Full Steam Ahead (18 page)

“When I did, it was too late. I finally caught hold of her and pulled her to the surface, then onto shore. I tried to pump the water out of her lungs. I begged her to breathe. But she never did.” A broken sob erupted from his throat before he could catch it back.

The tears fueled his rage. He lashed out, slamming his fist so hard against the shelf nearest him, it cracked. “Why, Nicole?” he demanded. “Why would God spare a self-absorbed, embittered man like me and take the life of an innocent? It’s not right!
I
should have died that day. Not her.” His throat closed up then, and his knees grew weak. He curled in on himself and slowly sank to the floor. “Never her.”

N
icole followed Darius to the floor, curving her body farther over his back as she glided her arms upward to wrap about his shoulders. His agony shredded her heart.

“The girl’s death was not your fault,” she whispered near his ear. “The accident was to blame. You did everything you could. More than most people would have done.”

“It wasn’t enough.”

And that was the issue, wasn’t it? Darius blamed himself for not rescuing a girl who was most likely dead moments after hitting the water. He held so tightly to his guilt that his wounds were torn open day after day, never getting the chance to heal. Why wouldn’t he forgive himself? Or was it God he couldn’t forgive?

“I should have died. Not her.”

Nicole stiffened against him. There it was again, that woeful statement belittling his value, his worth. When he’d first uttered the words, she’d heard only his grief over the girl’s death. Yet this time she detected hints of bitterness and suppressed anger—corrosive elements that had no place in heal
ing. She would gladly comfort Darius in his pain, but she would do him no favors by fueling his self-pity.

“So, you think God made a mistake.” She leaned away from him, her voice hardening just enough to get his attention.

He twisted to face her. “Why should an innocent die while a reprobate lives?”

“I see,” she said. “Only sinful people should have died in that accident if God were indeed just. Of course, all have sinned, so I suppose only the tiniest of babes should have survived according to your reasoning.”

Darius turned fully toward her, his features tightening in anger. “You’re being deliberately obtuse.”

“Am I? Well, you’re being deliberately arrogant, thinking you know better than God.”

“I am not! I—”

“Yes. You are.” Nicole crossed her arms beneath her breasts and glared at him. “What happened was an accident. A horrible, tragic accident. But accidents happen in this fallen world we live in. Innocence is no guarantee of protection. Rain falls on both the just and the unjust.”

He scowled at her, and Nicole nearly lost her nerve to continue. But a still, small voice inside her urged her on.

“God sees things in a scope so broad our narrow-focused minds can’t even comprehend. If you had died that day instead of that young girl, what would have become of me? Have you asked yourself that, Darius? I was out of money and out of options when you took me in and offered me a job. And what of Jacob? He’d still be running about on his own, sneaking into people’s houses to pilfer food. Without you to offer him work, food, and a place to sleep, the boy might have been shot by an irate homeowner by now. I thank God he spared you that day.”

Nicole steeled herself as Darius’s piercing blue gaze bored into her. Some of the anger seemed to have left him, but the intensity of his scrutiny made her squirm. She’d not back down, though. If she could say something to help him heal, somehow give him the strength to let go of his guilt, perhaps leaving him later wouldn’t be so hard.

Darius finally turned away from her and braced his back against the edge of the bookshelf. Propping his knees up, he rested his forearms across them and stared blankly into the empty space in front of him.

“After the accident,” he said, “I wrestled with that idea—that God had saved me for some divine purpose. That’s why I started collecting boilers and conducting experiments. It was the only thing that made sense. If I could discover a way to prevent future explosions, maybe then I could redeem my greatest failure.”

“Oh, Darius.” Nicole scooted next to him and took hold of his hand. “Don’t you know? You
can’t
redeem your failures. None of us can. Only the Redeemer has that power, and he’s already wielding it on your behalf. He’s bringing good out of that tragedy, good that we are only beginning to see.”

He yanked his hand from hers as if she’d scalded him with the steam from one of his boilers. He shoved his fingers through his hair and closed them into a fist that had to be painful pulling against his scalp.

“You don’t understand, Nicole.” The anguish etched across his features brought new dampness to her eyes. “I have to fix it. I have to atone for my mistakes.”

“‘There is therefore now no condemnation for them which are in Christ Jesus,’” Nicole softly quoted. “The work you are doing is important, and I believe God led you to it. It is one of the ways he is working his good in your life. But when
you continue clinging to your feelings of guilt, this God-given mission becomes nothing more than self-imposed penance.

