Elizabeth Grayson (32 page)

He scrubbed at his mouth with the back of his hand.

Annie had come to him that night in St. Louis when he hadn’t even known how to be with himself. She’d cupped his face between her hands and told him she believed in him. She’d gathered him into her arms, delighted him with the warm, yielding sweetness of her mouth. Then she’d offered him the kind of consolation he’d needed so desperately.

She’d given herself to him.

What incredible courage it must have taken for her to do that. He’d seen by the tremble in her hands and the set of her mouth just how much each new intimacy frightened her. Yet she’d trusted him. She’d responded to him with a shy voluptuousness that made him ache with love and longing even now. She’d abandoned herself and found joy in being one with him.

Annie had given him back himself that night. She’d pleased him and soothed him and renewed him in a way he’d never imagined anyone could. He’d awakened that next morning loving her more than he ever imagined possible.

After that one perfect night, Chase had assumed what they’d shared would grow into a deep and enduring marriage. But Ann had backed away. She’d asked for time, more time. An indefinite period of time while she—

While she what?

He loved Ann, and he believed she loved him, too. They were married, shared a child they both adored, and were standing on the threshold of a wonderful life together. Why couldn’t they just go ahead with it?

Chase sighed, downed the last of his coffee, and waited. But Ann didn’t come, and what he saw as the
Andromeda
rounded the next bend made him curse under his breath.

In the middle of the stream, a steamer had grounded on a sandbar. Because shipping was a business where time was money, one boat generally ignored the plight of another unless the potential for loss of life was involved. But because this steamer was lodged crosswise to the current, preventing
Andromeda
’s passage, they were going to have to stop and help.

Then Chase noticed the gold star emblazoned on stretchers between the chimneys. He saw the half-moon finial on the pilothouse roof and realized this was the
Cassiopeia.

It was Boothe Rossiter’s steamer that had run aground.

ANN KNEW HE’D COME.

She listened all morning to the officers’ shouted consultations on how to free the
Cassiopeia
from the sandbar. She watched all afternoon from the safety of the cabin’s doorway as the crews off-loaded the smaller steamer’s cargo. She felt the
Andromeda
’s floorboards shimmy beneath her shoes as the engines labored to pull the
Cassiopeia
into deeper water. She waited as they reloaded and towed the disabled craft upstream to put in for the night.

Though she knew Chase would have done his best to keep Boothe from bedeviling her, he materialized out of the sunset’s sulphurous glow. He loomed up in the cabin doorway, a dark, menacing presence that cast its shadow over Christina and her.

Though Ann had done her best to prepare herself, her stepbrother caught her at a disadvantage anyway. She was trapped in the cabin’s single armchair with her daughter asleep in her lap when he arrived.

“I came to see my
—niece,”
he greeted her.

“Christina’s asleep,” Ann told him as coldly as she could. “I won’t have you disturbing her.”

If she’d expected the admonition to deter him, she should have known better.

“I won’t wake her,” he promised and sauntered toward them.

As he closed the distance, the smell of the camphor moth-proofing that permeated his clothes became more and more oppressive. So did Ann’s memories of that night last fall.

She swallowed the surge of bile at the back of her throat and tried to maintain her composure, but Booth did his best to make that impossible. Each circuit of her chair brought him nearer; each step he took became a further violation. Ann had ample reason to be afraid, but she shored up her courage for her daughter’s sake.

As Boothe stopped before her, his menace wrapped around them like a shroud. Ann shivered in spite of herself.

“So our Christina is two months old?” he asked her.

“Nearly three,” Ann corrected him. She gathered the baby up in her arms and splayed a protective hand across her back.

Ann knew Boothe liked that she was afraid of him, and though she loathed to give him power over her, she couldn’t seem to help herself. He’d bullied her and terrorized her since they were children. Because her mother had never allowed her to retaliate, Ann never thought she had a right to protect herself.

But the regard Ann recognized in other people’s eyes when they looked at her, had changed her somehow. Hadn’t she won the respect of the men aboard the
Andromeda
? Hadn’t the Hardestys claimed her as one of their own? Didn’t Chase show in the simple way he draped a shawl around her shoulders what she meant to him?

