by Lisa Kleypas
“War is a test of man’s integrity,” Emerson said, his elderly visage pale with what could have been either anger or upset. “An apprenticeship. By subjugating the Rebels, the North proved its moral integrity. It was worth the loss of our men, every one of them.”
“That’s right, Mr. Rayne.” Daniel plunged into the fray, his mustache barely moving as he spoke stiffly. “Good men, who died because of Southern arrogance, starting with the secession of South Carolina and going right on through—”
“South Carolina seceded,” Heath interrupted, “because you toed a line and dared us to step across it.”
“As I said,” Daniel cut in with a small half-smile, “Southern arrogance. The fact is, South Carolina did step across that line, with the full support of the rest of your people, even though you all knew what would happen if you did. And now we have good Northern men lying in graves—”
“Yes, and twice as many Southern graves—” came the swift rejoinder.
“Graves of uneducated Rebels. As Mr. Emerson once said, the whole State of South Carolina is not worth the death of one Harvardian,” Daniel sneered, and then fell silent.
Heath’s face paled. His eyes glittered with a full draught of the pride that had kept his people fighting long after their cause had been lost. But his hands, formerly clenched into hard fists, relaxed and loosened. “Lot of good men in South Carolina,” he pointed out, and then he smiled oddly. “Even a few who were Harvardians . . . Mr. Collier.”
And with that, he left amid an uproar of raised voices, the orderly discussion becoming a tumult of people wanting to be heard. Lucy fled through the kitchen and out the back entrance of the building, nearly tripping over a cement dismounting block as she crossed over to the side of the street. “Heath . . . stop. Wait, please . . .” He stopped and then turned slowly to face her, his expression wiped clean of emotion. The branches of the bare elm trees cast streaks of shadow across his face. “You were right,” Lucy said breathlessly, her eyes dark and troubled. “A lot of what you said was right—but you’ve got to be careful about what you say. You know how they feel up here about the war, and how they feel about Mr. Emerson. No one ever tells Mr. Emerson outright that he is wrong.”
“Someone needs to.”
“You’ve only seen one side of him tonight. You don’t understand what a good, kind man he is. You should see him stopping to talk to little children, and pitching in to help whenever it’s needed, and doing so much to benefit the town. He is kind and benevolent, and the most loyal—”
“Please,” Heath snapped, holding up his hands in a defensive gesture. “No lectures on him.”
“The point is, he is the most beloved citizen of Concord. My Lord, if you sat and thought for hours, you couldn’t have come up with a better plan for making them want to run you out of Concord—why, Daniel and his friends—”
“If they do, it’s nothin’ to you, honey,” he said, his voice light and unconcerned, his jaw rigid. Suddenly he seemed so alone, so terribly alone that Lucy felt a sharp ache of compassion she couldn’t hold back. She reached out and laid her small hand on his upper arm in a soothing gesture. Under her fingertips the muscled surface was smooth and hard as steel, shaking slightly with the force he exerted over it.
“What are you doing here?” she asked softly, the sound of her words a sweet hum in the stillness of the night. “Why have you come so far away from where you belong? You should be at home with your family, with people who care for you—”
“No,” he interrupted suddenly, jerking away from her touch. A laugh caught in his throat. “Don’t playact with me. It’s not helping.”
“I’m not playacting. You helped me once. I wish I could help you.”
She stared up at him with reluctant concern, her skin pale and translucent in the cold light of the moon. Suddenly, Heath looked at her in a new way, without tenderness or friendly amusement. No one in the limited scope of Lucy’s experience had ever switched from one mood to another with such ease. The lazy, laughing stranger had turned into quite a different man, whose expression was bitter and his eyes sharp. Bewildered, she let her hand drop from his arm.
“You can,” he said roughly. “You damn well can.” In a swift movement he caught her wrists in his and dragged her to the space between two buildings, pulling her into a space of frightening darkness. The peaceful, familiar street seemed to disappear, and she went rigid with fear.
“Don’t!”
