Ryan could not breathe. His chest felt as if there were metal bands molded around it, with screws being tightened inch by inch so that the flesh and blood and muscle was all forced upward into his throat. Beside him, Amanda felt the tension ripple through his body. If it was true, if Wainright now held the notes on Rosalie, he could and would demand repayment in cash—cash they simply did not have.
Horace Jackson had indeed done them a favor by extending credit on a mere signature, and not all because he was a father-in-law and friend to the Courtlands. He was also a loyal and fervent supporter of the Confederate cause, and if any of the big plantation owners needed cash to supplement their efforts toward supplying the war machine, he gave it freely and without question.
Horace Jackson had let sentiment interfere with sound business practices—something Wainright was obviously not going to be guilty of doing. He would take Rosalie from them if he could. Any way that he could.
Some of what she was thinking must have been swimming in her eyes, for Wainright’s smile took on a sardonic curve. “If nothing else, your husband and father-in-law both died believing they had helped your cause. Passion, however, has never made a businessman much profit.”
“Why, you bastard—” Ryan started forward, all but dragging Amanda with him since she refused to let go of his arm. It was only this added weight, along with her sharp cry, that prevented him from launching himself off the edge of the veranda and going for Wainright’s throat.
“Ryan! No!”
“Let me go! Let me at the son of a bitch!”
“What good will it do? He has the note! He has all the thieving Yankee carpetbaggers on his side!”
Ryan’s mouth was white, his eyes blazed with a murderous rage, and E. Forrest Wainright was enjoying the experience immensely.
“I have been advised,” he said calmly, “that I may give you thirty days’ notice of intent. If, within that time, you fail to repay the entire amount outstanding, the house and the land it sits on will be forfeit.”
“Thirty days!” Ryan surged against the pressure of Amanda’s hands, and she was forced to step in front of him to keep him from flying down the stairs.
“Surely,” she cried, asserting her own appeal, “it would not be too great of an imposition for you to at least honor the original terms of the loan! Six months cannot mean much to a man of your position and means, whereas six months to us could be the difference between surviving and losing everything.”
“Which is exactly what he is counting on,” Ryan spat past her ear.
“A gentleman”—she paused long enough to put the proper importance on the word—“would do nothing less than honor the agreement.”
“My dear Mrs. Jackson.” The burnt umber of Wainright’s eyes glittered maliciously. “As a gentleman, I have offered a fair price for this land in the past. The offer still stands if your brother chooses to accept it, and if he has the business acumen to walk away from this situation with enough cash in his pocket to begin again. If not, if he is too stubborn to sell outright, and if in thirty days he does not appear before me with fifty thousand dollars in hand, then it is his conscience, not mine, that will suffer from his obstinacy.”
“Is there no way to change your mind?” Amanda asked, horrified.
The glowing eyes raked down the length of her body and a smile twisted the corners of his mouth. “There are always ways,” he murmured. “A husband, for instance, would never see his wife’s family turned out into the street.”
Ryan’s voice was brittle enough to shatter. “I would burn this house down and poison every acre we own before I would see my sister married to you, Wainright. Now get off my land or by Christ I’ll see you grinning in hell.”
Wainright’s smirk flattened marginally in response to the threat, but his eyes never left Amanda’s face as he settled his hat firmly on his head and walked back down the steps. At the bottom, reins in hand, he gave the house and surrounding land a last lingering look that suggested it was only a matter of time before they were his.
“Thirty days,” he reiterated. “One way or another.”
Amanda was shivering visibly by the time Wainright was swallowed into the fog again. Ryan had his arm around her shoulders, but it did little in the way of offering her comfort or reassurances.
“What are we going to do?” she asked in a whisper.
“I don’t know. I need time to think.”
“We don’t have time. And what is there to think about? He owns the notes. He intends to foreclose. Perhaps … maybe if we spoke to Father about it?”
