“Don’t I?” he asked in a loud whisper. “When we leave here, who are you more likely to stay with? Me or Armitage?”
“Quiet, or they’ll hear you. Mr. Grady doesn’t want anyone to know who he is.”
“You think Eli doesn’t know? He practically kisses the man’s ring.”
“Jamie doesn’t wear any rings.”
“What?” Alex growled, his eyebrows pulled together so they nearly touched in the center.
“Nothing. I was making a joke. I was trying to cheer you up. What has happened to make you suddenly get so angry? I thought you were enjoying yourself.” She put her hand on his chest and lowered her voice. “I’ve been enjoying myself a great deal.”
He took her hands in his and held them. “And when this is over, that’s all it will be.”
“What does that mean?”
“When we get back to a town you’ll reveal yourself to Grady, and what will you two do then? Confess that you’re in love with each other and post the banns for your marriage?”
Cay gave him a serious look. “Every night after you and I make love, as soon as you’re asleep, I sneak away and join Mr. Grady in his tent. We have wild sex all night long, and by the way, he’s a much better lover than you are.”
Alex drew in his breath so sharply that the canvas walls of the tent moved. “You . . . you . . . ,” he began, choking on the words.
“And Eli is the best of all,” she said without a hint of a smile. “Tim’s not any good, but I’ve been teaching him what I’ve learned from you three men. Mostly from Eli, though. Did I tell you that he—”
“Stop talking,” Alex said as he pulled her into his arms and kissed her.
It was later, as they were lying together, sweaty and sated, that she again told him that he shouldn’t be jealous of Mr. Grady. Cay entwined her fingers in Alex’s beard. “Although, he is much more handsome than you are. Even the Indian women said so. Did you get that nest of sandpipers out of this mess?”
He picked up her hand, kissed the palm, and held it on his chest. “It’s not looks that worry me. It’s that Grady is like a duke, and you’re a princess.”
Cay laughed, but Alex didn’t. “I haven’t had a bath in a week and I spend my days hauling big boxes around. I see nothing princesslike in my life.”
“I well know that even when you’re covered in mud, you act and talk and move like a princess. Even when we share a spoon and a bowl of stew, you’re a lady.”
Cay knew she should be flattered by his words, but they made her frown. Something big was bothering him, but she couldn’t get him to tell her what it was. The only way she could get to sleep was to tell herself that of course he was upset. He’d been unjustly accused of murder and they had no idea what was awaiting him when they left the secrecy of the uncharted territory of Florida. She finally did sleep, but she was restless, and so was Alex.
Twenty
Alex shaved.
The next morning Cay needed the only washbasin they had, and when she saw that Alex was using it, she was too impatient to register what he’d done. “I need that,” she said. The flatboat was loaded and she hadn’t even washed her face and hands. As always, Eli had saved her some hot water, but she hadn’t had time to use it because Tim had played one of his tricks on her that morning, this time involving porcupine quills from the little creature Alex had brought to her the day before. It was only from a month of wariness that Cay managed to escape being impaled on the sharp spikes. Tim had been smirking all morning as Cay pulled quills out of her clothing.
So now, Alex was further agitating her by hogging the washbasin. “Since when do you wash?” she snapped at him.
“Go ahead and take it,” he said, but she could barely hear him as he had a towel over the lower half of his face. When she picked up the basin, she saw the soapy water and the whiskers in it, but even then she didn’t register what Alex had done. Eli and Mr. Grady shaved every morning, so she was used to whiskery water.
With the basin in her hands, she turned away, but after two steps, she halted, and turned back to look at him.
Alex still had the towel over his face, and he was looking at her shyly, as though he was almost afraid to let her see that part of him naked. If they hadn’t been surrounded by other people, she would have made jokes about what parts of him she had seen unclothed. “Let’s see what you look like.”
He didn’t move, just kept looking at her, the towel held closely about his face.
Cay smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, I won’t be shocked.” Her voice softened, and she stepped closer to him. “Even if you have scars under there, I won’t mind.” She’d meant her words to make him laugh, but she stopped smiling when she remembered that he’d been in prison. She hadn’t thought about what they may have done to him while he was there, but she did now. Tortures that she’d read about in her history studies—all of which Tally had gleefully read aloud to her—ran through her mind. She held on to the rim of the basin until her knuckles were white. “Please take the towel down,” she said softly as she prepared herself for what she’d see.
Slowly and with reluctance, Alex removed the towel from his face and looked at her.
Nothing could have prepared Cay for what she saw when Alex’s face was exposed. He was beautiful. Not just handsome, but as lovely, as perfect, as an angel. His blue eyes, so familiar to her, were set above a nose that was perfectly formed. His lips, which she’d kissed so many times but had never really seen, were full and shaped like those in classical paintings. What was more was that Alex was young, less than thirty was her guess, and there wasn’t a line or a flaw on his face. Compared to Alex, Mr. Grady was a plain-faced old man.
