The evening before Brett and Delta had told them about the plantation, inviting them all to return for Christmas. “Even if we haven’t completed all the work,” Delta had said, “there’s plenty of room for pallets.” She smiled at Ellie and Kale. “As I recall we were supposed to attend a wedding in Texas last Christmas.”
Ellie grinned and Kale responded. “I managed to take care of that little matter well ahead of time.” His gaze rested on Brett and Delta. “Speaking of weddings, when’re you two plannin’ to tie the knot?”
Delta blushed.
“We’ll let you know,” Brett promised.
The docks buzzed with activity when they arrived in two of Cousin Brady’s carriages.
“It’s like Christmas, New Year’s, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one,” Kale commented.
“Better not mention the Fourth of July around here,” Brandy cautioned. “Folks aren’t far enough away from the conflict to celebrate being back in the Union.”
Delta clutched Brett’s hand and felt excitement build to excruciating levels inside her. Bunting draped all the boats in the harbor, but the Mississippi Princess was the grandest of all. A banner strung between the two smokestacks proclaimed the showboat to be the official representative of Captain Eads’ hometown of St. Louis. The calliope played and Delta waved to Zanna, who leaned over the rail on the promenade deck searching the crowd.
Pulling Delta by the hand, Brett led the Jarrett entourage toward the gangplank, where he stopped, and Delta gaped.
There stood Gabriel, playing his fiddle as he had done at every stop along the way. She rushed over and hugged him, causing bright red spots to flower on his cheeks. Drawing back she noticed Pierre, whom she greeted with a less demonstrative hug, and was surprised at the enthusiasm he showed in returning her greeting. When she faced Mary Dupré, regal in a colorful gown adorned with bracelets and necklaces and tiny bells, Delta’s composure slipped. Tears sprang to her eyes.
Brett’s mother reached with a lacy handkerchief to dry them. “There, there, pichouette, don’ cry, non.”
Delta introduced Ellie and Aurelia and Cousin Brady to Brett’s mother and friends and together they all trooped aboard. Captain Kaney, flanked by Zanna and the Princess Players, greeted them on the main deck. He shook hands with Brett, kissed Delta on the cheek, and issued a robust welcome to their guests.
“Come aboard, folks. History is being made today.”
It wasn’t until they were steaming along in the midst of a procession of ships that stretched as far as the eye could see in both directions that those around them began to suspect they might have more in store for them this day than the opening of the jetties, as important as that occasion was.
The captain led them to the promenade deck, where he invited them to help themselves at the buffet set up along the wall. Waiters moved among the crowd serving champagne. Zanna gave the first clue when she distributed flowers, roses for all the ladies—Ellie and Aurelia and Brett’s mother each received corsages. Delta’s was a bouquet, at least four dozen, she decided, thinking suddenly that if there were time she could count them to calm her nerves.
There wasn’t time, of course.
Carson made the first guess. “Now I know why Aurelia loaned you her wedding dress,” he whispered in Delta’s ear.
She laughed. “Relie didn’t know. It was a coincidence.”
They stood in the middle of the open deck with other passengers milling on either side, talking, laughing, sipping champagne. The boat churned along the narrow channel. Captain Kaney stepped to the end of the prow, motioning Brett and Delta to follow him.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he called. Brett slipped his arm around Delta’s waist. She knew she was trembling. He bent over and kissed her cheek, lightly, tenderly. Then the captain continued.
“Gather ’round. We’ve some official business to take care of before we reach the jetties.”
Delta looked into Brett’s eyes, wondering whether they were doing the right thing. Around them she heard feet shuffling.
“What’s happening?” Ellie’s voice questioned.
“Hell, it looks like a—” Kale began.
The band drowned out his voice, with a brass rendition of “The Wedding of the Lily and the Rose.”
Before the last strains died away, Captain Kaney’s voice boomed above the surrounding confusion. “We are gathered here today to witness the marriage of these two fine young people—Anatole Dupré, known to many of us as Brett Reall, and our own lovely journalist, Delta Jarrett.”
