Free Rocky Mountain Ride (Rocky Mountain Bride Series Book 7) by Lee Savino

lady. Bad habit. Third son of a lord, must make my way on my own wits and charm. In addition to my father’s allowance.” He swung up on his horse, adding, “But, if it’s any consolation, I do get something out of it. As a noble knight, I must complete one selfless act a year, or be turned into a frog. As much as you dislike me, you wouldn’t banish me to live out the rest of my days as an amphibian?”
    Her small, fleeting smile was more than enough reward.
    *
    Over the next few days, Sebastian made himself indispensable, to Francesca’s great annoyance. Even after the work on the acequia was done and planting continued, he made no move to leave. He was everywhere, maddeningly, helping her with chores, smoking in the garden while she weeded, or sitting on a stool in the kitchen with his man Cage, both of them playing off each other to make Ana laugh.
    Señor Chivington was really two men, she reasoned. Or perhaps three. One, the merry jester who lived with no responsibility, content to laze about. She had no time for entertainment. The other, the firm disciplinarian, lashing her to a tree trunk and whipping her with sticks. The jokester was present during the discipline, though, for the man enjoyed it. And the disciplinarian became a strong man, a pillar of good sense, willing to labor in the fields. But she never knew which Sebastian she was talking to: the rakish lord, silly without substance, or the man of substance, helping in time of need. Which was he?
    She wished she could chalk up all his acts to one man, intelligent and bored. But for all his silly arrogance, he was eager to please her. And his willingness to discipline her tilted her whole world and left her body aching and mind in disarray.
    He made absolutely no sense. He fascinated her. And, more and more often, at night when she lay in bed and thought of him, she burned.
    At dusk one day, Francesca stood at the apothecary window, watching his lanky form as he paced and smoked in the garden. He was waiting for her, she knew. Why else would he be hanging about, striking up silly conversations with Ana’s goat?
    She hid in the apothecary until the sun sank just behind the mountains, then sneaked away.
    It was the magic hour before dark, the time of gloaming, where the world is in perfect balance. Night and day, dark and light. Anything was possible. Francesca hurried across the fields to the woods, passing the family burial ground where her Cyro was buried along with her father. She touched their grave stones as she passed, but didn’t linger. The woods called her, and she hesitated only a second before plunging into the cool shadows.
    She was going to visit her mother. Everyone else lay in the family cemetery, but not Francesca Bari, daughter of Francesca the wise and mother to Ana Maria Francesca De La Vega.
    All the Francescas were buried under the large old tree in the forest grove. Now Francesca went about the grove, lighting candles at the feet of a statue of the Madonna.
    She’d stopped going to confessional years ago, after she heard Bishop Bernardo believed her own deceased mother a witch. Cyro hadn’t approved of her quiet rebellion against the town’s faith, but he’d let her go her own way.
    If her mother was a witch as the church claimed, who’d laid with the devil for power over herbs and potions, then that made Francesca a devil child. She’d once told Ana that since the church thought her the spawn of Satan, she had an excuse to avoid all boring religious practices. Ana had thrown up her hands at the twisted logic.
    Francesca’s decision to stay away from mass didn’t make her popular with the bishop, but the townspeople accepted her as they had her mother—some eagerly, some grudgingly, but all eventually desperate enough to come to her for some tonic to ease backache or fever, or help to help deliver a baby or set a broken bone.
    Francesca had found her place as a healer early, when she was very young and following her mother