Jeremy hadn’t just paid for the damage to her crops. He managed to pay her a small fortune for a broach she had. He was going home, and he had needed a gift for Callie.
Callie would take good care of the gift. And with his Yankee dollars, the widowed Mrs. Jenny Morgan—whose husband had been killed at Shiloh—would be able to buy food and clothing for her growing young brood.
Christmas had come and gone.
Jeremy had come back to Mississippi. He’d remained on her land while Grant determined to dig in until Vicksburg fell, no matter what the cost. Grant was the one damned smart general the Union had. He
didn’t retreat every time a southern force came near him. He knew that he had more of one important thing than any southern general out there—manpower. The Rebs couldn’t afford to keep dying. The Union could keep replenishing her fallen forces.
But the war hadn’t really mattered between them. They had never been at war with one another.
He didn’t know when he had fallen in love with her. Maybe it had been one of those nights when he had stared at her windows so long he hadn’t been able to take it anymore. He had mounted up and ridden over, and he had discovered that Jenny Morgan waited up nights for him. The hours of darkness became magic.
Jenny didn’t have much interest in politics. But she had been born a Mississippian and she cared deeply about what was happening to the people around her. Jeremy never knew that she intended to go into Vicksburg along with her children
despite
his words of warning while the Union continued its siege of the city. She could help with the soldiers in the hospital.
Jeremy explained the futility of her wishes, and she listened to him. While war pounded on around them, they formed a curious domesticity. The children loved him, and loved to pick his pockets when he came. Jeremy and she were on different sides of the upheaval, but Jenny, though she wouldn’t say the words, didn’t believe that the Confederacy could win the war.
Jeremy was ordered to take his company on a reconnaissance ride around the perimeters of Vicksburg. As it happened, the maneuver took them days. When he returned, Jenny was gone, leaving behind a note that she loved him and that she’d marry him as soon as the siege at Vicksburg was over. She was expecting their child in autumn.
When she was gone, he realized just how much he loved her. He tried to get word into the city to make sure she was all right. There were Union spies moving
in and out, so it wasn’t very difficult to discover her whereabouts. She was with many other citizens of the city, living in caves below the hills because so many of the houses had been hit with cannon and shell fire. The caves were the only place to avoid fire.
It was a terrible ordeal for the citizens of Vicksburg. The Union spies who returned shook their heads wearily at his questions. There was no food to be had in the city. Those who remained were cooking the rats that scurried among the refuse.
His heart sickened and he wrote her a long letter, begging her to come out. Yes, he wanted her. Yes, he loved her. He wanted their child, and he wanted to be a father to her other children. He didn’t want her in Vicksburg. She needed to take the children, marry him, and find somewhere to live safely.
Somewhere where neither army came.
Days passed. A spy brought a letter back to him. He was grateful. He knew the man had put his life at risk. The letter was filled with Jenny’s words, with her enthusiasm and empathy for all men, with all the beautiful things that had made him fall so completely in love with her.
She was unique. He hadn’t lived so very long—he’d just turned twenty-four at the start of the war—but he’d put some mileage into those years. He came from a family of hardworking farmers. They were not rich but his father had earned a wealth of friendship and respect in his dealings, and he’d seen to it that all his sons had gone to West Point.
Once he’d graduated, he’d served some time in the West, riding hard on the Santa Fe Trail. He’d seen some action, enough to test his mettle under fire. He’d been initiated into battle fighting Indians, and he’d come to know a fair amount about a number of the tribes, from the civilized and fascinatingly cultured to the very savage and warlike.
He’d seen some other action in the West with the camp ladies who managed to trail behind any army. He’d even been growing serious about the daughter of an army major, but something had been lacking and so he’d backed away.
Once he realized just how deeply he cared for Jenny, he learned what had been missing. Love. She was, indeed, unique. Sweet and dignified. And strong, too, he realized. She pretended to bow to him in all things, then she went her own way.
