RESPECT DIED A quick death. The chance of a future together withered from the blight. Some things live and thrive and some things die. Love is not enough. Passion falls despicably short. Desire lives between the legs. Alone it cannot cement a relationship. When respect died it killed both trust and hope, too.
There was an arm’s-length easiness about walking away and never looking back, an ease that made Abbey nervous. A simmering doom settled around her shoulders like a cloak meant to soothe her from the cold, and somehow it did soothe her. Somehow her heart closed itself off from the pain and her mind accepted the death as though she were standing over a coffin, gazing at the sedate sleeping face of a departed friend. Some things, some living things, were indeed better off dead. Sometimes the pain they brought and the tension of their existence was simply harder to bear than the loss when they finally died.
Terrible, to think this way. Terrible for turning away to be so easy.
She found herself moving through her duties with the three Nash children as though she, too, had died and simply gone on moving. She managed to smile and laugh occasionally for the children’s sake, to pour herself into them and play with them and lasso with them and actually forget for a few moments at a time, moments which were great relief. Whatever she did with the children and with Dominic or Lucy or Cordelia, those teatimes and dinners at the big table and even a picnic that Thursday under the Nantucket sun, all happened to someone else. A distant person, moving by rote and accepting a death. She recognized the feelings; she’d done it before, a year ago. She knew she would live through it.
Except that he was still walking around this island. No matter where she went or how deeply she poured herself into her activities, he was never more than a matter of minutes away. And that was the single thorn always under her clothing, pricking her. She could only walk so far before the ocean would stop her and gently turn her back, and if she turned back—which she always had to because of her obligations—she would invariably be facing Jake. She wouldn’t see him through the streets and brick and cedar walls, but she sensed him there. Shopping in town or taking the children to school was annoying and nerve-racking because Abbey knew all she had to do was turn the wrong corner at the wrong moment and she would run into him.
How long had it been? Five days? Eight? Strange how she had lost track. He would be walking about by now. He wouldn’t bother to hide himself away. The whole town knew what had happened, the whole island. It was that kind of place. And by now it was no secret that the new lady from the Continent had participated in this dockside brawl in some improper way.
She avoided going around corners. She often found herself walking right down the middle of the street. The children, of course, thought this was delightful.
Abbey found her frozen state of mind almost to be a relief. For the first time since she stepped off the ship and whipped that slaver, she could be numb. Fine, except that people around her noticed the death. Dominic was even more attentive in his uncomfortable way. Cordelia kept putting hot meals in front of Abbey in hope of thawing her. Lucy dragged her here and there to do this and that as though the roles were reversed and Abbey was the one in mourning.
Abbey conscientiously worked at letting them succeed at their efforts, at least outwardly. She fell into Lucy’s clutches willingly and even started learning to mend the hats at the hat store because Lucy was desperate to keep her busy. She allowed Dominic to converse with her about dull island business. Which tax law applied to which element of sheepshearing, the island’s first industry. Which ship had to be moved from its berth at the docks in order to build an extension to fit in four smaller ships. Progress on trying to get the federal government to construct a breakwater so that large whale ships could negotiate too-shallow Nantucket Harbor.
The time passed. Nine days? Twelve? Nights were hardest—dusk especially, when the beacon shone from Great Point. Like him, it was almost inescapable. And when she did manage to escape it, she found her loneliness had become a physical pain. Those moments just before falling asleep were pure torture.
And during the days, there was no sign of Pollock either. It was truly strange. As Abbey began to reawaken and think about it, why hadn’t she encountered him? Her dramatic threat was good, but not that good. Thomas Pollock was a vengeful man, and she half expected him to appear the very next day after she torched his boat, kill her, and stuff her body under the boardwalk. He hadn’t. Then again, he was also a practical kind of criminal. He didn’t do things if they were too hard. There was always better pickings just over the hill, so why fight? That was why he’d left Wyoming. Leaving was easier than fighting uphill against the judge’s raving widow, who wasn’t about to let the county forget that he was at the bottom of the ambush.
