The Sparrow Sisters (12 page)

“I was trained for it. I was a fireman for years. This guy is
just a doctor. I heard he had to be pulled away before he bled out. If you screw around with him, you'll answer to me.”

The air around Patience went cold, really cold. Sam watched the hair rise on his arms, thought he felt the bite of frost at his lips as he exhaled.

“Dial it back, P,” he whispered.

Patience took a deep breath. “What if I like him, I mean
like him,
like him?”

Sam ran his hands over his arms. “Then prove it. Play nice.”

Patience nodded and waved Sam into stepping back. “How's Abigail?” she asked.

Sam's face relaxed. “She's feeling good,” he said.

“Who's going first, Sally or Abigail?”

“I don't care as long as I don't have to deliver either of them myself.” Sam laughed. “One time was enough.” He looked down at his wedding ring and took Patience's hand. “You deserve to be happy, Patience. You deserve to always smell of lavender and roses and lip balm.”

“Bee balm, Sam.”

“Right, that too.” He put his thumb under her chin. “No kidding, Patience. If you have to, take your chance, but don't make Henry Carlyle pay for it.”

Patience watched Sam walk away and into Abigail's arms. His wife was the only reason he was at the Mayos'. If possible, her family was even richer and more prominent where it really counted—New York. But their happily-ever-after was all down to Granite Point. Sam got what he wanted: a loving
wife, a job he adored, and a baby on the way because he was brave and kind and good. Patience didn't know if she was any of those things right now, and she sure as hell couldn't think beyond finding Henry and bolting. She felt the party press in on her until the bodice of her dress felt too tight and her breath too short. And, as was often the case with Patience, her uncertainty turned to irritation, mostly with herself. She spun in a circle, trying to find Henry before she lost her nerve.

“Hey there! Is Sorrel with you?” Simon Mayo moved in front of Patience, blocking her sight line just as she thought she'd spotted Henry.

“What do you think?” she asked, swaying sideways trying to see the terrace again, trying to move away from Simon so he didn't take the brunt of her mood shift.

Simon frowned and turned to follow her gaze.

“Oh boy, Charlotte's got a live one.” Simon looked back at Patience. “Wait a sec, you
did
come with the doctor?”

“Kind of,” Patience said.

“Well, well.” Simon was laughing. “The Sisters must have their panties in a wad right about now.”

“Don't be such a frat boy.”

“Oh, stop it, Patience. This could be fun. Maybe you'll finally break out. I'm happy for you. I'm sure Sorrel is. I wish I'd—” Simon held onto her by the wrist as if she could lead him out of the mistakes he'd made. Patience looked at Simon as she leaned away from his grip. She saw the regret that framed his eyes with wrinkles.

“Simon, please be careful,” Patience said quietly and twisted her hand away. She walked out the front door, roughly half the guests watching her. And a good thing they were. If anyone had turned to Simon in that moment, they would have seen a man who regretted the whole damn party.

H
ENRY WOULDN
'
T REALIZE
Patience was gone until she was in her own house, the smell of juniper wholly unrelated to the drink in front of her. It was tequila. The sisters took one look at Patience's face when she slammed through the door and retreated up the stairs. They could sense her intensity, and if she unsettled Simon Mayo that night, she threw a sharp splinter of caution and not a little concern into her sisters. They'd seen her irritated, peeved, angry even, but this was something else, something desperate and hungry. And although Patience's energy was turned inward, both sisters could feel the heat now rolling off their sister. Nettie wiped a drop of sweat from her temple as she pulled Sorrel down the hall.

Patience held the glass in her fist; her hand was so hot the tequila turned brown and thick as syrup. She wasn't angry with Charlotte or Henry. She knew that Charlotte had only been flirting with Henry because she needed something; that was how she got things done with men, how all the Mayo women got things done when they weren't ordering those men around. The confused look on Henry's face as he listened to Charlotte was to be expected. Patience had seen both sexes sent into a
virtual fugue by the rapid-fire delivery of the Mayo wives and daughters.

