Page 12 of The Autumn Wife (King’s Girls #3)
“It looks fine.” Theo jerked his chin toward the resin-scented woods behind her, with its carpet of russet needles. “It’ll wander off to safety once we get out of its way.”
“Yes,” she said, coming to her senses and marshaling up what courage she could. “We should get back to where we belong, too. Monsieur Martin, would you mind carrying the canoe back to its berth?”
“Mother.” A black look passed over Etienne’s face. “I can carry the canoe—”
“I know you can. You’re strong enough. But I want…
” Theo’s hands occupied, and you far away, when I ask him difficult questions.
“I want you to fetch the basket and oars and take them back. I’ll carry this blanket.
” She ran her wretchedly shaking hand over the wool.
“That way we won’t have to make several trips. ”
Despite the practical answer, Etienne narrowed his black eyes as he looked from her to Theo and then back to what she supposed was her pale, pinched face.
“Go on ahead, now.” She lifted her skirts and edged around the young porcupine, still occupied with cleaning its bristles. “I have business with Monsieur Martin, tsítsho.”
Etienne’s expression flickered. Since his childhood, they’d used that Mohawk word for fox as a signal that all was well.
They had another word to indicate danger, but she’d rarely used it.
If she had been in danger from his father in those days, the last thing she wanted was little Etienne to stick around to witness it.
Casting a last, sullen look at Theo, Etienne walked down the bluff, grabbed their food basket, and shouldered the oars. Theo followed a few steps behind to fetch the vessel itself, saying something jocular to her son as he passed. A query that Etienne ignored, stewing.
She should scold Etienne for rudeness, but suspicion of big, strong men was tough to shake for both of them.
Instead, she watched Theo haul the canoe up and over his head as if the vessel were constructed of feathers.
His bare thighs flexed as he climbed the steep slope, his hands on the gunwales, arms bulging.
The soaked linen shirt still clung to the parts of him she had no business noticing—though she did notice his high, flexing buttocks as he marched by her.
She followed, heart halfway up her throat, body tingling in unnerving ways, and her mind smoking from the burning effort to make sense of a confounding situation.
As she lagged behind, he said, “You’ve been avoiding me, Cecile. Me and the children. They’ve been asking why you haven’t come for lessons.”
Flinching, she tightened her grip on her skirts and raised the hem above her boots.
“Mother Superior is due back any day now.” A lame excuse—the Reverend Mother had warned Cecile that her stay in Quebec would likely be extended—but how quickly came the lie!
“I haven’t finished the accounts, so I couldn’t spare the time to go out to the stable. ”
“The kids miss you.”
Guilt shot a dart through her. She would make it up to them, whenever she figured out how dangerous this man was.
“Cecile.” He slowed his pace so she would reach his side, shifting the weight of the vessel hanging above him. “Don’t let me—and whatever you think of me—prevent you from teaching those kids.”
“Frankly,” she said, hurling herself into the breach, “I don’t know what to think of you.”
“On the contrary.” His voice dropped. “You think the worst of me.”
She wanted to say Of course I do, but it wasn’t completely true. She had witnessed him being kind, generous, and charitable—to a point she couldn’t ignore. But she’d also witnessed his violence.
“Your crime…” she forced words past a barrier of her own making. “Was it a bloody one?”
He paused for only a moment.
“Yes.”
She stumbled over nothing as a burst of white light emptied her mind.
Theo shifted the weight of the canoe to fling out a hand toward her, but she ducked it.
She found her feet and struggled to get herself steady, realizing as she fell into pace that she didn’t want to hear any more about the nature of his crime.
She’d heard all that she needed to know.
Girding her courage, she flung an accusation instead. “That’s why you kept your incarceration a secret.”
“I didn’t keep it a secret.” He gripped the canoe with both hands again. “The man who owns my papers should have told Mother Superior in the letter he sent her, but apparently, he didn’t. Knowing the man, I’d say he didn’t want to risk the outrageous wages she’d agreed to pay for my labor.”
“Still,” she said, bile rising at her daring, “you didn’t tell me.”
“Because you flinch in my presence—and have done so long before you learned I’m a convict.”
Heat swept up her cheeks. Of course she’d flinched the first time she’d met him.
She shouldn’t be ashamed, but she had struggled long and hard to contain the uncontrollable terror—had even taken pride in small successes.
She couldn’t let her husband win—she’d long vowed not to spend the rest of her life shrinking like a coward in the presence of the rougher sex.
And yet Theo had noticed not just the flinch, but he’d figured out why she flinched.
What else had he noticed about her?
