CHAPTER THREE

 

Alisha Courtland stretched and purred with delicious contentment as she listened to the rush of leaves stirring in the wind. It sounded like muted applause and made her skin tingle, adding to the heated waves of satisfaction already flooding through her body. It had been a performance worthy of applause, and absently she let her fingers trail across her full breasts, down the smooth indent of her belly, and finally, with a kind of adoring fondness, into the moist, silky thatch of curls at the juncture of her thighs.

She was still throbbing, and so dewy her fingers slid through the golden triangle and elicited a moan of pleasure. “You’re only asking for more trouble by doing that.” Alisha smiled lazily and turned to admire the sleek, hard body reclining alongside her. His skin was glistening from the strain of his own performance—one equally deserving of rapturous applause. A large, callused hand covered hers and brought it to rest at the base of his belly, and she felt a thrill course through her blood. He was not as completely spent as she might have expected him to be, and even as her fingers wrapped teasingly around him, there was a distinct stirring of interest.

“I suppose we must get dressed soon,” he murmured with genuine reluctance. “Though I’m in no hurry to leave.”

Alisha snuggled against the curve of his body and draped a cool, bare leg over his. “Nor am I. But we have been out here for well over an hour and I might be missed.”

“You’ll be missed more if you leave now,” he said huskily, pushing himself up into her hand.

She laughed and released him, then sat up and gave her tousled mane of hair a shake. The exhilaration she was feeling was due to more than just the wild lovemaking of the past hour. There was the added element of risk, daring to do it so close to the house, that had aroused her to unbelievable heights. They were in the summerhouse, and although it was late and most of the manor was in total darkness, she could see the ghostly silhouette of the gabled roof and tall, jutting chimneys etched against the sky.

She suspected … no, she knew damned well she had screamed at the peak of her orgasm, despite his efforts to keep her mouth covered with his, but she had seen no flicker of light, no glow of a lamp moving from room to room.

“It would serve them right if they heard me,” she muttered petulantly, still bristling over the heated exchange in the parlor.

“What?”

“Oh … nothing.” Alisha glanced down at her lover and smiled through the ribbon of heat that slithered between her thighs. He was broad across the shoulders, his muscles incredibly well defined from the hours he spent working under the broiling sun. His hair was auburn, his eyes jade green. In all, he was a handsome specimen of pure animal magnificence—with his clothes off.

Dressed, he became a reflection of his position in life: the fifth son of a man who had lost everything in the war. A well-bred Southern gentleman, he had been raised to excel in riding fine horses, drinking good whiskey, and charming beautiful women into compromising positions. Stripped of his home, his horses, and the money to buy anything more than cheap, raw spirits, he still possessed the magnetism to find his way between Alisha Courtland’s thighs, but he could hardly hope to aspire to anything more. As much as she enjoyed his body, Alisha could no more have considered a more serious tie to Joshua Brice than she could to a common field hand.

“Has anyone ever told you that you resemble a cat when your eyes are half closed like that?”

“Not recently,” she purred.

“You behave like one too when your claws are bared and you feel the need to defend your territory.”

Alisha’s body tensed perceptibly as Josh’s hand slid up the length of her thigh. “I wasn’t aware I was being challenged to defend anything tonight. If you truly prefer Amanda over me—”

“If you truly preferred to marry me instead of that larded German toad,” he countered with a growl, “neither one of us would have to sneak around in the dead of night.”

“We don’t have to now,” she said in a pique. “I can just go on back inside and—”

He rose up beside her and silenced her with a kiss that was deep enough, long enough, brutal enough to scatter any thought of resistance when he pushed her back onto the crush of clothing that had served as their mattress. His hand glided to the top of her thighs, winning a husky groan as he stroked deftly through and into the pearly folds of flesh. He slipped two fingers inside her and, after a few moments of teasing pressure, thrust them deep enough and hard enough to bring her hips rising up off the floor with a raggedly mouthed oath.

