"AGH-H-HM".

A volcanic eruption of pain shot up through him, setting off red-hot rockets in his head. All his bodily processes stopped... breath, sensation, blood flow... He contracted violently around the blinding pain in his loins, holding himself and toppling over. He saw the wench scrambling up, staring at him, and he tried to rise and grab her. But his reactions were abysmally slow and she was already out of reach, backing away, then wheeling and running.

He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes as he sank to the ground and waited for the sickening waves of pain to subside. Holy Mother!-the little witch knew exactly where to kick! Dammit-he could be ruined for life!

But his heart resumed beating, his blood began to course again, and the searing patches of light that filled his vision gradually faded. He gulped air and gritted his teeth as the world righted itself. His Townsend control finally exerted itself over all but the worst pain, and he pushed up to a sitting position.

He was in one piece... he'd survive. No permanent damage done... he hoped. But it would take something akin to herculean fortitude for him to sit his horse when he got back to... his men. The thought crashed over him like an icy, suffocating wave. Oh, God, he'd forgotten all about them, forgotten all about his bloody mission. Give him a curvy bit of flesh within a mile of his highly reactive loins and he forgot time, forgot duty, forgot his own last name! Dammit-even here in the bloody wretched wilderness!

Steamy hot chagrin poured over him, scalding his male pride. His face, his neck, even his ears began to burn. Clenching his jaw, he cast around for his coat and dragged it onto his shoulders. Had to get back to his men, he grimaced, staggering to his feet while refusing to admit that terrible thudding in his loins to consciousness. He swayed, then took a deep, cleansing breath, and began to walk in the direction from which he'd come, thanking God for a decent sense of direction. At least he wouldn't be lost out here.

Each step jarred both his pride and his body. He afforded his body some relief by affecting a slightly straddled, stiff-legged gait. But there was no relief for his seething pride. With every step his anger grew, fueling his determination to take this miserable assignment in hand and wring some credit-and perhaps a bit of vengeance from it. He was going to go through this enclave of treasonous rabble like a dose of salts, and in the process he was going to find that curvy little piece with the legs like a mule. Soon she'd regret ever laying eyes-or anything else!-on Garner Townsend.

It was a sweaty, sore, and irate Major Townsend who crested that final ridge and paused to straighten. His double-breasted coat front was flapping, and twigs and pieces of leaves till clung to his gentlemanly sleeves and breeches. Benson and Laxault were exactly where he'd left them, and they'd managed to subdue the miscreant they pulled off other. Lord-he growled mentally-they should have given the poor bastard a hand instead of trouncing him. He was probably the one in the greater danger!

"Did ye git 'im, Majur?" Benson jumped up from his seat on the ground as soon as the major swung into view. He stared at his gentlemanly commander's disheveled state in some perplexity.

Their gaping looks made him look down and he grimaced with both chagrin and pain as he bent to brush the offending litter from his clothes. He buttoned his elegant blue officer's coat with brisk, angry movements as he came forward.

"I learned all I needed to know," Townsend said, dismissing the question with a furious wave and a stiff expression. "He's the one we need to interrogate," he gestured to Charlie, who was pushing up from the ground, shaking his head groggily. He was only now recovering from a crack on the head delivered from the stock of Laxault's musket. "Get him up on his feet and back to the column. I want to find this ditchwater settlement and secure a bivouack before dark."

"Aye, sir," and "Yessir," Laxault and Benson murmured, hauling a very surly Charlie Dunbar to his feet and prodding him into motion with their muskets. And as they trailed their hard-nosed commander back to their unit, they exchanged heated looks and silently dared each other to tell him that he had a bit of lady fern stuck in his hair.

Chapter Three.

Whitney reached the broad, tree rimmed clearing of her family farmstead and headed straight for the log and planking barn, throwing herself against the side of it. She clasped her heaving middle desperately, gasping for breath and praying that her heart didn't give out altogether. Her lungs were burning, her stomach and legs were cramping, her head was pounding, and there were ominous dark blotches swirling in her vision". She turned her back against the rough planks and pushed her legs out in front of her, bracing to stay upright.

