Текст книги "Charming The Highlander"

Автор книги: Джанет Чапмен

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“So he spanked her?” she asked, indignant. The woman had been trying to save her husband’s life, and he had spanked her for it?

“He tried.” Grey turned to look at her. “He actually sat down and told Mama to lay herself across his knees.”

“And did she?”

“Aye,” he said, looking back up at the stars, his white teeth gleaming in the moonlight as he grinned. “She walked over and lay on his lap and just stayed there, not saying a word. And Da lifted his hand in the air.”

Grace closed her eyes. She could see it all in her mind, a giant warlord with a paw as big as a bear’s, about to hit a defenseless woman in anger. “Did she cry?” she asked in a whisper.

Grey suddenly rolled over and pinned her beneath him, brushing the hair from her face, lacing his fingers through her curls, and anchoring her in place.

“Da lowered his arm,” he continued, “but gently, until he was cupping her bottom. Without saying a word, he picked Mama up and carried her upstairs. They didn’t come down the rest of the night.”

“He didn’t do it,” she said. “And neither will you.”

“I’ll never hurt you, Grace,” he whispered, his lips mere inches from hers. “I’d cut my arm off first.”

“Good answer, MacKeage,” she said, trying to lift her face up to kiss him.

He wouldn’t let go of her hair. “That doesn’t give you license to be reckless with my temper, lass,” he warned, his eyes glinting with the promise of some other form of retribution.

Grace sighed as deeply as she could, considering she had two hundred pounds of hot, sexy forged steel sprawled on top of her. She had resigned herself to the fact, months ago, that she had fallen in love with a man who saw the world through the eyes of an ancient. She would never change him; you can’t change the soul of a warrior.

She could, however, at least enjoy trying.

Grace stretched her arms over her head and wiggled beneath him, hugging him with her knees and lifting her hips against his. His eyes darkened, and his breath caught in the back of his throat.

“Don’t do that,” he hissed, rolling to the side, his breathing suddenly labored. “If you don’t want a bloody brawl to break out, you’ll remember your brothers are not ten feet away.”

Grace sighed again, more freely now that he wasn’t on top of her, keeping her smile to herself. She had a weapon much more effective than his hollow threat to spank her. She mimicked Grey’s posture by placing her hands behind her head and looked up at the stars.

“We’ll bring our children up here every summer,” she said.

“Aye. I’ll build us a cabin on West Shoulder,” he told her, his voice sounding strained as he fought the passion she had awakened in his body.

“No. I want them to learn to live in God’s shelter, not man’s. Will you teach them to hunt and fish and run through the forests like you do? And handle a sword? A smaller one,” she added, remembering the weight of his.

“Damn right I will.”

She wondered what his answer would be if he knew he was having daughters. Grace was unable to keep the question to herself any longer. She needed to know he wouldn’t be disappointed.

“Would you be upset if this baby’s a girl?” she asked.

“You’re wanting a daughter?”

“Of course I do. Every mother wants a daughter. I’m not living in an all-male household for the rest of my life. I have six brothers,” she reminded him.

“Okay,” he murmured. He laid his hand on her rounding belly. “If you need this one to be a girl, that’s fine, lass.”

Well, that was also the right answer, for now. But she would wait a few more years yet before telling Grey that none of his children would ever be able to lift his sword.

Chapter Twenty-five

Seven Sutters, four MacKeages, two MacBains, and Father Daar were all standing on the edge of the meadow high up on TarStone Mountain at daybreak.

Grace couldn’t stop smiling, partly because she was so happy to be surrounded by family and friends and to be marrying a Superman, but also because that Superman couldn’t stop staring at Father Daar’s new cane long enough to repeat his vows.

“Where did that come from?” were the first words out of Grey’s mouth when the priest had arrived with the aid of a new, smaller cherrywood cane.

“I made it,” Father Daar had said, his wrinkled face lit with amusement.

“I bought you a new cane four months ago,” Grey had snapped at the grinning priest. “Where is it?”

“I used it for kindling. It was uncomfortable in my hand.”

Grace had gone up and touched Daar’s new cane, admiring it. It hadn’t hummed or felt warm, it had only felt smooth and delicate. “It’s very pretty,” she had told him. She’d darted Grey a reassuring smile. “It’s not as large as your old one.”

