Elizabeth Grayson (22 page)

“Rue told me the chance you took to get me to Hardesty’s Landing,” Ann went on, marveling. “I’ve never once heard of anyone running the Missouri River in the dark.”

“I hardly did it by myself. Rue helped, and Beck Morgan ...” He lowered his gaze from hers. “I’m just sorry it took so long to get you someone who could help.”

Still, she knew he’d risked his steamer and everyone on it so she could have this morning, this child.

This chance.

Ann reached out and brushed his cheek by way of thanks, reveling at the sun-drenched warmth of his skin.

He turned his gaze from Christina to her. His eyes were a brilliant blue, clear all the way to the bottom. They were honest eyes, trusting eyes. Eyes that held the promise of a life she was just beginning to dream about claiming for herself.

She spread her fingers, cupping his face with her hand. She stroked the corner of his mouth with her thumb, sought the bristle of his whiskers with the hollow of her palm, felt his breath fall warm against her wrist. No matter what had brought them together, here was a man strong enough to protect her, solid enough to build a life on, and tender enough to win her heart.

But then, he’d already won it, hadn’t he?

Over these last months, he’d proved he was someone she could count on, someone she could trust. Last night he’d been with her when she’d needed him so desperately. This morning she’d found him cradling her daughter in his arms as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to scoop up her child and comfort her. As if Christina was as precious to him as she was to her. As if after their marriage’s rocky start, they might be able to make a life together.

Just then Christina gave a high, squeaky cry and nuzzled against the half-open placket of Chase’s shirt. The words of commitment Ann had been about to speak fell abruptly silent.

Chase laughed and rose. “The baby was happy enough to be with me when I changed her diaper and let her suck my fingers,” he said, “but what I think she wants now is something only her mother can give her.”

Balancing Christina against his shoulder, Chase helped Ann to her feet and tucked her back in bed. Then he scooped the baby up in his hands and offered her to Ann.

He does this so easily,
she thought, amazed. As if he knows how to hold Christina so she won’t break.

Ann found she wasn’t nearly so deft. She fumbled for a grip on the squirming child. Only gradually did she discover how to cup her hands and nestle that small dark head in the crook of her arm. Chase stood over them, giving Ann the time she needed to get the baby settled.

Finally Ann drew her daughter against her and smiled at him. A current flowed between them, a current so warm and sweet she might have lingered in the light of his answering smile, except that Christina squalled, impatient for her dinner.

Once Chase had gone, Ann opened the front of her bedgown and put the baby to her breast just the way Lydia had showed her the night before. As Christina suckled, Ann looked down at her little girl, and the soft, crooning words she had been about to speak died to silence on her lips.

Because what Ann saw in her baby’s face, was the very essence of Christina’s father.

chapter ten

THE CITY OF ST. LOUIS ROSE IN TIERS FROM WHERE HALF-A-hundred steamers nuzzled up close to the foot of the levee. The mile-long expanse was swarming with wagons and drays, with steamboat agents and stevedores, with passengers and pursers. Goods—both inbound and outbound—stood in mounds along the cobblestoned slope that lay between the river and the solid block of warehouses fifty yards back from the water.

“That, my love, is your new home,” Ann said, standing at the head of the Texas deck, holding Christina in her arms. “At the end of the season your papa’s going to find us a fine, new house up there in town. We’ll have a garden where you can play, and I can sit and do my needlework.”

Christina gurgled and waved her arms.

In these last two weeks Ann had picked up Chase’s habit of talking to Christina as if she understood every word. In truth, Ann had learned most of what she knew about taking care of the baby from him. She’d learned how to lay Christina across her knees to burp her, how to hold her daughter with one hand and diaper with the other. But Ann had perfected her parental sway—a rhythmic shift from foot to foot—all by herself.

Just then, Chase’s sister Evangeline turned from the railing beside her. “Is
all
of that St. Louis?” she asked, wide-eyed.

Hearing the faint waver in the girl’s voice, Ann reached across and patted her arm. As grown-up as Evie sometimes seemed, she was still only fifteen and had never set foot outside Hardesty’s Landing until she boarded the
Andromeda.

Ann introduced the city to her bit by bit. “The warehouses store the goods we brought downriver,” she pointed out. “Up at the top of the rise is the business district. It’s full of hotels and offices and shops—”

“Shops?” Evangeline perked up. “Oh, Ann, will you take me to some of those shops while we’re here?”

Chase was giving the girl a stipend for helping with Christina, and the money must have been burning a hole in her pocket.

“We leave for Sioux City at midday tomorrow,” Ann reminded her, “and I suppose my stepfather will expect to see us while we’re here. Maybe Rue will have time to take you shopping.”

“I’ll go ask!” Evie cried and darted toward the wheelhouse.