His arms were tight around her, his breath hot against her neck. “Go ahead,” he muttered. “Scream and kick . . . that would bring the whole lot of them down here, wouldn’t it? I don’t give a damn, honey. I don’t care . . . I don’t . . .”
His mouth, ferocious and greedy, bore down on hers so hard that it hurt, and Lucy struggled against him wildly. The night surrounded them in a flood of velvet, suffocating her with blackness. Desperately she took a handful of hair, grasping the close-shorn thickness at the back of his neck, and then his kiss gentled, the painful pressure of it changing into the sweet, searching warmth that she remembered from before. He was using her to soothe a hurt, she realized, and gradually she stopped fighting him, her gasps changing into sporadic sobs.
She stilled and began to lean against him, out of pity—yes, out of sympathy and nothing else. Then his arms loosened and slid around her in a different way, protective, sheltering. His head bent deeper, his mouth beginning to play on hers expertly. Lucy moaned in her throat as she succumbed to the pleasure of it, responding to every touch and stroke of his tongue, her mind going blank as she became a stranger to herself. Her hands clenched in the silken hair, and the ends of it curled around her fingers. Gently—oh, so gently—he curved her body to his, and his warm hand slid down the line of her back with a caressing touch before coming to rest on the upper rise of her buttocks. Her body was wedged into his as if they had been made for each other. Her breasts thrust against his chest. Her hips fitted snugly into his, so closely that she could feel the powerful outline of his arousal. He pulled her even harder against his body, his anger changing into pure desire.
“This is wrong . . .” she gasped as his mouth left hers and slid down the fragile outline of her throat. She tilted her head back and let it fall to his shoulder. While his lips marauded the delicate skin of her neck and the shallow depression underneath her jaw, she began to realize that he knew things about her she had not been aware of. He knew how to make her feel things she had never felt before, and all of it was forbidden. He had no right to do this to her, just as she had no right to encourage it. “Stop,” she whispered, her nostrils filled with the scent of him, her body clamoring for her to let him do whatever he wanted. His mouth returned to hers, both of his hands cupping around her head as he took one last, devouring kiss. Then his chest rose and fell with an unsteady sigh, and he let go of her.
“It’s not my fault,” Heath muttered, while Lucy retreated until her back was against the wall of the building. Her heart was hammering almost audibly. His voice was thick and heavy, the sound of it curling around her in the darkness. “I can’t help it any more than you can. So don’t follow me again, or you know what to expect.”
Motionless, she stood there, her palms pressed to her racing heart.
“Go back to your father,” he said harshly. “And to Daniel. Go on.”
She stumbled back to the street, her feet moving faster and faster as she fled back to safety.
Lucy could not understand or get rid of her secret fascination with Heath Rayne, who was now known around town simply as “the Confederate.” The less she saw of him, the more she thought and wondered about him. She thought that he deliberately tried to avoid her, for he never came into the store during the hours when she was helping her father, and he never even looked at her when they happened to be in the same area. Perhaps it was better that way.
Rumors spread around Concord very quickly about him, for the subject of Heath Rayne was a continual source of interest. He was reputed to keep fast company
. Mrs. Brooks said that she and her husband had seen the Southerner in Boston escorting a well-dressed woman, while some of the more reckless and younger Concord men reputedly went with him to a dance hall in Lowell and came back reeking of spirits and cheap perfume. The general opinion was that Heath Rayne was a hotheaded hell-raiser who had come up North to stir up trouble. No one knew the answers to the two most important questions about him: who was he and what did he do for a living? He didn’t seem to have any sort of occupation, but he seemed to have quite an adequate amount of money, for he was always superbly dressed and generous with a dollar.
Then there came a long silence about Heath, for the simple reason that he went to Boston for undisclosed purposes and stayed there for more than two months. The weeks passed by slowly while the talk about him burned out for want of fuel. Although his gray horse was being kept in the centrally located livery stables, which surely meant that Heath would return, Lucy began to think that she would never see him again. Putting him out of her mind, she devoted herself to concentrating on her duties as Lucas Caldwell’s daughter and Daniel’s fiancée, keeping busy with her involvement with the Ladies’ Tuesday Club and the Concord Female Charitable Society as well as her literary clubs and meetings. Whenever it was possible Daniel took her to a dance, since there was a new one held nearly every week by a different organization.
