Barrett's Hill Read online

  Every life function stopped inside me for a moment then started again. “Seen who?” I demanded hoarsely.

  “Why, whatever do you mean? Adam, of course. What else have we been talking about? He’s come to take you back to Wyoming.” Karlew seemed quite annoyed. “Miranda, where are you going?”

  But I had already run out of his study and down the front steps. It was one of those rare, unseasonably warm days. Even early in the morning the sun was shining, heating everything. But at that point I needed no outside warmth—I had enough fire in me to warm hell. And there he was, over by the stable, tall and strong and self-contained. Something broke inside me.

  “Adam!” I shrieked and, tossing all sense of decent behavior to the Northern winds, ran across the lawn and flung myself into his arms.

  “I didn’t think you were coming back,” I babbled, “I never thought I’d see you again. Oh, Adam, please take me with you. I’ll do anything you want, anything.” I was crying, but I didn’t care. I just kept holding onto him in desperation.

  He held me a little away from him for a second. “That’s good, because I wasn’t intending on giving you any choice in the matter. For some idiotic reason I’m in love with you, and it’s more than clear you’re crazy about me, so I figure we may as well make it legal.”

  I really wanted to object to that “more than clear” line, but it was simply the truth. “So what do you think?” he continued, looking down into my upturned face. “Are you ready to face the Wild West?”

  I looked back at him, all the love in my heart showing on my face. “I’d follow you to hell and back,” I said rashly.

  He grinned. “I always thought you were a fool.” And he kissed me.

  Epilogue

  WE DIDN’T SEE Vermont again for another thirty or more years. The rough New England snows left me partially prepared for the rigors of Wyoming weather, and if we spent the first winter in a three-room cabin, I didn’t mind. I was just as happy to spend it all in one room—the bedroom. It turns out I was just as wanton as I’d always secretly feared, though no one brought it out in me like Adam’s persuasive hands and mouth and . . .

  I was already pregnant by the spring—Nanny had been right. Together we added on another room for the baby and then a porch, and Adam and a neighbor built a decent-sized barn, and of course I gave birth to baby Alison on the snowiest night of the year. Adam suggested we call her Carly, which earned him a book thrown at his head, but by that time he was used to ducking, and he had a particular talent for inciting my temper, always to be followed by a most satisfactory rapprochement. A year later I was pregnant again.

  Fortunately I was one of those women who was made for having babies, with good wide hips and a strong constitution. My babies were strong as well, five of the six survived, and we mourned our lost one to this day.

  I didn’t really want to return to Vermont. Karlew was long gone, but for some reason frail Elinor was still alive, in her nineties and apparently quite happy now that she didn’t have her overbearing husband hovering around her. Maxine had married Tommy Patterson, and the two of them had gotten alarmingly stout, as were their three children, according to Elinor’s latest letter. Nanny and Cook were gone, of course, and I could see no reason to return.

  But Alison had gone east to college and become a doctor, of all things, living in Boston. At the age of twenty-nine she was getting married, and there was no way I would let a daughter of mine marry some overbearing man without me making sure he was worthy.

  I should have trusted Alison’s judgment. Richard was worthy indeed, and Adam and I saw them off on their honeymoon with only the faintest misgivings. After all, she took after me, which was never an easy road.

  I don’t know which of us suggested we go back to Vermont, to Barrett’s Hill, but the next day we found ourselves on the train, heading north, sitting close together as the miles sped by. We would make a courtesy call on Elinor, of course, and I’d probably have to see Maxine whether I liked it or not, but most of all I wanted to face the darkness that was Barrett’s Hill.

  Adam must have felt my sudden tension. He looked down at me, still beautiful, his green eyes unfaded, the silver mixing with golden hair so that it almost looked like a halo when it was mussed, though anyone less like an angel I couldn’t imagine. Unless it was Lucifer, the fallen one.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked me.

  “That you remind me of Lucifer,” I said promptly.

  He laughed, used to me by now. “I’m not surprised. But I don’t think that’s what made you tense up.”

  “I was thinking of Barrett’s Hill,” I confessed.

  “I know you were.”

  Indeed, he would. He knew me too well. “I want to go there,” I said, not sure I meant it. “I don’t want to have nightmares any more.”

  He smiled down at me, and even after thirty years I was still bemused by the light in his eyes. “I tell you what. The weather is beautiful, and you’ve got me. Why don’t we climb to the top and make love in the spring grass? Turn it from a place of death to a place of life.”

  I looked at him with scandalized eyes. “It better not be a place of life. I’m not interested in having any more children.” And then I realized what he’d said. “You mean we’d . . . make love outside? Without our clothes?”

  “Don’t look so shocked—we’ve done it often enough in Wyoming.”

  “There aren’t any other people in Wyoming,” I said with some asperity.

  “There aren’t that many in Vermont either—at least, not wandering around on hillsides. Don’t worry. If by some strange chance someone interrupts us, I’ll cover you.”

  I gave him a long, calculating look, wondering if he were truly serious. And then he said the one thing that would convince me.

  “Dare you,” he said softly.

  I thought of Barrett’s Hill, the fresh grass and the blue sky overhead. Smaller, somehow more cramped than the blue skies of Wyoming, but beautiful nonetheless.

  “You’re on,” I said. “You know just how to get me,” I added accusingly.

  He grinned. “Yes, ma’am, I do.” He leaned down and gave me a shocking and entirely satisfactory kiss, and I found for the first time in my life I was looking forward to Barrett’s Hill.

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  About the Author

  Anne Stuart is currently celebrating forty years as a published novelist. She has won every major award in the romance field and appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List, Publisher’s Weekly, and USA Today. Anne Stuart currently lives in northern Vermont.