Odd . . . to be enemies with a man with whom she had never exchanged more than fifty words. She’d never talked to Thomas Pollock at all. In pioneer territory it was always the men who did the trading and the talking. The women did the practical work, the men did the dealing and the buying and selling. She learned about Pollock only in hindsight, after Judge Sutton and the other ranchers were already dead and it was too late to warn them. Oh, she’d heard his name and had half listened, but not enough to bring him down, not enough to knock his knees out from under him and get him in jail or dangling. By the time her accusations began to make sense to the authorities, Pollock had smelled the scent of retribution on the wind and abandoned Wyoming.
By the time she spied him here in Nantucket, he was nothing more to her than a name, a face, and a crime. She had no idea what motivated him, what he wanted from life, or what kind of man it took to do the things he did.
He had tried to coerce Jake Ross into working with him. Coerce, entice, seduce . . . convince . . . Jake had refused. But had he refused because he saw more profit working with the competition? It was unthinkable. . . .
For something unthinkable, she thought about it a lot. A damned lot. Almost constantly. She thought of it from one angle, then again from another angle, then went over the previous angles again, reexamining the facts until her recurring thoughts made her nauseous each time they started up.
Gradually, by the hour, she found herself beginning to accept that she had no future with Jake. Her mind accepted it, her reason discovered it palatable. Her working from day to day became more fluid, and she was more likely to speak back when someone spoke to her instead of having to be called two or three times before she returned to reality. She was learning to survive without the possibility of winning the prize she had so diligently and so unrelentingly fought for, this man who mirrored her own visions.
But with acceptance, the life had gone out of her. She performed necessary duties dispassionately, only summoning up her enthusiasm for the sake of the children and almost only in front of them. Dominic didn’t trouble her with questions, though she often felt his concerned gaze and his desire to help her. Cordelia was generally quiet, but tended to fuss about Abbey’s comfort more.
Lucy wasn’t quiet at all, though. In fact, she had nearly taken over the Nash household. Wilma played with the Nash children and with Dominic’s mustache. The Nash children listened in rapture to Lucy’s wacky accent telling stories about England—stories Lucy was obviously tapering down to their level. Abbey’s sole pleasure came from listening to the stories and translating them into adult terms. What really happened, and how. These stories, properly interpreted, were nursery rhyme versions of events of questionable safety and no propriety at all. For a woman barely out of her teens, Lucy had a life worthy of several people’s experience. Somehow even in the midst of her mourning, Lucy provided the greatest light in the house. Abbey would never again refer to her as a girl.
But there was always this clutching sense of loss. Lately Abbey was half the woman she’d been when she stepped off the ship from the mainland. She was less than the person who had taken up the whip, less by half. Less, and still hurting.
Sometimes her hurt was so terrible, it burned. It came to her in the night like a wraith, sat on her, and burned. Jake. Jake . . .
And the humiliation—that he loved her, yes, but not as much as smuggling. Probably that was the only thing that kept her from seeking him out, the true force that kept her away from corners, away from the docks, away from Great Point, and certainly away from The Brotherhood.
Dinnertime was a bit tense every day, but Abbey looked forward to it. Though she conversed somewhat less, usually only when she was asked a direct question, she enjoyed listening to Lucy’s yammer and then watching Dominic’s mouth turn up in a stern smile when Lucy said something entirely inappropriate. Then Dominic would regain control over his face and scold, “Madam, your language,” and Lucy would throw a dinner roll at him. The children would dissolve into guffaws. This went on with alarming regularity, but somehow the regularity itself was a comfort to Abbey.
That was why the pain tripled when she herself had to admit that this couldn’t go on, that she had to rupture the artificial peace she had crocheted and had been lying in.
She strode rather stiffly into Dominic’s study one evening when he was still working on government documents.
Pausing involuntarily at the archway, Abbey hovered on her toes as though an invisible spiderweb was strung up against her and kept her from going into the room. Dominic was bent studiously over his desk, sitting in the filtered yellow glow from the frosted-glass hurricane lamp beside him. His curly red hair had a cast like polished copper. A pair of reading spectacles were balanced on the tip of his nose, and his brows were raised as he contemplated one of the thousand little problems in running the island. For many moments he didn’t realize she was there. He turned a page, turned it back, pursed his lips, then affixed his signature to the document and went on to the next one.
Abbey was entranced. Dominic was such a bastion of common sense. He exuded order from every pore. He would never know the comfort and strength he gave her in these moments.
