The Vow

by Lindsay Chase

  Please. Take the risk. You have nothing to fear, I promise.”

  Hannah drew her hand away and headed for the door. “I—I don’t think that would be wise, Samuel.”

  And she fled.

  Everyone will know, Hannah thought on her way back to the house. They just have to take one look at my guilty face and they’ll know I’ve been unfaithful to Reiver.

  All Mrs. Hardy noticed was that Hannah didn’t have the berries for the boys’

  blueberry cobbler and went out in a huff to pick them herself. Later that evening at dinner, Reiver and James were too preoccupied with designing new looms to notice the “A” for adulteress Hannah had branded into her own forehead.

  That night, when Hannah was alone in the heavy summer darkness, her thoughts invariably turned to Samuel, the only one to understand her lonely, wounded heart. Restless and unable to sleep, she rose and went to the window facing the homestead. Velvet darkness enveloped the house, except for one illuminated window in the upstairs studio. She saw Samuel’s familiar shadow 164

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  limned by golden light, and felt his hot, hungry gaze on her bedchamber window.

  She had to keep away from him. She had to.

  Samuel stood before his studio window, staring moodily out at the morning drizzle graying the landscape. He resisted the urge to fling his engraving plate right through the glass.

  Eleven days had passed since he had seduced Hannah, and still she hadn’t come to him. Oh, he saw her every day. He could hardly avoid her. But, to his surprise and chagrin, she acted as though nothing untoward had happened.

  He ran his hands through his hair in frustration. How could she pretend that their union meant nothing to her? It meant everything to him.

  Then he heard it, the pattering of light footsteps up the steep stairs.

  He held his breath until he felt light-headed, not daring to hope.

  The door opened a crack, then swung wide.

  The breath he had been holding came out in a soft swoosh. “Hannah.”

  She hesitated in the doorway, her ivory cheeks flushed with either shame or excitement. Fine beads of moisture from the drizzle outside clung to her smooth, straight hair like stars and dampened her blue calico dress so that it smelled faintly of dye.

  “I wanted to stay away,” she said, resigned at last, “but I find that I can’t.”

  Her hand dipped into the deep pocket of her dress and she pulled out a clear stoppered bottle and small sponge. “I suspect I shall be needing these.”

  Vinegar and a sponge. A tangible but unspoken admission of surrender and premeditation, of sweet, illicit complicity. It had taken eleven days, but he had won. She was his at last.

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  Reiver threw down another broken cocoon in disgust and stepped on it, grinding it with his boot. “How many does this make?” he snapped at Constance Ferry as if she were personally responsible for the catastrophe.

  Constance sat at her table surrounded by the white mountain of cocoons that she was sorting. “At least a hundred in the last basket alone, Mr. Shaw,” she replied.

  “Damn it, that’s too many! I don’t pay good money for broken cocoons!”

  Constance’s long face puckered. “’Tain’t my fault, Mr. Shaw. They come that way.”

  Reiver stormed off, oblivious to the young woman’s distress as he bellowed for James.

  In the reeling room, the half-dozen looms hummed industriously, a sound Reiver usually found relaxing. Today their monotonous droning set his teeth on edge.

  “James! Where in the hell are you?” He ignored the workers’ questioning looks as he went striding into the machine room and almost collided with James.

  “What’s wrong?” James wiped his greasy hands on a towel.

  Reiver glared at him. “Why haven’t you invented a machine that can use those damned broken cocoons? I’m damned sick and tired of throwing them away. It’s waste, pure and simple.”

  “I’m trying my best, but inventing something takes time.”

  Reiver lowered his head like a charging bull. “We don’t have time. We lose money every time we have to throw away a broken cocoon.”

  James bristled, his eyes darkening in anger, for he was not used to being the brunt of Reiver’s temper.

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  “What are you hollering at me for? It’s not my fault. I’m working as fast as I can.”

  “Then work faster.”

  A red flush crept up James’s cheeks. “You know, Reiver, I don’t think the cocoons are setting you off. You’re mad about something else and taking it out on anyone foolish enough to cross your path.”

  “I’ve never heard anything so stupid in all my born days.”

  James shrugged. “You think about it. I’m getting back to work.” His lanky figure drifted away.

  Reiver had to get out of the mill before he exploded at all the incompetents around him. He whirled on his heel and stomped off.

  Once he was outside, the soft September breeze fanning his cheeks cooled his steaming temper. His angry stride slowed and he considered what James had said.

  Reiver jammed his hands into his pockets. James was right; broken cocoons were not responsible for his incendiary temper.

  He missed Cecelia. He ached whenever he thought of her. He still wanted her.

  Cecelia.

  Reiver approached his brothers’ house just as Hannah emerged through the back door, several shirts draped over the crook of her left arm. In the crystal richness of an autumn morning, he mistakenly attributed her flushed cheeks to the invigorating air, and her sparkling eyes to some remembered sally of her children’s before they went off to school that morning. Today she wore a demure dress of soft blue wool, its white collar edged with a narrow border of black lace, a token bit of mourning for her Uncle Ezra, who had died just this summer of a bad liver.

