Blue Moon (2 page)

Ignoring his question, she asked one of her own. “How did I get here?” Her tone was wary. Her gaze kept flitting over to the door and then back to him.

“I heard a scream. Went out and found you in the swamp. Brought you here—”

“The wildcat?”

“Wasn’t very hungry.” Noah tried to put her at ease, then shrugged and stared down at his moccasins. Could she tell how nervous he was? Could she see his awkwardness, know how strange it was for him to be alone with a woman? He had no idea what to say or do. When he looked over at her again, she was staring at the scarred side of his face.

“How long have I been asleep?” Her voice was so low that he had to strain to hear her. She looked as if she expected him to leap on her and attack her at any moment, as if he might be coveting her scalp.

“You slept around two hours. You must have hit your head very hard.”

She reached up and felt the bump. “I guess I did.”

He decided not to get any closer, not with her acting as if she were going to come out of her skin. He backed up, pulled a stool out from under the table, and sat down.

“You going to tell me your name?” he asked.

The girl hesitated, glanced toward the door, then looked back at him. “I’m Olivia Bond. Where am I?”

“Heron Pond.”

Her attention shifted to the door once again as recollection dawned. “The swamp,” she whispered. Her eyes widened as if she expected a bobcat or a cottonmouth to come slithering in.

“You’re fairly safe here. I built this cabin over the water.”

“
Fairly
?” She looked as if she were going to try to stand up again. “Did you say—”

“Built in a cypress tree. About fifteen feet above the water.”

“How do I get down?”

“There are wooden planks nailed to the trunk.”

“Am I anywhere near Illinois?”

“You’re in it.”

She appeared a bit relieved.

“Are you hungry? I figure anybody with as little meat on her bones as you ought to be hungry.”

What happened next surprised the hell out of him. It was a little thing, one that another man might not have even noticed, but he had lived alone so long that he was used to concentrating on the very smallest of details: the way an iridescent dragonfly looked with its wings backlit by the sun, the sound of cypress needles whispering on the wind.

Someone else might have missed the smile that hovered at the corner of her lips when he had said she had little meat on her bones, but he did not. How could he, when that slight, almost-smile had him holding his breath?

“I’ve got some jerked venison and some potatoes around here someplace.” He started to smile back, until he felt the pull of the scar at the left corner of his mouth and stopped. He stood up, turned his back on the girl, and headed for the long wide plank tacked to the far wall where he stored his larder.

He kept his back to her while he found what he was looking for, dug some strips of dried meat from a hide bag, unwrapped a checkered rag with four potatoes inside, and set one on the plank where he did all his stand-up work. Then he took a trencher and a wooden mug off a smaller shelf high on the wall and turned them over to knock any unwanted creatures out. He was headed for the door, intent on filling the cookpot with water from a small barrel he kept out on the porch, when the sound of her voice stopped him cold.

“Perhaps an eye patch,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I’m sorry. I was thinking out loud.”

She looked so terrified he wanted to put her at ease.

“It’s all right. What were you thinking?”

Instead of looking at him when she spoke, she looked down at her hands. “I was just thinking …”

Noah had to strain to hear her.

“With some kind of an eye patch, you wouldn’t look half bad.”

His feet rooted themselves to the threshold. He stared at her for a heartbeat before he closed his good eye and shook his head. He had no idea what in the hell he looked like anymore. He had no reason to care.

He turned his back on her and stepped out onto the porch, welcoming the darkness.

A little while later, Olivia lay in the stranger’s bed, trying to make herself small, trying to fade into the bedclothes so that he might not notice her, but as they were the only two people in the treehouse, that was impossible. Noah LeCroix was careful to keep his face turned away from her as she watched him move back and forth. He stoked the fire in the fireplace and then buried a potato in the hot ash. When she thought of how he must have carried each stone up the tree in order to build the small fireplace, she wondered at his accomplishment and marveled at the craftsmanship.

Since he seemed to have dismissed her, she studied him freely, thankful that he had not asked any prying questions. She would not relish volunteering anything about herself, so she asked him nothing about himself, either.

Now that she had recovered from the shock of seeing the deep indentation and puckered skin of his eye socket, the ragged line that ran from below his eye to the corner of his mouth, she had to admit he was not a bad-looking man. In fact, she could see he had been extremely handsome. His looks were dark, exotic. His build rugged.

He had kept his distance, had not forced his company or any questions on her, had not pried. For that she was grateful. Still, she knew enough of men from raw firsthand experience to know not to let down her guard. Not even for an instant. She would remain wary, ready to flee if necessary, no matter how badly her head throbbed or her wrist ached. She would never let a soft-spoken, well-mannered man fool her again.

