Free McAlistair's Fortune by Alissa Johnson

breeches, or at least fewer, and preferably shorter, layers of fabric.
    When she returned, several minutes later, she found McAlistair lifting a satchel from the back of his horse.
    Curious, she wandered closer. “What are you doing?”
    He spared her a single assessing glance. “Unpacking. You’re well?”
    “Yes, of course.” She waved the question away, more than ready to be done with the subject of her health. “Why are you unpacking?”
    “We’ll camp here.”
    “Here? In the woods?” Evie looked around. Why she bothered, she didn’t know.
    “You like the woods,” he pointed out, reminding her that he knew a great deal more about her than she did of him.
    “I like walking in the woods, not sleeping in them.”
    “Have you ever tried?”
    “I have, actually. I snuck out of Haldon when I was fifteen and made a camp in the woods for a night.”
    He stopped what he was doing to look at her. “You didn’t care for it?”
    She’d loved it, and not only because it was forbidden and therefore appealing. She’d lain under an old Scots pine and listened to the trees creaking in the wind while the smell of the outdoors filled her lungs. Her last thought as she’d drifted off had been that sneaking out to sleep in the woods was quite the finest idea she’d ever had.
    Her next had been that it was the worst. She’d woken midway through the night in terrible pain, her leg cramping mercilessly in protest of the hard ground.
    She could only imagine how she would fare after a ride like the one she’d just endured.
    “Evie?”
    “I…couldn’t we press on? There’s light left yet.”
    “You need rest.”
    So very true, and so very irritating. “I’m not one of the horses. And I thought you were worried someone was chasing us.”
    “Good a time as any to make a stand.”
    She felt her lips twitch. “I’ll assume that’s another joke, though it marks you as a man who prefers quantity over quality.”
    “Out of practice,” he reminded her. “Answer my question.”
    She bit her lip—more in an effort to stop herself from commenting on his high-handed order than an act of nerves—and shifted her feet, which was, she was forced to admit, very much an act of nerves. How many times would they both have to be reminded of her infirmity in one day?
    “Evie.”
    She shifted again, then capitulated. What was a little more lost pride? “Yes, I enjoyed sleeping in the woods…but my leg did not. May we move on now? I—”
    “Did you take care where you placed your bedding?”
    “Well, of course. I brought a blanket and cleared a space of rocks. I’m not a fool.”
    He shook his head. “There are ways to make a spot more comfortable for sleeping. Pine boughs, grass, even leaves can soften the ground.”
    “Oh.” She frowned a little. “No, I didn’t think of that. I didn’t know.”
    “How would you?”
    Common sense came to mind. She very much hoped it didn’t come to his. His opinion of her was apt to be depressingly low as it was. She wasn’t so swamped in her own discomfort that she couldn’t see how that very discomfort was making her unpleasant.
    She made herself smile a little. “Perhaps you’re right. And it won’t hurt me—” Then again, it might. “That is, I am willing to try.” Particularly since it meant she wouldn’t have to crawl back onto a horse for the remainder of the day. “Thank you for the suggestion.”
    Evie chose the soft, grassy spot where McAlistair had set her down earlier, and when she had finished tossing aside a few hidden pebbles, she made her way to the edge of the woods to find branches for her makeshift mattress.
    She was so tired, she thought she could probably sleep standing up, but she made several trips before standing back, hands on hips, to survey her work. It looked, in her estimation, like a very small, very leafy nest. “This can’t possibly work.”
    “It will work.”
    She glanced over at McAlistair, and noticed for the first time that he was