Choices of the Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Who?” he repeated on a sigh.
    “Who what?” Bethann dropped to her knees beside him and slipped one arm beneath his shoulders. “You sound like an owl.”
    Griff focused on her face, pasty white save for a constellation of ruddy freckles across her slightly crooked nose. “Who did it? Who tried to kill me?”
    “Zach, of course. Drink.” She held a cup to his lips and tilted it so he had to swallow the bitter but cold draft or choke.
    He swallowed, fighting dizziness and weakness. “Not Zach. Zach wouldn’t.”
    “He’s a Brooks and related to the Gosnolls, isn’t he?”
    “Sure, but—” He leaned on his left hand to spare his right side.
    Zach, his friend, his cousin, would never harm him, despite his family. Together they had knelt in the makeshift church and prayed for God to forgive them for their part in the family dispute. They had vowed before God that they would stop the fighting, the violence, before any more of the men of Brooks Ridge were maimed or killed, and then they persuaded their mothers to hire a schoolma’am for the younger children to be properly taught how to read and write and love their neighbors as themselves. Neighbors or family. Either counted. Miss Esther Cherrett sounded perfect—the daughter of a parson, educated by him with some fancy English education.
    “Not Zach. He took a vow,” Griff murmured.
    Bethann snorted. “Since when does a Gosnoll or Brooks stay by a vow?” She rose with one fluid motion and stalked to the open door of the cabin, plain in face and form but as graceful as a mountain lion.
    And as bitter as one of her herbal concoctions.
    Griff slid back against the rough wall to keep himself from succumbing to one of those herbal concoctions. His side murmured a token protest at the movement. “So why do you think it was Zach?”
    “Rest. You need your rest.”
    “I’m right rested, Bethann. I need to talk.” The effort not to yawn nearly dislocated his jaw.
    Bethann laughed, the sound like a saw blade striking metal. “You need to rest so’s you don’t open up that wound.”
    “It’s healed well enough.” He groped beneath the remnants of his shirt for the bandage wrapped around his middle.
    No fresh blood soaked through the linen. His touch on the slice through the flesh right above his hip bone didn’t send him reeling into unconsciousness. A twinge. A simple twinge. He would be back on his horse in another day or two.
    And continuing east to meet up with the party from Seabourne.
    “Tell me why you claim Zach threw that knife at me,” Griff persisted.
    In the doorway, Bethann shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Who else was around who can throw a knife but him and Hannah?”
    “Hannah couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a knife if she was a yard away, let alone in the dark from fifty feet away.” Griff stifled another yawn. “But why would Zach ambush me and slice my guts open?”
    “To be rid of you, Brother. You die and it’s all his—the woods, the mine, the farms.”
    “Not with our fathers still alive, and we have younger brothers and cousins who expect a share.”
    “Our fathers.” Bethann kicked her booted foot against the door frame.
    Dust and splinters shimmered in the last rays of the sun. With a ripping sound, the frame cracked up the middle.
    “They’ll kill each other off sooner than later,” she insisted.
    “No. No, it’s over, I’m right certain of that.”
    Bethann snorted.
    “I can’t—” Griff shoved his hair out of his face, finding only a line where a lump and a gash had rendered him unconscious. “No, I won’t go around accusing Zach of trying to murder me without more proof than your guessing.”
    “You ain’t up to believing proof.” Muttering something about fetching more water, she slipped out of the door and beyond his line of sight.
    The water bucket remained in one corner of the cabin.
    Griff remained in the far corner, drowsing, aching in body and heart.
    Not Zach, not the cousin who was