Days of Gold

by Jude Deveraux

  “Nothing,” he said as he moved to sit up on the foot of the bed. “I came here to see how you are. How is this woman treating you?”

  “Harriet?”

  “Aye, that’s her name. The old spinster.”

  “Don’t call her that! She’s a good woman. She’s been very kind to me, and we spend a lot of time together.”

  “So you like her?”

  “Very much.” When Edilean reached out her hands to him, he took them in his and looked at them in the pale light of the room. “Something is wrong. Why are you here? Why aren’t you in Virginia?”

  “I liked it here, that’s all,” he said, still holding her hands and looking at them. “I’d almost forgotten that hands as small and soft as yours exist.”

  He was wearing James’s clothes without the jacket, but she could see that something was different. “I want to know what’s wrong.”

  “Nothing,” he said loudly, then glanced at the door. “Where is she?”

  “Don’t worry. Harriet sleeps like a dead person. She wouldn’t hear us even if we started making love.”

  Angus dropped her hands. “You say that as though you know what it means.”

  “I’ve had enough suggestion of it that I should know,” she said with a grimace.

  “And what does that mean?”

  “What do you think it means but that every man in this country wants to marry me, that’s what. I’ve had old men, young men, short, fat, never wed, widowed, you name it, they’ve all come to visit me and try their hand at winning me.”

  Angus leaned back against the bedpost, his long legs across the bed. “And which one of them do you want?”

  “None,” she said, but when she saw his smile, she changed her mind about telling the truth. “There have been a few who’ve enticed me. Some of them are quite elegant gentlemen.”

  “But you’ve said yes to none of them?”

  “What are you up to? Did you come here to ask me to marry you?” Smiling, he got off the bed and walked about the room. “I never left Boston, and I’ve heard about you. You’re causing quite a stir with the men in this town. A rich young beauty with a fine house. Yes, you’re setting this town on its ear.”

  “What do you mean you haven’t left Boston?”

  He sat down in the chair beside the bed. “I didn’t come to talk about me. I want to know about you. What have you been doing? How do you get along with Harcourt’s sister?”

  “I already told you that she’s a good woman.” She was looking at him hard, studying him. Something was very wrong but she couldn’t figure out what it was. “Have you lost weight? You look on the thin side.”

  “I’ve had no woman to make sure I eat,” he said, smiling. She was in her nightclothes and he’d never seen anything more beautiful in his life.

  “Angus,” she whispered, then pulled the corner of the bedclothes back a bit in invitation.

  “You’re a she-devil,” he said. “Now stop tempting me. I plan to leave this city tomorrow and I wanted to say good-bye, and I wanted to hear from you that you’re all right.”

  “Yes, I’m...” She closed her mouth and looked at her hands for a moment before meeting his eyes. “No! I’m not going to lie. I’m bored to the point of insanity! Oh, Angus, these men... They’re all so very boring. Sometimes I think I’m going out of my mind with the sheer tedium of them. They either try to impress me with their great education or they talk to me about their crops.”

  “They can read, then?” he asked, smiling.

  “So much so that I sometimes wish they couldn’t. They think to court me with poems or serenades. They think that if they read to me in Latin that I’ll look at them with love.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “Not hardly,” she said, waving her hand in dismissal. “Please tell me what you’ve been doing. I’ve missed you so much.”

  “Have you?” he said. “I’ve—” He didn’t want to tell her how he’d thought of her every day. He’d been unable to pry himself away from the city where she was. Every time he tried to make himself leave for Virginia, he couldn’t do it. There was rarely a night when he didn’t stand in the street and look up at her window. He knew when she blew out the lamp and knew the nights when she stayed out late.

  “How’s Tabitha?” Edilean asked, the name like a curse in her mouth.

  “Fine. We’re to be married tomorrow before we leave for Virginia.”

  Edilean’s eyes opened so wide her skin almost cracked.

  “Oh, lass, I’ve missed you too! I’ve not seen Tabitha since we got off the ship. We said farewell”—he didn’t say how “fond” Tabitha made it—“then she slipped away. For all I know, she may have married someone else by now.”

  “Whatever she did, you can bet that it wasn’t good.”

  “What made you hate her so? Because I danced with her?”

  “She has no morals.”

  “That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?”

  “I couldn’t care less about her. Are you really leaving for Virginia tomorrow?”

  “Aye, I am. I have a wagon loaded and ready and a couple of good horses.”

  “And what will you do when you get there?”

  “Buy land. Build a house.”

  “In Williamsburg?” she asked.

  “I can’t bear a city, you know that. This Boston is too loud for me, and there are too many people. I like a place where I know everyone.”

  “Like in Scotland,” she said softly.

  He shrugged. “It’s what I know. And what about you? What do you want? Besides a man who doesn’t bore you, that is?”

  “I don’t know.” She threw back the covers, got out of bed, and reached for a dressing gown on the chest by the foot of the bed. But she didn’t pick it up. No, she’d rather walk around in just her nightclothes in front of him. “When I was in England I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life, but here it’s different. I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s all the sunshine, or—”

  “The sweltering heat,” he said. “I can hardly bear to wear clothes it’s so hot.”

