AS HAD HAPPENED EACH TIME BEFORE, BRIGHAM'S LOVE-MAKING left Lydia in a stricken daze. A long interval had passed before she returned to herself, remembered how to make her heart beat and her lungs draw air, and finally spoke.
“I need to know if it's true, what they're saying,” she whispered into the moist warmth of Brigham's bare shoulder.
Brigham gave a long, contented sigh and settled himself more comfortably to the mattress. “I guess that depends on what's being said,” he replied after a long pause.
Lydia felt the first stirrings of anger as reality settled over her mind like a net of gossamer cobwebs. “You know,” she told him, with a small but fierce nudge to his ribcage. “It's that Clover O'Keefe, over at the Satin Hammer. People say she's your mistress now.”
There was another sigh, but this one was ragged. “Cl—Miss O'Keefe is a friend of mine,” he acknowledged reluctantly.
Lydia's heart was teetering on the edge of some stony precipice, ready to topple over and smash to bits on the rocks of truth below. She knew Brigham would not lie to her; he always said exactly what he was thinking.
“I have a wife,” he said at last, his embrace neither tightening nor growing slack, one hand spread possessively over Lydia's bare bottom. “As yet, I've seen no need to take a mistress.”
Relief flooded Lydia's soul, but so did fury. It was hard to face Brigham's power over her, let alone accept it as fact. Some primitive feminine instinct declared that she held equal sway over him, but she dismissed that as wishful thinking. She tried to rise, but her husband held her in place with gentle but inexorable strength.
“It's been over a month since—since we were together,” she said. Something in her wanted, needed, to fight, to drive Brigham back beyond walls he'd already scaled, away from ground he'd long since conquered.
Brigham laughed. “I've been celibate for longer periods of time than that, my dear wife,” he said after his amusement had waned a little. In a sudden but maddeningly graceful move, he pulled her on top of him and flashed his white teeth in the triumphant smile of a dark-haired Viking claiming the spoils of battle. “Don't you believe me?”
Lydia was wonderfully, miserably conscious of the hard, rough, and entirely welcoming maleness of the body beneath hers. Her nipples had tightened, and there was a sensation of something warm tumbling in the depths of her. “Of—Of course I believe you. You haven't the good grace to lie, not even when it would be the kindest thing to do.”
He laughed again, and the sound rumbled under her like an earthquake. “As soon as I work out whether that was praise or damnation, I'll respond.” He spread his hands over her buttocks, now quivering with renewed sensation, and pressed her to him. His erection seemed as magnificent and elemental as one of those giant trees he'd felled, and Lydia felt herself expanding to take him inside her.
“It was damnation,” she answered, but she had already grown breathless. His hands moved from her bottom to her hips, raising her, positioning her. She gave a tremulous cry as the gentle but inevitable invasion began.
While she straddled him, Brigham traced each of her nipples with the tip of an index finger. “Are you really carrying my baby?” he asked in a low voice. He was still entering her, making slow but incredibly pleasurable progress. “Or was that just a ploy to get under my skin?”
Lydia drew in a sharp breath and held it to keep from crying out in the sheer wanton glory of Brigham's leisurely seduction. “There—is really—a baby,” she replied grudgingly, her breath fast and shallow now. She tried to move upon him, but he held her hips firmly, stilting her as the pillar of fire rose inside her. “And it seems to me—oh, dear God, Brigham—that you're—under my skin—”
He let her have a little more of him, a tantalizing fraction of an inch, then raised his head far enough to drink languidly from one of her breasts. “Indeed I am, Mrs. Quade,” he replied in a low voice, gruff with both passion and amusement.
“Oh, Brigham, please—”
He lowered her farther and farther onto his shaft, until she sheathed him completely. For the first time the fact that his own control was finally slipping was audible in his voice. “This won't—this won't hurt my child?”
Lydia was touched, but the passion had gone too far for her to stop and indulge in tender emotion. The needing was in her blood, coursing through her system like a fever, and Brigham offered the only antidote. “No, Brigham,” she managed, with a certainty that came from some deep, unexplored part of herself. “Your son is safe.”
At her words, Brigham's powerful body buckled beneath her, like a stallion trying to throw off a rider. Lydia clamped her thighs on either side of his hips and stayed in the saddle. The sweet battle went on and on, until Lydia and Brigham broke through the invisible barrier, their low cries intertwining like ribbon as they streamed toward the ceiling.
When they finally had their fill, Brigham and Lydia drifted off into fitful slumber, their perspiring bodies still tangled in each other and in the sheets. Lydia awakened with a start somewhere in the deepest folds of the night, thinking a lantern had been lit.