It was indeed a pity, she lamented inwardly, but how could she, Alisha Courtland, possibly allow herself to become the wife of a fifth son of a bankrupted plantation owner? A lover, yes, but a wife? His father had turned them all into sharecroppers, for pity’s sake, barely scraping together enough of a loan to rent out a miserly few acres of what had once been their own sizable plantation. Josh had, naturally and honorably, pleaded with her to marry him, but she had had more than her share of tired old dimity frocks and red, chapped hands. Josh was handsome and virile and insatiable—exactly the kind of bedmate she craved physically. Karl von Helmstaad, on the other hand, was old and rich and infatuated with her. He owned a grand and stately manor that was sorely in need of a woman’s extravagant touch, and if his generosity thus far had been any indication of things to come, he would be more than able to provide her with a lifestyle that would keep her young, beautiful, and pampered forever.

She also needed Karl Kristoffer von Helmstaad for another important reason. It had been three months since the first glorious tryst with Joshua Brice, and God only knew how many times they had been together since. She did not know on which occasion she had been careless enough to let his seed take root within her, she only knew her time had come and gone and she needed an obliging husband quickly. Karl was convenient, gullible, and as impatient to be done with the civilities as she pretended to be. In three weeks’ time, she would have a rich, doting husband, a father for her unborn child, and a lover who would go to almost any lengths just to hear her cry his name in ecstasy.

She gasped it out now as the wet heat of his mouth closed around her nipple, suckling the flesh with the same lusty rhythm his fingers were using to debilitate her senses elsewhere.

Defend her territory, indeed! As if it needed defending from her cloyingly naive, ingratiatingly wholesome twin. Why, it almost brought a laugh to her lips to imagine Amanda sprawled naked on the floor of a ruined summer-house, her body running wet with desire, her breath coming in broken gasps, her hips moving in a blur beneath a man who grunted words of encouragement at each clenching shiver.

It did make her laugh each and every time she remembered pressing her ear to her bedroom wall and listening to the sounds the bride and groom had made on their wedding night. Polite conversation. Polite whispers. A sudden and oh-so-brief sawing of bedsprings that ended in more polite murmurings. She doubted if either Amanda or the doting, doe-eyed Caleb Jackson had even taken off their night-clothes.

Alisha would miss none of them. Not the simpering silliness of her mother, not the exasperating foolishness of her father, or the glowering hostility of her brother. Most decidedly she would not miss Amanda. In fact, when the time for pretenses was over, it would give Alisha immense pleasure to tell her dear sister that her beau had only been playing a game—a game Alisha had devised and encouraged shortly after she and Josh had become lovers.

“I can’t deceive Amanda by letting her think I am courting her,” he had protested. “I can’t give her false expectations.”

“Amanda expects nothing from you but your friendship. She never has and never will. It is only the rest of the family we will be deceiving. They are so determined to see me wed to Karl, they would spirit me away at the first hint of rebellion.”

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

“Do you love me, Josh? Do you?”

“You know damn well I do.”

“Then you mustn’t abandon me now. Oh, please, Josh! It was Ryan’s idea to arrange the marriage with Karl. He knows the baron would not allow his wife’s family to become homeless and destitute, and it is Ryan’s intention to save Rosalie at any cost—even my happiness.”

“How can he force you into the marriage when he knows you don’t love the man?”

Alisha had bowed her head sorrowfully. “Land. Property. The honorable Courtland name has always been of supreme importance to Ryan. He is adamant the plantation must be saved. And as much as I loathe what I am being forced to do, I cannot stand by and see my family driven off our land. The d’Ibervilles have lived here since the Trace was just a footpath between Natchez and Nashville, and the only boats on the Mississippi were birchbark canoes. I cannot stand by and watch my poor mother cruelly turned out of the house where she and her mother and her mother’s mother were born. I just can’t! You couldn’t either, if the situation was reversed. If it was you the family hopes depended upon, would you be able to run away and leave them? Would you be able to live with the guilt and the pain, knowing you had left them in ruin and despair?”

