Sara Mitchell - Legacy of Secrets

Neala cleared her throat. “Obviously she expects us to come to some sort of accord.” Her fingers fluttered at her waist before she twined them together. “Mr. Faulkner, it would help tremendously if you believed me, about someone shooting at me, I mean.”

“Why should I, Miss Shaw?”

“Because I’m not a liar!”

“Well, now how would I be knowing that, me darlin’?” he retorted in a perfect mimicry of the Academy’s Irish stableman. Her obvious frustration pleased Gray more than was polite, but for some reason he couldn’t seem to quit needling her. He folded his arms, rocking a little on his feet while he watched a barrelful of expressions race across her face. “This is only the second time we’ve met, after all. Why, for all I know your hunter might be lying in wait in my bedroom.”

“Well, if he was, at least he’d be close enough to do the job! Oh!” The brown eyes rounded in dismay as her palm flew to belatedly cover her mouth. “I can’t believe I said that! I can’t believe…I don’t know what came over me. I don’t talk like that, I don’t even think like that.”

Abruptly she turned her back to him.

Deprived of the entertainment of watching her face, Gray’s attention zeroed in on a long strand of curling hair that had escaped the pins to dangle down the back of her neck. She’d managed to stuff the rest of the mass into a twist of some sort; he thought it made her look dowdy, incredibly old-fashioned. Yet his fingers itched to twine that strand around his hand. He wanted to know if her hair felt as soft as it looked, if the curls were as untamable as the fire sparking in her eyes a moment ago.

And he hated the longing almost as much as he hated himself.

“Apparently you’ve not heard about my reputation,” he observed coolly. “Even if you send a man with a gun after me, Miss Shaw, I’m not the one who’ll end up in a pine box.” When she turned back around, something in the dark brown eyes goaded him to add, “Well? Why don’t you go ahead and say what you’re thinking—that your headmistress’s nephew is a dangerous fellow, and today he tried to shoot you out in the woods?”

She blinked, and the expression disappeared. “Mr. Faulkner,” she began, then hesitated. Just as Gray opened his mouth to deliver another jab, she drew herself up and leveled a look upon him worthy of Aunt Bella. “Mr. Faulkner, do you enjoy intimidating people and insulting women innocent of any wrongdoing, or do you merely possess a misogynistic streak?”

“I only enjoy intimidating devious women,” he whipped back without missing a beat. “Insults I save for conniving liars. As for an innocent woman, I can’t remember the last time I encountered one, age notwithstanding. So you might say my…ah…misogynistic streak developed over years of exposure to various members of your misnamed ‘gentler’ sex.”

This time she stepped back as though he’d just sprayed her with venom, but at least she didn’t turn her back on him. “There’s no use trying to talk with you, is there?” she whispered, half to herself. “You’re just like Adrian…”

Adrian? “Who’s Adri—”

“Tell your aunt I wished her a good night,” Miss Shaw chirped in a voice women used with toddlers and small children. Without meeting his eyes she scuttled across the room to the door, where she delivered her parting shot. “I’d wish you the same, except I think you’ve forgotten how to have a good anything, which I find terribly sad.”

The door opened and closed with a firm click. Gray stood, her words ringing in his ears. The desolation he’d been fighting for months pressed back around him, squeezing all the air out of his lungs.

Neala Shaw…

He closed his eyes, half lifted his hand as though reaching out for that dangling strand of hair. Eventually, moving as if he were fighting his way through thorns, he returned to the fireplace and sat down in the chair where Aunt Bella had been sitting. The faint scent of his aunt’s toilet water wafted through his nostrils.

With a shuddering sigh Gray leaned his head back and tried not to think of anything at all.

After completing morning chores, Neala grabbed her old corduroy jacket, a small writing tablet and a freshly sharpened pencil. As an afterthought, on the way out she retrieved a small magnifying glass from her desk. It was Saturday, and a brisk southwest wind carried the scent of rain and lilac through the windows. On her way downstairs, she debated whether or not to fetch an umbrella, decided the contraption would only be in the way and darted toward the back entrance off the kitchen, hoping nobody would stop her for a chat.

Grayson Faulkner’s scowling image intruded into her mind as she scurried past the entrance to one of the school’s informal parlors. What an infuriating man! Rude, unpleasant—a bully, he was. And he had hurt her feelings, which infuriated her even more. How could a saintly soul like Miss Isabella be kin to Mr. Faulkner?

Well, by the end of the day the rude bully of a man would be the recipient of a much-needed lesson. When Neala returned from her outing, she planned to be armed with enough proof of the hunter’s presence in the woods yesterday to satisfy an entire room of Pinkerton detectives, much less Miss Isabella’s nephew, who thought entirely too much of himself.

A small voice tweaked her conscience. All right, Neala conceded the point. Grayson Faulkner might be rude, unpleasant and arrogant, but last night, in the parlor, she’d sensed an undercurrent of emotion that, for the flicker of an eyelash, had almost prompted her to…feel sorry for him?

“Neala!” Judith Smithfield, her arms full of quilt scraps, interrupted the discomforting revelation. “We’re quilting in an hour. Join us this time?”

“Not today, Judith.” She waved an arm and grinned. “I’m off on a mission. I’ll try to join the fun next Saturday.” She ducked into the kitchen, almost tripping over a half-full pail of sudsy water.

“Oops, sorry, Neala!” Deborah McGarey sang out from beneath the huge island in the center of the kitchen. “I’m making pound cakes, but decided to break the eggs on the floor instead of the bowl.”

Both of them laughed as Neala carried the pail closer. “Need help?” she asked reluctantly, relieved and guilty when Deborah shooed her on with a wry remark that only the guilty party should clean up smashed eggs.

Now there was the manner in which congenial people engaged in conversation, Neala thought, tossing her head. Stride determined, she crossed the grounds toward the forest. Civil people did not assume the worst about perfect strangers. Civil people did not act as though you had just perpetrated a crime of Machiavellian proportions, or accuse you of lying. And certainly a man who rushed to the rescue of a damsel in distress did not react like a churl.

The damp breeze swooped down, tugging several pins from Neala’s hastily bundled hair. When a handful of curls blew over her eyes, she glared upward, then stopped long enough to untie a large kerchief from around her neck. In a few ruthless movements she covered her hair and retied the ends beneath her chin. She looked like a gypsy washerwoman—but since there was nobody to see her but birds and other woodland critters, what did it matter how she looked?

What mattered was unearthing evidence of the wayward hunter.

Over an hour later, Neala was ready to concede that the general populace afforded scant appreciation to detectives and officers of the law. Not only could she not find the exact spot where she’d been when the first shot rang out, she could not find the tree she’d ducked behind, from which she’d hoped to extract a bullet, or at least mark as evidence of being struck by a bullet. Thoroughly out of sorts, she finally collapsed beneath a stumpy pine tree, yanked off the kerchief, and rubbed her face with it. The wind had blown the clouds away, leaving behind sunshine and a watery, pale blue sky. Much preferable to a rainstorm when one was playing detective.