She ran her hand over his back and felt the scar tissue—and knew instantly, letters or no letters, that everything he’d said was true. He
had
been shanghaied and spent years at sea, a slave to an obviously cruel captain. “Oh, Gil,” she whispered.
Gil flinched slightly, and closed his eyes for a moment.
Emmeline kissed his bare shoulder, wanting to soothe him in the only way she knew how. He pulled away from her, and in that moment Emmeline grasped another truth: She wasn’t the only one who wasn’t ready for the complete, utter, and explosive physical reunion. Gil was afraid, too.
After gazing down at her for a few seconds in silence, his expression unreadable, Gil slid one hand from her hip to the sumptuous curve of her breast.
Emmeline whimpered as his thumb coursed back and forth across the sensitive nipple, ever so slowly, over and over again. Too breathless to speak, she watched his face, and saw that he seemed wonder-struck by the breast, stricken by its splendor. He made a circle around the areola with the lightest touch of his index finger, causing Emmeline to moan again, and then traced the length of each of the tiny blue veins, barely visible under the pale, translucent flesh.
A deep, primal shudder went through Emmeline when Gil finally bent his head over her and touched the aching nipple with the tip of his tongue. One arm was pinned against her side because of the narrowness of the cot, but her free hand went immediately to his hair and buried itself there, pressing him closer, urging him to devour what he had merely been sampling.
But Gil took his time. Each time he tasted the morsel, or rolled it between his fingers, or simply blew on it as though to put out a candle, he paused afterward and watched the involuntary responses his touch had aroused.
Emmeline grew quietly frantic and pleaded in soft, half-coherent words, but Gil would not appease her. He had apparently decided to seduce her by degrees, to focus his attentions on one part of her at a time, she surmised, remembering how he’d kissed her the first day, then stroked her ankles and feet the next. There was no telling when he’d reach the point he’d spoken of with such scandalous frankness
in the kitchen, but Emmeline harbored a shameless and desperate hope that it would happen soon.
“Let me touch you,” she said.
Gil shifted so that Emmeline could move her arm, but he was suckling in earnest by that time, and he did not lift his head. When she found his rod and closed her hand tightly around it, she felt his groan move through the tissues of her breast, and he drew harder on the nipple, and harder still.
Emmeline stroked him slowly, all the while writhing in a storm of pleasure. With a cry, Gil freed himself and pressed her beneath him before falling to her other breast with the same hunger. She entangled her fingers in his hair and began to chant his name under her breath, a rhythmic and disconsolate plea.
He did not mount her, but instead reached down between their two bodies, enjoying her breasts all the while, to ply her with his fingers.
Emmeline went wild, so great, so consuming was her need, and Gil left her nipple at last to cover her mouth with his own and muffle her hoarse groans with his kiss. His fingers went still, and he left her mouth to speak gruffly into her ear.
“I will satisfy you, Emmeline,” he said, his voice no steadier than hers would have been, “but you must not cry out.”
She nodded her assent—at that moment, she would have agreed to practically anything—and he rolled off the cot to kneel beside it, parting her legs with one hand, stroking the tender flesh of her inner thighs almost reverently.
“Gil,” she whispered, arching her back.
“You promised,” he scolded. Then he parted the silken delta between Emmeline’s legs, studied the treasure buried there for a few moments, and lowered his head and feasted.
Emmeline let out a long, low cry, and Gil reached up to cup one hand over her mouth. She rocked under his tongue, her
hips rising and falling as he led them to do, and he teased her without mercy. While he was engaged in a series of fleeting nibbles, Emmeline’s universe splintered into a many-petaled blossom of white light.
When it was over—her back still slightly arched in an instinctive quest for pleasure, her flesh still quivering with satisfaction—she watched in silence as Gil rose to his feet, found his clothes, and began to put them on. When he bent to kiss her lightly on the mouth, she caught her own musky scent on his skin.
“You’d better get dressed, Miss Emmeline,” he said. “That teakettle is probably boiling by now.”
Emmeline sighed and stretched. For the moment, she was at ease, but she knew her body only too well, and the effect that Gil’s attentions had upon it. The benefits of his efforts would wear off soon enough and then, because he hadn’t put himself inside her, she’d want him more than ever. What he’d done to her there on the sunporch was not meant to satisfy, but to prime her for a true conquering.
