone to Barbados?”
“To serve out my seven years of bondage – until I reached the age of twenty.”
Her lips parted in a horrorstruck inhalation. “You were a bond servant – at thirteen?”
“But, God Almighty, did I learn, among other things, how to hack my way through sugar cane – or any kind of forest.”
“That is how you lost your finger?”
“Aye, but I gained survival skills. It was the sugar cane that kept me alive when food was scarce. Shall we have at it?”
“It is still dark,” she protested. Nevertheless, blanket held modestly before her, she struggled to don her tattered clothes and cloak.
“I do not think darkness will stop this Indian called Catamount.” Gentleman that he was not, he focused his attention on knotting the leather reins he had severed from the horses’ bridles, for what purpose she could not imagine.
§§ CHAPTER EIGHT §§
What recklessness, delivering himself up to the fickle friendship of the Indians.
But then never had Adam imagined such a woman as Evangeline Bradshaw existed. At the St. Knut’s celebration in Printz Hall, he had watched the capering backcountry females attempt to dance with ungainly hen-pecking, wing-flapping movements, while she had glided as gracefully as a swan. And they had eyed her with an admiring sort of simper.
He seemed to have started a courtship in reverse, with his taking her in the intimacy of his bed first, then getting to know her during their precipitous flight. But courtship it had been from the moment he had first sighted her at Whitehall, thought he may not have had time to properly court her then, had he even thought it the expedient thing to do.
Only as he began to know her better – to see demonstrated her valiant nature, her inviolable integrity, and her temperamental spirit – was he able to understand better himself; albeit, a little too late to make a difference.
To her consternation, he looped the two pair of bridle reins, from the horses’ bits, between the back of his belt and around her small waist – affording a goodly pacing distance of a couple of yards. “We will be running full tilt,” he explained. “This way you cannot lag behind nor lose sight of me in the underbrush – and I shall be taking the brunt of it.”