“Forgive yourself for the child you were unable to save, Darius, and praise God for the many who are alive today because of your actions.”

Deciding she’d lectured him enough for one night, she rose up on her knees, checked her balance with a hand to his shoulder, then leaned close and pressed a gentle kiss into the side of his forehead. “You’re a good man, Darius Thornton. I’m proud to know you.”

Surround him with your comfort
and your mercy so he won’t feel alone as
I leave,
Nicole prayed as she pushed to her feet and crossed the room. Casting one last look over her shoulder when she reached the door, Nicole couldn’t help wishing she had the right to stay by his side the rest of the night, to hold him and guard against the nightmares that had haunted him for far too long. But she had no such right and never would—not with the promise she made to her father hanging over her head.

Biting back a sigh of regret, she slid quietly from the room.

Darius watched her leave from the corner of his eye, careful to keep his face angled toward the darkened window so she wouldn’t realize where his gaze rested. He could still feel the touch of her lips above his temple. A kiss that soothed the sore places her words had scraped raw moments earlier.

“I’m proud to know you.”

Darius closed his eyes and leaned his head against the bookcase behind him. After all he’d told her—his failures, his selfishness—and she making no bones about her opinions regarding his drive to atone for past mistakes and defeats,
she still managed to say the one thing his heart most needed to hear.

“I’m proud to know you.”

If he were to be honest with himself—and tonight certainly seemed the time for such brutal observations—he’d have to admit that she’d touched on the real reason he’d yet to go home. Fear that he’d never hear such a sentiment from his father or brother. Fear that if they learned the full truth of his failure, he’d lose their respect and become the son and brother they simply tolerated, not the one they embraced without reservation. Such a turnabout would erode his insides and leave him as hollow and useless as an old steamship scavenged for parts.

There were ponds and vacant acreage in New York as well as Texas. He didn’t have to hide away so far from home in order to conduct his experiments. Yet he’d
wanted
to keep himself distant, to give himself time to fix things before facing his family.

Darius snorted and shook his head at himself. What was he—a young lad determined to glue together his mother’s favorite vase before she came home so her disappointment would be tempered by the evidence of his efforts to repair the damage? Did he truly believe she wouldn’t notice the cracks and jagged edges? Would his remorse after the fact erase the sin of his disobedience?

“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which
are in Christ Jesus.”

Could that really be true? Could Christ make the vase new again with no cracks or imperfections? Perhaps Nicole was right. Perhaps he was keeping Christ from making all things new by letting guilt run rampant in his soul. But how was he supposed to let go of it? It haunted his dreams, drove his
work, and even motivated his kindness. Heaven help him, it defined the man he had become. Who would he be without it?

The image of the broken vase lingered in his mind. He couldn’t fix it. No matter how hard he tried, it would never be the same.
He
would never be the same. Not in his own eyes. Not in the eyes of his family. It was impossible.

“The things which are impossible with men are possible with
God.”

The verse from Luke resonated in Darius’s mind as if it been spoken aloud. He jerked his head up and straightened away from the bookshelf.

I am
the potter; thou art the clay.

The potter. Of course.

New energy pumped through Darius as he stood and crossed to his desk. He opened the top right drawer and grabbed hold of the small leather volume he kept there, a volume he’d been neglecting of late in favor of his work. He turned up the wick on the desk lamp, opened the cover on his Bible, and began flipping pages until he found the passage he sought in Jeremiah 18.

“‘Arise, and go down to the potter’s house,’” Darius murmured beneath his breath, “‘and there I will cause thee to hear my words. Then I went down to the potter’s house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels. And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter.’”

Marred. Cracked. Broken. Yet for the first time Darius realized that what truly mattered was not that the pot was marred, but that it remained
in the hand of the
potter
.

He continued reading. “‘So he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord. Behold, as the
clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.’”

Darius stared at the page until his vision blurred.

I’ve taken myself out of
your hand over these last eighteen months, haven’t I
, Lord? So sure I could fix things myself if I
could just accomplish enough good to fill the cracks. But
you don’t want me to fill the cracks, do
you? You want me to put myself in your hands
and allow you to create a completely new vessel.

Forgive my arrogance. My stubbornness. Help me to yield to
you, to submit, to surrender. To release the guilt that
steals my peace and turns your calling on my life
into burdensome penance. Create in me a clean heart, O
God; and renew a right spirit within me.