The old priest had held it up and fingered the one lonely burl in the wood at the top of the cane. “No, it’s not. But then, it’s so new, you see,” he’d told her, a twinkle in his clear blue eyes, “that it hasn’t been properly broken in yet.”

She’d been satisfied with his answer, but apparently her almost-husband was not. It was his turn to declare his love and pledge himself to her, but he wasn’t paying attention.

“You’ve changed your mind, then?” she asked, tugging on his sleeve.

“About what?”

“Marrying me.”

He looked startled. “Of course not.”

“Then say ‘I do.’”

“Do what?” he asked, glancing back at Daar’s cane.

She walked away, heading down the mountain.

That got his attention.

Grey ran after her. “Wait. Where are you going? I thought we were getting married.”

“I’ve been trying to marry you for the last ten minutes.”

“We’ve started?” he asked, whipping his head around to look back at the assembly of people staring at them.

“It’s not a staff, Grey. It’s just a new cane. It probably can’t even heat a can of soup.”

“I don’t want anyone having the power to separate us,” he told her, his gaze filled with desperate anxiety.

Grace was damn close to crying, she loved this man so much. She reached up and ran her finger down the side of his worried face. “Nothing can ever separate us now, my love. You and I are going to grow old together.”

“Have I ever told you that I love you?” he asked, his entire body suddenly relaxing as he realized he believed her.

“Aye,” she said, mimicking his brogue, which was more pronounced these days. “Several times a day, without saying a word.”

“Are we getting married or not?” Ian asked in a shout of impatience. “The sun’s not waiting, people.”

They walked back to Father Daar hand in hand, and Grace repeated her vows to Grey. And this time he looked directly at her, his evergreen eyes fierce with possession, and said the words she had been waiting eight hundred years to hear.

Then he kissed her to seal their bond.

“It’s time,” she whispered to Grey before turning to Samuel. “Mary attended my wedding, and now it’s time to give her to TarStone.”

Samuel picked up the Oreo cookie tin and traded it to Michael MacBain for Robbie. With unsteady hands, Michael pried off the lid and held it out to each of the brothers, then to each MacKeage and Grace and Grey, and even Father Daar. In turn, each of them pulled a palm full of ash from the tin and waited until everyone carried a part of Mary in his or her hand.

Michael took Robbie back in his arms and smudged a bit of ash on his son’s fingers before he took his own handful. They turned in unison, lifted their hands over their heads, and opened their fingers.

The first gentle breeze of summer carried Mary into the meadow with whimsical playfulness, scattering her over the face of TarStone Mountain, taking her home.

Grace watched the ash slowly settle in the ebb of the breeze, now scattered over the meadow like wafted snowflakes. She turned to her brothers. Every one of them had tears in his eyes and a wide grin on his face.

“Happy birthday,” she told them.

“We’re not doing this for another sixty years,” Brian said, wiping at his face with his sleeve. He pointed at her. “You damn well better take good care of yourself, little sister. Because I’m not doing this again.”

She went up and hugged the huge, powerful oil-rig worker. “I promise,” she told him.

“Happy birthday,” he muttered, hugging her back so fiercely she squeaked.

“It’s time for the pancakes,” Timmy said, failing miserably at trying to sound cheerful.

“I brought party hats,” she told them all, smiling at their groans of dismay. “I found them in the attic last month. Mom never threw anything out.”

And that was when the Sutter family taught the MacKeages, Michael MacBain, and their nephew how to celebrate birthdays. They spent the morning eating strawberry pancakes and playing touch football.

The football match became more like a weaponless war of strong-bodied and even stronger-minded men. Not one of them headed down the mountain to continue the celebration with the people of Pine Creek without sporting at least one bruise and a torn piece of clothes. Timmy had a black eye, and Paul sprained his thumb. Morgan was limping, and Ian supported his back with his hands. Callum kept tonguing the cut on his lip until it was so swollen he couldn’t speak without slurring his words. Michael didn’t have one piece of clothing without a rip in it.

And Grey? Well, Superman had managed to dodge most of the tackles her brothers had tried to land on him, but he probably wouldn’t be swinging his sword for the next couple of weeks. Big boy Brian had stepped on Grey’s right hand, apologized, and then stepped on his shoulder.

Grace had laughed until tears came to her eyes. You don’t grow up in a house with six older brothers without having learned that good-natured violence is a way of life, especially when more testosterone than blood ran in their veins.

