She glanced back over her shoulder. “I sure hope Papa doesn’t forget to watch Lycodomes. If that silly dog tries to come down this hill, he’ll slip and hurt his splinted leg, for sure.”
“Papa won’t forget to watch him,” Ambrose assured her. Then he said, “Cassie, are you feeling embarrassed?”
“About what?”
“About me knowing you’ve got a bun in your oven.”
She’d never heard pregnancy referred to in quite that way. “A bun in my oven? Ambrose, don’t be crude. And, yes, I feel sort of embarrassed.”
He gave her a heavy-lidded glance. “I suppose you thought I never noticed you were female from the neck down…and a mighty pretty female, at that. Sex and babies are natural things. Your being pregnant isn’t any big thing that we’ve got to be secretive about.”
Cassandra slanted him a look of sisterly teasing. “I can’t believe you just said the word sex to me.”
He chuckled and rested a hand over hers where she clutched his jacket sleeve. “I’m sorry. I guess I should’ve said fiddlin’ and diddlin’.”
She swung her free hand around to sock him on the shoulder. The sudden movement caused her to lose her footing, and she nearly upended herself. Laughing, Ambrose kept her from falling. “You need your mouth washed with lye soap!” she cried, clutching the front of his rough wool coat to keep her balance.
“And you’d better stop acting like a two-year-old,” he said, grappling to keep her standing on the slick-soled hand-me-down shoes that kept skating out from under her. “If you fall, Papa will have my head. Thunderation! That’s why I’m escorting you down the mountain, to make sure you reach Luke’s house in one piece. You’re pregnant, for cripe’s sake!” His words cracked like a whip in the brittle air.
“Just yell it out, why don’t you, for God and everyone else to hear!” she whispered.
“I think God already knows. And when you start to look like you swallowed a pumpkin, everyone else will, too. You’re a married woman, Stump. It’s not an awful thing to be with child. It’s what married folks do, you know. Fiddle and diddle and make babies.”
“Don’t call me ‘Stump’!”
He slipped a brawny arm around her waist to ensure she stayed upright. “Why not? In a few months, you’ll look like one that has a very large and round pitch bole poking out its front.” He chuckled when she elbowed him in the ribs. “Just between you and me, you’re the cutest little stump I’ve ever seen.”
Cassandra flashed him a smile, but her heart wasn’t in it. They had nearly reached the bottom of the mountain, and every step they took led them closer to Luke’s house.
At the corner of his street, she tugged Ambrose to a halt and drew in a breath of frigid air. “I can go the rest of the way alone.”
“But you won’t.”
“Ambrose—”
“It’s too slick, Cassie.” His expression was suddenly somber. “That’s my niece or nephew you’re workin’ on, you know.”
Taking a tighter grip on her arm, Ambrose escorted her clear to the Taggart front gate before he finally released his hold on her. Cassandra gazed nervously at the house. Golden light illuminated some of the windows, casting an amber glow over the blanket of snow that covered the shrubs around the foundation.
“Scared?” Ambrose asked, all note of teasing gone from his voice.
Cassandra nibbled her bottom lip. “If I denied it, I’d be lying.”
Ambrose regarded the house for a moment. “Nobody’s perfect, Cassie, Luke least of all. And we all make mistakes. The way he went about getting you was wrong, very wrong. But I truly do believe he loves you.”
She glanced up at him, astonished. “You what?”
Her brother, who so seldom treated her with anything more than teasing disregard, suddenly bent forward to kiss her forehead. “I’ve been working beside the man for almost two weeks. He’s been sweating blood down there in that tunnel. Not for me. Not for Papa. But for you.”
“That’s not what you said that first day when he showed up with his pick.”
“I was wrong.” He gave her a rueful look. “Funny, isn’t it? The person he’s done it all for has refused to notice, and it’s Papa and me he’s managed to impress, the ones who started all the trouble between you in the first place.”
She shook her head. “No, Ambrose. Luke started it all with his lies. You and Papa just finished it.”
