The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn Read Online Free PDF

again, but Tamsen’s ears rang as if she’d been the one struck. She looked toward her stepfather. Somehow he’d missed the entire episode. She forced herself to face Mr. Kincaid. Her voice shook.
    “You needn’t have done that. Didn’t you hear what he said? Your slave—”
    “Hasn’t anything to do with us,” Mr. Kincaid finished for her.
    “How can you say so? Of course she does.”
    The true cause of her distress seemed finally to register: not the interruption, but his reaction to it. “Miss Littlejohn … I only meant you needn’t be concerned.”
    “Yet I am—and you should be.” This wasn’t what she was meant to say now. She was meant to smile and nod and suppress whatever opinion she might hold on the matter. But she could not do it. “The people whose lives and bodies you own, those whose burden it is to see to your every need, they are your responsibility to protect.”
    These were her mother’s words, spoken often in years past in timid counter to Mr. Parrish’s callous dealings with his slaves, but she wasn’t saying them in any tone of voice her mother had ever used.
    “Yet you hear of such cruelty done to a woman you call your property and cannot be bothered to go to her aid? Because of me ?” She stood so abruptly that her chair rocked back and would have hit the floor had she not caught it. “If I’m to be your excuse, Mr. Kincaid, then allow me to excuse myself from your presence. Please, go and see to her.”
    The faces in the taproom were a blur, all turning to gape at her flight. At the door she glanced back to see her stepfather—very much aware of her again—hurrying to where Ambrose Kincaid still sat, staring after her more stunned than when she’d entered.

With the cattle down from the mountains, Cade and Jesse had parted with the drovers and now had only their mounts and the packhorses to manage. Or so Jesse had assumed. Turned out Cade was carrying around some peculiar notions in his head. Not till they’d reached Morganton, leading the horses, did he let on about them.
    “What would you say to us getting a milch cow this trip—and some extra seed corn, more’n last year? I talked with Tate before we left. He don’t mind us planting another acre or two.”
    “Milch cow?” Jesse halted between an oak-shaded frame house and the trade store, where the beaten path between met the town’s main street. “You take up courting some woman without telling me? She got you flirting with the notion of settling down?”
    A pace ahead, Cade stopped his horse and said something to that, but Jesse never heard his answer, since that was the moment he saw the girl in the blue gown.
    She was crossing the lane where they’d halted, moving fast and looking straight ahead, heedless of left or right—till her stride hitched like she’d put a fancy heel down wrong and she staggered smack into Cade. She’d have gone sprawling over those yards of silk petticoat had Cade not loosed his horse and snaked an arm around her slender waist to catch her.
    Jesse caught the horse as Cade released the girl—a dark-eyed, dark-haired beauty, dressed finer than any female he’d ever set eyes on. Next to him and Cade, both topping six feet, she seemed as neat and tiny as a doll, and somehow not quite real.
    “I—I beg your pardon,” she said, not how Jesse expected such a girlwould speak to a trail-begrimed stranger in buckskins who dared put his hands on her person. More like she meant it.
    She looked up at Cade, and her eyes rounded. Then she looked at Jesse, who promptly forgot everything else about the girl save what was staring from her eyes—fury, fear, resolve, all in a stunning flash as real and raw as the earth beneath his moccasins and the sun beating on his back.
    A shout rose from the direction she’d appeared. “Tamsen!”
    The girl flinched. Breaking their gaze, she swept up her skirts and was across the lane in a blink, making for the house next door. Jesse watched her mount