And Grace was very glad that some things never changed. That through timeless worlds without end, modern or ancient, men would forever be men.

Epilogue

Grey bent down and kissed his wife on the cheek, then quietly lifted his daughter from her sleeping arms.

With her cradled safely in the crook of his elbow, he stared in awe at the tiny six-and-a-half-pound bundle. Barely hour-old crystal-blue eyes stared back at him as he ran his finger gently over her wrinkled pink cheek.

Carefully holding the greatest treasure a man could wish for, Grey carried his daughter over to the crowd of anxious young ladies patiently waiting by the hearth. He sat down in the chair and laid this precious new addition to his family out on his knees for them to see.

“This is Winter,” he told them. “Your new sister.”

“She’s wrinkled,” eight-year-old Heather said, carefully pulling back the blankets to see better. “And her eyes are blue, not green like ours.”

“She has your mother’s eyes.”

“She’s small,” six-year-old Sarah said through her missing front teeth.

“She’s been living in a very small place the last nine months,” he explained.

“When can we play with her?” Sarah’s twin sister, Camry, asked. Camry had only one tooth missing as yet. The other one was barely hanging on, though, wiggling back and forth when she spoke.

Grey smiled at her expectant look. “Soon. Once she’s strong enough to sit up and crawl around.”

“Can she talk, Papa?” four-year-old Chelsea asked, pushing her sisters out of the way to see better.

“Not yet,” Grey told her with a sigh of relief for that small blessing. There was plenty of nonstop chatter echoing through the halls of Gu Bràth now. “But I’m sure all of you will be teaching her that trick soon enough.”

“Can she fwim?” Chelsea’s twin sister, Megan, wanted to know, proud of her own newly acquired skill.

Grey had been forced to build an indoor pool for his daughters, who complained every autumn when the cold weather arrived and rudely put an end to their swimming for another year.

“We’ll teach her in a couple of years,” he told Megan. “And then she can join the rest of you in the high pond when you hunt for Daar’s cane.”

Three-year-old Elizabeth touched Winter’s cheek and giggled when the infant turned to root at her finger.

Grey leaned back in his chair and watched as his daughters examined and welcomed their newest sister.

Seven girls in eight years. Two set of twins. And every blessed one of the precious, exhausting darlings had been born at Gu Bràth on Winter Solstice, in the same bed where all but Heather had been conceived. Grace had insisted on that trick, much to Grey’s dismay. He had argued mightily against it, but his petitions had fallen on deaf ears. They were MacKeages, she had reminded him throughout each pregnancy. They would be born on MacKeage soil.

And they had all learned to swim at an unusually young age, also thanks to his wife’s determination.

Every summer for the last eight years, they had spent several days camped out at the high mountain meadow, when it was covered in a mantle of blooming forget-me-nots, which shouldn’t be growing at all that far up the mountain. Grace insisted it was Mary’s doing, since the flowers only grew in that one place where her ashes had been spread.

So every summer Grey had made his growing family of females a camp amongst the forget-me-nots and had taken his daughters over to the high pond where they learned to swim, appreciate nature, and hunt for Daar’s magical cane.

That was another strange thing none of them dared comment on. That pond had never frozen over with ice since the day Grey had thrown the old priest’s cherrywood staff into it.

Winter stirred on his lap, awkwardly moving her head to see the many young eyes staring back at her.

Grey’s hands warmed with a vibrant energy, reminding him of the feel of Daar’s cane when he’d held it for that brief moment before he banished it forever—he hoped—to the depths of the pond.

He was a rich man, he decided as he looked at all seven of his children, not one blessed son in the lot.

Now all he had to do was find them husbands—modern, intelligent, gentle, but strong men who would cherish his daughters without dominating them.

Men also willing to change their names to MacKeage.

Pocket Books

Proudly Presents

LOVING THE HIGHLANDER

Janet Chapman

AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK

MAY 2003

FROM POCKET BOOKS

Turn the page for a preview of

Loving the Highlander…

Sadie Quill was still in awe of her luck. She was actually being paid to do what she loved most—hike and kayak through the beautiful forest of Maine. She’d gladly given up her job as a meteorologist in Boston to return to Pine Creek and the mountains she’d grown up in to map out landmarks for a proposal for a park. These last ten weeks had been a pleasant dream she never wanted to wake up from.

