The Rustler's Bride Read Online Free PDF

not to notice her—he continued the steady rhythm of ducking down and straightening, the muscles on his arms and shoulders bunching and flexing as he scooped up the soiled straw with a pitchfork and tossed it into the wheelbarrow behind him.
    “Good morning,” Victoria said, and moved deeper into the dim light.
    Declan stood straight. He propped the tip of the pitchfork against the cement floor, and, lifting one arm, wiped a tattered sleeve across his brow. Strands of golden hair clung to his damp skin. His black Stetson—the only part of his clothing that didn’t look as if it might disintegrate any moment—hung from a peg on the wall.
    He offered no reply to her greeting. He merely stared at her with narrowed eyes, caution stamped on his battered features. Victoria drifted closer. Her hips swayed with the lazy steps of an aimless stroll that suggested she had stumbled upon him purely by chance.
    “How are you settling in?” she asked.
    At first, she didn’t think he would answer. Then he lifted the pitchfork again and started swinging it, but his pace was slower, and there was a new tension to his movements.
    “Met the men,” he said finally.
    “How’s your room?”
    He slanted a rueful glance at her. “Adequate.”
    Adequate. An educated word.
    “Mrs. Flynn said you didn’t eat much last night.”
    “I wasn’t hungry.”
    Declan finished with the stall that belonged to Flint, her father’s black stallion, and moved on to the next. Victoria scuttled forward to keep him fully in her sights. The horses were all out grazing, except a mare and a newborn foal in the far stall. Flies buzzed in the air. The heat made her dizzy. She could feel beads of sweat gathering on her brow.
    “I’m sorry about my father last night,” she ventured.
    “Nothing to be sorry about.”
    “I mean, those things he said…”
    Declan shrugged and tossed another load of dirty straw into the wheelbarrow.
    “He’ll get over his hostility,” Victoria muttered. “Eventually…”
    Declan shot her a glance, half sour, half amused. The hell he will, and you know it, the single mocking blue eye seemed to say.
    “I mean…you’re my husband…surely, it would be fitting for us to get to know each other a bit…a year is a long time to be tied to a stranger without at least making friends…” Victoria let her fumbling words trail away.
    It wasn’t going as she had expected. In Boston, if she spoke to a gentleman in a ball or in a concert, or if she boldly let a stranger approach her in a store or in the public library on Boylston Street, those men would fall over themselves to engage her in conversation. She might not experienced in the art of flirting, but she knew when a man’s demeanor told her that they wanted her to go away, and that was what Declan’s rigid posture was telling her right now.
    She stood in helpless silence while he continued to work. At the end of the corridor, the foal whinnied. The mare blew soothing sounds from its nostrils, and then Victoria could hear the eager, slurping noises of suckling as the foal found its mother’s teat.
    All of a sudden, loneliness closed in around her. Victoria rarely felt sorry for herself, but now Declan’s taciturn refusal to interrupt his work and keep her company acted like a wrench that lifted the lid from the pain of having grown up without a mother.
    Oh, Declan Beaulieu, speak to me , she thought. Look at me.
    She admitted now that ever since they sat on their horses beneath the hanging oak and took their wedding wows, the girlish dreams she’d made up about the fair haired outlaw had grown into something more, something ill defined, and yet real and powerful.
    “I…I assumed,” she muttered. “Since we’re married…”
    Her voice died away. What had she assumed? She hadn’t really thought it through at all. She had merely acted upon instinct. And instinct drew her to Declan Beaulieu.
    Her eyes followed him as he finished with Buttercup’s stall and came