Alisha had flung herself tearfully into his arms and Josh had succumbed like a hapless schoolboy. He was so desperately in love with her she could have asked for the moon and he would have flown straight up to fetch it. He had played into her hands more perfectly than she could have hoped, and he still did, sweet merciful Jesus. He still did. “Josh,” she gasped. “Josh!”

Alisha bit her lip against the scream that was threatening to tear from her throat as his hands and mouth worked her body into a frenzy. She clutched at his arms and dug her nails into his flesh, vowing to rake him into bloody ribbons if he didn’t replace the dancing, teasing fingers with something of more substance.

When he did, she welcomed the first savage thrust with an eagerness that left them both gasping for the wit to muffle their cries of pleasure. She met each successive thrust with shuddering breathlessness, wrapping her arms, her long legs around his plunging body, urging him to a near-brutish demonstration of his skill as a lover.

She was not disappointed. His strength and power filled her, even frightened her a little as the force of each thrust slammed her closer and closer to the splintered edge of the stairs. But the fear was an added elixir and she arched up in an agony of pleasure as her climax tore through her, the spasms so powerful, they shocked her body into a hard, tight curl of ecstasy.

She heard Josh’s strangled groan and felt the heat breaking within her, and she held him locked in her arms, rocking and writhing with each throb of sensation until the last heated pulse was wrung from their flesh.

“Alisha … Alisha …”

She swallowed hard and gulped at the air needed to clear her senses. He was still moving inside her as if reluctant to admit the finality of the act. She stroked her hands down the length of his back and kept her limbs twined around his waist, sharing his despair at feeling him slowly diminish.

“Tell me you love me,” she whispered. “Promise me you will never leave me.”

“You know I love you,” he rasped, dragging his head out of the crook of her shoulder. “You know I could never leave you.”

His mouth descended with a fierce passion and when the kiss ended, Alisha’s eyes were glazed with pleasure and triumph.

“I … want to be with you so much. Promise me we’ll be together one day, Josh. Only promise me this and I know I can endure anything. Anything,” she added, her voice catching on a sob.

Josh lifted himself free and rolled beside her. He gathered her protectively against his chest and felt the sting of outrage burning behind his eyes, not even wanting to think of what lay ahead, only three weeks away.

“Are you absolutely certain you want to go through with the wedding?” he asked tautly, his body rigid with anguish.

“You know I must The situation is even more desperate now that the crops are a total loss.”

Josh pressed a fevered kiss into the silky blonde crown of her hair. “I can’t bear to think of that bloated, loathsome toady touching you. Sometimes … sometimes I think I’ll go mad just imagining what he’ll want from you.”

“What he wants and what he will get are two different things,” she insisted.

“He’ll be your husband, for God’s sake. He’ll have rights.”

“He will never have the right to my heart,” she whispered, tilting her head up so that their eyes met. “For it belongs only and always to you, my love. Only to you.”

His hands shifted and he grasped two streaming fistfuls of silvered hair, holding her mouth against his until the salty taste of her tears broke them apart.

“I must go,” she breathed, and started to collect the scattered articles of her clothing.

“When will I see you again?”

“Tomorrow,” she said, deliberately misinterpreting his question. “You are still coming to tea, are you not?”

“You know what I mean.”

Alisha shook her head. “We will have to be careful from now on.”

Josh laughed dryly and glanced around the summerhouse. “You call this being careful?”

“You were the one who came tossing pebbles at my window. If I hadn’t come down, you probably would have climbed that rickety old trellis and crashed straight into Ryan’s room.”

“I needed to see you. I probably wouldn’t have been able to make it through tomorrow’s little farce without telling them all to go to hell and lifting your skirts right there in the parlor.”

Alisha let a small rush of breath escape her lips as his hands pushed up beneath the camisole she had just slipped over her shoulders. Her nipples constricted instantly under the pressure of his fingertips, but she drew determinedly away and set to work fastening the ribbon closure.

After a long moment of frowned concentration, she looked up and smiled. “You wouldn’t dare do something so scandalous … would you?”

