The Wayward One (The De Montforte Brothers Book 5) (41 page)

“I could live anywhere as long as you’re there.”

“Brendan’s my cousin. And he tells me his sister Eveleen lives here, too. Only family I’ve got left except for Deirdre, and she’s off in England. I wouldn’t mind it, and it’s close to Boston, too. Useful, in my profession.”

“The wooden houses might take some getting used to.”

“So we’ll buy or build a brick one.”

“And the winters here are colder than in England.”

“No matter, I’ll keep ye warm.”

She smiled. “I would like that.”

He eased her back down to the bed, pushing an arm beneath her back and rolling her up against himself to plant a kiss on her forehead. “I love ye, Nerissa.”

She burrowed closer to him. “I love you too, Ruaidri. You make my life complete.”

“Feel better now?”

“Yes.”

And she did. All was, at least for the time being, right in her world. They lay there together listening to the rain tapping against the window and the wind beginning to die. She snuggled closer to him and idly traced the hollow beneath his collarbones with her finger, and it was then that a memory came to her, one that she’d put away at the time but now, in the close darkness, brought out to be examined.

“Ruaidri,” she said quietly, “you were sharp with your cousin earlier. When he called you that odd name… ‘Roddy.’”

It was a moment before he answered. “Aye, maybe I was, a bit.”

“Why?” She gazed over at him, confused. “Why this aversion to a name you once went by? I’m sure he meant no harm.”

He put a weary arm over his forehead, and gazed up at the ceiling. “Ah, Nerissa. I suppose that if I tell ye I’m finally gettin’ sleepy, ye’ll still demand an answer.”

“You have all morning to sleep in.”

“And you have all day to get yer answer.”

“But you know I’m impatient. And the fact that you’re suddenly too tired to tell me makes me all the more curious.”

He said nothing for a long moment, and even in the darkness she could see that the question pained him. She immediately regretted it.

“I’m sorry,” she said, releasing him. “I can wait. Let’s go to sleep, Ruaidri. You can tell me later.”

“Might as well tell ye now.”

“It was an innocent question.”

“I know, love.”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“There are a lot of things I don’t want to tell ye but should. My aversion to what was once my nickname is just one of them.”

She moved up and over him, and rested her head on his chest. His shirt was damp and warm with his body heat, and beneath the fine fabric she could feel the little wiry hairs of his chest against her cheek, could hear the quiet beat of his heart.

“My da was a fisherman who came down from Mayo and settled in Connemara after he met and fell in love with my mother,” he finally said. They named me Ruaidri, and a few short years later, my sister Deirdre came along. We scraped a living off the land, a better one off the sea, but it was a hard life, Nerissa, bein’ Irish and servin’ an English landowner.”

“I remember you telling me that, once.”

“Then I told you about the English comin’ to our little bay, and the press-gang takin’ me when I was still a young lad. There was no one to support me mam and little sister, as my da had died by then and they were left to the mercy of charity and neighbors. I never saw my mother again and when I next met Deirdre it was here, in America, and she was all grown up and married to the very man who’d led the press gang that took me.”

She sensed his guilt that he’d not been there for his family but said nothing, instead just letting his heart beat against her palm.

“I was forced to serve the Royal Navy for years,” he said, his voice quiet in the darkness. “Worked my way up, and had I been born to privilege and wealth instead of poor Irishfolk, maybe I’d have been able to make lieutenant. But there was nothin’ in the Royal Navy for me but scorn, contempt, and the lash. No chance for a fellow like me to ever get ahead or find equal footin’ in a race who looked down on, would always look down on, a poor Irishman. In ’74, I found a way off the ship I was servin’ at the time in Boston, introduced myself to some wealthy Bostonians and convinced them to give me command of a little sloop. Smugglin’, ye know…a man can get rich off it, and I did pretty damned well. Knew the ways of the English, knew their strengths and weaknesses, knew the waters around Boston like the back of me hand.”

“What did you smuggle?”

