Halfway Home, page 17
Currents of honey. That’s what she had felt. And that, for a woman who had always prided herself on her sensibility, was downright frightening.
Oh, she knew what it was all about. She might not be terribly experienced, but she was, after all, a married woman. Twice married, for all intents and purposes. She knew what it was to bed a man.
Actually, it wasn’t at all what she’d expected. It hadn’t hurt—at least, not down there where it had all happened. Mostly, it had been embarrassing. Sort of like the way one felt when one bathed one’s self with a washcloth. All decent girls were taught to think of something else when they bathed their private parts, only sometimes . . .
Well. At any rate, Jericho wasn’t Archibald, and he certainly wasn’t a washcloth.
“Do you want breakfast served in here, or would you like to try the dining room this morning?” she inquired brightly the moment she detected a sign of life from the bed.
Jericho groaned and flung his good arm up over his eyes. “If there’s two things I can’t abide of a morning, it’s sunlight in my eyes and a chirky woman before breakfast.”
“Oh? And how many chirky women have you had before breakfast?”
Easing his arm aside, he cocked an eye at her. “That was a figure of speech, woman. But if you really want to know—”
“I can close the curtains if the sun bothers you,” Sara said quickly. She had waked early, bathed and dressed behind the screen, wearing her most flattering gown—well, actually, it was the only other gown she had brought with her—and now she was starving.
“Close the curtains, look to see if there’s water in the pitcher, order me up a quart of coffee, and then make yourself scarce. meet you in the dining room in half an hour.”
“Are you sure? I could help you—”
“Sara . . .”
“Oh, all right. There’s plenty of water. I. had the pitcher filled after I—that is, it’s full. And I’ll ask the dining room to send around a pot of coffee right away.”
“One more thing,” he said when she was halfway to the door.
Sara glanced over her shoulder. He was sitting up in bed, the covers rumpled down around his hips, his chest bare of all save the fascinating tee-shaped pattern of dark curling hair she had noticed when she had first seen him without a shirt. “What happened to your shirt? You went to bed last night in your clothes.”
“My shirt? Now that’s about the strangest thing I’ve ever seen, Sara. Sometime during the night, my clothes just upped and plum disappeared. Every blessed stitch I had on. I reckon I could’ve got up and looked around some, but I was afraid you might wake up and take fright to see a buck naked man in your bedroom, so I decided to wait until morning. Things don’t look near as scary once the sun comes up.”
The flash of white teeth in the shadowy morning growth of whiskers made her catch her breath. She had almost forgotten what a wicked sense of humor. her husband had. When he bothered to use it.
“Well, at least you seem to be feeling better this morning.”
“You might say I’ve thought of a good reason to get well.”
“Of course you have a reason to get well. My mercy, with all that’s going on back at Wilde Oaks, I should think you’d want to hurry back there as fast as you could.”
“Unhuh,” he said, still studying her with that dark, wicked gleam in his eyes.
Well, Sara thought as she hurriedly shut the door behind her.
Well!
Chapter Fourteen
Rafe dragged a chair from another table, straddled it, and propped his elbows on the table. “Morning, Rico. Glad to see you’re feeling some better than you were last night. Sara was worried—told me she was afraid you might be having some kind of a relapse.”
Jericho nearly choked on his coffee. “I’ll thank you not to talk about me behind my back, madam.”
Sara’s lips tightened, but she refused to rise to his baiting. The slatternly woman who served their table slapped down three plates of hominy, biscuits and underdone bacon, and Sara hastily averted her eyes. She had woken up feeling unwell and put it down to last night’s turtle stew. The gluey gray mess had begun to return on her during the night.
“I’ve got a plan,” said Rafe, attacking his own plate with enthusiasm.
Jericho sipped his coffee and said nothing: His first day dining in public, and he hadn’t even touched his breakfast, Sara thought irritably. Didn’t the exasperating man even want to regain his strength?
“You want to hear it?”
“I reckon you’re going to tell me anyway.”
Looking totally unperturbed, the older man slathered butter on a huge, ragged biscuit and took a big bite. “Mmm, best cooking I’ve tasted in years. If you don’t want your biscuit, Rico, I don’t mind taking it off your hands.”
“I don’t need you to take anything off my hands.”
For reasons she didn’t dare delve into, Sara felt her face grow warm as both men continued to glare at each other. At least Jericho glared. Rafe looked smug as a cream-fed cat.
Crumpling her napkin, she eased her chair back and stood, bringing them both to their feet. Rafe dusted bread crumbs off his waistcoat, which was of yellow brocade, piped in royal blue to match his coat. He did favor elegant garments.
Jericho was dressed in his usual black.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said primly, “I believe I’ve had enough.”
“You didn’t even touch your food,” Jericho accused.
“She means she’s had enough of your grouchy disposition.”
Jericho’s jaw took on that granitelike quality that Sara had come to recognize, having seen it on more than a few occasions in the short time since she had met him. “I don’t need you to tell me what my wife needs or doesn’t need.”
“You sure as Solomon need somebody to set you straight. That is, if you mean to hang onto her.”