The Charitable Society sponsored its annual dance to raise funds for the poor and needy. They asked for ten cents from everyone who attended; twenty-five cents was the family rate. Having been elected as a member of the organizing committee, Lucy found much of her time taken up with planning meetings. The dance was to be held in the town hall—its theme, of course, was the advent of spring—and she spent an entire Saturday with the other women on the committee, decorating the second floor, the large balcony, and the main staircase.
The women helped each other to get ready in the dressing rooms, and Lucy felt pleasurable pangs of excitement in her stomach as she took out her dress from the box in which it had been carefully packed. It was a brand-new dress, one she had never worn before, and she knew that Daniel would be stunned by the sight of her in it. Perhaps tonight he would be so enchanted that he might even want to set the date of their wedding.
“Lace me extra tight,” she said breathlessly to Sally Hudson, a bubbly girl of nineteen who had been one of Lucy’s closest friends since childhood—mainly because Lucy had always been sweet on Daniel and had never competed against Sally when it came to men.
“Nineteen inches?” Sally asked, wrapping the laces around her fists and pulling firmly.
“It’s got to be eighteen . . . for the dress . . . I’m going to wear . . . ,” Lucy gasped, holding her breath and closing her eyes.
“I don’t think it’s going to work,” Sally said, yanking harder. “Why did you have a dress made with an eighteen-inch waist? You never get past nineteen—”
“I thought I . . . was going to be thinner.”
After a mighty tug, Sally knotted the laces and surveyed her handiwork admiringly. “Eighteen and a half . . . almost. A perfect hourglass.” She angled her blond head in a considering attitude. “But the next time you want to lace this tight, you should try the Swanbill. What’s the kind you’re wearing?”
“Thompson’s Glove-Fitting Corset. It’s new—”
“Oh, yes. I saw it advertised in Godey’s. But I’d never use anything except the Swanbill—it’s much stiffer.”
Industriously Lucy struggled into a bustle and petticoats, then lifted her arms as Sally dropped the new dress over her head. As it settled into place, there were several sighs of admiration heard around the room. The dress was made of white silk that glistened as pristinely as a new snowfall. The skirt was adorned with deep flounces of silk and huge puffs of transparent illusion, while the waist was trimmed with sprays of heartsease and leaves. The neckline of the bodice was almost indecently low and trimmed with silk rosettes, while the puffed sleeves were fastened with more rosettes. Sally fastened the gown and then gave Lucy an envious stare.
“Don’t ever speak to me again, Lucy Caldwell.” Sally held up a hand mirror for her and mock-scowled over the top of it. “You look exactly like an engraving in Godey’s.”
Lucy smiled and checked her hair in the mirror. Her chestnut locks had been crimped and fastened into a chignon. Several curls had been allowed to escape, and they bobbed enticingly against the back of her neck. Her malachite earrings and necklace emphasized the green in her hazel eyes, while her cheeks burned with a glow of anticipation. She knew she had never looked more attractive. “I wonder what Daniel will say,” she wondered aloud.
“He already loves you madly. I suppose he’ll do nothing more than fall to his knees and recite an ode to your beauty.” Sally smiled wickedly. “If I were you, Lucy, I’d be careful of Daniel trying to pull you into one of those empty offices downstairs.”
If only that were the problem, Lucy thought, and twisted her mouth ruefully. “I just hope he isn’t dreadfully late for the dance,” she said, fluffing out the petals of a silk rosette.
