wishes.” His head dipped in a small bow and he stepped back from the stairs. “I will be here in the morning...and for as long as Manning wishes my help. Good evening.” He tugged his hat on his head and strode down the hall toward the dining room. The back door opened and closed.
How dare he make her the guilty one! She caught up her hems and ran to her bedroom, crossed to the window and watched Cole Aylward striding down the garden path toward the woods, the rising moon casting silver epaulets on his broad shoulders. Memories drove her from the window before he neared the trees and the entrance to the wooded path that led to her grandfather’s sawmill.
* * *
Cole glanced right and left, aware as never before of how the trees encroached upon the path, of their thick trunks and looming branches. He slowed his steps at the curve where it had happened, took a breath against the sudden clench of his stomach. He’d walked this path at least a hundred times, but now he’d seen her. That made it all different.
The sylvan depths drew his gaze, halted his steps. How easy it would be to steal silent and unseen from trunk to trunk in order to overtake someone walking along the path. Is that how Payne had done it?
He raised his arm and scrubbed his hand across his eyes, trying to rid himself of the image of the fear on Sadie’s face as she’d stood on the stairs looking down at him. Payne had caused that fear. Payne, who had been so pleasant and funny and kind. What had changed in his brother that he could do that to someone?
His gut churned. Bile surged into his throat. He fisted his hands and continued down the path toward Manning Townsend’s sawmill. If only he’d been here when the attack took place. Perhaps he could have prevented it somehow or at least found out what had caused Payne to do such a thing. He knew his brother’s habits, had hunted and fished with him. He could have tracked him down, talked him into staying and facing justice, helped him atone somehow. But Payne had already disappeared when he’d come to Pinewood to tell him their mother and father were dead, and Payne’s trail had been obliterated by the angry men of Pinewood who were searching the hills for him.
Cole climbed the steps to the sawmill deck and stepped under the shingled roof, walked by the silent saws and entered the attached office. He stepped behind the partition he’d built, jammed his hat onto one of the pegs he’d driven into the wall, shucked his shirt and hung it on another peg, then sat on the wood edge of his cot and tugged off his boots.
The horror and disgust, regret and guilt that had weighed so heavily on him when he’d learned of Payne’s actions had returned full force when he’d looked into Sadie Spencer’s eyes and now sat like a rock in his stomach—though why it should he didn’t understand. He’d stayed in Pinewood and tried to find Payne to bring him back to face justice in spite of the disgust and distrust of the irate villagers who’d watched his every move with suspicion. He’d trudged countless times to the outcropping of rock where the men said they’d lost all trace of Payne’s trail to see if he could find something they had missed. It wasn’t for lack of trying that he’d failed. He had no reason to feel guilty. But the way she’d looked at him...
He yanked off his socks, flung them over his boot tops, rose and snatched the soap and a towel from the make-do washstand. The rough puncheons scraped against his bare feet as he marched to the end of the sawmill deck, dropped the towel and dove into the deep pool formed by the stone dam. The shock of the icy mountain-stream water drove all thought from his mind.
He soaped his hair, threw the soap up onto the deck, did a surface dive and swam upstream underwater to let the current from the overflow carry the soap film away.
If only it could carry away his troubled thoughts that had resurfaced. He kicked his trouser-clad legs, dug hard and deep with his arms and circled around the pond until his shoulders and arms screamed for mercy and his lungs burned for air. What sort of depravity coursed through his brother’s veins that he could look at a woman as delicately beautiful, as quiet and refined as Sadie Spencer and then—
He arched and dove deep, swam to the center of the gently rippling water, flipped over onto his back and stared up at the stars, bright against the dark sky. Peaceful evening sounds filled the night as the water lapped over his chest, but the fear he’d been carrying around for four years wouldn’t leave. Wash me clean, Lord, wash me clean. Don’t let that violence and depravity be in me.
Bats darted and swooped overhead in erratic patterns as they snatched insects from the air. An owl hooted. Another answered. Something rustled through the brush and grasses on the bank. Something big.
A she-bear and her two cubs ambled toward the water. Last year’s cubs, by the size of them. He moved his arms beneath the surface to stay afloat but stationary without causing a ripple and hoped the cubs weren’t in the mood for a swim. Mama Bear reared up on her hind legs and stared out over the pond, snuffled.
His moonlight swim was over.
He drew in air, sank out of sight beneath the water and stroked hard for the deck ladder, leaving the bears behind. If only he could outdistance the fears that plagued him.
* * *
She strolled along the path, humming softly, the basket of berries she’d picked swinging at her side.
Payne Aylward stepped out of the woods onto the path ahead, his tall, broad-shouldered frame large in the sunlight filtering through the leafy treetops. The glitter in his dark gray eyes frightened her. She stopped.
He smiled, his teeth white against his black beard. “I been watching you, Sadie.” He stepped forward, reached for her.
* * *
Sadie bolted upright gasping for air, her heart pounding, her body quaking. Moonlight flowed in the windows, bathed the objects in the dark room in silvery radiance. She stared at the blanket chest at the foot of her bed, the dark blue-and-white cross and crown woven coverlet that had warmed her every night of her childhood. “It’s all right. It was the nightmare. You’re safe.”
Her whisper trembled on the warm night air. She clutched the fallen sheet, slipped beneath it and curled into a tight ball. She wanted so desperately to believe that was true, but how could she? Cole Aylward was here. Cole Aylward. Payne’s brother.
A shudder shook her. She tugged the sheet tighter around her neck and roamed her gaze over the familiar objects in the room to hold at bay the face that hovered at the edge of her fear.
Chapter Three
Sadie left her grandmother in the kitchen discussing the day’s meals with Gertrude, carried the stack of washed dishes to the butler’s pantry, put them in their proper place on the shelves and continued through to the dining room. Her stomach was settling—not that she’d been able to do more than choke down a few bites of breakfast. But the knots from having Cole Aylward seated at the table were slowly coming undone.
To come downstairs after the sleepless hours haunted by the nightmare made more powerful by her return and to see him there...she paused and pressed her hands to her stomach as the knots twisted tight again. Cole’s likeness to his brother unnerved her. And try as she would, she could not ignore his presence—the man dominated a room. She would be thankful when he was gone, though it was clear after last night that he would defy her request. It had to be her grandfather who told him to leave. She would have to find a reason.
She lifted the lamps off the mantel in the dining room and carried them back to the table beneath the window in the butler’s pantry. She’d learned long ago that plunging into work the morning after