Patience was angry with herself because, for the first time in years, she wanted something more than she wanted to be left alone. And that something was Henry Carlyle. She had no idea that Henry had had the very same revelation a day before. Patience wanted to know about him, to hear his stories, to watch his hands as they lifted a stethoscope, sutured a wound, transcribed his notes. She'd seen the fountain pen in his pocket; she knew his handwriting would be precise, elegant. It wasn't, of course; it was scrambled and raw, a handy metaphor for his soul. Patience listened to the rustling of her sisters as they moved around their rooms. Earlier, she'd misted each of their pillows with clary sage, knowing how it would smooth the way to sleep should she need a little privacy. Patience had been hopeful then. Now she felt bereft, purposeless.

Back on the harbor Henry wandered through the Mayo party looking for Patience. Only moments before he had locked eyes with another man, a vaguely familiar man talking to Patience, and for a second he felt the irrational clutch of jealousy. But then, Charlotte had whisked him off to another introduction and he'd lost sight of them both. When he finally broke away from his hostess, he was so exhausted and confused that he couldn't remember where Patience had been standing when he left her. Henry found himself by the front door and the harpist. He looked at the woman, her long fingers brushing lightly across the strings, and let the music fill him until he
closed his eyes. When he opened them, the harpist was staring at him. She nodded and then turned her head to the front door. “That way,” she mouthed, and Henry made a break for it. He was no longer confused. Henry wanted Patience. Now.

Patience was used to reading men. She always knew when a man was thinking about her and in exactly what way. She could see when one needed her help to tell him why he couldn't sleep, or slept too much, why his skin was suddenly cracked and bleeding from the salt water he'd spent his life in or how it was that he had no appetite. Just as clear was when a man came to her on a bet, to see if he was the one who would snare the Sparrow. Henry didn't fit either category, and Patience realized she hadn't the first idea why he really wanted her because it didn't occur to her that he felt exactly as she did.

“Damn it!” Patience growled and stood. She went to the screen door and braced her hands against the frame. She could see a mist settling on the plants. Night-blooming jasmine climbed the fence along the south side of the garden. The scent was soaked with desire: bare skin, tangled sheets, tears. Sweat pooled in the hollow of Patience's throat, gathered in beads along her top lip, ran in a single rivulet down her spine. She pushed the door open and stalked into the dark. Her dress was silver under the moon, her hair bronze, her skin pale as milk.

When Henry came into the house, he headed down the hall to the back door. The screen shimmered with dew. He passed the glass of tequila and paused only long enough to knock it back. It burned his tongue and slid sluggishly down his throat.
“Jesus!” he hissed and went to the sink, filled his palm with water and drank.

Patience drifted in the garden, her dress draping softly off one shoulder and her hair falling across her back like blood in the shadows. She saw his tall silhouette first as he stood at the screen. She stopped, her bare feet sparking against the gravel path. Henry saw the blue-green lights around her, his brain searching to name them. He settled on fireflies although he smelled brine and seaweed and wanted to say phosphorescence. He shook his head and went out.

“You ran away,” Henry said. “I couldn't find you.”

“You were with Charlotte.” Patience shrugged.

“I—” Henry stopped. “Has she come to you?”

“No Mayo has ever come to me,” she said.

Henry crunched onto the gravel. He smelled the jasmine and felt a surge of damp heat as Patience neared. She seemed to waver in front of him and he reached for her, certain she was about to faint or melt or something else impossible. The moment Henry touched her hand the heat lifted, the moonlight turned liquid as it fell over them both, cool and slippery.

“Is this you?” Henry asked, shivering as he pulled her toward him. “Is this us?”

Patience nodded. She laid her ear against his chest and listened as his heart sped up, slipped her arms around him and tucked her fingers under his waistband. She pressed her palms into his back. Henry sucked in a breath.

“Your hands are cold,” he said. “I thought they'd be warm.”

“Sometimes they are,” Patience said and looked up at Henry, her chin sharp against him. She was shivering too; her hair was wet. “Come inside,” she said.

“Your sisters?”

“They already know,” Patience said, and Henry looked up at the windows expecting so see their faces, pale and concerned. Patience shook her head. “They will have felt the change.”

