His Wild Heart

by Colleen French

  "It's all right, really." She broke into a smile. "When I forget the pain of the circumstances, my cousin and uncle's death, I can honestly say it was the best thing that could have happened to me."

  "Why?" he prodded gently.

  She squeezed his hand and then let it go, leaning back in her chair. It felt so good to sit and talk with someone she felt comfortable with, someone she could speak candidly with. "Because Hunter"—she looked up—"Geoffry was called Hunter in the Colonies—because Hunter found me. He bought me from an Indian called Two Crows. Hunter led me over half the Maryland Colony searching for Captain Cain who killed his first wife. I slept on the ground, in Shawnee wigwams, in forts, on the ground under the stars. I fell in love with him and we married. I didn't even know he was Geoffry Rordan until we reached Annapolis."

  Roland screwed up his face. "Christ, this tale sounds better than anything one could possibly have made up."

  A knock came at the door and Alexandra was silent while a maid brought a plate of fruit and cheeses and a decanter of sweet wine and two glasses. Alexandra poured Roland a drink as the maid left, closing the door behind her.

  "When I think back, it all seems ridiculously impossible. I can't believe all I went through, and now I'm back here in my father's house where nothing has changed."

  He took the glass from her hand. "Nothing but you?"

  Her gaze met his. "Do you see it? Is it me? Everything here seems so much the same and yet so different. I'm so confused. I was beginning to think I'd left part of my senses somewhere in the wilderness across the ocean."

  "Then you're not happy?"

  She twisted her hands in her lap. "No," she finally answered. "I thought this was what I wanted but . . ." She sighed, at a loss for words. "I don't know what to do to make things right."

  "Your husband is not the devoted man you thought him to be?"

  She shook her head. "No, it's not Hunter. It's me. It's us. It's this place." She looked up at him. "I haven't been able to tell anyone about the colonies, because we decided it was best if people didn't know the circumstances of our marriage, but Roland, it was the most magical place you could ever imagine. It's so beautiful, so vast and empty. The people, the Shawnee, are like no one you've ever met or even known existed."

  He set down his glass. "And now Mother England can never be the same for you?"

  She looked down into her lap at her hands twisted in the azure blue folds of her sack gown. "No."

  "So what does Geoffry say of all this?"

  She looked up at Roland. "I haven't told him. I can't."

  "And why the hell not?"

  "Because." She sighed. "Because I insisted we come back to England. I insisted he return to the responsibilities he left behind when he left me six years ago." She lifted her hand. "The Earl of Dunnon is dying. Hunter will inherit all that's his. This is where he belongs, where he must stay. I can't tell him I've changed my mind!"

  "And why not?" Roland reached for a square of cheese and tossed it into his mouth. "You love the man. I assume he loves you. What can there be in a marriage if there's no honesty?"

  She rose and walked to the window, but didn't allow herself to focus on the filthy street below. "This is where I belong. My duties as my husband's wife are here in England. The colonies were just a dream, a good dream, but one that had to end. I'll get used to England and our way of living again. I know I will. I just need time."

  Roland rose and crossed the room to come stand beside her. "You're a fool, Mary Alexandra."

  "What?"

  "You're a damned fool. Ask a man who spent thirty-odd years denying who he was, pretending he was happy when he wasn't, all for the sake of confounded duty!"

  Alexandra brushed her fingertips over Roland's ruby red coat. "Roland, you don't understand."

  "The hell I don't!" He spoke quietly but his voice was filled with fervor. "I lived a lie and I know what it does to a person inside. It kills one, Alexandra. It took me a long time to realize that. But it was killing me one day at a time. What good was I to my father only half a man? What good will you be to Geoffry if you're slowly wasting away inside?"

  She sighed. What Roland said made sense. Yet, she knew she couldn't take Hunter away from all he was entitled to. All that he had returned for. She would just have to make herself content here, that was all there was to it.

  After a moment of silence, she rubbed Roland's arm. "Thank you for coming. I needed to talk to a friend."

  He kissed her cheek. "Think about what I've said, Alex. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about."

