Memory's Embrace (30 page)

The expression on his face as he righted himself was one of absolute hatred. “How dare you refuse me, you
chit?” he whispered, in a rasp, running one hand across his mouth as though he had just taken a drink.
“How dare you?”

He came at Tess again and she acted without thinking, sheerly on instinct. She clasped the pan of acid fluid in her hands and flung it at Cedrick.

Cedrick froze, lumbering slightly, and then screamed. The acid made a sickening, sizzling sound, and he sank to his knees, his shrieks fading to frantic, animallike whimpers.

Emma burst past the curtain, staring at Cedrick in horror. He was still kneeling, his hands over his face, his cries of pain terrible to hear.

“Get a doctor, Emma,” Tess said calmly. “And then a constable.”

Chapter Eighteen

T
HE HOSPITAL WAS QUIET, SEEMINGLY EMPTY
. C
YNTHIA
Golden stood beside her brother’s bed, watching him sleep. Poor, dear Cedrick—he was so much thinner than before, and he had to be strapped in, lest he do himself harm.

Cynthia winced to remember the maniacal scene he’d made, that day when the bandages had been removed from his face. Nothing had settled him, not the fact that he had not lost his eyesight, as the doctors first feared he would, not the assurance that the scars would fade a little with the passing of time. Cedrick had wanted—still wanted—very much to die.

And Cynthia didn’t blame him. He was a wretched sight, a monster. The flesh on his face was blistered and stretched out of place, distorting his features. Yes, he resembled a monster more than a man.

His career as an actor, of course, was over. And with his livelihood would go Cynthia’s, for she was not strong enough, not smart enough, not talented enough, to prosper without him.

Oh, she might marry, she supposed, but though she loved a dalliance with an attractive man, the idea of being bound to just one, for a lifetime, was inconceivable to her.

Resentment stiffened Cynthia’s spine, hatred pounded beneath her temples. It was all the fault of that hoyden, Tess. She had done this dreadful thing to Cedrick and she hadn’t even been arrested! Oh, no. The tramp had told the police that Cedrick had intended her some harm—ridiculous thought—and that she had only been defending herself when she’d flung that chemical into his face.

Incredibly, they had believed her. Cedrick had lain in this dreary place, helpless and despairing, longing to die, for nearly a month. And in that time, justice had certainly not been served. Tess Corbin was still free. Tess Corbin was busy with her shop, happy with that handsome husband of hers.

Cynthia was suddenly filled with the first true resolve she had known in all her sheltered life. She took a pillow from another bed, placed it over her brother’s spoiled face, and held it there.

Cedrick had been sleeping, of course, and he was probably sedated in the bargain. Wide leather restraints
made it impossible for him to do more than writhe slightly in a natural attempt to breathe. Cynthia knew what was good for him, though, and she held the pillow firmly in place until he was still.

Keith was almost completely recovered. He should have been happy, he guessed—he was alive, he was married to a woman he would have died for. All the same, he felt restless.

Tess slept beside him, exhausted, her beautiful face bathed in the moonlight streaming in through the bedroom window. He smiled and traced the outline of her jaw, so gently, not wanting to awaken her. She’d had a hard day, working in her shop, and the incident with Cedrick Golden, now several weeks in the past, still upset her when she permitted herself to remember it.

As if those things weren’t enough, Keith suspected that she was pregnant in the bargain.

He lay back on his pillows and soberly studied the shadowed ceiling. Ever since the day he’d met Tess, he’d been healing, getting stronger, in a way that even the shooting couldn’t have interfered with. It had been a painful, wrenching process at times, a gradual one at others, but it had never stopped. Not for one minute had it stopped.

He sighed, cupped his hands behind his head. Tess had been sent to him, he knew that now, and not as a replacement for Amelie, either. No. The boyish infatuation he’d felt toward Amelie paled in comparison to this. He belonged to Tess, had been born to love her. It was Tess who’d been meant for him all along, not
Amelie. And, just as surely, he had been meant for her.

It had been good to be with Tess again, so very good. They’d made love every night and sometimes during the day, and each time, though it seemed impossible, had been better than the last.

Now that he was strong again, Keith could face what he was, what he believed, what he needed. He wanted to preach again.