By the time Emmeline got back into her camisole and drawers, Gil was gone, and she had just reached the top of the stairs, carrying the rest of her clothes in her arms, when she heard Izannah call her name from the kitchen.
Emmeline pretended not to hear, and fled into her room, where she splashed herself with tepid water from the basin and wept inconsolably.
An hour later, when she’d collected herself enough to go downstairs and face her cousin, she found Izannah at the stove. Emmeline had put on a wrapper and nightgown, like a convalescent, while Izannah wore a flower-print poplin and was putting the finishing touches on a dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and corn.
“You let the teakettle boil dry,” Izannah accused, but there was no rancor in her voice. She was watching Emmeline with
a speculative, worried expression in her usually mischievous eyes. “Are you sick, Emmeline?”
There was coffee, and Emmeline got a cup and poured herself some. She would have preferred a stiff dose of the judge’s brandy, but it was Sunday afternoon and still light outside. Besides, she thought with a sniff, if she indulged, Reverend Bickham would probably find out somehow and preach a roof-raising sermon on the evils of strong drink.
“No, pet,” she said gently. “I’m not sick, just tired.”
“I stayed away as long as I could,” Izannah went on, carrying a steaming bowl of mashed potatoes to the table. When it was just the two of them, they always ate in the kitchen. “Since Mr. Hartwell followed you home and everything.”
“That was thoughtful of you.” Emmeline turned, pretending to watch the rain through the small window over the sink, so Izannah wouldn’t see her face.
“He gave me a dollar to spend the afternoon with Becky,” Izannah confessed, without a trace of repentance. “Some people would call that bribery, but to me it’s a new hair ribbon and that book I’ve been wanting.”
Emmeline smiled a very small smile, but said nothing.
A brief silence fell while Izannah carried the rest of the dinner to the table and Emmeline assembled her composure.
“Come away from that window and eat your dinner,” Izannah said when the meal was ready.
Vaguely amused at the turnabout—it was usually she who gave orders and cooked—Emmeline obeyed, taking her customary place at the table. Izannah even offered grace, which was a relief to Emmeline, who felt reticent just then about approaching the Lord for any reason.
“I bet Mr. Hartwell would enjoy a meal like this,” Izannah said, buttering a slice of bread. “But of course he’s gone home already, hasn’t he?” She tried to be subtle as she eyed
Emmeline’s disheveled hair, puffy eyes, and nightclothes, and failed.
“Yes,” Emmeline replied evenly. “Mr. Hartwell has indeed gone home.” Picking up a fork, Emmeline forced herself to smile. “You really are quite a cook, Izannah. This chicken smells delicious.”
“Thank you” was the girl’s response. “But I know flattery when I hear it. You’re only trying to change the subject, so I won’t ask why you’re in your nightclothes if you’re not even sick, or why Gil paid me to stay away from my own house all afternoon. As if I couldn’t guess.”
Emmeline continued to eat, for she hadn’t had breakfast and the day, though only half over, had been a long and arduous one. “You must content yourself,” she said grudgingly, making no effort to sustain her smile, “with your own speculations. Why should you be different from the rest of the town?”
“I don’t understand why you don’t just go and live with him, or ask him to move in here, with us,” Izannah pressed. Tenacity was one of her foremost qualities, a trait that would no doubt serve her very well in the wide world, but was nevertheless trying in Emmeline’s kitchen.
“Even if the situation was that simple, which it most assuredly is not, I wouldn’t simply move out and leave you all alone in this house. As for asking Mr. Hartwell to live here, well, I don’t happen to want to, and besides, he wouldn’t come anyway. Not with that stiff-necked pride of his. No, he’d never leave his ranch.”
Izannah smiled like a cat with feathers sticking out of its mouth. “You’ve given the matter a great deal of thought, it seems to me.”
Emmeline glared at her cousin. “I had seven years to consider the matter,” she answered, spearing a drumstick from the platter of chicken.
“Do you believe that Mr. Hartwell was really and truly shanghaied?” Izannah asked mildly, still undaunted.
Emmeline recalled the smooth, thick scar tissue she’d felt under her fingers when she’d stroked Gil’s back, and her appetite was gone. Surely receiving such savage punishment changed men in very fundamental ways, breaking some, making others bitter or cruel.