Sara didn’t linger to hear her husband’s response. She was afraid she already knew what it would be. Flinging her napkin onto the table, she spun around and marched from the room. “Oh, for mercy’s sake,” she muttered. Blinking hard, she barged into a matronly female, bouncing off the well-upholstered bosom.
“Lawks a mercy, look where ye’re going, why don’t ye?” the woman protested. And then, “Why, ye’re crying. Honey, it cain’t be all that bad.”
Sara brushed past her and hurried across to the door that led to the rooms of the Carolina wing. The woman stared after her. From the dining room beyond, both men followed her progress. Then Rafe turned to Jericho and said, “I reckon she’s breeding after all. Damned shame. Last thing you need now is a cuckoo in the nest.”
“My nest is none of your bloody business. Now, if you’ve got something else to say, spit it out.” Jericho was behaving badly. He blamed it on a number of things: a sore shoulder, losing Louisa, losing his ship, and then damned near losing his life. It had nothing to do with Sara.
“Speaking of nests, it came to me last night that what with you and Sara and that horse of yours, this place is costing you damned near twenty dollars a week. Now that you’re up and about, maybe you ought to start thinking about heading south.”
“I can do my own thinking, damn it.”
“Just thought I’d mention it. But if you happen to run out of worry-fodder, you might want to chew on this for a spell. You got one horse in the livery. I’ve got a horse and a shay that’ll hold two people. Now, I could drive the shay on back, and you and Sara could double up in the saddle, but it’s a long ride. Be rough on that big ugly gelding of yours, even rougher on Sara. Especially if she’s breeding. Or I could take Sara up with me in the shay, and you could follow along behind us on—”
“No.” Jericho had settled back into his chair and was twisting his thick china cup in his hands.
“No? All right then, what if I was to ride your gelding while you and Sara take the shay? Trouble is, you ain’t up to driving all that distance, and I don’t know if Sara even drives. You happen to know if she does?”
“How the devil would I know?”
Rafe shrugged as if to say, she’s your wife.
“There’s always the packet,” Jericho said reluctantly.
Leaning forward, Rafe propped his elbows on the table. “Now why didn’t I think of that?” he mused, leaving Jericho to suspect that was what the man had been aiming at all along.
In his early days at sea, before he’d become the captain of his own thirty-two ton schooner, Jericho had traveled the canal many a time, hauling lumber, pork and whiskey up through the Albemarle Sound, up the Pasquotank River, rounding the Narrows at Elizabeth City and lock-stepping north to Deep Creek, up to the southern arm of the Elizabeth, through the mouth of the James and into the bay.
With the arrogance of youth, Jericho had stood at the rail with his mates and jeered at the doughty little packet boats plying the canal. Pissants, they’d called them. Mud-kicking pissants.
God, he had owned the world back then. “Tell me something, Tubby—does it strike you that now and again a man can make a royal ass of himself without half trying?”
Appearing to consider the matter, Rafe stroked his jaw, which was, as always, impeccably shaven. A dissolute rake he might be, but he prided himself on being a fastidious dissolute rake. “Come to think of it, I believe you’re right.”
*
Sara was all packed by the time Jericho had smoked a cigar on the veranda, strolled out to the livery to see how Bones was faring and returned to the room they shared.
Standing in the open doorway, he frowned at the valise on the bed. “You had it all planned, didn’t you? You and Rafe. Is that what you had your heads together over last night?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Rafe mentioned going home now that you no longer need him, and I simply thought, since you don’t need me any longer, either, I might as well leave, too.”
“I never did need you. It wasn’t me that invited you here.”
Up went that small, stubborn chin of hers. Jericho could see the flash of fire in her eyes all the way across the room. “You never wanted to need me,” she corrected. “But you needed me, all right. You couldn’t even turn over in bed without help, and that princess woman wasn’t about to cancel her trip to Libya to—”
“Liberia.”
“Wherever!”
“You want to talk about who needs who?” Jericho drawled. “What were you planning on doing with no money, no husband and your belly full of baby?”
Sara gasped. “I do so have money. I have more money than I could ever spend.” Which wasn’t precisely true; she had enough to live on for the rest of her life, as long as she wasn’t too extravagant. “I certainly didn’t marry you for yours.”
“That’s right, I remember now. You married me to give Rickett’s bastard a decent name.” Jericho knew she had her own money. The trouble with Sara was that she was just too independent for her own good. Maybe it was time he reminded her of just why she had married him.
Even as he watched her, her face flushed, then drained of all color. It struck him that from the first time he had laid eyes on her, in that ugly brown frock, with her brown hair and her brown eyes and her suntanned face, something about the woman had snagged his keel and held him fast. He still wasn’t sure how it could have happened. The way she dressed, she should have looked plain as a slab of salt horse. Instead, she looked as fancy as one of those caged jungle birds he saw for sale at all the South American ports he visited.
He was still considering all that when she lurched for the screen, fell to her knees over the chamber pot and began to wretch. After one moment of feeling totally helpless, he grabbed a clean towel, dipped it into the pitcher, and stood hard by to lend a hand.
“Go away,” she groaned, twisting around to glare at his boots.
Jericho knelt beside her and clumsily wiped her face.
