A smooth and sandy hollow provided them with a place to sleep that night. Thomas kept his distance, and although she did not care to admit it aloud, Katherine was able to admit to herself that she was relieved.
A thief. She would never have guessed it of him.
She could not help but stare at him as he offered her the leftover bread and butter he had wrapped in his handkerchief from the morning before. Would she have agreed to such a marriage if she had known? He had known her own past, to be sure. Had she deserved to know his? What difference would it have made?
“Penny for your thoughts, Katherine.”
Katherine jumped, startled, and stared at him, eyes dragged away from the rolling horizon ahead of her. Thomas was smiling; nervously, to be sure. His shirt was crumpled, and the collar was yellowing with the sweat of the previous day, but he was smiling.
“I think,” she said awkwardly, “we have gone past Christian names in our knowledge of each other. My friends call me Kitty.”
“Penny for them, Kitty,” he repeated. His lips twitched to a quick smile, and then disappeared swiftly.
Kitty swallowed and reached for a piece of bread. “Nothing.”
His smile, already weak, faded. “Did you sleep well? I am sorry our funds are gone, or I would have tried to find somewhere to sleep – but then, this hollow is remarkably sheltered. I trust you did not sleep too ill.”
She stared at him as the slightly dry bread stole the saliva from her throat. Since his confession – for she could not think of a more accurate phrase to describe what he had related to her the day before – Thomas Bryant had been uncommonly kind to her. The one blanket he had pulled from his luggage had been hers, no questioning, and the bacon that had remained had been hers and hers alone. He had not eaten that evening.
“I slept soundly, I thank you,” was the sum of what she could muster. “And you?”
There was that smile again; it crossed his beard and split his face in two, it was so wide. “Excellent, I assure you.”
What nonsense was this – they were speaking with one another as though they had moments ago met in a parlor of a mutual friend! This courtesy, this dancing around polite conversation, this small talk. It was nonsense, thought Kitty, and it must be stopped.
“How far do we have to go?” she asked abruptly. “I am sure it cannot be too far – you said Sweet Grove was no more than a few miles from El Seco, and we must be nearly there.”
“Not exactly.” Thomas turned away, ostensibly packing the last remaining items into his luggage, but she was starting to know him far better than that. That tone was the one he used when he did not want to further explain something.
And he was not going to get away with it. “Not exactly how, Thomas?”
He twisted to face her, but stood as though ready to leave. “Come now; the sooner we leave, the sooner we will arrive.”
Kitty rose, but did not move. “And exactly when will that be?”
He spoke as he strode out of the hollow, and Kitty had to lift her skirts and skip after him to catch up. “There was a little . . . altercation in the coach, nothing worth mentioning, but it meant we left it a little earlier than I had thought. It is a day’s added journey, however. We should arrive, God willing, sometime before sunset tomorrow. A traveler passed through here early this morning – a Mr Laken Weston – and he told me that we were not far.”
Kitty barely looked where she was going as she strode beside him, barely able to match his long gait with hers. “Altercation?”
He said nothing, but gazed out across the Texan land.
“Altercation.” Kitty repeated, mirth in her voice. “Thomas Bryant, are you telling me you had a fight with those men?”
He turned to her, and she saw with a jolt of surprise that he was grinning. “And so what if I did?”
“Thomas!” Her voice was at such a volume that, despite there being no one else on the road, she clapped her hands over her mouth. “Thomas, you cannot be in earnest. Be serious!”
“I do declare, Mrs Bryant, I have never heard a wife so distraught because her honor was protected,” he said, laughing. “Do not you recall your own words? You asked myself, and those three reprobates we had the misfortune of meeting, whether any of us were running from our own pasts. And you were right – you know now how right you were.”
“Yes, but – ” Kitty paused as she tripped over a rock, so focused was she on her husband. “But I had never expected – I did not mean you had to – ”
“I know,” he said, more kindly now, and he looked at her again. “But did you think I would allow such villainy if I could prevent it? Once I was man enough to understand who the real guilty party in that coach was, I mean.”
