Page 28 of The Winter Husband
Oh yes, you did.
“There’s not even a log wiggling.”
“You shot wide.” How much drier could the pan get? “You’ll do better with practice.”
“I will.” The tone of her voice shifted. “Show me how to reload.”
He paused cleaning to see her squinting toward the targets, one hand outstretched in his direction. Blindly, she waited for him to put the flintlock in her grip.
He should stop underestimating her.
He handed her the weapon, explaining again how to load it, offering the ball and horn. A soldier wouldn’t live long unless he could shoot and reload at least three times a minute. It must have taken her ten minutes, fumbling as she did with those pink-tinged, half-frozen hands, to get the weapon loaded and the butt set against her shoulder. She cocked it carefully this time, pulling back until it clicked, and then aimed down the barrel before squeezing the trigger.
She didn’t fly off her feet as the shot echoed through the woods. She lowered the bore and peered through the dissipating smoke. “Everything’s still standing.”
“You waited too long to pull the trigger.”
“I wasaiming.”
“The barrel sagged.”
Her chin tightened. She turned the gun upside down, yanked out the ramrod, and held out her free hand. “Powder and shot, please.”
He suspected she wasn’t going to give up practicing anytime soon, so he settled himself against the fencepost of the yard that would someday hold pigs and watched.
Good thing he’d stocked up on ammunition and saltpeter for the winter. She made three shots wide, canting east, and then followed that up with two more shots wide, this time canting west. He suggested she raise the bore higher to compensate for the weight of the rifle and strength of her grip. She hit a knot in a white pine twenty feet off the ground and swore in her lady’s voice in a way that made him bite the inside of his cheek. Dinner was going to be late today, he figured, as the next shot kicked up snow about a dozen yards beyond the targets.
She kept reloading. More quickly each time. Now she was doing one reload in less than two minutes, though her aim wasn’t getting much better.
As she pulled the ramrod from the bore once again, he said, “You’re thinking too much.”
Her head jerked up, smacking him with a frustrated look.
He said, “Try staring at the target as you raise the rifle and then pull the trigger right away.”
“Don’t aim, you mean?” She seized the horn from his grip and tapped powder into the pan, thrusting the horn back at him when done. “How’s that going to work?”
“Better than what you’re doing now, I suspect.”
Blue flames, those eyes, they could light a bonfire. Blasted with that heat, he felt his cock remind him it had been months since he’d enjoyed the warmth of a woman.
Down, boy.
“You’re a terrible teacher.” She swiveled toward the target and raised the rifle just as she pulled back the hammer.
POW.
Crack!
She peered through the billow of black smoke, then dropped the weapon and took a few running steps forward. The shawl slipped off her head as she stopped. All that remained of one of the targets was splinters scattered around the stump.
“I’d call that a direct hit,” he said, hooking the much-lighter powder horn back onto his belt. “What were you saying about me being a terrible teacher?”
He expected another one of those blood-warming glares. But Marie swirled in the snow, her skirts twisting. She looked at him with her hands pressed against her cheeks, her black hair tumbling, and made a triumphant little sound. The smile on her face was like the break of clear white sunlight through a sky full of clouds.
His heart stopped.
The whole world froze in crystalline clarity, dark pines stark against the sky, light glittering off beds of powdery snow, Marie’s lips gleaming as laughter fell from them.
