Deep as the Rivers (Santa Fe Trilogy) (6 page)

   
Tish turned to face him with a scornful expression hardening her patrician features, robbing them of the doll-like beauty that always turned heads. “You mean to say you were foiled by a little slut—probably one of Samuel’s lightskirts?” she asked incredulously. Anger blazed in her eyes. She smoothed a hand over the arc of her hip, which was amply revealed through her sheer mull gown of pale blue.

   
Richard Bullock watched her move across the room, as aware as she of every inch of her voluptuous flesh. She always had her “at-home” dresses made up from virtually translucent fabrics which she wore only for him in the privacy of her apartments. He wet his dry lips and stared enraptured as she waited for his reply.

   
“I don’t know who the chit is, but the way she was driving her phaeton on the Post Oak Road she is one hell of a horsewoman,” he said defensively, watching Leticia toy restlessly with one long silver gilt curl that hung enticingly across her cleavage.

   
People often remarked that they looked like sister and brother, for Richard, too, possessed the same pale hair and gold eyes. They were in fact only bound by marriage. Worthington Soames was widowed shortly after Leticia’s twelfth birthday. He had remarried a widow with an eight-year-old boy in the hope that she would give him his own son to claim his senatorial seat and carry on the prestigious Soames name. Richard and Tish were stepsister and brother, raised together with every advantage.

   
When the new Mrs. Soames failed to provide the requisite heir before passing to her reward, the senator had turned his ambitions to his beloved daughter. Whatever “Tisha-Belle” wanted, she received, including Colonel Samuel Sheridan Shelby, who was now proving to be a grave mistake. One she planned to remedy with Richard’s help.

   
“Forget the worthless little nobody driving that carriage. Tell me why you failed to kill Samuel.”

   
“I had him pinned down. Bloodied the bastard, too. He had nowhere to run until that carriage came flying around the curve in the road. I tell you, Tish, no one knows about that deserted old road except Shelby. I have no idea how she happened on us before I could finish him.”

   
“You apparently bloodied him right enough,” she said, slightly mollified as she thought of the blackened stain on her husband’s left sleeve.

   
“We can hope he’ll take the red poisoning from it and die,” Bullock said lightly, watching her pose for him before the cheval glass in her dressing room. No one knew he was admitted to her private quarters except for Tish’s personal maid, a slave girl who had been raised with her on her father’s tidewater plantation.

   
“We cannot leave his death to chance,” she rebuked sharply.

   
“Don’t be angry, my pet. You know I can abide anything but your displeasure,” Bullock wheedled, gliding across the carpet toward her. He was whipcord thin and slight of stature yet a deadly swordsman, swift and cunning in duels, always ruthless when crossed—except for his stepsister who dared say or do anything she wished to him.

   
Tish studied his intense narrow face with its sharply chiseled almost feminine features, then reached out and pressed her heavy milk white breasts against the perfumed satin of his waistcoat. He kissed her savagely, his thin fingers digging painfully into her heavy golden hair as his mouth ground over hers. She rocked her hips against his pelvis and chuckled low in the back of her throat when she felt his erection pressing into her belly. Then she broke away abruptly, turning back to the mirror. He stepped up beside her and they gazed into its silvery surface, two perfect golden figures.

   
His lips nipped and bit at her neck, leaving small angry red marks that stung. She liked him to hurt her when he made love to her. A low ragged moan tore from her throat, exciting him past endurance, but when he reached up and began to tear the fragile muslin of her low-cut bodice, she stopped him.

   
“No, not now,” she said breathlessly. “You know how dangerous it is with him in the house. He might walk in on us and kill you.”

   
Richard scoffed. “He hasn’t set foot in your quarters for two years.”

   
“But he’s been shot. It’s my duty as his wife to attend him,” she said mockingly, feeling him stiffen when she said the words “his wife.”

   
How Richard hated being reminded that Tish had shared another’s bed. She had seduced him when she was seventeen and he a stripling lad of thirteen, teaching him well, turning his boyhood adoration into something far more intense and binding. She had learned at a tender age how to use sex not only for her own pleasure, but as a weapon. It always worked with Richard. But not with Samuel.

   
Samuel.
She recalled the electric thrill she had felt the first time she had seen him, so tall and dashing in his uniform, so dark and rugged, the veriest opposite of pale, effeminate Richard. But her husband had become a bitter disappointment outside the marriage bed. The confrontation between the two of them yesterday afternoon replayed itself in her mind once more. She and Richard had been to her dressmakers to pick up her gown for the gala last night. Samuel had just returned home after months of absence, off on another odious secret mission.

   
They had another, of their endless arguments about the same old thing—his utter disregard for his political future. She had actually abased herself by undressing and trying to seduce him—only to be rejected with cool indifference! That was when she knew a momentous change in their lives was about to occur.

   
A tremor of genuine alarm had shivered down her spine when he said, “We have to talk, my dear...seriously. I suggest you slip back into that fetching little frock and have a seat. I’ll pour us a drink. I think before this is done we’ll both need it.”

   
His voice had been calm and his expression glacial as he handed her a goblet with over an inch of brandy in it. She had always been so sure of her plans, so sure of her husband. Brave, honorable Samuel, a dashing soldier. Perfect presidential material with some direction and polishing—which she and her father would supply. She had moistened her lips nervously, trying to read what lay behind the grim lines etching his face. “Don’t say you’ve found a Spanish señorita in the wilds of Florida—or some English pensioner’s daughter,” she said with forced lightness.

