Just a Kiss Away (6 page)

But the room was not much different from the study at Hickory House. Carved wood bookcases lined two walls, and there were the requisite oxblood leather chairs, the large, flat-topped desk, and a huge but faded carved rug. All the masculine objects and ornaments were there, from the large brass-bordered gun case to the misty odor of tobacco. Nothing special. Nothing that said, “I’m your daddy.” Nothing that helped her. In fact, as she looked around, the excitement and anticipation that had driven her for weeks suddenly faded like the rich colors in that rug.

She walked over to the desk, hitched her hip on one corner and looked at the globe, remembering how many times as she was growing up she’d looked at the pale colored splotches that represented her father’s new posts. As she got older, she’d looked up the countries in Collier’s, trying to imagine her father amid the colorful images described in the encyclopedia. But her image of him held no vivid color; it was little more than a sepia-toned figure in a photograph, like the one she kept near her bed at home. She had vague bits of remembrances of him, but seventeen years had dimmed those memories.

At times, alone up in her rooms at Hickory House, she’d imagined what her life would have been like if her daddy had been there and if her mama hadn’t died. She knew it would have been different, and she wasn’t sure if her fantasies came from a deep yearning for something she’d never had or from boredom with what she did have.

Her brothers loved her in their own way; she knew that, and that they cared for her. They took their duty seriously, so much so that there were times when she felt smothered and chained. As a child she’d dreamed of a mother’s gentle hand and soft words. Someone who smelled like gardenias and would hold her against a soft neck to make the childhood hurts go away.

As a sensitive young girl on the verge of womanhood, with no confidence, she’d dreamed of a mother’s wisdom and experience. Someone she could emulate. Someone who knew how she felt when her brothers placed all those tags on her. They didn’t understand that it hurt to be thought of as too young, too fragile, and naive. It hurt to be thought of as a jinx and most of all as helpless, and she’d wanted someone who could make that hurt go away, or at least understand why it hurt her.

But most recently, as a young woman, she’d dreamed of having a mother’s listening ear. Someone who’d really listen to her, who’d stand up for her against her brothers’ notions. Someone who would tell her about love and men and marriage, and someone to whom she could tell her deepest secrets and all those insecurities she hid. For as much as she tried to fight it, as much as she wanted to be otherwise, she knew she truly was afraid to be on her own. Things did seem to happen to her when she was alone, like today.

Her purpose had been to go out and buy a fan. Instead she’d come home fanless and she’d lost her parasol, broken a shoe, not to mention almost getting her throat cut and being kidnapped. She just wasn’t very capable, and deep down inside she worried that maybe because she was inept, it was difficult for people to find something about her to love.

She wondered, as always, if maybe she would have been different if she’d had at least one real parent. Her mother had died, so she couldn’t be there, but Eulalie tried desperately to be the exact image of what her mother had been, a lady. She wasn’t very good at that, either.

But her father hadn’t died. He had chosen not to be there, and though she had tried to be like her mother, hoping that might bring him home, he’d never come. He’d written to her from all the faraway places, just as he had written to her brothers. But it just wasn’t the same. Her father had been there when her brothers were growing up. He hadn’t been there for her. And all her life she’d wondered why.

She glanced around her father’s study. Seeing no answers there, she closed the shutters and crossed the room. Then she turned for one last glance at the study, shoulders down, a vacant, unsure feeling wedged in her chest, and she walked out of the room, more alone and more vulnerable than she had been in a long time.

The note had arrived
two hours ago. He was coming home. Eulalie paced the reddish plank flooring of her room for what must have been the hundredth time. She stopped and smoothed out the imaginary wrinkles on her dress. Though she’d worn it when she waited earlier, Josefina had pressed all of the wrinkles from the gown. It was pink—Calhoun pink, the color her mother had worn in the huge portrait that hung in its place of reverence above the drawing room fireplace.

Eulalie had studied the dress in the painting; she knew every flowing line, every glimmer of shot silk, every scrap of imported white lace. She’d had the best dressmaker in Charleston copy the gown for her and had taken an hour to get her hair just so. Small pearl earrings hung from her ears. Lovely little French kid slippers with Louis XV heels graced her feet, and the hem of her whispering gown allowed for the little pink and red beaded shoe rosettes to peek out as she glided across the room.

She grabbed her skirts and lifted them so she could get another glimpse of her slippers. She wiggled her toes inside the shoes and watched the beads catch the lamplight in the room. The rosettes twinkled back at her like winks from the stars.

A loud clatter rang up from the courtyard. She dropped the skirts in a flurry of lace flounces and ran to the shuttered windows, but she could barely see a thing through the narrow wooden slats. She tried to slide the shuttered doors open, but they jammed. All she could see through the small opening was the center of the massive courtyard. Between the dark of night and the carved post rails of the long verandah outside her room, she couldn’t make out a fool thing.

Her heart pounded drumlike in her chest, and she ran to the large oval mirror that hung over her lingerie chest. She stared at her image, looking for flaws. She had to look perfect. This first impression was just too important.