He shifted onto one side, watching Tess as she slept. She had made a success of her shop. A smashing success. Would she be willing to leave it, to follow him to Port Hastings? A verse from the book of Ruth rose in his mind,
“Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”

“Tess?”

She muttered something and pulled a tangle of sheets and blankets up to her nose, her eyelashes fluttering as if to ward off wakefulness.

He didn’t have the heart to awaken her. Instead, he let himself imagine her as a pastor’s wife. What a sensation she’d cause, with her wild, beautiful hair, her cameras, and her bicycle.

The thought brought an involuntary chuckle from the depths of his throat.

Tess yawned and opened one eye and then the other. “Keith? Are you all right? Wh-what’s the matter?”

He pulled her head down to rest on his shoulder, the love of her a tight and twisting thing in his throat. “I’m fine. I was just thinking, that’s all.”

She yawned again and cuddled close to him, soft and
fragrant. “Thinking? In—the middle of the”—yet again, she yawned—“night?”

He had begun to want her, and that wanting made his voice gruff. “This is something I’ve had on my mind for a long time. Since I met you, in fact.”

“What?”

“I’m not supposed to be a peddler or the indolent, unemployed husband of an up-and-coming photographer, Tess.”

She shot bolt upright, her hair a moon-kissed curtain falling over one shoulder and tickling against Keith’s chest. “You don’t want to be my husband?” she whispered.

Keith drew her back, smoothing her tangled hair with one hand. “Of course I want to be your husband.” He paused, searching within himself for the courage to go on. “But I also want to preach again, Tess.”

There was a silence, during which Keith knew an agony of doubt. Suppose he lost her?

When she spoke, her voice was soft, almost inaudible. “You don’t want to stay in Portland, do you, Keith? You want to go back to—what was that place? Wenatchee.”

Her hair was like a spray of silken ribbons in his fingers. “No. Not Wenatchee. Port Hastings.”

“Your family is there.”

Another silence, this time, broken by Keith. “Yes. Will you give up this shop, Tess? If I promise to buy you another, that is?”

She laughed, actually laughed. “Of course. But it can’t be an idle promise, Keith Corbin. I want that shop.”

He laughed, now, more with relief, with joy, than
with humor. “You shall have your shop, Mrs. Corbin. I swear it.”

Tess cuddled closer still, her fingers making swirls in the hairs on his chest. He was aware of her, and in need of her, in every part of his body. “I don’t suppose your congregation will approve of me,” she ventured softly, shyly, after a very long time.

“My congregation had better approve,” he answered flatly. “They don’t have a choice.”

She was crying; he could feel the tears, cool and wet, on the flesh of his bare shoulder. “We’ll see,” she said.

He turned, so that she was beneath him, was careful not to rest his full weight upon her. “Tess. Don’t cry. Please. If this makes you unhappy—”

“Unhappy?” She laughed, through her tears, and stroked the side of his face with one tender hand. “I’ve known since the day I saw you throwing dishpans and coffeepots at God that this would happen, you idiot. Even that was a form of faith few people ever have. God was so real to you that you would challenge Him to a fisticuff!”

“I suppose that is unusual,” he conceded, embarrassed to remember.

“Unusual is hardly the word, mister. You should have seen yourself, ranting and raving, stomping around. I thought you were mad.”

“But you stayed.” He circled her lips with one index finger and let that finger stray down the length of her neck, over her collarbone, to her breast.

“It was raining and my bicycle wheel was bent—” She made an involuntary, crooning sound as he caressed her, her back arching.

“Excuses, excuses,” he muttered, letting his lips follow the path blazed by his finger. “You were crazy about me.”

He circled her nipple with the tip of his tongue and she gasped, her body groping for his.

“If anyone was crazy, Keith C-Corbin”—she quivered, her hands in his hair now, fingers splayed and strong as they pressed him closer—“it was you.”

He could offer no argument. They made love, slowly, sweetly at first, and then with a fierce savagery that hurled their strong young bodies one against the other in a frenzied attempt to become bonded together forever.

