“HOW IS SHE?”
Dominic stood up from the velvet wingback chair in which he had been sitting and drew himself up to his full height.
Abbey approached him slowly from the hallway, keeping her footsteps from sounding on the bare wood floor. She bit her lip sympathetically, then murmured, “She’s young, Dominic. She’s very young.”
Settling onto the other wingback, Abbey shook her head in disbelief and fell silent.
Dominic hovered nearby, plainly discomfited. “Hardly seems fair, I know,” he said, forcing strength into his tone. In a single gesture he pulled off his spectacles and dropped them on the polished mahogany of one of the side tables. “Losing a spouse seems to be the badge of courage for this day and age.”
Abbey stared into the knobby woven rug beneath her feet. “And there is always more than one casualty when children are involved.”
“The Whitesides will be holding a funeral luncheon for Seaman Edmonds come Sunday,” Dominic said, making sure the room didn’t fall prey to any more sudden silence than he could avoid. “He saved the lives of eight of his shipmates in that whaleboat. It’s not the same as a man dying from sickness—which, by the way, is the unglamorous fate of most who die at sea.”
Abbey squeezed her hands into a ball. “Why do you feel it’s necessary for me to know that fact at this particular moment?” She got to her feet and paced over to the window, only to find herself staring at her own reflection against the darkening sky.
When Dominic spoke, it was plain her attack had hit home in his sense of responsibility, even his sense of guilt at not knowing what would comfort her. “Only because . . . you should know that Edmonds did not die for nothing . . . but for the lives of eight men who also came home to young families.” He paused, then turned away. “I’m sorry.”
He was honestly apologizing, not merely expressing sympathy.
Abbey stopped him as he moved through the archway to the dining room. “No . . . I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have barked at you. You’ve been kind beyond call, letting me bring Lucy here tonight. I simply couldn’t leave her all alone tonight to look at that sweet little baby’s face.”
“Of course you couldn’t,” Dominic said, sadness softening his square face. “Neither could I.” Once again his fingers hooked into his waistcoat, an affectation that Abbey sensed denoted his discomfort. “I must . . . I must thank you for banking my shortsightedness.”
Her brow furrowing, Abbey thought over the past few days and tried to think of what he was talking about. Unable to put a picture to those words, she finally had to ask, “Pardon?”
Dominic sighed. Plainly he’d hoped she would understand and spare him explaining. “This afternoon, in the backyard. The children.”
“Oh.” Abbey blurted. “Yes . . . I never thought it would upset you. I didn’t realize you might disapprove until I saw your face. I’m sorry if—”
“It did upset me,” he said firmly, “with myself.” He paced around one of his wingback chairs and placed his hands on its back, caressing the velvet. “Since their mother died,” he said, “I haven’t seen them so happy. I’d forgotten the look of it. What you saw on my face,” he said, pausing at the memory, “wasn’t disapproval. It was astonishment. And it was disgust. . . . With myself. I was on the verge of making them spend their childhood in a mausoleum of tribute to their dead mother. I had forgotten how to laugh, and because children are wonderful they were willing to forget how to laugh, also, just so I wouldn’t be alone in my misery. A man loses his perception sometimes. The dead can make us forget life. Had you not come along with your . . . your . . .”
“Bohemian ways?” she supplied affably.
He rolled his eyes in amused embarrassment and admitted, “Yes. You caught us just at the precipice. Or shall I say, you caught me. I’ve been dangling there for a year, and only the children were holding the rope. Children shouldn’t have to hold their parents’ lifelines, Mrs. Sutton . . . I mean, Abbey. The children have changed utterly for the better since you came, just these few short days. They speak of little else than you—your fire, your cheer, your spontaneity, your ostentatious approach to life. You attack life, Abbey. I’d forgotten how to do that, if indeed a somber law student from Philadelphia could ever have known. You are a tonic for my family.”
Abbey felt a rush of warmth. By telling her what the children thought of her, she realized, he was telling her what he thought of her. In his gallant way, he was really quite shy. The man could be so endearing!
Then why were her thoughts turning even now to Jake Ross?
With a hard squeeze of thought, she drove the tough brown eyes and thatch of blond hair from her mind and tried to concentrate on Dominic. He deserved her first consideration, for he had been nothing but considerate to her.
“When my wife died,” Dominic went on, glancing up the stairs. “I didn’t know what to tell Luella. She’s so small . . . to be told she could never be with her mother again. I find myself—am I being cruel? I find myself glad Mrs. Edmonds’s daughter is so very little. In many ways it’s a blessing that she never knew her papa. And yet, Mrs. Edmonds must bear the sorrow alone.” He shook his head, as if trying to free it of a confounding burden. “There is no equation of ease, is there?”
A pang of empathy went through Abbey—for Dominic as much as for Lucy. “Lucy’s a strong young woman,” she told him. “She’s already accepted her husband’s death completely. You should have heard her. Her odd, silly accent sounded so incongruous compared to the words she spoke. She said she still had her baby, and a better life than what she had before she met Billy. She’s glad she still has her job at the hat store and already speaks of the future. Even though my husband was older and we had no children, I know I wasn’t as strong as that. Sweet Lucy. I find myself fortified by her.”
Dominic gazed at the floor, eluding her eyes. “You . . . didn’t tell me you’d made a friend.”
Abbey folded her hands and said, “Because you’ve been avoiding me, Mr. Nash.”
He looked up now, his lower lip pursing beneath the red mustache. “My dear, I never avoid people,” he announced indignantly. “I simply allow fate to misplace them.”
His eyebrows bobbed in punctuation, and Abbey laughed lightly.
“You’re a kind man, Dominic,” she said simply.
He cleared his throat and tried to appear stem. “Please keep that rumor from spreading.” He smiled in a reserved fashion. “She’s young, and so are you. These things pass, in time.”
Abbey folded her arms and without thinking said, “The voice of ancient wisdom.”
She was instantly sorry for what she had said. As she watched, she could all but see images of Dominic’s dead wife passing before his eyes once again. He seemed embarrassed by his own concern for her and for Lucy. Why was it that in the East people’s own feelings embarrassed them? His concern for her was ingratiating, but it shouldn’t come at his own expense.
He recovered almost at once and said, “May I never be such a liar as to claim that. I’m sorry . . . I never meant to appear callous.”
