His miserable attempt at brevity didn’t make her laugh, didn’t even tickle a smile.
“I think you look wonderful,” she said softly. “Alive and wonderful.”
Michael moved closer to the bed, braced for almost anything but the sweet, loving desperation he saw welling in her eyes.
“Michael …” She had to pause to moisten her lips. “The baby. Dr. Dorset said everything was all right, but I thought … I mean, he might just have told me that to make me feel better.”
“He wasn’t just saying it,” Michael declared fiercely. “He meant it. He told me the baby and you will both be fine.”
“But I can’t feel anything. I’m all … numb … inside. And my head … feels like it’s floating around the ceiling.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and, not knowing what he could touch, what he could dare to touch, he kept her hand cradled to his breast like a precious gem. “That only means the medicine he gave you is working. You have to heal and get your strength back, and to do so, you’ll need a lot of sleep.”
“I’m too cold to sleep,” she said miserably. “You would think … being burned … I should be hot, but I’m not. And I’m not allowed to have any covers over my legs or on my arms. It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t want to sleep,” she added tearfully. “If I sleep, you’ll go away. You won’t give me a chance to tell you …”
He frowned and leaned closer to catch the last few words that had been muffled under a sob. “Tell me what, Mandy?”
Amanda’s breath rasped between her lips and she stared up at him, her expression so somber and solemn, it rivaled Verity’s when the child was confronting one of her gravest dilemmas. “How very stubborn, foolish, pig-headed, ungrateful, and stupid I am. I was ready to believe Alisha’s lies without even giving you the chance to deny them. I believed her when she told me the two of you had been together that night."
“Mandy … it doesn’t matter.”
“But it does matter,” she insisted fiercely. “It matters a great deal if you are ever going to be able to forgive me.”
“Forgive you?” He bowed his head over a muttered oath and raised her bandaged hand to his lips, pressing the gentlest of kisses over her fingertips. “Mandy … I’ve been waiting outside that door for the past hour, wondering what in hell I was going to say to you, how in hell I was ever going to convince you to forgive me.”
“You haven’t done anything that needs forgiving.”
“No, nothing at all,” he scoffed. “I’m a real saint, all right, pushing you away, holding you at arm’s length because I believed your sister’s jealous rantings. I wasn’t honest with you about the Queen. I couldn’t even be honest about why I married you.”
Amanda’s lips parted, then came together again in a thin, trembling line. “Why did you?”
His eyes held hers in an embrace as warm as anything his arms could provide. “I married you because you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I married you because you had strength and courage, because you were willing to risk your name and your reputation and everything you held dear … just to buy your daughter an orange. I married you because you weren’t afraid to tell me to go to hell, and because you were prepared to go there yourself, with a man like Wainright, in order to protect your family and your home. I married you hoping some day I might see one-tenth, one-hundredth a part of the love I see shining in your eyes each and every time you look at Verity. I married you … because I started falling in love with you the moment I saw you on the Mississippi Queen, and have been falling deeper in love every day since. And … if you don’t forgive me, if you don’t tell me we at least have a chance to start over again, I … don’t know what I’ll do.”
Amanda stared, trying to see him through the tears that were blurring her eyes. Michael loved her. He loved her and despite his usually uncanny ability to read her thoughts before she could speak them, he sat there, like a condemned man awaiting judgment, witching her.
“All these weeks,” she whispered, lifting her hand and resting it on his cheek, “I was afraid you didn’t want me anymore.”
“Not want you? You are the most important thing in my life, Mandy. You, Verity … and now the baby. Absolutely nothing else matters. Nothing at all. The rest of the world can go hang, for all I care. I just want you.”
He leaned closer and his mouth found hers in a kiss so gentle she barely felt it. They broke apart and met again, harder this time, the kisses getting deeper and longer and expressive enough to leave both of them cursing softly at the encumbrances of bandages and burns.
“Tell me again," she whispered, against his lips.
“How much I love you?”
She nodded shyly, the smile drifting across her face even as he bent his mouth to hers and breathed the words over and over and over. This time, when he pulled away—no farther than her arm would let him—the love in her eyes was shining so brightly he had to close his own a moment to keep them from filling.
In the end, he didn’t care about that either.
“Oh, Michael,” she sighed. “I wish he hadn’t given me any medicine. I wish—”
“I wish you would let it work so I can get you out of here and take you home.”
“Will you stay here with me? Will you stay close by?”
Michael slipped an arm carefully beneath her shoulders and she felt the bedding shift as he stretched out alongside her. With infinite tenderness, he gathered her close against the hard curve of his body, his shoulder pillowing her head, his love promising to keep her warmer than all the blankets in Natchez could have done.
“Is this close enough?” he asked.
“No. But I suppose it will have to do for now.”
His arms tightened and she snuggled contentedly against him. Her eyelids grew almost too unbearably heavy to keep open and, with another sigh, she let herself slip further into the gently swirling currents of darkness.
EPILOGUE
“Mother, he did it again.”