The service took only a matter of minutes, all of which Delta spent worrying over whether Brett was marrying her because he wanted to, or because he felt coerced by her brothers. The deck swayed beneath her feet. The last few weeks played through her brain, as familiar in their despair as the lines of Zanna’s melodrama.
“Kiss your bride,” Captain Kaney instructed.
Brett turned her with hot palms to her bare shoulders. She lifted worried eyes to his. He frowned.
“Are you sure—?” she whispered.
His lips effectively halted her words; his kiss, hot and sensual, answered her question. She leaned into him, feeling secure and protected, and very, very loved.
At length, she became conscious of hands clapping around them. Gabriel’s fiddle took up a lively jig. Brett lifted his lips. “Madame Dupré,” he whispered against her skin.
Her eyes searched his. All she wanted was to hold him, to kiss him, to love him. And he knew it, she could tell.
He winked. “Later, chère.”
Carson was the first to claim a kiss. “You’re a beautiful bride, Delta.” His voice cracked when he added, “I’m glad you wore Aurelia’s gown.”
“I’m glad you married her,” she told her brother.
Kale came next, shaking Brett’s hand, then grabbing Delta in a rough bear hug. He held her back and gazed into her blue eyes, eyes the color of his own. “Guess we laid that old worry to bed,” he told her. He shook Brett’s hand, then turned back to Delta. “There’s no curse on our blue eyes.”
She clasped Brett tighter. “I think they’re lucky,” she told Kale. “We may be the luckiest ones of all.”
Brett kissed the top of her head. “Ellie and I are the lucky ones.”
The calliope struck up the familiar, “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” drowning out any chance of conversation. Horns from boats both ahead and behind them blared, and the Mississippi Princess began its historic entrance into the channel created by Captain Eads’ jetties. Delta turned her attention, as much of it as she could, to taking notes for an article on the new passage. Brett stood beside her, tall and proud.
From the third deck of the showboat they looked out upon the broad, flat terrain. In most places it was hard to distinguish between land and water and sky.
“James Eads is an engineering genius,” Captain Kaney proclaimed, while his pilot steered the bulky showboat through the narrow man-made pass.
“For truth,” Brett agreed. “I’d have doubts about poling a pirogue through these marshes.”
Once the showboat cleared the channel and turned around in the basin, Cameron approached Delta with congratulations. “When do you figure on finding time to write that article?” he teased. “How ’bout I wire Hollis not to expect it for a fortnight or so?”
Delta blushed, but recovered quickly. “Would you wire him when you return to shore? Brett and I are leaving on the boat in the morning and I won’t have a chance.”
“Sure thing.”
“Tell him …” She thought a moment. “Tell him to tell Joey and Jimmy that I’m bringing them a pirate.”
He shook his head in mock despair. “What happens to this career you were dead set on pursuing?”
“I may still. Cousin Brady knows the publisher of the Picayune. He offered to introduce me after we get settled.”
“And babies? How will you work and run that mansion and raise babies?”
Delta caught Brett’s eye from
across the deck. He winked and her spine tingled. She started to tell Cameron he’d left out her most important role: loving her husband.
Instead she patted her cousin’s arm. “Don’t fret, Cousin Cameron. You know the old saying, ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way.’”
Cameron hugged her. “I’m happy for you, Delta. Long as you’re sure this is what you want.”
“I’m sure.” Her eyes twinkled. “When we get to Memphis, I’ll see about putting Mama Rachael’s matchmaking skills to work for you.”
He laughed. “She is pretty good at it, isn’t she?”
Somehow Delta made it through such suddenly mundane things as the first jetty passage and visiting with her family, family she wouldn’t see again for a very long time.
Once she spied Zanna and Cameron in conversation, and when she asked Zanna about it later, Zanna blushed. “Stuart is meeting the boat at Natchez. Cameron said Stuart’s taking some time off and wants to travel to St. Louis with us.”
Pierre and Gabriel were eager to discuss the new plantation and the roles they would play in running it. Delta liked them both, she realized quite unexpectedly—even Pierre, with his stern countenance. His job had been to protect Brett, and he had performed it admirably. He hadn’t liked her at first, but she couldn’t blame him. When all was said and done, she had endangered Brett’s life.