“I believe it all right,” she said.
“Then why don’t you take him back?”
Emmeline could not bring herself to admit that she’d tried, and been rebuffed. “It’s more complicated than that,” she told Izannah with conviction in response to her latest question, but in her heart of hearts, she had plenty of questions of her own.
G
IL STOOD ALONE AT THE FOOT OF HIS OWN GRAVE, PONDERING
the many paradoxes of life—and death. It is not given to every man, he thought with grim amusement, to read his name on a marble tombstone.
Heedless of the copious summer rain, as soft and warm as an angel’s tears, Gil noted that Emmeline had elected to bury him in the family plot, facing the judge’s resting place. This touched him deeply, for Emmeline was a woman to whom family was vitally important.
It was the empty space next to his own, though, that tightened his throat and twisted his heart into a painful knot, for she had plainly reserved that spot for herself. Emmeline must have loved him when she’d commissioned that stone, he realized, and with such devotion that she would have gladly lain beside him throughout eternity.
He wondered, with the semblance of a smile rooted in irony rather than humor, exactly where she would have planted Mr.
Montgomery—had she married him, of course. She hadn’t, and for that Gil, who had learned to expect little in the way of miracles, was wondrously grateful.
He folded his arms, his new clothes soaked and his hair dripping. His body, still throbbing for want of the satisfactions he had denied it on Miss Emmeline’s screened porch, found some small mercy in the dousing, and was eased.
For a time, Gil considered the world and its ways. Then, as mystified as ever, he squatted to trace the letters of his name, chiseled with Old World precision onto the face of the fine stone. Below was his birth date, followed by that of his supposed death—in a tragic twist, the day he’d been shanghaied. In many ways, he had indeed perished then, so he supposed it was fitting that there should be a grave for his old self. He might have come here to mourn the Gil he had been in the innocent arrogance of his youth, believing himself invincible and feeling so damn certain of everything.
He smiled bitterly at the memory. “Rest in peace,” he said, rising and laying a hand to the smooth, curved top of the headstone. And then he turned and walked through the puddles and the thick, claylike mud to his wagon. The mule stood shivering in the rain, head down.
Gil climbed into the box, pushed the brake lever down with one foot, and took up the reins. The mule, glad to be moving, slogged patiently over the slippery, rutted track, hauling his master home.
• • •
Gil did not come to town on Monday, or at least he didn’t pay Emmeline a call, and she told herself that was for the best. The rain had stopped sometime in the night, but the shrubs and the grass were bejeweled with water droplets, quivering prisms flinging off light. After her ten o’clock piano lesson, Emmeline went out into the garden and carefully took
down the Chinese lanterns, now mere globs of brightly colored pulp.
On Tuesday, Reverend Bickham came to call. He was a good man, attentive to his flock, and Emmeline gave him tea and tried to reassure him that her soul was safe in the bosom of the lamb. He departed in some doubt, she suspected, despite her efforts.
By Wednesday, the prairie grasses were lavish, nurtured to a dazzling shade of emerald by Sunday’s rain, and Brother Joy arrived, with his wagons and barkers, and set up his gypsy camp just outside of town. The rhythmic sound of hammers rang through the weighted, fragrant air as the faithful pounded nails into the speaking platform inside the main tent.
Plentiful buzzed with delighted expectation, and Emmeline was pleased. For a little while, at least, people would talk about Brother Joy and his good friend, the Lord, instead of her. Like everyone else, she cooked extra food, and she and Izannah cleaned the house from top to bottom, even though it was unlikely that either Brother Joy or the Lord would come to call. All the while, Emmeline thought about Gil, alternately blessing and cursing him, wondering if he was eating properly and if he’d taken a cold from walking her home in the rain.
With disturbing regularity, she caught herself halfway to the carriage house, bent on hitching Lysandra to the surrey and driving out to see how Gil was faring. Each time, however, Emmeline turned around and marched right back to whatever task she had just abandoned. She’d played the fool as it was, letting that man kiss her the way he had in the parlor that first night, allowing him to stroke her bare ankles beside the stream, and, finally, submitting to him as he’d stripped her naked on the screened porch. Not for all the rubies in India would she go to him again, just asking to be cast off like some strumpet.