Page 17 of The Winter Husband
She turned her face from him as warmth crept up her cheeks. It shouldn’t matter whether he was handsome or not. Whatdidmatter was that he was nurturing a bad opinion of her. She didn’t think she could stomach that for all the long months they’d be each other’s only companion. The worry brought a new tension into the fraught silence between them, broken only by the rhythmic burble of the paddle in the river.
“It belongs to Philippe.” She dragged her knees up against her chest. “The knife, I mean.”
He scanned the far shore but didn’t alter the rhythm or the ferocity of his paddling.
“Philippe has dozens of knives tucked all around the house. I figured he wouldn’t miss one. So…I found it in a drawer and kept it.”
“You stole it.”
She winced. Theft was just another crime to add to an ever-growing list. “I intend to give it back to him.”
“It’s still theft.”
She folded her arms atop her knees. It wasn’t as if she enjoyed stealing it. She’d made the choice carefully, out of respect for Etta. By the dust that clung to the sheaf, Marie figured Philippe had forgotten about this particular knife, maybe for years. She’d known, too, Etta would have gifted it to her, had she only asked.
But how could she have asked, without raising so many questions?
“I promise I’ll hand it back to Philippe—with apology—when we return in the spring.” Over her skirts, she gripped the knife in its sheaf. Just holding it gave her mind ease, but, really, would she ever use it? Could sheintentionallyplunge the blade into human flesh?
“Here.” She pulled it from under her garter and, shaking her skirts out of the way, held the sheaved knife toward him. “Take it.”
He frowned. “You keep that.”
“You don’t think I’ll murder you in your sleep?”
“You didn’t do it last night.” Winter-gray eyes skewered her. “I know you’re no murderer.”
“You can’t know that.” People could hide the worst of themselves so easily. Even Lucifer was pleasing to the sight, so it was said.
“I’m a soldier.” With an efficiency of movement, he swung the oar across his body to paddle on the other side of the canoe. “For years, I guarded a trading post in a lawless wilderness. Before that, I fought in Flanders. I know too many of the murdering kind. You’re not one of them.”
She couldn’t dismiss his soldier’s experience…but maybe he couldn’t see deep enough inside her. In less than a year, she’d gone from an obedient girl to a liar, a swindler, an accomplice, and now a thief.
She hardly recognized herself.
“My father was a soldier, too.” She set the knife down on the crate beside her. “He was a cavalryman in the regiment of La Ferte during the Spanish War.”
Lucas’s chin dipped, a sign, she supposed, of respect.
“You said you fought in Flanders?” She wrinkled her brow, calculating the years. “Did you fight under the Prince de Condé?”
His rhythm paused. “What do you know of that?”
“Newspapers and journals had a way of slipping into the orphanage.” Along with secret notes amid the pages.
“Girls in convents are supposed to be shielded from bloody news.”
“They are. But I went looking for it.”And many other things I never should have sought.“I missed my father and his stories, so I followed the news of the latest wars as a way to remember him.” Her heart squeezing, she remembered the smell of her father’s uniform, folded and tucked away in a dusty trunk. What, she wondered, ever happened to it? Cut down, she supposed, into make-pretend soldier’s uniforms for the baron’s youngest heirs.
She shook off the thought. “Why did you leave France to come to a place like this?”
“Like this?”
She jerked her chin toward the unbroken forest of the far shore, and all the terrors it contained. Back in Paris, after she’d been chosen as a King’s Daughter, she’d made an effort to find out more about the colony. Stories about enormous beasts, brutal, bone-chilling winters, and especially bloody conflicts between the settlers and first peoples had left her terrified. And yet on the walk down to the waterfront this morning, she’d seen dozens of non-French inhabitants, bartering, smoking long pipes, talking with the settlers, and wearing splendid fur robes. And last night, Lucas had mentioned the local tribes as if he were referring to folks from neighboring provinces, like Bretons or Parisians or Bordelais.
It was all very confusing.
As was Lucas’s continued silence.