Now as she waited while her host prodded the coals in the fireplace and then poured her a cup of steaming coffee, she tried to remain alert. Her condition prevented her from making any kind of swift exit. Not that she would relish going back out into the swamp anyway. For now, though she found herself alone with a complete stranger, she was happy to be out of the dark, high and dry above the watery wilderness.

When the potato was cooked, he left her alone while she ate it, sipped strong coffee, and nibbled on jerked venison. She decided he must have been watching her from the porch while she ate, for as soon as she took the last bite, he immediately appeared, collected the trencher and mug, and set them on the crude sideboard. Then he turned to her again, took a deep breath and let out a long sigh.

“Just out of curiosity, what were you doing out there in the swamp alone?”

“I’d rather not talk about it right now.”

Half expecting him to question her further, Olivia waited, but all Noah LeCroix did was nod. He appeared terribly uneasy as his gaze scanned the small interior of his tidy cabin. The pained expression on his face gave her pause. Because he was unlike any of the men she had dealt with lately, she did not know what to make of Noah LeCroix and no idea what to expect. That in itself made her feel vulnerable.

“I’m sorry to have to impose upon you like this, but—”

“No need to be sorry. There is no way you can leave tonight.”

Olivia glanced around the room and wondered if she should make some effort to vacate the only bed.

As if he could read her tumultuous thoughts, he shifted his stance, cleared his throat and volunteered, “I’ll bed down on the porch.”

“Thank you. That would be kind of you.”

An awkward stillness lengthened between them.

“If you don’t need anything else, I’ll put out the lamp,” he said, reminding her that he was still there, still watching her.

She could not face the dark. “If … if you could just turn the lamp low, but leave it burning?”

Noah nodded and did as she had asked. As the darkness slowly thickened, he once again became the illusive, mysterious figure she had first glimpsed upon awakening. The glow from the fire expanded his shadow until the elongated black shape wavered over the log walls, following Noah as he walked out and was quickly swallowed by the night.

Chapter 2

It was late in the season, too warm to snow, but there was a heaviness and a damp chill in the air. The stars appeared faded and thin, indicating rain before morning. Noah closed the front of his buckskin jacket and sat down on the floor of the covered porch. With his back pressed to the outside wall, he was impervious to the cool air.

He could hear the dried moss in the mattress rustle each time the girl moved restlessly in his bed. Strange, he thought, so strange having someone else here, in his house. Strange to listen to the sounds of another person moving about where a few hours ago only his own footsteps and the pulse of the swamp marked the passing of time. Intrigued by her, knowing she was lying there awake, he found himself holding his breath, listening for the slightest sound.

His mother had passed on when he was fourteen, and for sixteen years now Noah had lived alone. Not long before his mother died, his father had come to them and said he was too old to endure the rigors of the life of a fur trapper any longer. Gerard LeCroix told them he was leaving forever to return to his legal wife and family in Canada. His white family.

Because it was his father’s habit to disappear for months at a time on hunting forays into the western territories and Canada, they missed his infrequent involvement in their lives very little. The son of a recluse, Noah was used to the solitude of the forest, to living off the land and dwelling in isolation. His mother, a mystic who claimed she heard voices in the wind, had segregated herself from her own people and brought him up outside the tribal community because the voices forewarned her of the coming of the whites. She saw no future for the Cherokee people, nor for any of the other native tribes, and so she became a recluse, intent upon raising Noah to survive off the land alone and escape the onslaught from the east.

When his mother suddenly died of fever, Noah left the small cabin in northern Kentucky that they had inhabited for most of his life and moved west, closer to the Mississippi. He built his first treehouse in a swampy marshland near Sandy Shoals, Kentucky, an experimental, smaller version of this one on Heron Pond. He had grown to love that first, odd house, one intended to be only temporary at best, but he had ended up living there thirteen years.

It was during his time living in Kentucky that he met the one and only man to whom he had ever grown close enough to call friend, a white settler named Hunter Boone, the owner of a tavern and trading post on the Mississippi.

As soon as Hunter found out that Noah felt at home on water, that he could navigate the rivers with ease, he encouraged him to try his hand at piloting settlers’ flatboats through the Mississippi’s dangerous shoals.

Hesitant at first, Noah soon realized he had a natural talent for the job, which paid two dollars a boatload; he found the challenge exhilarating. Although he never became comfortable around the flatboat passengers, he loved navigating the wild waters.

His skills became much sought after, especially during the spring when the rivers often ran high and fast. Because he was used to living off his fur trades, he saw no need for the white man’s money and so he never fell into a routine. Instead, he began to pick and choose the occasional boat to pilot and continued to live alone in the swamp until three years ago when, one fateful day on a trip downriver to New Orleans with Hunter, their flatboat ran into a log.

