The Scent of Jasmine (Edilean 4)

Cay wanted to say more, even wanted to argue with him. She wasn’t especially sleepy, and the night around them, with the rain coming down, made her nervous. “And you loved your wife very much?” she asked softly.

“With all my heart and soul.”

“And you knew that in just three weeks?”

“I knew it in the first moment. Her eyes met mine and I was hers.”

“But you knew nothing about her, not her personality, not what she liked or disliked, what her hopes for the future were, nothing?”

“And I guess you know all about the men you’re considering marrying.”

“Of course.”

“Make lists, do you?”

Cay thought of her notebook full of her comparisons of the men she might possibly marry. She had compared ages, houses, backgrounds, whatever she could think of. She knew that marriage was a serious matter and she didn’t want to make a mistake. She wanted a marriage as good as her parents’. “Of course I didn’t do any such thing,” she lied. “I’m going to let my heart make the decision for me. Isn’t that what a bride should do?”

“If you’re asking me what I think you should do, I think you should lie down and go to sleep. We’ll leave early tomorrow, before light, so you need to get as much rest as you can.”

Reluctantly, Cay lay down on the hard ground and tried to still her mind, but it kept working. “Have you finished making a plan for me yet?”

“Aye, I have, but I’m not going to tell you what’s in my mind, so there’s no use in nagging me now.”

“I don’t nag,” she said.

“You could give lessons in it. You could open a school that teaches how to nag a man until he’s crying for relief from your tongue.”

She truly hated the way he treated her like a child! “Micah Bassett didn’t want relief from my tongue. In fact—”

“Lass, you’re alone in the forest with a convicted murderer. Tell me you’re not going to talk to him about what a girl can do with her tongue.”

“I, uh . . .” Cay couldn’t think of what to say to explain herself, but then there was no explanation she could give. Instead, she rolled to one side of the cloak and, after a moment’s hesitation, she threw the other side over him. He grunted his thanks, and when he moved closer to her, she could feel his body heat on her back. Maybe it was the comfort or maybe it was the soft sounds of the rain, but she closed her eyes and went to sleep.

Seven

“I am not going to dress as a boy,” Cay said. “Absolutely, positively no! That’s the end of it, and I won’t discuss it anymore.”

“Good!” Alex said. “Then I won’t have to hear more of your complaining. When you get dressed—as a boy—you can keep your mouth shut—unless you meet some man you think you should marry, then you can do other things with your mouth.”

“You are disgusting. You’re worse than any of my brothers.”

“Does that include Adam?” he asked. “Or is he too perfect for unchurchlike thoughts?”

She was pulling the cinch on her mare and she looked under the horse’s neck to glare at him. He didn’t look at her, but she could see that he was pleased with himself, thinking that he’d bested her in a duel of words. “My brother Adam doesn’t have any thoughts that he couldn’t repeat in front of a congregation in church. Are you ready to go or do you need help?”

“I don’t need any help, and your brother sounds like a bore,” Alex said as he walked around her horse, bent, grabbed Cay by the calf, and nearly threw her up into the saddle.

Only years of experience and very strong thigh muscles kept her from going over the other side. But she refused to give him the satisfaction of complaining.

“Look at that, you’re half male already.” He looked up at her. “The truth is, lass, if you didn’t have all that hair, you could pass for a boy.”

In that one sentence, he said everything she’d ever feared. Her mother was so beautiful that men had written poems about her. One young man composed a song about her beauty. But Cay, the only daughter, didn’t look so much like her mother as she did her father and brothers. In fact, when they were growing up, what with only ten months difference in the ages between her and Tally, sometimes people thought they were twins—male twins.

Alex, standing by her feet and looking up at her, saw that he’d hurt her feelings and she was trying hard not to cry. He hadn’t meant to. The truth was that after a good meal and a full night’s sleep, he’d awoken this morning to see a very pretty girl in a beautiful gown reaching up over her head to try to get a bag down from a tree. At first, he hadn’t remembered where he was and all that had happened in the past few months. He was in the moment and he thought he’d never seen a prettier sight in his life—and therein lay the problem.

The idea of dressing her in boy’s clothes had come to him when he’d told old man Yates that he was traveling with his young brother, but Alex hadn’t told her his thoughts for fear that she’d react just as she had. What was it with women that they thought they didn’t exist if they weren’t wearing ribbons every minute of the day?

“It’s just for a while,” he said gently as he looked up at her. “There’s a town near here and today’s Sunday. I figure we can get inside a store while it’s closed and get what we need. And leave money to pay for it all,” he added because he already knew her well enough to know that she’d want to do that. “After you’re kitted out, we can go down to Florida. I’ll leave you with T.C.’s friends and you can wait there until I’ve been gone a couple of weeks, then you can go home. People won’t notice a boy traveling alone, but a pretty girl by herself will cause nothing but problems.”