After a moment's recovery, she dragged in a deep breath and crept to the corner of the barn. Scouring the side yard and the gardens around the two-story log house for some sign of Aunt Kate, she finally spotted a familiar bonnet, just visible through the remnants of the pole beans in the far garden.

It wasn't too difficult to slip from the barn to the arbor to the kitchen door at the rear of the house without being noticed; she'd done it dozens of times, and that wealth of stealth proved invaluable now. She was soon through the dark, fragrant kitchen with its huge stone hearth and sturdy oak table and racks of pots and crocks, and on her way through the keeping room with its strange mixture, of frontier primitive and imported French furnishings. Hand over hand, she pulled herself up the rough-hewn stairway, heaving grimly and thinking what a mixed blessing it was to live in the only private house in Rapture Valley that had one.

It took a full minute for Whitney to swallow her heart back into place as she leaned back against the planking door when she reached her room. Sweat trickled down her sides, matted hair clung to her neck and forehead. She held the sweaty shirt out and examined its tellingly-placed rip with trembling hands. Charlie. With his teeth... like some bloody barbarian!

She slid down the door as the impact of what had happened that afternoon crashed in on her. She'd nearly been... and twice! Her green eyes widened as the sights and sounds flashed through her mind again. But, in truth it wasn't Charlie's square, bullish face and barrel-like chest that rose up inside her. It was that other face, that second chase, that soldier- Soldiers! She quivered as if stung, and straightened onto her own two feet. It was true, then, about the federals sending in troops to enforce the Act. And Pa and several men of the valley were still off at the meeting. Sweet Jehoshaphat-she prayed it was still just a meeting and not bloody warfare by now! Pa probably wouldn't be home for a while. She swallowed hard. Maybe not for a very long while...

"No!" she declared tightly. "He'll come home." She cast a desperate look around her safe little room under the eaves and wished she could be there at her pa's side. But she knew she had responsibilities here. And with the soldiers come...

She pulled a clean shirt from a rough-hewn oak trunk and poured water for washing into a china basin on an elegant marble-topped mahogany washstand. She stripped off her ruined shirt and green-stained breeches, tossing them into a pile on the floor.

But as she scrubbed her face and throat vigorously with the rough, soapy cloth, she found that her lips were tender, and that they tingled strangely as she rubbed them. She scowled, concentrating on the feeling, and paused to touch them with her fingers. There-was a disconcerting itching welling up beneath the tingling, an odd, pleasurable sort of feeling. And when her fingertips pressed harder against her lips she felt a surprising surge of warmth through her cheeks. Her eyes widened, then narrowed.

Her Scotch-Irish temper billowed up from beneath those mysterious feelings. It was what she'd felt when that soldier kissed her, that's what it was! The same devastating sensations he had produced in her when he pressed her lips with his and slid his tongue between- She growled from low in her throat and licked her lips vigorously. It didn't help. Alarmed, she raked her teeth over her upper and lower lips... and only made it worse. Even the slightest pressure seemed to make her crave more! She growled and rubbed her mouth hard with the back of her hand, trying to obliterate the alarming perceptions.

Seizing the soap in one hand and the wet cloth in the other, she began to cover the rest of her body with angry efficiency. Soap, stroke, rinse; bit by bit, she covered her satiny skin. But when the soap raked the rosy nipple of her breast, she felt a shocking flash of pleasure radiating through the firm mound. She froze, her eyes widening as she looked down and watched the nipple drawing up, tightening before her very eyes. What was happening to it... to her? Swallowing hard, she raised the soap and drew it slowly over the nubbly berry that was forming at the tip of her breast. The soap fell on the planking floor with a loud bang. That same tantalizing half-itch, half-tingle she had felt in her lips now lodged in the sensitive tips of her breasts.