She would not come out of Vicksburg. She had learned how to meet one of the blockade runners on the river, and she was determined to be of help to the citizens in the city. She could bring in food and morphine for the children.
She had been dead a long time now.
He had come in the very day the city had fallen. He had watched the women weeping in the streets as the blue-clad forces had marched through. He had felt the southerners’ hatred.
He had ignored them all, demanding directions to the caves.
He had found her. She had been struck by a stray bullet just two nights before the surrender of the city.
She had died within twenty-four hours.
No one in the cave had said anything about his blue uniform. Maybe his grief had been that naked. Jenny’s beautiful blond children had offered him more comfort than he had offered them. He had taken her into his arms, held her dead body. He had laid his palm over her belly, where their child had died with her. He had not wanted to give her up.
A woman like Jenny had stood in the entry to the makeshift home in the cliffs. He had looked up, his eyes glittering with his pain. “I can take the children. I’ll adopt them if they’ll have me, I’ll find some place—”
“Sir, Vicksburg will be safe enough now,” the woman said. “We’ve surrendered. The children will be safe with me. I’m Jenny’s sister, and I’ve lost my husband and my only boy.”
He could remember nodding. He could remember stumbling to his feet, still holding Jenny’s body.
“She did love you,” the woman told him. “And she knew that you loved her. She was happy about the new one, and it didn’t give her any mind whatsoever that it was a Yank fathered her babe, she loved you that much. You put her down now. We’ve got to bury her.”
Jenny was buried; Vicksburg was secured. Jeremy was transferred back to the East, whether he wanted to fight there or not. Grant was determined to trap the wily Lee, and it didn’t matter what it took. He would lose battles, and he would lose men. He’d fight again, and he’d draft more men.
There was one benefit to being assigned back to the East. He’d have a chance to see Callie. He had been so angry with Callie when he’d first discovered she was about to have a Reb’s child, and she was not married to that Reb. He might well have fathered a southern child himself. It opened a wealth of understanding. He had been so anxious to see her.
But he discovered that Callie had been spirited down south by that Reb and so he had come to Cameron Hall for the first time. He had come to know Daniel and Christa. The beautiful blue-eyed witch upstairs. The one who had married him, condemning him, hating him.
“To you, Christa!” he murmured, swallowing down another two-finger swig of brandy. He was certain she had sat at this very desk often enough, sipping brandy—or swigging it down—just as he was now. It was a fine old office with the massive desk and rows of books. The ledgers and all the books were kept here. And once, Jeremy was certain, gentlemen would have retired
here in the midst of a party for brandy or whiskey and cigars and talk. Politics. Animal husbandry. Things in which the women wouldn’t be interested.
Until the war had taken away the men and left the women.
For a moment, a heartbeat of pity slipped its way into his heart. She had managed well enough. She had a right to love the place. Working like a field hand, she had kept it standing. And she had fought for it. When Eric Dabney’s Yankee raiders—out to bring Daniel in dead or alive—had come sneaking around the place, Christa had been armed and ready. She had shot a man in defense of herself and Kiernan and Callie. She hadn’t killed him, but she hadn’t hesitated to pull the trigger when she had been threatened. She was a fighter.
Pity. Because she was going to lose the place. The house belonged to Jesse.
He smiled suddenly. He
should
make her come west with him. She was a fighter; she had magnificent courage.
And she was beautiful. And desirable.
He set his glass down, sobering. The western plains were really no place for a woman, any woman. Some of the men did bring their wives, but those wives loved their husbands.
The West was wild, primitive, dangerous, savage. Then again, Christa was all those things too! Heaven help the Indians she got her hands on.
Somewhere in the house, a clock struck. He counted the chimes. Midnight.
It was his wedding night. He had imagined it so differently. He’d imagined laughter and caring, and making love deep into the night. He’d imagined sleeping with golden blond streams of hair tangled all over his naked flesh. He’d imagined her smile and her welcome, touching her stomach to feel their child grow.
“Anything! Anything but sitting alone in the Camerons’ plantation office, sipping brandy.”
