The Scent of Jasmine (20 page)

“You did,” she said and braced herself for his anger, but it didn’t come.

“No, I didn’t. Lilith wasn’t rich like everyone thought she was.”

“Please tell me about it,” Cay said.

“Lilith was the paid companion of a hate-filled, rich, old woman named Annia Underwood. The old hag had run even the greediest of her relatives off, so she had no one. But she didn’t want all of Charleston to know that, so she hired Lilith to work for her, but she told the town that Lilith was her grand-niece.”

“Was she nice to your wife?”

“Not at all, but Lilith took it until she met me. I said a few things to the old woman that made her stand back a bit. She was angry that Lilith was going to leave her to live with me after the wedding, which, by the way,
I
paid for.”

“How angry? Enough to commit murder?”

“If she’d had anyone killed, it would have been me, not Lilith.”

Cay looked at him in the darkness, the roar of the alligators around them, and said, “I’m no lawyer, but if Lilith wasn’t wealthy as everyone thought she was, doesn’t that take away your motive for murder? If you’d told your attorney—”

“Do you think I didn’t?” he nearly shouted. “Do you think I didn’t tell my lawyer all of this? He went to old lady Underwood, and she kept to her lie. She said that Lilith had been her grand-niece and was her heir and that’s why I’d married her. She said I’d killed the poor girl to try to take away Lilith’s inheritance. She even said she’d warned Lilith against me—but at least that part was true.”

He took a breath and calmed himself. “The truth was that the old woman begrudged Lilith every crust of bread she gave her. The expensive clothes Lilith wore were to put on a show for the town, not because the woman was generous.”

Cay thought about what he’d told her. “So this is why when I mention the riches of Jamie Armitage you run off into the woods and won’t speak to anyone?”

It was dark, but she felt him relax. “Aye, lass, that’s what it is.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I speak so sweetly of Jamie because I
want
to make you jealous?”

He paused, a bird wing on the way to his mouth. “No, I canna say that that thought ever entered my mind.”

“Sometimes,” she said as she wiped her mouth, “a person should look at what—and who—is around him now instead of always dwelling on the past.” She looked at the plate full of bones. “I feel much better and I’m going to bed. When you come, would you bring the plates?”

She got only four steps away before he put his hand on her shoulder and pulled her around to face him.

“You always make me feel better,” he said as he buried his face in her neck. “You take the worst things in my life and make them something I can bear.”

“Alex,” she whispered. “Make love to me.”

“Lass, I canna do that.”

“Today I was a second away from being killed. When I met you, you were one day away from death. Your Lilith didn’t live to have her wedding night.”

He put his fingertips over her lips. “I’m not a whole man. What’s been done to me has taken away something inside of me. I can’t be the man you want.”

“And I’ll never be the woman you lost, so we’re even.” Pulling away from him, she took a step back toward the camp, but he caught her.

He took her in his arms, and she stood on tiptoe to kiss him. For a moment he looked into her eyes, searching them to see if she was sure of this. In the next second, his mouth came down on hers in a way that she’d never felt before. She’d had chaste kisses with each of her suitors, and she’d exchanged two kisses with Alex, but she’d never felt anything like what she did now.

His hands slid down her back, and went over her, touching her arms, the back of her neck, her hair. “Do you know how you’ve driven me crazy since the day I met you?” he murmured as he kissed her neck.

Cay put her head back and her chin up to give him better access. “You hated me.”

“You looked like an angel in that dress. I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t died and you were there to welcome me to Heaven.”

“Alex, that feels so good.”

He put little biting kisses along the sensitive cord of her neck, and when he felt her knees begin to give way, he bent and picked her up, his arms under her legs. Carefully, he put her on the soft grass and began to unbutton her shirt. Under it, she had the tight binding cloth over her breasts, but Alex lifted her and soon had removed her shirt and the cloth.

When his lips touched her breast, she gasped. “I had no idea . . . ,” she murmured. His hands and his mouth seemed to be everywhere, and her clothes came off her body in one smooth motion. When she was naked, she tried to pull him down to her, but he drew back. “I want to look at you, to see the flesh I’ve lusted after for so long.”