Thunderstruck, she slowly brought both hands up and rubbed her fingertips experimentally back and forth over her taut, expectant nipples. Swirling eddies of sensation surged and curled through her, lapping at unacknowledged centers of pleasure embedded deep within her body. Her legs went weak and she felt all fluid and wriggly inside. Her fingers cupped and curled over her breasts, tightening. A hot, moist wave of pleasure swept her from head to toe. She stared at her breasts in shock. Suddenly her hands became his hands and bold, stunning sensations of pleasure coursed through her as memory and perception were enjoined. It was exactly the same as when that soldier had...

The wretch! He'd done something to her, caused those shocking feelings to linger in her body, bedeviling her like this! She gritted her teeth and picked up the soap, flushing those strange, tingling wonders from her body with a blast of angry chagrin. It was just like those calloused federal monsters to start pillaging and abusing folk the instant they set foot in the valley!

But as she washed her legs, drawing the cloth up her inner thighs, she felt another blush of trickling pleasure rising under her skin, lodging in the sensitive flesh of the cleft between her legs. She stared down her body in horror, then ran her fingernails up the inside of her thigh again. A shiver of raw pleasure ran through her and she straightened, glaring at the gingery curls at the base of her smooth belly. Heat was collecting there, around some unseen-unthinkable-point.

"Agh-h-h!" she groaned as she flushed crimson with heat and fell to scrubbing furiously. This was all Charlie's fault, he'd started it all, him and his wretched bargaining!

But in truth, it wasn't Charlie's bald-faced bargaining for her virtue that angered her. She'd been raised to believe that everything was fair game for an honest bit of bargaining, including that most personal and intimate of services. After all, that's what most of the marriages she knew were; a "proper bargain" struck betwixt a buck and a gal, where each dealt and traded to get their needs and wants satisfied. Most marriages in Rapture Valley had begun with just such heated negotiations.

No, it was the fact that Charlie wanted her virtue at all that angered her... and mystified her. Since he had come back from the army, he'd spent a great deal of time studying the changes she'd reluctantly undergone in his absence. When he looked at her now, he just saw those awful bumps and bulges on her body that branded her as hopelessly female... and vulnerable in special and sometimes humiliating ways.

Until today, it had still been her lingering hope, a vestige of childhood's wistful logic, that if she ignored the changes in her body, they would someday go away. But nature had already prolonged her childhood well past the norm, and now seemed bent on recouping lost time by inflicting womanly attributes on her with a vengeance.

At fourteen, when most of the young gals in the valley were budding and filling out and casting sheep's eyes at the young bucks, Whitney had still had the shape of a young lad; broadening shoulders, long gangly legs, slim hips, and flat chest. And she still strutted and swaggered and challenged local bucks in the manly frontier exertions of riding, running, and wrestling... and generally beat them. Then at the ripe old age of fifteen, she began to "bust out all over," as she had dismally put it. "Blooming," her aunt Kate called it. Whatever it was called, it made her shirtfronts bulge and her breeches bind and made the young bucks back off from her company as if she had a bad case of the cooties.

She had breasts now, healthy sized ones, too, she'd learned from surreptitious comparisons. Her waist had suddenly begun to shrink and her hips... they rounded and mounded alarmingly. And something had happened to her straightforward gait... her bottom rocked and swayed annoyingly when she stretched out to cover ground. It was all faintly embarrassing, having her body up and change on her like that. And so she had ignored it as much as possible... until today.

"Spit and roast you, Charlie Dunbar!" she growled, blaming him for this unholy rebellion of her bodily responses. But she stopped in the midst of rinsing, stilled by the realization: "No... not Charlie."

She hadn't felt anything except angry when Charlie fell on top of her and pressed her lips and tried to pry her mouth open with his tongue. And when he had reached through her ripped shirt for her breast, it was just a humiliating invasion of privacy, a typically and absurdly male flaunting of power. It wasn't anything like when he touched her there and sent trickles of warmth and quivers of pleasure through her. She'd never felt anything like that in her life... and prayed desperately that she'd never feel anything like it again!