He blinked then, and his eyes lost their focus on the papers. After a beat, he looked toward her. He didn’t glance or flinch, but looked right at her as though he knew she was there.
“Mrs. Sutton,” he said, rising to his feet gallantly. “Abbey. Please . . . come in. You’re not interrupting.”
She pushed through the web. It popped around her, but she made it into the room. “Dominic, may I speak to you?”
“Why, of course.” He gestured toward the velvet chair. “Please.”
Abbey did sit down this time. By now she knew that standing or sitting, her announcement would be just as sour.
“Dominic,” she began, though it sounded indecisive to repeat his name, “you’re the kindest man in the world, I think.”
A ruddy flush appeared on his cheeks, and his lips disappeared under the mustache. “Oh . . . not at all. But thank you. What brings this to the fore?”
Abbey lowered her eyes and fixed them on the rug beneath her feet. “You’ve let me come here to live, under conditions that do me nothing but good. You’ve let Lucy stay here with us just when she needed to have a family. . . . I don’t know—you simply are a well of kindness.”
“Abbey, please,” he said. He strode across the room, hiding his mouth with his knuckles. “I must look like a tomato by now.”
She looked up and smiled warmly. “You do. It’s endearing.”
He placed a hand on his hip and said, “Madam, I’m not supposed to be endearing. I’m conscientiously fostering a reputation for surliness.”
Unable to accept his effort at levity, Abbey nodded as though he actually meant that. Solemnly she went on. “Regardless . . . all this only makes it difficult to say that I must leave Nantucket.”
Dominic sank into the other chair, facing her. His hands came to a rest between his knees. “Leave?”
If only he wouldn’t seem so much the little boy when he looked at her like that.
He spoke too softly to be referring to business when he said, “But our arrangement—”
“Will have to survive with some kind of alteration,” Abbey finished smoothly. “I can’t endure living on the island, not for as long as I’d planned. It simply isn’t working out.”
Dominic sat back in his chair. The velvet breathed as he settled against the upholstered heart-shaped back. “That Ross character,” he said, almost a snarl.
“Yes,” Abbey handed back. She lowered her eyes again, licked her lips, and nodded.
A grim sobriety fell over Dominic, and he was silent for a long time. Then he flatly said, “Abbey, the man is a villain. A highwayman.”
“I know that!” she snapped.
“And you could still go with him?”
Gripping the sides of the chair seat, she leaned forward. “Go with him? Hardly. No, it’s not that, for pity’s sake, Dominic. It’s that . . . it’s that he’s here and I’m here, and we both know it.”
He slumped until his shoulder blades pushed back into the velvet. “Oh,” he murmured. “Oh. Oh, I see. . . .”
Abbey gazed down, neither embarrassed nor expecting things to get better. “In fact,” she said slowly, “I hope never to see him again.”
There was a knock at the big front door. “I’ve got it,” Cordelia’s voice clipped through from the kitchen. Then, as though rematerializing from a different place altogether, she appeared near the front door through the hallway and opened the door.
Neither Abbey nor Dominic rose, but they both were silent, their conversation holding on through this moment of interruption.
“Thank you,” they heard Cordelia say, and the door sighed shut.
She appeared at the parlor doorway and was holding an envelope.
Dominic stood up immediately and went toward her with his hand out, ready to take the message, but Cordelia gave him a pointed chin and said, “Not for you, sir, this time.” She strode in and handed the envelope to Abbey.
Abbey glanced at each of them before actually taking the envelope. She couldn’t imagine why she would be getting a message here. She murmured something polite at Cordelia and looked at the envelope. It was blank. She looked up as Cordelia was stepping past Dominic toward the dining room. “Cordelia—”
The housekeeper turned around. “Yes?”
“Who delivered this?”
“I didn’t know the man, Abbey,” she said. “A seaman.”
She offered no other description of the messenger, leaving Abbey with nothing to do but look at the envelope.
Dominic hovered nearby until he realized she wasn’t opening the letter. Finally he cleared his throat and muttered, “Yes . . . excuse me. We’ll talk later.” He made a quick gesture toward the note in her hand. “There’s no need to be hasty, in any case.”