The morning sunshine was bright. Smiling, Tess Corbin turned the golden wedding band on her finger, so that the small emeralds embedded in it caught the light and flung it, in shimmering patches, all over the tiny kitchen. Ever since Keith had given her that ring, while he was still in the hospital, she had felt that, to him, it was merely a formality, lacking the meaning that Amelie’s had had. Now, after their talking and loving in the night, she knew better.

Tess drew a deep breath, to sober herself. She found an apron and put it on. Breakfast. The wifely thing to do was to cook breakfast.

She inspected the woodbox. Since Emma and Rod’s departure for St. Louis, with Emma’s subdued but recovering mother in tow, Keith had kept it full. Today, however, it was empty.

She could hear him stirring in the bedroom, grumbling and clunking his boots around. Those were such
ordinary sounds, but they brought a bursting lump of joy to Tess’s throat; if she loved that man another smidgeon, she marveled to herself, she just wouldn’t be able to bear it, that’s all.

Eager to please him, she dashed down the stairs. It wasn’t as though she would cook breakfast every morning, Tess reflected, as she unlocked the shop door, for any early customers who might venture in, and put up the window shades. There was no law that said the Reverend Keith Corbin couldn’t prepare a meal once in a while.

She made her way through the workroom, having her usual difficulty with the latch on the back door. She left it open, so that she would not have to walk all the way around to the front of the building to get in again, as had happened on several occasions.

The woodshed was filled with the pungent smell of aging wood, the dusty, half-imagined scent of cobwebs and mice. Unaccountably, as she bent to gather an armload of kindling, Tess shivered.

Woodsheds were shadowy, eerie places, she decided, but she brightened as she planned the meal she would cook for Keith before starting her own day in the shop. She would fix his favorites—bacon, flapjacks, and eggs hard enough to shape a horseshoe.

Tess was grinning as she straightened up, her arms full of scratchy wood. She was going to be the best wife any man, preacher or otherwise, had ever had.

Cynthia Golden was framed by the woodshed doorway, standing perfectly still. Barring her way.

Tess hadn’t heard Cynthia’s approach, and she was startled. Even frightened, though that didn’t make
sense. It was broad daylight, for one thing, and for another, when it came to protecting herself, she was a match for this woman any day.

She had not seen Cynthia since before her tragic encounter with Cedrick. Tess was damned if she was going to grovel, for Cedrick had attacked her and she had only used the first means at hand to protect herself. Still, she was sorry that it had come to that, that Cedrick had been scarred so badly. “I hope your brother is recovering,” she said.

“As if you cared,” replied Cynthia, and she did not move out of the woodshed doorway but, instead, clasped the framework on both sides of her with gloved hands. Tess could not see her face, and that, along with the sensation of being cornered, bothered her.

“I do care, Cynthia. And I’m very sorry that things turned out the way they did. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

Cynthia didn’t move out of the doorway, but a dusty shaft of sunlight, coming in through one of the wide cracks in the woodshed roof, found her face. As beautiful as ever, she was also calmly, coldly rancorous. “You’ve ruined Cedrick, you know. Ruined us all, really. I had to save him.”

Something in the tone of Cynthia’s voice and the stance of her flawless body caused a chill to spin up Tess’s backbone. “What do you mean, you had to save him?” she whispered.

Perfect shoulders moved in a shrug. “I couldn’t let him live. He would have been an object of ridicule. Scorn. Cedrick could never have borne that.”

Tess’s stomach roiled, and a trembling seized her,
though she brought it under swift control. “Dear God,” she breathed. “You don’t mean that you—that you killed him?”

“I saved him,” corrected Cynthia, in the sing-song, hide-and-seek voice of a little girl.

Tess was stunned, but her instincts kept her alert, wary. This was no time to let her wits go wandering hither and yon. “And what do you want with me?” she asked, slowly. Quietly.

“Oh, I mean to kill you, of course,” replied the woman-child.

The wood Tess had held went clattering to the shed’s dirt floor. She lunged forward, meaning to push past Cynthia, into the sunlight and sanity—and safety—of the world outside. That world was so close, yet so far away.

Small as she was, Cynthia stood like a bastion in Tess’s way. Metal glinted silver in the patchy light, and something slashed at Tess’s upper arm, stinging. She gasped and retreated a few steps, amazed. So amazed that the screams her instincts urged on her would not pass her throat.