“Wouldn’t I? It isn’t me who is insisting we keep our feelings for one another a secret. And it certainly isn’t me who’s afraid to tell Ryan what a bastard he is.”

Alisha’s smile froze. “You’re not planning to do something … rash … are you?”

Josh pulled his shirt over his head and raked his hands through his hair. “If you want to know if I plan to demand satisfaction on a dueling field, the answer is no. Unfortunately, Ryan is a far better shot than I, and the baron … well …”

Alisha held her breath. “Yes?”

He ground his teeth together as he dragged his breeches over his ankles. “The baron has a purpose to serve. After that, I won’t guarantee anything.”

“Wh-what do you mean?”

“I mean, I will do whatever I have to do to make you mine,” he said quietly.

“But I am yours, you know I am.”

“Mine completely” he said with grim emphasis. “In every way. Even if it means making a rich widow out of you.”

“A widow? Oh, Josh, no! No, you mustn’t even think such a thing. If anything went wrong, or if you were caught! No, Josh. No! You must promise me you won’t even consider—”

“Hush,” he commanded, pulling her into his arms. It was the first time he had dared to voice his turbulent thoughts out loud, and he cursed his error in judgment, especially when he felt the tremors of fear racing through Alisha’s body. “I’ll think what I want to think, and if I think there is some safe way to hasten your toad prince along to his kingdom in the sky … well …”

Alisha clung to him, unable to suppress her shivers of excitement. It was working! It had taken him long enough to agitate himself into such a state that the only logical solution had finally presented itself. For all his boldness and brawn, he was somewhat lacking in the area of initiative, and she had begun to think she would have to spell out the obvious answer to all their problems. But now that the idea had taken root, she would see that it flourished and grew, and in seven or eight months’ time—after the baby was born, of course …

A low throb of sound, still distant, yet familiar enough to raise the tiny hairs along her arms, echoed through the darkness, distracting both occupants of the summerhouse. As they stared motionless at the velvet blackness that stretched out toward the river, Alisha’s fingers curled around the gold locket that hung between her breasts and she rubbed it as she would a talisman.

A second plaintive wail reverberated over the waters of the mighty Mississippi and Alisha groped the shadows for Josh’s hand.

“The Contessa,” he guessed, returning the questioning squeeze in her fingers. “She is due to dock in Natchez tomorrow.”

“The Contessa,” Alisha repeated in a hushed murmur. “We missed her on her last trip upriver.”

Josh looked at her with some surprise. “Didn’t you just finish saying we had to be careful from now on?”

Alisha’s eyes were shining. Josh had introduced her to more than just sexual adventures. Like most of the Southern gentry, he had learned early that to a planter’s son—especially one who was groomed to marry into money rather than earn any of his own by honest means—the sound of a river-boat whistle was the beckoning call to easy women, smooth-flowing whiskey, and high stakes games of chance.

He had taken her on board one of these floating casinos, intending only to amuse her with a few hours of harmless diversion, but the diversions had grown less and less harmless when she realized she could put her father’s clever parlor tricks to good advantage. Over the course of the past few months, the meager handful of hoarded dollars they had started with had grown into enough to pay for the rent on a small hotel room and to outfit them both in the fancy attire needed to gain entry to the best games on the best boats.

“It may be our last chance for a while,” Alisha said breathlessly. “It may be our last chance period to luck into a big game. If we won enough, we could give Ryan the money he needs to stave off the bankers and I wouldn’t have to go through with the marriage to Karl von Helmstaad.”

Josh drew in a slow, deep breath along with the bait. “It’s too risky. What if someone sees us? What if someone recognizes you?”

“If the Contessa is up from New Orleans, there won’t be anything but Yankees on board. Rich, bored Yankees who have nothing better to do than play poker and stare down the front of my bodice.”

“I don’t know,” he said, hesitating. “Didn’t you say the last time you thought someone was staring at more than your bodice?”

“They were,” she agreed, leaning against him. “But then so were you. I could feel you undressing me all the way across the salon. Why, it almost put me off my game the whole blessed night long.”