Instead, the light of a late-summer moon was shining through the window, bathing her and Brigham and the whole bed in a silvery glow. Lydia's heart tightened at the beauty of it, and the plain hopelessness of loving the man who slept beside her.
She had to rally her strength, she thought miserably, and save some part of her soul for herself. If she didn't, her identity would mingle with Brigham's, then dissolve entirely, and she would have no more substance than the reflection in a looking glass.
She disengaged herself from her husband, cautiously, limb by limb. He stirred, and she waited, her hand resting soothingly on his side, until he settled into deep sleep again. Then she rose from the bed, dressed with quiet awkwardness, and slipped from the room. Part of her spirit stayed behind, nestled close against Brigham's side.
She wept silently as she made her way down the darkened hallway and the rear stairway, through the kitchen, which was spilling with moonlight, and outside into the night. The sounds around her were companionable ones; a night owl hooted in a tree, and she could hear the faint rustle of the water as it broke on the nearby shoreline. Crickets sang their summer chorus in the grass, and a calico cat rushed past, intent on some urgent feline business.
Lydia would have gone straight back to her cottage if she hadn't seen the light burning in a window on the second floor of Quade's Harbor's brand-new general store. Polly lived there now, in a couple of spacious, unfinished rooms above the mercantile.
Polly might be ill, Lydia reasoned, hurrying in the direction of the large, clapboard store. But even as she went over all the dire possibilities, her friend being with child and all, Lydia knew she was fooling herself. She was not going to Polly to lend aid, understanding, and reassurance, but to ask for those things.
She climbed the outside stairway, smiling as she passed the hand-painted letters on the raw wooden wall. QUADE's MERCANTILE, the ornate words proclaimed. DEVON AND POLLY QUADE, PROPS.
On the splintery landing outside Polly's door, Lydia's resolve faltered a little. It was thoughtless of her to intrude this way, she concluded. Here it was, the middle of the night…
The door swung open before Lydia could shuffle back down the stairs and disappear into the few shadows available on such a brightly lit night.
“Lydia,” Polly said. In the shimmer of the lantern inside, and the silver splash of moonlight, Lydia could see that her friend had been weeping. The realization caught Lydia by surprise, partly because she'd been so caught up in her own problems, and partly because Polly seemed so strong and optimistic in the daytime. She had a definite knack for running a business, and sometimes it almost seemed that she didn't care if Devon Quade ever came back.
Now, seeing Polly's face, Lydia realized she'd been wrong.
“I saw your light,” Lydia said lamely as Polly stepped back to admit her.
Polly closed the door, then embraced her midnight caller for a moment. “Come and sit down. We'll have some tea.”
Lydia nodded. She had no better place to be, except in the warmth and safety of Brigham Quade's bed. Just the thought of returning to her cottage filled her with loneliness, even though she knew she would eventually have to go there.
Polly's quarters were tidy and very sparsely furnished. There was a wood cookstove, a changing screen of silk painted with a delicate Oriental design—no doubt purloined from the main house—a table and two chairs, a chest of drawers, and an iron bed. The covers were rumpled, as though Polly had tried to sleep and failed.
“Have you heard anything at all from Devon?” Lydia asked quietly, accepting a seat at Polly's table while her hostess went to the stove, where a kettle of water was already simmering.
Polly's lovely dark hair was wound into a thick braid that trailed down her still-slender back. “No,” she said, without turning to meet Lydia's eyes. “He's got to be the stubbornest man God ever breathed life into.”
Lydia smiled in spite of herself. “Second stubbornest,” she corrected. “I think Brigham taught Devon everything he knows about being hard-headed and unreasonable.”
Polly scooped loose tea leaves into a crockery pot, then added water from the kettle. She left the brew to steep while taking mismatched cups from a cupboard fashioned of stacked shipping crates. “Sometimes I think I should just go and find him,” she told Lydia distractedly, “and drag him home by the ear. I declare, he acts like a little boy in need of a spanking.”
The image of the suave, powerfully built Devon being hauled up the wharf by an earlobe made Lydia smile. All the same, her words were uttered in a sad tone. “Wouldn't it be a luxury just to be weak sometimes?” she reflected. “I mean, Devon and Brigham aren't monsters. Why can't we just let them steer us blissfully through life, the way so many other women let their husbands do?”
