She shrieked out, holding fiercely to him, limbs locked around him as her climax exploded fully upon her at last. She heard him whisper something, but she didn’t know what. She drifted, aching, trembling, spent, delicious, still throbbing.
Seconds later, she was aware of the sudden, steel-hard constriction of his body. A long, harsh groan escaped him, and he shuddered, coming within her again and again. And more gently, just once again.
He held her, then sighed. He eased his weight from her and scooped her into his arms. He held her, stroking her hair.
I love you!
The words were there again.
But she couldn’t say them. He had brought her to the plains of heaven. But that was only an illusion. The tepee was real. The fire was real. The threat of death was real.
She started to speak.
“Sh!” he said softly. “We have the night.”
The night. They had the night.
Perhaps no future. Only a past.
Sometimes it seemed the past they shared had begun forever ago.
Sometimes it seemed as if it had been just moments ago when he had come to her, galloping up upon his horse.
An unwilling cavalier. One who wore the wrong color.
And one with whom she had made a devil’s bargain.
It had been forever ago …
No, it had been just a few months ago, with a lifetime of living in those months.
The war had ended at the beginning of summer.
And their private battle had begun.
One
A Conquered Nation
June 1865
Cameron Hall
Tidewater, Virginia
The day was so hot that the sun seemed to shimmer above the ground, making the fields and the land weave in a distorted manner. The humidity was as high as the day was hot.
Christa Cameron suddenly stood straight, bone-tired from the heat. She arched her sore back and dropped the small spade she had been using to loosen the dirt by the tomato plants. She closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them.
If she looked to the river, it was as if the past years had never been. The river flowed on just the same as it always had. The sun shimmered above it, too, and the water seemed blue and black. At this distance, it seemed to be standing still. Pa had always said that summer in Virginia could be like summer in hell. Hotter than it was even down in Georgia or Florida, or way out west in California. The river might make it a spell cooler by night, but by day it didn’t seem to help at all. Still, the heat was something she knew well enough. She’d lived with it all her life. The house had been built to catch every little breeze that might go by.
Turning around, Christa stared up at it. While the river gave away nothing of the tempest of the past four years, the house told it all. Peeling, cracking paint, loose boards, that one step from the back porch still missing. There were a few bullet holes in it from the day that the war had come right to them. Staring at the house, she felt ill. For a moment, she was dizzy. Then her anger and bitterness came sweeping down on her and her fingers trembled.
She should have been grateful that the house was still standing. So many other fine homes had been burned right to the ground. In so many places lone chimneys could be seen, rising up like haunting wraiths from the scorched earth around them. Her house still stood. Cameron Hall. The first bricks had been laid in the sixteen hundreds. The building was a grand lady if ever there had been one. Down its middle ran a huge central hall with broad double doors on the front and rear porch, all of which could be opened to welcome the breezes, to allow a host of beautifully dressed men and women to party and dance out to the moonlit lawn if they so desired.
Even the lawn was ravaged now.
The house still stood! That mattered more than anything. The graceful columns that rose so majestically from the porches might need another coat of paint, but they stood. No fire had scorched them, no cannon had leveled them.
And though the paint was chipping and three-fourths of the fields were lying fallow, her home still stood and still functioned because of her.
The Yanks had been ordered to leave the place alone because of Jesse. Jesse was the oldest male heir, so the place legally came to him. And Jesse had fought for the Union. But the Rebs had left the place alone because her brother Daniel had fought for the South. Once, the Yanks had nearly burned it, but for a few bright shining moments her family had all managed to band together, neither Yanks nor Rebs, and fought to preserve it.
They had all fought for it, but she had saved it. She had stayed here while Jesse had gone north and Daniel had gone south. She had learned to keep the garden when so many of their slaves—freed by an agreement between her brothers—had begun to wonder what they could do with their lives in the North. She had watched them go—and she had watched some return. She had learned to garden, she had learned to plant. She had plowed, she had picked cotton. She had even repaired the roof when it had begun to leak in Jesse’s study. She’d had help from her sisters-in-law, but they’d both been busy with their babies. Jesse, the Yank, had married Kiernan, the Reb, and Daniel, the Reb, had married Callie, the Yank, and so they’d all had each other.
Christa had had the house.
The softest whisper of a cooling breeze suddenly swept up. She lifted off her wide-brimmed straw hat and held it before her.
It might have been different. She might not have had to love a house—brick and wood and paint and shingles—if it hadn’t been for the war. Once upon a time she’d been in love. And it hadn’t been awful, like it had been for her brothers, loving women who were their enemies. She had been in love with a Confederate officer, Liam McCloskey. They’d spent what hours they could together, dreaming and planning and building a better world, one they could live in when the war was over, the brand-new and liberated Confederate States of America. They would have had a half-dozen children, and they would have raised them along with the cotton and tobacco that had built their world, that had made it rich.
But they wouldn’t raise anything now. Her fair young officer was dead, fallen upon the field of battle. His uniform was his funeral shroud; the bare dark earth of his homeland, the Confederacy, was his coffin.