“I’ll go to my room,” Abbey offered, but Dominic was already at the archway, on his way out.
“Not at all. Be my guest,” he offered with a final wave of his hand before slipping out, a gesture that gave her the parlor and its privacy as a gift.
The envelope blurred before her eyes as she tore it open. There was nothing on it. It hadn’t been officially mailed, but sent from someone nearby. Didn’t take much guessing.
Now what did he want? Hadn’t it all been said?
Even though she knew, she still flinched when she saw his name scrawled on the end of the message.
Meet me. Pacific National Bank.
By the north meridian stone.
Nine o’clock.
Jake
Some message. Fewer words than a common polite hello on the street. The instant her eyes touched the words, she considered not going, but she knew a second later that she would.
Dominic’s words rang . . . no need to be hasty . . . no need to be hasty—
She had her shawl around her in two seconds. And may she be damned for it.
Outside, it was the first truly warm night of spring. There was no bite in the air at all, but only the cool, moist breath of the sea. The warmth of a sunny day still radiated from the ground. She didn’t even need her shawl. It hung on her shoulders and flapped against her arms. She was walking too fast.
The bank was as dark as all of Nantucket, but there was something restless about it. It stood there, a huge brick building, just as stubbornly unintrusive in its own way as the ocean. At its side there was a conical limestone obelisk about the size of a gravestone, which was the marker of the north meridian line. Etched on the conical part was “1840,” the year the stone had been erected, and on the main part was etched with typical Nantucket reserve, “Northern extremity of the Town’s meridian line.”
And he was there, standing right beside the stone. Leaning with one knee against it, in fact.
Abbey crushed her eyes closed for an instant as she rounded the corner and saw him, then forged forward so she didn’t look as though she couldn’t make up her mind. She couldn’t, really, but that was beside the point. Impressions were everything now. She might buckle to her needs, but she would never let him see it. Never again. Appearing miserable would only swell the pain.
“Abbey,” Jake breathed as she came up to him, and he reached out for her.
Just before he would have caught her shoulders in a gentle grip, Abbey stopped and backed away.
Jake lost his equilibrium and stumbled forward a step before catching himself. He closed his empty fists—a gesture very human, and very sad. Abbey couldn’t resist gloating a little. Now he knew how it felt.
He pulled his hands back and stuffed them into his pockets—for the first time Abbey noticed he wasn’t wearing his sea coat, only a loosely knitted sweater.
“How are you?” she asked him. Luckily her voice didn’t clog up in her throat.
“Better,” he said with a tip of his head.
“All better, or getting better?”
He smiled. “Getting. Matt insists it’s the Colbert blood in me making me heal fast so I can get back to work.”
Abbey folded her arms. “Work’s a sore subject with us right now, Jake. At least yours is.”
He closed his lips tightly and nodded, rocking on his heels. “I know.” Briefly he studied the meridian stone, then looked up. “You saved my life, Abbey.”
“Before or after almost getting you killed?”
Silence squirmed between them. When Jake couldn’t bear it any longer—Abbey could see clearly that he couldn’t—he stepped close to her, so close that she caught the scent of smoke from the pub clinging to him.
“Abbey, I’m leaving Nantucket.”
She drew her shoulders in. “What? When?”
“Soon. I’m not certain of the day or time, but soon. It’ll be sudden when it comes, I know that. Abbey—” He moved even closer, a lover’s closeness now. “Abbey, I want you to come with me.”
She turned her back on him. Perhaps it was overly dramatic, but it was what she had to do in order to keep from looking into his eyes—which would be her undoing.
“Go with you?” she murmured, tasting the prospect.
“Yes,” he said, too quickly.
“Are you leaving Nantucket because of me? Does it have something to do with me, with us?”
There was a pause. “Yes,” he said again, this time more slowly, his tone completely different. “Yes, it does. Its all about you now. Everything is you now. It’s distracting me,” he complained, but his complaint had a certain sweetness about it. He pushed his hand through his hair and strode away a few paces, taking a little of the pressure off her. “I can’t stand to be without you anymore. Abbey—I love you.”
I love you. I love you. I love you. . . .
