Ride the Fire (37 page)
He strode down the hallway, knocked lightly on the door so as not to startle her and opened it. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach.
In chairs on either side of Bethie sat his father and Jamie. Both looked almost as he remembered them, though his father had more silver in his hair, and his eyes held more worry.
Nicholas stared at them in disbelief, found he could not speak. A part of him cried out that he was not ready for this, that he needed more time.
But then his father stood, strode toward him, embraced him in a crushing bear hug, and Nicholas knew he had waited far, far too long.
“My God, Nicholas!”
Nicholas dropped his packages, answered his father’s embrace with his own fierce hug, held the man he’d never thought he’d see again, the man he’d thought had surely disowned him by now. There were no words, no room for anything but feelings.
“I say he looks like hell.” Jamie muscled his way in, embraced Nicholas, slapped him hard on the back.
“Is that so, Jamie, old boy? Bethie finds me ‘dashylookin’.’ She said so herself.” He met Bethie’s gaze, saw the sweet smile on her face, the glitter of tears in her eyes.
Jamie cuffed him lightly on the chin and grinned. “Love is blind, as they say.”
Nicholas looked from the man he thought of as a brother to his father. “There is so much I would ask you, so much I would know.”
His father nodded, turned to Jamie. “Would you mind keeping my beautiful daughter-in-law company while I speak privately with my son?”
Jamie met Nicholas’s gaze, and a slow smile spread across his face. Then he turned to Bethie, lifted her hand to his lips. “It would be my great pleasure.”
Nicholas didn’t like that one bit. “Watch yourself !”
Jamie gazed at him, a feigned look of innocence on his face. “I’m a happily married man, the father of five.” Then his expression sobered. “I’ve got five children, Nicholas. Five. Three of them you’ve never even met.”
Nicholas nodded, felt the first edge of what he’d done to himself—what he’d done to his family—press in against him. He shifted his gaze to Bethie. “I’ll be back soon, love. Jamie, do try to be charming—but not too charming.”
“How could you have known? I was unable to speak of it.”
“I am so sorry, Nicholas. So sorry.” Then the tone of his father’s voice changed. “But I need to know why you left. I need to understand why you turned your back on your mother and left her weeping. Do you have any idea how much she has suffered these past six years?”
Nicholas felt his own temper rise. “I left because I no longer felt fit to live among you.”
“That’s absurd! No matter what you were going through, we would have faced it with you, as a family, but you chose to leave.”
“I nearly killed Elizabeth! I nearly killed my own sister!”
“And for six long years, she has blamed herself for your decision to leave.”
Nicholas turned away, strode across the room, his guilt pressing heavier upon him. “I never intended that.”
“I’m sure you didn’t, but that’s what she’s had to live with since she was sixteen. She’s a married woman now, you know—a mother with a child of her own.”
Nicholas tried to picture his sister as an adult woman, a mother, realized how much had changed these past years. Emma Rose had been little more than a baby. She’d be nine now. And William, Alex and Matthew . . . But his father wasn’t finished.
“We have lived every day these six years wondering if we’d ever see you again, wondering if you were alive or if perhaps you’d been killed by illness or accident or violence and lay unburied and unmourned, a nameless pile of bones in some forest bog. My God, Nicholas, can you imagine wondering that about your child? Your mother doesn’t even know that I came here looking for you. She believes I’m here on business. She’s already lost you twice. I was afraid the heartbreak would kill her if we failed to find you.”
Nicholas turned, faced his father’s wrath. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do to take back the pain these past years have caused you all. At the time, leaving truly seemed the best course of action for everyone. I don’t expect you to understand. Hell, I’d still be out there, headed back west, if it hadn’t been for Bethie. I meant what I said that morning. I
was
dead.”
His father took a deep breath. “She loves you very much.”
“I know.”
“She loves you so much that she thinks you’d be better off with a woman of your own class and believes I should intervene to prevent this marriage.”
Nicholas felt his temper build again. “And will you?”
His father shook his head. “You have my blessing, Nicholas. She is a wonderful girl with a pure heart. Your mother will cherish her and little lsabelle.”
“Bethie’s had a rough life. It will be good for her to have family. I hope in time you and Mother can be for her what her own parents were not.”
“We will, I’m certain, if she’ll let us. When I think of what that bastard did to her—”
“How do you know about that?” Then it dawned on him. “And how in God’s name did you know I was on my way to Philadelphia?”
His father retrieved a letter and a document signed by Nicholas’s own hand from a nearby sideboard. His will and testament. He’d entrusted it in confidence to the captain. Nicholas looked at the signature on the letter, gave a snort of disgust. “Ecuyer! The bastard!”