“Don’t distract Rue until the
Andromeda
’s tied up!” Ann shouted after her, but the girl was gone.

That left Ann alone to consider her reunion with James Rossiter. She’d left the town house and boarded the
Andromeda
without his permission, committed the unpardonable offense of altering the plans he’d made for her. Now he’d make her pay dearly for defying him.

He’d insist that she and Christina come back to live at the town house, at least for the rest of the shipping season. But Ann had come a long way since the morning she’d taken the commodore’s arm and gone down to marry Chase. She wasn’t going to allow her stepfather to order her life—or Christina’s, either.

Chase would help her make her stand against the commodore, if she asked him to. But she didn’t want to ask more of Chase than what he’d given them already.

“Well, at least we won’t have to face your grandfather on our own,” she whispered to Christina and turned to the hurricane deck where her husband was bawling orders.

From the way he stood with his feet planted wide on the planking and his head held high, Ann could see how proud he was to be bringing the
Andromeda
safely home. Judging from the figures he showed her last night, not only had the trip to Fort Benton gone smoothly, but it had also been extremely profitable.

The
Andromeda
had been tied up at the levee not quite ten minutes when a messenger bounded up the gangway and delivered an invitation to dinner written in the commodore’s own hand.

Ann immediately lost her appetite.

Chase studied the missive for one long moment before he handed it back to her. “So he’s summoned us to the town house, has he?”

The hint of censure in his voice surprised her. “I suppose he has,” she acknowledged.

“To upbraid you for leaving?”

“I expect.”

“And pass judgment on Christina?”

Ann glanced up, surprised that he’d seen the invitation for what it was. “Dare I send him our excuses?” she asked him.

“We’ll beard the lion in his den—” A smile quirked one corner of Chase’s mouth. “—But perhaps things won’t go quite the way the commodore expects.”

Ann wasn’t sure what that meant and spent the afternoon worrying. By the time Mary Fairley, the commodore’s longtime housekeeper, led them to the town house’s parlor, Ann’s heart was throbbing against her corset stays.

Chase must have sensed her uneasiness because he closed a hand around her elbow. “You’re presenting the commodore with his first grandchild,” he whispered. “No man alive could spurn such a beautiful baby.”

Ann had certainly never expected Enoch Hardesty to cuddle and croon over her newborn daughter the way he had. But Ann’s hopes that Christina would melt the commodore’s heart were dashed the moment the three of them crossed the threshold. Instead of speaking so much as a word of welcome, James Rossiter waited in frigid silence as they crossed what seemed like an acre of flowery Aubusson carpet.

“Good evening, sir,” Chase greeted him.

James Rossiter ignored the words and turned a scowl on Ann.

“You damned ungrateful girl!” he spat at her. “You left this house without my permission! After I’d taken responsibility for you when your mother died, after I’d sent you to that exclusive school back East, after I found you a husband when you disgraced yourself, you show your gratitude by ignoring my wishes.”

If half of what he claimed was true, Ann wouldn’t be married to Chase, she wouldn’t be standing with Christina in her arms. She wouldn’t have had reason to run away. A need to speak the truth clawed at the back of her throat.

“Didn’t I make it perfectly clear,” he all but snarled at her, “that I intended for you to stay on here at the town house? It was a damned generous offer, and instead of having the good grace to accept it, you slunk away without a single word.”

Beside her, Chase shifted back on his heels preparing to come to her defense. Ann stayed him with a touch.

“Indeed,” she admitted, drawing Christina close as she faced her stepfather. “I did leave without your consent. But I was a married woman by then and no longer your concern. My place was with my husband, even if it meant following him all the way to Montana.”

The commodore’s face darkened and his fists knotted at his sides. For an instant Ann thought he meant to strike her for her impertinence, and she shielded the baby with her hands. But the commodore managed to regain control of himself.

He turned on Chase instead. “You knew I meant for her to stay on here while you were gone. It’s what we agreed.”

Chase gave a laconic shrug. “I don’t recollect that Ann’s living arrangements were any part of the bargain we made.”

“She defied me—and you helped her do it!”

“All I did was accede to my wife’s wishes—as any good husband would.”

Ann sliced a startled glance at her husband. Chase hadn’t “acceded to” anything; he’d done his best to send her home. Now he was defending her, lying for her sake.

The commodore’s eyes narrowed as he looked from Chase to her. Clearly he hadn’t expected they’d form an alliance, stand united against him. A scowl furrowed his wide face. Then, as if he could see he’d gain no ground with them today, the commodore’s stance softened, and he drew a breath.

“Well, then,” he said, “lets have a look at that baby.”

“At your
granddaughter,
you mean?” Ann asked, determined to press her advantage while she could.

Rossiter grimaced. “I’d like a look at my
granddaughter,
if you please.”

