Deep as the Rivers (Santa Fe Trilogy) (48 page)

   
She had excellent timing, Samuel would give her that. All the theatrical gestures, the cajoling and tears—she could hold a stage with the best of them. Old Senator Soames always fell for it. So did Richard. So had he, at first. Shelby watched as she wrung her hands and moistened her lips with a pleading look in her eyes.

   
“We’ve both had time apart to reconsider our lives. I...I wanted to prove to you that I could change, could learn to make a home here in the West. You believed you had lost me forever and I’ve feared so much that you might have been killed... I must say your sister and that foreigner she’s married to weren’t at all forthcoming about where you’d gone or when you might return. They wouldn’t tell me anything.”

   
He arched one eyebrow cynically, standing with his arms crossed and feet braced apart. “You scarcely seemed to be pining away in my absence. Liza tells me you’ve become the belle of the Mississippi. Every prominent family in the city has feted you while I was upriver.”

   
“Well, I did have to meet your friends and business associates. If we’re to build a new life here—”

   
“We are not building anything, Tish. I told you back in Washington, our marriage has for all practical purposes been over for three years.”

   
“You can’t do this to me!” She almost stamped her foot, but restrained herself and forced the tears to well up instead. “I’ve done exactly as you wished. I’ve come to you in St. Louis. I risked my life traveling up that hellish, savage-infested river. I’ve given up Washington, broken poor Daddy’s heart leaving him the way I did—just for you, Samuel. All for you.”

   
“All too late, Tish. You know it, too. Is that why you concocted the lie about drowning? To buy yourself time so you could get here and insinuate yourself back into my life before the divorce bill was brought to the Virginia legislature?”

   
Tish paled, balling her hands into tight fists to keep from clawing at him. How had he guessed? When had she become so transparent to him? So careless of him as to let matters get this disastrously out of hand? She swallowed the bile rising in her throat and cried prettily. “How can you be so cruel? I have nowhere to go. Daddy will be ruined by the scandal of a divorce. He’ll disown me.”

   
“Your father would never disown his precious Tishabelle, not even if you sprouted a tail and horns and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue stark naked.” Samuel watched her growing frustration as all her well-rehearsed, teary scenarios failed, one by one. “Anyway, you’ll always have Richard to console you. He is here with you, isn’t he?”

   
“You’ve always hated my brother,” she accused.

   
He shrugged. “Bullock may always do what you want, Tish, but I will not. Best you have him take you home to Daddy. I’m going through with the divorce.”

   
The words were delivered with flat finality. She stared at him with pale calculating eyes narrowed. “It’s her, isn’t it? That little French slut you took upriver with you—the one you thought you’d married.” Tish smiled in satisfaction at his lack of reaction. She had long ago learned that he never revealed his most deep-seated emotions. Richard had been right, damn it all. Her husband was well and truly lost to her.

   
“What do you think you know, Tish?” he asked carefully.

   
“I know everything. One of the prominent men I’ve become acquainted with happens to be the little fool’s guardian. Mr. Wescott has been most concerned about his ward’s absence. Imagine his horror to learn that she had contracted a bigamous marriage with my husband,” she finished in catty triumph.

   
Samuel’s guts clenched, but he fought to remain calm, although it had never been more difficult in his life. “You don’t intend to rusticate here in St. Louis, Tish,” he began; carefully neutral. He had to buy time for Olivia, to get Tish back to Washington, away from St. Louis where she could ruin his innocent love. “I’m frankly amazed you lasted for these few months.”

   
“Now that I’ve been reunited with my husband and his mission here is completed, I had hopes we might return to civilization.” She stressed the we maliciously.

   
“And if I don’t dance attendance on you?” His voice was low, deadly.

   
“Why, Samuel darling, it’s quite simple. I shall take shameless advantage of what the distraught Mr. Wescott told me and announce to the world that Olivia St. Etienne married you and lived as your wife thinking all the while that I was dead...which I most obviously am not.”

   
“A situation I itch to remedy, my dear,” he replied bitterly.

   
“Ah, but you won’t, Samuel dearest. I know that you’re too honorable to stoop to murder.”

   
A sudden flash of intuition caused him to ask, “But you aren’t, are you, Tish? Neither is your lapdog, Bullock.”

   
She feigned confusion. “I’m quite certain I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I want is my husband returned safely to me. And now I have him, don’t I, Samuel?”

   
“What you have, Tish, is a stalemate. I won’t petition for divorce and you won’t besmirch Olivia’s reputation. When do you wish to return to Washington?” he asked with bitter resignation.

   
“I think by the first of the week. I shall have to have time to pack. And we must attend the gala the Parkers are giving tomorrow night. You will escort me, of course.” She looked up at him coyly. “I suppose I should move into that quaint little cottage of yours now that you’ve returned.”

   
“Don’t put yourself out, Tish. You could never survive without a retinue of servants and I’ve no room for them—not to mention no place for your beloved brother either.”

   
“Very well. But don’t think to publicly humiliate me by sleeping with your French whore. You’d not like my retaliation, I vow.”

   
Samuel stepped closer to her and seized a fistful of silver gilt hair, twisting it around his fist. He pulled her head back, forcing her to look him full in the face. “Don’t ever threaten me or Olivia again, Tish. We have an agreement. I’ll not tarnish her reputation. You had better not either.”

   
With that, he released her and stalked out, leaving her to rub her aching scalp while she seethed.

* * * *

   
“I already told you I don’t care a fig for my reputation! Don’t let her do this to us, Samuel,” Olivia pleaded.