He was weakening, and he knew it. Her breasts, clad only in the thin layer of her chemise, were pillowed against his chest, warm and soft and ripe with entreaty as she tickled his chin with a kiss.

“Besides,” she whispered, trailing her lips down his throat. “You know how enthusiastic I get when we win.”

Josh knew. He also knew the risks of becoming too familiar a face along the waterfront. He had already heard the rumors concerning a beautiful lady gambler whose “luck” was beginning to annoy the owners of the riverboats. He dared not tell Alisha, however. The challenge, the thrill, the danger would only whet her appetite more.

“Hasn’t anyone become suspicious about you making so many trips into Natchez?”

“Au contraire, my darling. I’m sure they’re happy not to have me underfoot all the time. Furthermore, I have a trousseau to buy, don’t I? And they know I’m well chaperoned by my dearest friend Olivia Ward. She’s such a mouse, they think me quite admirable for spending any time with her at all. Not that I have,” she giggled. “I doubt I would recognize her if I tripped over her in the street. Oh, Josh—” She laced her fingers behind his neck and covered his face and throat with tiny, feathery kisses. “Can’t we go? Can’t we at least pretend we are still just as rich and bored as all those damned Yankees? Just one more time?”

“Alisha …”

She pouted prettily and thrust her tongue between his lips. His breeches had not made it above his knees, and she was more than a little aware of his weakening resolve. She left his mouth wet and still wanting, and trailed her tongue down onto his chest, stalking his nipple like a hungry predator. Sharp white teeth plucked at the raised nub, winning a jolted curse before they prowled lower on his belly.

Josh threaded his fingers into her hair, his teeth clamped around a half-formed protest as he felt the greedy tug and pull of her lips. She would get her way again. She always did. He would take her into Natchez and help her dress in her velvets and ruffles, and he would be there to watch her back if something … anything went wrong. She was good with the cards, there was no question of that. Even counting the ups and down, the wins and losses, the extravagant meals and hotel rooms, he knew there was enough to buy their way into one big game where five hundred could become five thousand in a matter of minutes.

“Hell and damn.” He gasped and looked down at the silken crown of her hair where it rose and fell with vigorous determination over his groin. His hands tightened and his head arched back, his body began to shudder and jerk with the persuasive power of her lips.

His own moved rigidly through a ragged promise, one that echoed harshly on each gust of his breath. It was a promise that he would never let her go. Never. Not for any reason. Not to any other man. Not ever.

It was a promise he vowed to keep if it cost him his life.

 

Amanda was wide awake, seated on the cushioned window ledge of her bedroom. She was not sure what had wakened her, only that she had been feeling restless and warm for the past hour or so. The chamber was steeped in heavy shadow, the guttering lamp on the nightstand too miserly to throw off more light than what puddled on the table beneath it.

There was a time when lamps and fires were kept burning in every room day or night. There were servants to fetch a shawl at the slightest hint of a chill, to run a pan filled with hot coals between the bedsheets so that tender pink feet would not suffer a moment’s worth of discomfort. These days it was up to each member of the family to see to their own needs. If Amanda forgot to fill her kindling box, she spent a long, cold night shivering. Each drop of precious whale oil was guarded as if it were pure liquid gold, and if a lamp was lit past sundown, it was done so only out of absolute necessity.

Of the hundreds of slaves and servants Rosalie had boasted before the war, only Mercy and her husband Obediah had remained, both of whom had declared themselves too old and set in their ways to regard emancipation as anything but a threat. They had stayed on of their own free will, scorning the masses of newly freed slaves who were starving and unable to find work with their new Northern masters. Promises of jobs and plenty of money to buy their own homes and hire their own servants had proved to be no more than that: empty promises. Every day Ryan went out to the stables he found more and more hungry mouths huddled there, offering to work his fields in exchange for food and a place to sleep. He had not refused any of them; he could not afford to, but the cost of feeding and clothing them only added more strain to his already limited reserves.

