“How did you get to town?”
“With Reeve.”
“You can keep me company until he’s ready to leave—all right?”
She chafed at the lack of options, alarmed by her own willingness to remain as much as by the danger
of leaving. Noting her reluctance, he smiled.
“If you can get past my accent, I’m really not such bad company. Some people actually find me amusing.”
“I’m afraid I’m not one of them, Lieutenant.”
He grinned, not offended. “Damn, at least you’re honest. Can’t fault you for telling the truth. All right. I’ll eat my breakfast and keep my mouth shut. You can sit pretty and pretend you’re at a table by yourself. When I’m finished, we’ll find Reeve, then I’ll fall off the face of the earth and never bother you again.”
He seemed sincere enough, even a little peeved, but Starla doubted that Hamilton Dodge would be that easy to get rid of. She’d already seen that hint of bulldog in him. Once he sank his teeth in, she doubted he was quick to let go. Why was that knowledge as welcome as it was worrisome?
But he did keep his word about not burdening her with conversation. His breakfast arrived and he tackled it in silence. And while he ate, she watched him, with displeasure at first, then with begrudging interest.
He wasn’t hard on the eyes. His features were cut with a pleasant symmetry, regular rather than dramatic. He wore his dark hair close cropped and paid scant attention to his razor. His dark-stubbled jaw was strong and squared, an indication of that bulldog again, as were the thickness of his upper body and the breadth of his shoulders.
She would have thought him placidly solid and nonthreatening, had she not seen him dispatch those two outside with such lethal speed. The
crutches suggested a weakness as false as her first impressions of him. He wasn’t helpless nor made up of empty arrogance. His dark eyes warned that there was more to him than just a nice face, a negligent manner, and a clipped, fast, and often profane pattern of speech. His eyes were deep centered, patient, and alarmingly intense. That quality made her uneasy around him more than any other. Patrice called him a good man, a dependable man.
She saw him as a potentially dangerous one.
She started to bring her cup of coffee up for a drink when the smell reached her. Ordinarily, she enjoyed the rich scent of beans and chicory, but this morning something about the odor seemed bitter enough to make her stomach roil in protest. She set it away in a hurry and swallowed hard to keep the creep of acid from coming up the back of her throat.
Before, she’d felt chilled. Now, the room was unbearably warm. Sweat popped out along her brow as the unsettled feeling continued to grow. She blinked hard against the sudden sense of lightness that had everything blurring out of focus. Perhaps she needed to eat.
But one glance at Dodge’s plate discouraged that thinking.
Then he tipped back in his chair and lit a cigar.
The instant the first curl of smoke brushed her nose, she went racing for the door.
She was hanging over the edge of the boardwalk, heaving ignominiously into the alley with the hope that it wouldn’t take long for her to die, when she
heard him lower himself awkwardly to his knees beside her. At the first touch of his hand, she groaned in objection but was too weak to pull away.
“Easy, now.” Something in the low croon of his voice conveyed a sense of comfort, as did the wet cloth he pressed to the back of her neck, then to her fevered brow.
Beyond shame, she leaned into him, letting him cool her face and even open the first few buttons to her bodice without protesting. Instead, she heard herself mumbling apologies.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know what—”
“Shhh. It’s all right. Don’t be embarrassed by something so natural. Five of my six sisters have gone through the same thing.”
He was stroking the reviving cloth down her neck, right to the beginning swell of her breasts, without hesitation or modesty. Caught in an agitation of relief and outrage that he should take such liberties so casually, she almost missed his meaning, until he put it plainly.
“How far along are you?”
“How what?”
“When are you expecting the baby?”
She lifted her head, staring at him through the straggle of her hair.
Baby?
Another wave of nausea tore through her belly, leaving her spent and trembling. She’d suspected it. She’d feared to consider it openly, but in the back of her mind, the possibility had been there, a terrible consequence of her sins.
She was pregnant.
And this brash Northerner, who was by his own admission no gentleman, knew it, too.
Starla pushed up from her hands and knees to wobble to her feet. It took Dodge considerably longer to wedge his crutches under his arms and angle his unwilling legs into a position to support him. By then, Starla was breathing in hard, hurried snatches, her stare unnaturally bright with panic.
