Rebel: The Blades of the Rose Read Free Page A

inhale deeply over the affidavits, as if he could draw her scent up from the paper. He shook himself. What the hell had gotten into him? He must be tired. He’d been riding hard for weeks, and it had been nearly two months since he’d been with a woman. That was the only explanation that made any sense.
    Once the papers were all signed, Sergeant Williamson examined them. “Everything looks to be in order. The Northwest Mounted Police will be happy to release Mr. Prescott’s belongings into your care, Mr. Lesperance.”
    â€œAm I finished here?” Mrs. Bramfield said before Nathan could answer the sergeant.
    Williamson blinked. “I believe so.”
    â€œGood.” She picked up a broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat and set it on her head. Without another word, she strode from the building, but not before stepping around Nathan as one might edge past a chained beast. Then she was gone.
    For a moment, Nathan and Williamson stared at each other. A second later, Nathan was out the door and in pursuit.
    He caught up with her near the corral. She was already shouldering a pack and a rifle with practiced ease, taking the muddy ground in long, quick strides. Nathan didn’t miss the way most of the men’s eyes followed her. Women were rare sights out in the wild, and trouser-clad, handsome women even more rare. Yet he had the feeling that even if the trading post yard was full of pretty women in pants, Astrid Bramfield would stand out like a star at dawn.
    â€œDouglas Prescott’s family appreciates you giving him a decent burial,” Nathan said, easily keeping pace. “They want to give you a reward.”
    She shot him a hard look but didn’t slow. “I don’t want anything.”
    â€œI’m sure you don’t,” he murmured.
    They reached the corral, and she walked briskly toward a bay mare. She threw the Indian boy watching her horse a coin. The boy said something to her in his language, glancing at Nathan, and she answered sharply. The boy scampered off.
    â€œWhat did he say?” Nathan asked.
    â€œHe wanted to know what tribe you come from,” she said. “I said I didn’t know.” Without asking for any assistance, she hooked her boot into the stirrup and mounted her horse in a single, fluid movement. She tugged on some heavy rawhide gloves before taking up the reins.
    â€œCowichan,” he said. “Government people took me when I was small. Raised me in a school. I never knew the people of my tribe.”
    Something in his tone had her looking down at him. Their eyes caught and held, and he felt it again, drawing tight between them, a heat and awareness that had a profound resonance. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her simple words held more real sympathy than anything anyone else had ever said to him.
    â€œYou could have kept Prescott’s things for yourself,” he said, gazing up at her. “People die out here all the time, and no one ever knows.”
    â€œThose who love him would know,” she said, her words like soft fire on his flesh. “And it was for them I took Prescott’s belongings to the Mounties. They would want something of his to help them remember.”
    She spoke plainly, almost without affect, but he heard it just the same, the raw hurt that throbbed just beneath the surface. She’d shown him a small piece of her heart, and he recognized it as a gift.
    Looking into her eyes, into the stern beauty of her face, he dove through the surfaces of words and gestures to the woman beneath. Wounded within, a fierce need to protect herself. And beneath even that, a heart that burned white-hot, blazing its way through the world.
    He understood just then that Astrid Bramfield spoke to him like a man, not a barely tamed savage or object of curiosity. The only woman to have ever truly done so. Even the Native women he knew could never place him, since he was neither entirely absorbed into the white