She stared at him, amazed. “But I have no memory of such a thing!”
Thomas laughed. “That is, my dear, because you sleep the sleep of the dead!”
He kept chuckling as he started to swing the two cases he was carrying forwards and backwards, humming a tune underneath his breath Kitty did not recognize.
Not that she was paying much attention to it. She was more affixed on the careless ‘my dear’ dropped from his lips, almost unthinking, almost unknowing.
Color had rushed to her cheeks, and the heat had nothing to do with it.
“Oh, bother.”
His words forced her to stop staring at him, and she looked ahead of them where the road dipped into a valley and across a rushing gorge. A rushing, swollen, impassable gorge.
“Somewhere upstream must have had a lot of rain,” breathed Kitty. “How are we to cross?”
Thomas stared at her as though she were mad. “Cross? Easily. Come, I will show you.”
It did not take more than twenty minutes for them to reach the edge of the rushing river, and it was indeed much deeper than it had looked from the top of the hill. Kitty bit her lip. She was not tall, and she was not strong; there was little chance she would be able to traverse it safely.
“How far to a bridge, or a way around?” she said, as Thomas popped the luggage on the bank.
He stared at her. “Around? Why would we want to extend our journey – ‘tis midday, I would think, and we are making excellent time.”
Kitty bit her lip. This man of hers – and he was hers, whether she wanted him or not; the ring on her finger proved that – had his mind in the clouds more often than not. “Thomas, there is absolutely no way I can – arghhh!”
The exclamation came, not due to the idea of walking a little further before they could cross over safely, but because Thomas Bryant had swept her in his arms and taken a step into the water.
It was freezing, and the current was strong. Kitty clasped her hands around his neck, and tried to lift her ankles out of the water, but her feet were already wet, and the weight of her boots prevented her from doing so.
“We will soon have you over.” Thomas smiled at her, and he had never felt this close before. She could feel his heartbeat in his chest. His arms were strong, and they kept her warm despite the rushing coldness of the water. “Just hold on.”
Hold on. For a moment, Kitty wanted to say she would always hold on to him, if he could carry her through life in the same way. She had never felt this warm and safe. His strength was life to her, and she gazed upwards into his sparkling eyes as he looked for the narrowest and shallowest path across.
The closeness was overwhelming. A flurry of water, and his shirt was absolutely soaked, and Kitty found her breath was pushed out of her own lungs. The cold and his warmth were too much for her to bear, and her fingers scraped at the hair at the nape of his neck.
And then it was over, and she was standing on the other bank, dripping wet, with him standing soaked to the skin before her.
“Stay here a moment and dry off. I will be back with our luggage.”
He was gone before she could say another word.
The freezing water was a relief to Thomas as he strode back towards their luggage. He had been in danger there, for a minute, of feeling far more than he ought. Having her pulled into his chest, feeling her shiver, knowing she was utterly dependent on him – it had given him a rush of protectiveness and power he had never felt before.
He was falling for this delicate yet fierce woman faster than he knew. She had a past he could not untangle and a future woven tightly around his own, and he could not make her out.
Kitty Bryant was a different kind of woman from anyone he had ever met, and for a moment he had held her in his arms.
The other shore was not far away, and Thomas strained to carry the two pieces of luggage above his shoulders to keep them dry, but the struggle was a relief. The pain burning in his muscles reminded him he was human. These feelings were natural – this feeling of devotion, perhaps not.
She was watching him. He tried not to notice, but as soon as his eye caught a glimpse of her, he could not help but check that she still had her gaze fixed upon him every few moments. Was she impressed? Was he such a child, a mere man-boy, that he cared?
There were her hands, reaching out to him, elegant and graceful with his mother’s wedding ring adorning the hand reaching for –
She took her own luggage from his shoulder. “Thank you.”