Were the words echoing in her head from his saying them, or were they her own words hammering at her, trying to get out? For a fleeting moment Abbey wondered if he had really said them or if she simply wished him to say them so much that she was hearing things. But his eyes were still saying it, even in the deep blue night.
Before she could ask him to hear the words again, Abbey’s ears caught a noise at the front of the bank. Both of them turned—and glimpsed a retreating form. Someone had obviously been hiding, watching them.
Abbey whirled. “Damn them again! It’s them again! Those two! How dare he send those buffoons after me again!”
She strode toward the front of the bank, but Jake pulled her back before she had gone more than three steps.
“No, no. Forget them. Come this way.” His hand was a tender, irresistible force as it cupped her elbow.
He led her across the street and between two darkened buildings, into a kind of an alcove. Inside the alcove was a door, and inside the door a room that was like a shed or a laundry area.
“Do you know all of Nantucket’s holes, or only the best ones?” Abbey saucily commented.
She turned, and found the utter darkness unnerving, entrancing. She knew he was there, but she couldn’t see him. In this complete blackness, with only her memory to offer any substance, Abbey rediscovered Jake as the quintessence of mystery. She thought of his tallow-blond hair and his contradictory brown eyes gazing at her through the darkness and seeing her body the same way she was seeing his. In the darkness they might as well both have been naked, for those were the images that popped into Abbey’s mind—Jake standing there naked, the long muscles of his legs twitching with an endearing nervousness, the twitch of lust that made all lovers curious and hungry. In the darkness his arms were bare and strong, his chest plush with a few soft yellow curls—not too many. Just enough to finger. His buttocks flicked like his legs did, tightening in and out with little muscle tucks, making promises.
In the utter darkness there was also an utter silence. She almost spoke, almost called his name just to have the reassurance of hearing his voice. Soon there was a small movement, and a match flared. Just as the tiny flame settled down, Jake touched it to a candle, and a globe of gold light hung in the room. The tiny room was all wooden and very appealing. Here they were completely separated from the rest of humanity, perhaps even more than they had been way out at Great Point. At the lighthouse, Jake had many duties to perform. Here, he had only one.
He turned to face her. All expression of contempt slid from her features as she gazed at him, knowing his heart was pumping beneath the soft gold tuft, and that his legs were warm. There was absolutely no malice in his eyes, no risk whatsoever.
He held his hands out to her and he said nothing, made no entreaty at all, but merely let his eyes do his asking, and his hands as he reached out without moving closer. She moved to him.
Their lips, arms, their bellies, their thighs, all came together at the same instant. Abbey’s eyes sank shut and she poured herself into him, heat to heat, moisture to moisture. They became lovers again, tugging and pushing at each other’s clothing until fabric made way for flesh. Their garments bunched up around their waists and under their arms, and the glow of the candle caught the ivory dunes and beaches of their skin. Slowly Abbey began to rotate against Jake. Power built gradually, hanging on to the promise as much as to the fulfillment, and their velocity rose. Tiny sucking sounds from their own kisses drove them onward, their rapid breathing becoming gasps and moans. As Abbey pressed forward, bending her body deeper into his, Jake wrapped his arm against the small of her back and dipped her to the earthen floor. He came down on top of her, his knee spreading her legs in a single fluid motion.
She lay back, her head against the packed dirt, and despite the intensity of her pleasure as she gazed up at him in the dim candlelight, she couldn’t will herself to smile.
She felt him rising against her leg and told herself it was all right, that it couldn’t do them any more harm than they had already done to themselves. Jake’s face was half in shadow, half in the candleglow. He took hold of her wrists and spread her arms out above her head until he was prone on top of her like a man diving from a cliff. One long study of her features, and he dropped his mouth to her throat.
The world fell away beneath her. Her head rolled back and she pressed up hard against him, her eyes falling shut again, this time squeezing tight at the burning of his mouth beneath her ear. The velocity that had paused now took up again with a raw new fury. The pressure of his weight and the rotation of his body provoked her, and she forgot everything that had led them to this moment. All she could feel or know now was the bubbling that rose in her thighs, the gasps that racked her throat, and the moans that poured from Jake as she writhed beneath him.