Polly sighed heavily, and her answering smile faltered on her lips. “I guess because once you're forced to learn to survive on your own, you don't ever forget it.” She brought the teapot to the table, along with sugar and milk and the unmatched cups, and sat down across from Lydia with another sigh. “Besides, I'm not sure Brigham would be attracted to you if you were nothing but a wilting violet, waiting to hear his will so you can act on it.”
Lydia would have laughed if she hadn't been so sure she'd become hysterical. “He's never told me he loves me, and he wouldn't compromise to save his soul from hellfire, he's so blasted obdurate! Why couldn't I love somebody like Joe McCauley? Why couldn't I be expecting his child?”
Polly's tired, tear-swollen eyes brightened a little, and she reached out quickly to squeeze Lydia's hand. “Oh, Lydia, you're carrying a baby! That's wonderful—now mine will have a cousin to grow up with.”
Imagining two small boys playing in the surf, one with Brigham's dark hair and pewter eyes, one with Devon's tawny shock and piercing blue gaze, steadied Lydia's disoriented heart a bit. Then she began to cry again.
Polly went to her bureau, still slender in her lavender silk wrapper, and returned with a clean handkerchief, which Lydia accepted gratefully. It was a measure of the accord between the two women, Lydia thought, that she could blow her nose with no attempt at delicacy. In the meantime, Polly poured the tea.
“Our situations aren't so similar as you seem to think, Lydia,” she remarked presently, in a kind tone. “I miss Devon. I'd gladly let him boss me around if he'd just come back and make a home with me.”
Lydia gave an unladylike snort and wiped her nose again, just as a precaution. “You're fooling yourself if you think that. You're every bit as strong and willful as Devon is. You could never live as his lapdog, only as an equal partner.”
“I suppose you're right,” Polly conceded after long and careful thought. “The trouble is, I miss him so much, I truly believe I'll go mad with it sometimes. I pace and weep and pound at these walls with my fists, as though that could change things.”
After stirring sugar and a dollop of milk into her tea, Lydia raised the cup to her lips and took a measured sip. “Where do you figure he's taken himself off to? Devon, I mean.”
Polly shrugged miserably. “Who knows? He could be in Seattle, or San Francisco, or halfway to China on a sailing ship, for all I can say.” Hope lit her eyes, and her voice quickened a little. “I swear, though, it's like there's a golden cord connecting us. It reaches from Devon's heart to mine, and no matter where he goes, he'll never be able to sever it.”
Lydia's eyes filled with tears. She felt the depths of Polly's love for Devon, and knew the perils of caring so much because of her own feelings for Brigham.
“So you're going to stay right here and wait for him?”
Polly nodded, and her expression held a degree of wryness. “You make it sound like I plan to sit on the front porch every night with a lantern burning at my side. I mean to run the store, make it profitable, and raise my baby with the sense of family and belonging that I never had. It isn't a perfect picture, not without Devon, but it's still so much more than a lot of women ever have that I can't help being grateful.”
Lydia thought of women like Magna Holmetz and Elly Collier, and that poor creature Dr. McCauley had found cowering in his outhouse. They had endured hardships all their lives, and would continue to do so, and they weren't married to one of the richest, most powerful men in Washington Territory.
“Brigham still refuses to close the brothel,” she said after she and Polly had both consumed a good portion of their tea.
“I suspect he'll never give in on that point,” Polly answered.
“He says he hasn't taken Clover O'Keefe as a mistress.”
“Then I'd say he hasn't,” Polly said matter-of-factly. “If he had, I do believe he'd say so, straight out, and expect you to deal with the fact as best you could.”
Lydia nodded. Brigham was still faithful to her, despite the crazy convolutions of their relationship, and she treasured that knowledge. She also knew the situation could change in the space of a heartbeat. If Brigham decided he wanted Miss O'Keefe, he'd go directly to the woman and declare himself, and it was most unlikely he'd be refused.
“I can't leave Quade's Harbor and I can't stay,” she finally said. “What am I going to do?”
Polly smiled sympathetically and poured more tea for herself and her guest. “Same thing I'm doing, I suppose,” she answered. “You'll do whatever work comes to hand and wait. After all, just because we can't solve our problems all at once doesn't mean we shouldn't chip away at a corner here and there.”
Polly's remark made sense.
Lydia debated with herself as she went down the stairs after her visit with her sister-in-law. She could return to the big house and crawl back into bed beside her husband, and no one, not even God and His angels, would blame her. She loved Brigham, she was his true and legal wife, and she carried his child tucked away under her heart. On the other hand, if she gave in so completely, she feared the man would soon own her soul.
Assuming he didn't already.