   
Shelby stopped pacing across the Quinns’ library and sat down on the small settee beside her. “I have no choice, Livy. Neither do you. If I don’t return with her to Washington, I’ll just be giving her father more ammunition to use against us. God, a court might consider my failure to escort her as desertion. If I’m ever to get free of her, I have to fight Senator Soames on his home ground, away from any possible scandal here.”

   
“You promised me you would never return to her and now she’s blackmailing you into it.” Olivia knew she sounded stubborn, petulant even, but she could not seem to help it.

   
“I’m doing only what I must. You know I would never touch her,” he said patiently.

   
“Nor me either until this whole ugly mess is over,” she replied disconsolately.

   
“It could take a year, Livy.’’ There was anxiety in his voice, his manner, as he watched her. “I have no right...”

   
Her heart turned over and she seized his hands, raising them, kissing the callused palms one at a time. “Samuel, sometimes you have no more sense than a chicken. You have every right. And I will wait no matter how long it takes.”

   
After Samuel had departed, Elise found Olivia staring out the window, lost in thought. “You’re sad,” she said sympathetically. “Do you want to talk?”

   
Olivia turned to Samuel’s sister as the tears she had held at bay so long battled for release. “I love him so much and I may lose him. If only he weren’t so pigheadedly honorable, she couldn’t do this to us.”

   
“Being pigheadedly honorable is one of my brother’s failings, but neither of us would love him half so much if he were any different,” Elise replied, remembering an earlier time. “Once he risked his life to save my reputation. He’ll do no less for you, Olivia. It will all work out in the end,” she added, praying that it was true.

   
“In the meanwhile he and Tish will masquerade as husband and wife. What can she hope to gain by it?”

   
Elise shook her head. “I never understood Leticia Soames. There’s something about her...something dark and sick beneath all that gilded beauty.” For some reason Richard Bullock’s handsome face flashed through her mind and she shivered, then forced the thought aside, wanting to reassure Olivia. “Samuel knows her for what she is now. He’ll deal with her. In the meanwhile, we can’t have you pining away like some recluse. I recommend a shopping trip. It’s marvelous therapy.”

   
Their conversation was interrupted by a servant rapping lightly on Olivia’s bedroom door, asking to talk with Madame Quinn.

   
“There’s a gentleman asking to see Mademoiselle St. Etienne, Madame. Monsieur Wescott, her guardian.”

   
Elise turned to Olivia. “You don’t have to see him if you don’t want to.”

   
“No. I’m not afraid to face him,” Olivia replied. “In fact, I’d rather enjoy it.”

   
Downstairs Emory Wescott stood in the Quinns’ parlor, mentally rehearsing his speech for Olivia, half expecting that she would refuse to see him. At least he had to try it the easy way. Perhaps he could bring her around with the lure of the New Orleans trip now that Shelby’s first wife had so conveniently broken up their little romance.

   
“Good afternoon, Mr. Wescott.” The coolness of her voice brought him swiveling around to face her.

   
“Mr. Wescott, Olivia? Come, come now. What happened to Uncle Emory?” he cajoled, walking closer to give her a fatherly embrace.

   
Olivia neatly sidestepped him without backing away. “He’s dead. An uncle would never try to sell his niece as if she were a common harlot. I must say I admire your gall coming here as if you hadn’t tried to pander me to Samuel.”

   
His face turned the color of aged bricks. “See here, Olivia, I’ll not accept that kind of talk from Julian St. Etienne’s daughter, whom I took in when her father died in penury. You owe me a debt of gratitude, gel.”

   
“I may owe you money for my upkeep, perhaps, but gratitude? I think not after you attempted to collect the debt the way you did.”

   
“You went to Shelby willingly enough after all was said and done,” he snapped testily. “I saw you and Shelby pawing at each other on several occasions.”

   
The thought of this twisted, greedy man spying on them made Olivia feel violated. She blanched as Wescott smirked triumphantly and continued.

   
“He even married you in some backwoods ceremony, didn’t he? A pity it was bigamous. If anyone in the city learned about your scandalous liaison with Shelby, you’d be quite ruined. That’s why I came to take you back under my protection.”

   
“I don’t need your protection.”

   
“I beg to differ. You’re a hot-blooded little chit who needs guidance. You should be thank—”

   
“This interview is at an end,” she said coldly. “Get out. Right now.”

   
“You ungrateful little—”

   
“You will leave this instant or I’ll show you a few of the tricks I learned from Micajah Johnstone. You won’t like them.” Olivia extracted a small, slender dagger from her sleeve. “Micajah’s first lesson was to always be armed. Shall I show you the second?”

   
Emory Wescott jumped away, backing toward the door, red-faced and furious. His eyes darkened to dull pewter, narrowing on her as he turned in the hallway. “You willful, foolish little bitch, you’ll pay for this.”

   
When he was gone, Olivia replaced the knife in her sleeve, then sat down on a chair, trembling from head to foot.

   
“Don’t weaken now. That was quite an excellent showing,” Elise said from the doorway. “I couldn’t have done better myself and I was accounted pretty good with a knife by some people who should know.” A small smile of remembrance tinged her lips as she pulled up another chair beside her friend. “I didn’t mean to spy on you, but I was concerned. Wescott isn’t to be trusted. I’ve always had a feeling about him.”

   
“Samuel thinks he’s the one who was supplying Stuart Pardee.”

   
Elise digested the fact that her secretive brother had shared his suspicions with Olivia. “How much do you know about what Samuel does for the army?” she asked point-blank.

   
“You mean that he spies for President Madison?” Olivia replied artlessly.