They hadn’t had this kind of freedom before. The other time they had been ever so careful, so cautious of his wounds. But now his wounds were healed over enough to be forgotten despite the occasional wince. Even Jake, as he felt his body telling him he wasn’t quite ready for this, seemed driven on harder every time the pain went through him. Or was he trying to prove something to her?
With each thrust he rocked her back and forth on the dirt floor, her shoulders rubbing the cool, dry earth, rubbing heat into it. The movement increased, driving Abbey backward, deeper into the vortex, and all her rationality fell away, bit by bit, fluttering around her and sparkling.
He stiffened once, twice, and a long breath wheezed from him. He was stargazing, his face tipped up toward the dark ceiling, his eyes closed, his mouth open, held there by the grip of passion. Beneath him, she was an echo of him, pushing upward against his weight, lost in the achievement.
Another gushing breath, and he collapsed on top of her, his face nestled into her throat again, his lips plucking at her skin, playfully this time. Little nips of accomplishment.
She lay on the cool earth, her arms still sprawled beneath his at their sides, her face turned away from him.
After a moment, he raised his head. “Abbey?”
There was no response. Only a tinge of desolation following their marvelous moment.
Jake rolled over and sat up, gently pulling his sweater down over his bandaged torso. “Abbey? You did want to, didn’t you? I didn’t push it on you . . . did I?”
His uncertainty crushed her to the floor. She rolled over in the opposite direction and sat up with her back to him. One by one, she pushed the loops over the buttons of her bodice. She hadn’t even noticed him undoing them, hadn’t noticed her breasts falling free under his touch. There had been only sensation and fire.
“No,” she said, meaning it. “You didn’t. You’re not one of them.” She closed her mouth before the rest came out.
“Come with me, Abbey,” he murmured into her ear. The words rode on a hot breath. “I can’t live without you, but I can’t stand making you live with danger, either. We can make a life somewhere else—”
“What’s the matter with life here?” she whispered back, spreading her dress down over her legs.
Jake sat back abruptly.
“I’m trying to tell you! You’re not much on listening, are you? Nantucket’s too much in the center of trouble for me to keep you safe. Loving you puts me in danger and it puts you in danger. Like the other night. Someplace else . . . I can keep the danger away.”
She turned to him now, feeling the night air sparkle in her eyes. “While you keep on with your smuggling?”
The truth came forward in his eyes, and he closed his mouth because the answer was so obvious. It embarrassed him, saddened him, Abbey could see that. But it didn’t sadden him enough.
“What kind of life is that?” she said softly. “What would it be like for us? Whenever you bring me a present, would I have to wonder, did he steal it? Did someone die for this bauble?”
“I’ve never killed anyone in my life,” he said, sounding injured. “I don’t intend to start. Certainly not for any petty contraband.”
Abbey sighed heavily. “You sing several songs,” she told him. “All different.”
He struck the ground with the flat of his hand. “You think you know all of it,” he fumed.
“I know this,” she told him, pushing her prerogative. “I know I despise you.”
Perhaps not him, but this part of him. Yet she failed to make the distinction as they sat a foot apart on the cool ground. Jake glared at her for many long moments, battling with the emotions that flew around them in a swarm.
He dropped his eyes, reorganized his thoughts, and looked up at her.
“Abbey,” Jake said slowly, almost a whisper. He held out his hands to her. “Come with me. I want you. Marry me. Come with me.”
Without moving, without blinking, she let the request fall and rest before parting her lips to answer.
“If I go with you,” she asked softly, “will you give me your word that you’ll give up smuggling and never deal this way again?”
His brows came together slightly, his lips parting as though to speak the vow, but no sound came out. In the empty air before his lips was the soft glimmer of the answer he couldn’t choke out.
Abbey caught the slightest spark of hope, but it was instantly smothered in his hesitation.
She gazed at him. “I thought so,” she said.
A million troubles ran through her mind. And joy—the tremendous joy of what they had just shared—was scattered by a heavy reality. It was a simple, disastrous reality. The reality of what would happen on the day she became a liability to him again, as she was now. What honor is there in a man who admits he smuggles for a living and won’t give it up? She drew her legs under her and got up before finishing what she had to say. Some things had to be said standing up.
She pulled her shawl back around her shoulders and closed it over her heart. Her crumbling heart.
“No,” she said.