He sat motionless at his desk for several minutes, the words of his prayer rolling over in his mind and seeping into his heart. His eyelids closed and his head bowed until it rested against the open pages of the Bible. Deep breaths moved in and out of his lungs as he remained still before the Lord.

Then slowly, almost without him recognizing it, the germ of an idea planted itself in his consciousness. The longer he sat at his desk, the deeper the roots penetrated. Soon leaves were sprouting and branches stretching until it consumed him so fully, he knew he had to act on it at once.

Straightening, Darius pulled open the left drawer of his desk and rummaged around for paper, pen, and ink. He had to tell them. Had to tell them everything. To trust in their love for him. To rely on God’s grace no matter their reaction. To steal the devil’s power by facing what
will
happen instead of cowering away from what
might
happen.

Darius steeled himself as he dipped his pen in the well and slowly stroked his parents’ names across the top of the
first page. If he could tell Nicole the truth, he could tell his family. He owed them that much. Blast. He owed them a lot more than that.

The words flowed from his pen. Pages of them. By the time he finished the task, a rosy glow glimmered outside the study window. Dawn had come. A new day full of promise and hope.

Darius sat back in his chair, stretched his back, and flexed the fingers of his right hand to work the cramps out. His eyelids drooped with weariness, his energy completely spent. Pushing up out of his chair, he braced his legs beneath him and turned off the lamp. Then he stumbled to the sofa, collapsed upon its cushions, and for the first time in months, fell asleep without dreading what was to come.

N
icole woke late the following morning and rushed through her ablutions before dashing off to the kitchen to grab something portable for breakfast.

“Yer late,” Mrs. Graham groused in her usual terse style. “I already tossed the leftover mush in the slop bucket.” She nodded toward the pail kept by the back door.

Not particularly fond of cornmeal mush anyway, Nicole suffered little regret as she eyed a half loaf of bread wrapped in a cloth on the cabinet near the hearth. “I overslept, I’m afraid. But don’t worry, I’ll just cut myself a thick piece of that bread you baked yesterday and be off. Mr. Thornton expects me to be in the study promptly at eight each morning, and it’s nearly that now.”

After leaving things so unsettled between them, the last thing she wanted to do was show up late for work. Besides, she needed to change that article page before he could mail it off with her pseudonym scrawled across the top.

“At least throw some butter on it.” The cook’s gravelly voice broke into her thoughts a moment before the woman
slapped a small crock onto the counter beside Nicole. “I won’t have the master accusin’ me of not feedin’ you. Skinny thing like you is bound to blow away in the first strong breeze of the day if we don’t anchor you proper-like.”

Nicole smiled as she set down the journals Darius had given her to read and picked up the bread knife. “Well then, I’d better spread it on thick, for everyone knows your bread is too light and airy to anchor anything.”

“Oh, get on with ya,” Mrs. Graham protested, swatting her with a damp dish towel before she turned her attention back to drying the freshly scrubbed mush pot. Nicole decided to act as if she hadn’t noticed the white-toothed grin that flashed momentarily across the dark-skinned woman’s face. Mrs. Graham took great pride in her surly demeanor, after all.

Once she had her bread sliced and buttered, Nicole retrieved the journals and hurried down the hall. Her skirt swept side to side, like a ringing bell, driven by her accelerated pace, until she whisked around the corner into the study and careened to a halt.

Papers littered the top of the desk—papers, a small book, an inkstand, pens. Nicole frowned. She never left Darius’s desk in such disarray. Neither did Darius. He’d always left her a short note outlining her duties for the day, perhaps a stack of schematics to copy, but nothing this . . . chaotic.

Had his temper gotten the better of him after she left last night? Somehow she couldn’t quite imagine him flinging pages about in a fit of frustration, at least not any pages that pertained to his work. It was too important to him. Even as the thought crossed her mind, she noted the stack of papers on the corner. The Franklin Institute article. Still there, carefully stacked, tied together with a piece of twine.

Slowly, she edged around the desk. If the papers scattered hither and yon weren’t from the article, what were they from?

Darius’s familiar script covered the ivory sheets from top to bottom, although he seemed to have taken pains to keep his handwriting more legible than he did when scribbling in his notebooks. One page, however, lay atop the others. It had writing only in the center, the words large and jumping off the page. An address.

