“Will you take the money to him?” she asked hopefully.
“What?” It required some fierce concentration for Josh to focus on the question. “What did you say?”
“I know it’s a terrible imposition, but will you deliver the money to Wainright?”
“You won tonight?”
In lieu of answering, she crossed over to the bundle of stained velvet and linen and rifled through the cast-off petticoats until she found the slitted opening of the pockets sewn into the side seams. She started pulling out money— stacks of it, bundles of it, folded sheafs that she tossed on the bed in an untidy heap. In a final gesture, she opened the drawstring of her reticule and poured out a glittering stream of gold double eagle coins.
“Christ on a cross,” Josh muttered. “How much?”
“Seventy-two thousand, thereabouts. Fifty of it is Wainright’s. He doesn’t deserve it, of course, but I’ll be buying the ease of my conscience. I will have done my sordid little part. If he wants more, he will have to get it from Alisha … or her husband. Will you do it? Will you take it to him for me?”
“If you’re sure you want me to, but—” He stopped and saw the desperate plea in her eyes. “Of course I will. I promised, didn’t I?”
“Thank you, Josh. Thank you for being such a good friend … to Caleb and to me.”
He smiled grimly and was relieved when she turned her attention to the money again, counting out the twenty-two thousand she would need to make a clean break from Michael Tarrington. When she was fully dressed, cloaked and hooded against any chance recognition, Josh saw Amanda safely into a carriage and hurried back to the hotel room to clean away the last traces of her presence. He tucked the flat packets of money into his pockets, distributing the bundles evenly so there were no telltale bulges. He stuffed the green velvet gown and the petticoats into a pillowslip and descended to the ground floor of the hotel by way of the servants’ staircase. He walked the several blocks to his own hotel, a journey that brought him to the door just as the diamond-like jewel of the sun was rising over the eastern horizon.
He was sweating profusely as he mounted the wooden steps to his own dingy room. His heart was hammering within his chest, his mouth was dry, his hands would not stop shaking as he slotted the key into the lock.
Once inside, he thrust a finger between his throat and collar to ease the pressure. He stood with his back braced against the door as if he expected to hear a battery of fists on it at any moment.
There was only silence, however. A dark silence filled with the beating of his heart.
“Well?”
Josh jumped and whirled around. Alisha was lying on the bed, her body clad in a slippery red silk robe, her blonde hair spread across the pillows in a yellow pool.
“Well?” she asked again. “Did the little bitch do it?”
Josh forced his heart back down his throat and tore off his cravat. “What the hell are you doing here? How did you get away from Summitcrest?”
She sighed and stretched, letting the robe fall open across her bare legs. “I persuaded Karl to bring me into Natchez yesterday, and by the time I finished shopping, it was too late to make the drive back, so we took rooms at the Emporium.”
“Won’t he miss you?”
“Not unless he breaks down the lock to my room and finds I’m not there.” She purred and stretched again. “And he knows better than to disturb me until after I’ve had my beauty sleep.”
Josh moved away from the door and searched the cabinet for the bottle of whiskey he kept there.
“You don’t look very happy to see me.” Alisha pouted, curling her legs beneath her as she rose to her knees. The hazy morning light shimmered faintly over the silk-encased curves of her body, outlining the lush swell of her breasts.
Josh stood rooted to the spot, unable to command either his legs or his brain into a response. She smiled her cat’s smile and he could swear she was purring as she stepped off the bed and stalked slowly toward him.
“Joshua Brice,” she chided softly, her hands smoothing up his chest. “Joshua,” she murmured, and her lips sought the underside of his chin. “Josh,” she breathed, her arms falling briefly as she shrugged the red silk robe off her shoulders.
He closed his eyes. “Alisha—”
“Hush,” she insisted, her hands trailing up his thighs. “You have obviously had a long and arduous evening—my goodness, but we are tense. Perhaps we should take care of this before we go any further.”
She dropped down onto her knees and started to unfasten his trousers.
