Chapter 3 #2
“Yes,” Hunter said, nodding. “Of course we will. I just didn’t want to scare you in the letters, that’s all. Otherwise, I would have told you everything. I promise.”
Grace eyed him. “Let’s talk about it later.”
She didn’t want to discuss it now because she was shaking, angry, embarrassed, and not feeling well. She wanted to hunker down in her raincoat and ride along in silence for a while so that she could gather her thoughts and feelings and sort them out.
At the moment, she felt she had been lied to, and that was bothering her more than anything else.
The lying was not okay, even if it was lying by omission.
Hunter should have done more than casually mention there were a few bandits in the area.
He should have told her that being kidnapped and shot at were all possibilities when coming out here.
At least then she would have been prepared, or she just wouldn’t have come.
The latter was the most likely outcome. Grace didn’t like adventure; she liked baking.
There was nothing in the world as homey and comforting as bread, rolls, cakes, and tarts.
They were the very symbols of stability and wholesomeness, and she loved them.
She wanted to share them with this new world she’d arrived in, but not while people were firing guns right behind her.
Perhaps that was why men like Hunter stopped off at that little chapel on the way out to their town. They married the women they enticed here before their fiancées could work out just how much danger they would be in.
“Grace,” Hunter said after a long silence. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I thought we would get back to the town without incident.”
She blinked back tears and said nothing, not trusting her tongue to say anything particularly kind at this moment.
“If you want some advice from a man who has never been married but still has an opinion … I grew up with Michael and two female cousins. They would get all upset because Mike riled them up deliberately, and the only thing to do when that happened was to leave them alone a while,” Jeff said with a grin.
“You might want to leave her be for a bit, Hunter. She needs a little time to acclimatize and to calm down.”
“I’m sitting right here,” Grace snapped, losing the tenuous hold on her temper.
“And I don’t need time to calm down. I need you to promise me, Hunter, that you will never, ever, ever lie to me again!
And I need to know exactly what is going on here.
I mean, you two are behaving as though this is a common thing, as though finding bandits in an abandoned building is just something that happens constantly.
Is it? Is this to be part of my ordinary life now?
Bullets flying over my head from the moment I wake? !”
Hunter looked desperate in the growing light.
The storm seemed to be moving off, allowing the sun to peek through again.
“Look, I didn’t tell you everything, and yes, that was wrong of me, but this sort of thing isn’t a daily occurrence.
No, you won’t be fending off bullets from morning to night, Grace, or almost ever.
Honestly. We’ve had some trouble with a particular group of people, but we’ve gotten them far more under control than they were when we first established the mining camp. ”
She said nothing more, her head too sore and her thoughts spinning too much to form any kind of coherent thought.
Jeff flicked the reins, and the horses carried on at a slower pace than before.
The cart didn’t bounce around as much as before, and after a good long while, Grace began to calm down.
The landscape took on a fairy-tale quality with the sunshine glinting on the raindrops suspended on leaves and grass stems. It looked like such a magical world that she couldn’t really find the energy to be angry any longer.
Hunter sat beside her, looking worried and desperately unhappy. While she remained unhappy with how her arrival in this new life had begun, she offered him a tired smile, knowing he hadn’t planned for any of this to happen. The relief in his eyes made her cold cheeks warm slightly.
“We’re nearly at our town,” Jeff said. “It’s just over that ridge there.” He pointed to a place where the ground seemed to drop off about a mile or two ahead of them.
“Oh? So, we’ve almost made it?” Grace asked, hoping that didn’t sound too sullen.
“Yup,” Jeff said. “And we’re all in one piece.”
She wondered how many times people arrived back at the town not in one piece but didn’t dare ask.
“What did you do at those boulders that stopped the bandits from following us?”
Jeff chuckled. “It was something our friends Troy and his wife came up with. It’s really simple, just a latticework of branches and iron spikes.
It tends to stop them in their tracks. And because of how Lizzy made the spikes, there are two rows on each one.
There’s one larger row and a smaller one, so even if the bandits try to move the pieces out of the way, they get poked and stabbed by the alternating spikes. It’s really quite ingenious.”
So they suffered enough bandit attacks that they had to come prepared with their own booby traps. She filed that away for future consideration.
“But the trap is sprung now,” Grace said. “Won’t they just find a way around it?”
“Sure, but it usually takes them a couple of hours. The land in that area is quite broken. It looked like a giant was trying to plow the ground and got things horribly wrong. So, they’ll have to go around that. ” He smiled in a confident, cocky fashion.
“We’re not crazy,” Hunter said. “None of us want to live in fear. We’ve been trying to make our town as safe as it can be. It’s just an ongoing endeavor for now. Part of being some of the area’s first permanent settlers.”
Grace nodded. “I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier. I just got such a fright.”