“I’m no such thing,” she denied with a shrill vehemence. “You are mistaken, sir. It’s something I ate, is all.”
Dodge stared back at her, his gaze knowing and strangely apologetic. She knew he didn’t believe her. So she leaned close to him, close enough for him to read the desperate sincerity in her glare.
“If you breathe one word of that slanderous lie, I’ll have my brother come calling with six inches of steel that’ll see you never spread such vile rumors again.”
With that cold promise to seal his mouth shut, she whirled away and ran a zigzag path toward Pride’s livery, where she’d have Reeve take her back to the safety of the Glade.
But how safe would she be, now that the past was coming back to haunt her with a merciless vengeance?
Few things could have surprised and alarmed Starla more than to hear that Hamilton Dodge was waiting to see her.
Patrice relayed the information carefully. And though she hadn’t said as much, Starla was certain Reeve had told her friend how rattled she’d been on the drive back from town. Reeve had asked no questions, but it was unlike Patrice not to. Starla sensed her friends were treading cautiously around her. While she was grateful for not having to explain, she had to wonder what conclusions they were drawing on their own.
Now the Yankee banker was here, requesting a moment of her time.
Patrice announced him the way she would a favored courting beau. That in itself was enough to goad Starla into anxious irritation. But knowing what he knew cast a different slant on his purpose. Whom had he told? What would it take to keep him silent? These questions defied the calm manner she tried to project. Patrice claimed the shrewd banker to be a good man. Starla knew only the
contradiction of the words “good” and “man.”
As she checked her color and the neckline of her gown for modesty, she scowled at her reflection in the glass. He’d seen her at her absolute worst. What was the point in preening? Unless a flirtatious smile could dissuade him from ruining her.
How much more would he demand than that?
True, the Yankee hadn’t fallen easy prey to her charms, not like the majority of men she led by their libidos. He seemed singularly immune to her coquetry. That very difference made him dangerous, to her and to her secrets. If he couldn’t be manipulated by a few simpering sighs, how could she bend him to her will?
She was searching frantically for that answer when she followed the scent of good cigar out onto the front veranda. In the late afternoon, the smell didn’t have the same disastrous effect that it had that morning.
He was seated on one of the inviting wicker chaises cozied up into the shadow of the Glade’s cool white brick, feet propped up on a low bench before him. His gaze jumped to her immediately but he made no attempt to rise.
But she felt averse to displaying her manners.
“What do you want?”
He blinked at her bluntness but refused to look put off.
“I came to make sure you were all right.”
“How kind. I’m fine. Was there anything else?”
He gave a lopsided grin and an admiring “Damned if you’re not the most aggravating female. Come sit with me for a minute. I don’t like
looking up at the people I’m talking to.”
She didn’t move. “I don’t want to sit with you, Lieutenant Dodge. I don’t want to talk to you. I want to know what you plan to do about this morning.
“It’s not me that has to do anything, ma’am. Guess I was kinda curious about your plans.”
His calm hedging undercut her patience. “You don’t figure into them, sir. What’s it going to cost me to see it stays that way?”
Dodge stared up with a comical blankness for a long minute. She could almost believe he had no idea what she was talking about. She hated that mock innocence almost as much as she hated the fact that she was at his mercy.
“Don’t just sit there like a dolt. Tell me what you want to keep your mouth shut.”
If she’d thought him amiable and harmless before, the sudden flash of his eyes gave her warning. The volume of his voice didn’t alter, but its tone took on a fierce intensity.
“Sit down.”
She glared. “I don’t think—”
“Sit down now.”
That order vibrated with the power of command. She wouldn’t have thought him capable of packing such an authoritative punch with simple intonation. She felt intimidated enough to drop down on the bench beside his booted feet but retained the mulish dignity to sit stiff and straight in rebellion.
He drew a slow breath. It fired the spark in his eyes like the pull of the bellows fueled a flame.
Still, he didn’t raise his voice, continuing to speak with that level chill.