“What good would that do?” Ryan blurted out angrily. “He thinks the stables are still full of horses and the fields are still ripe with cotton. He can barely keep the days of the week straight anymore, and when he sits out here in the mornings, he still nods and chats to invisible slaves as they go off to work the farm. He’s in another world, Mandy. A better world. A world he knew and loved and felt safe in.”
Amanda bit her lip and started to pull out of his embrace. She turned her face so he would not see the wetness brimming along her lashes, and found she had to cover herself again, for Sarah Courtland was bustling around the side of the house, her face flushed from hurrying, her hair flying out like soft gray wings from beneath the rim of her bonnet.
Trailing in her wake, her own oversized bonnet askew over one blue eye, Verity Jackson was struggling valiantly to maintain the balance of the huge wicker basket she was clutching in both hands. Her tongue was thrust out of the corner of her mouth in grim determination. Her cheeks were pink and puffed up with air, and her little feet were tangling over each other as she scuffled side to side on the path. In the basket were a handful of scrawny, underdeveloped carrots and onions still covered in black mud from the garden—a good deal of which was streaked down the front of the child’s pinafore.
Ryan smiled despite himself as he went down the stairs and relieved his niece of her terrible burden. “Heavens above, you didn’t carry this all the way from the garden by yourself, did you?”
Verity looked up at her uncle’s great height and shoved at the brim of the drooping bonnet. She was an exact replica of her mother at that age, with a bow-shaped mouth and enormous cornflower-blue eyes that seemed to fill her whole face. Her long blonde hair had been properly braided earlier in the morning, but with the strain of playing and gardening, and the constant worrying of the bonnet, it looked as if it hadn’t been brushed in days.
She giggled at Ryan as he pretended to groan under the weight of the basket.
“Dear me,” Sarah fretted. “I thought I heard a horse and wondered if your Mr. Brice had come early. I said to Verity, ’My word, but Mr. Brice must have come early,’ didn’t I, child? but then I said, ’No. No, it could not be Mr. Brice, for it has barely gone noon and he would have to be dreadfully eager to have come out in all this wretched fog.’ It wasn’t Mr. Brice, was it?” she asked, peering into the settling mist.
“No, Mother,” Amanda replied. “It was not Mr. Brice.”
“Well, who was it then?” Sarah demanded, her gaze having found a fresh pile of steaming horse dung. “Who on earth would visit at this time of day and why did you not invite whoever it was to sit for a cup of coffee or a cool glass of water? Surely to goodness we haven’t forsaken all of our manners!”
She glared expectantly at her son and daughter and Amanda sighed, knowing there would be no putting her off.
“It was Mr. Wainright, Mother, and he wasn’t visiting, he was just … consulting Ryan on a business matter.”
“Wainright?” Sarah frowned, trying to place the name. “Wainright? Not that dreadful man with overlapping teeth and eyes that go their own separate ways? Well, thank goodness he didn’t stay then, for I declare it exhausts me just trying to figure out which eye to talk to.”
Amanda and Ryan exchanged a glance, but neither one made any effort to correct Sarah’s identification. Ryan offered his mother his hand to help her up the last two steps, then passed
her into Amanda’s care.
“If the three most beautiful ladies in Adams County will excuse me now, I have some chores to tend to down at the barn. Mandy—try to smile a little. It might help to bring out the sunshine.”
Sarah presented her upturned cheek for his kiss and nodded in agreement. “Indeed, yes. It wouldn’t do to look so glum when your Mr. Brice arrives. It wouldn’t do at all.”
Amanda attempted a half-hearted smile, but her thoughts were with Ryan as he headed along the path toward the ruins of the slave quarters, half of which now served as stables for their livestock. His shoulders were squared and his stride was firm, but his hands were shoved deep in his pockets and balled into tight fists.
Fifty thousand dollars in thirty days. No one had that kind of money. No one but Yankee speculators and the vultures appointed by the government whose job, it seemed, was to drive every honest Southern family to the brink of ruin.
