Karin doesn't know who she is—will she find the love of her life in the discovery, or uncover a tragic past and fresh betrayal?
“Whisht!” Grandpa McNeal hushed the startled assembly. He held up a silencing hand.
The fiddles ceased. Dancers stilled and every head turned toward the front of the house. Karin’s wary eyes joined the dozens of others all boring into the solid oak resounding under someone’s urgent fist.
“For God’s sake—let me in—” a man’s low voice rasped out.
Grandpa McNeal strode to the door, slid the bolt, and opened it wide. Dry leaves swirled through the blackened doorway as a young man staggered inside, his face partly hidden under a wide-brimmed hat, chestnut hair pulled back. His brown, green-fringed hunting shirt, wool leggings, and tall deerskin moccasins were the rugged dress of a frontiersman. Wet through from the blowing rain, he fell forward. Blood streamed down his sleeve from a wound to his shoulder.
“What on earth?” Grandpa McNeal grunted. The stranger collapsed in his arms.
“I’m shot—”
Karin covered her mouth in alarm, her eyes riveted on the newcomer. “Who in the world?”
“I've no notion. Wait here,” Uncle Thomas cautioned, and pushed through the onlookers to his father and the newcomer.
“Who fired that shot?” Grandpa McNeal demanded. “Most everyone in the settlement is here.”
“Not the Tates,” Uncle Thomas pointed out. “Horace Tate will shoot any man he takes for a Tory. So will Jeb.”
“Don't that old fool and his boy know the war’s over? Give me a hand with this poor fellow, Thomas. Let’s take him to the back room,” his father said.
Uncle Thomas braced the stranger on one side and Grandpa McNeal from the other. He was every bit as tall as they were and appeared solidly built, but the McNeal men weren’t daunted.“I’ve got him, Papa. Come on,” Thomas said.
Aunt Neeley rose stiffly from her chair and shuffled forward, her stooped figure a head shorter than Karin’s. “You’ll want my help, John McNeal. Fetch the woundwort, Karin. Sarah, steep some comfrey in hot water and fetch fresh linens. Joseph, the poor fellow could do with a spot of brandy,” the little woman rapped out, taking charge as she always did in a medical emergency whether folks liked it or not.
The stranger lifted his head and looked at Karin. She stared into vivid green eyes in a tanned face stubbled with dark whiskers and felt an odd sensation shooting through her. And not just because he was devastatingly handsome, though he was. Something in his penetrating gaze drew her, and almost against her will, she leaned in closer to him.
“Someone seeks for you, Shequenor’s dahnaithah,” he whispered in Karin’s ear, before closing his eyes again.
What in God's name was he talking about? The strange words set a distant drum beating inside Karin like a primal summons urging her to some untamed land—not a place she wanted to go.
The year is 1784 and life among the Scot-Irish settled in the rugged Alleghenies is getting back to normal after the long War for Independence—or is it? Former Shawnee captive, Jack McCray, has secrets that will turn Karin McNeal's world upside down.