Belatedly, she washed her hair to rid herself totally of the taint of male touch and it took considerably longer than she anticipated. Then with her wet hair wrapped in toweling, she shoved into a clean pair of breeches and was just buttoning her shirt when three sharp raps came at her door.

"Whitney?" her aunt Kate's voice had the imperious tone that demanded immediate answer. "Whitney Daniels, are you in there?"

"Yes, Aunt Kate, I was just... freshening up a bit." Whitney winced, realizing her thoughtless honesty only opened her to a raft of questions. She was known to wash and scrub her person when the necessity arose, but she'd never voluntarily "freshened up" in her life! She hurried to the door and jerked it open with a purposefully dazzling grin on her heart-shaped face. "Sweet Moses-I completely forgot the time, Aunt Kate-" she slipped by into the narrow passage and would have quickly been halfway down the stairs, if Aunt Kate hadn't had the reflexes of a timber rattler.

"Here you are, ready for evening cookfire, and here I am, late with it, and we're purely starving, the both of us- She found herself nose to nose with Aunt Kate's stern, blue-eyed suspicion and gave it one last, valiant try. "I'll have a fire going quick as a dog'll lick a dish!" She tried to duck around Kate Morrison's rail-straight form and found her way blocked again.

"You washed your hair." It was an accusation. Aunt Kate's eyes narrowed at the same time and by the same amount that Whitney's widened and rolled to catch a surprise glimpse of the towel on her head.

"So I did." Whitney managed a look that was impossibly bright and innocent.

"Where were you this afternoon?" Aunt Kate cocked her head and crossed her arms under her full bosom.

"Out-walking." Whitney faded back into her room and busied herself removing the towel from her head and taking a brush to her jumbled hair. "I'll just do a quick plait, then I'll get the wood and water-"

"Walking where?" Kate followed her inside, scrutinizing her fresh-scrubbed skin, her clean breeches and shirt. She stepped close to Whitney and sniffed pointedly, several times. There was the faint scent of teaberry on her niece's breath, but none of the rash, vaporous undercurrent of raw whiskey that often accompanied it. Still, it was a safe bet... "The still. You were out at Blackstone's still, weren't you?"

"I was out for a walk, Aunt Kate," Whitney was a master of the technique of the artful half-truth. "Gloriful Heaven, the colors that are comin' on. '... even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.'"

"Now stop that!" Kate demanded irritably. She hated it when Whitney or Blackstone Daniels quoted scripture like that. Just rolling it off their glib tongues, innocent as you please. "You know you're not supposed to be thrashing about in the woods by yourself, Whitney Daniels. It's not seemly. Or safe."

"But I wasn't by myself." Whitney managed to seem completely absorbed in her hair tangles. She didn't stop to think how it would sound when she revealed: "Charlie was with me."

"D-Dunbar?" Kate choked. "You went out into the woods with Charlie Dunbar?! Good Lord, Whitney!" Her horror over this new development eclipsed her ire at Whitney's continuing involvement in the operation of the still.

"Well, you said I wasn't to go out alone anymore." Whitney defended herself with no small pang of guilt, "So I took Charlie."

Aunt Kate sputtered, then seemed to find her tongue again. "Charlie Dunbar is no mere stripling, Whitney Daniels. He's a man... with a man's... urges. And he's strong as a bull. Why, if he were to decide... He could..."

It took all of Whitney's control and most of her considerable guile to face her aunt Kate with convincing nonchalance. Everything she'd been through that afternoon validated her aunt's fears in the most emphatic way possible. A moment later, separate relief poured covertly through two sets of limbs.

"Plant your bottom on that stool, young lady." Kate thrust a genteel but authoritative finger at the three-legged stool near the washstand.