She was small, and her body was firm from her many days of exercise. He ran his hands over her thighs, over her stomach, and up again to her neck.

“I’ve never seen such a beautiful woman,” he said.

“I don’t look like a boy?” Her hands were at the back of his neck, clasped, her eyes on his.

Alex merely chuckled in answer.

Tentatively, she ran her hand over his chest. “May I touch you?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice husky. “Touch me all you want, wherever you want.”

Smiling, she began to unbutton his shirt, and when it was open, she slipped her hand inside. There was much more muscle on him than she’d thought, and it occurred to her that she’d made up her mind about his looks on that first night and hadn’t changed it. She’d seen him as a thin old man, and they’d been too busy since then for her to notice that he’d filled out a great deal.

She pushed the shirt off his shoulders, and ran her hands over the hair on his chest, and went down to his waist.

“Ah, lass,” he whispered. “You are truly beautiful.”

All she could do was smile as he began to unfasten the buttons at the sides of his breeches.

When he was naked and beside her, she kept her eyes on his face and stroked his beard. “Is your face scarred under there?”

“Only my heart bears the scars of my life,” he said and began kissing her some more. He nibbled at her ears, and went down her neck again. He kept on, his lips so soft and warm on her skin that she arched against him. “Please,” she said. “Please make love to me.”

His hand went lower and she gasped when he touched her between her legs. Slowly, he moved on top of her, his hands on her thighs, as he parted them and moved between them.

When he entered her, she instinctively drew back, and he started to move away, but she pulled him back down to her.

“I’m afraid I’ll hurt you.”

“‘But what about
passion
?’” she quoted to him. The words and the tone were exactly what he’d once said to her.

“Is it passion you want, lass?” His eyes were sparkling.

“Yes, oh, yes.”

“Then I won’t hold myself back any longer.” In a second, Alex went from being a kind and thoughtful lover to a man who was nearly overcome with desire for the woman beneath him. His kisses changed to being demanding, and taking from her what he needed. His hands held on to her with a fierceness Cay had never felt before—and she met him in kind.

When his tongue sought hers, she opened to him and she replied thrust for thrust. It was as though something had been trapped inside her all her life, and Alex’s hands and lips were releasing it. Somewhere in her mind, she thought, So this is what he meant by passion. And she knew that none of the men she’d ever before met could have made her feel what Alex was sending through her veins. Heaven help her, but it was as though her blood actually was boiling.

When he entered her, he stopped her cry of pain with his lips, and the pain soon gave way to the pleasant feeling of his being inside her. Pleasant soon turned to something different as her body began to feel as though it needed something. She didn’t know what it was, but she felt as though she might die if she didn’t have it.

“Alex,” she whispered. “Alex, Alex, Alex.”

His face, with all the hair on it, was buried in her neck. She clasped on to him, her hands at his back, pulling him down and down. His thrusts became faster and deeper until she was nearly screaming with wanting him.

When he came inside her, Cay clasped her legs around him, and she could feel her body pulsating, as though great waves of sensation had taken over her body.

He held her tightly to him, but when he moved off of her, she couldn’t bear to release him. He pulled her head onto his shoulder and they lay together, snuggled, their bodies sweaty. They could smell the oranges around them, hear the animals.

It was much too soon when Alex said, “We need to go back.”

“In a minute. Now I just want to lie here.”

“You want a honeymoon,” he said. “It’s what a woman deserves.”

Raising on one elbow, she glared down at him. “So help me, Alex McDowell, if you tell me you regret this, I’ll . . .”

“You’ll what?”

“Make you sorry.”

Smiling, he pulled her head down to kiss her lips and put her head back on his shoulder. “Nay, lass, I don’t regret a thing. That was what I needed. It was . . .”

“The best you ever had?”

He knew she was teasing him, but he couldn’t tease back. “Yes,” he said honestly. “You were the best. Now promise me something.”

“What’s that?” she asked dreamily. Her thoughts went to his asking her to promise eternal love.