Mr. and Mrs. Saul Thornton

Castlewood Manor

New York City, N.Y.

His parents. Nicole’s heart fluttered faster than a hummingbird’s wings. He must have written all of this after she left, pouring his soul out on paper as he had done in person with her. She blinked to clear the sheen rapidly glazing her eyes.
Oh, Darius. You’re learning to
trust again. To let go.

Curiosity burned a hole in her midsection, teasing her with snippets of the letter exposed to her view. How she longed to read what he’d written, to bear witness to his reconciliation with his family. But the correspondence was private, and she’d not betray his trust in such a manner. Averting her eyes, she turned her head from the desk and nearly choked on the startled cry that rose in her throat.

Darius lay sprawled upon the sofa not five feet away.

Nicole clamped her lips closed and managed to muffle most of her surprised squawk, but a tiny squeak escaped before she could swallow it. Darius’s brow crinkled a bit, and he rolled onto his side to face her more fully, yet his eyes remained closed.

How had she missed him? The man was so large the sofa
could barely contain him. Legs dangled off the side. Wide shoulders dwarfed the curved lines of the upholstered back. Even the yellow cushions beneath him jutted at odd angles as if trying to rearrange themselves to better accommodate his stature.

A smile danced across her face. Her mighty scientist looked like a young boy now, gangly limbs draped every which way, a relaxed, peaceful expression upon his face. So different from the tortured man she’d encountered a few hours ago, tension screaming through his muscles, anguish etched into his features. He had thrashed and moaned when she’d found him, but now his chest rose and fell in a deep, steady rhythm. It was beautiful to see.

He
was beautiful. Nicole inched closer. With him asleep, she didn’t have to worry about keeping her guard up. She could paint a mental portrait of him to carry with her when she left. Just for a friendly remembrance, of course, not because her heart bled at the thought of never seeing him again.

Lowering herself to the rug, she let her gaze roam slowly over Darius. She started with his tousled honey-gold hair, then lingered over his face: his strong jaw, dark with whiskers; the brush of his lashes against tanned cheeks; the smooth, supple line of his lips. Ah, his lips. They’d once kissed her in playful celebration. What would it be like to have them meet hers with more personal intent?

Heaven.
She was pretty sure it would feel like heaven.

Which was exactly why she shouldn’t be staring at them, she admonished before forcing her attention away from his face. Of course, his throat wasn’t much better, leading as it did to the top of his chest and exposing a hint of masculine hair to her view through the open collar of his shirt.

Nicole bit her lower lip. Perhaps this mental-portrait notion
wasn’t such a good idea. Her pulse was leaping all over the place. And what if he somehow sensed she was ogling him and woke up? She’d be mortified.

The thought threw her into action. Lurching to her feet, she backed away from the sleeping man, then turned and scurried for the door. At the last minute, she remembered the article. Going back, she set her breakfast down, grabbed the article and a clean sheet of paper from the drawer, then tossed everything on top of the journals and pivoted back toward the door. She had pen and ink in her room.

Her eyes swept over Darius a final time, her attention snagging on the bare feet dangling off the end of the couch. What was it about this man and his bare feet? Whenever she saw them, they inspired the most ridiculous thoughts in her head. Thoughts of closeness and shared secrets.

Botheration. They were just feet, for pity’s sake. Darius’s were nothing special. Built for standing, walking, running. Same as any man’s.

Yet feet were intimate things. She couldn’t recall ever seeing a man’s bare foot except for her father’s, and that only when the family went sea bathing during the summer. She’d seen Tommy Ackerman’s feet of course, helped bury them in the sand more times than she could count, but that hardly signified. They’d both been children.

A man, in contrast, kept his feet covered at all times. He might doff his hat, remove his gloves, roll up his shirt sleeves or even remove his shirt if involved in physical labor. But he never removed his shoes unless he was getting ready for bed.

Bed? Nicole jerked her attention away from Darius’s feet and practically ran the rest of the way to the door.

Nicole Camilla Renard,
she scolded with the best mental imitation of her mother she could manage.
You get your
head out of that
man’s bedroom and back on your shoulders where it
belongs. Darius doesn’t need you mooning over him like
some lovesick debutante. He needs you to help with his
experiments and transcribe his documents. And you need his wages
so you can get on to New Orleans and find
a man to marry and save Renard Shipping.

