Forever and Ever Read Online Free PDF

platforms. The dressing area was partially under-roof, and from here he could see the children and “bal girls”—women, most of them miners’ wives—cleaning and dressing the ores. The first core began at eight o’clock, so there were no miners about now, only grass workers and machinery men, and the drivers of mule-drawn carts full of rock and metal and the crude implements used to unearth them.
    Over the crest of the hill that wound down to the toll road, a different sort of vehicle came into view, a jaunty, yellow-wheeled cart pulled by a pretty gray pony. A bright red feather waved from the driver’s dashing straw hat. Watching the cart draw near, Connor leaned back against the mine office’s clapboard side and jammed his hands in his pockets, trying not to be seduced by the beguiling frivolity of the sight, the charming unlikeliness of it in such homely surroundings. But it wasn’t easy. He’d been thinking about Miss Sophie Deene for a day and a half. This morning he thought he’d finally banished the last outlaw impression of her as an attractive woman rather than as the owner of one of the copper mines he’d committed himself to investigate. Now here she was, handing the pony cart’s reins to Andrewson and jumping gracefully down to the ground in the muddy mine yard, and it was impossible to think anything at all except that she was beautiful.
    She didn’t wear white today, but she was just as fresh and fetching in a stylish tartan skirt, green blouse, and red kid boots. Connor tried to feel sullen, tried to sneer mentally at the impracticality of those little boots, the silly feather in the girlish, oversize hat. But no luck again; one look around at the men nodding or lifting their caps to her in the yard told him he was exactly the same as all of them: bewitched.
    Andrewson was saying something to her, gesturing in Connor’s direction. She threw him a brief glance and went back to her conversation. Hadn’t she recognized him? Pushing away from the shadowed wall of the countinghouse, he moved toward her.
    The wide brim of her hat hid him until he was nearly beside her. When she looked up, she started slightly, and then her lovely face lit up in a smile only a blind man wouldn’t know was glad. “Why, it’s Mr. Pendarvis,” she said wonderingly, while pretty pink color stole into her cheeks. It tantalized him to see that she was flustered. He almost offered her his hand before he remembered himself. He pulled off his own hat, a heavy felt miner’s helmet, and said, “Good morning.” It was hard not to smile back, hard to bear in mind that everything had changed since the afternoon he’d untangled her hair from Birdie’s button. They weren’t enemies—not yet—but they would certainly be adversaries, she unwittingly, and so he’d damn well better keep his head.
    Andrewson scratched his chin, puzzled. “Didn’t know you knew him,” he said to his employer. “He never said.” She looked at the grass captain in perplexity. “This is the one I just told you about, Miss Deene. He’s here wanting work in the mine.”
    She turned her head on her long neck by slow, subtly incredulous degrees. The pleased smile faltered, lost its charming self-consciousness. If disillusionment had a color, it was the shade of slate-blue her eyes turned behind her thick lashes, like a cloud-shadow moving across a clear, deep pool. “Mr. Pendarvis, you . . . you’re a miner?”
    Connor felt hot blood rush to his cheeks, at the same time he became exquisitely aware of his loose-fitting pants and dirty gray smock frock, his heavy, mud-caked boots, his graceless hat. There was no mistaking her tone or her look, and her disappointment was as sharp and clear as a slap in the face. “Yes, I’m a miner,” he said through his teeth. With enough disbelief in his voice to insult, he said, “Don’t tell me
you’re
the owner of Guelder mine.”
    It was her turn to blush. Her posture, already finishing-school