“That you won’t drive me mad by asking me about all the other women in my life. Now get up, get dressed, and let’s get back before they send young Tim after us. I wouldn’t like for him to see you like this.”

Cay ignored most of what he said as she stood up and began to dress. “Other women? How many women have you done . . . this with?”

Alex groaned. “Not as many as your tone says you think I’ve had.”

“What does that mean?”

“Lass, you have to remember that to the others I’m your brother, so tomorrow please don’t make the mistake of asking me about other women. And don’t kiss me!”

“You think that
I
will be lusting after
you
? I think it will be the other way around.”

“All I’m asking is that you make an effort.”

“We’ll see who needs a lesson in deportment,” she said as she pulled on her shirt over the cloth binding her breasts.

“What a shame,” Alex said with a sigh as he watched her button the shirt. “To cover up such beauty is a transgression.”

Cay was trying her best to keep her anger, but she couldn’t. As she looked at Alex, she thought of what they’d just done, and in the next moment she was in his arms, and they were kissing.

He smoothed back her hair. “It won’t be easy for either of us to keep up the act, but we must. Hands and eyes off of each other. Now give me two more kisses, then we must return.”

“Three kisses.”

After six more kisses, Alex took her hand and they started back to the campsite and the others. “And nothing can happen in the tent,” he whispered. “We can’t risk being heard.”

“I promise I won’t touch you,” Cay said. “But I can’t vouch for you, as you have murderously wandering hands.”

“Do I?”

“Aye, you do,” she said seriously.

Alex bent as though to kiss her again, but they heard a voice and he straightened up. With a regretful look, he dropped her hand, and they entered the camp.

Nineteen

It was three days since the first time they’d made love, and Cay was sitting by the side of a little pond, her feet dangling, her legs bare. She was wearing only her shirt, and it was unbuttoned down the front. Alex was just a few feet away, holding long leather bags up to a little stream of fresh water coming from a rock. He was wearing only his underdrawers, so his upper half was naked. She looked at the back of him, at the way his skin played over the muscles of his body, and she wanted to touch him, to put her mouth on his, to do all the things they’d been doing for the last few days.

On the morning after their first night together, he’d had a talk with her about the possibility of conception.

“Then you’ll have to marry me,” Cay said.

The only sign he gave as to a reaction to this announcement was a flicker of his eyes. “But what if my name isn’t cleared? You can’t live with a criminal all your life. I may have to go back to Scotland.”

Cay decided to display as little emotion as he did, so she made no comment on the fact that they’d just agreed to get married. “Could you bear living with my father’s clan, the McTerns?”

He smiled at her. “Have you fallen in love with me, lass?”

She didn’t want to say what she felt about him, but then, the truth was that she wasn’t sure of her own feelings. All her life she’d known what she wanted and what kind of man would fulfill her dreams, but Alex was far and away from being that sort of man. On the other hand, she deeply enjoyed his company.

But then there was Lilith. As far as Cay could tell, Alex thought the woman was perfect. She’d had no flaws, not even any annoying personality quirks that mortals have. In Alex’s eyes, Lilith was the epitome of all that a woman should be. That he didn’t know much about her didn’t seem to bother him.

Cay knew that if she and Alex did come through all this together, even if they married and had a dozen children, she’d never live up to his memories of his first wife. The wondrous, beautiful, perfect Lilith would always be between them. The woman he’d lost. The great love of his life. The woman he’d fallen in love with at first glance.

Cay drew the name Lilith in the mud by the pond with a stick, then pulled the stick across it, making deep furrows.

“They’re full,” Alex said, a water skin in each hand.

Looking up, she had to laugh. His beautiful body was nearly naked, but his face was still covered by a bushy, untrimmed beard.

“And what amuses you so much, lass?” He walked across the rocks to get to her, put the sacks down, and began to dress. Around them, the alligators made their deep cries, and the birds were settling into the trees for the evening. By nightfall, all the trees would be so full of birds you’d hardly be able to see the leaves. At the camp, the tents were set up, and Eli, Mr. Grady, and Tim awaited them.