Henry pulled back so he could see all of Patience. “I don't understand.”

For a second he was almost frightened. Not by Patience exactly but by this place where sisters sensed each other in the dark, this town that believed a young woman could keep them well with nothing but her garden: an ordinary place where flowers bloomed long past the first frost and people sniffed the air to guess what Patience Sparrow might be feeling before they checked the weather. At that moment all Henry could smell was the lemon in Patience's hair; the bee balm had fallen away when she untangled her bun and now the strands ran with water. He dismissed his anxiety quickly because he suspected he was on the brink of something that could change him, and he knew he wanted to be changed. But then Henry feared that she must have read him, this anticipation that felt like fear. He watched Patience move away.

“No,” he whispered and wrapped his hand around her forearm.

“Come, now,” Patience said and pulled him toward the
screen door. When she opened it, June bugs clattered to the steps, moths fluttered up in a powdery cloud. She left wet footprints across the kitchen floor. Henry eyed the tequila bottle but remembered how it hurt. Patience stopped at the stairs, one hand on the newel post.

“Are you afraid?”

“Answer hazy, ask again later,” Henry said and ran his knuckles along the pale underside of her arm.

He followed her up the dark stairs and down a hall that swam with the scent of clary sage. To Henry it just smelled of soap, but to Nettie and Sorrel it was so soothing that they had drifted into their rooms in a sudden dazed torpor. As hard as Sorrel tried, she couldn't hear Patience or Henry, she couldn't see in the dark that tugged her deeper into her bed. Her last thought before sleep was that she'd have a firm word with her sister in the morning.

Patience's room was smaller than Nettie's. There was no chaise, no bookshelves, no hope chest, dusty and empty. There was only a bed, a tall bureau, a low slipper chair covered in worn gray velvet and a pile of books beside it. The moonlight was streaming in through her open windows. The air that had cooled around her in the garden breezed past curtains covered in tiny violets and long skeins of ivy. Henry watched Patience as she lowered the windows and, still turned away from him, reached to unfasten the buttons at her back.

Henry crossed the room in three crooked steps and finished for her. He let his thumbs linger on the bones at the nape of
her neck, the small whorl of hair at the base of her skull. He moved the dress down over her shoulders before he turned her to him. Henry was surprised that Patience had ceded control. She was as pliant and soft as a sleeper and for a moment Henry worried that she'd disappeared into herself, away from him, again. But she tilted her head up and pressed the length of her body against his; rising on her tiptoes so that she could reach his mouth as he bent his head to reach hers. Henry felt his belt buckle scrape along her belly. He pulled it from his trousers with a snap and dropped it to the floor.

Patience wasn't surprised at the fierce need that surged through her as soon as Henry kissed her. She spread her fingers through his hair and angled her hip into him as he took his hand away from her waist to unbutton his shirt. Henry gave up fumbling and pulled the shirt over his head. What surprised Patience was how a wash of tenderness filled her as she pressed her cheek against his chest.

That is what the night became, a tangle of ferocity and yielding for both.

It wasn't until later, as Henry had requested, that he was able to separate from Patience, to ask himself if what he saw in the garden was real and if it did indeed scare him. He watched her sleep and tried to name her scent, the taste of her that lay across his tongue, still. He wasn't sure if it was the soft white sheets beneath him that smelled of sun and summer air and wooden clothes pegs or if it was the tee shirt Patience now wore, the shirt he wanted to peel away. There was a trace of cream and
butter in his mouth and in hers. Or was it cucumber, cantaloupe, and clover honey? Was it salt or sugar? Was her tongue warm or cool as she kissed him? Her hands had been almost icy in the garden, but then when she sketched the scar starting at the side of his knee, following the silvery mark up his leg, her fingers had been hot enough to make him press his thigh into them. His whole body warmed beneath her touch. Henry sighed and sank back against the pillows, his hands laced behind his head. He didn't know whether to stay or go; it was not even midnight. Patience hadn't said a word to him, except to tell him when she wanted more. And now she was turned away from him in her sleep.