Read Heart of Thunder for Free Online Page B

it was an old coach and the windows were all broken. Patch had said he had a condition aggravated by dust. The man shouldn’t be traveling in the Southwest if he wants to avoid dust, Samantha thought to herself in annoyance.
    She wasn’t really annoyed with Mr. Patch, though, not even when they were forced to light a smoky old lantern for light. No, it was Adrien who had her miffed. It was always Adrien. Sometimes she wondered how she could ever have fallen in love with such a man. After all this time, all the traveling together, he still remained distant. Why, he wasn’t even talking to her just then.
    Of all the childish ways for a man to act! It was something she might do in a sulk, but a man of thirty? And all because he had been reminded of Tom Peesley.
    She could thank Mr. Ruger for that. Hearing that she was leaving Denver, he had come to the stage office just before the coach departed and had had the gall toask that she not leave until he was sure no crime had been committed. He couldn’t insist, however, and they both knew it. Tom Peesley had not made a complaint against her, and Samantha knew he never would. He didn’t dare.
    She appeased Floyd Ruger by telling him where he might find her if necessary. But there had been no appeasing Adrien.
    She just didn’t understand Adrien. She couldn’t even put his behavior down to the fact that he was an Easterner, for other Easterners weren’t so…so childish. She had complained to Jeannette about him, but the petite blonde had sympathized with her brother.
    “He is sensitive, chérie ,” Jeannette tried to explain. “He just cannot abide violence.”
    “But this is a violent land he has chosen to come to,” Samantha pointed out.
    “ Oui , and he will get used to it in time. But it will take time.”
    How long would it take for him to get over Tom Peesley? Samantha wondered. She was coming to the conclusion that she would have to do something drastic. She considered making Adrien jealous. After all, she had rebuffed all other men since meeting Adrien. He really had had no competition. Perhaps he needed a good shaking up. But Mr. Patch, with his nearly bald pate and heavy paunch, was the only man available just then, so she had to dismiss the idea for the time being. The trouble was that when they reached Elizabethtown, Adrien would be busy.
    What was she going to do? She wouldn’t give up on Adrien. She had decided that he was the man she wanted, and she always got what she wanted. She dreamed about him, imagining him holding her, kissing her, making love to her in the way the girls at school had described. Yes, Adrien would be her first man.
    She had never even been held by a man, not tenderly, for she didn’t count Tom Peesley and his bruising embrace. But Peesley was the first man ever to kiss her with passion. She prayed that such brutal kissing was not typical, and that the kiss of Ramón Mateo Nuñez de Baroja, from the ranch nearest theirs, was also not typical. Ramón’s kiss had been a brotherly peck, given to her before she left for school.
    There had to be an in-between kind of kiss, something that would stir her, make her faint, as she had read about in the romantic novels that were smuggled into school. That was the kind of kiss Samantha dreamed about, the kind she knew Adrien would give her—if he ever got around to it. There had to be something she could do, some way to give him a little push in her direction.
    They had been bouncing along in the coach for five days, a miserable way to travel. The train ride from Pennsylvania to Cheyenne had not been so bad, but after her experience on the stage to Denver, Samantha had almost considered buying a horse and riding along beside the coach. But then she wouldn’t be near Adrien, so she had rejected that idea.
    Her father had been appalled to learn she was coming home across the country instead of traveling by ship, as she had gone. She had known he would be furious, so she had waited to telegraph