The Scent of Jasmine by Jude Deveraux Read Free Book Online Page A

branches. In the next moment, he kicked his horse forward and began galloping.
    “And I guess he assumes I’ll follow him,” Cay said as she patted her mare’s neck. She glanced back the way they’d come. It wasn’t quite daylight yet, but she could see enough to know that no one was coming after them. Maybe she should go back to the barn and get that man to help her return to her family.
    Cay even turned her horse that way, but something stopped her. Maybe it was the way the Scotsman had let her keep his knife when he could easily have taken it, or maybe it was his mention of Tally. Or it could have been her uncle T.C.’s belief in him, but she didn’t run away from him.
    “I think I’m going to regret this,” she said aloud as she turned her horse toward the Scotsman and went after him. It took a while to catch up, and if his horse weren’t so laden with supplies she didn’t think she would have. He could ride as well as her Scottish cousins.
    When she rode up beside him, his look showed his relief. “I came because you have the bread,” she said loudly. He reached inside his tattered shirt and withdrew the hunk of coarse, stale bread, and handed it to her.
    It was no easy task to reach across the two running horses and take it, but Cay had run relay races with her brothers, so she knew how to grab something while going full speed. She snatched the bread and for a moment she thought, Am I supposed to eat this dirty thing? If she hadn’t been so hungry and if he hadn’t been watching her, she would have thrown it down, but she wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. She tore off a hunk of the bread with her teeth and chewed it with gusto.
    “Well, Catherine Edilean Harcourt, maybe you aren’t useless after all,” he said in a clear American accent, then kicked his horse forward.
    For a moment, Cay was so stunned that he knew her name that her horse slowed down.
    “Come on, lass!” he called to her. “We haven’t got all day for you to lay about.”
    “Lay about!” she muttered as she ate the last of the bread. “Come on, girl,” she said to her horse, “let’s go get him.”
    Five minutes later, she passed him, and ten minutes after that she was so far ahead that when she looked back she couldn’t see him. For a moment she thought she’d lost him, but when she turned a curve in the road, there he stood—and he was angry.
    “Do not do that again,” he said softly, but his tone was almost frightening. “I can’t protect you if I don’t know where you are. It’s one thing to tease a man, but to endanger your mare is another. You could have hurt her forelegs on this hard road.”
    “Me?” Cay said, her mare going in circles around him while he and his horse stood perfectly still. “You beat me here, so you must have run faster than me. Didn’t you use the road?”
    “How I went is of no concern to you. If I’m to protect you, you must obey me.”
    Anger ran through her. “The only man I ‘obey’ is my father—and sometimes Adam,” she said as an afterthought. “As for you, if you can’t keep up, then I suggest you sit down and wait for the sheriff to find you.” With that, she reined her horse around, and took off down the road as fast as the mare would go.
    It took over three miles of riding as hard as she could before her anger began to calm down. Of all the overbearing, arrogant things that had ever been said to her, his was the worst.
    She slowed her horse and looked behind her. There was no sign of the man. Well, maybe, truthfully, what he’d said hadn’t been the worst of the worst. One by one her brothers had all told her she was to “obey” them. And the truth was that she had. They wouldn’t let her, so much younger and a girl, tag along with them if she hadn’t. But she’d never obeyed Tally!
    When her horse gave a little limp, Cay got down and walked her to the shade of a tree. The poor animal needed to rest—as did Cay. She listened but heard nothing.