She thought again of Wainright’s marriage proposal and shuddered. It would resolve all of their problems, certainly, but was it something she could actually go through with? The narrowed, glittering eyes and spidery thin white hands made her flesh shrink just to imagine waking to them each morning and submitting to them each night. She had felt weak with relief at Ryan’s adamant refusal even to consider allowing the unholy alliance, but in thirty days’ time, they might be left with no other alternative.
CHAPTER FIVE
Joshua Brice was not the most lively conversationalist at the best of times, and certainly not when the topics centered around flowers or hats or precisely which shade of yellow velvet would most likely flatter the peach moiré gown Sarah Courtland would be wearing to her daughter’s wedding.
Alisha was doing it deliberately, he had no doubt, chattering on and on about who was wearing what and bemoaning the fact that several crucial articles were still missing from her trousseau. To her credit, she acted as if he were not even present in the room when she declared she had so many things to do, she simply had to go into Natchez the following morning, and, if the strain of a full day’s worth of running from store to store was as telling as it had been in the past, she would be best off staying the night with her dearest friend, Olivia Ward.
Sarah had initially protested, which was how they ended up talking about hats or, more specifically, the cunning little yellow bonnet Alisha had ordered for her mother on her last trip into town, intending it as a surprise.
Josh hoped he smiled in all the right places and made the appropriate sounds of approval when his opinions were called upon. His hands shook only a little and his palms were only moderately clammy. He should have been used to Alisha’s games by now, he supposed—her feigning an almost rude disinterest in him in front of the rest of the family—but after last night … after the passion and the wildness and the pleasure … half the time he couldn’t hear what they were saying over the incessant pounding of his own heartbeat.
Making matters worse, he felt like a complete fool balancing a delicate cup and saucer on his knee while the sweat gathered between his shoulder blades and poured in rivulets down his back. The jacket he wore belonged to his brother and fit snugly across the shoulders—not as snugly as his breeches each and every time he risked a glance at Alisha and watched the way her tongue glided across her lips to moisten them. He was sure she knew whenever his eyes were on her, certain she exaggerated the need to keep her lips so shiny or mold them so deliberately into a soft, seductive pout.
Thankfully, no one else appeared to notice his discomfort. Sarah Courtland was too distracted by the thought of a new bonnet, and Amanda …
Amanda looked as uncomfortable and miserable as he to be there, not touching her tea at all or even pretending to follow the conversation. Normally she was the one to suggest an escape from the clutches of such civility, but today she seemed distracted and it fell on Josh’s shoulders finally to ask if she might want to take a stroll outside with him.
“I understand Ryan’s mare is in foal.”
“Yes indeed,” Sarah replied, breaking briefly away from an exchange with Alisha. “And we are all quite proud of the coming event. It will be the first birthing since the war.”
Once renowned for breeding the best horseflesh south of Kentucky, the stables of Rosalie had been emptied in order to supply the Confederate cavalry with every advantage of speed and stamina. Upward of three hundred of Ryan’s pride and joy, his Thoroughbreds, had been sent onto the battlefields, and he had come home to find one stallion and two mares strapped in front of plows, all three half starved and near crippled.
“Ryan will fill the stables again in no time,” Josh predicted as he walked by Amanda’s side, his hand cradling her elbow. “Hell, he and your pa started out with a handful of knock-kneed breeders. All he needs is a turn of good luck.”
“Luck,” Amanda said wryly. “And a few thousand spare dollars to rebuild the stables, buy stock, and purchase the oats and hay to feed them.”
They lapsed into silence again as they cut through the garden . Josh felt more than a small twinge of alarm as they approached the summerhouse and he tried to hasten his steps to carry them past before Amanda noticed the white lace handkerchief snagged on a broken spar of the railing.
Amanda did just the opposite, however, slowing when they came abreast of the once-elegant structure and stopping altogether before they reached the fork in the path that would take them in the direction of the slave quarters. She was feeling foolish and awkward, not because she had seen any flapping white squares of lace, but because she had suddenly become very conscious of Josh’s hand on her arm. The encounter with Wainright was still raw in her mind. The cloyingly sweet odor of the hair oil he used came to her as freshly as if the Yankee’s narrow face were still before her.
