“Oh, Deacon, we can’t go back to what was, but we can go on to something new.”
“I don’t know anything else, Patrice. I was raised to control a plantation, not lay bricks. I’m so tired. I just wanted to come home to things they way they used to be.”
“I know.” She reached back to stroke his hair, to caress his cheek, pausing when she felt his fevered skin. “Deacon, are you all right?”
Not catching her concern, he rambled on in a disjointed tone. “I’ve done things, Patrice, things you could never forgive or come close to understanding. I thought they were the right things but now … Maybe this is my punishment, the punishment for my pride.”
Not listening, Patrice swiveled on the step to place her palm to his damp brow. “How long have you had this fever?”
He blinked at her incomprehensibly.
“Deacon, you’re burning up. How long have you been sick?”
“I’m all right.” To prove it, he started to push away, gathering his feet beneath him, only to topple back in an uncoordinated sprawl. When he made no attempt to lift up again, Patrice did the only thing she could think of.
“Reeve!”
Deacon’s eyes opened, their focus gone, their color flaming brightly. “I don’t need him. I’m fine. Patrice, I’m—” His gaze did a slow loop and rolled up white.
Then Reeve was kneeling beside her. One look at the sweat-slicked face had him pushing up Deacon’s shirtsleeve.
“What is it? Reeve?”
By then he’d bared the wound with its hot, reddened edges. The slightest pressure brought a noxious
oozing from the stitched seam and an anxious moan from Deacon. Reeve had seen the signs a thousand times, and they weren’t good.
“The wound’s gone bad. It’s poisoned his blood.”
“But he’ll be all right. Reeve? He’ll be all right.”
He glanced up, expression somber. A ragged wail tore from Patrice.
“No! I won’t lose him. You tell me he’ll be all right. Reeve, tell me!”
He couldn’t lie to her. “I’ll do what I can.”
“That’s not good enough! You tell me he won’t die!”
“I can’t.”
She looked down upon her brother’s flushed face. He was close to insensible now, as chills started working up through him. Wild with despair, she begged, “Then do what you can. Please, Reeve. Do what you can.”
He called for Jericho, and the two of them carried Deacon inside, stretching him out on a chaise that had been brought into the front parlor. There was no time to take him back to the comforts of the Glade when his life balanced upon each passing minute.
“Jericho, your mama had a poultice she used to use for drawing out poisons. Do you remember how it was made?”
“Sure do.”
“Show Miz Patrice how to make it.” When Patrice balked, he pushed her toward Jericho. “Show her now.”
“C’mon, Missy Patrice. I’ll show you where to find the right herbs.”
Reluctantly, she went with him, leaving her brother in Reeve’s care. Grateful for her absence,
considering what he had to do next, Reeve lit a candle then drew his knife, holding the blade in the flame until the metal glowed white-hot. When he turned back to the chaise, Deacon’s stare was on him with a fixed intensity.
“Gotta reopen the wound so it can drain proper,” he said with a calming firmness, then carefully moved Deacon’s arm into position. He never expected Deacon’s cool reply.
“No, you aren’t.”
Reeve never saw it coming. He was bending over, concentrating on the exposed injury. The blow struck like lightning, knocking him to hands and knees, his head ringing. He grunted as Deacon’s boot smashed into his ribs but retained enough control to grab onto his foot. When Deacon tried to lunge over him, he yanked hard, and Deacon met the ground with a crashing thud. Then, despite his fever, or because of it, Deacon began scrambling toward the door, toward the rifle Jericho left leaning there.
“Son of a—”
Reeve shook off the effects of the first punch and dived to intercept. He landed across Deacon’s legs, hanging on when he began to writhe and kick. Then Deacon rolled, and, looking into the bared saber steel of his glare, Reeve realized what a coldly efficient killing machine they’d made him. Without a sound, Deacon drove his palm up beneath Reeve’s chin, clacking his teeth together with jarring force and momentarily putting out the lights. He followed with a vicious backhanded blow, but Reeve wouldn’t be shaken. If Deacon got his hands on the rifle, he wouldn’t hesitate a heartbeat before
blowing him to hell. He had to be stopped, and there was no easy way to do it.