Though Ann had pressed for that acknowledgment, she had to fight down a surge of protectiveness as she folded back the baby’s lace-trimmed blanket. If James Rossiter said so much as one disparaging word ...

Christina blinked up at her grandfather as if she knew she was on display.

The moment James Rossiter clapped eyes on her, his face changed, falling into lines of tenderness and delight that looked like they might once have been habitual and well-used. Ann wondered if it had been the struggle to rise from the corruption and squalor of Natchez-under-the-Hill when he was a young man that had turned him into such a tyrant. Or were there other things that made maintaining his power and control so important?

As her stepfather stroked Christina’s thick dark hair, the hard knot of Ann’s misgivings eased. Perhaps for all his guile and manipulativeness, the commodore had a gentler side, one he’d never been able to show to Boothe or her.

But when he turned his black, speculative gaze from the baby to Ann, she knew enough to shield herself. “Well, my dear,” he drawled. “I can’t say I see much of
you
in the child.”

The comment seemed innocuous enough, but his words resounded in Ann’s head like a slap. What he meant was that with her shock of black hair and widow’s peak, with her dark eyes and narrow mouth, Christina looked exactly like her father.

For Ann, that resemblance was not only a reminder of things she longed to forget, but a fuse burning toward detonation. How long before Chase saw the likeness, too? How long before he guessed the truth? And what would he think when that moment came?

Yet, for now at least, Chase seemed oblivious.

“What we hope,” he told the commodore, resting his hand at the small of Ann’s back, “is that Christina will have her mother’s grace and wit, as well as her generous heart.”

Ann’s cheeks warmed. For the second time since they’d arrived at the town house, her husband had taken her part against the commodore. Not wanting either of the men to guess how much Chase’s words had meant to her, she drew Christina close and turned away.

And all but collided with her stepbrother.

Boothe reached out to steady her. But as considerate as the gesture might have appeared, his grip bit deep into her upper arm. In the moment before she jerked out of his hold, the scent of moth-chaser and malevolence nearly overwhelmed her.

“You had the child,” he said, his black eyes holding hers.

“Yes,” Ann confirmed. “A little girl.”

“And what do you call her?”

Chase turned at the sound of Boothe’s voice. “We call our daughter Christina.”

“Your
daughter?” Boothe scoffed, his voice ripe with irony.

“Annie’s and mine.”

For a moment, a frisson of antagonism that had nothing to do with Christina or Ann danced between the two men.

Then Boothe shot Ann his viper’s smile and reached to grasp one of the baby’s flailing hands. “Is she his, indeed?”

Ann shrank back against her husband’s chest, not wanting her stepbrother’s touch to sully her daughter. Refusing to tread the dangerous ground of Christina’s paternity.

She fumbled for a reason to get away. “Perhaps I should go and feed Christina so she’ll sleep through dinner.”

“You may use my study if you like,” the commodore offered. “And while you’re gone, I mean to offer these two gentlemen some of my excellent brandy. From what I hear, both the
Andromeda
and
Cassiopeia
did very well on their runs to Fort Benton, and we have a great deal to celebrate.”

Once Ann was settled in one of the armchairs in her stepfather’s study, she opened the bodice of her gown and guided her nipple into Christina’s mouth. The baby snorted with delight and suckled noisily.

“You
were
hungry, weren’t you?” Ann murmured, smoothing the baby’s hair. How could any child conceived the way Christina had been, have become so precious to her?

Christina nursed for a good long while, and just as the baby was falling asleep, a chill of uneasiness slithered up Ann’s back. Instinctively she turned and saw Boothe standing in the doorway to the servants’ stairs, watching her. For a moment their gazes held, then with a feral smile, he sauntered toward her.

Cold speared Ann’s heart. She tugged at the baby’s blanket, veiling both Christina and herself from his view. “How dare you intrude on us here?” she hissed at him.

He settled himself at the edge of the commodore’s desk, an arm’s-length away. “Goodness, Ann,” he observed quietly. “Who’d have thought you’d take to that bastard child the way you have?”

Ann drew the blanket higher. “I refuse to make an innocent child pay for her father’s sins.”

“Or for her mother’s?”

Ann felt the blood flood into her cheeks. “Her mother was blameless in this!”

Boothe shrugged. “The little girl’s dark-haired,” he observed mildly. “And she’s going to have her father’s eyes.”

“She’s not a thing like him!”

He snickered, showing his teeth. “I thought you liked him well enough when you lay with him.”

“He took me against my will—as well you know.”

“Perhaps he’s sorry,” he suggested and reached for the blanket. “Perhaps he’d like a chance to know his daughter.”

She slapped his hand away, hot, black loathing bubbling beneath her sternum. “Her father has no rights at all where Christina is concerned.”