But something was wrong. She frowned at her reflection, trying to figure out what was missing.
The cameo.
She’d forgotten her mother’s cameo. Some more noise clattered up from below, and she rummaged through her jewelry case until she found the cameo. Quickly she pulled it off its wrinkled blue silk ribbon and threaded it through a brand-new piece of pearly white velvet ribbon. Holding it to her neck she took in her image again. Now everything was perfect. She bent her head slightly forward so she could tie the ribbon loosely at the back of her neck. Then she looked up at the reflection.

The dark native face of a soldier appeared over her left shoulder. She opened her mouth to scream, but he placed the cold barrel of a gun at her head.

And Eulalie LaRue, of the Belvedere LaRues, owners of Hickory House, Calhoun Industries, and Beechtree Farms, did the most ladylike thing she’d ever done. She fainted.

“What’s going on here?”

Three seconds.
“I suppose you could call it a revolution,” he said sarcastically. He rested his elbows on his bent knees, his bound hands dangling between, and he watched her face flash with every little thought: doubt, belief, fear, then worry. She looked around the hut as if she expected someone else to be there.

Her voice barely above a whisper, she asked, “What’re they gonna do with us?”

Sam shrugged, choosing not to tell her they’d probably not live out the week, if they were lucky.

“Why do they want me?”

“They want you because they think you’re involved with me. By golly remember the marketplace?” he said in a drawl.

Her full lips tightened into a thin line. She didn’t like him mimicking her. He stored that knowledge for use later. She shifted her legs to one side, trying to get comfortable with all her frills. She looked him straight in the eye and as sweet as sugar asked, “Why would they ever think that you and I would be associated?”

He just stared at her, didn’t move, didn’t blink. The little snob. He should have left her in the marketplace. He kept staring, trying to intimidate a little fear into her, or at least make her think about what she’d said. She still awaited his answer, a pure innocent look on her face.

He shook his head and laughed to himself. Finally he said in a wry tone, “I guess they don’t know you’re not my type.”

“Well, I should say so.” Her expression said she’d be about as likely to hitch her hooks into him as she would be to eat one of those three-inch-long cockroaches that had run around the edges of the hut last night.

Leaning back farther into the corner, he watched her a moment. He could almost read her thoughts on her face.

Ah, he thought, the lamp just lit. It had dawned on her what he’d said. She recovered nicely, once again making eye contact as she spoke. “You mean you’re not my type of beau. I understand.”

When he didn’t say anything, she rambled on, “I’m from South Carolina. A LaRue of the Belvedere LaRues—you know, Hickory House, Calhoun Industries; my mother was a Calhoun, you see—and Beechtree Farms.”

She pronounced the last word as far-ahms. She drawled on, reciting her pedigree like some prized filly. He’d met enough of her type in his thirty-odd years. Virginal little blue bloods with nothing between their fancy pearl earrings but air. Ladies—that breed of women who could barely think past their next party.

Christ, but this one could talk. Now she’d gotten back about as far as the Revolutionary War—some great-great-grandparent on her father’s side who had signed the Declaration of Independence.

Hell, Sam didn’t even know who his father was. He could still remember asking his mother once where he’d come from. His uncle had said to his stepfather—both of them drunk and laughing—that Sam had come from a long line his mother listened to. He’d been confused at the time, but a few years later he’d learned what his uncle meant.

Growing up in a Chicago slum made a kid’s innocence a short-lived thing. The area he’d been born in was only a few blocks away from the Union Stockyards. They’d lived in a rat-infested one-room flat on the fifth floor of a crumbling old brick building where the stairs were rickety and half the railings broken away. Some of the tenants—a ginsotted woman and a couple of kids—had been killed falling from the open top landings. He could still remember the screams echoing a spine-raking, seemingly endless dirge up the stairwell only to finally cease with a dull thud and dead silence.

Inside the apartment the windows were cracked and loose. Noxious, hot summer fumes of a nearby sweat factory seeped through the gaps, as did the ridged, brittle cold of the Chicago winters. At age seven, Sam had finagled a job at that factory, working twelve-hour night shifts shoveling coal in the heavy burn furnace just so he wouldn’t be cold anymore. His few dollars a week supplied them with bread, and some milk for his two half-sisters.

Sam didn’t have a long pedigree, but he knew how to stay alive. He knew how to get what he wanted, and his years on the streets had taught him to outthink and outfight the most practiced, the most shrewd, and the most calculating minds.

And in the last ten years he’d been getting paid for those skills, and paid well, by whatever faction needed him. He’d been in the Philippines for five months, hired by Bonifacio to train his men in guerrilla strategy and to use the Hotchkiss breech-loading rifles and, more importantly, those coveted Sims-Dudley dynamite guns that were due from his arms source any day.

He glanced at his fellow prisoner. She was still at it, going on about rh-ice and indee-go on her mother’s side. Right now he wished he had one of those dynamite guns. He’d cram it in her mouth.

She finally made eye contact. There was a moment of blessed silence, a very brief moment.