Page 69 of A Dangerous Heart
Rebekah made a noise of reassurance.
Ben wasn’t the only one upset to learn that Eli had been taken. Both girls and David had expressed their emotions in different ways when Clare had ridden back to the main house with Ed and Drew.
“We all are,” Rebekah said now, voice low.
Clare must’ve made some movement, because both women glanced in her direction.
There was a beat of awkward silence.
“Can I—can I help clean up?” she asked.
Kaitlyn shook her head tightly, glancing away and out the window where it’d grown dark outside.
Rebekah’s face was somehow less open than when she’d been comforting Kaitlyn. The distinction was so slight, but it was there. Clare was an expert at reading folks, every minor detail of their expressions.
“We’ll get to it,” Rebekah said.
There was no hint of unkindness in her manner. It was more a hesitation.
A momentary hesitation that told Clare all she needed to know.
The two women held her responsible for bringing danger to their family.
She couldn’t blame them. Her breath locked in her chest as she remembered the moments when she’d been face-to-face with Isaac as Victor had threatened them. The moment she’d seen his doubt creep in.
After everything—every moment she’d tried to prove her trustworthiness, everything she’d told him that she’d never told anyone else, every tender moment they’d shared—when it had counted, he hadn’t trusted her.
Blood will tell.
She felt that same despair wash over her now.
“All right,” she said softly. “I—” She shrugged. She didn’t know what she’d meant to say, only that her throat was choked with tears. If she’d thought to find the family camaraderie she’d experienced over the past few weeks, she was sorely disappointed.
She blinked back tears as she retreated to the living room.
“Isabella must know about this scheme,” Ed argued as he stacked another rifle in the line of guns already on the dining room table.
Clare shivered as she passed by the brothers.
Ed and Drew barely glanced up, and when they did, their eyes were shadowed.
She took a seat on the sofa across the room, one where she could see the outline of Ben’s head, where he slept in David’s bed, through the cracked door.
Victor had taken Eli. Had hit him. Now she couldn’t bear to take her eyes off Ben.
She needed to make a plan—but she was all alone.
“Isabella is as upright as they come.” Drew sounded so reasonable, even as he counted bullets and put them into piles in one corner of the table. “She’d alert the marshal if she knew about this.”
Ed blew out a breath. “And implicate her own pa?” Ed asked skeptically.
Clare tuned out their conversation, couldn’t stop thinking about Victor. Boom. Tom. And the other men in the Barlow Gang, every one of them vicious and cruel.
“Keep Eli safe,” she prayed desperately.
“Quade’s been keeping a tight rope on her,” Drew said, and Ed nodded.
“I guess that new foreman has his thumb on her too.”