“Papa says that loving a woman can change a man.” He turned his gaze toward the house. “I think it’s changed Luke Taggart. For the better. Much, much better.” He flashed her a slow smile, his eyes soft with understanding. “Gather up your courage, little sister, and go in there. See if I’m not right. I’ll wait for you down at the corner.”
TWENTY-NINE
After an amazingly informal greeting from Pipps, who grabbed her up and gave her a fierce hug the instant she stepped into the foyer, Cassandra asked if she could see Luke.
Pipps eyes lighted. “Of course, my dear. Let me announce you.”
Feeling a sudden flare of panic, she forestalled him with a hand on his arm. “No, but thank you, Mr. Pipps. If you’d just tell me where he is.”
Pipps’s sigh was heavy. “In the study. Where he always goes when he comes home.”
Cassandra repeated her thanks and moved along the hall. At the study door, she paused, heart thudding, to wet her lips and straighten her spine before she entered. For good measure, she pressed gentle fingers to her tummy before slowly turning the knob.
The door opened soundlessly on well-oiled hinges. Frozen on the threshold, she stood staring at the man seated in a circle of light from the lamp flickering on the desktop.
Luke sat leaning back in his chair, his muddy boots propped on his desk. Still garbed in work clothes, his tawny hair lying in untidy waves over his forehead, he looked exhausted, dirty, and very out of place in the elegantly appointed room.
Having entered unannounced, Cassandra shut the door quietly and simply stood there gazing at him. The oddest thought came to her as she studied him, that this was the real Luke Taggart, a man of sweat and steel, who’d survived poverty and God knew what else, only because he’d had a will of iron.
Memories. They came over her like tumbling debris carried forth on a gigantic wave. I’m a toad pretending to be a prince. That had been true, she realized now; the wealthy, polished man she’d believed him to be had been an imposter, a very clever, manipulative fraud who’d broken her heart into a million pieces.
Only now, with the advantage of hindsight, was she beginning to realize that maybe she’d hurt Luke as well—not deliberately, but by failing to see him for what he really was. Not a prince, and not a toad, but a man made up of both good and bad.
She’d looked at him through a shimmering layer of unreality, wanting to believe he was almost perfect. That was an impossible order for anyone to fill. Yet, in his way, Luke had taken a stab at it, desperately trying to be someone he wasn’t. Then when he finally fell from the pedestal she’d placed him on, she’d turned her back on him.
Don’t leave me, Cassie. Swear you’ll never leave me. And she’d promised she never would.
Maybe, if she’d been more mature, she wouldn’t have broken that promise. But deep in her heart of hearts, she doubted it. If she lived to be a hundred and became as wise as Solomon, she would still want the one thing from Luke that he seemed unable to give, his love. To her, a good marriage couldn’t exist without that, and she refused to settle for less.
Cassandra looked desperately around the room for something that might insulate her from the pain. Her gaze landed on the whiskey bottle at center stage on his desk. He had been drinking, she decided, evidently straight from the jug, for there was no fancy crystal brandy snifter in sight. Some “big change” his feelings for her had wrought in him, she thought with disdain. He obviously still liked to guzzle his whiskey, and if he hadn’t foregone that particular habit, how could she be sure he didn’t still indulge in others, falsehoods be
ing at the top of the list? For all she knew, he might have stopped by the Golden Slipper on his way home for a casual romp with one of his shabby women.
His pale blue work shirt, unfastened halfway down the front, lay open to reveal the bronze chest and midriff she remembered so well, only now the mounds of muscle and corrugated tendon had been honed to steel by swinging a pick these last two weeks. Folded back to reveal thick, darkly burnished forearms lightly dusted with golden hair, his shirtsleeves stretched tautly over the powerful contours of his upper arms.
Doing something with his hands, which she couldn’t see because they lay in his lap behind the desk, he had his head slightly bent, a preoccupied frown pleating his high forehead. He seemed completely unaware of her presence, his expression so bleak that he once again put her in mind of Khristos when he’d awakened from a bad dream, lost and in need of a hug.