She stared at him in silence for a moment, unable to speak for her astonishment, then all the times she’d called him an old man, and all the things she’d said about the handsomeness of other men, came back to her—and anger began to run through her. He had lied to her by omission. She remembered how he’d laughed at her so many times, about so many things, but it looked as if that hadn’t been enough for him. Since the day they’d met, he’d given himself the pleasure of knowing he was making a fool of her. How he must have enjoyed the thought of her humiliation when she found out the truth about him! And the worst was that even when they’d been making love, he was laughing at her.
Without a thought of what she was doing, Cay threw the dirty shaving water into his face, dropped the basin to the ground, and marched off. She didn’t know where she was going, but she never wanted to see Alexander McDowell ever again.
He caught her by the time she reached the river and put his hand on her arm.
She jerked away, refusing to look at him. Cay stood there with her arms folded over her flattened chest and stared straight ahead at the water.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“You know very well what’s wrong.” Her jaw was clenched so tightly she could hardly speak.
“Am I too ugly for you to look at?” He put his hand out to touch her shoulder, but she moved away.
She tightened her arms and her lips, but she still wouldn’t look at him. “You are beautiful!” she said in a way that made the word sound like an accusation.
For a moment he was silent, then he said, “Am I better than Adam?”
That he was again—still—laughing at her, ridiculing her even now, made her want to hit him, to at least shout at him, but she wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. If he could make jokes, so could she. “Of course not. And you’re not better-looking than my father, either.”
“How about Ethan?”
“Not even close.”
“Nate?”
“Yes.”
“I’m better-looking than Nate?”
“Yes.” Her jaw was still clenched, and she hated that he was enjoying himself so very much.
“What about Tally?”
“Tally has horns and a forked tail.”
“I’d better look.”
“Look at what?” s
he snapped, and made the mistake of glancing at him. He was better-looking than her first sight told her he was. She turned back to the river. “No! Don’t tell me. You mean to look to see if you have a tail. For your information, I’ve seen your bare behind, and it’s completely ordinary.”
“Is it?” There was laughter just under his voice.
“Stop laughing at me!”
“Sorry, lass, but this is the best conversation I’ve ever had in my life. When I was nine and a boy told me how babies were made, I liked that conversation, but this time is better.”
“Well, I don’t like it! I feel like . . . like Eve in the Garden of Eden.”
“You mean you feel naked?”
“No! I mean that I can now see the truth. I thought you were older. I thought maybe you were Uncle T.C.’s age.”
“I’m the son of his friend.”
“I can see that now, but forgive me if I got a little mixed up. What with people shooting at me when I met you, and being near a murderer, my thoughts were a tad bit confused.”
The laughter left Alex’s voice and he moved closer to her, but he didn’t touch her. “Lass, you must have known that I wasn’t old. An old man can’t . . .”
“Can’t what?” She spun around to glare at him and blinked at the sight of his beautiful face. “Forgive me for not having your experience in seeing the naked bodies of so many men that I can compare them. Or your experience with the abilities of old men versus young men as lovers. I—”
“What about Eli?” he asked, his face solemn.
Cay didn’t smile. “I hate you.” She turned away from him, her body still held rigidly.
“Do you?”
“Yes! And stop looking at me like that.”
“Since you won’t look at me, how can you know how I’m looking at you?”
“I can feel it. You’re looking at me in the same way that Ethan looks at girls.”
“I am honored by the comparison.”
“My brother is a good person. You, Alexander Lachlan McDowell, are not.” Without another glance at him, she went back to the campsite.
Twenty-one
When Alex was fourteen, he had lusted after a girl who lived a few miles from them, but she wouldn’t so much as look at him. One day he’d hidden in the bushes and jumped out at her. When she still would have nothing to do with him, he’d asked her why not. She told him that he was too pretty, that he’d never be faithful to a woman, so she wanted nothing to do with him. Despondent and angry at the unfairness of her accusation, Alex had gone home to his father and told him everything. Mac listened in sympathy, then said that women had ways of hurting a man that were worse than anything a sword or a pistol could do. At the time, Alex had thought that was absurd, but in the last three days with Cay, he’d found out what his father had been talking about.
For days now, Cay hadn’t spoken to Alex or touched him. The day that he’d shaved, Alex had been sent away to hunt, so he hadn’t seen Cay until that evening. While he’d been following deer trail through the thick vegetation on the shore, half running the whole way so he’d get to where the boat docked as early as possible, he’d planned what he’d say to her. He imagined conversations, all of them ending with Cay’s falling into his arms and “forgiving” him for being handsome. The thought of what their argument was about always made him smile.
Sometimes his imagined conversations were angry. He thought of telling her how unfair and unjust what she’d said to him was. She would then agree with him and run to him.
Other times he thought of apologizing to her, saying he was sorry for not having revealed to her . . . And that’s where he got stumped. What was he sorry about? When they were in old man Yates’s barn, should he have told her that, by the way, under his mess of itchy hair he wasn’t ugly? Or should he have told her when they were dancing in the store they’d broken into? Or on the night they first made love?