  “I hear that it’ll get hotter,” she said and took a step toward him. He was sitting in the chair and she was standing, with just her nightgown on, with not a stitch beneath it. “And it’s hotter in Virginia than it is here.”

  “I imagine I’ll get used to it.”

  She moved closer to him.

  “What are you playing at?” He frowned at her. “I don’t think I should have come.”

  “Angus...” she began. “I want to go with—”

  “Don’t say it,” he said as he abruptly stood up. “Don’t ask of me what I canna give.”

  “Please,” she said. “When I’m with you I feel alive and full of energy, as though I could plan things and accomplish them. Here in this house I feel my life is the same as it would have been in England.”

  “And wasn’t it enough for you then?”

  “Perfectly, but then I knew no better. I had no idea that there was more out there.” He had his back to the window and she took a step toward him.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying. You lived in those boarding schools with other girls. You’ve not seen how it is with a man and woman when they live together.”

  “I’d like to hear all about it,” she said. “You could tell me. Or show me.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders and held her away from him. “Lass, please believe me when I tell you that what you think you want canna be. You want me to be something that I’m not.”

  She shook his hands off her shoulders, and turned away from him. “So we’re back to that, are we? You’ve led a life of hardship while I’ve been pampered all my life.”

  “More or less,” he said.

  “Are you laughing at me again?”

  “I usually do, don’t I?”

  She smiled. “Yes, you do. And you make me laugh at myself.” She sat down hard on the edge of the bed. “Oh, Angus, what am I going to do with my life?
”

  “Marry some nice man and have a hundred babies,” he said, even though a lump formed in his throat as he said it. They wouldn’t be his babies. She was sitting on the side of the bed, and all he’d have to do was gently push her backward. He ran his hand over his face. “I shouldn’t have come here tonight.”

  “Shall I send you an invitation to my wedding?” she asked and there was anger in her voice.

  “No,” he said softly. “I don’t think I could stand that.”

  She looked up at him and saw the longing in his eyes. In one motion she went to him, stood on tiptoe, and put her arms around his neck. “Hold me. Just once, hold me as though you don’t think of me as a childish nuisance. Pretend I’m Tabitha and hold me as you would her.”

  He ran his hands over her hair, which was hanging down her back in fat waves. It gleamed in the lamplight. “This is the gold you own that I like,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. He picked up a tendril of her hair and held it to his nose, then to his lips. “Those men are fools if they don’t make you laugh, if they don’t throw you across a horse and run away with you.”

  “Will you do that with me?” she asked, looking up at him, her eyes on his lips.

  “I canna,” he said, his accent heavy.

  “Why?” she demanded even as she moved her hips close to him. “Sometimes it seems that every man in this city wants me, but none of them interest me, and you know why?”

  “No,” he said as he put his cheek against her hair. “Why are you not in love with one of those fancy young bucks I’ve seen go in and out of this house?”

  “Because I compare them all to you and find them wanting.”

  “Me?” he asked, smiling down at her as his hand stroked her hair, then her cheek. “They’re men who’ve been raised as you have, who know what you do. What don’t they have that I do?”

  “What would one of them do if he found a woman in a coffin in the back of his wagon?”

  Angus laughed in a way that she could feel as she pressed her breasts against his chest. “For one thing, they wouldn’t be driving a wagon themselves. They’d pay someone else to do it.”

  “My point exactly,” she said. “Angus, you don’t understand that I love you.”

  “Don’t say that.” He dropped his hand from her hair. “You don’t mean that.”

  “I do mean it. And don’t tell me I don’t know what love is. People are born knowing what love is. Even the people who’ve never had it know when it’s missing from their lives.”

  “You’re young and you—”

  “So are you. To hear you talk, you’d think you were an old man, but you’re young, with your whole life before you. I want to go with you. I want to share your life. I want to—”

  He pulled her arms from around his neck and his face lost its humor. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You’re in love with what you think I am. In your mind I’m a... a...”

  “A romantic Scotsman?” she said, her arms at her sides, her fists clenched. She’d just told him she loved him, but he was telling her she didn’t. “Do you think I see you as something out of a novel, a man with no faults?”

  “I think—”

  She didn’t let him finish his sentence. “I know what you’re like. I know you better than you think I do. You’re stubborn beyond all imagining. Even now when you have the offer of the love of a woman who is rich and not bad to look at, you’re so damned stubborn that you won’t take her up on her offer.

  “And you have an awful temper,” she continued. “You take out your anger at other things on me. You like to tease, but when you’re teased in return, that magnificent pride of yours makes your whole body turn into marble. You freeze, with your backbone rigid, and your face shows me that I have dared to make light of the McTern of McTern.”

  “If you find so much fault with me, I canna see what you’d want with a man like me.”

  “There!” she said. “Look at you. You climb up a wall to sneak into my bedroom, lounge about on my bed until I’m mad with desire for you, but when I tell you I love you, you tell me I’m too much of a child to know what love is. And now you are getting angry at me! You’re not only an uneducated man, you’re a stupid one too. Go on, get out of here! Jump out the window. Run off to Virginia and—”

  She broke off because he pulled her into his arms and put his mouth to hers. Edilean would have said that she was knowledgeable in kissing, as it had been a favorite pastime of hers when she’d visited the country houses of her schoolmates, but those schoolgirl kisses were not like the one Angus gave her.