She and Kiernan and Callie had all worked endless hours, sewing beautiful beads and lace onto a white taffeta bridal gown. The war had raged around them, food had grown more and more scarce, and a pair of stockings had become a great luxury. But they had created a stunning gown for her to wear for her wedding.
But though she had dressed in the beautiful white gown, Liam McCloskey never arrived for his wedding. When Liam did not arrive by the time night fell, she had known with a sinking surety in her heart that he was dead.
They had taken the beautiful wedding gown and had dyed it black. Dressed in her mourning, she had gone to the train station to claim her lover’s remains. All she’d received was word that his body had been buried with countless others in a mass grave.
At least he had died in Virginia.
Christa swallowed hard and lifted her face to the sun, her eyes tightly closed. She had ceased to cry. So many were dead. She had grown numb against the news of death. Both Jesse and Daniel had survived, and she was deeply grateful for that, but they had come home to wives with open arms. She had watched her brothers, one in blue and one in gray, coming home together. She had started to run to them herself, but then she had remembered. They had wives to run down the long road to meet them. She could not run, for the man she should have run to, ragged and worn in his gray, was no more than a memory now. He would never walk down any trail toward her, never smile his slow, warm smile, never open his arms to her again.
And so she had watched.
Now she was like the house. When the war had begun, they had both been beautiful, vibrant, full of life.
The house needed paint and repairs.
She needed her youth back. She had been so very young before it had all begun! The hostess of Cameron Hall, her father’s daughte
r, her brothers’ pride. Men from across the country had vied for her attention at parties and balls. She was known as the “Cameron Rose,” for they joked that she was the beauty between two thorns, Jesse and Daniel. They’d all been blessed with the Cameron eyes, eyes that were near cobalt-blue, and the Cameron hair, a deep dark shade that was nearly as black as ebony. In those days her face had been ivory with just the right touch of rouge in her cheeks. She had been so quick to smile, so quick to laugh.
Maybe now she needed a paint job too.
Her big floppy hat hadn’t kept the sun from her face. She had burnt, she had peeled. No matter what lotions Janey had given her for her hands, they had callused and grown rough. She’d acquired startling muscles. Very unladylike.
But Cameron Hall still stood. She had done it. Despite war, despite devastation. She had kept the hall standing, and she had seen to it that they all ate while they waited and prayed.
Now the war was over, and she was still out here working with the tomato plants.
It wouldn’t be long now. She was alone with the house again because Jesse and Kiernan were in Washington on business and Daniel and Callie were in Richmond trying to help sort out some of the confusion of getting wounded Rebs back south from northern prison camps while returning wounded Yanks to their homes. The babies—her three little nephews and one little niece—were all gone with their parents. The Millers’ twins, Kiernan’s young sister and brother-in-law from her first marriage, were also in Washington. Janey had gone with them, just as Jigger had determined to go along with Daniel to help him and Callie with their little brood.
And so now it was just her again, her and Cameron Hall. She wasn’t completely alone. Jesse and Daniel had agreed to free their slaves long before any emancipation proclamation had been written. Many of their slaves had left, but many had returned.
Many had stayed even at those times when she’d had nothing to pay them with but worthless Confederate scrip. Big Tyne, the huge, handsome black man Kiernan had brought home with her from Harpers Ferry, was with her, but his cottage was down by the stables.
She was alone in the house she had been born in.
She suddenly wondered if she was destined to grow old and die here.
She’d be Aunt Christa—a maiden relative. Living on the fringes. She could almost hear the children at some later time, telling a visitor about her. “Ah, yes, that’s our aunt, poor dear! She is wrinkled and withered now, but once upon a time, she was one of the greatest beauties in all of the South. Men flocked around her like daisies in the summer. Her fiancé was killed in the war, but she’s—well, she’s been with us always, keeping up with us as children, making delicious little things to eat, knitting, sewing …”
Hanging on. Hanging on to other people’s lives, Christa thought.
She should marry sometime.
There wasn’t anyone left to marry. Far more than the devastation of buildings and land had been the devastation of human life. So many men, in the flower of youth, cut down to bleed, like her beloved Liam, that blood feeding the land they had fought for, died for.
It wouldn’t matter if there had been a thousand men left to marry. Christa had been in love. She had buried her heart in that unknown mass grave along with the tattered remnants of her lover’s body.
What was left? Cameron Hall. It had kept her going through the war. She had clung to one of the tall proud pillars while her sisters-in-law had rushed to greet her brothers. And there were those long empty years ahead when her nieces and nephews would say, “Yes, that’s Aunt Christa, and there was a time when she was beautiful, when she was young.”
She bent down again, pressing the soft dirt around her tomato plant. A faint trembling in the earth caused her to look up quickly.
Just around the corner of the house she could see the long elegant drive that led up to it. She frowned, seeing that an unknown rider was coming along the drive at a hard lope. She squinted to see better. The heat of the sun shimmered above the drive and the rider and horse seemed to weave and wave even as they moved.
The man on the horse was wearing a Yankee uniform. Her heart beat fast for just a moment, and she wondered if it was Jesse returning for some reason without Kiernan. But within seconds she knew that it wasn’t her brother. There were no medical insignias on the uniform, nor was this man wearing a plumed hat the way that Jesse always wore his.