Well, most of the job had been a dream, except that some of her work was being sabotaged. But having her trail markers stolen was more of a nuisance than a setback. The orange ribbons were nothing more than a visible tool for her project. She had the coordinates written on the large wall map back at her cabin, and she could map them into her GPS to find the trails whenever she wanted.

Now she was cataloging the flora and fauna of the valley, noting in her journal points of interest and areas of animal activity that future hikers would want to see.

Sadie stifled a chuckle and raised her camera, pointing the long lens through the honeysuckle bush where she hid on the shore of a small lake. The scene unfolding before her was priceless, and exactly why she loved her job so much.

At the urging of its mother, a young moose stepped into the shallow water of the protected cove. Sadie depressed the shutter on her camera, captured the shot, and advanced the film. No noise betrayed her position, thanks to her father’s ingenious skill in making the mechanics of the camera silent.

She and her dad had walked these woods for years, taking pictures as she was now, and Sadie’s heart ached with sadness that he was not here with her today. It had been Frank Quill who taught Sadie the fine art of moving silently among the animals, and had instilled in her not only an appreciation of nature, but a respect for it as well. And now she was thanking him by the only means she could find, by helping to build a park in his memory.

The mother moose suddenly lifted her head and looked toward the open water of the lake. Sadie used the telephoto lens of her camera to scan across the calm lake surface. And there, on the opposite shore, she saw the movement.

Something was swimming toward them.

Sadie leaned forward to get a better view. The mother moose heard her, whipped her head around and stared directly at Sadie. For a moment, their eyes locked.

There wasn’t much in these woods that worried a full-grown moose, but a mother had to be more cautious of the vulnerability of her calf. Sadie’s presence and whatever was swimming toward them was apparently more than the mother moose was willing to deal with. She gave a low grunt of warning and stepped out of the lake, pushing her baby ahead of her.

With a sigh of regret for scaring the moose, Sadie turned her attention back to the lake. Whatever was swimming towards her was too small to be another moose and too large to be a muskrat or otter. Sadie sharpened the focus on her lens and watched, until finally she saw the rise and fall of arms cutting a path through the water.

Arms? There was a person swimming across the lake?

Sadie settled herself deeper into the bushes, making sure she was well-hidden as he moved ever closer.

Yes, she could see now that the swimmer was male. And that he had broad shoulders, long, powerful arms, and a stroke that cut through the water with amazing ease. The swimmer moved with lazy, rhythmic grace, right up to one of the boulders in the cove Sadie was hiding in. He placed two large hands on the rock and pulled himself out of the water in one powerful, seamless motion.

Sadie blinked.

She tore her eye away from the viewfinder. She didn’t need the vivid clarity of the telephoto lens to see that the man was naked.

She looked through her camera again and adjusted the focus. Yup, as naked as the day he was born. He sat on the boulder, brushing the hair from his face and wringing the shoulder-length mane out in a ponytail at his back.

Well, heck. The guy’s hair was almost as long as hers. Sadie pushed the zoom on her lens closer, aiming it at the top half of the man. She almost dropped the camera when he came into focus. He was huge, and it wasn’t an illusion of the lens, either. His brawny shoulders filled the viewfinder, and when he lifted both hands to push the water away from his forehead again, his chest expanded to Herculean proportions.

Sadie noticed then that the guy wasn’t even winded from his swim. His broad and powerfully muscled chest—which was covered with a luxurious mat of slick, dark blond hair—rose and fell with the steady rhythm of someone who had merely walked up a short flight of stairs.

Who was this demigod of the woods?

Sadie zoomed the lens of her camera even closer, on his face. She didn’t recognize him from town. She’

d only been back in the Pine Creek area for a few months now, and had only gone into town six or seven times for supplies since returning, but she would have remembered such a ruggedly handsome face on a man his size. She definitely would have remembered such startling green eyes framed by such a drop-dead gorgeous face. His jaw, darkened with a couple-day’s growth of beard, was square, stern, and stubborn looking. His neck was thick, with a leather cord around it that dangled an odd-shaped ball of some sort over his chest.

Sadie zoomed the lens out again until his entire body filled her viewfinder. His stomach was flat and contoured with muscle. He had long, powerful looking thighs, bulging calves, and even his feet looked strong. He was turned away just enough that his modesty was barely intact.

It wasn’t every day she was treated to such an exhibit of pure unadulterated maleness. And despite her own sense of shame for being a blatant voyeur, Sadie wished he would turn just a bit more toward her.