  She smiled. "Please come to see us at Dunnon Castle. Come and stay a few days. I'm lonely there."

  "I will. I swear it."

  She followed him to the door. "You're coming to the masquerade ball aren't you?"

  "Of course. Wouldn't miss it, not to dine with the king."

  "Who are you coming as?"

  "Hah! I'll not give away my secret." He walked out the door and into the hallway. "I'll see myself out. I still know the way. Take care, Alex. Do what you know is right in your heart."

  She waved halfheartedly to him, leaning on the doorframe until he disappeared down the stairs and then she went into the room and closed the door quietly behind her. If she was to see to the musicians in an hour, she would have to get the menu back to the cook. With a sigh, she went back to the desk, sat and bent her head over the papers, vowing to set her mind to the task at hand. Everything would work out for the best. She knew that. It would just take time.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Alexandra stood at the door in her corset and shift with a silk powdering mantle thrown over her shoulders. "You're late."

  Hunter crossed his arms over his chest and stood in the hallway. "No, I missed you, dear husband. Good to see you, dear? Perhaps a wifely kiss on the cheek?"

  Alexandra sighed. She was glad to see him. But he was hours late, a fact her mother had been reminding her every hour on the hour since three o'clock. "Please come in before someone hears you. The guests are already beginning to arrive."

  Hunter hesitated for a moment and then strode in. She closed the door behind him. "How's your week gone?" she asked, trying to smooth things over. She went to sit at her dressing table and finish applying her makeup before one of her mother's maids came in to help her put on her gown.

  "Well enough."

  "And your father?"

  "Worse."

  "I'm sorry."

  "I don't think he'll live much longer, Alex." He touched his ear, an old habit from when he had worn the earring. "But he says he's ready to die. He says now that I'm home, he'll die in peace."

  She glanced up at him through the reflection in her oval mirror. Hunter looked tired. He was dressed in plain, worn breeches and a shirt without a stock. He wore no shirtwaist, only an old coat. "Are you going to dress?" she asked softly.

  He came to her and lifted the curls of hair off her back to kiss the nape of her neck. "I thought I'd go as Adam and walk stark naked through your father's ballroom," he murmured in her ear.

  She chuckled. Of course it wasn't funny. If she encouraged him in any way, he might well do it. But it was so good to hear that voice that was so familiar to her, the voice she loved—Hunter's voice, not Geoffry's. How odd it was that she had begun to think of him as two different men, "Does that mean I should go as Eve?" She watched him in the mirror as he peeled back the silk powdering mantle and covered the creamy skin above her shift neckline with soft, fleeting kisses.

  "I was getting to that."

  She laughed, leaning against him and taking his hands to wrap them around her. She closed her eyes. It felt so good to feel his touch, so reassuring. "I did miss you," she whispered. "I'm sorry I was cross with you. I've had a horrible week. My mother is about to set me mad. I'm going home the first of the week with you."

  "But your week wasn't worse than mine." He kissed the top of her head and then wandered to the window. "My father's financial affairs are a mess."
/>   "Poor investments?" She powdered her face with rice powder, using a hare's foot for a brush.

  "Hardly. Excellent investments. Staggering. He's bought one plantation in Maryland, buying a second. Tobacco is still extremely profitable."

  She began to rouge her lips. "So what's the trouble?"

  He pulled back the draperies and looked out at the dark street below. It was raining. "Little bookkeeping and what there is, is poor. The money is with too many banking houses. It'll take me a year to straighten it out into any semblance of order."

  Adding a dab of color to her cheeks, she rose. "I'm sorry you've had to come home to such disarray. Can't you get anyone to help you?"

  "Eventually, but at this point I'd rather not share the information with a hired man. There's so much damned money that I don't know where it all is. It would be too easy for someone to steal from us right now, and I can't let that happen. My father's worked too hard to make this fortune." He exhaled, obviously frustrated. "Damnation, Alex. I don't know where all of Father's land is or even the deeds. He's got priceless artwork I've never seen, lands in places I've never been. I'm just not cut of the right cloth to manage monies and lands as my father did." He shook a finger. "Now Jon, Jon's the one with the head for this."