“Alisha …” he hissed, “dammit … stop!”
“Hush, I said. You’re my man, Joshua Brice, my only man, and if I can’t show you how much I love you … how much I love to love you …”
He swore again and looked down but he did not stop her. He was tense but not aroused, and he watched the stretched and moistened suppleness of her lips teasing his flesh, sliding with an economy of effort, a proficiency of skill that should have had him hard within seconds, but instead left him feeling cheap and disgusted.
“God,” he whispered. “You’ll do anything to get what you want, won’t you?”
Alisha pulled back in surprise. “Why, what a perfectly ungrateful thing to say. What on earth is wrong with you tonight?”
“Nothing,” he muttered. “Absolutely nothing. Go ahead, carry on with what you were doing. It would be a shame to waste such a wonderful and talented performance.”
Alisha’s brow darkened and she pushed away. “I am not your whore, Josh Brice. You have no right to speak to me this way.”
She stood and walked to where her clothes were draped across the footboard of the bed. She snatched up a petticoat, but turned to face him without making any move to cover her nudity.
“I gather she wasn’t successful? I didn’t believe for one minute the little bitch could do it. And I certainly didn’t believe half the stories I’d heard about the cunning and clever Montana Rose, let alone that she and Amanda were one and the same person.”
“Odd, then, that you were so damned convinced of it yesterday.”
“Yesterday I was upset. I told you Wainright wanted me to play on board the Queen, but I refused.”
“You told me a lot of things,” he said harshly. “Nothing that came anywhere near the truth, I would wager to guess.”
“Joshua!” Alisha dropped the petticoat and approached him again, her hands pressing flat against his chest, her eyes shining behind a silvery veil of tears. “Why are you so angry with me? Why are you being so cruel?”
“You don’t know? You have no idea?”
“No. I don’t.”
He searched her face for all of two seconds before he jerked away and walked to the wardrobe. He pulled his portmanteau down from the upper shelf and stuffed into it the single change of clothes he had hanging on the pegs.
“What are you doing?” she asked in a querulous voice.
“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m leaving.”
“Leaving the hotel?”
“The hotel, Natchez, maybe even Mississippi.”
“You’re leaving me?”
He glanced up at her. “You say that as if the thought never occurred to you. As if you assumed I would stay at your feet like a puppy, happy to lick your toes now and then, happy to be kicked out of the way when it didn’t suit you.”
“You’re speaking in riddles, Josh,” she said petulantly. “And you’re frightening me. Why do you want to leave? Are you tired of me? Is that it? Have you found someone else?”
He snapped the clasp on the portmanteau shut and sighed. “I’m leaving because it’s time to leave. Because I’m tired of the lies. Tired of losing little bits of myself every time I’m with you and tired of wondering who the hell I see in the mirror every morning.”
Alisha stared at him, her tears spilling artfully down her cheeks in constant, unbroken streams. “Lies? What lies have I told you? Or should I ask what lies Amanda has been tell
ing you? That’s it, isn’t it! She’s been telling you lies and you believe her!”
“Alisha, for God’s sake—” He lifted his case and started for the door but she ran in front of him, blocking his way.
“Oh Josh, please … please don’t leave me. Not now, not like this. I—” Her eyes widened. Her hands, grasping at the folds of his jacket, had come into contact with the bundles of money. Her eyes flicked from one pocket to the other, following her hands as they searched and found more bundles, more sheafs of hundred-dollar bills.
She inhaled sharply and raised her eyes to his. “My God, she won! She won tonight, didn’t she!”
“Yes,” he conceded with a grudging sigh. “She won.”
“And you weren’t going to tell me? You were just going to leave”—she gasped and stumbled back a step—“with her!”
“Alisha, don’t be absurd. If you must know, there was trouble on board the Queen tonight and Amanda gave me the money to deliver to Wainright.”
“She gave it to you? She just … handed it over?”