She smiled. “You don’t appear callous. You appear strong. In fact, you’re much like Lowell was.”
Dominic’s blue eyes sparkled. “Am I?”
“I hope it sounds like the compliment I mean it to be.”
“Of course. He was a sensitive, intelligent fellow, and I’m deeply complimented, but—” He stopped himself and didn’t seem obliged to finish.
Not to be dashed by his hesitation, Abbey said, “But what?”
Dominic turned away and fiddled with a doily on the end table. “Perhaps it’s only the difference in our ages,” he said, and he appeared to drop his guard. “To be with a man the age of a father . . .” He deliberately let his words trail off, and Abbey was there to catch them.
“Dominic, I loved Lowell,” she said. “I was also in love with him. And I would never think to do with my father the things I . . . well . . . I like men your age,” she boldly claimed. “They’ve lived life. They know life as a friend. Youth is such a frivolous thing to covet.”
His eyes followed her now, rather full of awe. “It’s true,” Abbey went on. “Don’t you find that it is? We all wish to be young again, but always with the proviso of knowing what we know now. When we were young we hadn’t the brains to appreciate our own vitality. Innocence is ignorance, I always say, and who wants ignorance back?”
Dominic laughed heartily now. The sound of it filled the house, pushing back the aura of mourning that had pervaded—if barely noticed—until now. “Abbey, you speak like an old gypsy. One would never guess you were so young yourself.”
“I have lived with a man twice my age and twice my wisdom,” she said. “Are you so surprised that I appreciate it?”
“A bit,” he conceded. He glanced toward the stairway. “I shouldn’t be so loud. It wouldn’t do for Mrs. Edmonds to hear me laughing.”
Abbey strode toward him, poking a finger. “That’s just what I mean. What younger fellow would be so sensitive to a woman’s feelings?”
And instantly they both thought of Jake Ross. In a flash of cognizance, Abbey was sure of it. She knew what she was thinking, of course, and something made her certain the same face had forced itself into Dominic’s thoughts. A man—a young man. A man to whom they both knew she was drawn. And after all her trumpeting about older men and their appeal to young women . . . She looked at Dominic and knew that if it weren’t for Jake . . .
If what weren’t for Jake? What? So far there was nothing. Attraction, rejection, denial, question—was there any kind of unity there? It was a bad adventure so far and nothing more. Or was it merely the suspense that had somehow been spun around Jake Ross that pulled at her?
Here stood Dominic Nash, subdued and ready to accede to her comforts.
She didn’t have the courage to tell him just how romantic he seemed—standing there so restrained and so chivalrous, waiting for her to decide what she wanted. If only she knew that was. But Abbey knew one thing; To find out, what she must disobey his orders.
• • •
As if by calculation, fate fell into her hands and waited for her to shape it.
For a man who kept a lighthouse on such a far shore, Jacob Ross seemed to find plenty of reasons to be in Nantucket Town.
The next morning, while almost everyone else was still in church, Abbey was just closing and locking up the door to the Geary Hat Store where she’d gone to gather a few things for Lucy, when who but the wraith himself came striding across the street. He was headed for the door of The Brotherhood, and he was accompanied by two other men. They strode across the cobblestones, self-concerned and speaking only to each other. They were almost at the door of the pub before Jake saw Abbey.
She was headed right toward him, her arms tight around a bundle of baby things.
His boot sales scraped on the cobblestones as he skidded to a quick halt, glaring at her. He stopped so suddenly that his two companions had to double back. Then Jake did an about-face and started walking away.
“Oh, no you don’t . . .” Abbey gritted her teeth and bolted forward, right between the two other fellows, to catch Jake’s arm by the sleeve. “Broad daylight, no storm, and no excuse.”
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I live here.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do, but I’m not giving you any straight answers until I get the same from you.”
Jake hovered self-consciously before her, glancing at the two men he’d been walking with. When he decided there was no way out of the situation, he took her elbow and pivoted her toward them. “Mrs. Abbey Sutton,” he said with unexpected formality, “my cousins, Elias and Matthew Colbert.”
Abbey took the time, in the midst of her now-silent quarrel with Jake, to give the cousins a good looking over. They both were handsome young men and were quite clearly brothers. They bore a strong resemblance to each other, as well as to Jake. Their blond hair, though a few shades darker than Jake’s and perhaps a shade redder, joined their brown eyes and bespoke a common relative—probably on his mother’s side, judging from their last name. Matthew had a neat red-blond beard, and seemed to be older—somewhere in his midthirties. If not for the crinkles around Matthew’s eyes and his beard, the Colberts could have been twins. Elias’s youth also showed in a certain wildness in his eyes and a funny crookedness to his mouth that became almost noble as he pulled his cap from his head and nodded at her, muttering, “Ma’am.”
Abbey nodded at him, then looked at Matthew, waiting for him to greet her, too. But he simply glared impatiently at her, making it quite clear that she’d interrupted the business he had with Jake.
She matched his arrogance measure for measure, though, and stood there stoically, waiting for her greeting. After a moment, she dared to raise her brows as though she were asking him what was taking so long.
Jake looked from one to the other, then muscled Matthew aside with rough familiarity and sternly said, “’Nough of that.”
Matthew shifted his glare to Jake, and the two men faced off for an uncomfortable moment.
Enjoying the turmoil she brought to Jake’s clandestine life, Abbey raised her chin a fraction and refused to budge, while the men stared at each other. She was disappointed—albeit slightly—when Matthew’s mouth turned up at the corners within his neat whiskers and the crinkles around his eyes deepened. He was visibly keeping down a chuckle.
Jake’s pale cheeks pinked, and his eyes steamed. “Off with you,” he said to his cousin tersely. “I won’t be late.”
“Don’t get into trouble,” Matthew mentioned, with a kind of intimate undercurrent. He bounced an amused glance off Abbey, then warned Jake with his glare again.
Abbey followed him with her own suspicious gaze as Matthew stepped back away from them. Had they been talking about her? Had she been the subject of pub gossip?
While she was trying to decide if she wanted to be offended or not, the younger cousin, Elias, clapped Jake’s shoulder and said, “Stay sharp, landlubber.”
Jake responded with a swat on Elias’s arm that was a little less than friendly. The rosiness in his cheeks deepened.