As Deacon’s thumbs gouged for his eyes, Reeve slammed his head once, twice, upon the floorboards but the other wouldn’t relent. He was unbelievably strong and fast, the mannered Southern gentleman swallowed up in dark, lethal purpose and momentarily fueled by fever madness. Reeve had his wrists, pinning them down, but Deacon butted him in the face, skewing his vision. As he tried to lever back on his elbows to reach the door, Reeve hit him, once to get his attention, twice to stop him. But he kept fighting with a tigerish tenacity.
“Deacon, stop! It’s over! It’s over!”
“No!” The word snarled from Deacon as he twisted onto his belly, then abruptly went still. “ ‘Trice, get the gun!”
Startled by the violence she’d come upon, Patrice dropped the basket of herbs she carried to snatch up the ancient rifle in response to the urgency in her brother’s voice.
“Shoot him, ‘Trice! He’s trying to kill me. Like he did Jonah. Shoot him!”
Unaware of doing so, Patrice threw the rifle butt up to her shoulder, her finger taut on the trigger. She sighted down the barrel … right into Reeve’s uplifted face. And hesitated.
“Shoot him!” Deacon screamed at her, his face a mass of bruising and blood. Deacon, her brother. She took aim again.
“Put it down, Patrice,” came Reeve’s steady command. “He’s out of his head. Help me with him.”
The rifle wavered.
“Patrice, for God’s sake, don’t let him fool you! You know what he is. He’s the enemy. He’s our
enemy. Don’t let him stop me. I have to get through.”
Through? What was he talking about? She lowered the gun. Seeing her surrender, Deacon gave up his fight, closing his eyes with a wretched moan. Reeve said a brief prayer of thanksgiving and motioned to Jericho, who’d just come up behind Patrice.
“Help me get him back to the couch.”
They got no protest as they settled him once more. His eyes opened fleetingly, gaze touching upon his sister as he whispered hoarsely, “How could you betray me? I’ll never forgive you. I have to get through. I have to get through.”
Seeing he was clearly delirious, Patrice set the rifle aside, the rush of fright still tingling through her. Then she knew a moment of doubt as Reeve drew his knife once more. He met her anxious gaze, his chiding her.
“Jericho, hold his arm. We’ve got to let the poisons out before the sickness gets any worse.”
It was done quickly, with only a rattly groan from Deacon as his awareness slipped beyond the capacity for pain. She jumped to comply with Reeve’s order to prepare the poultices. After she wrapped the steaming cloth about her brother’s arm, she felt the probe of Reeve’s gaze and glanced up in answer.
“Glad you decided I wasn’t the enemy. Took long enough.”
Patrice didn’t smile. “I decided you weren’t trying to kill my brother. That doesn’t make you any less the enemy.”
While Patrice sat with Deacon, keeping close watch on his soaring fever and replacing the poultices as they cooled, Reeve went back to work on the house. The physical release helped loosen the knots in his gut.
She’d almost shot him. For an infinitesimal instant he’d seen it in her eyes; enough hate, enough fury, enough courage to pull the trigger.
Not a real encouraging way to start a courtship.
He hammered fiercely, stopping only to suck at his thumb after it interfered with a downward swing. The pulse of pain helped him focus beyond the coil of his emotions.
What was he thinking? How could he hope to win the favor of these people when he couldn’t earn their trust?
It was Deacon mucking up his hopes of romance. Deacon with his shadowy government past and murderous intentions. Such a prideful man despised losing. And he, with his Union blues and less than humble manner, was salt in those arrogant wounds.
Patrice loved her ice-cold brother, despite the lack of returned warmth. She saw him as her salvation.
So what was the point?
He was slaving over the home of a man who wanted him dead, to earn the love of a woman who resented all that he stood for.
What a fool he was.
Best he get the damned house habitable and move them on in and out of his life. Then he could get on with it.
But there was no appeal to getting on with life without Patrice.
She was the reason he’d come home.
Having her glare down the barrel of that gun scared the bejesus out of him. But it also quickened a pride and passion inside him that wouldn’t be ignored. Here, he thought, in those moments he feared might be his last, is a woman worth loving, a woman worth risking everything to have. Her tremendous fire, her compassion, her common sense, her unwavering loyalty. To possess those things, to possess her …
But Deacon wasn’t the only obstacle in his way.
There was Jonah, too. And that was something the two of them had to confront if time was ever going to bleed the poisons from her heart. Or the guilt from his.