Hanging over the bow while guiding the boat, Noah lost his footing and was launched into the water. A partially submerged log floating downstream hit him in the head, tore the side of his face and took his eye. It was Hunter who saved him from certain death when he pulled him, torn and bleeding, from the raging Mississippi.

Certain that with the loss of his eye, his talent would be diminished, Noah never went back to river piloting. Nor did he stay in Kentucky long, for shortly after the accident, Hunter decided to marry and settle down, and began urging Noah to do the same.

His friend told him it was not natural for a grown man not to want a woman and even went so far as to persuade Noah to look for a wife. “Go on down to New Orleans and look around,” Hunter had suggested. “At least down there, if you don’t find a wife, you can buy some time with a woman.”

Noah had no need for a wife, but thought maybe it was time he had a woman, so he took Hunter’s advice and went to New Orleans to buy himself a night with a whore.

The plan proved to be a disaster. The first woman he tentatively approached at a riverside tavern stared long and hard at the new, still-raw side of his face, threw back her head and laughed.

“You think I want to take on a half-breed with half a face? Honey, even
I
ain’t that desperate,” she had said.

He damned her for laughing, damned himself for being fool enough to have listened to Hunter in the first place, and headed back to Kentucky without looking back.

Now, as Noah sat outside listening to the sound of Olivia Bond’s gentle, rhythmic breathing, he wondered how and why a man would make a choice that would put an end to the dream in his heart—a choice like the one his own father had made when he returned to his white wife and children in Canada. Even as Gerard LeCroix had sworn to Noah’s mother that she and Noah would always hold a piece of his heart, he left them to spend his old age with his first wife, to die among people of his own kind. Family.

As for dreams of his own future, Noah had had none since the accident and his ill-fated trip to New Orleans. Even before he had lost his eye, he had lived day by day, waiting to see what each new sunrise would bring into his life. He had always been uncomfortable around people, had never imagined himself married. He had been content with keeping up his home in the swamp, hunting and trapping to survive, living in solitude. He knew nothing but isolation. Extended family, ties of the heart, were for others, not him. He did not miss what he had never known.

Inside the cabin, Olivia Bond was finally asleep. He could tell by the steady, even cadence of her breathing and was relieved. Without making a sound, he walked back indoors, paused beside the bed to make certain she was tucked in, then picked up the lamp and carried it back outside along with a burlap sack filled with some of his mother’s old things. The sack had been ignored so long it was dusty.

He opened the sack and searched through its contents. Finally his fingers identified the object he was looking for and he pulled out a small, round hand mirror. He purposely kept the reflective side down so that he saw only the ivory back and not his image on the shiny surface.

The mirror had been a gift his father brought home to his mother when Noah was no more than seven or eight years old. As he traced the streaked, yellowed ivory back with his fingertips, he recalled the way his mother had smiled up at his father when he had presented her with the treasure. After she looked into the mirror and studied her own reflection, his mother had laughed and pressed it close to her heart. Then she remembered Noah, smiled and handed him the mirror. For the first time ever he had been able to clearly see his own face.

His eyes had been dark as pitch, his nose straight, his skin brown. His thick black hair shone with glints of blue-black highlights where the sunlight that shimmered through the trees touched it. He recalled being disappointed when he discovered he did not resemble his father at all. His mother’s Cherokee blood was predominant in his build, his coloring, and features.

Gerard LeCroix had been of medium height, portly, heavily bearded, and always jovial. He loved to sing and play his concertina. Whenever he was with them, the woods were filled with music and the sound of his deep baritone laugh. During cold spells in winter when they were closeted indoors, sometimes his father would appear and weather out the storm with them, teach them to speak English and French, and sing many, many songs.

That music and laughter came back to haunt Noah now as he took care to hold the old mirror upside down. He found himself smiling, enjoying the brief sojourn into the past, until the girl inside the house stirred and murmured in her sleep.

Noah straightened, looking into the halo radiating from the lamp. He turned the mirror over in his hands, taking a deep breath before he leaned close to the light and looked at his reflection.

The lamplight was not kind. The unmarked right side of his face had not changed much in three years, but on the left there was the empty eye socket, deep and puckered. A jagged red streak ran down his cheek from the outside edge of the depression, almost as if a molten tear had seared a path down his face. It ended near the corner of his mouth. He traced the scar with his fingertip.

All things considered, the damage was not as bad as he remembered. He held the mirror between his knees, put a hand over his ruined eye, and studied himself objectively. The girl was right, he decided. An eye patch would definitely help.