Josh reacted badly to the sarcasm in Alisha’s voice. “Yes. She gave it to me. I didn’t have to follow her. I didn’t have to wait until she’d given the money to Wainright to steal it away from him—though God only knows how you ever talked me into attempting such a foolish piece of insanity.”
“But we have the money!” she cried breathlessly, her hands searching greedily for more bundles. She tossed the bills on the bed behind her, scattering them across the mattress like rose petals. She laughed and dug her hands into the crinkly piles and tossed the greenbacks into the air, watching them flutter down over her head. “My God—how much is here? The whole fifty thousand? Josh … we’re rich! We’re rich!”
“The money isn’t ours,” he said quietly. “I told you, I was taking it to Wainright for Amanda.”
“Like hell you are,” she declared, the tears gone, the act already a memory. “She doesn’t need our help to pay off Mr. E. Fucking Wainright; she can just go to her rich husband and get all the money she needs.”
“All the money she needs? Exactly what is Wainright holding over her head?” he asked quietly.
“I told you it was a private matter. I really don’t think Amanda would want her disgrace bandied about by everyone.”
Josh moved closer to the bed. She was kneeling on the money, running her hands through the little piles, pouring handfuls of the Yankee greenbacks over her naked breasts, her hips, her thighs.
His jade green eyes scanned the curves and planes of Alisha’s body. The perfect breasts were perfect again, no longer glowing with burgeoning ripeness. The perfect waist was trim, the soft belly now bereft of its faint hint of plumpness.
He reached down and gripped the slender shoulders with enough force to startle a cry of pain from her lips.
“What was Wainright blackmailing her with?”
“He found out she was Montana Rose!” Alisha gasped. “Isn’t that enough? Do you have any idea what gossip like that could do to our family?”
“You didn’t seem overly concerned when it was you sneaking off to go gambling.”
“I didn’t care because I was doing it for us … for you!”
“Yes, and I begged you, pleaded with you to leave Natchez with me—”
“We didn’t have any money!” she countered furiously. “How far could we have gone? How could we have survived —you a farmer without a farm, me waddling around with a bastard inside me—” She sucked in her breath and her expression froze for a fleeting second when she saw the fire blaze into his eyes.
“Yes?” He snarled. “You were saying?”
“I … I meant … it could have happened,” she stammered. “I could have become pregnant. It happens, sometimes, you know when two people—”
“Happens? Could have happened?” His fingers gouged so deeply into her shoulders, the pain sent a flush of red into her cheeks. “What the hell have you done?”
“Wh-what do you mean?”
“Alisha … I know every curve of your whore’s body. I know when it changes. I knew when it changed. I was waiting for you to tell me, hoping it would make a difference—”
“You knew?” she whispered.
“I knew,” he spat. “And I guessed that was the real reason why you married von Helmstaad: to buy us time … us … you, me, and the child you couldn’t bring yourself to tell me was growing inside you. But it isn’t growing inside you anymore, is it?” His eyes narrowed to hard, glittering green shards of contempt and he shook her once, with enough violence to make her teeth snap together. “Is it, Alisha?”
She brought her hand up to his cheek, her fingers trembling with entreaty. “We can have more children Josh. Passles of them if you want. I never meant to hurt you or to deceive you. I never meant to hurt our child—I swear I didn’t. It … it was Karl. Karl! He tried to … to force himself on me and when I told him I was with child, he … he flew into a rage because I wouldn’t tell him the name of the father. He … tried to kill me. He beat me, and raped me, and … and I lost the baby.”
Josh stared at her, unmoved.
“Josh—you have to believe me. I swear it is the truth! I was so frightened, I didn’t know what to do. I tried to run but I was hurt and … and you were out of town. I was alone … and he just kept beating me and beating me, trying to get me to tell him whose baby it was.”
“He beat you?”
“Yes!”
“Is that why you went to see Wainright?”
She gasped again and he could actually see the lies hastily rearranging themselves behind her eyes. “I couldn’t very well go to see any of the doctors who knew me, could I? I could never have borne the shame. And Wainright was courting my sister at one time. I thought I could trust him.”