After an hour or so of nonstop visiting, Brett insisted she eat something, so they filled plates and stood together at the rail watching the ship steam into its berth at New Orleans. Together, where they belonged.
Together, where they had always belonged.
Delta got teary-eyed when it came time to bid her family farewell.
“Take care of her,” Kale warned.
“Oui,” Brett said.
“She may be your wife,” Carson added, “but she’s our little sister—” He left the statement hanging. No sense issuing threats. The facts were enough—they loved Delta and were willing to take on anyone who harmed her.
But from the hearty way Kale and Carson bade Brett good-bye, Delta figured those two had been won over.
Pierre and Gabriel prepared to leave. They escorted Crazy Mary, who hugged her son, then Delta. “You, pichouette, you’re the one he should have married the first time, sure. Then we wouldn’t have had all that trouble.”
Delta hugged her. “If all those terrible things hadn’t happened, I would never have met him.”
Crazy Mary’s eyes brightened. “Me, I would have arrang’ it. I wouldn’t let you wander the spirit world pining for each other, non.”
Gabriel hugged Delta, then shook hands with Brett. “When you bringin’ yourselves home, you two?”
Brett shrugged. “Since Cameron fixed things with the Mounties, we don’t have to return to Canada, but I’ll need to close down operations along the river.” He glanced at Delta. “We’ll stay a while in St. Louis with Delta’s family. It may take us a couple of months to get everything settled.”
When the two men turned to escort Crazy Mary toward the gangplank, Brett called to them. “Contact Bontura up in St. Francisville. Tell him to advise Nat of the truth and set him loose.”
Delta tensed beside him. “Do you think it’s safe?”
Brett chuckled. “For me, Oui. Maybe not so safe for the next fellow Nat goes after.”
Delta thought about it. “Zanna might take him back as leading man for the Princess Players.” She looked across the gathering at Elyse, lovely and lonely as ever.
Brett’s eyes followed hers. He chuckled. “Not a bad idea. Nat made a better actor than he did a bounty hunter, anyway.”
The ship bucked against the rushing current, rocking the bridal bed where two lovers lay locked in a heated embrace.
“Ah, ma chère,” he whispered, “you are as passionate a bride as you were a lover.”
“And you, my husband, are as lusty as the pirate in my dreams or the gambler on board the showboat.”
He belted out a laugh as he plunged again and again into her receptive body. “God’s bones, Delta! You have led an exotic love life.”
He drove his hungry body faster and faster into hers, until at length she felt them dive together into that swirling river of fire. When they broke the surface it was to a blue sky veiled in bayou moss and the sweltering heat of a summer’s night. She drew him to her bosom, holding him in sweat-laved arms. “For truth, my love, you have become one man, and I at last am whole.”
“We are,” he whispered into her tangled hair. “We always have been. Now we will be forever.”
Author’s Note
I leave the truth about Anne Bonny and Calico Jack Rackham, if truth about pirates can ever be separated from fiction, to others. Delta Jarrett’s dreams are fictitious. However, Anne Bonny did deliver a girlchild while she and fellow-pirate Mary Read were in prison. (Mary also delivered a child, and it may have been stillborn.) Although Jack Rackham was Anne’s lover most of her pirate life, facts vary as to whether he fathered her child. The law in those days provided for women pirates, if pregnant when captured, to deliver their babies before being executed.
Delta’s brothers, Kale and Carson, have appeared in their own stories. Kale and Ellie’s love story is found in Sweet Autumn Surrender, released by Zebra Books in October of 1991; Carson and Aurelia’s in Silver Surrender, June, 1992. The next book in the Jarrett Family Sagas will feature one of the twin brothers, Rubal Jarrett.