Elias arranged his cap on his head again, paced backward a few steps, then wheeled around and followed his brother into the sanctity of the pub, leaving Jake at Abbey’s mercy.
Well, perhaps mercy wasn’t the word for it.
Jake gazed after them, plainly wishing he was with them instead of standing here blocked off from the world by a stubborn woman who probably could bite. He pressed his lips together and sighed.
“They don’t seem like tavern keepers,” Abbey said flatly.
“Abbey, stay away from me,” Jake said with clear resolve. “It’s better for you.”
Ready with her response, Abbey shot back, “I keep hearing that and never the why of it. Here. Be a gentleman. Walk me home. Carry these.”
She shoved her bundle against his chest with such force that his reflexes made him grab it. Then she immediately stepped too far away for him to shove it back at her.
Frustration colored his peach cheeks. His wide lips tightened, and he worked to shore up his resistance to her. “You are a madwoman,” he said, in almost a conspiratorial whisper.
“With luck I’ll never find sanity. Why did you run away from me at Great Point? Did you burrow into the sand like a clam? I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“I didn’t mean to get found. Don’t you understand plain English? You’re in danger.”
“Why? Are you a crook?”
He dropped his head and shook it. Like a miracle a little light of insulted honesty popped up on his face. “No, I’m not a crook. I wander in bad company that’s not suitable for you. So stay out of it.”
Abbey cast a look toward the pub. Your cousins don’t seem like such bad company.”
“It’s not them I mean,” he said defensively. “I’d die for them and they for me.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Abbey tossed back fluidly.
He drew in a breath and stepped past her, but she caught his sleeve.
“Come here—I have something to tell you!” She crooked her finger at him, then pointed to a secluded corner at the side of an ivy-covered trellis. She glanced around the street, then tiptoed rapidly toward the wall of ivy and hid in its bend. Peeking out at him, she whispered, “In here,” and waved him toward her.
Her game of intrigue got the better of him. From where he was standing all he could see was the latticework trellis and the layers of dark green ivy draping from it. Knowing she was back there, waiting, baiting, had to be more than he could stand.
She could hear him coming toward the secluded corner and forced herself not to look. At the first glimpse of his jacket as he appeared beside the trellis, Abbey grasped the lapel and drew him under the trellis, pulling him off balance so abruptly that he dropped the bundle of Wilma’s things and stood empty-armed before her.
The ivy created a sun-dappled arbor over them. Abbey made a great ado of peeking about to make “sure” they weren’t being watched or followed—how rare!—and continued this until her playfulness brought out a reluctant smile on Jake’s wide lips.
Seeing that, Abbey flattened back against the ivy and grinned in satisfaction. “I knew I could make you curious.”
Jake shook his head. “Judas,” he muttered. “You’re something strange. What do you have to tell me?”
Saying nothing, Abbey let the tension between them take over. She spoke with only her eyes for many long seconds, and soon, as she suspected it would, the enchantment began to take hold.
Of him, too. That was how she knew it was real.
She saw, as surely as dawn coming up from nowhere in the morning, his senses spiraling toward her. Her indiscreet ribaldry had brought amusement into his prismatic eyes, and that served as a bridge for a simple confession of souls: they liked each other. They felt a common appreciation for each other. At least she thought so.
Abbey reached out and caught his hand between hers. “I don’t know why,” she began, “but there’s something between us—not just of the body. Some . . . power. I don’t know what it is yet . . . but I intend to find out.”
His grin widened even more, but his brows came together. “I thought . . . you were going to say something else,” he confessed.
“What?” she pressed. “That I love you? No, I don’t love you. Not yet. Nor you me. But something is going on between us. Don’t you feel it?”
“I never thought it was love,” he said. His confession was a little disappointing.
“What, then?” she asked.
He returned the grasp she had on his hand, and for the first time, instead of her doing all the holding, they were holding onto each other. With a slow, steady pull, he drew her against his chest and breathed the word.
“Want.”
Triumph surged through her as he said it, wrapping its coils around them with a heavy, humming energy. Still, he didn’t bend down to kiss her. They gazed into each other’s eyes, scanning for confusion, deception, all those odd things that this sort of magnetism could blur until it was too late. But there were none of those things, nothing that might signal the downfall of whatever was cultivating itself between the drapes of ivy. There was a texture of discovery in the sunlight that patched their faces, and in the awareness of their clothed bodies pressing slightly tighter with every breath.
She smiled. “And?”
His lips pursed quizzically. “And . . .” He shook his head, confusion descending over his thickly lashed eyes.
Abbey laughed aloud, her eyes twinkling with pleasure—and suddenly a wagon came by, clattering on the cobblestones.
They pulled apart. Abbey folded her arms nonchalantly. Jake pulled his cap down over his eyes and turned his back to the street until the wagon had wobbled past.
“I wonder what we’re hiding from,” Abbey mentioned.
She reached for him, got her fingers under his sea coat’s lapels, and pulled him back across the little arbor’s width until his body trapped her against the ivy. “You’re not an evil man, Jake,” she said softly. “I can’t explain how I know that. But I know it as surely as my name. I’m going to make you say it. Tell me what you like about me.”
Jake sighed. “You mean, besides your having the humility of a barn cat?”
“Yes,” she murmured, giving voice to the sensations running between them. “Besides that.”
His hands clenched at his sides, and when he spoke there was a tinge of bitterness to his tone. “I think were put on this earth so destiny can laugh at us.”
Terrible regret—or some kind of undefined sadness—layered his words so heavily that Abbey pulled back enough to look clearly into his eyes. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” he began, hesitating, “that you’re right. I can’t resist you. My arms hurt to be around you.”
Victory. Abbey drew his arms up around herself, and still she felt the tremors of denial in him. “I wouldn’t want you to hurt, Jake . . .”
“I’m asking you once more,” he said, rasping. “For your own good . . . resist me.”
Their hearts beat in percussion as though they were trying to hammer through their chests and merge into a single beat.
The playful smile fell from Abbey’s lips. If there was any mischief left in this moment, it now had simmered away.
She touched his face with her fingertips and murmured, “Would you light your lamp, then ask it not to burn?”
As though some unknown hand had finally pulled that string tying them together, their lips met. Blood-heat rose, and bubbled.