“We can talk about that later. In the meantime, for what it’s worth, Nicholas, I’m proud of the man you’ve become. I know what you did for Bethie. I know what you did at Fort Pitt. No father has ever been more proud of his son and heir than I.” His father’s voice was strained at these last words, and his eyes seemed oddly bright.
Nicholas might have said something in response—if the strange lump in his throat hadn’t stopped him. “Now fetch your bride. I’d say a celebration is in order. And I must get a letter off to your mother with the next post.”
Jamie winked at her. “So help me to understand, Nicholas—you held a pistol to her head?”
Nicholas’s rich baritone voice sounded in her ear. “Aye, I did.”
“You held a pistol to the head of a woman ripe with child?”
“Aye, and clearly she found it charming.”
Bethie gaped at him in disbelief. “You’re daft!”
“Is that normally how you seduce women, Nicholas—with cold steel?”
“Of course not. To seduce them, I use hot steel.” Bethie gasped, shocked by the lewdness of his comment, and felt her face flush.
“I’m sorry, love. Did I say something wrong?”
“My apologies, Bethie, dear. Clearly, my son has spent far too long in his own company!”
The carriage rounded a corner, drew to a halt. Alec glanced out the window. “Ah, here we are. Are we agreed, gentlemen? One of us is to be at Bethie’s side at all times, and under no circumstances is she to be abandoned to the vicious company of women.”
Jamie and Nicholas responded with a single, “Aye.” Feeling more cosseted and protected than she’d ever felt before, but nonetheless terrified, she accepted Nicholas’s help alighting from the carriage, stared up at the large, three-storied brick house before them. A friend of his father’s—a man named Benjamin Franklin—had agreed to host a dinner party to welcome Nicholas home and to introduce Bethie into society.
“When they see my affection for you, it will curb their tongues,” Alec had explained the night before. After dinner last night, Nicholas and Jamie had taken turns teaching Bethie what manners and etiquette she would likely need. Though she’d been terrified at the thought of a party, the two of them had made her laugh until she’d quite forgotten to worry. But now, as she stared up at the grand house and its many glass windows, her fears returned.
They had agreed to tell a simple version of the truth: Nicholas had encountered Bethie, a widow living alone, far west on the frontier and had fallen in love with her, claimed her as his wife and helped her and little Isabelle to escape to Fort Pitt, where they had survived the siege. That they had not been married in a church was a fact they had saved for the ears of the priest, who was set to marry them in a private ceremony on Saturday—only two days hence. Of course, Bethie had not yet agreed to marry Nicholas, but it didn’t seem to matter to him. Everyone, including Nicholas’s father, seemed to believe the question of their marriage was settled. Whenever she pointed out yet another reason why Nicholas should take a more fitting bride, the men cast aside her concerns and reassured her that everything would be fine. But Bethie wasn’t convinced. Nicholas had done so much for her. She did not want to repay his kindness by becoming a source of shame or embarrassment for him and his family.
“Shall we?” Nicholas slipped his arm around her waist, gave her a reassuring smile.
Her heart swelled with love for him. Though she fancied him in leather breeches—or none at all—the sight of him dressed as a gentleman made her belly flutter. He wore a matching coat and breeches of dark green velvet with brass buttons. His waistcoat was of ivory satin and matched his ivory silk stockings. But he looked more manly than the other gentlemen she’d seen on the street—broader in the shoulder, more muscular in the thigh with no need to wear pads on his well-defined calves. And his hair, although tied back with a black ribbon, still hung to his waist. She adjusted Belle’s weight in her arms, let Nicholas guide her up the steps and through the doors, Alec and Jamie before them.
“Good to see you, as always, Ben.” As Bethie watched, Alec shook the hand of a heavy-set older man with a balding head, large, kind eyes and a firm mouth. “Thank you for hosting this tonight. I am in your debt.”
“Nonsense, Alec. Come in and make yourself at home. Welcome, Jamie. You’re looking well. Now where is Nicholas? I’ve a mind to take a switch to his backside for worrying us so these past years.”
Nicholas chuckled. “You can try, old man, but I doubt it will reform me.”
Bethie saw surprise and a touch of sadness in Master Franklin’s eyes as he measured Nicholas against the younger man he remembered.
“My God, a boy rode to war, and a man has returned.” He shook Nicholas’s hand fiercely. “I cannot tell you how relieved I am to see you alive and whole.”
“Thank you, sir. Allow me to introduce my wife, Elspeth Stewart Kenleigh, and our daughter, Isabelle.” At the sound of her name, Isabelle buried her little face shyly against Bethie’s breast, but Bethie forced herself to meet the kindly man’s gaze.
“Tis a pleasure to meet you, sir.”
“The pleasure is entirely mine.” Master Franklin took her free hand, kissed it. “You make me wish I were a young man again, my dear.”