  "Then ask him to help you."

  He let the draperies slip from his hand to cover the black window. "I can't. It's not fair. This is my responsibility." He rubbed his temples. "Damn it, I should never have left. If I hadn't gone—"

  She touched his lips with the tip of her finger. "If you hadn't gone to the colonies, you'd never have had me. I'd never have loved you as I love you now, Hunter of the Shawnee." She rose up on her high-heeled scarlet slippers and kissed him.

  He wrapped her in his arms, pulling her against him to rest his head on her shoulder. "God, I love you, Alex. I don't want to hurt you. Please don't let me be like this, act like this."

  She looked up into his hazel eyes. "Like what?"

  "Like an ass. Like all the men I despise in my father's world. Troubled, arrogant, self-centered, possessive."

  "You're none of those things."

  He dropped his head to her shoulder again. "I hope not, but I'm afraid . . ." He sighed, his warm breath tickling her ear. "I can see myself becoming all those things in a few years, all the things I ran to the colonies to avoid becoming."

  "It doesn't have to be like that," she told him, stroking his soft, thick, auburn hair. "I won't let it happen."

  He lifted his head and let go of her. "I suppose I need to go dress. Your mother had my clothes sent elsewhere. The next bedchamber over, I think." He looked up at her, grimacing. "Christ, doesn't anyone in England share sleeping rooms with their own wife?"

  "We do." She shooed him with her hand. "Now go dress. I'll have your bags moved in here tonight."

  He went to the door and turned to face her. "What are you wearing tonight? Who are you going as?"

  She smiled mischievously. "Mind your knitting. You'll have to find me among the other ladies."

  He reached into his coat and took something out. He shook it in his palm as if considering whether or not to show her. "I have something, something for you. Now that I've had it made, I don't know that you'll like it. It won't go with any of your clothes, I'm sure."

  She came to stand in front of him, one hand resting on her hip. "Show me."

  "I won't be offended if you don't wear it."

  She grasped his hand. "You're being silly. Let me see. I'll be the judge of what I like and don't like."

  He opened his hand. Nestled in his palm was a black obsidian arrowhead surrounded by diamonds.

  "For me?" She looked up at him as she took it from his hand. "Hunter, it's beautiful."

  "Geoffry. You've got to get into the habit of calling me Geoffry."

  She ran a finger over the triangular shaped broach. The arrowhead was warm to the touch from being inside his coat, next to his skin. "I'll call you what I want, in private," she told him. She looked up at him again. "Thank you." She could feel a lump rising in her throat. "It's the most precious gift I've ever received."

  "I made the arrowhead when I first went to the colonies. It took me all damned winter and then it wasn't good enough to go on the shaft of an arrow."

  "It's the most beautiful piece of jewelry I've ever owned," she marveled, still fascinated by the way the light played between the brilliantly clear diamonds and the shiny black stone. "Thank you."

  He winked at her and went out the door. "See you at the ball, my lady."

  "At the ball, my lord."

  "My lady, will you be needing help with your gown now?" the maid in the doorway asked. "The mistress, your mother, sent me to tend to you."

  "Yes, come in," Alexandra nodded. "I'm ready to be dressed." She squeezed the brooch in her hand, thinking to herself, the sooner this is over, the sooner I can get away from here and return to Dunnon Castle with Hunter.

  Not half an hour later Alexandra came down the grand staircase of her father's home. The Earl of Monthrop, wearing a leopard's mask, met her at the bottom. She was dressed in a scarlet red gown with an embroidered linen stomacher with gold cord lacing. Around her neck she wore a ribbon of red velvet with Hunter's brooch at the pulse of her throat. On her head she wore a red and white Shawnee headdress with feathers dangling down her back. Her papier-mâché mask was painted bronze in the face of a sleeping Shawnee maiden, the marking of Hunter's adopted family painted across one cheek.

  "God's bowels, Daughter. Where did you get that contraption?" her father asked, staring at her headdress in disgust. "Where's the unicorn mask and headdress I had sent up last night?"