The sparks hadn’t been imaginary. They hadn’t been wishful thinking or idle musing or the effects of a storm on a man and a woman alone together. They hadn’t been, because they came flooding back now, brighter than before and more stinging. One by one they peeled back the layers of Jake’s resistance just as she hoped they would. For an instant, the kiss was only a tool, a test, but as her Angers dug into the fabric of his coat and she pulled harder, pressing her mouth tighter against his, her mind began to fog. Purpose blurred. A wonderful, salacious yearning exploded between them—she pulled harder, pressed tighter. Its potency grew until kissing alone couldn’t assuage it.
Her hands found their way inside his coat, and his hands painted her back with strokes that burned through the fabric of her dress. She bent against him with sudden pliancy. They rocked against each other, hearts racing. The knot of need twisted tighter.
Her hands slipped under his sweater, experiencing the thrill of finally touching his skin—so much silkier than she expected. Abandon caught them, like two children indulging in a first curious grope, knowing that somehow they were committing a sin that nature demanded they try. Breaking a rule that was made to be broken. Defying that which begged defiance. A rascal and a scamp, that’s all the two of them were, and that’s all they wanted to be as they allowed the floodgates to slip open a crack.
Until Abbey heard voices—women’s voices.
Jake dragged his lips away from Abbey’s in a moist gasp. With volcanic effort he pushed himself away, so abruptly that his shoulder knocked the edge of the trellis and shook the whole arbor.
A clutch of town ladies strolled by and noticed them hiding in the arbor, particularly noticing Jake’s back turned to them. But Abbey gave them a nod of greeting and they nodded back. They passed by, their conversation falling off only for a moment as they looked into the arbor, but then picking up again in a manner that seemed fairly harmless.
Harmless, from Abbey’s point of view, but apparently not from Jake’s.
He tugged his cap down even farther over his eyes, as though everybody in town didn’t know who he was already anyway.
“Judas—” he muttered, glancing about again. “We can’t talk this way, not now and certainly not here.”
“Why not?” Abbey asked, trying not to sound accusatory.
“You have to trust me,” he said. “Though if you had any sense, you wouldn’t.”
“I have no sense at all.”
“I can tell that. You shouldn’t be seen with me around town for a while.”
This time Abbey was ready for his reaction. She ducked deeper into the pin-neat little garden and crouched behind the heavy veil of English ivy. On one side of them there was nothing but the side wall of a house, with nothing but a little window way up in the attic. On the opposite side, a tangled garden, poorly kept but somehow reflective of their senses at this moment. To Abbey’s right as she sat with her back against the wall of ivy, there was a tall wooden fence, solid and weathered, starkly different from the dainty picket fence on which the ivy grew. They couldn’t possibly be seen here.
Pulling her skirts under her as a cushion, she sat down against the leafy fence and motioned to him to join her. “Seclusion,” she whispered.
Jake hung his head, closed his eyes, and chuckled. Muttering, “Aren’t you something . . .” he wandered toward her and lowered himself onto the grass. The way he sat down betrayed a kind of exhaustion—not physical, but mental. A stressful weariness that begged for relief. And that, it seemed, was the real power that pressed him to sit beside her behind the ivy.
“If I’m going to trust you—even though you say I shouldn’t—we should know more about each other. You said you’re from Ohio. Which part?” Abbey asked gently, careful of her tone.
He contemplated his answer, obviously judging whether or not there was any risk in telling her. That contemplation, that signal of something hanging over his head, Abbey saw clearly now, dominated his every word, every move, every mood.
“My home town is Williamston, Ohio,” he said, still being careful. “Grew up there.”
“With those two?” She cocked her head in the direction Matthew and Elias had gone.
Jake actually looked in that direction as though he’d forgotten the two other men existed. “Oh . . . yes. We were raised together. In the same house. My mother and theirs were sisters. French immigrants. Our fathers shared a business. A saloon. Matt and Elias and I always talked about running our own place. We took over our fathers’ business eventually, but . . .” He trailed off, listless about the whole conversation, making it necessary for Abbey to prod him on.
Softly she asked, “And why did you leave it?”
He gave her a quirky grin, knowing what she was up to. “Starting at the beginning, eh?”
She shrugged, wrapping her arms about her knees. “Good as any place.”
Jake sighed. “If you insist. I wanted to . . . travel. See the United States.”
“Why?” she asked. “Travel is a hard way of life. I’ve grown to know it intimately of late, and I wouldn’t wish it on a dead sow.”
His eyes widened illustratively. “I discovered that. The hardship I saw was disillusioning for a while. But then I discovered something rather special.”
“Which was . . .”
“Which was,” he picked up, “the independence of it.”
Abbey felt her eyes narrowing. “I don’t follow.”
Jake crossed his legs and picked at the grass. “I found out how much I love the United States. And I found out why I love it. Independence, self-possession . . . that’s what we live by, even if that means the hardest life on earth. You know, my father—my father himself—was there in 1789 when James Madison presented the Bill of Rights to the House of Representatives. He used to tell me all about the fight to make this country a real place. How the process took year after year of war and revolution and proposals and ratifications. Even that had a certain victory in it—no king to say what and when. So . . . I went out to see what we’d made.” Jake gazed silently at the grass for several moments. “I found hardship, pain, people dying on the frontier trail, in the mines, on the wagon trains, nothing very pretty. And it was everywhere, from folks fighting drought and heat in Texas, to here, where we fight the wrath of the sea on a daily basis.” Now he gripped a handful of grass. His hand closed around it and he pulled. As he raised his tightened fist, the grass carne up with it, making a soft ripping noise. “But it was theirs. Their fight, their hardship. The hardship of choice.”
Abbey said nothing, but merely smiled gently at his discovery. She’d never thought of the West that way; never thought of anything that way. This new perspective intrigued her, and her wish to listen to him went far deeper than just trying to pull him out of his shell.
Sensing her interest, Jake looked up now, his brown eyes filled with respect for the people who had made the country what it was, and something in his gaze said he knew that her life in Wyoming had been part of what he was talking about.