He remembered the way Olivia Bond had stared, the panic in her expression, and he found himself wishing he had given her some warning before he walked in on her, but he was rusty as an old nail when it came to using the manners he had learned by mimicking Hunter and the others at Sandy Shoals.

Unlike him, Olivia Bond was physically perfect: flawless, except for the minor injuries that would heal, the dirt on her milky skin, and the fact that she was so thin. But her weight was really no concern of his. Come morning he would take her to the edge of the swamp. From there, the nearest settler’s cabin was a good hour’s walk. All he really had to do was point her on her way.

Tomorrow Olivia Bond would be gone, but Noah reckoned it would be a long, long time before he forgot her. He set the mirror down and picked up a soft piece of cured hide, spread it on the plank flooring of the porch near the oil lamp, and with a small piece of charred wood from the fire, he began to draw a pattern on the leather.

She was dreaming again. The old, familiar nightmare. No escape. She is almost eighteen. The flatboat. Her father. His young second wife, Susanna. Her half-brothers: Payson Junior, five, and Freddie, three years old
.

The bearded stranger, Colonel Sullivan. Asking her father for a ride downriver. Shifty and suspicious. Must warn him. “No, Daddy. Don’t take him aboard.”

Suddenly, a hole in the boat. Taking on water. Pulling into shore. Other men. The colonel’s men. Thieves. No, no, it’s a trap. Run. Run. Fight off the darkness. It’s only a nightmare. Struggling to awaken. Still no escape
.

“They don’t have much.” The colonel’s voice. “Ought to get somethin’ for that silver teapot.”

Payson Bond reaching for a rifle. How, Daddy? How can you hold off five men?

“You think you can kill us all?” Sullivan laughing. “Try it, farmer.”

“I can kill one of you.” Her father’s voice. His fear so evident. “Which one will it be?”

The leader leers at her. “Give us the girl. We’ll leave you alone.”

Run. Run. Her father’s shock. Susanna’s cry. The little boys clinging to their mother’s skirts
.

“Give us the girl. Give us the girl.”

Freddie wailing. Little Pay terrified. Susanna’s sobs. Her father frozen. His long, tapered fingers white-knuckled on the rifle. Helpless. He cannot kill. He can only teach. The pirates with broken teeth. Tobacco-stained beards
.

“Give us the girl.” Sullivan’s demand. Two men step toward Payson
.

“No!” Her own voice screaming. Her father turns, looks at her. Considering. Her hope dies
.

“We’ll spare you. Spare the rest of your brood,” Sullivan promises. “Give up the girl. Nothing else we want. Give her up. Save four lives and that babe on the way.”

Susanna wails. “Oh, God. Listen. Please listen to him, Payson.”

“Susanna, no!” Her own voice again. Desperate. Disbelief. Betrayal
.

“Olivia, think of the boys …” Susanna pleads. “I can’t let them harm my boys.” Susanna reaches for Payson. Grabs his sleeve. Begs. “Payson, please. Give her to them.”

Indecision in her father’s eyes. Her heart shatters like spun glass
.

“I’m so sorry.” Payson whispers, lowers the rifle. Submits. “What else can I do?”

“But what about me, Daddy?” She screams. “What about me?” Shamed by her selfishness
.

Run, run
.

She tries to run. The river pirates are on her, dragging her past her father. Payson’s silent surrender. He sheds tears, but cannot fight. Susanna on her knees, sobbing, her arms around the boys. Freddie wailing uncontrollably. Little Pay the only one to plead for her. He breaks away from his mother. Runs to Colonel Sullivan
.

“Don’t take my sister, sir. Please, let her go.” The man laughs, cuffs Little Pay. The boy turns to Payson. “Papa, don’t make Livvie go!”

The men shove and pull her. Fight, run! She tries. Scratches them, kicks, twists. But they are too strong. She screams until her throat is raw
.

“No, Daddy! No! Don’t let them take me! Don’t let them take me! …”

“Don’t let them take me!”

Shocked awake by the sound of Olivia’s screams, Noah shot to his feet and ran inside. The sun was dawning, filling the cabin with misty blue light, just enough illumination for him to make out her form in the middle of the bed. Her hair was a wild black mane that hid most of her face. She cradled her wounded wrist as she rocked back and forth sobbing uncontrollably. The sheet and blanket were wadded together. The hem of her frayed gown rode up to reveal her thighs. The neck of the dress hung open, exposing her shoulder and the rise of her breast.

Noah’s breath caught in his throat. Suddenly he felt as if his moccasins had been nailed to the floor. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. Even if he had some inkling of what to say to calm her, the words would not have come. He had never been alone with a strange woman—not under any circumstances. Now here he stood before one who was not only hysterical, but half-naked. He was helpless and appalled, not at her, but at himself, for he had no idea how to console her.