“Has your husband noticed,” Boothe taunted, a narrow smile slithering to the corners of his mouth, “how much Christina is coming to look like me?”

It was an old taunt, one he didn’t think she’d answer. It was the opening salvo in a skirmish he thought he’d win.

“Chase hasn’t noticed,” she answered quietly.

“Surely it’s only a matter of time,” he purred, “before he sees the resemblance and knows you lay with me.”

Ann was beginning to think that though Chase might stroke Christina’s night-black hair, remark on her widow’s peak or her long-fingered hands, he might never mark the resemblance between Boothe and their little girl. Or even if he did, she wasn’t sure he’d fathom what it meant. Chase simply wouldn’t expect anyone to have suffered the kind of depravity that made her daughter.

“So what are you going to tell Hardesty,” he sneered, “when he asks if I’m Christina’s father?”

Ann knew how she must answer him and gathered Christina closer as if she could draw courage from her daughter’s nearness, from the very weight of the child in her arms. Still, her heart fluttered in her throat as she declared herself. “I’m going to tell Chase the truth.”

Boothe gave a yip of disbelieving laughter. “You mean to tell your husband you lay with me?”

“I’ll tell him you took me against my will.”

She knew telling Chase the truth would mark him in a way a man like him ought not to be marked, but it was necessary.

“I’ll tell him you forced yourself on me,” she said, “to punish me for things that happened when we were children.”

Boothe paced away, then turned on her. “Goddamn you, Ann! Why didn’t you just stay in Philadelphia?”

“I was wrong to come back,” she admitted bitterly. “But I’d missed having a real family, a real home. I thought that if the two of us were grown, the commodore wouldn’t have the same power over us he had when we were children.”

The commodore always had used what passed as affection to manipulate them. He’d bought Ann’s love by cosseting her; he’d wrung obedience from Boothe by withdrawing his favor.

“I remember how you sashayed into the town house that first day,” Boothe accused, his voice raw with loathing. “You came all done up in your pretty clothes, with your pretty manners and your pretty ways. With your lovely mama to take my mother’s place.”

Ann straightened in her chair. “She didn’t come to take your mother’s place. All Mama wanted when she married your father was a bit of security.”

Boothe went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Before you and your mother came, my father took me everywhere. He let me go with him to the warehouses on the levee and onto the boats. When you came, he stopped doing that. You and your mother turned my father against me!”

“We never did anything like that, Boothe. Your father cultivated your jealousy so you’d do what he wanted!”

Boothe shook his head, and Ann knew he’d never recognize the truth.

“Do you know how much I hated you?” he raged, his eyes black with loathing. “How much I wanted you dead!”

“You really did try to kill me, didn’t you?” she asked uncertainly.

She’d been out in the stables not long after her mother died. The air had been thick with the tang of fresh-cut hay. Sunlight streamed in the open windows. Boothe’s horse had been nuzzling an apple from her hand when he came in and found her.

“Sammy was
my
horse.” He blazed at her as if it had happened yesterday. “I hadn’t given you permission to touch him.”

“You pushed me down and sat on me,” she accused, remembering how his knees had crushed her ribs. “You put your hands around my throat.”

“I wanted to teach you a lesson.”

But it had been more than that. She’d kicked and flailed, but Boothe had been too big and too strong for her to dislodge. Black dots had begun to wink before her eyes when Mary Fairley came into the barn to gather eggs. Boothe had scrambled away, but Mary must have seen what he was doing.

That night James Rossiter had called Ann into his study. He’d examined the bruises on her throat, questioned her about being in the stable, then told her he was sending her away.

He’d punished her as if what Boothe had done had been her fault. But it hadn’t been her fault. Boothe’s attack last fall hadn’t been her fault either.

The rage Ann had held in check for months burst through her, surging through her blood, sizzling along her nerves, clearing her head like a whiff of ammonia. She rose to her feet feeling suddenly vindicated, suddenly purged of all restraints. Suddenly ready to face her stepbrother after all this time.