Patrice laid another hot compress on her brother’s arm, then sank down upon the floorboards next to his inert form. She touched his damp cheek and hoped she didn’t just imagine a lessening in his temperature.
He was going to get better. She refused to consider the alternatives. Death. Amputation. Reeve didn’t mention it, but she’d seen enough empty sleeves in Pride County to know the threat was real.
Tears wobbled upon the edge of her lashes, but she blinked them determinedly away. She wouldn’t cry for what might be when what already was had taken such a toll of sorrow. Her brother was here with her, he was strong, a fighter.
“Oh, Deacon don’t give up. I’ll stand by you. We’ll get through this.” She didn’t say how. She didn’t know how.
Resting her head upon the rolled edge of the chaise, Patrice closed weary eyes to allow a moment of reflection. For so long, she had only had time to
act. Now was the time to think, to plan. So much hinged upon Deacon, and she was afraid for him. He and all those who’d fought a losing war had to do battle again, this time against wildly inflated prices, smothering taxation, the destruction of their livelihoods, and—most damaging—the loss of their pride. To a Southern man, pride was all. Such men had no experience in humility and loss. She’d never known her brother to admit a mistake or apologize for a wrongdoing.
How, then, were they to survive?
“Is he better?”
The sound of Reeve’s voice brought back the magnitude of what she’d been ready to do at Deacon’s command. For a moment, she didn’t respond, unsure of how she could and still save face. She’d been ready to kill him. In her panicked need to protect Deacon and her instinctive obedience to her brother’s will, she’d been prepared to take a life. She glanced up slowly, knowing the right thing to do was apologize, to beg his forgiveness for her misrepresentation of the circumstance.
But the instant she beheld him, the words dammed up tight in her throat, caught behind a wedge of Sinclair pride. And at that moment, she understood completely how conflicted her brother must be between heart and mind.
She said nothing about what had almost happened.
“He seems to be.”
Reeve waited, expectation bringing a lift to one brow. Obviously, this was where she was to throw herself at his feet in humility, pleading excuses for her brother’s behavior.
Her shoulders squared, supporting the haughty
hoist of her chin. She wouldn’t beg for what was well deserved. How dare Reeve Garrett demand sympathy after his part in their misery? Union soldiers had ravaged their home. Union arrogance had turned her brother into the dark, nearly soulless man who’d come home to her. Reeve’s allegiance to the Union cause had cost her the man she was to marry. He
was
their enemy and not worthy of their trust.
But he had saved her brother’s life.
“Thank you for what you did for Deacon.”
The terse concession coaxed a faint curl of amusement. “For what? Tending to him, or seeing that he don’t hang for murder?”
A bolt of outrage shot up Patrice’s spine as Reeve bowed slightly and left the room. She glared after him, her chest heaving with indignation. The nerve! The gall!
The truth! She took a quick breath.
If either she or Deacon managed to pull the trigger, killing a former Federal soldier, martial law would place a noose around their necks without asking if they had reason for what was done.
In saving his own life, Reeve had spared theirs.
The starch went out of her proud righteousness. She was no better than any of the stiff-necked Rebs sulking over their defeat. She’d let pride dictate her reactions.
What hope did any of them have when dying with conceit was preferable to surviving in humility?
They came from all across Pride County, arriving in wagons, on foot, some even in the carriages that used to bring them there before the war. They came wearing taffetas shaken out for the first time in years, frock coats shiny with wear, and Kentucky or Tennessee regiment gray, ill fitting, patched, but proudly borne. They came out of the need of a social people to group together, pretending nothing had changed, to grumble and exchange stories.
And they came to get a look at the Yankee murderer living under the Glendower roof.
Acting hostess at her mother’s side, Patrice silently thanked her mother for talking her out of wearing a widow’s black in Jonah’s memory. Hannah insisted the occasion be one for rebirth, not a funeral dirge, and produced lengths of treasured dove gray silk with silver lace for trim. In its off-the-shoulder
elegance, Patrice attended her first party as a woman matured instead of a giddy young girl full of dreams. As she greeted old friends with a smile and extended hand, directing the ladies to the receiving room and the gentleman to Byron’s study, where cigar smoke and laughter rolled out in an ever-growing cloud, she caught herself sweeping the front steps and the shadows for a figure conspicuously absent. And gauging from the tension in each guest, they were all wondering the same thing; where was Reeve Garrett and would he dare put in an appearance?