Growing impatient with herself and her silly, gullible heart, Cassandra took her tangled emotions firmly in hand. She’d walked this path before, and the heartbreak at the end of it had nearly killed her. Luke wasn’t a little boy; he was very much a man, and completely in control of his world. Completely in control of her as well. She’d be wise to remember that.
“Luke?” she said softly.
At the sound of her voice, he shot up from the chair as if someone had jabbed him with a red-hot poker. A green tin of salve fell from his lap and bounced across the floor; the clanking sound nearly made her leap. Now that he was standing, she saw that he’d removed the bandages from his hands. Apparently, he’d been applying salve to the raw and bleeding patches where the blisters had burst and festered.
Hesitant, her heart slamming, she avoided his gaze as she took a step farther into the room, the lies and the hurt forming a chasm between them that could never be bridged.
Her attention fell to his hands again. The flesh of his palms resembled the meat she’d run through a grinder for Khristos when he was a baby. For the life of her, she couldn’t imagine how Luke could stand to flex his fingers, let alone swing a pick, hour after endless hour. Her stomach knotted, and she glanced quickly away, searching for something, anything, to focus her gaze on besides his poor, injured hands.
“Cassandra…” He said her name so softly, so…reverently, that her gaze jerked up as if drawn to him by a magnetic force. Was it hope that she saw in his eyes? An almost desperate hope? After searching her face for a long moment, he asked, “What brings you here this time of night?”
“I, um…I need to talk to you about…something.”
The tendons along his throat worked as he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He gestured toward the chair at the opposite side of his desk. “Do you have time to sit down?”
She approached warily. As she perched on the leather cushion, an awful smell assailed her nostrils. Wrinkling her nose, she blurted, “What on earth is that?”
One corner of his mouth twitched as he sat back down. Inclining his head toward the whiskey bottle, he said, “A special remedy of Cook’s for blistered hands. Cider vinegar, brine, tincture of iodine, and whatever else it struck her to pour in, I think. Burns like a son of gun, but it seems to be toughening my hands up. Sorry it smells so bad.”
“I thought it was whiskey.”
He leaned back in his chair to regard her with eyes that seemed to miss nothing and twinkled faintly with amusement. “I’ve backed off quite a bit on my drinking.”
“Why?” she couldn’t resist asking.
“I was told by someone I greatly admire that I wasn’t going to find any answers to my troubles at the bottom of a jug. Since he was right, and all I found down there was a headache, I decided to drink a little less and think a whole lot more.”
“And?”
His gaze dropped to where her hands lay in her lap, the knuckles white with tension. “I think you’re very nervous.” That bleak, lost look came back into his whiskey-and-smoke eyes. “I know I’ve done some unforgivable things, sweetheart, but surely nothing to make you afraid of me.”
“There are all different kinds of fear, Luke, and so many different ways to inflict hurt. You never hit me or treated me mean, I’ll give you that. But didn’t it ever occur to you that perhaps you drew blood in places you couldn’t see?”
He sat there, gazing at her, his face stony and expressionless.
She disentangled her fingers and made fists on her skirt. “Luke…I didn’t come here to quarrel with you, or to dwell on what’s already done.”
“Then why have you come?”
“I, um…want to ask a favor.”
“What is that?”
She forced herself to meet his gaze. “You remember the contract you had me sign?”
His mouth tipped up at one corner in a rueful grin. “If you’re talking about the contract—every confounded word of which is emblazoned on my brain—yes, I remember it.”
She dragged in a bracing breath. “There’s one clause in there—the one about my relinquishing all right to any issue that arose from our relationship—that I was, um…wondering if you’d consider waiving.”
His whiskey-colored eyes darkened to misty gray around the irises, and a muscle along his jaw began to twitch. “You’re having my child,” he whispered.
It wasn’t a question. Cassandra sat there, her gaze held relentlessly by his. The tension that crackled in the air between them was almost electrical. Finally, she said, “I’ll die if you take my baby away from me, Luke. Please, say that you won’t.”