“No one cared about how hard life got,” he went on. “They just kept on hammering through it to forge the life they’d chosen for themselves. It was their hardship to have as they pleased. No one ordered them to be there. No one decreed that they should carve out an existence from the prairies and the mountainsides and the canyons. They weren’t subject to the whims of the elite, and anything they earned was their own. So the tough life was a kind of reward, too. I was amazed. Still am. Amazed at how alive this country is!” He shook his fist in front of her again, tendrils of grass vibrating from his knuckles, as though that grass were his testimonial. “The spark of life in America caught ahold of me. There are huge varieties of pain here, but all by choice. What happens to a person is up to him. You know, Europe is still waiting for this country to fall apart,” he said with an arrogant grin. “Instead, aristocracies the world over are being kicked out by people following the American example. I love the United States. I love it. . . .”
“. . . and my mother never let us forget those stories about her childhood and what happened in France. We grew up with the history her family had brought with them from Europe when they emigrated. When you look at the long history of the world, it’s mind-boggling that a nation like this finally emerged. There’s no precedent for it. We’re a piece of art in the making, shaping ourselves out of the clay of this earth, and we have the chance to be more beautiful than any other work of art in all of history.”
Abbey hadn’t spoken a word in—how long? Her chin rested on her knees, and she was listening with an exquisite attention, mesmerized by Jacob Ross. She knew his stories intimately. She had dug in that soil he spoke of with her bare hands, had helped carve the civilized nation he adored, and all without really appreciating her own participation. For her, Wyoming’s hardships had been just that—a way of life. She had had a hazy awareness of the East, but nothing substantial. She only vaguely remembered the wagon train her parents had joined when she was still a toddler. As Jake spoke these words, described his rapturous love affair with a concept for a country, Abbey gained unbidden respect for her parents and, no matter the agonies of pioneering, for the freedom that allowed them the hardship of their choice.
She was utterly caught up by his story. Jake had lost himself in his soliloquy as though his words had been waiting for years and finally had been able to say them all at once.
At length Abbey raised her chin from her knee. “All this talk of independence,” she said, “and you fail to allow yourself any.”
For an instant, Jake seemed not to know what she meant, but then a comprehending look passed across his features. “Everything can’t be as we might like it.”
She inched closer to him on the grass and touched his hand—a deliberately subdued gesture. “We deserve our own choices, you and I,” she murmured. “Would you deny them?”
“That’s plain wisdom right now, Abbey,” he said. “I can’t tell you why.”
“Won’t tell,” she corrected. “Burdens are easier to bear if they’re shared. Share yours with me, Jake.” Her voice dropped to a whisper and she added, “Perhaps I can even help.”
Jake’s lips were pressed into a line of indecision, as though an explanation lurked behind them, pushing to get out. He returned the touch of her hand, wrapping her fingers in his and gazing at the entwined hands with a look of wishfulness. “This isn’t . . .”
“Don’t say it,” Abbey breathed quickly. Lifting her other hand to his face and caressing his cheek, making him look into her eyes. “I don’t believe it. You’re not the kind of man who speaks of choice and then denies yourself your own. There’s a way. We’ll find it. We’ll think of it. I’ll fit into your life somehow. Fate brought us together—I do believe that. This is a perfect time in my life for change. You may find it’s perfect for you, too. Believe, Jake . . . believe.”
Warmth rose in her cheeks as she lost herself in his almond-shell brown eyes, and the moment felt endless.
Growing upon itself like memories piling upon one another to make a mosaic of possibilities, the moment bent its endlessness into a kind of seclusion and told them it was all right to be alone, here, together, apart from both past and future, separated from all eyes but each other’s. As Jake clung to her whispered words, the strings that bound them together softly began to tighten. Closer, closer, swallowed by need. His lips pressed on her open mouth, engulfing it with his gentle touch.
Abbey slid into his arms with alarming naturalness—even she was surprised by the ease of it, by the quiver of her skin and her instant forgetfulness. She felt as thin as paper as he lay her down on the place where the grass and ivy met, paper made of silk threads, its edges curling under the heat of his fingers. She brought her hands up—no, they came up of their own will—to become lost in his hair. His cap toppled to the grass. She kneaded the back of his neck, where the skin turned soft and his hair invited her to stroke it, grasp it, tangle her fingers in it.
She felt his lips slip off her mouth and graze the side of her face, then her ear, then the wild spots on her throat. She bent backward against the unyielding earth, pushing herself up into him. Her body screamed invitations to his as she pulled her hands down and dove deep beneath his sea coat and under the sweater to his bare skin. He was hot—searing hot. Moist. Soft, so demonically soft . . . Her legs began to throb, to tighten.
Every thread of her being stiffened and shivered like tips of shore grass in a breeze. She was a thousand separate bits of sensation, all trembling and acute, reaching up in that breeze, reaching toward the top of the sky, pushing off the earth to fly with him. Jake was kissing her face, her temple, the side of her cheek, the bridge of her nose, making his way slowly back to her quivering lips.
She sucked in a breath of surprise, of victory, and of approval when his hand escaped to her leg, pushing her dress out of the way with possessive little gestures until he found her bare calf and kneaded it, tugging it against his own leg until it bent and caressed his buttocks. Abbey was lost in folds of clothing—the cotton of her dress, the woven yarn of her shawl, the wool of his coat, and deep inside all that fabric was their skin, screaming for freedom. Every one of her pores wanted a taste of Jake’s sweat, just as his body pressed and dug at hers for a quenching it had so recently been denied.
“I can’t fight you anymore,” Jake rasped. The sound of his voice was so startling, it seemed like thunder, the words drumming through their bones as though they didn’t need ears to hear the confession. “I can’t do it, I don’t want to do it—”
His voice caught fast in his throat and destroyed itself in a wet, crushing kiss.
Abbey answered by returning that kiss, by pushing upward into him as he lay across her possessively. Each response cued another. Her, then him, then her again, then him—a symphony of echoes riding each other like waves. His tips of his shoes dug into the grass as he pushed harder and harder. The ivy reached out for them and cloaked their indiscretions with a soft rustling.
On a gasp Abbey forced herself to ask, “Are you afraid?”
“Terrified,” he choked back without a hint of pause. His hands burned across her back, damning the fabric of her dress with every stroke. “I know you’ll devour me and that scares me. But I want it, I want it . . .”
Desire ate at them, teasing and tormenting them. Abbey knew that no matter how they hungered, no matter how they pawed and pressed and probed here in the ivy, there would be no fulfillment here and now, for this was someone’s backyard in a town where everyone knew about everything, where people could read a face as clearly as reading a newspaper, where anyone strolling by on the other side of that fence could hear their soft, sucking kisses and their frayed breaths. And somehow Abbey also knew that such a thing would be far worse for Jake than for her—somehow his life dangled on the tenuous threat of his reclusiveness, on his not getting involved with other people . . . with her.
