He put an arm around her waist and ushered her toward the rear stairs. “I’m not going to let you out of my sight,” he answered gruffly.
In the spare room, he settled Elisabeth under the covers and then began stripping off his own clothes. She was grateful it was dark so she couldn’t see what she was missing and he couldn’t see her blushing like a virgin bride.
A few moments later, Jonathan climbed into the bed and enfolded Elisabeth in his arms, fitting her close against the hard warmth of his body. Despite the lingering effects of her illness and their decision not to make love again until they were man and wife, desire stirred deep within Elisabeth.
When his hand curved lightly over her breast, she gave an involuntary moan and arched her back. She felt Jon come to a promising hardness against her thigh and heard the quickening of his breath.
“I suppose we could be quiet,” she whispered as he lifted her nightshirt and spread one hand over her quivering belly as though to claim and shelter the child within.
Jonathan chuckled, his mouth warm and moist against the pulsepoint at the base of Elisabeth’s throat. “You?” he teased. “The last time I had you, Lizzie, you carried on something scandalous.”
She reached back over her head to grasp the rails in the headboard as he began kissing her breasts. “I g-guess I’ll just have to trust you to be a…to be a gentleman.”
“You’re a damn fool if you do,” he said, just before he took a nipple into his mouth and scraped it lightly with his teeth.
Elisabeth flung her head from one side to the other, struggling with all her might to keep back the cries of surrender that were already crowding her throat. Rain pelted the window, and a flash of lightning lit the room with an eerie explosion of white. “Jonathan…” she cried.
He brought his mouth down onto hers at the same moment that he parted her legs and entered her. While their tongues sparred, her moans of impending release filled his throat.
Their bodies arched high off the mattress in violent fusion, twisting together like ribbons in the wind. Then, after long, exquisite moments of fiery union, they sank as one to the bed, both gasping for breath.
“We agreed not to do that,” Elisabeth said an eternity later, when she was able to speak again.
Jonathan smoothed damp tendrils of hair back from her forehead, sighed and kissed her lightly. “It’s a little late for recriminations, Lizzie. And if you’re looking for an apology, you’re wasting your time.”
She blushed and settled close against his chest, which was still heaving slightly from earlier exertions. Thunder rattled the roof above their heads, immediately followed by pounding and shouting at the front door and a shriek from Trista’s room.
“I’ll see to her,” Elisabeth said, reaching for her nightshirt while Jon scrambled into his clothes. “You get the door.”
Trista was sobbing when Elisabeth stumbled into her room, lit the lamp on her bedside stand and drew the child into her arms. “It’s all right, baby,” she whispered. “You were just having a bad dream, that’s all.”
“I saw Marley’s ghost,” Trista wailed, shuddering against Elisabeth as she scrambled toward reality. “He was standing at the foot of my bed, calling me!”
Elisabeth kissed the little girl’s forehead. “Darling, you’re awake now and I’m here. And Marley’s ghost isn’t real—he’s only a story character. You don’t need to be afraid.”
Trista clung to Elisabeth’s shoulders, but she wasn’t trembling so hard now, and her sobs had slowed to irregular hiccups. “I don’t want to leave you and Papa,” she said. “I don’t want to die.”
The words were like the stab of a knife, reminding Elisabeth of the fire. “You aren’t going to die, sweetheart,” she vowed fiercely, stretching out on top of Trista’s covers, still holding the child. “Not for many, many years. Someday, you’ll marry and have children of your own.” Tears of determination scalded Elisabeth’s eyes, and she reached to turn down the wick in the lamp, letting the safe darkness enfold them.
Trista sniffled, clutching Elisabeth as though she feared she would float unanchored through the universe if she let go. “Will you promise to stay here with us?” she asked in a small voice. “Are you going to marry Papa?”
Elisabeth kissed her cheek. “Yes and yes. Nothing could make me leave you again, and your father and I are getting married tomorrow.”
“Then you’ll be my mother.”
“I’ll be your stepmother,” Elisabeth clarified gently. “But I swear I love you as much as I would if you’d been born to me.”