  Alexandra was smiling beneath the mask she'd secretly had made. "You don't like it, Father?" She nodded to the Earl and Countess of something, old friends of her parents.

  "It's not that I don't like it." He took her arm and led her toward the ballroom. "I just don't know that it's appropriate."

  "Has Geoffry come down?"

  "I haven't seen him. Your mother said he was late. She was concerned he wouldn't make it on time. The redman is here. He was one of the first guests to arrive."

  "Jon? Where?"

  "Gaming tables, I believe. Wearing an orange wig with the mask of a buffoon."

  Alexandra laughed.

  Her father led her into the bright white crystal chandelier light of the ballroom. The music of French horns and violins filled the large, opulent room. Laughter, voices, and the clink of glasses mingled. There were more than two hundred guests present, all dressed in their finest, and wearing masks.

  An ancient Greek couple fluttered by, calling a greeting. The Earl of Monthrop spoke, Alexandra smiled behind her mask and nodded. As she walked beside her father, speaking pleasantly with guests, she looked for Hunter. He hadn't said what he would be wearing. She knew she'd recognize him immediately, but she was anxious to see who he would come as.

  Alexandra's mother came bustling after Alexandra and her father. "Heavens to handmaidens, where did you get that apparatus on your head, Daughter? Where's the horned headdress?" She considered her daughter from head to toe. "Didn't you like the lavender and pink ribbons? I had it made to go with the lavender gown which you're not wearing either, I can see."

  Alexandra glanced at her mother, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Her mother was wearing hundreds of yellow false curls that covered her head in a halo. Her mask was that of a young girl's face with round rouged cheeks and a perfect little red mouth. The costume was not becoming.

  "You don't like my feathers?" Alexandra tugged at the train of dyed red and white feathers that trailed down her back.

  Her mother's eyes widened behind her mask. "And where did you get that hideous brooch, child?" She reached out to touch it, but Alexandra drew back. "It was a gift, Mother." She smiled to both of her parents, curtsying. "If you'll excuse me, I'll start greeting everyone. If you see Geoffry, tell him I'm looking for him."

  Before her mother could speak again,
Alexandra sailed off. She was already hot beneath her mask, but she liked it. She liked the feel of the feathers on her back.

  "A Shawnee maiden! Is she in need of rescuing yet again?"

  Alexandra turned to see a buffoon in an orange wig and matching coat and breeches, the breeches so tight she doubted he could bend if his life depended upon it. "Jon." She laughed, leaning to kiss the only part of his skin that remained bare, the line of his jawbone. "Don't you look the fool!"

  "No more than I am. Have you seen my merry grig?"

  "Hunter? No."

  "God's teeth, Alex. Can't you remember the man's name. It's Geoffry—very soon to be the Earl of Dunnon, I fear."

  Alexandra looked up at Jon. "Yes, he told me the earl is worse. I'm sorry."

  She saw him smile sadly behind his mask. "He's lived a good life. He was a good man. He treated me like a son, better. If there's a God, and indeed a heaven, I'm certain that's where he'll go."

  Alexandra looped her arm through Jon's. "Come with me and we'll make some introductions. Try not to cause a scene, will you? I promised my mother."

  He patted her hand, his laughter mixing with hers. "No matter how intoxicated I get, I swear I won't strip naked, don Lady Warner's shift, and dance on top of the spinet. Fair enough?"

  "Fair enough."

  So arm and arm they made their way around the ballroom, speaking to old acquaintances and making introductions. Manservants in silver and green livery served goblets of French champagne and trays of sweetmeats. Alexandra had just finished her second glass of champagne when someone walked up behind her and laid a possessive hand on her shoulder.

  "A dance, my lady?"

  She turned around to see Hunter staring at her through a mask that looked much like her own. She smiled up at him, delighted that they had both had the same idea, that their hearts were both in the same place. "A Shawnee."

  "Supposed to be a medicine man but the maskmaker had his own ideas." He tugged at the two black feathers that fell from the mask to dangle at one cheek.

  She slipped her hand into his. "I've been introducing Jon to all my relatives. Everyone thinks he's you."