"Brenna!" Jenny interrupted, thunderstruck by her own callousness. "Are you much grieved by Alexander's death? He was your brother and-"

"Don't talk of it any more," Brenna pleaded shakily. "I cried when Father told me, but the tears were few and I feel guilty because I didn't love him as I ought. Not then and not now. I couldn't. He was so-mean-spirited. It's wrong to speak ill of the dead, yet I can't think of much good to say of him." Her voice trailed off, and she pulled her cloak about her in the damp wind, gazing at Jenny in mute appeal to change the subject.

"Tell me how I look, then," Jenny invited quickly, giving her sister a quick, hard hug.

They stopped walking, their way blocked by the dense woods that covered the rest of the slope. A slow, thoughtful smile spread across Brenna's beautiful face as she studied her stepsister, her hazel eyes roving over Jenny's expressive face, which was dominated by a pair of large eyes as clear as dark blue crystal beneath gracefully winged, auburn brows. "Well, you're-you're quite pretty!"

"Good, but do you see anything unusual about me?" Jenny asked, thinking of Mother Ambrose's words as she put her wimple back on and pinned the short woolen veil in place atop it. "Anything at all which might make a male behave oddly?"

"No," Brenna stated, for she saw Jenny through the eyes of a young innocent. "Nothing at all." A man would have answered very differently, for although Jennifer Merrick wasn't pretty in the conventional way, her looks were both striking and provocative. She had a generous mouth that beckoned to be kissed, eyes like liquid sapphires that shocked and invited, hair like lush, red-gold satin, and a slender, voluptuous body that was made for a man's hands.

"Your eyes are blue," Brenna began helpfully, trying to describe her, and Jenny chuckled.

"They were blue two years ago," she said. Brenna opened her mouth to answer, but the words became a scream that was stifled by a man's hand that clapped over her mouth as he began dragging her backward into the dense cover of the woods.