But beside her, smelling of nothing more threatening than sunshine and hard work, was Joshua Brice. His lean handsomeness was as familiar and warming as a slow fire on a cool evening, and, as she looked up at his clean, strong features, she wondered why she had had any doubts at all that Josh could make her happy.
“Josh—?”
His head jerked around and he frowned. “Mmmm? Sorry, I must have … ah, drifted there for a minute. Did you want to ask me something?”
She looked down at the path and kicked at a pebble. “No. No, not really.”
“Well, I want to ask you something,” he said softly.
Amanda held her breath. “Yes?”
“Do you remember”—a grin spread across his face and he tilted his head in the direction of the river—“the night Stephen, Evan, Caleb, and I snuck out of a Christmas party your folks were throwing? We sat here and shared our first full jug of whiskey together, drinking until we couldn’t hardly stand, then caught the bright idea of going on down to the jetty and sailing a boat all the way to New Orleans.”
Amanda laughed. “I remember. The current was stronger than you counted on and Evan fell overboard. He sobered up enough to come tell Father where you had gone, but they still had to ride nearly twenty miles before they could get a line to you and drag you ashore.”
“Christ, our butts were red-raw for a week after that.” He turned, his hands shoved into his pockets, a lock of brown hair fallen over his brow. “The four of us were always getting into one sort of trouble or another together. We went to the same schools, got expelled the same number of times for the same reasons, fell in love with the same women … even managed to ride in the same unit for a while. Damn,” he added in a whisper, “but I miss them. It’s like someone cut off both my arms and a leg, and I just can’t seem to find my balance anymore.”
Amanda caught her lip between her teeth. “I know exactly how you feel. You and Caleb were as much a part of this family as any of us.”
“Yeah, well, Caleb was the smart one. He made it official. He said it came over him all sudden-like, that you weren’t the yellow-haired brat with big blue eyes who used to follow us around with dirt on her face and holes in her smock. You’d grown up when we were
n’t looking and he worried himself into a lather every night thinking someone else might have noticed too.”
Amanda shook her head. “He shouldn’t have worried; no one did. Or if they did, it was only because Alisha set their heads in a spin and they figured one twin was as good as the other.”
Josh stiffened perceptibly and she hastened to add “I didn’t mean to sound catty. It’s just that … Alisha has always seemed to know what she wanted, what was out there waiting for her, what she could expect to find around every corner. And if it wasn’t there, she knew how to go out and get it. She still does.”
“Amanda—” Josh placed his hands on her shoulders, but in the next breath, the words died in his throat and all he could see was the startling blue of her eyes, the tempting softness of her mouth. Alisha’s eyes. Alisha’s mouth. And it was Alisha’s hand that lifted and rested lightly on his chest.
“What a terribly serious expression, Mr. Brice. What can you be thinking about?”
“I’m thinking … Caleb was a mighty smart man.”
Amanda felt a small thrill spiral through the length of her body. She was conscious of the breadth of his shoulders and the muscular leanness of his waist and thighs. His jade-green eyes were like a second pair of hands, warm and soft and sensual as they caressed her temples, her cheeks, her lips. A stronger wave of light-headedness, tinged with impatience, coursed through her, and she swayed even closer, wondering why it was taking him so long to see that she wanted to be kissed. The thought had startled her, to be sure, but now it was there, forthright and urgent, and she wanted more than anything to be gathered into his strong arms and told that everything was going to be all right.
Josh felt the gap closing between them. The liquid, pulsing heat in his belly refused to subside. His eyes remained intent upon her face … Amanda’s face … Alisha’s face. They shared the same flawless complexion, warm as velvet, smooth as fresh cream. Their eyes were the same evocative shape—wide and slightly uptilted, surrounded by the same thick fringe of lashes. Their bodies were equally lithe and seductive He knew exactly what lay beneath the thin layer of lavender muslin, knew the shape and firmness of her breasts, knew they would be rose-tipped and succulent …
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