“I can’t stand for you to see me like this.” With one shaky hand, she shoved back a coil of hair that had slipped its mooring. “Rico, please go away.”
Rico. It was the first time she had ever called him that. “We always keep a supply of gingerroot and dried peppermint leaves in the lazaret aboard the Wind. Every now and then, a green hand comes down with the heaves, mostly after they’ve been aloft the first few times in a rolling sea. All that pitching and yawing can look mighty fearsome when you’re thirty, forty feet above the deck.”
Sara closed her eyes and groaned.
“Don’t know that it’d serve for your troubles, but it’s worth a try.”
“Just let me lie down for a few minutes. The packet boat won’t be coming for at least an hour, will it?” She put the lid on the chamber pot and rose, thrusting out a hand to steady herself against the wall.
Jericho wanted to sweep her up into his arms, but he restrained himself. For one thing, he suspected she would try to fight him, and right now, she lacked the strength.
For another thing, so did he.
After setting the pot out into the hall to be collected by the potboy, he poured a tumbler full of water. “Here, sip on this while I see if I can find something to settle your belly. What with the slop they serve at mess here, they’re bound to have something on hand.”
He ventured a smile, and she responded with a weak one of her own. “Lie down, Sara,” he said in a voice he scarcely recognized as his own. “Let me unlace your boots for you.”
She let him. It was an indication of just how miserable she must be feeling that she settled back on the pillows and allowed him to fold back her skirt and petticoat and unlace her boots. Small, sensible black boots. Nothing frivolous for his Sara, no sirree.
When, rejoicing in their freedom, she wiggled her stocking-clad toes, he stopped himself just short of clasping them in his hands. He figured she had allowed him about all the freedom of her person she was of a mind to right now.
“I’ll be back directly. Try to sleep.”
“Jericho, thank you. I know I’m sharp-spoken. It’s a failing I’m working on.”
“We all have our failings, I reckon. I know how it is with women in your fix.”
“How could you possibly know . . . Oh. You must’ve had a lot of mistresses.”
Halfway to the door, Jericho stopped dead in the water. He figured it was a shot in the dark, but she’d been square on target. He’d had him a mistress once for nearly two and a half years. Which wasn’t all that long considering he’d been at sea most of the time. The relationship had ended when he’d come in from a spell of lumber hauling up from South America. Lucy had greeted him with the news that he was to become a father in five months’ time and he’d best marry her right away.
The trouble was, he’d been at sea for six months. When it came to the trade of mistressing, Lucy had been right up there with the best of them.
When it came to ciphering, she had never been even middling fair. She had married a redheaded greengrocer, and five months later she presented him with a redheaded daughter. Jericho had sent the child a carved wooden box he had picked up on the west coast of Africa and sworn off mistresses, which he had only sworn onto in the first place because he’d been scared of catching a case of the French pox from one of many prostitutes who prowled every seaport.
“Well? Am I right?” she asked without even opening her eyes.
“Madam, you sound just like a confounded wife.”
“I am a confounded wife.” Sara waited for him to deny the charge. It was none of her concern. All men kept mistresses, or so she had been told. And besides, theirs had never been intended as a real marriage.
So why did it matter so very much?
Arms crossed over his chest, Jericho regarded her dispassionately. “It’s common knowledge, madam. Carrying women are always sickly of a morning.”
“So are women who eat stewed turtle that’s gone off. And I do wish you would stop calling me madam in that nasty tone of voice.”
Sara scrunched her eyes shut and prayed he would leave her in peace. The truth was, she didn’t know whether her trouble was what she had eaten the night before or what she had done on her wedding night. Her first wedding night, that was.
There’d been only that single time, and that over and done with almost before she’d known what was happening.
On the other hand, many a time she had planted a whole row of store-bought seeds, only to have nary a one sprout, while a chance-fallen seed tossed out with the kitchen garbage would sprout, flourish and bear fruit.
“Oh, go away,” she grumbled.
Somewhat to her disappointment, he did.
Vowing to sleep no more than thirty minutes and then to rise and take her valise out to the landing, Sara concentrated on visualizing a black velvet curtain swaying in the wind.
Swaying . . . and swaying . . .
She had always put herself to sleep this way whenever she was troubled. Usually it worked like a charm.
Swaying . . . swaying . . .
With a groan, she curled over onto her side and swallowed a fresh surge of nausea. “Please, dear God, let it be the turtle,” she prayed.
*
Out by the livery stable, Jericho heard the Albemarle’s steam whistle blowing in the distance. From the sound he figured she was somewhere between the Wallaceton locks and the feeder ditch. Traffic was heavy this morning.
Giving his gelding a shriveled carrot he had stolen from the cook, he was headed back to the hotel to rouse Sara when the elderly female she had barged into in the dining room that morning grabbed him by his coat sleeve and shook his arm.
“I’ll have a word with you, if you please, sir.”
He didn’t please, not that he thought it would do him any good to say so. “Ma’am?”
“Any man who makes a helpless woman cry is an abomination before the Lord.”
For all she was small, she had the grip of a stevedore. Jericho’s backbone ratcheted up another few notches. “Beg pardon, ma’am, but—”