Amanda looked up from her knitting and sighed. “Who is he and what did he do?”
The answer to the first question was obvious as Verity hauled her brother Lucas through the door of the parlor using his ear as leverage. Lucas was five, the youngest of her three brothers and the one who seemed the most determined to make her life a trial.
“He was in my room uninvited, trying to hide this”—she held up a small box, the contents of which jostled side to side and croaked audibly—“in my armoire. Last week it was a snake and the week before it was a fat, hairy spider. I told him if I caught him putting any more creatures in my room, I would make him eat them.”
“Lucas.” Amanda sighed and rubbed an ache in her back. “Why must you torment your sister so?”
The little boy shrugged and screwed his mouth into a contemplative grimace. “Cuz Bits doesn’t scream as loud.”
Bits—Elizabeth—was a year older than Lucas and not too ladylike yet to box him on the ears if he tried it, which was a more plausible reason. Verity, on the other hand, had just turned a beautiful, regal fifteen and had spent the past summer in Boston being awed by the blue-nosed society of her Northern cousins.
Amanda rubbed harder at the cramp and shifted awkwardly on the chair. The movement started the baby squirming and she laid a hand over her swollen belly, wincing at a particularly energetic tussle. Another boy, she thought ruefully. It had to be. Elizabeth and Justine had been delights to carry, their movements all like the delicate flutter of butterfly wings. They had been soft, dainty creatures who had mewled when they were born and smiled like the little blonde angels they had become. All three boys, conversely, starting with the first, Samuel William Tarrington, had kicked and pummeled their way through each month of the pregnancy and come out squalling like prizefighters. Dark like their father and devilishly handsome, they were a constant source of aggravation for Verity, who had declared in no uncertain terms that if Amanda gave birth to another boy, she would pack her things and move in with
her Uncle Ryan and Aunt Dianna. They had the good sense to have only daughters.
“Mother—!”
“Verity …” Amanda’s hand had remained on her belly and she held her breath as another telltale flush of tightness rippled through the stretched muscles. “You will have to feed your brother frogs some other time. Will you find your father for me and … tell him to send for Dr. Dorset.”
Verity relinquished her hold on Lucas’s ear and shoved the box into his hands. “Is it the baby?”
“I think so. Oh!” She dropped her knitting and gripped her stomach with both hands. “I know so!”
Verity whirled on her brother. “Run down to the paddocks and fetch Papa quick as you can. Don’t stop or dawdle for anything, do you hear me, or—”
“Verity! Where’s Flora?”
Verity gave her brother a push out the door and hurried over to help Amanda, who was struggling to her feet. “She’s gone to town with Sally and Mr. Foley.”
“God, yes. I’d forgotten. They were taking Matthew to the store to buy school clothes.”
“And Mrs. Reeves went along to make sure they didn’t dress her grandson like a ‘wee bleetin’ billygoat,’” Verity quoted in the accent.
“I guess it’s just you and me, then, for the time being.”
“Papa’s here too. And it’s foaling season; he’ll know what to do.”
“Thank you very much for the comparison,” Amanda mused grimly. “Now, if you could help me upstairs to my stall?”
They heard running footsteps on the porch and a bang as the door swung open. A moment later, Michael was in the parlor, his face flushed with concern. “Lucas found me in the yard. He said his frog made you sick?”
One look at his wife’s face and at Verity’s arched brow and he knew. “Oh.”
“Yes,” Amanda said tightly. “Oh.”
“Has someone sent for the doctor?”
“I … don’t think there’s time.”
Michael blew out a sharp breath and scooped her up in his arms, shouting orders over his shoulder as he carried her up the stairs. “We’ll need hot water. Plenty of it. And towels.”
“Hay and oats too,” Amanda murmured against his throat.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she gasped, clutching him fiercely through another contraction.
Michael kicked the door of their bedroom open and set Amanda gently on a chair for as long as it took him to peel back the heavy covers and fetch a loose nightgown from the dressing room. Amanda had already worked most of the fastenings on her bodice free, but surrendered the task willingly to Michael as he knelt in front of her.
His eyes were smoke-gray and intent on every twinge of discomfort that flickered across her face.
“You still maintain it’s a boy?”
“I know it’s a boy. Flora does too.”
“Flora has been known to be wrong a time or two.”
“She’s been right with all of ours so far. And she started knitting blue blankets for both of Sally’s boys before Mr. Foley even knew he was going to be a father.”
“Dianna fooled her.”
“Once. Out of three times. The odds are still heavily in her favor.”
“This is all your fault, you know,” he murmured.
“My fault?”
“Mmmm. Wanting to domesticate me.”
“I was thinking it was all your fault,” she said crossly. “Sometimes beds are just used for sleeping, you know.”
“Is that a complaint?”
Her wide blue eyes looked up and met his. After eleven years of marriage and five children, he still had the ability to melt her insides to jelly with a look or a touch. “I suppose … if we run out of bedrooms it could be,” she said softly.
He shook his head and kissed her. “We’d just have to move to a bigger house.”