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  Hannah closed the door behind her, and when she turned and noticed him, she froze. The light in her eyes dimmed as it usually did whenever she looked at her husband these days. Hannah smoothed the shirts with a nervous hand and walked down the path toward him.

  “Samuel had some shirts for me to mend,” she said, as if compelled to explain her presence in the homestead.

  “It’s time my brother married and let his own wife mend his shirts.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  She walked back toward the house, and Reiver joined her. As usual when they were together, an uncomfortable, unforgiving silence rose between them like a stone wall.

  Reiver said, “It’s hard to believe summer’s over.”

  “Yes.”

  He waited. When she said nothing else, he added a few more platitudes about the weather, then stopped and placed his hand on her arm. “Is this what we’re going to do, spend the rest of our lives discussing the weather?”

  Hannah hugged the shirts tight against her waist. “We can always discuss the children. Abigail can say her name now—at least the ‘Abby’ part of it.”

  He recognized her irritating statement for the challenge that it was. “I’m pleased. No, don’t look at me as if I’m lying. I am pleased for her. But I don’t wish to discuss the children. I want to discuss their parents.”

  “Then we should go inside.”

  Once inside the foyer, Reiver checked to make sure they were alone, then ushered Hannah into the parlor and closed the doors behind them.

  She stood there, still clutching Samuel’s shirts, still smoothing them nervously in a gesture that was beginning to annoy him.

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  “I’ve suffered enough, Hannah,” Reiver said quietly. “You’ve had all summer to accept what happened and—�
��

  “I’ll never accept what happened.”

  Reiver’s temper flared. “Well, whether you can accept it or not, you are still my wife, with a wife’s responsibilities.”

  Hannah turned paste white. “You are speaking of my responsibilities in the marriage bed.”

  “I’m moving back into your room tonight.”

  “Even if I don’t want you there?”

  “I’m sure you’ll put your personal desires aside and do your wifely duty.”

  He smiled wryly. “I promise you that I will be quick, and you won’t have to suffer my intimacies longer than necessary.”

  “You would force me?”

  Reiver shook her out of sheer frustration. “Damn it, I will not let you make me feel like some rutting pig, do you hear me?” When he saw her stricken look, he released her and fought to control himself. “You will obey me, Hannah. The longer we delay this, the rift between us will only grow wider.”

  His decision made, he whirled on his heel and strode away before he noticed his wife’s shudder of revulsion.

  When she was sure she was alone, Hannah pressed Samuel’s shirts to her face and breathed in the faint scents of paint, turpentine, and maleness. How was she ever going to endure Reiver touching her now, after knowing such sweet delight in his brother’s arms? She trembled, wondering if Reiver would be able to tell that another man had possessed her. Surely every curve, the texture of her skin, the very depths of her, would feel different and strange to him now. Surely her own body would betray her in some subtle way.

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  She set the shirts in her lap and smoothed them absently as if she could coax out the answer to her dilemma. There was none, save the one she wanted to ignore.

  The straw basket filled to the brim with rosy apples was heavy, but when Hannah thought of baking apple pies and how the calm, satisfying ritual would cleanse her mind—at least for a little while—she ignored the aching muscle in her forearm and marched resolutely along the path.

  Then she saw Samuel.

  He stood on the hill rising to her left, his feet spread slightly apart in a commanding and expectant stance, hands on hips, pale eyes alight with a mixture of triumph, desire, and reproach. A strong breeze sprang up out of nowhere, snapping his white shirt as if it were laundry on a clothesline and flattening it erotically against his chest and ribs.

  Hannah envied the wind. She stopped, unable to smile and wave nonchalantly, helpless to drag her eyes away from his, even though they softened, giving her permission to flee.

  She couldn’t.

  Samuel walked down the hill, slowly at first, then faster as his impatience grew. When he reached her, he extended his hand. “That basket looks heavy.”

  The moment she relinquished it to him, she regretted it, for now she had nothing to do with her nervous hands.

  “Shall I walk back to the house with you?” he said. Without waiting for her answer, he began walking, and Hannah fell in step beside him.

  They strolled without speaking, presenting the most innocent picture of a man carrying a basket of apples for a woman.

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  Finally Samuel said, “I’ve missed you.” When Hannah made no comment, he added, “The last eight days have seemed like an eternity to me. I can’t sleep, I can’t work.” He chuckled, a dry, bitter sound. “Now I know what hell is like.”

  She knew as well.

  “Why haven’t you come?” he asked gently. “Couldn’t you get away?”

  “It’s not that.” Hannah took a deep, shuddering breath. “Reiver has moved back into my bedchamber.”

  Samuel stopped in his tracks and looked at her, a rare burst of jealousy distorting his features. “That explains much.”