Don’t think about that now. “You didn’t tell me about your prison sentence,” she blurted, “but apparently you had no qualms telling Jules.”
“I didn’t tell Jules. I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Then how did he know?”
“People talk.” The canoe he carried wobbled as he stepped over a divot in the grass. “The man who holds my contract spends a lot of time in taverns. As does Jules.”
She looked down at her boots, wondering if Jules had known her husband, who’d also spent lots of time in taverns.
“Cecile,” he said, in that intimate way, “has there been any trouble on the building site since I’ve taken over?”
“Yes. You nearly broke Jules’s jaw.”
“I did that to protect you.” He dipped his head so he could meet her eyes from below the canoe. “You must know that.”
Her heart had risen so high in her chest that it felt like it clogged her throat.
She had no words, anyway. She wasn’t so foolish as to ignore that he’d jumped down from the scaffold for the sole purpose of protecting her.
But she didn’t know how to feel about it.
Or maybe she just didn’t want to feel the gratitude, the surge of warmth…
or the sense of being cocooned in safety by a man who wasn’t the least bit safe.
She stayed mum and fixed her attention on Etienne’s stiff back as he strode ahead of them.
She noticed how the grass in this part of the field had grown wild.
The fruited heads brushed against her skirts and left little seeds and burrs behind.
Every step launched another grasshopper in a flying arc.
Crickets sang in the weeds, and barn swallows swooped and looped in the sky above them.
Three-quarters of the way across the field, he broke the silence. “Do you have a problem with my work? Or with how the building is going up?”
“Of course not.” It would have been so much easier if Theo had been a lazy worker.
But Theo guided the men without arguing about their mistakes.
The laborers ran to consult him about everything.
He always had a trowel in his hand, spent most of his time on the scaffold, didn’t toss orders for the sake of shouting, didn’t swagger and boast, but kept his head down.
He was a man roped with muscles, a creature capable of building and destroying in equal measure, who channeled his strength into something else, something solid and lasting.
“I’m quite sure Sister Martha will be thrilled at the progress when she returns. ”
“Then it’s just me—the man—that you’re afraid of. Is that why you’re wearing the gray habit of the congregation today?”
She glanced down at her stiff skirts. There were loads of reasons why she’d decided to shed her yellow dress.
A woman who intended to become a nun might as well get used to the dull, coarse clothing she’d wear for the rest of her life.
A woman in a habit received fewer stares and propositions when walking about the market square, visiting the Lachine Rapids, or wandering through a building site.
All good reasons, but not the main one. She wore this habit to remind herself how she’d vowed to avoid the company of strong, dangerous, unsettling men altogether—whether the Reverend Mother consecrated her into the congregation or not.
“It shouldn’t matter to you,” she said, kicking sheafs of upright grasses, “what I wear.”
“You think it’ll keep men at bay.” His voice tightened like the knuckles of his hands. “But a man with truly bad intentions won’t let a nun’s habit stop him from taking what he wants. Is that what you think I’ll do?”
“I told you.” Nausea rose along with a pounding in her temples. “I don’t know what to think of you.”
Her foot scuffed against hardened ground.
They’d reached the area beyond the grassy field where the canoes were stored under a brace of pines by the convent schoolhouse.
Etienne waited there, leaning against the schoolhouse wall, his fierce gaze fixed on them.
Theo shot a few steps ahead of her, overturned the canoe and laid it on the hard-packed ground next to the others.
When Theo straightened, her heart did a double thump as his pale gaze of green pinned her.
“You’re not going to ask anything else about my crime?”
She threw a palm up. “It’s not my business—”
“You mean it doesn’t matter.” His eyes narrowed as he took a step toward her. “A dirty criminal is just a dirty criminal, right?”
The fierce, angry words hit her like a whip snap. He’d read her wrong. But she couldn’t calm his affront without revealing some secrets of her own.
“Hey.” Etienne strode in front of her, all puffed up. “No one talks to my mother like that.”
“Etienne.” She placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Mother, he’s been bothering you since—”
“Enough.” She whispered the word. Etienne went silent. Theo, too. “Sir.” She turned her attention back to Theo and forced her voice even. “I thank you for bringing the canoe back for us. I will see you tomorrow morning for our usual discussion.”
She headed toward the convent schoolhouse, nudging Etienne to come along with her, only to stop as a black ball of spines waddled across their path.
The porcupine continued on its way, chaff and seeds caught amid its quills from the long trip across the field.
It stopped, snuffling, by Theo’s bare feet.
Theo crouched down and swept it up into the crook of his arm again, where it burrowed.
By all that was holy.
Even wild things trusted this man.