She was curious, dammit, and made no apology for it.

She liked men. Especially big ones like this guy. Sadie was six-foot-one in her stocking feet, and she usually spent most of her time talking to the receding hairline of the men she knew. Since she had hit puberty and shot up like a weed, Sadie wished she were short. Like the heroines in the romance novels she loved to read, she wanted to be spunky, beautiful, and petite. And she was tired of falling short of the three by at least two of those traits.

About all Sadie could say for herself was that she did possess a healthy dose of spunk. She may have come close to beauty once, but a deadly house-fire eight years ago had ended that promise. And no matter how much she had willed it, she hadn’t stopped growing until her twenty-third birthday. She was taller than most men she met, and every bit of her height was in the overlong inseam of her jeans.

She’d bet her boots that the guy on the rock had at least a thirty-six inseam, and that he wore a triple-extra-large shirt he had to buy from the tall rack.

The vision in her viewfinder suddenly began to fade, and Sadie had a moment’s regret that it had all been a dream.

Until she realized that the viewfinder had fogged up.

Well, she did feel unusually warm. And she was breathing a bit harder than normal.

Wow. Either she was having a guilt attack for being a Peeping Tom, or she was experiencing a fine little case of lust.

Sadie didn’t care which it was, she wasn’t stopping. She used the back of her gloved right hand to wipe the viewfinder dry before she looked through it again.

The man was now laid out on the boulder, his arms folded under his head and his eyes closed to the sun as he basked in its warmth like an overfed bear.

Sadie suddenly remembered that she was looking through the lens of a camera. If this guy was willing to parade around the forest naked why should she feel guilty about a couple of pictures? She just wondered where in her journal of fauna she should place his photo.

Probably at the top of the food chain.

Feeling pretty sure that the man had fallen asleep, Sadie snapped the shutter on her camera and quickly advanced the film. She zoomed in the lens and snapped it again.

But just as she advanced the film for another picture the man leapt to his feet in an unbelievable blur of motion. And suddenly he was looking directly at the bushes where she hid.

Dammit. He couldn’t have heard that. Animals couldn’t hear the damn thing, and their lives depended on their ears.

Sadie sucked in her breath and held it; she wasn’t sure if she was doing so from fright, or from the fact that she now had a full frontal view of the man.

She snapped the shutter down one last time and scurried backward to free herself from the bush. She foolishly stood up, then immediately realized her mistake when she found herself face to face with the giant, with only a hundred yards of water between them.

She couldn’t move. He was magnificent, standing there like a demigod, his penetrating stare rooting her feet into place.

“Come on, Quill,” she whispered, her gaze still locked with his. “Move while you still have the advantage.”

He must have heard that, too, because he went into action before she did. He dove into the water and began swimming toward her.

Freed from his flint-green stare, Sadie snatched up her backpack and headed into the forest. She broke into a run as soon as she hit the overgrown trail and set a fast, steady pace toward home.

She grinned as the forest blurred past.

The swimmer didn’t stand a chance of catching her. He had to get to shore first and then find the trail as well as the direction she had taken. Sadie’s long legs ate up the ground with effortless ease, and she actually laughed out loud at the rush of adrenaline pumping through her veins.

This was her strength; there were very few people she couldn’t outrun. Especially a barefooted streaker that looked like he outweighed her by a good sixty pounds. It took a lot of energy to move that much weight through the winding trail, ducking and darting around branches and over fallen logs.

Yes, her long legs would give her the edge this time, rescuing her from the folly of trespassing on a stranger’s right to privacy.

Sadie slowed down after a while, but she didn’t quite have the courage to stop yet. Only a maniac would have followed her, but then only a maniac would be swimming naked in a cold-water lake.

So Sadie kept running, easing her pace to a jog.

Until she heard a branch snap behind her.

She looked over her shoulder and would have screamed if she could have. The man from the lake was fifty feet behind her. Sadie turned back to watch where she was going, the adrenaline spiking back into her bloodstream.

There was nothing like seeing a fully naked, wild-haired, wild-eyed madman on her heels to make a girl wish she had stayed in bed that morning. Sadie ran as if the devil himself was chasing her. She could actually hear the pounding of his feet behind her now; could practically feel his breath on the back of her neck.