The truth—and Alex knew it well—was that he had purposefully let her think he was ugly and old. In fact, there had been more than once when he’d said something like, “Your young eyes can see better than mine.” Or “You’re younger, you do it.”
And then there was Grady. If Alex were honest with himself, he’d been jealous of all the things Cay had said about Grady being so very good to look at. According to her, angels were jealous of Grady’s looks. Or, in her words, “Jamie’s beauty.” It had been all Alex could do to keep his mouth shut when she said those things. Five minutes after they met Grady, Alex had wanted to shave. He knew he was better-looking and younger than Grady, and his impulse was to show her that, but something had held him back.
He knew what it was. He wanted to be sure that she liked him even though she thought the worst of him. Since Alex was a baby he’d had people speak of his looks. Women said what a pretty child he was, and men said to his father, “Handsome lad you have there.” When Alex was older, his looks had caused problems with females. They seemed to either throw themselves at him or, as the girl he liked did, want nothing to do with him.
It was in the new country of America that his looks had brought him luck. He’d always believed that it was his good looks, combined with his skill with horses, that had let him into the rich society of the upper class of Charleston. And it was because he was there that he’d met Lilith. He knew that she would never have looked at him if he’d been ugly. That a woman of her extreme beauty was attracted to someone like him had always shocked him. Later, when they were in love and had been able to spend time alone together, she’d confided in him that she was poor, and little more than a servant to a rich old woman. She’d also explained that she couldn’t accept one of the proposals from a plantation boy, because his family would expect her to have a fortune, but she had none. And she’d even admitted that, yes, Alex’s good looks had been what first attracted her to him.
Alex had been so in love with her, so dazzled by her beauty, that he said he understood. At the time, he felt that he did. It was only after he met Cay and realized that she saw him as old and ugly, and as a possible murderer, that he grew to like the idea of staying that way to her. Whether she did or did not like him was based solely on him, on Alex, not on what she assumed about him based on how he looked. That she’d come to . . . like, if not love, him without ever seeing his face, had been wonderful.
Yes, great for him, but the problem was that it didn’t seem to have been so good for her. So maybe it was true that he’d smiled a bit when she’d mentioned his age. And maybe he’d even laughed—inside, certainly not where she could see him—when she talked endlessly about how handsome Grady was.
And, true, maybe Alex had been so interested in his own side of it all, that he hadn’t given a real thought to how Cay was going to react when she found out that he hadn’t, well, been honest with her. The question now was how to lie his way out of it all.
All day long he thought of everything he could imagine to get back into her good graces. There were even a few minutes when he considered telling her the truth, that he’d made a big mistake and would she please forgive him. But he soon put that idea out of his head. Women liked men to be strong, and groveling and begging for forgiveness would never work. Although . . . he remembered that he’d apologized to her before and it had worked. But this was more serious than that time—and back then he’d not had the ultimate solution: kisses.
At the end of the day, when he saw the camp, he breathed a sigh of relief. Soon he’d be in the tent with her, and he’d pull her into his arms and make such sweet love to her that he’d never have to say a word. He’d show her he was sorry for anything he’d done to her, and that would solve everything. He’d make love to her with such tenderness that she’d forget all about what had happened between them. There would be no need for words, and certainly not for apologies.
By the time he got to the camp and had tied the deer carcass into a tree, he was smiling. No doubt Cay would be just as glad to make up the argument as he was. In fact, he’d learned a long time ago
that he could use his looks to get ’round women. All he had to do was kiss the back of a woman’s hand while looking up at her with half-closed eyes, and she’d forgive him anything. If he left her waiting for two hours while he ran a race, what did it matter? She’d forgive him. If he didn’t show up for dinner with her family because he was arranging the next day’s races, she forgave him. The most he’d had to do was kiss a woman’s neck a few times. Neck kisses always made a woman forgive him for anything.
Except Lilith, he thought as he tied the rope holding the carcass up. Lilith didn’t put up with anything from Alex. He’d stood her up only once, and the next day he saw her on the arm of another man, laughing at whatever he said, and she smiled happily at Alex when she saw him. That she hadn’t been upset, hadn’t even seemed to care that he’d missed their date, had made him never be late again.
So now he knew that Cay would be angry. He knew her temper, so he expected some unpleasantness, but he’d kiss her back into a good mood.
Feeling confident in his thoughts, he removed his sweaty shirt and crawled into the tent. He could see Cay’s form asleep on the far side. She’d put a roll of canvas between the two blanket beds, and even a small crate, but Alex silently moved them away, and snuggled down beside her. He reached his hand out, lightly touched her shoulder, and put his face to her neck to start kissing.
Everything happened at once! Alex realized that the hairy neck he put his lips to was not Cay’s, and the recipient awakened with a scream of horror. It was Tim who was in the tent with Alex, not Cay.
The boy yelled, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” and nearly knocked the tent down as he fought his way out.
The others were awakened by the noise and came out of their tents. Grady had a loaded pistol in his hand, and Eli had a big butcher knife. When Cay came out of Eli’s tent, she looked at Alex with an expression of amusement.