  She couldn’t reassure him by revealing how she had lain in her bed that first night, stiff with terror that Reiver would divine her secret the moment he touched her. She couldn’t tell him how she willed her mind into his bed while her husband used her body with the merciful quickness he had promised. Some things were best left unspoken, especially between lovers.

  Hannah jammed her fists into her apron’s deep pockets and stared at the mills not far away. “I loathe his touch, but what right do I have to refuse him?

  I’m no better than he is.”

  “But you are.”

  Hannah looked at him out of tormented eyes. “We can’t go on being lovers, Samuel, not while Reiver occupies my bed. I can’t jump from one man to the other, I just can’t. It would make me feel like a—”

  “Don’t you dare call yourself that!” He set the apples down and reached for her, but Hannah bent over and grasped the basket’s handle with both hands, holding it between them as if she were offering him the fruit.

  “You mustn’t touch me, Samuel! Someone may see.” Hannah’s gaze darted around nervously, then she froze. In the distance a man walked out of the

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  throwing shed and looked in their direction before disappearing into the dye house. Hannah sighed in relief, but she was visibly shaken.

  Samuel pried the basket from her stiff fingers. “Come back to the homestead with me. We’ll talk.”

  She knotted her fingers together. “I—I have to get back to the house and bake pies.”

  “Don’t act as though you must carry this burden alone. I’m just as responsible as you are, so share your misgivings with me,” he said, his voice soothing but insistent.

  “Someone will see us.”

  “You’re worrying needlessly. We’ll stay down in the parlor, and if anyone should come by looking for you, we’ll say that you stopped by to give me and James some of these delicious apples.”

  “I—I can’t.”

  “Why not? Are you afraid that once I get you into the house, you won’t be able to resist me, and we’ll wind up in my studio?”

  “I’ve managed to resist you for eight days, haven’t I?” Both of them knew that wasn’t much of an accomplishment.

  “Then you shouldn’t be afraid to come with me.”

  Hannah didn’t reply, but when they came to the fork in the path, she hesitated for only a fraction of a second before turning right and heading for the homestead.

  Once inside, Samuel set down the basket and turned to Hannah, but made no attempt to touch her, though he wanted to do that and more. “You’re safe here. We’re alone. No one will see us.”

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  He failed to reassure her. Visibly agitated, she crossed the parlor to the window and looked out as if expecting Reiver or Mrs. Hardy to peer in. “I’m afraid I’m ill-suited to deception.”

  “That’s because you’re so honest, Hannah.”

  “I’m not. I’m an adulteress, no better than Cecelia Tuttle.” She sighed. “Now that I’m in the same situation, I can understand why she and Reiver did what they did, but I still can’t forgive him. I suppose that makes me the worst kind of hypocrite.”

  “You’re nothing of the sort. You’re the kindest, most generous, most loving woman I’ve ever known, but your guilt is like some great cat-o’-nine-tails ripping away more of your courage with every stroke. You must overcome it.”

  She grasped the windowsill until her knuckles turned white. “We must stop seeing each other, Samuel.”

  “Do you mean that? Can you look me in the eye and tell me that you don’t want me?”

  She turned. “It’s not that. It’s just that I live in fear of being caught and bringing disaster down on both our heads. I shudder to think what Reiver would do to you if—”

  “That will never happen.”

  “But it almost did.”

  He stared at her. “You never told me. When?”

  “Nine days ago. He caught me leaving here after we had just made
love.”

  Mad, passionate loving that had left her skin warm and rosy for the world to see.

  “Fortunately I was carrying your shirts and made the excuse that I had just stopped by to retrieve them for mending.”

  “Did he believe you?”

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  “Yes.” Hannah closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “But I was so afraid he would see the guilt written on my face and know that I was lying.”

  “I know all this secrecy and deception is torture for you, but you must not let your imagination anticipate the worst.”

  “Don’t you see?” Hannah cried in despair. “It’s only a matter of time before Reiver learns the truth. Or Mrs. Hardy. Or James. They’ll wonder why I spend so much time in the homestead. Or they’ll notice the way I look at you across the dinner table. They’re not blind or stupid, Samuel!”

  He went to her and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. “Then we’ll go away together. Paris… London… Rome. Somewhere we can be free, where my brother will never find us.”

  “And my children?” she reminded him bitterly.

  “We’ll take the boys and Abigail with us.”

  Hannah noticed his pointed inclusion of her daughter in their plans. “Then Reiver will surely hunt us down until he finds us, if only to claim his sons.”

  Samuel dropped his hands and shrugged helplessly. “Then what are we to do? And don’t tell me that you will no longer come to me, my sweet Hannah, because I don’t believe that you can stay away any more than I can.”

  “I must.” But when she looked into his eyes, all her fine resolve to resist him crumbled because he had enslaved her mind as well as her body. With a cry of surrender, she threw herself into his arms, and as his lips came down hard on hers, she knew she would risk and endure anything, even her husband’s unwanted intimacies, to experience Samuel’s love just one more time.