Thomas’ excitement died a little, like a fire sprinkled with water. Of course, she had wanted her belongings. But that was surely not the only reason for such interest and care. There was a smile dancing across her features he had never seen before; could it be for him?
“Tomorrow, you said we could be at Sweet Grove?” she said, as he upturned his boots to rid them of the water inside them. “Tomorrow evening, before sunset?”
He nodded. “As long as nothing else stands in our way, then I do not see why not.”
She beamed, and it made his heart soar.
“I am pleased,” she confessed, “for I have not seen my sister in over five years.”
Thomas’ heart fell completely at her words. You should not have forgotten, he berated himself. You knew the one reason she wanted to go to Sweet Grove in the first place ‘twas to see her sister. That is the reason she married you. And that is all.
“You must miss her,” he said finally, picking up the two pieces of luggage and starting the long walk up the other side of the gorge. “Your sister.”
Kitty squelched a little as she walked, but nothing could dampen her spirits. “Elizabeth. Yes, I do. It is strange; you think eventually your heart will cease to care because it is too painful, but if anything, the agony increases over time.”
He stared at her as they reached the top of the valley and started out on the mercifully flat road once more. “I think I know what you mean. Mariana – my twin, you know – and I had a connection unlike all others. I wonder sometimes whether she can feel my emotions when they are strong, for I sometimes think I am experiencing hers.”
The thought of Mariana hurt, and he stopped speaking.
After a moment, Kitty continued. “Elizabeth and I were not twins, though there are but two years between us. When our parents died, we were but children; she became half sister, half mother to me.”
Thomas shook his head slowly. “I had not realized you had lost your parents.”
“Why would you?” She spoke lightly, but he knew enough of parental loss to see when someone was ignoring the pain that had broken their spirit. “It is not something I speak much of.”
“It must have been hard, losing them at a young age.” Thomas spoke, but he received no reply. They continued walking for an hour, Texas landscape unchanging and uncompromising, before she spoke again.
“I had Elizabeth.” Her voice was soft and full of emotion. “Whenever I was with her, I believed nothing bad could happen to me.”
Thomas smiled wanly. “But you were alone.”
She sighed and stared at the road ahead of them. “We were taken in by my grandparents -- my mother’s parents. They were not . . . they did not exactly know what to do with us.”
His stomach turned. “They did not – they did not hurt – ”
“Oh, no,” Kitty said quickly. “Nothing like that.”
But Thomas had seen the flinch. It was well hidden, especially considering they walked together so closely, but he had seen it. Someone had hurt her. She had known the wrath of another enforced on her body before.
Rage hurled inside him, and he struggled to keep his voice calm. The idea that anyone would lay a finger on her – would harm her, this innocent and defenseless woman – it was too much to voice. He could not.
“I matured from childhood, and Elizabeth and I were as much alone in the world as young women as we were as babes in arms,” she was saying quietly, mopping her brow. “And yet we did not know much difference. I was but three years of age, you must remember, when my parents died.”
“But you did not remain there for long,” pressed Thomas. “Unless you lived with them in Nacogdoches.”
Kitty did not speak for a moment, and then she said slowly. “No, we lived together in San Antonio.
They reached a small grove of trees and stopped underneath it. “So what happened to you then?” Thomas asked, despite himself. Knowing where he had found her, this story could not have a happy ending.
“Nothing,” she said shortly. “Nothing happened.”
Thomas blinked. “Something must have, or else why were you living in Nacogdoches?”
“Elizabeth,” Kitty said, striding out of the shade and back onto the road, “has a sweet and simple temper. She was always able to endure – I mean, she was more patient with my grandparents than I ever was. She and I looked alike, I was always told.” Thomas could see a smile threatened to emerge. “Though I could never see it.”
He held his tongue as she talked more about her sister. Something had happened. How could it not, situated as she was when he had literally stumbled across her in Nacogdoches. But what that was, she would clearly not tell. Or could not.