Whitney obeyed and surrendered the brush to Aunt Kate's practiced hands. She could tell by the curt, tugging strokes of the brush that she was in for a lecture... and she could guess what about.

"It's not like you haven't been warned." Her aunt's finely featured face tightened as she worked. "You're no longer a child, Whitney Daniels. You know the straight of things, where men are concerned. I've told you what men are like." She took a deep, preparatory breath and Whitney braced.

"'Bucks' as you call them, all have a raging tempest in their gut and an unholy taint in their blood. It makes them prone to fits of heat and disagreeable tempers... and ludicrous demonstrations of their brute strength. And it makes them crave certain... fleshly indulgences... the satisfaction of which requires them to seek out the association of low, immoral women..."

"Delilah's," Whitney supplied. She'd heard this part before.

"Exactly." Both Kate's tone and posture tightened. "Delilah's . . . women born to tempt and betray and lure men from their rightful duty and decent conduct. Men get that fever in their blood and the heat just purely melts their spines... and their brains along with it. They forget everything they've ever learned; decency, honor, trustworthiness. All they know is they have to satisfy that craving fever, no matter what the cost, no matter who it hurts. Just like Samson craved Delilah, even knowing she was bad, clear through." She began to plait Whitney's hair with the intensity of a funeral preacher. "There are two kinds of women in this world, Whitney Daniels; Delilah's and decent women. But there's only one kind of man. They're all Samson's... all just waiting for a Delilah to come along."

Whitney nodded, more in understanding than agreement. She'd heard her aunt Kate's summary of the world of men before, several times, and it never failed to make her a bit uncomfortable.

Oddly enough, proper, upstanding Aunt Kate didn't hold much with "all that 'bible business.'" She declared she'd started to read the Good Book straight through once, in her formative years, and was so offended by all the begetting and slaughtering that she never made it past the Book of the Judges. There was one story that seemed to stick in her mind, however, one story that seemed to her to contain a cogent and incontrovertible truth for womankind: Samson and Delilah. And though she never talked about it, Whitney had guessed that somewhere in her prior life, probably in her life as Mrs. Clayton Morrison, there was a Samson who'd succumbed to a Delilah.

Now just past thirty years old, Kate Morrison had come to live with Whitney and Blackstone Daniels upon the death of her husband, nearly five years before. She was the younger sister of Whitney's deceased mother and, lacking children of her own, had decided to devote herself to raising her sister's motherless daughter. When she arrived, with her wagonload of elegant furniture and her fine lady-dresses, she was appalled to find a meager two-room cabin and a wild, gangling colt of a girl... who at thirteen was appallingly accomplished in sundry male vices. She immediately set about transforming both their house and their lives.

The two-room log cabin was slowly extended into a two-story house with two real glass windows and hand-split planking and whitewash added to the interior. Kate Morrison made few concessions to the hardships of their frontier setting. A proper house was a proper house, she maintained, and decent standards of living and behavior had to be upheld regardless of location. Unfortunately, those standards also included a rather trying set of expectations for her brother-in-law and niece.

Single-handedly she had set about regularizing their quixotic homelife; no mean feat, with a pair whose prime axioms in life were: "Good enough-" and "Everything has its price." She instituted household routines, provided for improved nutrition and hygiene, and insisted on what she termed "civilized decorum" in her presence. "In her presence" became the operative term in the new Daniels household; for what her aunt Kate didn't see, she couldn't disallow. Thus, Whitney's unconventional life of rambling about at her pa's side continued, covertly, for another two years, until Nature herself added impetus to Kate's insistence that Whitney's "buckish" behavior be curtailed.

But now it seemed that what Nature and her aunt Kate together had failed to accomplish, Charlie Dunbar and a nameless federal soldier with hot, silvery eyes and a mysterious, lingering touch had managed to achieve. Sitting on the stool, having her aunt Kate put finishing touches on her thick braid, Whitney suddenly felt her entire universe rising in unison and shifting one seat to the right.