It probably wasn’t what Christa had imagined either, he reminded himself. Maybe it was worse for her. She’d been engaged, she’d waited.
Callie had written Jeremy when they’d all heard the news that Liam McCloskey was dead. She had told him how they had all dyed their wedding finery black. Christa hadn’t mentioned her fiancé’s name today, not once.
He stood up suddenly.
She wasn’t going to sleep alone. One didn’t marry an ebony-haired enchantress and sleep in the guest room—even if she was a shrew!
He took one more swig of brandy. He sighed out loud, lifting his glass again to the air. “To all of us poor wretches!” he said. He smashed the glass against the fireplace, left the room behind him, and started up the stairs.
The damned Camerons looked at him again from the portrait gallery along the upper stairway. This time he paused and looked back.
“Not a damned word out of a one of you! She’s my wife.”
The word sounded so damned strange in connection with Christa.
He walked purposefully past the portraits and to her room. The door was closed. He entered the room and closed the door behind him.
Moonlight streamed in on the canopied bed. He walked to it and looked down at her.
She had fallen asleep. Another woman might have cried herself to sleep, but he doubted that Christa had done so. She lay on her stomach, and the covers were pulled just to the small of her back. The beautiful curve of it was plainly visible in the moon glow. Black hair spilled all around her, and her fingers were curled just
below her chin. Her lashes swept her cheeks. He reached out and touched her face, wondering if he didn’t feel just a bit of dampness there, just a hint of tears.
“But this is it!” he said to her softly in the moonlight. “This is what you wanted!”
He sat at the foot of the bed and pulled off his boots. She must have been really exhausted—she didn’t even stir. He watched her face all the while that he stripped off his uniform, folding it neatly, piece by piece, and setting it upon her dressing table. He crawled in beside her, not touching her. He stared up at the ceiling, then swore silently at himself once again.
He knew damned well he’d never intended to rape her in her sleep, so what the hell did he think he was accomplishing by being here? He was on fire again, from head to toe. He had tried to pull the covers over his body, and now the damned sheet was rising, just as if there were a ghost down in the center of the bed. It was impossible to lie beside her and not want her.
Remember Jenny! he told himself fiercely. Remember what it should have been. Remember Christa’s words. The way that she says “Yankee” as if it were the filthiest word in the English language.
It didn’t work. He was as hard as a poker, and with the sheet flying up he felt like a flagstaff.
Well, he wasn’t getting up. They were married, and whether there was anything between them or not, he was suddenly determined that they were going to sleep like a married couple tonight.
She was his enemy, as no man had ever been.
But she was also soft and supple. Her flesh was silk, and he could just feel the whisper of it against his own. He turned slightly and her hair teased his nose, smelling like roses, feeling like a swatch of velvet.
He turned his back on her, making sure that their
flesh didn’t touch. He slammed his fist against his pillow.
He started to count sheep.
It was damned funny.
No, it was torture.
But thank God for brandy, for long endless days, for total exhaustion. Toward morning, he slept at last.
He usually awoke easily, at the slightest sound. All those years of sleeping on the field in tents, alert to the slightest danger, had done something to his ability to sleep deeply.
But that night he slept as if he were dead.
And oddly enough, he had beautiful dreams. He was in some meadow, somewhere. Maryland, probably. He had always loved his home, where in the distance around him the land began to roll majestically and the mountains rose blue and green. The trees were rich and beautiful, draping over the trails in natural arbors. He was coming home. He was running because he could see her. Jenny. Delicate, feminine, her hair a cloud of sunshine around her, she ran down the trail toward him, her arms outstretched. He began to run. He could feel his heartbeat. He could feel the muscles constricting in his legs. The war was over. It was time to come home. She was reaching out to him.
Then the vision of her began to fade. In the dream he knew that she was dead.
Vaguely, from the deep, deep recesses of that dream, he began to hear a noise, and he realized that the noise was coming from the real world of consciousness.