Trista yawned. It was a reassuring, ordinary sound that relieved a lot of Elisabeth’s anxieties. “Will there be babies? I’m very good with them, you know.”
Elisabeth chuckled and smoothed the child’s hair. “Yes, Trista, I think you’ll have a little brother or sister before you know it. And I’ll be depending on your help.”
She yawned again. “Did Papa go out?”
Elisabeth nodded. “I think so. We’ll just go to sleep, you and I, and when we wake up, he’ll be home again.”
“All right,” Trista sighed. And then she slipped easily into a quiet, natural sleep.
Jonathan had still not returned when Elisabeth and Trista rose the next morning, but Elisabeth didn’t allow the fact to trouble her. He was a doctor, and he would inevitably be away from home a great deal.
While Ellen prepared oatmeal downstairs in the kitchen, Elisabeth brushed and braided Trista’s thick, dark hair. After eating breakfast, the two of them went up to the attic to go through the trunks again. The school term was over, and Trista, who was still a little wan and thin from her illness, had a wealth of time on her hands.
Elisabeth found a beautiful midnight blue gown in the depths of one of the trunks and decided that would be her wedding dress.
Trista’s brow crumpled. “Don’t brides usually wear white?”
Draping the delicate garment carefully over her arm, Elisabeth went to sit beside Trista on the arched lid of one of the trunks. “Yes, sweetheart,” she replied after taking a breath and searching her mind for the best words. “But I was married once before, and even though I wasn’t very happy then, I don’t want to deny that part of my life by pretending it didn’t happen. Do you understand?”
“No,” Trista said with a blunt honesty that reminded Elisabeth of Jonathan. The child’s smile was sudden and blindingly bright. “But I guess I don’t need to. You’re going to stay and we’ll be a family. That’s what matters to me.”
Elisabeth smiled and kissed Trista’s forehead. It was odd to think that this child was her elder in the truest sense of the word. The dress in her arms and the dusty attic and the little girl had become her reality, however, and it was that other world that seemed like an illusion. “We are definitely going to be a family,” she agreed. “Now, let’s take my wedding gown outside and let it air on the clothesline, so I won’t smell like mothballs during the ceremony.”
Trista wrinkled her nose and giggled, but when her gaze traveled to the grimy window, she frowned. “It looks like it’s about to rain.”
There had been so much sunshine in Elisabeth’s heart since she’d awakened to the realization that this was her wedding day, she hadn’t noticed the weather at all. Now, with a little catch in her throat, she went over and peered out through the dirty panes of glass.
Sure enough, the sky was dark with churning clouds, and now that she thought of it, there was a hot, heavy, brooding feeling to the air. From where she stood, Elisabeth could see the weathered, unevenly shaped shingles on the roof of the front porch. They looked dry as tinder.
She tried to shake off a feeling of foreboding. Jonathan was right, she insisted to herself—if there was truly going to be a fire, it would have happened before this. Still, she was troubled, and she wished she and Jonathan and Trista were faraway from that place.
They took the dress down to Elisabeth’s room and hung it near a window she’d opened slightly, then descended to the k
itchen. Since Ellen was busy with the ironing, Elisabeth and Trista decided to gather the eggs.
Fetching a basket, she hurried off toward the hen house, expecting to be drenched by rain at any moment. But the sullen sky retained its burden, and the air fairly crackled with the promise of violence. Jonathan, Elisabeth thought nervously, come home. Now.
But she laughed with Trista as they filled the basket with brown eggs. Surprisingly, considering the threat of a storm, Vera appeared, riding her pony and carrying a virtually hairless doll. After settling the horse in the barn, the two children retreated to Trista’s room to play.
Elisabeth joined Ellen in the kitchen and volunteered to take a turn at pressing Jonathan’s shirts. The cumbersome flatirons were heated on the stove, and it looked like an exhausting task.
“You just sit down and have a nice cup of tea,” Ellen ordered with a shake of her head. “It wasn’t that long ago that you were sick and dying, you know.”
There was a kind of grudging affection in Ellen’s words, and Elisabeth was pleased. She was also enlightened; obviously, her disappearance had been easily explained. Jonathan had probably said she was lying in bed and mustn’t be disturbed for any reason. “I’m better now,” she allowed.