She grabbed a small cedar tree to pivot around a corner, and that was when he caught her, hitting her broadside in a full body tackle. Sadie wanted to scream then too, but he knocked what little air she had left out of her body. They rolled several times, and Sadie swung her camera at his head. He grunted in surprise from the blow, and grabbed her flailing arms as they continued to roll.

When they finally stopped he was on top of her…and her wrists were being held over her head…and her back was being crushed into the ground…and she had never been so scared in her life.

Sadie thought about really screaming now, but her throat closed tight. She pushed at the ground and tried to buck the man off of her. At the same time she lashed out with her feet.

That was when he shifted from sitting on her to laying on her, trapping her legs with his own.

Sadie instantly stilled. This was going from bad to worse; she now had a naked madman on top of her—

and she was wearing shorts.

Oh, God. Now that she had such a close and personal look at him, he was no longer a demigod. He was a full-blown god, Adonis or Atlas, maybe. Heck. His broad shoulders and amazingly wide chest blocked out the light. His warm breath feathered over her face. Sadie could feel every inch of his long, muscled legs running the length of hers. And she could feel something…something else touching her bare thigh. He was excited, either from the thrill of the chase, their suggestive position, or the anticipation of what he was planning to do. Sadie didn’t want to scream anymore. She wanted to faint.

She did close her eyes, so she wouldn’t have to look at his triumphant, lethal looking, very male face.

Why didn’t he say something?

Sadie opened her eyes to find him staring at her hands, which he still held firmly over her head. Sadie immediately opened her bare left hand and let the camera fall onto the ground.

Still, he kept staring over her head.

He reached up and tugged at the glove on her right hand. Sadie closed it into a fist. Momentarily deterred from his task, he turned his attention back to her face.

She turned her head away.

He pulled her chin back to face him, then gently ran his thumb along her bottom lip, watching it as if fascinated.

Lord save her. This gorgeous, naked man was going to kiss her.

His finger trailed down her face, over her chin, to her neck, and Sadie felt him touch the opening of her blouse. She twisted frantically and tried to bite the arm holding her hands over her head.

He lowered the full force of his weight onto her then, and Sadie fought to breathe. Well, heck. She hadn’t realized he’d been holding himself off her before. She stilled, and he lifted himself slightly, allowing her to gasp for air.

Their gazes locked.

His long blond hair dripped lake water on her chin and throat. The heavy object dangling from his neck nestled against her breasts, causing a disturbing sensation to course all the way down to the pit of her stomach. Sadie could feel her clothes slowly sopping up his sweat, his hairy legs abrasive against hers, his chest pushing into her with every breath he took. The heat from his body scorched her to the point that she couldn’t work up enough moisture in her mouth to speak.

Not that she could think of anything to say.

The silent brute leaned forward and Sadie froze in anticipation of his kiss, but he only picked up her camera. He obviously knew how it worked, because he carefully lifted the rewind and popped it open.

He was not so gentle however, when he ripped the film from it. He tossed the exposed film and the camera on the ground beside them.

He opened her pack next, spilling the contents on the ground. He poked around in the mess he’d made and found her GPS. He turned it over, pushed several buttons, and tossed it back on the ground. He picked up her cell phone, flipped it open, then discarded it like trash to the ground.

And then he picked up the small roll of duct tape she used for emergency repairs.

Now Sadie had heard that victims were often killed with their own guns. She suddenly understood that concept when the man freed a length of her own tape and grabbed her wrists to tape them together. He then slid down her body and started to take hold of her legs.

Sadie kicked him hard enough in the stomach that he grunted, then she rolled and scrambled up to run.

She didn’t even make it past her camera before he grabbed her by the ankles and pushed her back to the ground, on her stomach this time. Sadie looked over her shoulder as he wrapped duct tape around her legs.

The damn crazy man was grinning again.

She kicked out at him again with her bound feet.

Sadie flinched when the brute gave a sharp whistle. She snapped her head around to see what he was doing.

Was he calling a friend?

Sadie looked at the scattered contents of her pack. Where was her knife? She needed something, a weapon, to defend herself. She checked to see that he was still looking off into the forest, watching for someone, while she rolled toward a group of young pine trees. She found a lower limb devoid of bark and wiggled to sit up beside it. She looked up at the man again, only to find him looking over his shoulder at her, still grinning, not at all worried she would get far being trussed up like a turkey ready for cooking.