She started to smile when another spasm gripped her. Her hands looked for something to grasp and Michael was there, not seeming to mind in the least that the hair on his chest was twisted into her fists.
When the contraction released her, he leaned forward and kissed her hard on the mouth. “Do you know how much I love you, Mrs. Tarrington?”
“Enough to say you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but here with me today?” she said with a gasp.
He gave her the rare, ravishing smile he saved only for her and brushed his lips over the dampness on her forehead. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else today but here with you.”
Amanda smiled weakly and allowed him to ease her out of her dress and shimmy. He had been down at the paddocks all morning and smelled horsy. It was a rich, earthy, wonderful smell she had come to love almost as much as the man himself. There were nearly three hundred thoroughbreds in the stables, many of them bred from Diablo and all of them trained by Amanda’s brother Ryan. He was in Kentucky at this very moment with their entrant for the Breeder’s Cup, one of the most prestigious races of the season, and one she knew Michael would not otherwise have missed for anything in the world.
“Do you think The Gambler will win?”
“He’s broken every record at every track this year. And if I was still a betting man”—he paused and pressed a tender kiss over the bulge of her stomach before he dropped the nightgown into place—“I’d say the Tarringtons were going to break a couple of records for speed today.”
THE END
I hope you enjoyed Straight For the Heart. For a complete list of my books, visit www.marshacanhamebooks.com
If you like Handsome Rogues, perhaps you would enjoy Pale Moon Rider, my homage to the Scarlet Pimpernel
Allow me to tease you with a brief excerpt:
***********
When Renée was halfway back to the window Tyrone held up his hand to stop her. He was not exactly certain if this was a test of her willpower or his, but he needed a moment just to think. He had not been able to do much of that when she was in his arms. Her hair had smelled like flowers—roses—and felt like silk against his cheek. It was spilling around her shoulders now like a silvery halo, burnished russet by the glow of the fire. Without the belt gathering the folds of her gown at her waist, the muslin hung straight from the edge of her bodice to the floor and there, too, the firelight was playing havoc with his powers of concentration, teasing its way through the sheer fabric to reveal the shapely contours beneath. It did not require a vigorous strain on his powers of recall to remember how she looked in just a skimpy, water-dampened chemise, how long and slender her legs were, how trim her waist, how soft and round and firm her breasts. Roses aside, the scent of her skin alone was as subtle as the drift of exotic spices that warned a sailor of a tropical island just below the horizon, and it had the same effect on the way his blood altered its course through his veins.
“Perhaps it is simply too dangerous to do this thing, m’sieur,” she whispered. “Perhaps it was a foolish idea and—and I do not think I could bear it if …”
Tyrone moved a measured step closer to her, closer to the glow of the fire. “If … what?”
Renée watched, dumbfounded, as he casually peeled off his gloves then reached up and removed his tricorn. With seemingly familiar ease, he tossed both onto the seat of the chair and advanced another step toward her.
“What is it you could not bear, mam’selle?” He asked again, unfastening the top three buttons on his greatcoat. Loosened, the tension fell out of the standing collar and it began to fold back around his shoulders as the remaining buttons were worked free. The fire was bright enough to reveal wide, deep-set eyes and boldly slanted eyebrows. His hair was thick and fell from a central parting over his collar, laying dark as ink against his cheeks and throat. His nose was straight and forthright, his jaw square, and his chin somewhat blunted with the hint of a cleft, or a scar, marking the midpoint.
It was, as she had guessed, a handsome face. Devastatingly more so than she had imagined it would be. There was also a careless nobility about his features, as if he was well aware of the effect it woul
d have on most people to know this common thief was not so common after all.
He shrugged the greatcoat off his shoulders and draped it over the foot of the bed before he moved another step closer to her.
The coat had added breadth to his form, but not so much so that he was reduced to a spindled weakling when he took it off. There were a good many muscles beneath the fashionable cut of his jacket giving bulk to his chest and arms, tapering down to a trim, lean waist and legs that needed no false padding to convey strength and power. His boots were tall, made of soft leather with a folded cuff below the knee; his neck was bare and his shirt open at the throat revealing the faintest hint of dark hairs curling over the top of his breastbone. That he wore no neck stock or cravat came as no surprise, for the whiteness would have shone like a beacon against the unrelieved darkness of the rest of his clothing. What did surprise her was the richness of each garment. The skin tight breeches were fine merino wool, his jacket exquisitely tailored broadcloth, his waistcoat black silk brocade embroidered with gold thread.
When he was close enough, he tucked a finger under her chin and tipped it upward, forcing her to meet his gaze. His eyes were paler than she had expected, of no distinguishable color in the uncertain light, but she felt more danger staring into them than she had into the twin barrels of his pistols. The glow that came from their depths rivaled that of the fire and was far more unnerving than any phantom starlight.
“Tell me,” he murmured. “What is it you do not think you could bear?”
PALE MOON RIDER, available where all fine ebooks are sold
Straight For The Heart Page 43