Ellen stopped ironing the crisp white shirts long enough to get the china teapot down from a shelf and spoon loose tea leaves into it. She added hot water from the kettle and brought the teapot and a cup and saucer to the table. “I guess you and the doctor will be getting married straight away.”
Elisabeth nodded. “Yes.”
The housekeeper frowned, but her expression showed curiosity rather than antagonism. “I can’t quite work out what it is, but there’s something different about you,” she mused, touching the tip of her index finger to her tongue and then to the iron.
The resultant sizzle made Elisabeth wince. “I’m—from another place,” she said, making an effort at cordiality.
Ellen ironed with a vehemence. “I know. Boston. But you don’t talk much like she did.”
By “she,” Elisabeth knew Ellen meant Barbara Fortner, who was supposed to be Elisabeth’s sister. Unfortunately, the situation left Elisabeth with no real choice but to lie. Sort of. “Well, I’ve lived in Seattle most of my adult life.”
The housekeeper rearranged a shirt on the wooden ironing board and began pressing the yoke, and a pleasant, mingled scent of steam and starch rose in the air. “She never talked about you,” the woman reflected. “Didn’t keep your photograph around, neither.”
Elisabeth swallowed, contemplating the tangled web that stretched before her. “We weren’t close,” she answered, and that was true, though not for the reasons Ellen would probably invent on her own. Elisabeth took a sip of tea and then boldly inquired, “Did you like her?”
“No,” Ellen answered with a surprising lack of hesitation. “The first Mrs. Fortner was always full of herself. What kind of a woman would go away for months and leave her own child behind?”
Elisabeth wasn’t about to touch that one. After all, she’d made a few unscheduled departures herself, and it hadn’t been because she didn’t care about Trista. “Maybe she was homesick, being so far from her family.”
The housekeeper didn’t look up from her work, but her reply was vibrant, like a dart quivering in a bull’s eye. “She had you, right close in Seattle. Seems like that should have helped.”
There was nothing Elisabeth could say to that. She carried her cup and saucer to the sink and set them carefully inside. Beyond the window, with its pristine, white lace curtains, the gloomy sky waited to remind her that there were forces in the universe that operated by laws she didn’t begin to understand. Far off on the horizon, she saw lightning plunge from the clouds in jagged spikes.
If only the rain would start, she fretted silently. Perhaps that would alleviate the dreadful tension that pervaded her every thought and move.
“I’d like to leave early today, if it’s all the same to you,” Ellen said, startling Elisabeth a little. “Don’t want to get caught in the rain.”
Elisabeth caught herself before she would have offered to drive Ellen home in her car. If she hadn’t felt so anxious, she would have smiled at the near lapse. “Maybe you’d better leave now,” she said, hoping Ellen didn’t have far to go.
Agreeing quickly, the housekeeper put away the ironing board and the flatirons and took Jonathan’s clean shirts upstairs. Soon she was gone, but there was still no rain and no sign of Jonathan.
Elisabeth was more uneasy than ever.
She climbed the small stairway that led up to Trista’s room and knocked lightly.
“Come in,” a youthful voice chimed.
Smiling, Elisabeth opened the door and stepped inside. Her expression was instantly serious, however, when her gaze went straight to the pendant Vera was wearing around her neck. It took all her personal control not to lunge at the child in horror and snatch away the necklace before it could work its treacherous magic.
Vera preened and smiled broadly, showing a giant vacant space where her front teeth should have been. “Don’t you think I look pretty?” she asked, obviously expecting an affirmative answer. It was certainly no mystery that her children had grown up to be adventurous; they would inherit Vera’s innate self-confidence.
“I think you look very pretty,” Elisabeth said shakily, easing toward the middle of the room, where the two little girls sat playing dolls on the hooked rug. She sank to her knees beside them, her movements awkward because of her long skirts.
Vera beamed into Elisabeth’s stricken face. “I guess I shouldn’t have tried it on without asking you,” she said, reaching back to work the clasp. Clearly, she was giving no real weight to the idea that Elisabeth might have objections to sharing personal belongings. “Here.”
