Columbine by MIRANDA JARRETT Page A

and stumbled to her knees and groped across the floor.
    Then suddenly she felt an arm circling her waist and pulling her from the smoke, a masculine arm that, even as she coughed, she knew was too strong and muscled to belong to Asa. The man was carrying her now, out the door and to the fresh air, murmuring odd bits of nonsense to comfort her. He propped her up against the well as she struggled to get her breath.
    Then Kit Sparhawk sat back on his heels and swore, long and colorfully, at the woman he thought he’d never see again. She was garbed simply now, like any decent Yankee goodwife; though covered with soot and her eyes red-rimmed: frOm the smoke.
    But even before he’d seen her face he had recognized her at once from the way her small body had filled his arms, and the dismay he’d felt had been tempered by a fierce joy at finding her again—a joy that angered him for being both unreasonable and irrational.
    Coughing, Dianna could only stare at him in return with equal dismay. She had believed him left behind with the Prosperity in Saybrook, yet here he was, every bit as handsome as she remembered, and every bit as angry with her, too. He was, she decided, dressed quite outlandishly. Gone was his English gentleman’s suit. In its place was a coarse linen hunting shirt, the yoke and collar elaborately fringed to emphasize the width of his shoulders, and a bright woven sash knotted around his waist. He wore deerskin leggings, not breeches, the soft leather straining across the muscles in his thighs as he knelt, and on his bare feet were moccasins. A curved powder horn with pewter tips swung from his neck, along with a fringed leather bag for rifle balls, and tucked into his sash was a long knife with a stag-horn hilt. Yet it all suited him, and with his long, sun-streaked hair and his cat’s green eyes, he looked like a savage himself.
    “Dianna Grey,” he said at last.
    “What in God’s holy name are you doing here?”
    Dianna’s lungs were still too choked to reply, but Mercy, standing close to Kit, was quick to answer for her.
    “Grandfer says she’s to watch o’er me, but I ask ye, who’s to watch o’er her? She don’t even know wet wood from dry, nor split from a blessed log. Faith, she near smoked us like a very ham in our own house!”
    Humiliated, Dianna saw the wretched log still smoking beside the door where Kit had tossed it, and she prayed he hadn’t seen the mess she’d made of the eggs, as well.
    Kit stood, wiping the soot from his hands with a red handkerchief.
    “You’d best come back with me. I can’t leave you here, not until your house has a chance to air. Asa will guess where you are.” He smoothed his hair back from his brow, and settling a broad-brimmed beaver hat on his head, he gazed contemptuously at Dianna.
    “Are you well enough to ride?”
    Dianna nodded, She should thank him for rescuing her, but the words stuck stubbornly in her throat. If he’d known it was she in the house, he probably wouldn’t have bothered.
    “How should I know the log would smoke?”
    “Because any child in these parts should, and would, or risk killing himself with stupidity like you very nearly did.” He clicked his tongue, and a black stallion like the one Dianna had seen his brother ride into Saybrook came to him and nuzzled his shoulder affectionately. He had been hunting; his rifle and three dead partridges hung from the saddle.
    “Though ladies, I suppose, do not dirty their hands with such tasks.”
    “Lady!” exclaimed Mercy, her turned-up nose turned even higher.
    “She looks like no lady I’ve ever seen!”
    “Oh, aye, Mercy Wing, and you’ve seen so many to judge,” said Kit dryly.
    “Don’t be fooled by how she looks now. She’s more things than you’ve ever dreamed.”
    Mercy frowned and sucked in her lower lip, considering.
    “How dye know her, Kit?”
    “I know Master Sparhawk from London,” answered Dianna, tired of being discussed as if she wasn’t