“You will never threaten me again after today,” she said, her voice honed like a blade of steel.

“You will never threaten or harm my daughter.” Ann cupped her hand protectively around that small, fuzzy head and stoked her anger with the need to protect all that innocence and vulnerability. “You will never speak a word to anyone about Christina’s parentage.”

Boothe gave a short, derisive laugh.

“If I hear that you’ve spread so much as a whisper of scandal about this child”—Ann cut him off—“I’ll go to the police and bring charges against you.”

“Charges of what?” He sneered at her.

“I’ll tell them you raped me, violated your own sister.”

Boothe’s nostrils flared. “There is no blood between us.”

“No,” she conceded. “But in the end, that won’t matter.”

“I could deny that Christina is my daughter.”

“Yes, you could,” she acknowledged him softly, “but as you say, she looks like you.”

“I will say it was you who seduced me.”

“And who would believe that a gently reared young woman would know how to seduce anyone?”

Ann waited, knowing she had this one chance to convince Boothe how ruthless she could be when it came to protecting her daughter.

“Agree to this, Boothe—” She clasped Christina close, knowing her love for her baby was the source of her strength. “—or I swear, I’ll see that no one up or down the river will ever acknowledge or do business with you again.”

Rivermen lived by their own code of honor, and Boothe had violated it the night he violated her.

Pinpricks of fear lit in the inky malevolence of his eyes. “Go to hell, Ann,” he shouted at her and spun toward the door. “And take your bastard daughter of yours with you!”

Boothe swept off into the thickening twilight.

Ann stood for a moment staring after him, listening to his footsteps
thud
across the deck and clatter down the stairs. Only when they’d faded away did Ann’s trembling knees give way. She sank into the chair, lay her daughter against her legs.

Christina was just blinking awake, gurgling and kicking her legs, pulling her tiny, spitty hands out of her mouth and waving them at her mother.

Ann bent above the child and saw for the first time bits of herself looking back. She traced the dimple in Christina’s chin and saw that the baby’s eyes were shaped like hers. She skimmed her fingertips over the baby’s blue-veined brow and her rosebud mouth.

Suddenly breathless, suddenly humming with elation, Ann gathered up her precious girl and laughed as tears streamed down her cheeks.

FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE THEY’D MADE LOVE, ANN WAS waiting at the railing when Chase stepped out of the galley. She stood silhouetted against the amber brightness of the morning sky, her profile as delicate and perfectly wrought as a cameo.

Chase’s heart squeezed inside of him, and he eased the door closed, stealing another moment to drink her in. They’d walked and eaten and spoken together every day this week, yet somehow he’d missed her.

“Morning,” he said a little gruffly.

Ann turned from the rail and smiled at him.

It was the kind of smile she should have given him the morning after they’d made love. It rolled over him like a line of breakers, a giddy fizz of exhilaration sweeping through him.

Chase clasped both hands around the mug of coffee to keep from reaching out to her. He braced his elbows against the rail and tried to convince himself this was just like every other morning.

But it wasn’t like every other morning. The sun seemed brighter, the air fresher, the birdsong from the trees along the bank especially sweet. His nerves tingled with awareness—especially of her.

Deliberately he spoke of mundane things. “I didn’t see much of you yesterday.”

“I was busy looking after Christina.”

“I thought maybe you were hiding from Boothe.”

She flashed him another quick, dizzying smile, then turned to watch the river.

He sensed an odd agitation in her. Her small, usually quiet hands twirled a button one moment and pushed back a strand of hair the next. She seemed skittish and full of energy.

And somehow more sure of herself.

Before he could ask her why that was, Annie turned to him. “Will they be able to repair the
Cassiopeia
?”

Chase hesitated, wanting to catch her and hold her still long enough for him to fathom the change in her.

“Was the damage to the
Cassiopeia
very serious?”

Chase studied her a moment longer, then allowed himself to be diverted. “It was serious enough. I can’t imagine why Boothe tried to run such a treacherous stretch of river in the dark. If the
Cassiopeia
had been going a few miles faster when they rammed that bar, they’d have stove a hole right through the hull.”