  His kiss wasn’t gentle, and it wasn’t light. It was filled with all the longing and pent-up desire that he’d felt from the moment he’d first seen her. Since the courtyard in Scotland, when she’d made a fool of him in front of everyone, he’d wanted her. During their weeks of being in the same room together on the ship, she’d driven him mad with desire. A glimpse of her hand as it pushed a golden strand of hair behind her ear would make him want her so much that he’d had to leave the cabin and go on deck.

  At first he kissed her with his mouth closed, but when she pressed her body fully against his and went limp so that her whole weight was in his arms, he opened his mouth. When his tongue touched hers, she gave a little moan that sent the blood coursing through his body.

  When her legs gave way under her, he lifted her and carried her the few steps to the bed. He’d seen her in bed many times, and always, he’d wanted to lie beside her, to hold her, to touch her. There were nights when he lay in his hammock and just looked at her, watching her sleep. He knew every little sound she made—and loved all of them.

  His kiss deepened and her body became more pliant as he stretched out beside her. Her leg went over his hips, and his hand went under her gown and up her bare leg, her thigh, then over her round little bottom.

  “Edilean,” he whispered as he kissed her neck, her cheeks, all the places on her beautiful face that he’d so longed to touch.

  “Yes,” she said. “Do with me what you will.”

  Angus groaned at her words. He’d never known that you could want a person as much as he wanted her. As her gown went up, she moved her body even closer to his.

  “Make love to me,” she whispered. “Please. I’ve desired you for so very long.”

  “As I have you,” he whispered, kissing her bare shoulder as the nightdress slipped to one side. One hand was buried in her soft, fragrant hair and the other was under her gown on her smooth, perfect skin.

  She was kissing his face and he groaned with the joy of it. Her breath was so warm, so sweet.

  He kissed her lips again, and as her hands wandered over his body, his voice caught in his throat.

  “Make love to me tonight,” she said again. “And tomorrow we’ll be married and leave for Virginia.”

  “Mmmm,” was all he could say as her lips moved down over his chest, and her soft hands made their way under his shirt. His head was back and he couldn’t think clearly, but somehow, a word made its way to his brain.

  “Married?” he whispered.

  “Yes, married.” She brought her mouth back up to his neck.

  “No,” he said, and gave her a push. When he looked at her, he groaned again. Edilean in a parlor drinking tea was a beautiful sight, but this woman with her hair spread about her bare shoulders and her eyes half closed with desire and passion was more than he’d ever dreamed about.

  But he could not let this go on. He couldn’t bear to see that love turn to hatred. He couldn’t bear to give her what she thought she wanted, then later see her look at him with contempt and disgust. No, he’d rather go away with this image of her in his mind and live with it for the rest of his life than to ever see her look at him with hatred.

  “I canna,” he said. “You’re not for me and I’ll not defile you.”

  In just a few seconds, he’d pushed away from her and then he was gone, out the second-story window, and down the way he’d come in.

  It to
ok Edilean minutes to come out of the pool of ecstasy she’d been in to realize that the man she loved was gone. She’d offered him not only her body, but her love and her life as well. And he had left her! He’d refused all that she’d offered him.

  Before she could fully realize what had happened, the door to her bedroom opened and there was Harriet, her hair covered in a nightcap, a dressing gown over her white cotton nightdress, and she was holding a candle.

  “He’s gone,” Harriet said, looking at Edilean lying on the bed, her eyes still showing her desire, but there was something else coming into them as she was fully realizing that Angus had again left her.

  “He’s gone,” Harriet repeated as she put the candle down, sat on the bed beside Edilean, and pulled her nightgown down over her hip.

  “He left me,” Edilean whispered, her eyes wide in disbelief. “I told him I loved him and he ran away.”

  “I know,” Harriet said.

  “You don’t know; you can’t know.”

  “I do,” Harriet said. “When I was your age I was in love with a young man, but after he talked to my father and found out I had no fortune, he left me too. I know what it is to love and lose.”

  “But I have money,” Edilean said in wonder. “He left me because...” She looked up at Harriet. “I don’t know why he left me. I don’t know why he doesn’t love me as I do him.” As she said these words, the tears began to come.

  Harriet opened her arms, Edilean went to her, and she began to cry in earnest.

  “I love him,” she said. “I love him but he didn’t believe me. He thinks I don’t know him but I do. I know him well.”

  Harriet would never tell Edilean, but she’d heard every word of what had happened. She hadn’t been able to sleep, and from her room on the second floor of the house, she’d heard someone outside. She got up to go to Edilean and warn her, but then she’d heard their first words, and she knew who it was. It was the man from the ship. She’d asked Edilean about him, but she’d just waved her hand and said he was someone she’d met. He wasn’t important. Harriet hadn’t been fooled. She knew Edilean was in love with the young man. And as the days passed and Edilean found all the men she met to be “boring,” Harriet knew for sure that Edilean was in love with someone else—and she guessed it was the man from the ship.