   
After taking a sip of his brandy he sighed deeply and began, “While I was hacking my way through miasmic swamps I did have a great deal of time to think. We’re on a collision course, Tish. I married a sweet girl who I thought would make a good soldier’s wife—”

   
“But that’s not fair! I
would
make a splendid soldier’s wife—if you were a soldier instead of some sort of agent provocateur skulking around the borders in disguise.”

   
“I’m afraid that’s the way I can best serve my country. There will be war soon, possibly against Napoleon, probably against Britain and her ally Spain—the latter two happen to occupy our northern, southern and western borders. No matter the lack of glory in it, that’s where I can do the most good.”

   
She had sensed something was seriously amiss, something even all of Worthington Soames’ money and influence could not fix.
Surely he couldn’t have found out about Richard and me! It is not possible—I was so careful...
Her thoughts had whirled frantically until his voice interrupted them.

   
“No use sugaring the medicine, is there, Tish.” His next words dropped like stones in the silent room as he said, “I’m asking Tom Jefferson to handle a petition for divorce.”

   
The shock of his plans to divorce her had rocked Tish to the very core of her being. Her life would be over, finished, done. She would be utterly disgraced, a social pariah, without hope of ever achieving the overweening ambition upon which her father had nurtured her. That was when she had decided Samuel must die.

   
“I could kill him right now, in his own bedroom,” Richard whispered against her neck, interrupting her troubling reverie.

   
“No, his man Toby is no doubt with him. We have to think, to plan something. Now that this first attempt has failed so miserably, he’ll be on his guard. Samuel hasn’t survived all these years as a presidential agent by chance. He is a very dangerous opponent.”

   
“Ah, but so am I, my pet...so am I,” Richard murmured softly.

Chapter Four

   
The courier lay sprawled on the muddy red earth, the rifle ball in his chest leaving a slow trickle of blood to pool around his body. It had been a clean, efficient kill in spite of the difficulty of the shot—the rider had been traveling at full gallop.

   
Richard Bullock rummaged quickly through the leather pouch tied behind his saddle, strewing the contents carelessly on the road while he kept an ear alert for sounds of any approaching travelers. It would be a waste to have to kill anyone else simply to silence them. He disliked waste.

   
Then his eyes fastened on the document he sought and he smiled serenely as he slipped it inside his jacket. This would give Tish the time she needed, the time he needed to complete his task. Samuel Shelby’s divorce request would not reach his old friend Tom Jefferson before the colonel began his long and dangerous journey to the Far West.

* * * *

   
Tish had been smiling and that always worried Samuel. He had expected tears and pleas if not outright threats to bring down the wrath of almighty Senator Soames on his head. Instead she had been reserved and cool, almost insolently amused as she watched him instruct Toby to pack his few belongings in trunks and send them to a storage warehouse owned by an old friend at the mouth of the Potomac.

   
“What damnable game is she playing now?” he muttered aloud as he tied the bulging saddlebags to his packhorse. As he completed the task, his wife’s malicious yellow eyes faded from his memory, replaced by a pair of mesmerizing emerald ones, slanted and sensuous, framed by a piquantly lovely face. “Forget her, you damned fool,” he chided himself. “Think of your mission.”

   
The journey ahead of him would be a long one, but he relished the prospect. First he would ride through the pristine rugged beauty of the Appalachian Mountains across the length of Pennsylvania to the frontier river town of Pittsburgh where he would begin a long water passage by flatboat down the tortuous Ohio River, then travel overland through the dangerous wilds of Indiana Territory to St. Louis which lay across the wide and mighty Mississippi.

   
Ever since his first journey all the way to Santa Fe back in 1806 Shelby had been obsessed with the Far West. As the only city centrally located on the one-thousand-mile length of the mightiest river on the North American continent, St. Louis was indeed the gateway to all the riches that lay in the uncharted wilderness beyond. The epic expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Pacific and back to St. Louis had only scratched the surface. Samuel knew the future of the United States lay inevitably over the western horizon and his blood quickened just thinking of the freedom and the excitement of playing a part in building that future.

   
In truth, he was also eager to see his sister again. Liza seemed happy enough with her Spaniard, Santiago Quinn. Shelby was still amazed that she was content to live under a Spanish flag in the largely unsettled province of New Mexico, especially considering that she, too, had worked as a presidential agent, risking her life for the United States. But she staunchly maintained that the American flag would fly over Santa Fe in their lifetime. Perhaps she was right, although right now he was more interested in what was going on in the Mississippi Valley than in distant New Mexico.

   
Liza and Santiago should be in St. Louis by the time he arrived. Every year the Spaniard took a trade caravan from Santa Fe to St. Louis and back, even though the Spanish provincial authority forbade trade with the Americans. But the border between the Louisiana Purchase and Imperial Spain’s possessions stretched thousands of miles and there were only a small handful of troops to patrol it.

   
Quinn’s trading ventures were making a tidy profit. Samuel was going to buy into the expanding business. His sister and brother-in-law had been urging him to join the company every time he visited with them. Well, he had truly burned his bridges in Washington now. With Jefferson’s considerable influence in the Virginia legislature, his divorce should be granted by year’s end.

   
Thoughts of Olivia St. Etienne again surfaced. Tish hated the wilderness but Olivia had spent years on the Mississippi. She was waiting for him right now in St. Louis. The thought appealed and alarmed at the same time. The last thing he needed to do was jump from the frying pan into the fire.

   
Marriage to Leticia Annabelle Soames should have taught him something. The demure Virginia belle he courted had changed dramatically into a shrewish bitch who killed more than one child growing within her body. Perhaps it was for the best. Tish would have made a truly terrible mother.