But to let go of him now? To become stupid and socially proper just when he—
Oh, God, was that his hand?
Her buttocks flinched under a glorious pressure that caught her thigh and pushed upward, all strokes moving toward her heart. An insane plan sprung up in her mind. If she could take him just far enough—just to the point where passion and panic blended and made a man insane—then perhaps she could guarantee reawakening the spell, leaving him at the mercy of a thought or a word, a magic word that would draw him back to her at the right time, in the right place.
So she pulled him down deeper against her, plunging into his kisses.
As though to echo the strong pulse of their hearts, the clock in the town hall rang its slow, relentless announcement of the hour.
It rang and rang. Lost in each other, they chose to ignore it. But the old clock had no intention of being ignored. It plied their ears until they heard it, and something inside Jake made him add up all its gongs.
Jake blinked, as though he were coming out of a trance, as though someone had pinched him.
Only in that moment did Abbey realize he hadn’t let himself become so drunk on her that he couldn’t think anymore. She felt his whole body tighten, felt his soul retreat and his hands grow cool.
He raised his head, squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them as if to shake away the visions that had been flying in his head. “God, Abbey . . . let go of me. Let me go.” He pushed her hands away, stiffly got to his feet, and stumbled as his legs almost buckled under him. “Noon . . . Judas—two whole hours . . .”
Her legs tingling, Abbey struggled to get up. “Jake, don’t do this.”
He spun back toward her, catching her hand, but this time with a clear regret. “Shhh . . . I have to go. I can’t stay. Don’t ask me to.”
Abbey felt the noon hour tugging at her, too—she had obligations to a girl freshly widowed—yet the urge to stay was nearly too strong to resist. Had Jake not been the one to resist it, she might have sat there all day. “We’ve spent a while together,” she said, her tone begging for more. “It’s not a crime.”
“It hasn’t been a while,” he corrected. “It’s been two hours. I’m late for a . . . I’ve got to go,” he stammered, his face flushing with color that might have been embarrassment at having rattled on for so long. His brows furrowed with concern, or regret—Abbey couldn’t tell.
He didn’t want to leave, that much was plain. Yet something pulled at him, some kind of obligation that he had to fulfill.
Abbey caught his arm as he slipped through the arbor. The sunlight fell on his face differently as he turned to her. During their time together, the sun had shifted, and now its light advertised the time that had gone by. “When can I see you again?”
Still breathing heavily, Jake glanced down the street. “Certainly not in broad daylight,” he said, as though being cautious was a given.
“Then when and where?”
He clamped his mouth tightly shut, obviously having a last-ditch wrestle with himself. “Tonight, he finally relented. “Behind The Brotherhood. After dark.” He scooped up the forgotten bundle of Lucy’s possessions and shoved them at her, took her wrist, and folded her arm around the bundle in a firm good-bye.
“Then will you tell me what it is you’re afraid of?” she pursued.
His hand lingered on her arm for one last second, and a testy smile pulled up one side of his mouth. “No . . . but we may find other answers. We’ll . . . talk.”
He had other plans besides talking. That much was plain in his expression, in the set of his shoulders as he held himself back from embracing her, which would have been so natural after these moments of secretive touches. He meant he couldn’t resist anymore either. He was plainly giving in—but he regretted it. Or was it that he thought she would regret it?
Without wasting another word he spun on the ball of his foot and strode away, not too fast, but apparently with a clear mission in mind. To Abbey’s eyes, he seemed to be holding himself back from running—as if running would draw attention. What was he so frightened of?
As soon as he could without being too obvious, he vanished between two dockside buildings and was gone. Abbey was left alone beside the trellis as a breeze rippled the shinglelike layers of ivy. Only then did she realize her face was hot and her heart was racing.
“Drat him,” Abbey grumbled. “All right then, Jake. Tonight. Outside The Brotherhood.”
“This girl,” Elias Colbert mentioned, trying to be casual about a forbiddingly personal subject as he wiped a grog mug dry and handed it to his cousin. “You, uh . . .”
Jake took the mug and stacked it with the others in a cabinet behind the dark wooden bar. “Not yet,” he said, avoiding clearing his throat.
“Better make it never,” Matthew told him, turning to him with fatherly sternness.
Elias looked across the pub at his brother and said, “Don’t tell him his business.”
Flashing the younger cousin a thankful glance, Jake said nothing, but continued stacking mugs. This was a place that was, for Jake, the safest haven the island could offer. The only spot he felt sheltered. Even remote Great Point couldn’t present the security of The Brotherhood. The small pub was an L-shaped room made partially of wood and partially of the redbrick foundation of the building above it. Long shiphatch tables of dark polished planking butted up against the brick all the way down the narrow room, each cozy with four captain’s chairs and bearing around-globed lamp. Each lamp cast a golden light across its respective table, and there were already a few sailors bent over wooden bowls of steaming soup. An hour from now the place would be packed wall-to-wall with seafarers enjoying the comfort of a warm room and a floor that didn’t move under them. There would be chanty singing and the drum of old work songs, the music of a seafaring heritage and the scratchy baritone yowl of a crowd of sailors. They would be singing both of the grandeur and the toil of a life none would wish on his little brother.
Jake involved himself with stacking the mugs and whiskey glasses, very aware of the glances coming his way from Matthew, who was pretending to be interested only in rubbing a glow into the battered plank tables. Any minute now. Any—
“Don’t forget what we heard last month.”
Not quite able to stifle a grin at Matthew, who had stewed until he predictably burst, Jake was ready with his response. “I’m not forgetting. We don’t get a warning from the mainland every day, you know.” Against his will an edge of defensiveness wrecked his tone. “What are the chances it has anything to do with Abbey?”
Matthew straightened to face Jake over the bar. “What are the chances it doesn’t? How many newcomers come to Nantucket these days, Jacob? They don’t come here. They leave here. We don’t even get a handful of strangers coming to live on Nantucket anymore.”
“And she’s one of the handful,” Elias defended. “You could leave, then we’d be even.”
