He shook his head. “Can you read, Yank?”

Maggie bridled. “You know very well that I can!”

“Then perhaps you wouldn’t mind reading this,” he said, tapping the front of the colorfully painted tin with a forefinger.

Maggie’s eyes widened as she read the single, ornately written word: Gunpowder.

“Oh,” she said lamely.

Reeve grinned and ruffled her hair with one dirty hand, and it began to fall in lush curls of silvery-gold all around her shoulders. For a moment there was a familiar heat in his eyes, but it faded away with his grin. “Try to stay out of trouble, woman. Just for a few hours.”

Maggie was insulted and hurt. “I’ll make things easier for you, Reeve. You have our bed, and I’ll sleep at the inn!”

“Set a foot off this property,” Reeve warned in response, “and I’ll forget me convictions and take a switch to you! And you needn’t think, love, that I’m joking, because I’m not!”

Maggie had no doubt that he wasn’t, and she sighed. Having nothing more to say, she turned and walked into the main house.

It wasn’t the prospect of a bed that took Reeve McKenna to the inn that night, but the need for a few drinks and a barkeep to listen to his woes. “I married a Yank, you know,” he told the innkeeper.

The man nodded sympathetically. “Aye, mate, I know you did. You’ll be wanting a room tonight?”

Reeve shook his head and lifted his second mug of ale to his lips. He was just about to take a sip when Eleanor appeared at his side. She was standing right there at the bar, bold as brass.

“Hello, Mr. McKenna,” she said.

Reeve could only gape.

“I suppose your next question, should you manage to utter one, will be ’What the devil are you doing here?’”

“Aye,” Reeve managed to say, “that would be the question.”

She lifted her chin and Reeve thought to himself that if it hadn’t been for Maggie, he might have wanted this woman very badly. As it was, he felt only numbness toward her. “I’m here with Mr. Kirk,” Eleanor explained. “We came to fetch the post—one does look forward to getting letters, doesn’t one—and poor Duncan fell quite sick.”

“Sick? Where is he?” Reeve still didn’t like or trust Duncan Kirk, but if the man had fallen ill, he couldn’t just turn his back on him. Kirk was his neighbor, if not his friend.

A flicker of triumph showed in Eleanor’s dark blue eyes, and Reeve wondered at it. “Upstairs,” she said. “We’ve put him to bed—he’s out of his head with fever, you know.”

Reeve glanced at the barkeeper, who was studiously polishing a glass and would not meet his gaze.