My husband always cautioned our sons not to make a mistake they would have trouble dealing with when they grew up. Someone should have warned Rubal Jarrett of such. After meeting Molly Durant at a dance a year before, he is unable to get her off his mind. Intending to pursue a courtship, he returns to East Texas only to find Molly in a peck of trouble and blaming it all on him. It takes all his wits and intervention from an unexpected source to woo this lady who has inherited a dilapidated boarding house, five young siblings, and valuable property from which the timber has been stolen. To make matters worse, she’s engaged to marry the local banker. Look for Rubal and Molly’s story at your bookstore in a few months.
In Delta’s story, as in previous books, I’ve used settings readers can visit today, either in person or vicariously through further reading. If you’re interested in taking a steamboat excursion down the Mississippi River, contact one of the steamboat companies headquartered in New Orleans. Chambers of Commerce are always a good place to begin such inquiries.
If you prefer to read about the trip or the bayous of Louisiana, I suggest:
Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
Tales of the Mississippi by Ray Samuel
The Bayous of Louisiana by Harnett T. Kane
I close with a special word of thanks to a dear friend and exemplary writer, Nancy Goodnight, for her help with this manuscript.
More from Vivian Vaughan
Branded
El Paso, Texas. 1895. Five years ago, life as Jacy Kimble knew it ended with a scandal that sent her brother Hunter and his best friend Trevor Fallon to Yuma Prison for murder. The scandal cost her family their Arizona Ranch, ruined her father’s political career and took his sanity, leaving the Kimble family in shambles. Once the belle of Arizona society, Jacy Kimble was haughty and flirtatious—her favorite target: Trevor Fallon. Her father called him a hired hand.
Now Trevor has shown up at her door, escaped from prison, or as he tries to make her believe: he was freed in the middle of the night with one order—clear her brother’s name and keep him from hanging.
For five years she has hated Trevor. How can she believe him now? Yet, how can she not help him try to prove her brother’s innocence? It’s a hard choice for Jacy: believe the man who ruined her life, or throw away any hope for her family’s future. Complicating everything, Trevor is the same handsome, no-account cowhand who once romanced her. And Jacy had loved him. Now she feels that powerful attraction returning. How can she spend time with him? How can she not?
No Place for a Lady
Whe
n Madolyn Sinclair, Secretary of the Boston Woman Suffrage Society, steps off the train in Buckhorn, Texas, she doesn’t know there is a right and wrong side of the tracks. Madolyn has come to this god-forsaken land with three purposes: to find her runaway brother Morley, secure her inheritance, and return to Boston to organize a Center for Women’s Rights. What she had not expected to find in this windswept land—or anywhere—was love: Madolyn Sinclair has dedicated herself to teaching submissive women from all walks of life that they don’t need men.
Then she meets Tyler Grant, her brother’s erstwhile business partner, who offers to take her to Morley’s ranch. She reluctantly accepts, and Tyler takes her on a wagon ride she will never forget. But Tyler has an ulterior motive, and he’s caught a tantalizing woman in his web of deceit.
Reluctant Enemies
New Mexico Territory, 1879. Will Radnor has never stopped looking for Charles Martin Kane, the man who murdered his father back in Philadelphia. Following the first good lead he’s had in years, Will accepts a position with a law firm in Santa Fé. In Chimayo, a golden-haired cowgirl, ‘dressed like Billy the Kid and smelling of horse sweat’ climbs into the stagecoach and changes his life forever. Then he learns her name.
Priscilla McCain has realized her dream to become the best danged cowgirl in New Mexico Territory, following in the boot steps of her beloved father, Charlie McCain. In Chimayo she climbs into the stage and trips over the flimsy black boots of a greenhorn lawyer. He is tall, though, and handsome. Silk shirts and perfume spring to mind. Then she realizes what he is—a greenhorn.
Soon, however, even wild horses can’t keep them apart. Will passes every ‘greenhorn’ test Priscilla poses and proves himself a quick learner. Before she knows it, Priscilla has donned that silk shirt, lacy chemise, and spritzes on her mother’s perfume.
As Will’s love for Priscilla grows, he knows that the time will come when she must choose between him and her father, and either choice will be disastrous for all of them. He has never seen a family as close. But can he forego bringing Charles Martin Kane to justice, even for the woman he loves?
Sunrise Surrender--Jarrett Family Sagas--Book Three Page 38