Free A Flight of Arrows by Lori Benton

kissed her. His lips warmed as she melted her mouth against his. Abruptly he pulled back. “Lydia?”
    “Gone. Until supper.”
    Awareness of their solitude rose between them, delicious and terrifying. Almost tentatively he kissed her again. Then with growing urgency. The longing of the past months wrapped her like cords. She didn’t want him ever to let her go, but too soon he wrenched from the embrace.
    “Bear’s Heart, I must not be here.” He turned toward the door. Leaving her.
    “No!” She caught his arm and clung. “We’ll be all right. I won’t even touch you.” She released him and backed away. “Two Hawks, I promise. Just don’t go.”
    His head was bent. He lifted it and looked at her. “I do not know, now I see you again, if
I
can promise.”
    She was shaking. “I ached so badly to see you. Now here you are—and I’m aching even worse.”
    “And I,” he said.
    Such raw and honest words. The moment held them suspended—until their gazes caught and something about it all struck them as funny and they both fell to laughing. It shattered the tension.
    “Please stay,” she said.
    They sat at the table—on opposite sides. Two Hawks for the first timelooked around the kitchen and spotted the broken jar. “Did I startle you, make you do that?”
    “The syrups!” She jumped up to move them from the heat, found a linen pad to collect the pottery shards, then scrubbed up the spill. She needed to bottle the syrups but could hardly think straight with Two Hawks sitting there watching her.
    “Are you hungry?” She turned toward the back of the kitchen, to the alcove where they kept their food stores. “Let me feed you. Then you can tell me everything.”
    The crooked grin he gave her threatened to melt
her
into a puddle of syrup. “Everything? That will take time.”
    She laughed again—how long since she’d laughed? It felt glorious. “Just all you’ve seen and done since I saw you last, and especially…what made you decide to come back? Let’s start with that.”

    Lydia thought it odd, what could trigger memories. On her return from the Ten Broecks, a doe had bounded across the snow-patched road ahead and vanished into the pines. It caused her placid horse no more than an ear twitch but sent her back in time with such clarity she might have sworn Jacob rode beside her, red hair blazing in the winter sun. The very thing had happened the second year of their marriage, on that stretch of road. Another doe. Another lifetime.
    She was still thinking of her late husband when she reached her gabled house inside Schenectady’s stockade, with its stable in back.
    At twenty-one she’d married her father’s longtime apprentice, though she hadn’t felt for Jacob van Bergen the love he’d had for her. He’d understood that. For her, theirs was a marriage of friendship and convenience. He’d offered her a continued presence in her father’s apothecary shop, until such time as children were born, children that never came. She’dspoken her vows with eyes open, aware she was making a commitment of the will, but to Lydia’s surprise, her heart had followed. She’d grown to care deeply for Jacob. He’d known that, too, before his death.
    As she dismounted and opened the stable, Lydia was grateful to harbor no regrets concerning Jacob, save that his promising life had been cut short. But his death had made it possible for her, after a true and proper mourning, to at last open her heart to a longing she’d denied herself since a girl: her love for Reginald Aubrey, who was free now to love her back.
    Or should be.
    She led the horse inside the stable, startled to find William’s gray mare occupying the extra stall.
William
. Then she remembered in whose possession she’d last seen the horse.
    It wasn’t William who had come.
    She tended her mare and hurried to the house.
    In the kitchen the hearth blazed. Bottled syrups lined the bricks. At the table Anna and Two Hawks sat, hands clasped over