Everything in the world as she knew it seemed to be changing somehow, her relationships, her outlook, even her awareness of her own body. A slow-building sense of dread crept through her. The pure and inescapable fact was that in spite of all her determination and efforts to forestall it, she was turning into a woman. The only question was: which kind?

Through the rest of the evening, Whitney immersed herself in work and miscellaneous talk aimed at staving off Aunt Kate's too-close-to-the-mark suspicions and her own discomforting thoughts. They dispensed with the cookfire, settling for a cold supper, then set their hands to mundane evening tasks like milking, shelling dried beans, and stringing onions for hanging in the smokehouse.

The autumn evenings were growing quite cool in the valley, and Whitney laid a fire in the keeping room hearth and lit the oil lamp. Kate settled on her quilt-covered French settee, near the fire, and picked up her tin-rimmed spectacles and needlework. Whitney purposefully took down the flintlock musket that hung above the mantel and began to clean it.

All through supper and chores, Whitney's mind had been racing, returning over and over to the soldiers that had invaded Rapture Valley. Sooner or later, they were bound to learn of her pa's distilling operations and come looking for his still and his, cache of spirits. And after this afternoon, she realized dismally, there would be at least one amongst their number who would be ill-disposed toward believing any denials she and Kate might make. She watched Aunt Kate surreptitiously and tried to decide whether to risk raising still more questions by telling her about the federal soldiers.

"Whitney..." Kate peered over her spectacles. The sight of Whitney's tapered hands working knowledgably with a firearm had produced a determined knot in her brow. She'd been doing a bit of watching and thinking, herself. "I want those breeches. All of your breeches, in fact."

"Why, Aunt Kate!"

"And your boots. And I want them now." Kate lowered her embroidery hoop and glared solidly at Whitney.

"M-my b-boots? And b-breeches? But, Aunt Kate, they won't fit you at all!" Whitney's eyes got that impossible wide and innocent look that never failed to infuriate Kate. It was the hallmark of Daniels guile.

"Don't be absurd, Whitney," Kate's chin came up to a familiar, no-nonsense angle. "I want those breeches."

"Well... you know I'm exceedingly partial to them, Aunt Kate." She rose, rubbing her hands down her thighs, having the disturbing feeling she was about to be boxed further into that "womanly" corner.

"And exceedingly indecent in them. They're too small and too revealing... and they give you far too much license of thought and movement." They both knew the latter was exactly the reason Whitney clung to them so tenaciously.

"But, I'm not indecent, Aunt Kate." Whitney managed to look a little shocked as she scrambled mentally to rescue both her mode of dress and her freedom. "I'm just comfortable. Like you always say: a decent woman's known by deeds, not by fancy trappings. You'll recall, I did try that corset and those skirts you made me. Didn't take to them at all. Felt all trussed up, like a pork rump ready for the spit, just goes to prove the righteous wisdom in that old saw: one shoe will not fit all feet. Why, I tell you, Aunt Kate, once you get used to the slide of soft deerskin against your bu- "

"Boots, Whitney... and breeches!" Kate pushed up from her seat with a furious scowl and pointed demandingly to the spot where she stood. "And none of that slippery Daniels talk of yours will change my mind. It's time you began to dress and act like a proper young woman."

"B-but what'll I wear climbin' up in the loft to pitch down a bag of oats, or muckin' out barn stalls, or hitchin' up the oxen for plowin'? I've purely got to have my boots, Aunt Kate-why, even you have a pair of old boots for when the mud gets as-nkle deep."

"Whitney!"

"I don't see the sense of it, Aunt Kate, I surely don't." Finding practicality falling short, Whitney scrambled yet again and instinctively reverted to the familiar and reassuring ground of down-and-out bargaining. "But I'm nothing if not dutiful. And as such, I'm willing to trade my breeches for those torturous skirts... on Sabbath. And I'll sit, properly trussed up, and read the Good Book and not spit nor scratch- "

"You will not wear skirts just on the Sabbath, young lady!" Kate stalked forward, her expressive hazel eyes snapping. "You'll wear them every day."