“I don’t know what I might have done to make you think I’d come here to blackmail you, but you’re wrong, lady. Dead wrong. You don’t know me, so I guess I’ll have to forgive you.”
“How generous.”
“You’re damn right it is. You don’t know me, so I’ll tell you this once. I don’t lie, I’m not dishonest, and I don’t play games. Now, I’m sorry if that makes me—what did you call me? A dolt? That makes me a dolt in your opinion, but I can live with that a lot better than I can you thinking I’m the kind of man who’d bank on your misfortune. I don’t want anything from you, Miss Fairfax. I was trying to be nice because you’re a friend of the only friends I have down here. Maybe you just don’t understand ‘nice.’ Forgive me all to hell for having bothered.”
He made a grab for his crutches, but they slid away from his grasp to bounce on the stone of the veranda floor. When he twisted to retrieve them, his feet slipped off the bench. The abrupt drop bent his back at a sudden angle, wringing a sharp hiss from him. He continued to flail for the crutches, breathing hard and furiously at the effort until Starla pressed a hand to his shoulder. He glanced up, clearly angry now, only to lose all momentum at her quiet claim of, “I’m sorry.”
He jerked back, wincing from the pain of that prideful move. “Don’t you dare feel sorry for me.”
“I’m not—I don’t. I’m sorry I mistook your motives. You’re right, I don’t understand nice. It
makes me uncomfortable when someone does something and expects nothing. That’s why I’m sorry.”
“Oh.” He settled back, slightly chagrined by his temper.
Rattled by her admission, she demanded, “Well, are you going to accept my apology or not?”
He studied her until she shifted nervously. It shouldn’t matter if he did or did not. But he had been kind to her and she repaid him with slanderous suggestion and hurt him in the bargain. She almost wished he had some hidden agenda. At least she’d know how to respond to that.
“Well?”
He smiled at the testiness in her voice. “Apology accepted.”
She bent to reposition his crutches within his reach, but he made no move toward them. He watched her instead, his dark eyes brimming with unspoken questions. Inexplicably she found herself needing to answer them, for him and for herself.
“I behaved badly this morning,” she began. “I didn’t know—I mean, I wasn’t sure until you said—”
Restlessly she stood and began to pace under his silent attentiveness, unable to meet his gaze while speaking of the embarrassing particulars.
“He said he wanted to marry me.” She laughed softly. “How many foolish females fall prey to that lie, I wonder? I believed him and now I shall pay for that foolishness.”
He spoke with practicality, not condemnation.
“If you told him about the baby, wouldn’t he change his mind?”
“I doubt it. And even if he did, I wouldn’t have him.” Her chin lifted with a pride dredged up from shame. “I wouldn’t want a man I’d have to trap through my mistake—a mistake my child would have to pay for. Marriage isn’t the answer for everything.” She canted a look his way to see if he believed her careful fiction only to be surprised by the naked emotion his expression betrayed.
“What kind of man would see his own child as a mistake?” He said that more to himself than to her, but Starla answered with a bitter smile of truth.
“Not a ‘nice’ man, Lieutenant Dodge. I discovered that a bit too late. If I tell my father, he’d likely insist I marry the man for honor’s sake.”
“And if you refused?”
“If I refused, he’d most likely commit me.”
Dodge had the oddest look on his face, as if he couldn’t believe a man would turn against his own daughter. She laughed at his naïveté. “We don’t like to live with our mistakes out in the open down here. At least, the women don’t. I can hear my father now, ranting about how I’ve proved him right, that I’m as immoral as my—” She pressed her hand to her lips to stop the words in time. “Forgive me, Lieutenant. I hadn’t meant to bore you with quite so many details.”
“What will you do?”
His basic question cut to the quick. Her shoulders slumped with the weight of her sigh.
“I don’t know. I could go abroad. I could ask around in some of the more unsavory quarters. I’m
sure I could find someone who could … eliminate the problem altogether.” Her voice shook at even considering that heinous possibility.
“Don’t do that.”
His vehemence surprised her. Then it made her angry to think he’d condemn her. How easy for him, a man, to sit in judgment. “I haven’t that many options, sir.”