“Oh, anything that needed to be brought in. The English had shut down the port of Boston and nothin’ was getting through. People were starvin’. They needed food, and when Sam Adams, Joseph Warren, and John Hancock approached me about runnin’ guns and powder into Boston so that the rebels could be armed, well, I didn’t have to think too long or hard about it.” He looked up at the ceiling, the branches of the tree outside throwing moving shadows against the plaster. “I was called Roddy, then. A childhood nickname that grew out of my initials—R. O. D. Or maybe Roderick, the English version, I guess, of me given name. Hated the name, I did, but I was a tough, scrappy cub, hot tempered and easily riled to fisticuffs, and the lads liked to call me that because it was guaranteed to put my hackles up and bring on a fight. Figured out one day that it was easier just to let it go…there were other things far more important to fight over than a name.” He made a little noise of remembrance. “Like food.”

Something in her heart hurt. It pained her to think of him as a child, hungry and thin, probably existing on fish, onion soup, whatever his family could eke out of a stingy land while she had never known an empty belly, poverty or want, a single day of her life. But she knew him well enough to know that pity would only irritate him.

“I don’t see you as a ‘Roddy,’” she said, instead. “I could never see you as anyone but Ruaidri.”

“Well, ye didn’t know me back in ’75, and a damned good thing ye didn’t Nerissa, as lookin’ back, I didn’t like the person I’d become. I was good at the smugglin’, and I was good, very good, at twistin’ the tail of the British lion, that hated country that had robbed me of my youth, my family. Vengeance felt sweet, and it was. But success and the huzzahs of the people to whom I smuggled food and arms…it got to me. I was the local hero, and my head swelled with the knowledge that I was their savior, their Robin Hood. Someone started callin’ me the Irish Pirate, and the name stuck. I reveled in it. I grew proud, boastful, cocky…thoroughly unpleasant with my success…obnoxious…and careless.”

“You got caught?”

“Aye, I got caught. And deserved it, I might say. Pride goeth before a fall and my fall was a long, hard, humiliatin’ one. It was Captain Lord—the very fellow who’d led that long ago press gang, the husband of my little sister—who got the better of me one night durin’ a smugglin’ operation. Next thing I knew my crew was in the gaol and I was locked up aboard his frigate and the town was calling for his head—and the Royal Navy, for mine. ’Tis doubtful they’d even have given me a fair trial…my fate was to die, and to die publicly. To make an example of me to the rebels.”

“But you’re here, now….”

“Aye, I…escaped.”

She heard the slight hesitation in his voice.

“Escaped?”

“Let’s just say I had some help…from the very man who captured me. It was tearin’ him up inside and he was about to lose the woman he loved—my sister—over it. So he found a way for me to escape with neither of us lookin’ bad. We’ve forgiven each other, and while we might not be best friends, we get on all right, Christian and I.”

“So why the aversion to the name ‘Roddy’?”

“Because it was the name of my childhood, the name I associate with pride, arrogance, and a certain ugliness of character that brought about my downfall. I associate that name with humiliation and embarrassment. With youth. I’m a better man than that, Nerissa, and lookin’ back on those times I’m filled with shame and disgust about how I behaved, crowin’ like a rooster at sunup to anyone who’d listen. I’ve grown up since then. I’m no longer the person I was when I was Roddy. I wanted to leave all that in my past, so I scuppered it, along with the name that went with it…and took back my real name. The one given to me by my da and mam. Ruaidri.”

She lay there, her cheek pillowed on his chest for a long moment. He had never struck her as a prideful or boastful man. A confident one, yes, and one sometimes given to judgments that some might have thought impulsive, but a braggart? Ruaidri?

No, she couldn’t see it.

But she could see something else, and her feminine intuition told her that there was more to this story than what he’d just told her.

“You’re holding something back,” she said quietly.

He said nothing.

“Aren’t you?”

“The baring of one’s soul is rather like stripping a bed, isn’t it, lass? One sheet at a time.”