Devon stood at the end of a long wharf, watching smatters of reflected starlight play over the dark water. Even with the noise of Seattle's infamous Skid Road clamoring in his ears, he felt as though he'd been left alone on the planet. He'd been so sure distance would heal him, that he'd forget Polly and her deception easily. All it would take, he'd reasoned blithely, would be a few gallons of whiskey and a whorehouse full of women.
The trouble was, all of the sudden perfectly good liquor tasted like kerosene to him, and worse, he'd thrown it up like some green kid who'd never taken a drink before. As for his visit to the brothel, well, that had been a plain disaster. He'd worked himself up by imagining the woman he'd bought and paid for was Polly, but there was a part of him that wouldn't be fooled. That part, hard as tamarack only moments before, had melted like snow under a tropical sun.
Just remembering it made Devon go crimson with humiliation. He'd paid the whore double her usual fee, and threatened mayhem if she ever told a soul what had happened. She'd patted his cheek and said she knew ways to put the starch back into a man, but Devon had only shaken his head. It was hopeless, and he knew it. For the time being he was spoiled for any woman besides Polly.
He took a thin cigar from the pocket of his shirt, along with a wooden match, then threw both into the water. The way things had been going for him lately, an innocent smoke would probably turn his stomach inside out.
Devon dragged in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He turned his thoughts to Lydia—God, he'd been so sure that he wanted her, in his heart and in his bed—but the love he bore for her was that of a brother for his sister. Lydia had been intended for Brigham from the beginning of time; he could see that now.
He shoved splayed fingers through his hair, and the longing that pulled him in the direction of Quade's Harbor was so strong that he nearly believed the water of the harbor would solidify under his feet so that he could take the most direct route home.
Home.
He had been away more than a month, but the sounds of the place still echoed in his soul. He didn't just miss Polly and his general store, he missed his brother, and Lydia, and those two nieces of his. He'd always envied Brigham his children.
He turned from the water, and the star-shimmered path leading homeward, his eyes burning with tears he would have denied before God Himself. The child Polly was carrying—suppose he really was the father, just as she'd said? Suppose he was letting the legendary Quade stubbornness and pride stand between him and everything he'd ever wanted?
Then again, Polly had certainly lied to him, not only in words, but by going through that pretend marriage ceremony in San Francisco. She probably wouldn't be above proffering another man's baby as his own.
The question was, did he care? His loneliness was so great that it threatened to consume him, and a child was a child. Devon wanted a home and family with a desperation that sometimes frightened him.
He strode along the board sidewalk toward the hotel where he'd been staying since his hasty arrival in Seattle weeks before. There was still some soreness in the muscles in his legs and back to remind him of his accident, and his thoughts returned to Polly as though magnetized. Even though he'd been downright cruel to her once he'd regained consciousness, he knew she'd stayed at his side throughout.
It was just possible that she loved him.
Devon wove his way between passing wagons and buggies and crossed the sawdust-covered street to his hotel. “Fool,” he muttered to himself, but the pull toward home was even stronger than before, and there was no telling how long he'd be able to resist.
Joe McCauley hoisted himself up off his examining table with a groan, letting his blankets slide to the floor, and finger-combed his hair. Since Frodine was in his bed, he'd had no civilized choice except to sleep in his examining room—if the ordeal he'd just been through could be called sleep. His back was killing him, the wind was howling like a thousand wolves, and somebody was literally flinging themselves at his front door.
Yawning, Joe pulled on his shirt and trousers and put his suspenders up over his shoulders. “I'm coming!” he yelled, murmuring as he made his way through the house. Despite the hard and dangerous work they did every day, some of these lumberjacks were nothing but crybabies. They risked getting themselves torn in two while topping a tree, or pinned underneath one with a branch going straight through their belly, but let them get a sliver or a bee sting, and you'd have thought they were dying.
“Hold on!” Joe said before wrenching open the door. He regretted his impatience immediately when he saw the terrified little boy standing on his front step. The Holmetz kid looked up at him with huge dark eyes, his thin face pinched white.
“My mama,” the child blurted. “It's her time.”
Joe was instantly as awake as if he'd gulped down a mug of strong coffee. “Is she having trouble?”
The boy nodded. “There's blood.”
Silently, Joe cursed, but his voice was even and calm when he spoke again. “You run and get Miss Lydia straight away. Tell her I'm going to need her help with your mama.”
Again the boy nodded, then he bounded down the pathway to the road, veering off in the direction of Lydia's cottage.
Joe went back to the kitchen, where Frodine was setting water on to heat. She was already dressed for school, which she attended faithfully every day, and so far there had been no visit from her no-good father.