“You and that beard. Don’t you think it’s time you shaved it off?” When he sat down beside her, she put her hand behind his head and kissed his eyelids. “Or are you hiding something under there? Maybe you don’t want me to see how ugly you are. Is that it?”

“How can I compete with Grady?”

Groaning, Cay pulled away from him. “You aren’t going to start that again, are you?”

“How can I not?” Alex said. “All day on the boat it’s ‘Mr. Grady this’ and ‘Mr. Grady that.’ You never stop. And the way you look at him! I swear, lass, that today I nearly shoved the man overboard.”

“Did you?” She was smiling. “There’s no reason to be jealous. He’s my boss, and I have to please him.”

“Please him?”

“With my drawings. He likes what I do, don’t you think?”

“I think he likes too much about you,” Alex muttered.

“If he likes me but thinks I’m a boy, that doesn’t say much for his manliness, now does it?”

“As for that, I’m not so sure they do.”

“Do what?”

Alex stood up to finish dressing. “Think you’re a boy.”

“You couldn’t think they know I’m . . .”

“I’m not sure. They certainly don’t seem to mind when you and I slip away for hours each evening when I do my best to satisfy your insatiable lust.”

She started to defend herself but instead laughed and stretched her bare legs out in front of her. “As for that, I think you need to work much harder. And more often. Yes, lots more often.”

“I don’t think I can,” Alex said, looking at her legs. “In fact, lass, you’ve worn me out. What with the wee, silent ones in the mornings, the quick noisy ones when we slip away during the day, and the long, lazy ones in the evenings, I’m sure I can do no more than that.”

“Can you not?” She ran her hand up his leg, curving her fingers around his calf, and going up to caress his thigh muscle that was hard and firm from a lifetime of riding horses.

When she got to the top of his thighs and eased her hand between his legs, he dropped to his knees and kissed her.

“I thought you couldn’t do any more.”

“Maybe just this once,” he said, and Cay giggled.

Three weeks, Cay thought as she looked up at Alex from the drawing she was working on. He was at the helm of their little boat, and to her mind, he ran it. At least he was all that she could see.

In the past three weeks, they’d done many things, and a great deal had changed. For one thing, Cay’s body had hardened. Mr. Grady nor Alex, or even Eli let up on her physically. At the beginning, she’d had difficulty carrying the cases, but now she practically ran with them as they made their camp. Even the heaviest of the crates was easy for her to lift. At night, when she and Alex lay together in their tent, he’d hold her arms up and admire the muscles she was developing. “Won’t be long before you really will be a boy.”

“I’ll show you who’s a boy,” she said as she rolled on top of him.

With the noise of the alligators, the birds, and the frogs all around them, they didn’t bother to hide the sounds they made. A few times Alex had put his lips over hers to keep her quiet, but for the most part, they talked and laughed without fear of being heard.

At the end of the second week, they’d stopped at a plantation, and she and Alex had slipped away to explore. The big house stood on a hill overlooking the river, and it had been Mr. Grady’s duty to spend time with the owner.

“Think his father owns this land?” Alex asked.

“Probably.” She gave Alex a sideways look. “When my mother hears that I had time alone with an Armitage and didn’t take advantage of it, she’s going to skin me alive.”

“Oh?” Alex asked. “Do you mean this skin? This skin that you’re wearing now?”

She pushed his hand out of her shirt, but her eyes told him that later she’d be more than willing to do whatever he had in mind.

The plantation owner had cleared a wild orange grove of weeds and brush, leaving hundreds of trees behind. There was a big kitchen garden that was flourishing even though it was winter. “The heat and the bugs get everything in the summer,” the head gardener told them. “Gardening is backwards here.”

All around them were great fields of indigo plants, all tended by slave labor.

“My father agrees with President Adams,” Cay said. “There should be no slavery in our new country.”

Alex looked out over the fields. “I think that here it’s a matter of economics rather than humanity.”

After a hearty breakfast the next morning, they left early, and Cay was glad to get back to their boat. She’d come to like their small group—except for Tim. The boy continued to do what he could to make Cay miserable. Every time Mr. Grady praised one of her drawings, she knew she’d bear the brunt of Tim’s jealousy. For the first week, she’d had to check her bedding every night to make sure the boy hadn’t put something nasty in it. She’d found three plants guaranteed to give her a rash, two snakes (nonpoisonous), and six different kinds of disgusting-looking bugs.