He said nothing. The silence pounded against her eardrums, the rhythm slow and ponderous at first, then escalating to a rapid and deafening thrum.
“I-I’m willing to strike a bargain with you, if I must,” she finally said in a shrill, shaky voice that sounded nothing like her own.
“What kind of bargain?” he asked in a dangerously silken voice.
“Wh-whatever you ask, in return for custody of my baby.” She leaned slightly forward, entreating him with her eyes. “Please, Luke? I’m even willing to be your paid companion again for a specified period of time if, at the end of it, you’ll let me take my baby and leave.” She waved a hand toward the window. “You’ve seen the snow. The mountain passes will be knee-deep.” She gnawed her lip for a moment. “I’ll be honest. I made Papa promise he’d take me away from here so you’d never know. But with this turn of the weather, that’ll be impossible. I’m left with no choice but to try and reach an understanding with you.”
Power. Gazing across his desk at her, Luke realized that he once again had it within his grasp, the proverbial high trump card. His paid companion for a specified period of time. Having her here with him again, in his home and in his bed. It would give him a chance to make her fall back in love with him.
He was about to take her up on her offer. Hell, scotch that. He was about to leap at the chance. But then he looked into those big, blue eyes. Innocence and complete trust had once shone in those cobalt depths. Now all he saw was crawling fear and a desperate urgency. His gullible little angel had become a cynical, distrustful, frightened young woman. And why the hell not? She’d been tutored in the realities of life by an expert. He had taught her every lesson, brutally and without compassion, so self-centered that his only thought had been for his own self-gratification. He’d pursued pleasures of the flesh relentlessly, and in the chase he’d captured a blue-eyed seraph who’d stolen his heart.
Now her shimmering halo and spiritual wings had been stripped away. No more glow in her eyes. No more uplifting dreams to buoy her. He’d single-handedly destroyed everything about her that he’d adored and taught her to watch her back, lest the people she trusted most come at her with a knife. Lies and deceptions and treacherous plots. Oh, yes, he’d drawn blood in places he couldn’t see, inflicted wounds that might never heal. And as his punishment, he might lose her. But better that than to hold her here against her will, snuffing out what little light still burned within her.
As Luke pushed to his feet, he felt old beyond his years. He
walked slowly toward his wall safe, knowing with every step that it was a desperate gamble he was about to take. But while teaching Cassandra so many brutal lessons, he’d learned a few himself—namely that love couldn’t be grabbed or stolen or bought. If she stayed with him, he wanted her there of her own free will, not because he held their child over her head as leverage.
As Luke worked the combination lock to his safe, he silently started to pray. It wasn’t the first time, for over the course of these last few weeks, he’d implored God for His intervention more than once. But this was the most heartfelt prayer he’d ever said, eloquent in its simplicity. Please, God, don’t let her leave me. Please, God, don’t let me lose her.
This was, without question, the biggest risk Luke had ever taken. He could only hope she realized how dearly this gesture was costing him, and that she’d decide to stay with him, after all.
After drawing both his and her copy of the contract from the safe, Luke stood there, holding them in his hands and staring down at them. Power. Sucking in a hard breath, he grasped the documents more firmly in his hands and, as he turned back toward his desk, began ripping them to shreds. There was another copy in his attorney’s possession, of course, but Luke promised himself he’d destroy it as well.
Cassandra’s eyes went wide and bewildered as she watched him tear the contracts to pieces. Once back at the desk, Luke let the bits of paper drift from his fingers to rain on his blotter. Blood from his hands now spotted the thick vellum, and he hoped with every fiber of his being that she’d notice it and that it would remind her of the punishment he’d inflicted on himself.
Cassandra sat stiff and motionless on the edge of her chair as he resumed his seat. He opened a drawer to locate paper and then reached for his fountain pen. His sore, raw hand screamed with pain as he crimped his unwilling fingers around the writing tool.