Kit Gardner by Twilight Page A

believe I owe him some sort of recompense.”
    “Recompense?” Halsey sputtered. “Simply for being the unfortunate recipient of your bad shot?”
    Rance barely heard Halsey when again her gaze lifted to his. A peculiar warmth having nothing to do with his wound seeped through Rance’s chest. An honest face. No one had ever said that about him. Hell, when a man was paid for his shot, his integrity mattered very little.
    “Avram, the fact remains, I shot the man.”
    “Then feed him, if you feel you must, and send him on his way. As for this ridiculous notion of hiring him on, the townsfolk shan’t see the logic in that, Jessica. You know as well as I that your reputation cannot withstand—”
    “Avram, I care far more about righting my injustices and salvaging this farm than I do about vicious gossip.”
    “So you say. But I ask you, what of me?”
    “You? Why, Avram, busy as you are with the church, you need not bother yourself with the farm any longer. Odd, but I would think you most of all would understand my need for a hand and encourage it, knowing me as you say you do. After all, did you not advise Mabel Brown to hire on a farmhand when her husband passed on? I don’t recall overhearing even one dire bit of warning when Melvin Hodges filled that post.”
    “Melvin Hodges is a toothless, bandy-legged old man, Jessica. He’s lived in Twilight longer than anyone. He’s harmless. Better still, we know him. He’s not some misbegotten devil of the prairie. And old Widow Brown is all but confined to her bed with rheumatism.”
    “She’s a lovely woman, Avram. What are you saying, precisely?”
    Halsey pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead, as if to assuage some deep ache. “All I know at this moment is that you are making no sense whatsoever. And I shan’t stand here in your private...room and discuss the matter another moment.” Halsey glowered at Rance. “What the devil are you looking at, Stark?”
    Rance gave the good reverend a bland look.
    Jessica faced Rance, with that one slight shift of her shoulders entirely dismissing Halsey. And then Rance saw it all emblazoned in her eyes, too clearly, far too guilelessly, and that warmth in his chest burgeoned into a deep, gut-wrenching ache of realization. Rance had taken much more from her in Wichita than a husband, a father, a protector and provider. His had been the hand that thrust this house and farm into disrepair. He had brought her all this heartache and turmoil. He had put that uncloaked desperation in her eyes. And he knew, beyond a doubt, that without help, she would lose it all. Halsey would see to that, no matter how stubbornly she fought him, or the inevitable crumbling of the farm around her and the wilting of all her pitiful strawberry plants. A woman this self-righteous would stand stalwart for something that just might not be worth the fight.
    Hell, he’d never met a woman who would choose back-breaking toil, even the humiliation of failure, over the relatively comfortable life Halsey was offering her. More than a few of the saloon girls he’d known in his lifetime had been widowed at young ages, with children and farms left to their care. They’d abandoned the harsh realities of farm life, the drudgery, the inevitability of failure, and opted for the life of a whore. The lesser of two evils, they’d told him, their faces ravaged by far more than the effects of unrelenting sun and wind as they bemoaned their lack of alternatives. Not Jessica Wynne. He couldn’t imagine a desperate Jessica bemoaning anything. She had scoffed at the doubters and was eager to pin her every hope upon a man she’d just met, out of some spurious sense of noble justice. The man who just happened to be responsible for it all.
    Simply because she thought he had an honest face. Yet some part of him suddenly wanted to prove to her that he was deserving of all that misplaced faith. He wanted to give her back all he was responsible for taking from her and