“But there’s something else. Something you don’t want to tell me.”

In the darkness, his face closed up, and his mouth took on the firmness it did when he dug in about something. “Ye’re a good lass, Nerissa. Aye, there’s more…but ye’re here with me, in my arms, and we’re both happy. Let’s savor that. There are some things best talked about at another time.”

“Was it about a woman?”

He said nothing.

“It was, wasn’t it?”

“Nerissa, love…not now.”

Not now.
She frowned, feeling a deep and unfamiliar twinge of jealousy that twisted like a snake in her heart, a sudden presence amongst them that had not been there a moment earlier. So it
was
about a woman, then. A woman he didn’t want to talk about. Anger made the skin on her back seem to prickle and she willed herself not to be a shrew, not to push him when he wasn’t ready to be pushed, to just let the matter go so it wouldn’t spoil things between them. But it stung, his reluctance to tell her. And she suddenly felt awkward, lying here on his chest while a few inches away, his brain was filled with memories of another woman that he would not discuss. Had he loved her, then? Loved this other woman as much as he claimed to love her? Nerissa felt suddenly excluded, and deep in her soul, cold.

Wordlessly, she pushed herself up and off his chest and lay stiffly beside him, both of them now staring up at the ceiling.

Moments ticked by. The branch continued to scratch against the windowpane, and somewhere in the house, a clock chimed the five o’ clock hour, joined by another and another until all were going off in near unison.

In the darkness, he reached down beneath the blankets and found her hand.

“This is why I don’t want to discuss it,” he said. “Now ye’re angry.”

“I’m angry because you’re my husband and you’re keeping secrets from me. It hurts.”

“We have a lifetime to get to know each other. And I don’t want to talk about another woman right here, right now. I don’t want her here in this bed with us, and her name’s not fit to be uttered in the same room as yours. She’s in the past, Nerissa. Leave her there.”

“Did you love her?” she said in a tight little voice.

“Aye, I did. And she was right for Roddy. Suited him quite well, in fact. But not Ruaidri.”

The snake that was uncoiling inside her heart twisted and turned some more. Nerissa didn’t know why this hurt so much, why it should bother her, but it did. Was this unknown woman the real reason he no longer went by the hated nickname? Because she was associated with it?

“What was she like?”

“I don’t want to talk about her.”

“You can’t even tell me her name?”

He sighed, released her hand, and with a sharp, irritated motion, threw back the covers, his feet already on the rug. He sat there for a moment, raking his hands through his hair, making his curls even wilder, frizzier. His breeches lay over the back of a chair and rising, he snatched them up and began to step into them. “I think I need to go take a walk.”

She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want him to go. She didn’t want him to stay, either, if there was going to be a sudden coldness between them. She wanted things to be the way they’d been when they’d spoken of Newburyport and their future and he had held her when she’d felt unexpectedly wobbly, and she suddenly hated this unknown woman who had, as her husband predicted, come between them.

She sat up in bed, pulling the blankets up to her chin as she watched him dress in the darkness. “Come back to bed.”

“I’m awake now.” He reached for his waistcoat and began to button it.

“I’m sorry. I…just can’t stand secrets between us.”

“You need to learn patience, Nerissa. There’s a season for everything, and the sharin’ of a person’s past is one of them.” He drew on his frock coat, rooted around in the pocket and found the piece of ribbon with which he’d earlier tied his hair, quickly securing it once more.

“Where are you going?”

“I told you, for a walk. There’s an apothecary in Market Square, maybe they’ll have something to quell your nausea besides ginger.”

“At five o’clock in the morning?”

’Twill be five-thirty by the time I get there, and if they’re not open for business yet I’ll wait. Go back to sleep. I’ll be back and maybe both of us’ll be in better temper by breakfast.” He came back to the bed and dropped a kiss on her forehead as he did every morning, but the usual tender warmth was gone and she could sense the penned-up frustration to which she’d pushed him. Anger gnawed at her insides and again, she felt the press of tears.