In some ways, Amanda did not mind the hardships. She did not resent having to cook or sew or sweep the rooms; it gave her a sense of accomplishment, of usefulness. Granted, there had been times—and there still were—when she felt like crying from exhaustion and frustration, but there were more times when she experienced a sense of satisfaction at having learned to bake sourdough bread and cook a spicey creole that set even Mercy’s eyes to watering.

The hard times came with watching Verity make do with dresses that were cut from her own, or seeing her clutch the rag-filled doll in her arms and pretend the gingham face had eyes instead of buttons and a mouth instead of a row of thick black stitchery. Amanda's youth had been so full of excess that it made her want to weep with the injustice of it all whenever they passed by a shop window brimming with porcelain dolls and fancy wicker prams.

She sighed and leaned her forehead against the window sash. The clouds had blotted out what slender hopes there were of a clear morning, and it wouldn’t be very long before the mist thickened into rain. Poor Ryan. Of all of them, he had worked the hardest to keep Rosalie on its feet, scratching out gardens to keep the family fed, mucking out the stables to keep the livestock healthy. If nothing else, the rain had forced him to slow down a little. To catch his breath. In the event the weather did improve and the cotton did have a chance to recover, he would need every last ounce of stamina he possessed to oversee the harvest.

A sound outside the window caught her attention. She listened closely for it to come again, and when it did, she lifted the heavy sash and leaned fully out into the night air to follow it.

If the night had not been so hazy, the paddle wheeler would have been visible when it reached the bend in the river less than a mile away. As it was, Amanda closed her eyes and pictured the sight as she had seen it so many times: the deck lights twinkling and sparkling through the trees like a cluster of slow-moving fireflies, the huge rolling paddle wheel cutting into the river’s current, pushing a wash of white, foaming water into its wake.

As a child, she had let her imagination fling her across the open spaces and carry her away on one of the huge, floating monsters, leaving nothing to mark her passage other than the fading eddies of music and the trailing plumes of black boiler smoke.

Her fantasies were not entirely of her own making, she knew. William Courtland had been no stranger to the riverboats, and he had regaled his family with many a colorful story of the grand salons, the high-stakes poker games, the thrill of watching fortunes won and lost on a throw of dice.

Amanda flinched as a fat splash of rain bounced off the window ledge and startled her up off her elbows. She started to lower the sash again, but a blurred movement in the gardens below made her stop and shrink back against the wall. It looked like someone running. No … it was two people running, and one of them, her skirts hiked high in front and belling out like a canvas sail behind, was Alisha.

What on earth was her sister doing outside at this time of the night? And who was the man in the garden with her?

The two figures ran beneath the shelter of the roof overhang and Amanda lost them. They were too far away to hear more than a whispered exchange before the man emerged and slipped away into the darkness, leaving Amanda with the distinct impression of someone hastily tucking in clothes and refastening buttons. The shadows made it impossible to identify him, but she did not think it was Karl von Helmstaad. Alisha’s fiancé resembled a large, squat bloatfly, and would not, by any wild stretch of anyone’s imagination, have been able to run as quickly or as agilely as this late-night paramour.

Did this mean Alisha was having second thoughts about her upcoming nuptials? Amanda dismissed the thought without really giving it serious consideration. Alisha had set her mind on having the baron’s wealth and title. Nothing and nobody was going to get in her way.

It had to be a lover, then, meeting her clandestinely in the shadows of midnight. Having a younger, virile beau would certainly explain why she was so indifferent to the criticisms heaped on Karl von Helmstaad. Nor was the notion all that shocking or difficult to accept. Alisha attracted men like a cake attracted ants. Armies of them had passed through Mississippi wearing the blue and the gray, and Alisha had thrived on the attention lavished upon her by both.