Nor did he ride anywhere nearly as well as either of her brothers, Christa decided matter-of-factly. This was a Yankee, and Yankees just didn’t ride as well as their southern brethren.
The war was over. She wasn’t going to be afraid of this Yankee. She dusted off the dirt from her fingers on the plain green apron she’d been wearing over the gingham skirts of her day dress and started to walk around the house to meet the man at the porch. A trickle of sweat ran down the back of her neck, then it seemed to turn cold, and a chill of unease swept along her spine. What did this man want?
He reined in, trotting up the drive. Christa began to hurry, catching up her skirts and running. As she neared the front porch, she could see that the Union soldier had dismounted. He had some kind of a flyer in his hand. He stared up at the house, then dug in his saddlebag and found a hammer and a nail, it seemed, shook his head, and started up the great sweeping steps to the porch. At the front door, he began to hammer in the notice he had carried.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Christa demanded breathlessly, having arrived at the foot of the stairs.
The Yank turned to her, arching a slow, curious brow. He was a big, furry fellow with broad shoulders and a paunchy gut, sideburns and a full beard and mustache. His curious brow began to wiggle licentiously as he looked her up and down, and somewhere, in the midst of all that fur on his face, he began to smile.
“Well, how-de-do, ma’am! I heard tell there was a Rebel lived out here, but they didn’t tell me it was a Rebel gal, pretty as a picture! It’s right nice to meet you, girly. Right nice. And we’re going to get along just fine!”
Christa ignored him. “What are you doing?”
“Uppity little miss, ain’tcha? Well, you’d better be nice to old Bobby-boy here. I’m slapping an eviction notice on this place.”
“An eviction notice!” Christa exclaimed. She felt her temper flaring. Damn, if it wasn’t one thing after another! She’d loved Jesse all through the war, even though he’d been a Yankee. He was her brother. She’d had to forgive him his confusion.
When the war had ended, she had tried to understand why it seemed to him that the sanctity of the Union had been so all-precious important. She hadn’t really minded digging in the garden, and she hadn’t even minded learning to fix the roof. But she did mind the scalawags, carpetbaggers, and downright trash that the Union had been sending down upon them now that the war was over!
“That’s right, little Miss Uppity. An eviction notice. For crimes against the United States of America by one Colonel Daniel Cameron.”
“Crimes!” Christa echoed incredulously. “He was a soldier, fighting in the war! You can’t evict him for that!”
The soldier walked toward her, peering intently down upon her. He looked toward the house, then back toward her. “You Cameron’s wife?”
“Who I am is none of your concern!”
“You a servant, then?”
“I’m Miss Cameron,” she informed him, exasperated.
“His sister,” old Bobby-boy said knowledgeably. “Well, where is he?”
“In Richmond—helping sick and injured people get back home where they belong! Rebs—and Yankees. The war is over, and you can’t evict people anymore, and I don’t think what you’re threatening is legal to begin with! The house isn’t really Daniel’s—it’s Jesse’s. Who is your authority?” she demanded.
Bobby-boy was grinning. “My, my. Ain’t you something. Whew! A wild one. I like that!” the soldier announced. He came down the steps toward her. Christa wasn’t a tiny woman. She was slim—the war seemed to have made almost everybody
more so, except for this furry soldier here—and nearly five feet six inches tall. Though this fellow was no giant, his girth was excessive, and despite the muscles she had acquired gardening, she suddenly felt another chill of unease sweep through her.
“I’ll take this up with someone who actually has authority,” she said. “For now, just state your business and get the hell off of my land!” she warned him, her hands on her hips as she took a single step back.
“Your land?”
“Yes!” she hissed. “It’s Cameron land, and I’m a Cameron!”
He grinned again. “Yep. Even all kind of starved-up looking, Miss Uppity, you are a right fine portrait of southern womanhood! I hear tell that demure southern ladies get real fired up underneath all that magnolia blossom innocence. You could be nice to me. Real nice. Then, if you were nice enough, I could probably make things better.”
He reached out and touched her, running his fingers over her cheek.
Christa didn’t even think. She recoiled, furious. She lashed out in a flash, striking him in a slap that turned his cheek crimson with the imprint of her fingers. She hit him with such strength that he staggered back, his hand flying to his face with surprise.
“Why, Miss-Uppity-Southern-Bitch!” he murmured in a long twang, staring at her with eyes like little twin points of fire in the midst of all the fur on his face. “You just made yourself a mistake. A real mistake.”
A mistake? Christa couldn’t begin to see it that way. She stared him down, her own eyes sizzling. “You get your fat Yankee carcass off my land right now or—”
“Or what?” the soldier demanded in a voice that had grown very ugly. He took a step toward her, then another. He was smiling again. “All alone, eh, Miss Uppity? You got this nice great big old house, and you think you come from some goddamned kind of southern royalty here, huh? Well, you and your kind have been beaten, lady. You ain’t no royalty no more and you’re putting your nose up real high for a gal dressed in clothes just as tattered as this here paint job.”