So what if she couldn’t imagine anyone else having feet as perfectly formed as Darius Thornton’s with his thick soles, long toes, and strong arches? What difference did feet make at all? None—that’s what. Her future husband could have hairy feet or unclipped nails or even webbed toes as long as he fulfilled her other requirements. What mattered was his character, his skill in running a business, his knowledge of the shipping industry, and . . . hopefully . . . his affection for her. That’s what she needed to focus on. Not feet.

So why did she feel like crying at the thought of seeing some other man’s feet in her future bedroom?

Pathetic creature. Time to grow a spine. Nicole firmed her jaw and quietly clicked the study door closed.

“Miss Greyson?”

Nicole whirled around, nearly spilling her stack of journals.

“Mrs. Wellborn,” she said in a voice too soft to carry into the study. “You startled me.” She steadied the article with the back of her left hand, taking care not to get any butter from her breakfast on the pages.

The housekeeper raised a brow as she approached from the direction of the kitchen. “I’m sorry, dear. But I thought there might be some kind of problem for you to be leaving the study so early. Are you out of ink again?”

“No, no. Nothing like that.” Nicole led Mrs. Wellborn back down the hall, away from the door. “I just won’t be working in the study this morning.”

“You won’t?” The older woman’s brow puckered. “But you always spend your mornings in the study.”

Nicole drew to a halt a few steps from the kitchen door. “Mr. Thornton will be making use of it today.”

“That man,” Mrs. Wellborn grumbled. She heaved a sigh, then straightened and brushed out her apron. “Well, I suppose I ought to fetch his breakfast tray from the workshop then, hadn’t I. The master really should learn to inform me of his plans. How else am I supposed to know when he gets the urge to switch rooms on me?”

“I wouldn’t bother with the tray, Mrs. Wellborn.” Nicole grinned as the furrows in the housekeeper’s brow deepened.

“And why not? Getting that man to eat is almost as difficult as getting him to stop working long enough to sleep. If he doesn’t get his tray, there’s no telling when he’ll actually . . . Why are you smiling like that?”

“He’s sleeping now.” Nicole couldn’t have contained her smile if Darius himself had ordered it. And the way Mrs. Wellborn’s arching eyebrows nearly disappeared into the lacy edges of her cap only added to Nicole’s delight. “I think he was up most of the night working on some correspondence, but he’s sleeping now. Peacefully. On the sofa. I didn’t want to chance disturbing him. He needs his rest.”

“Oh, miss. You don’t know the half of it.” The housekeeper lifted the corner of her apron to wipe at her eye. “That bed upstairs is never used. Never. He prowls through his workshop all hours of the night, then heads to the study for more of the same. Every now and again, he’ll collapse on that sofa for a few hours, mussing the cushions just enough for me to know he had laid there. But never enough to get any true rest. It’s like the man’s afraid to fall too deeply asleep—crowding
himself onto that narrow sofa instead of using the perfectly good bed he has upstairs.”

Nicole blinked. Of course. If memories of the
Louisiana
attacked Darius in his dreams, it was no wonder he avoided sleep. What amazed her was that the man was still functioning at an intelligent level after more than a year of such torment.

“If he’s slumbering now, with the sun streaming through the curtains and the sounds of everyday activity humming around him,” Mrs. Wellborn continued, “the man’s either half dead with exhaustion, or he’s finally found a bit of peace.”

Nicole clutched her stack of papers more tightly against her chest. “Let’s pray it’s the latter.”

Mrs. Wellborn’s chin bobbed in agreement. “I’ll see that he’s not disturbed, miss, and will do my best to keep the house quiet.”

“Excellent. I have a few details to see to in my room, but after that, I’ll find Jacob and do
my
best to keep the boy outside. We’ll stay close in case Mr. Thornton awakes and has work for me to do.”

“We won’t have to worry about Arthur,” the housekeeper added as she reached the kitchen door. “He took the rig to town to run an errand for Mr. Thornton. He’ll be gone several hours.”

Odd,
Nicole thought. Wellborn had run errands Monday, as well. Three days ago. One would think a single trip would be sufficient. Had something urgent come up to warrant a return trip?

Nicole brushed off the thought as she continued down the hall toward her bedroom. She didn’t have time for puzzles. She had an article page to edit, journals to study, an energetic young boy to distract, and a slumbering scientist to insulate. Wellborn and his mysterious errands would have to wait.