Amanda turned her head slightly, catching the faint sound of tiptoeing feet in the hall outside the door of the adjoining bedroom. Her glance was intercepted by the ghostly reflection in the cheval mirror—a reflection that might have been Alisha herself save for the minuscule variances in their features. Amanda’s mouth was a shade fuller. Her nose was a breath thinner, her hair a glimmer lighter. All of their lives, however, they had been mistaken one for the other, and there had been no lack of suitors eager to win the favors of either twin when such things were considered to be of monumental importance. Moreover, truth be told, it had been a game of sorts to trade places with this beau or that—a game that had rapidly lost its charm when Amanda realized her sister was decidedly freer with the liberties she allowed.

It was possibly one of the reasons why Amanda had accepted the marriage proposal from Caleb Jackson. His reserved demeanor had never appealed to Alisha, and she had found his strict sense of honor too stifling and far too boring. The Jacksons had owned the Mercantile Bank in Natchez, so the families had both been pleased when they had announced their intentions to marry on his next furlough home. Amanda had, it seemed, always done the right thing, the expected thing.

Caleb Jackson had been her husband for four days and nights. He had been both gentle and painfully modest, reluctant to vilify her in any way, mortified by the jackrabbit urgency that always ended with him drained and trembling helplessly in her arms. The experience hadn’t exactly left her singing the praises of passion and desire, nor had it left her with more than a lingering impression of bony arms and legs tangled together in the sheets.

Joshua Brice was neither bony nor modest. He was lean and hard and exuded a vitality that could not be easily dismissed … or, she suspected, too easily forgotten.

Amanda’s gaze sought its own accusing stare in the polished surface of the mirror.

She had not meant to be quite so candid with Ryan in the garden earlier, but she had spoken the truth when she had admitted she could scarcely recall Caleb’s face anymore. She had to rely more and more on the daguerreotype of him she kept on the bureau, a glossy gray-and-white image of a stiff-backed young man proudly standing in his Confederate uniform, too wary of the newfangled photographic process to spare a smile.

When she had been told of his death, she had held his picture against her breast and wept for the loss. She had wept over Stephen and Evan too, and the countless other friends, neighbors, and acquaintances whose names appeared on the long rolls of casualty lists. After a time, their faces had all started to blend together, and Caleb's had started to fade.

Was Joshua Brice partly to blame for this growing apathy? Was it because Josh was here and real and vibrantly alive that she could conjure his handsome face in the blink of an eye?

There was no answer forthcoming from her reflection, and Amanda’s gaze slipped down the length of the shapeless cotton nightdress she wore. It was mended in places and so threadbare the muted glow from the lamp was strong enough to outline the shape of her body beneath. It was the same shape as Alisha’s, with the same voluptuous fullness across the breasts, the same slender waist and long, lithe legs. So what was different about them? Why was Alisha returning breathless from a tryst in the garden while she stood in a dark bedroom resenting it?

Maybe Ryan was right. Maybe she had been hiding behind her widow’s weeds too long. Josh cared for her. He would love and protect Verity as if she were his own child. He was not afraid to bend his back to the land or to be seen with calluses on his hands and dirt under his fingernails. She was comfortable in his company. While it might not be love she felt for him, it was certainly a deep fondness.

For E. Forrest Wainright, on the other hand, she felt only disdain. An admitted speculator and profiteer, he had made his fortune during the war selling black-market goods to fools who were willing to pay exorbitant prices for silk underpinnings and English wool. He had come to Natchez two years ago from Charleston where, it was rumored, the military government had begun to frown on his less than lily white business ventures.

Wainright would never bend his back to the land; he was far more interested in buying up every spare acre he could lay a hand to then turning around and selling it again at a 500 percent profit. He had been trying to buy Rosalie for several months now but had met a formidable obstacle in Ryan’s stubbornness. Wainright was unaccustomed to losing at any match of wills, and Amanda guessed it was no longer even a case of wanting the land so much as wanting to see the Courtlands humbled.

He was arrogant, possessive, and cold-bloodedly ruthless. Amanda was decidedly uncomfortable in his company, but then she had stopped believing in stardust and Hallelujahs long ago. Marriage to Joshua Brice might make her and her family happy. But marriage to Forrest Wainright would keep them safe.