Shadow's Stand by Sarah McCarty Read Free Book Online

she’d overheard her father’s concubines discussing—
“Honey, you keep looking at me like that and we aren’t going to make it to this place of yours before morning.”
He’d caught her staring at him, worse yet, he had correctly interpreted her interest. But it wasn’t really interest. Just weakness in her defenses. She was not a woman fated for a man. Her destiny lay elsewhere.
“I am not looking at you in any certain way.”
He smiled. A genuine smile that took his expression from austere to charming. “Is that so?”
His fingers brushed her cheek. She blinked as the emotion inside her shifted to something more dangerous. And much more exciting. It was wrong to feel anything for this man. Shadow was an outlaw. A horse thief. A man without principle who made his way in this wild land through violence. He was everything her father would not want for her. Everything that was wrong for her, yet there was so much about him that was acceptable to her. At least on that instinctive level that would not be quiet. Bringing her hand up to her cheek, she rested her fingertips against his. Was this what her mother had experienced when she’d fallen in love with a man from China? This overwhelming push in a direction she knew she should not go?
The attraction her mother had felt for her father had to have been powerful for her to leave her family and suffer the insults and degradation of a society that had no place for Chinese ways and those who chose to embrace them. But her mother had embraced her father’s culture even when she’d not been welcomed into it. She’d learned the language, learned the customs and she’d raised her daughter with the same beliefs. Fei shook her head. She wished her mother had lived long enough for her to ask for the answers to questions she still had. Questions about why and how. She wished her mother were here so her father would be here, but she wasn’t, and he wasn’t, and as surely as her mother was locked in her grave, her father was locked in the anguish of her death. Grief had stolen his will and his love and the man she’d left in the cellar at home was just an empty shell of the man her mother must have loved. She wished she could remember that man.
“I think I liked it better when you were staring at me like I was dipped in honey.”
This time Fei didn’t mind the interruption of her thoughts. Sad thoughts had no place in her new life. She placed her hand back in her lap. The heat of Shadow’s skin lingered in the tips of her fingers. Curling them, she held the sensation to her, trying to hold the connection to him. To her mother. To her plan. “And how do you think I stare at you now?”
“Like I’m a rather disgusting bug you poked with a stick.”
She couldn’t restrain a slight smile. Shadow had a way with words that painted images in her mind. “Maybe I’m hoping you’ll run away.”
His expression sobered. “Are you?”
She studied the guns he’d acquired, sitting so easily on his hips, the knives tucked so casually into the knee-high tops of his moccasins as if they belonged there, the rifle resting so casually across his lap. She remembered the way he’d fought the hanging party even when bound.
This time, you finally chose right.
Maybe she had. “No, I do not hope you’ll run away.”
“Good to know I have my uses.”
“Everyone needs a purpose.”
“And what is yours?”
To save her family’s reputation. To save her cousin. To find a way for herself. “To fulfill my destiny.”
“That’s a tall order.”
“It is the same for everyone.”
“You think I have a destiny?”
“You do not?”
“Honey, I think my brother’s and my birth was greeted with nothing but a curse.”
“You are a twin?”
“Yes.”
“Such good fortune upon your family.”
Shadow pulled his horse up short. “My mother was an Indian whore. My father was a Mexican soldier from a family that didn’t see their union, or anything that came of it, as a blessing.”
Her horse