“The outskirts,” I repeated, and leaned down, looking again with fresh eyes.
“Luck can’t be covered away or contained within a crowd,” he murmured, raking his fingers through the edge of the clover. “It won’t blend in. It wants to be found. You just need to know where to look.”
As quick as a wink, he snatched up another clover and displayed it in the center of his palm. He raised one eyebrow, daring me to take it.
When I reached out, he snapped his hand shut, closing it around mine, rough and warm. His touch, so strangely intimate, brought a mess of flutters shimmering beneath my skin, like light dancing across the waves of Greenswold.
“Does your beau hold your hand like this?”
Our eyes met, and a hot flush crept up my neck. I found myself unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to do anything but stare back into his amber depths. My heartbeat couldn’t decide where it belonged, first soaring high in my throat, only to plunge to the depths of my belly. I knew my cheeks must have been glowing, but the rest of me felt delicious, nauseating shivers of delight and worry. I was wholly divided, savoring his presence and wishing he’d leave before I could do something to embarrass us both.
“I…I don’t have one,” I finally admitted, slipping my fingers free and leaving the clover behind.
A lazy smile grew across his face, crinkling his eyes with merriment. “Is that a fact?” He contemplated the little clover for a moment. “Go on and take it. Luck already seems to be working in my favor today.”
I jabbed one final flower into Sadie’s crown and stood, brushing off my skirts. “I ought to be heading home.”
He leaned back on his elbows, peering up at me. “So soon?”
Deep within my boots, I curled my toes in and out as I thought through my next move. “Would you like to come with me? Papa did say you’re welcome to have dinner with us…and Mama will have made plenty to share. You could even give this to Sadie yourself.”
He tilted his head, pondering my offer. “Dinner at the Downings’….Dinner with Ellerie….” He was up on his feet in one sharp moment. He moved like a cat, all languid sprawl one moment and graceful action the next. “I’ll need to make myself a bit more presentable. What time should I join you?”
This was the first time I’d stood next to him and realized just how much he towered over me. Though I’d been the tallest girl in my class, the top of my head barely skimmed his shoulders. For a moment, I imagined him pulling me into an embrace. I’d fit perfectly beneath his chin, tucked in the secure circle of his arms and…
I shoved the wild thoughts aside. “I’m sorry….We usually eat around six.”
He nodded. “That sounds just fine. My camp is up that way,” he mentioned, pointing to a break in the pines about a half mile away.
“Is it safe up there?” I asked, setting off. I noticed how he slowed his pace, shortening the length of his stride to better suit mine.
He scratched at his ear with a rakish grin. “Are you offering to join me?”
The heat in my chest, which had fallen to a low simmer, flared again, staining embarrassment all over my face. “Of course not! You know, you ought to be careful talking that way around here. There are many fathers who’d shoot a man for speaking to their daughters like that.”
He looked delighted. “Would Gideon?”
“Probably.”
He bobbed his head approvingly. “And I respect him all the more for it.”
“How have your traps been?” I asked, eager to change the subject. Imagining the stranger—my stranger, as I was coming to think of him—filling other girls’ ears with outrageous flirtations made my stomach pulse with a jealousy I wasn’t familiar with.
“I’ve caught a few little victories,” he said, jumping over a fallen branch. “I’m still waiting on something grand, though.”
“A buck?” I guessed, unsure of what trappers would consider the biggest prize.
His teeth winked in the sunlight. “Much grander than that, Ellerie Downing.”
I paused, weighing out my next words. “I still don’t know your name.”
“Of course not,” he replied, the corner of his mouth twisting with wit. “I’ve not said it.”
I waited, assuming he would offer it now, but he ambled through the tall grass, seemingly content to walk along in silence. When he glanced up, he caught me staring at him, and his eyebrows rose in a dare.
The joke was wearing thin, becoming more awkward the longer he carried it out. “It doesn’t matter to me what your family name is….I think a person ought to be free to make their own way in the world…no matter who their parents are…or what they might have done.”
“How magnanimous of you.”
I swiped my braid back over my shoulder. “I only meant—”
“I know what you meant, Ellerie. And…as someone whose family has done an awful lot of awful things…I do appreciate it.”
I’d been right! I instantly conjured up a sweeping and romantic backstory for him—a little boy raised in the dangerous world of stagecoach robberies and highwaymen. I wondered if Papa might have heard of the stranger’s bandit father.
“But it would be nice to be able to call you something—anything, really,” I persisted. The seconds ticked by unfilled. “You’re truly not going to tell me?”
“No,” he laughed. “I’m really not. There’s a power in names, don’t you think? Once your name is given away, you can’t help but be pulled along by those who have it.”
My footfall landed on an uneven rock, and I stumbled forward. He grabbed my arm to keep me upright. “I don’t—I don’t think I underst—”
“Ellerie Downing!” he exclaimed, his voice raised, bursting from his chest like cannon fire. My eyes snapped up from his hands encircling my wrist, and his nose wrinkled. “You see. Power.”
He had a point, but I wasn’t ready to admit it. “You’re impossible.”
“I suppose I am. And, for now, this is where I must leave you.”
We paused at the opening of the pines, and I suddenly couldn’t seem to remember what I ought to be doing with my hands. They felt too large and ungainly and, no matter how I held them, unnatural. “I’ll see you later on this evening, then…” I trailed off, allowing him ample time to fill in the gap. “This is absurd. I have to be able to call you something.”
“Why?”