“Somethin' wrong?” she asked, her dark eyes wide with concern. Her blond hair was wound into a flyaway braid, and she looked like the woman she was in her borrowed dress, which was a size or two too small for her.
“The Holmetz baby is on its way.” Joe grabbed a basin and began dipping tepid water from the reservoir on the side of the stove. “I'll need Lydia's help today, so I doubt there'll be any school.”
The disappointment in Frodine's eyes was keen; she'd just grasped the alphabet and learned to count to a hundred, and she begrudged every second of education she'd been denied. She followed Joe as he went into his office, stripped off his shirt, and began to wash in the basin of water he'd set on the examining table.
“Miss Lydia said there's no reason in the world I couldn't take another name,” she babbled. “Frodine don't suit me, you know.”
Joe was splashing industriously, a little annoyed that the girl had lingered while he was washing. It wasn't entirely proper, her seeing him without his shirt on, but then neither was letting her live under his roof without a chaperon.
“I know,” he said, reaching for a towel.
“What name do you like?”
Joe snatched up his shirt again, thinking not of Frodine's dilemma but of Mrs. Holmetz, who was probably in considerable pain and might even be dying. “Etta,” he said shortly, picking the name off the top of his head. “I like Etta.”
With that, he grabbed his bag and his coat, shoved on his boots, and hurried out of the house.
When Brigham woke for the second time, just before dawn, he could hear the wind whistling in the tops of the big trees surrounding the house. It was a sound he'd grown used to, a sound he loved, but today something about it made the pit of his stomach turn cold.
He cupped his hands behind his head and stretched. His body was still languid from the sweet satisfaction he'd taken in the night, but a persistent ache had settled in his heart. Lydia was gone, had been for several hours, and he was pretty sure she didn't intend on coming back.
Brigham cursed. He'd been awake when she'd sneaked out of bed and dressed, after that last feverish bout of lovemaking, but he'd feigned sleep. It had been his pride that kept him quiet, and not any nobility or prudence. He'd known she wouldn't stay, even if he begged, and he'd also known that if he'd so much as opened his mouth, he'd have been pleading with her.
He'd never begged anyone for anything, and he sure as hell didn't plan to start now.
Brigham rolled onto his side and squinted at the window, where pink and apricot shadows were invading the otherwise solid blackness, slowly turning it to gray. The sun would be up in another few minutes, but the moan of the wind told him the weather wouldn't be good. From the sounds of things, there was a storm blowing in, the kind that made it too dangerous to work in the woods.
“Shit,” he said. He had a deadline to meet, and the least the weather could have done was hold for another day or two so he could get the lumber ready for the ship that would soon be arriving.
Normally, he would have been out of bed by then, splashing himself awake at the washstand and reaching for his clothes, but today he lingered. He could catch Lydia's scent from her pillow, and the warmth of her passion and tenderness still heated the marrow of his bones.
He smiled. She was going to have his baby. A shout of pure joy rose inside him, pushing past all the doubts and misgivings that plagued his spirit, but he stopped the cry at his throat.
After all, it wasn't as though Lydia loved him or anything. She responded wholeheartedly to his attentions in bed, it was true, and she'd even come up with some innovations of her own that had made him certain he was about to die of pleasure. He knew only too well that the spirit wasn't always willing, even though the flesh might be weak. Lydia was a young, healthy woman, just discovering the delights her body was capable giving and receiving, and it was entirely possible that any man with a reasonable degree of skill as a lover could have made her carry on the way she had.
The thought chased the sparkle of pride from Brigham's eyes. Hell and tarnation, he wouldn't be able to stand it if Lydia were to lay herself down in another man's bed. His reason, rock-solid until the day Devon had brought her home from San Francisco and presented her like a present, would desert him entirely. He swore again and thrust himself himself out of bed, his legs so entangled in the twisted sheets that he nearly fell on his face.
Stumbling over to the washstand, he poured water from the pitcher into a basin, and then stood studying in the small mirror affixed to the wall. He imagined Lydia going on her merry way, visiting his bed when she felt the need, then returning to her cottage on Main Street and her work as a schoolteacher as if she didn't even have a husband. He considered the example he'd be setting for his son, not to mention Millie and Charlotte, letting his wife treat him like that, and the eyes looking back at him from the mirror rounded in proud horror.
No one dared show amusement now, of course, but if Lydia kept up her high-handed eastern ways, he'd soon be the laughingstock of every lumber camp between California and the Canadian border. And he'd be damned if he'd let that happen.