“I know Wainright. I know the kinds of services some of his friends provide—some of his doctor friends? I also know enough about Karl von Helmstaad to believe he wouldn’t swat a fly if it was chewing a trench in his arm. What I don’t know, what I am almost afraid to know, is exactly what lengths you would go to in order to maintain this little arrangement you so cleverly planned, with the baron’s home, his wealth, the comforts he could provide on the one hand … and the services of a blinded, dimwitted stud on the other.”
“No! No, Josh, no. You’re wrong!”
Josh’s hands tightened around her arms again. “Alisha— I’m coming damned close to beating you myself.”
With a sob of anguish she flung her arms around his neck and let the tears flow free again. “All right! All right! I’ll tell you what you want to know. I’ll tell you the absolute truth about what happened, but you mustn’t hate me if I do. You mustn’t hate me, Josh, swear it!”
“Just … tell me … the truth” he grated through his teeth.
“It was the Yankee,” she whispered against his throat. “It was the Yankee who raped me, not Karl. He lured me into the garden the night they stayed at Rosalie, and he … he threatened to kill me if I told anyone. Afterward … he was so rough … I knew something was terribly wrong, but … I couldn’t go to Dr. Dorset because he would have known the child wasn’t Karl’s. I went to a doctor in town, and … and lost the baby right there on his table. Wainright found out what happened and sent for Amanda and me, and told us his silence would cost fifty thousand dollars. That’s why Amanda did it. It was his crime she was trying to keep quiet—Tarrington’s. That’s why I wanted you to steal the money, why I still want you to steal it! I want that bastard to pay for what he’s done. You should want him to pay too; it was your child!”
“And Amanda? You don’t care what happens to her if we do?”
“Amanda!” she raged, pushing out of his arms. “I’m pouring my heart out to you and all you can think of is Amanda!”
“I’m thinking she hasn’t done anything to deserve any of this,” he said intently.
“And I have?”
Alisha saw a subtle change transform the anger in Josh’s face to pity. The wi
ld heat of condemnation faded from his eyes and she saw them cloud over with remorse instead.
“Josh, it’s all right,” she murmured, pressing close again, running her hands up his chest and curling them around his neck. “Everything is going to be all right … as long as the two of us are together. You … do still love me, don’t you?”
Not only her lips, but her breasts, her belly, her thighs sought forgiveness. Her pleas shivered into whispers, then snatches of breath that smothered him, drowned him, swallowed him into a dark well of conflicting emotions. His lips began to respond despite the numbing confusion. His hands too lifted to the soft indent of her waist, and a shudder welcomed the cool determination of her fingers as she tugged at the waist of his breeches again and peeled them down over his hips.
Her own hips were already in motion, bribing him with slow pelvic thrusts. She sank her teeth into the steely muscle of his shoulder and whispered his name over and over, chanted in the same erotic rhythm, the same beating tempo of her hips as she pulled herself up and over the rock-hard spear of his flesh.
The flames blazed to life in his body and trembled through his limbs as he fell with her onto the piles of money she had scattered on the bed. Her legs were already locked around him, pulling him into the deepest, tightest part of her. The first brutal thrust sent her skidding deliciously over the greenbacks, the second had her crying out in triumph.
His hands were on her breasts, then on the arch of her throat. He closed his eyes and slammed his flesh into hers again and again, feeling her body shake beneath him, hearing her gasp out her pleasure, her ecstasy as his rage mounted. He squeezed his hands tighter around her throat and ignored the sudden shock that rippled through her body. He squeezed and squeezed and squeezed, blinded to the pain in his face and neck as her nails began to claw and score bloody ribbons into his flesh. He roared as he spilled himself within her, his hands crushing the tender cartilage in her throat. They kept crushing it until the desperate spasms weakened and faded away, until her body grew still and limp beneath him and her eyes stared sightlessly up at the ceiling.
Straight For The Heart Page 37