One Wish

2nd

she felt a pang at that, though she couldn't have identified the emotion behind it. The name was accursed, after all luke's father had gone to prison and later hanged for the murder of his wife, and his elder brother, Vance, was wanted for a whole string of vicious robberies Luke himself had left Jubilee nobody seemed to know where he'd gone after old trigg Shardlow's trial, when he was around fifteen.
"I-I'd better be getting on home," she said
"I'm not about to hurt you," Shardlow said, with a note of mingled sorrow and disgust in his voice. Then, without another word, he turned his back on her and walked away, toward the campire. The gelding was snuffing at the fish cooling in the frying pan, and Luke growled a command that sent the animal skittering backward.
She didn't moved "I never thanked you properly for saving my life," she said clearly.
Luke turned, looked at her over one shoulder.
The grin, though tenuous, was back, and he inclined his head slightly in acknowledgment of her words.
"Did you get a beating?" she asked, wodering even as she spoke why she was lingering. It was like passing a finger back and forth through a candle flame, daring the fire to burn her, talking to Shardlow. suppose he was an outlaw, like his brother?
"Pardon?" he picked up the frying pan, assessed tha contents for horse damage, and apparently found nothing amiss.
"That day when I fell into the stream. You said your pa was going to whip you for ruining your clothes."
"You didn't fall," Luke pointed out, the affable defender of truth. "You wanded in, after a frog prince or something." he paused and shook his head at the memory, then answered her question. "No, i came out of that one with my hide intact. The old man was off someplace, I guess. Otherwise occupied." He glanced toward the brilliant, fading sun. "You'd better get on home, Miss Barnham. They'll be looking for you."
She nodded, turned and started up the hillside.

Sitting cross-legged on the ground, a few feet from the fire, Luke ate his supper and watched the dying sunlight flicker on the surface of the stream. Although he had his demons, like everybody else, he was used to solitude and at peace with his past, turbulent though it was. His reflective mood had, in fact, nothing to do with thw frustration and shame of being old trigg's younger son; no, he was thinking about charity. How much she had and hadn't changed in fifteen years. The spark in her slate gray eyes that said she was on comfortable terms with her own spirit and the world around her. The proud, graceful way she carried herself. She was tall and, Though slender, womanly in a way it would behoove him not to consider too carefully or too long. Feminine she most definitely was, but there was nothing fragile about her.
He chuckled, remembering her bristly discomfiture at being stuck up in the braches of that venerable oak. He'd noticed her right away, of course, for he'd taken refuge in the same place many times, as a boy. And in the interim, hard experience had taught him not to make camp underneath any tree without making damn sure he knew what was up there. Once, he'd been jumped by a cougar, and lost a good horse and strip of hide off his back in the ensuing dispute. On another oocasion, a man he was tracking had laid for him in the same way, and he'd almost lost that scrap, too. He had scars to show for the lesson.
His meal finished, he ferreted a bar of soap wrapped in cheesecloth from his saddlebags and headed toward the creek. Reaching the water's edge, he unstrapped his gunbelt and laid it carefully on a flat rock he'd long since chosen for the purpose. Then he kicked off boots and tested his fast moving bath with a toe.
He drew in a harhs breath at the chill, but he'd been on the trail for the better part of a week, and figured he probably smelled like his horse, which left him with little choice in the matter. The home place, though private, was nothing but a pile of rotted timber and cobwebs now he'd already been bye there. He could have gone to Jubilee's one rooming house for a decent bed and a hot bath, he supposed, but the return of Luke Shardlow, after all these years, was bound to draw attention. He wanted time to get his bearings before he made his presence known.
So he got out of his clothes and flung himself, Blue-lipped and cursing, into the biting cold of the water. It was, given some of the thoughts he'd been having about Charity Barnham, a good decision, however painful. After a lot of splashing and sputtering, and another fit of swearing, he came out again, clean. Or at least reasonably so.
He kept a spare set of clothes rolled up in his blanket, and hastened into them, dancing there in the sweet summer grass like a one legged man on a bed if hot coals. It was a good quarter of an hour before his teeth quit chattering, but the bath had left him feeling a certain exhilaration. If he'd been anywhere else, he'd have been ready for a night of drinking, Card-playing and woman chasing, but this was Jubilee. Here, more than any other place on earth, he needed to keep his wits sharp to watch and listen and, at the same time, give the impression that he was in town purely to raise hell.
That last part Shouldn't be so difficult, given the family reputation.
After donning the gunbelt again, he whistled a summons to the pinto, called Shiloh, and staked the animal on lead long enough to reach the stream bank. He started to make his bed in the grass, as twilight fell, then changed his mind and climbed up into the tree.
The platform of old weatherd boards was much as he remembered it, except that Charity's scent lingered there, with the green smell of the leaves and the odors of pitch and dust. She'd apparently swept with a branch or something, for the place had a tidy look about it. In her haste to depart, She'd left behind the stub of a candle and a battered book Grimm's Fairy Tales.
     He smiled, thumbing the pages. Miss Barnham,it would seem, was still looking for a magic frog. Fancy that, after all these years.
        He spread the bed roll carefully, stretched out with a sigh, and slept.

    Charity had been right in thinking she would be late for supper the dishes had been cleared and her father and Mrs. Quincy Blaise the attractive widow he planned to marry come the fall, were lingering over coffee. Aaron, Blaise's ten years old son, had already been sent to bed..
      Thankfully, neither Jonah nor his intrended wife remarked upon Charity's late arrival and hasty slapdash ablutions; they were too caught up in each other for that. Jonah stood and drew back his daugther's chair, and Mrs. Quincy favored her with a bright smile. Peony, who had already made her opinions of folks who couldn't be bothered to get themselves home ti supper know in rhe kitchen, when Charity arrived, carried in a plater of Lukewarm food, still grumbling, and plunked it down in front of her.
      Never graced with a delicate appetite, Charity began to eat almost before the aging cook had drawn her hand back. "Whi owns the old Shardlow place?" she asked.
        Jonah's expression turned solemn. He was a powerfully built man, in his mid-fifties, with brown eyes and plenty of gray in his dark, still-thick hair, and Blaise was envied, far and wide, for his devoted affections. "Still in the family, I suppose," he answered. "If there's any family left, that is."
   "Oh, there is," she replied, between bites." Luke is back i saw him tonight."
    Jonah had been raising a china coffee cup to his mouth, but at his daughter's words he set it down again slowly and with a care vastly out of proportion to the demands of the task. "Where?" he asked simply.
      "By the creek." She reached for biscuit, sighed because it was cold, and buttered it lavishly. "He's camped there."
        Blaise, pleasantly solid, reasonably intelligent, despite her sometimes flighty ways, and posssessed of a head of gleaming chesnut hair, always neatly and rather elegantly coiled at her nape, paled slightly.
"Charity, you didn't---?"
"Speak to him?" she finished cheerfully. "Well, I didn't intend to, but as it happened, I wasn't given an alternative.I was up in that oak tree, and he rode in started making camp beneath ir. I couldn't very well stay there all night."
Though of course she might have done exactly that, If Luke hadn't guessed that she was there. She saw no need to go into excessive detail, however.