His reward was the light smack of a cleaning cloth in his face. In spite of the playful gesture, Matthew didn’t drop the cloak of doom he held across the subject. “Damn this, Jake,” he said, grabbing on to the solid wooden bar and shaking it as though he could make it move. “She’s suddenly appearing right after we get word there’s a federal investigator on the island, looking to break our operation. Think, man!”
Jake dropped his head and sighed. “Please, Matt, I’m struggling enough, thanks.”
“That’s yet to come,” his cousin foretold.
Matthew started to say something else, but a knock on the back door distracted him. With a scolding glare to punctuate his meaning, he broke off and disappeared into the kitchen.
Jake held his breath as he listened to the back door opening to a mutter of voices, then the back door clapping closed again. A moment later Matthew reappeared, tearing open an envelope and pulling out a folded sheet of paper. He read it, then immediately spoke up. “He’s here.”
“Who?” Jake and Elias chimed at the same time.
“Thomas Pollock. A broker from the Continent.”
Jake stepped out from behind the bar. “A what? You didn’t tell us anything about this!”
“Because I wasn’t sure it was genuine,” his cousin said. Shaking the paper, he said, “But he came through. He promises he can expedite our transportation process, maybe double what it is now. More direct routes, bigger ships.”
“Matt! Are you blinkers, trusting somebody we don’t know?”
“Then you meet him. Judge for yourself. He’s coming in tonight. Be outside after dark.”
Jake caught himself in midbreath. “Tonight?”
“Right after dark,” Matthew said. Then he looked suspiciously into his cousin’s now-blank eyes. “Why?”
Elias Colbert had been watching all of this in silence, and now he read Jake’s expression as clearly as if it were a page in a newspaper. “Uh-oh,” he muttered.
“Aw, Jake,” Matthew groaned. “You’re meeting her, aren’t you?”
There was no need to answer. Silence did the job.
“This is more important,” Matthew insisted, slapping his fingers against the piece of paper and making it snap.
Jake rubbed his palms together, suddenly feeling nervous and over-taxed and embarrassed. “I have to know, Matt.” He glanced from Matthew to Elias and back again. “I have to find out why she makes me feel . . . so hollow. Like an empty glass waiting to be filled up.” Words failed him utterly. He twisted away, unable to face the other men with this wholly poetic affectation. He could feel the burning stares of his cousins following him around the bar as he tried to hide behind it.
Careful silence passed, then Matthew turned on his controlled diplomacy and said, “All right. I’m a man, too. I know what’s after you. So let’s say she’s not the investigator. Say she’s what she appears to be. A girl who likes the looks of you.” He reached his brawny arm over the bar and grasped Jake’s arm, forcing him to look up. “Do you pull her into the pit with us?”
Truth made his question penetrate. It was nothing Jake hadn’t heard ringing inside his own head already.
Matthew sighed. “While you’re jawboning about whether yes or whether no with this gal, you’re getting closer to a yes. I see it in your face. This is the kind of business that kills people, Jake. I’m telling you . . . shake her,” he urged, “before it’s too late.”
Jake felt suddenly queasy. He glared unblinkingly at Matthew, who wore the very face of sense.
After a moment, unable to contain the misery it brought him, he nodded.
“I will.”
Abbey looked out the parlor window at the darkening sky. Why wouldn’t the dratted sun set faster? The afternoon had been torture for her, since she knew what was coming. No matter how she tried to distract herself, the knot of sexual tension at her very core continued to tighten in anticipation. No amount of activity with the Nash children, no gentle conversation with poor Lucy, no cooing and cuddling with little Wilma, no level of attentiveness from Dominic could assuage it even for a few moments. It continued to pile need upon need until she thought it would twist her apart. This would be the night when she would know, when she would find out. No matter the circumstances, no matter the inconvenience. At The Brotherhood, in the hat store’s back room, on the ground behind the buildings, somehow . . . somewhere. This would be the night, or she would know why not.
And if passion died in its being spent, if the binding fabric tore when it was tested, at least the ache would go away and take all questions with it. Then, these terrible cutting threads would cease their hungry pull on her and, yes, on Jake.
No matter how he tried to escape her, his eyes betrayed him every time. The desire had shone itself plainly in them whenever he looked at her. She and Dominic had spoken of the advantages—even the sweetness—of experience, and Abbey knew she wasn’t misinterpreting what she saw and heard.
Jake Ross was no criminal. In spite of all his clandestine sneaking about and all his talk of danger and such, the clearest image she had of him was the most recent one: the picture of him sitting there behind the ivy, telling her all about the wonderful new concepts that had forged the United States and how much it all meant to him. This simply wasn’t the kind of man who was a criminal. As she thought of it, she smiled. How adorable it was, really. He was probably involved in something as harmless as smuggling European liquor onto the island to skirt around tariffs. And he thought that was so unconscionable as to be ashamed about it. What a sense of conscience!
Luella was already in bed. The boys were playing checkers in their room, Cordelia was off mending socks, and Dominic was generously spending his evening hours in the parlor with Lucy, doing his duty as her host and, no doubt, twisting himself inside out to keep her distracted, no matter how improbable that seemed on the day of her husband’s funeral luncheon. Today Abbey had seen what Nantucket was really about. Half the island—at least that—had turned up at Trinity Church at one o’clock for a memorial to the young man they hardly knew. The church’s Gothic windows had reverberated with the bell chiming from its spired tower, and the congregation had spilled out onto the street and all the way across it. Sailors came and went, lived and died, that was true, but this particular young man had done more than just that—he had given his life in an act of heroism. A snagged line on a toggle iron had nearly taken down eight men in a whaleboat. Billy Edmonds had been the ninth man in that boat. He’d plunged overboard and cut that line, only to be buried beneath the descending flukes of a Greenland right. In those churning waters, his body had never turned up.
That had been the end of music on board the Nancy Ames. Billy Edmonds’s penny whistle, hurdy-gurdy and little wrist bells had come home silent.
And as immediate as the grief felt to Lucy, to Abbey, to everyone on the island of Nantucket, all that had happened over three months ago.
As the preacher spoke of Billy Edmonds, Abbey had thought it strange to be mourning a man three months dead as though he had died that day. In Wyoming they always knew where their men were . . . except for the mountain men, who disappeared for years at a time, but they never wanted families anyway. Those women who had husbands always knew where they were.
