Silver Tears by Becky Lee Weyrich

shimmering rosy hue to everything in sight. She took a deep, invigorating breath. The cold air smelled of salt and sea and pine, a delicious potpourri.
    Going to Pegeen’s cot, she shook the girl awake. “Get up, you lazy thing. I need your help getting ready.”
    The bleary-eyed servant squinted up at her mistress through a riot of dark, tousled hair. “Ready, mum? For what? Where are we going?”
    “Possibly to my wedding,” Alice announced. “You see, I’ve decided Mr. Gunn isn’t so bad a bargain after all.”
    “Oh, Lady Alice,” Pegeen cooed, “what a fine man that one is!”
    Alice smacked Peg’s round bottom playfully. “On that we both agree. Now, move your Irish arse, girl.”
    While Peg heated water in a black kettle hung on a spider over the fire, Alice opened one of her trunks, searching for just the right thing. She’d decided it was high time she left off wearing her dreary mourning duds.
    “Not too fussy,” she said to herself. “But it must look elegant. Ah, here’s the very thing.”
    The gown of rust-colored damask, etched with a delicate design in a purplish rose and olive, featured a wide falling band at the shoulders, bordered in white Buckinghamshire lace. The overskirt was drawn dramatically toward the back to give an enticing hint of underskirt peeking from beneath the long lace apron. Full sleeves belled out, the cuffs dripping more of the delicate lace. With this costume Alice would wear the parure of rubies and pearls that had been one of Lord Geoffrey’s many gifts to her.
    “Oh, mum,” Pegeen said, sighing, “that’s a proper wedding gown, indeed.”
    “Well, don’t just stand there gawking, girl, help me bathe and get into it. I have to be ready by the time my groom arrives.”
    Chris Gunn was in no hurry to get back to the fort that morning. He awoke stiff and aching from spending the night in his chair. The cabin was cold and Ishani was still fast asleep.
    He got up and threw more birch logs on the fire, poured water into the pot, and cut a large hunk of dried pumpkin with his hunting knife. Moving aimlessly about the cabin, he ate as he went, his mind working all the while.
    He kept remembering the sight of Alice leaning down to kiss Jonathan Hargrave. The act had seemed defiant to him. Maybe she had known that he was there in the shadows, spying on the two of them. If so, she had put on quite a show for his benefit. Her kisses had been meant, he was sure, to cleanse the taint of his own lips from hers.
    No woman had ever tossed him over for another man. “And Jonathan Hargrave, of all men,” he grumbled through a tough bite of pumpkin. “Damn his eyes!”
    But what could he do? It seemed that Alice had made her choice. Hargrave was a solid, steady sort of fellow, but hardly a lady’s man. Not cast in the usual flamboyant mold of the sea captain, he was a plodder, a ponderer, a dullard to Gunn’s way of thinking. The very idea that such a man could steal a woman from him was almost more than Gunn could stomach. He had to do something, but what?
    A thought struck him suddenly. What if Alice was only using Hargrave to make him jealous? Granted, she’d tried to make out that she hadn’t the slightest interest in either of them. Yet there was no mistaking her warm response to his own embraces. Gunn had held enough women to be able to recognize true desire. Was Alice only toying with him? He’d seen many women back in England play just such a game. Though he would never admit it to anyone, he’d fallen victim to such triangles more than once before.
    “Well, two can play at this,” he said aloud, smiling to himself.
    Drawing back the homespun curtain, Gunn peered in at Ishani. The girl lay sleeping in the rumpled bed of furs, her long, copper-colored legs stretched out and her straight, blue-black hair spilling over her shoulders. Asleep, she looked even younger than her tender years.
    Gunn shook his head and smiled. “Imagine the little scamp running away,