“Late?” Sally echoed. “Why? Does he have another one of those meetings with the other lawyers?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I don’t know how you stand it, with Daniel so busy all the time—”
“I’m very proud of him. Daniel is the youngest railroad attorney at Boston and Lowell, and it’s taken a lot of dedication to get there. Now that the war is over, all sorts of new plans are being developed, and that means that he has to work that much harder—”
“Oh, well,” Sally interrupted, looking bored, “I guess you can get used to just about anything—even his long Friday meetings. I mean, at least you have a fiancé, which is more than most of us can say. With the shortage of men, it’s getting so that I can’t afford to be as selective as I once was. Just think—I’m already twenty and still not engaged—”
“You’re talking as if you’re some old spinster,” Lucy said, laughing.
“No—that’s one thing I’ll never be,” Sally stated with utter conviction. “I couldn’t bear to be like Daniel’s sister Abigail, thirty-three and never been kissed—oh, look, she’s heading over this way.”
Lucy smiled engagingly at Abigail, who was prim and tight-mouthed, a woman with an iron disposition and a complete lack of humor. Had she ever wanted to be kissed? It didn’t seem likely. Few people presented such an unapproachable front. Her eyes were dark brown, the same eyes that Daniel had, and her face seldom revealed whatever it was that she thought about. Abigail doted on Daniel, just as the rest of his family did. In fact, the Colliers doted on him so much that Lucy felt privately that in some ways they didn’t think she was good enough for him.
“Good evening, Lucy,” Abigail said politely. “I wanted to tell you that we got word from Daniel earlier today. He said to tell you that he would be in Lowell until late this evening.”
“You mean he won’t be coming to . . .”
“That’s right,” Abigail said, her sharp eyes almost daring the younger woman to complain. “You know how important his work is, Lucy. He can’t fall behind just for the sake of a little dance.”
“Of course not,” Lucy replied, flushing, and she felt her heart sink. To her dismay, her disappointment was so sharp and immediate that tears pricked at her eyes. Don’t you dare cry! she commanded herself, and managed to will them away. Sally and Abigail looked at each other frostily, and then Abigail left.
“That was a mean trick,” Sally declared indignantly, “to wait until you were dressed and ready before telling you. Without Daniel here—”
“Everyone seems to think that my life should center around Daniel,” Lucy said in a low voice. “I guess now I’m supposed to go home, or mope around here and look lost because he’s not here with me. Well, I’m not going to do either of those things. I’m going to have a good time, and . . . and dance with other men, and . . . and laugh . . . and maybe even flirt a little!”
“L
ucy!” Sally looked shocked and delighted. “You couldn’t. What will everybody say?”
“I’m not Daniel’s property . . . not yet. There’s no reason to put me on a shelf. We’re engaged, but we haven’t even set the date of the wedding. And I’m young and unmarried—and I want to enjoy myself tonight.”
Determinedly Lucy lifted her chin and swept out of the room, clutching her silk fan as if it were a small hatchet. True to her word, she swept through the evening as if she had no attachment to any man, chattering in an animated fashion and dancing uninhibitedly. Lucy knew that she was not behaving like her usual self, and she knew that she was attracting much attention with her quick laughter and fast manner. Good, she thought grimly, plying her gleaming smile on any man who happened to catch her eye. When Daniel hears about this, he won’t be so eager to work so many extra hours instead of being with me. Maybe he would get angry and demand an explanation from her, or insist that from now on she talk to no other men. All she knew was that she would gladly welcome any attention from him. Ignoring her father’s reproving glances from across the room, Lucy whirled around the dance floor with partner after partner. Gradually, as the music rang through the room and the windows were partially opened to let some cool air in, the hard knot of frustration inside her loosened.
“Daniel’s going to be sorry he missed seeing you tonight,” David Fraser, her current partner, said as they waltzed to a popular new melody. Lucy beamed up at him in pleasure, because that was what she had most wanted to hear.
“Do you really think so?” she asked, and as David launched into a series of prettily phrased compliments, Lucy giggled unrestrainedly. But just a few seconds later her laughter stopped abruptly as she looked over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of the small group of men by the refreshment table. Heath was there, saying something that made his companions chuckle, and his smile was startlingly white against his tan.