So the day slowly ended—luckily for Lucy, it had taken its time. The townsfolk didn’t hurry through their memorial. After the memorial service, after the tears and the sympathy and the tender gazing at baby Wilma asleep in the arms of all those people who wanted to hold her today, the town ladies had set out a fine luncheon to ease the pain. These people gathered up all their strength and sympathy to spread out Lucy Edmonds’s grief. She might be widowed, the attention said, but she would never be alone. Not here, not on Nantucket. Home was still home.
And the sun finally set.
Abbey tugged the big wooden door shut with a click. The last thing she heard from inside the house was the gentle voice of Dominic Nash speaking to Lucy. Such a kind man, to bother spending time with a girl like Lucy. Yes, Lucy was sweetness itself and vivacious to a fault, but she was out of Dominic’s league entirely. There wasn’t really much for them to talk about—Dominic was forcing the conversation to keep Lucy from falling into a mood. And so generous. He wasn’t avoiding the subject of Billy Edmonds; he was pursuing it. Abbey had heard him as she retrieved her shawl from her room and threw it around her shoulders. Dominic was asking Lucy how she had met Billy, what she liked about him . . . anything to keep her talking, never mind that he probably couldn’t understand a third of her shredded sentences.
A pang of guilt stripped away a portion of Abbey’s enthusiasm as her feet hit the cobblestones. Dominic was clearly attracted to her, and here she was sneaking off to rendezvous with a man who had done his best to avoid her.
Still, she set her mind forward as the Nash house fell away behind her and faded into the darkness.
Nantucket Town at night. All fell quiet, although there were unending signs of life. The warm golden glow of lanterns shone through countless lace curtains in tiny rectangular windows. Occasionally the soft sounds of a horse’s hooves and the creak of carriage wheels would creep along the cobblestones from some other street. Distant voices in some evening conversation would trickle across the shipyard docks from the deck of a sleeping vessel. The twitter of a penny whistle and the scratchy lilt of a fiddle played badly rolled across the water from a ship moored in the harbor.
To Abbey’s ears, these were pleasant, peaceful sounds. The streets were milk-bathed with moonlight on these clear seaside nights—no matter how gray the days, nights always seemed to be clear. At least so far. As she walked through the blue evening, Abbey thought about the Nantucket nights and knew that fog would come eventually. She’d heard much about it from travelers, people who’d been east or came from the East. One of these nights, there would be fog. She looked forward to it. The steam of the sea.
Now there was a new sound, very sudden, like the opening of a door—voices, men’s voices. More music, louder, clearer . . . fiddle, hurdy-gurdy, banjo, concertina, penny whistle . . . voices both singing and talking, and there was laughter, too.
Then the door abruptly closed with a hush.
The Brotherhood.
Abbey hauled up short. Am I ready?
She hovered there in midstep, one of her shoes wedged at an angle between two cobblestones. She didn’t breathe for a few moments after the door closed. If only the walk between the Nash home and The Brotherhood could have been a bit longer. . . .
“Yes,” she spoke aloud, forcing the word out. “I’m ready.” She leaned forward, ready to move, although for a second or two her feet didn’t go with her. Soon they had no choice and she was striding with deliberate resolve toward the wide intersection across which lay The Brotherhood.
The intersection opened before her. She could almost read the sign. THE BROTHERHOOD FOOD, BED AND GROG. GOOD COMPANY. She remembered all that from before, though tonight darkness obscured the lettering. The simple brick and wood building was attached to all the other buildings from here to the brink of Old North Wharf, and the tavern door was nothing but a portal of planking cut into a wall of gray cedar, displaying the same Quaker reserve that most of the other buildings on Nantucket did. Like a plain woman on the outside, but gurgling with activity within.
She forced herself to keep walking, and with every step there was less force involved. The magnetism was at work again, that line leading her to Jake Ross, drawing her unerringly and without pause toward The Brotherhood and finally around the corner to the back of the pub.
But she did slow down now . . . she did stop to hide behind a cluster of tree trunks. Just to look first, just to get the upper hand, or at least to pause and think of what she would say to him first.
And he was there. He hadn’t noticed her yet.
He paced aimlessly, then paused and put his foot up on a food crate. He leaned one elbow on his knee and sighed deeply.
Abbey wasn’t close enough to hear the sigh, but she saw it, and wondered what it meant, what he was feeling, what he was thinking.
A thread of moonlight came between the housetops and touched Jake’s head, leaving a gray spot where his cap was and a shimmer of silvery fringe where his hair fell below the cap. It cast a shadow on his face from the cap’s brim. His coat hung open around his body, its broad lapels parted to show a wedge of oatmeal sweater. More of the sweater showed when he pushed back the coat on one side and stuffed his hand into his trouser pocket—a gesture of comfort in a moment of unease.
Was she imagining all this? Was she forcing him to react to his own loneliness out there on Great Point? No—she wouldn’t believe it. There was something between them. But because it wasn’t a concrete something, neither of them knew whether or not it was real.
Finally, she resolved to make it real. She straightened her shoulders and stepped out from the clutch of trees.
Boot soles crunched on the cobblestones—not hers.
She ducked back into the trees, admittedly a silly and unnecessary action. Part of the sensation of making all this a game, probably, as she thought about it. She was sneaking around, and she enjoyed it. It was fun.
But then the fun abruptly ended.
The footsteps grew louder. A man came up from the other side of the street. Abbey saw Jake look up, saw him suddenly straighten and stare. He glanced about, then looked back at the man who approached.
The man strode by Abbey’s hiding place in the tree trunks without as much as a glance her way; he didn’t see her at all and strode resolutely toward Jake.
Abbey felt as though her chest were caving in when she saw the man’s face in the glare of moonlight. A big round face, framed with a pair of broad broom-shaped sideburns, gray-shot black, very bushy. Above the sideburns were cheekbones like broad cliffs, and above those his crescent-shaped eyes were hardly more than dark wedges in this evening light.
Her heart slammed against her breastbone. She’d know that face, no matter the darkness, no matter the crowd, no matter the impossibility that this particular man would be in this particular place, or that Abbey Sutton would happen to be in the same place at the same time.
It was a long way from Wyoming.
She parted her lips, and whispered into the night, her breath warm against her face.
“What are you doing here . . . murderer?”