Cay had wanted Alex to step in and make the boy stop, but he’d just shrugged. “It’s what boys do to each other.”

“Then I think it’s time you males stopped it. Here and now. If one man makes the effort to stop boys from torturing one another, then, eventually, it will spread to all of you.”

Alex looked at her as though she were crazy. “And girls are better? When girls get angry, they don’t hit, they just stop speaking to one another.”

“Yes, well . . .” Cay’s head came up. “That’s better than putting bugs in a person’s bed.”

“Is it?”

Cay didn’t want to argue with him. She just wanted horrible Tim to stop doing mean things to her. She decided to talk to Mr. Grady about it, but he refused to listen.

“I can’t get involved in spats between boys,” he’d said as he walked away.

Frustrated, Cay decided to take matters into her own hands. She was going to treat Tim like one of her brothers, specifically as she did Tally.

The first time Cay had seen a snake slithering its way into their tent, she’d had to put her fist into her mouth to hold back her scream—and Alex had taken care of the matter. He put his foot on the snake, grabbed it just behind its head, and threw it down the hill away from them. The second time she’d seen a snake making its way into the tent, Alex had also captured it and thrown it out. But the third time, Cay didn’t bother him. She just did what he did, held it with her boot, grabbed its head, and carried it down to the river, where she threw it in. It was only when she got back to the camp that she saw that the three men were staring at her.

“What?” she asked.

“That was a cottonmouth,” Mr. Grady said.

Even she knew they were extremely poisonous.

Mr. Grady said, “Next time, call one of us.”

But Cay didn’t call anyone for her next snake, nor the next. But she did consult the books T.C. had in his trunk, and she made drawings of the most poisonous snakes and memorized them.

At the end of the second week, she borrowed a big jar from Eli and filled it with little, nonpoisonous snakes, and one night she dumped them all at the foot of Tim’s blanket bed. He wasn’t used to Cay retaliating, so he didn’t find them until they were crawling up his legs. When she heard his shouts as she lay in the tent beside Alex, she smiled, and he asked her what she’d done to “poor Tim.” “Played his own game,” she said and began kissing Alex before he could ask more questions.

After that, it was as if a war had been declared. When she saw an alligator head in the water, its body missing, she lugged it up the hill, hid it in the bushes, and the next morning before daylight, she slipped it partially under the tent Tim shared with Eli. When Alex awoke to screams from Tim, he looked at Cay lying peacefully beside him. “What have you done to that poor boy now?”

She just smiled.

Tim started to be more cautious in the tricks he played on her. He’d learned that there would be retribution for whatever he did to her.

For Cay, what balanced her dislike of Tim was her growing affection for Eli. They were days into the trip before she realized that she’d unjustly made some assumptions about him that were far from true. She’d thought he was a man who’d spent his life cooking for people, but no, as a young man he’d studied to be a lawyer.

“When I was an attorney, I had to deal with too much hatred,” he told Cay one evening. “Everybody was screaming and full of hate, so when a client of mine, young Mr. Grady here, said he wanted to go exploring, I shut up my law office and went with him. I’ve never looked back.”

Cay knew that if Eli had worked for the Armitage family he must have been a very good attorney. “So you didn’t want a home and family, then?” She saw the light leave his eyes before he looked away and said nothing more.

Later, Cay asked Mr. Grady what that was about.

“He wouldn’t like to know I’d told you, but he had a wife and child, but they died of smallpox. He never remarried.”

After that, Cay looked at Eli differently, and when she saw him reading a copy of Cicero, she smiled broadly. She knew someone who wanted a husband.

In the third week, they pulled the flatboat half out of the water and began a trek inland to see some ruins that Mr. Grady had heard about. He and Alex carried survey equipment, and Cay put drawing paper and pencils into a bag, while Tim and Eli carried the cooking pots. Alex always kept up with his duty of providing food, so Tim had to carry the big turkey Alex had shot.