"And not get a stroke of work done?" Whitney made the most of a properly horrified expression. "But who'll feed the stock and carry wood and roust broody hens up in the trees? Why, that would be a purely mortal sacrifice, Aunt Kate. We can't possibly spare me more than one day a week."

"You'll learn to work in skirts, in time. And there's no better way to get used to them than to plunge in and wear them every day."

"Every day? But I'd positively suffocate, being stuffed into the wretched things more than one day a week. A body has to ease into these things, Aunt Kate, or the shock of suddenly being cumbered and lashed-in could bring on some dread bodily complaint!" She was watching Kate's eyes intensely and saw the flame in them flicker... just as she'd hoped it would.

"Every single day, Whitney Daniels." Kate stiffened her back and tucked her chin, bracing for what she knew in her very bones was about to happen.

"No more than two days a week."

"Every day... but, keep the boots for chores."

"Plus one pair of breeches, and I'll wear skirts two days a week after dinner and all day on Sabbath."

"Every day!" Kate demanded stubbornly. But she was feeling the pull of Whitney's glowing, autumn-fire eyes and couldn't stop herself from adding: "after chores and all day on Sabbath."

"No corset."

"Yes, a corset. Proper womanly dress."

"Every day of the week..." Whitney countered, "after supper and all day on Sabbath. But no corset."

They stood nearly nose to nose, neither flinching nor batting an eye. But in the end, Whitney's worldly apprenticeship in "dealing," under the charismatic, smooth-talking Blackstone Daniels, gave her the edge. A slow, stunning mischief of a grin cast irresistible, green-eyed charm around her like an inescapable net and Kate Morrison's proper matronly resistance was swept up in it. It was the final and most devastating weapon in the Daniels's considerable arsenal of persuasion... a grin that was a final gambit and a claim of triumph all in one. It was the ultimate seduction and there wasn't a body alive, regardless of age or sex, that was known to resist it when a Daniels turned it on, full force.

"At supper every day." Kate reddened and scowled at her own gullibility. She hated the way Blackstone and Whitney sucked her into the blessed bargaining again and again, and hated even more the way she always seemed to come out on the short end of things. "And all day on Sabbath." When Whitney's eyebrows rose expectantly, she found herself adding: "... and no corset."

"Done!" Whitney slapped her thigh with her palm, her face aglow, her forest-green eyes littered with flecks of autumn fire. She flashed a brilliant smile as she started for the stairs. "Now that we're agreed, I guess there's no need to surrender up my breeches, is there? Oh..." she paused and looked at Aunt Kate with infuriating sincerity, "are you retiring now, too, Aunt Kate? I could bank the fire and light you a candle..."

Kate drew her chin back farther and the dent in her brow deepened. Her lips moved, but no sound issued from them. Lord-how she hated it when Whitney nimble-toed around her, then got all earnest and helpful.

"No!"

Whitney collapsed back against the door for a second time that day, feeling as though she'd run yet another frenzied race for her very life. In the quiet darkness, her heart was beating in her ears, her breathing was ragged. The euphoria that always accompanied the final escalation of striking a deal drained all too quickly and she was left feeling winded and strangely unsettled. She pulled off her boots and felt her way through the familiar darkness to collapse, face down, on her large mahogany bed.

A moment later she rolled over onto her back and stared up at the ghostly tracings formed by the lace of the elegant, crocheted canopy above her. As her eyes adjusted to the moonlight coming through the wavery glass of the window, she could make out the slanting sweep of the roof just beyond the lace. She turned her head to search out the familiar night-shapes of her room; the lumbering oak chest of drawers, the graceful washstand with its marble top glowing eerily in the moonlight, the three-legged stool and the linen closet. How could everything else seem so unchanged?