Elisabeth’s hand trembled slightly as she reached out to let Vera drop the chain and pendant into her palm. Rather than make a major case out of the incident, she decided she would simply put the necklace away somewhere, out of harm’s way. “Where did you find this?” she asked moderately, her attention on Trista.
Her future stepdaughter looked distinctly uncomfortable. “It was on top of Papa’s dresser,” she said.
Elisabeth simply arched an eyebrow, as if inviting Trista to explain what she’d been doing going through someone else’s things, and the child averted her eyes.
Dropping the necklace into the pocket of her skirt, Elisabeth announced, “It’s about to rain. Vera, I think you’d better hurry on home.”
Trista looked disappointed, but she didn’t offer a protest. She simply put away her doll and followed Vera out of the room and down the stairs.
Afraid to cross the threshold leading into the main hallway with the necklace anywhere on her person, Elisabeth tossed it over. Only as she was bending to pick the piece of jewelry up off the floor did it occur to her that she might have consigned it to a permanent limbo, never to be seen again.
She carried the necklace back to the spare room and dropped it onto her bureau, then went downstairs and out onto the porch to scan the road for Jonathan’s horse and buggy. Instead, she saw the intrepid Vera galloping off toward home, while Trista swung forlornly on the gate.
“There was supposed to be a wedding today,” she said, her lower lip jutting out just slightly.
Elisabeth smiled and laid a hand on a small seersucker-clad shoulder. “I’m sorry you’re disappointed, honey. If it helps any, so am I.”
“I wish Papa would come home,” Trista said. She was gazing toward town, and the warm wind made tendrils of dark hair float around her face. “I think there’s going to be a hurricane or something.”
Despite her own uneasiness and her yearning to see Jonathan, Elisabeth laughed. “There won’t be a hurricane, Trista. The mountains make a natural barrier.”
As if to mock her statement, lightning struck behind the house in that instant, and both Trista and Elisabeth cried out in shock and dashed around to make sure the chicken house or the
woodshed hadn’t been struck.
Elisabeth’s heart hammered painfully against her breastbone when she saw the wounded tree at the edge of the orchard. Its trunk had been split from top to bottom, and its naked core was blackened and still smoldering. In the barn, Jonathan’s horses neighed, sensing something, perhaps smelling the damaged wood.
And for all of it, the air was still bone-dry and charged with some invisible force that seemed to buzz ominously beneath the other sounds.
“We’d better get inside,” Elisabeth said.
Trista turned worried eyes to her face. “What about Vera? What if she doesn’t get home safely?”
It was on the tip of Elisabeth’s tongue to say they’d phone to make sure, but she averted the slip in time. She wished she knew how to hitch up a wagon and drive a team, but she didn’t, and she doubted that Trista did, either.
She could ride, though not well. “Let’s get out the tamest horse you own,” she said. “I’ll ride over to Vera’s place and make sure she got home okay.”
“Okay?” Trista echoed, crinkling her nose at the unfamiliar word.
“It means ‘all right,’” Elisabeth told her, picking up her skirts and heading toward the barn. Between the two of them, she and Trista managed to put a bridle on the recalcitrant Estella, Trista’s aging, swaybacked mare. Elisabeth asked for brief directions and set off down the road, toward the schoolhouse.
Overhead, black clouds roiled and rolled in on each other, and thunder reverberated off the sides of distant hills. Elisabeth thought of the splintered apple tree and shivered.
As she reached the road, she waved at the man who lived in an earlier incarnation of the house the Buzbee sisters shared. Heedless of the threatened storm, he was busy hammering a new rail onto his fence.
Just around the bend from the schoolhouse, Elisabeth found Vera sitting beside the road, her face streaked with dust, sobbing. The pony was galloping off toward a barn on a grassy knoll nearby.
“Are you hurt?” Elisabeth asked. She didn’t want to get down from the horse if she could help it, because getting back on would be almost impossible, dressed as she was. It was bad enough riding with her skirts hiked up to show her bare legs.
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