Tender (The Trelawneys of Williamsburg Time Travel Romance Book 1)

by Anne Meredith

  Bittersweet longing pervaded her at his offering. He spoke as an ardent young suitor, offering all a woman could hope for. With one niggling detail; she would never know the right to his name.

  Her lips curved in a joyless smile. “I’m glad—so glad—that you’ll stop the trading. But I can never love the husband of another woman.”

  “Rachel—”

  She touched his mouth, silencing him. But as she felt the soft warmth of his lips under her fingertips, her eyes met his. She thought she would never see as imploring a gaze. The temptation was too great, and she slowly curved her hand around his cheek, settling her lips over his.

  Startled by her kiss, Grey was immobile for a moment, adrift in sensation. Odd, how he’d never noticed the shy, virginal catch in her breath just as her lips touched his; the lightness of her fingers on his throat; the enflaming, instinctive lift of her breasts against his chest, an innocent, involuntary invitation. And remarkable that she could perceive this as a farewell kiss; it fired his desire, reminding him of all he was losing if he lost her.

  Rachel felt the exact moment when an almost desperate hunger seized him, when her kiss became his. He pulled her close, his fingers sliding into her hair, his body half rising, curving over hers, his mouth exploring hers in a plea and a demand. He drew her tongue still deeper into his mouth as his hand traveled from her hair to the slim column of her throat, as he strove to dam the desire that raged through him. Lean, strong fingers brushed the pale, malleable curve of her breasts with delicate longing.

  “Please,” she gasped, tearing her lips from his.

  “Please what, darling? My only love—”

  She wrenched herself out of his grasp, rising unsteadily, and her voice shook. “Please don’t ask me to do this.”

  “Rachel!”

  She hurried down the path away from him, and in another minute knew he hadn’t followed. As she stood alongside the edge of the river, she gazed out over the water. The moon over the horizon was reflected in the wide, gently rolling river, and she raised her gaze to the skies. Never had she seen as many stars in a night sky; and as she stared, those long-dead bits of long ago blurred into blinding starbursts.

  By the time she started up the path toward Rosalie, the moon had risen high in the sky. As she neared the house, she heard the soft, subdued laughter of a woman and a man. Embarrassed to have happened on a lover’s tryst, Rachel stepped into the shadows.

  “God above, how do you stand it?”

  “I don’t miss London.” The man was Donavan; the woman, none other than Grey’s wife. “What was it you wanted, Letitia?”

  Her laughter was that of contrived seduction. “Donovan, you were once attuned to my every whim. Whatever happened?”

  “I’m growing older,” he chuckled. “My reflexes are slowing.”

  They were standing farther up the same path Rachel had trod, and in another minute would have run square into her. Letitia turned to him, laying a hand on his chest. She raised her face to his, and in profile, only a few inches separated their lips.

  “Yet you’ve the same reckless enticement you had that night in my box at the opera.”

  “Grey’s box. The memory brings me little pleasure.”

  “And it brought me little more than a thickened waistline.”

  “And a lovely child,” he murmured grimly. “Emily.”

  Rachel’s mouth dropped. Donovan Stuart had fathered Emily? It struck her as remarkable that Grey could behave without rancor toward this man, who he knew had betrayed him.

  “Enough of her,” Letitia said. “Do you not remember our time fondly, Donovan? It certainly seemed otherwise at supper.”

  “’Twas to distract you from persecuting the servant. You were making a dreadful scene.”

  “Donovan, make love to me. Here. Now.”

  Letitia’s impulsive demand surprised Rachel, and she gasped, clapping her hand over her mouth—but the noise went unnoticed.

  “For the love of St. Michael, Letitia—let me go! I refuse to make a cuckold of Grey thrice in this lifetime. Faith, in his gardens! That’s quite funny!”

  Letitia stiffened into a ramrod-straight line. “You dare deny me? Over something as trivial as consideration for a rival?”

  “It would seem so.” He sighed. “As I said, I’m getting older. Now, if you’ll excuse me, dear?”

  Letitia abruptly swept up the overgrown path, and Donovan laughed, watching her go. Then he turned, his amused gaze resting squarely on Rachel. “So you know my tawdry little secret.”

  Rachel gulped, embarrassed. “I—I—how did you know?”

  “Gasping gives the game away.” His blue eyes gently mocked her. “Although perhaps even I would’ve been breathless at the prospect of such perverse entertainment.”

  “It wasn’t that!”

  “I know. I stayed behind to warn you, Rachel. The lady suspects something between you and Grey.”

  She sighed. “What kind of woman is he married to?”

  “An exceedingly lusty and cruel wench,” he said, with a philosophic twitch of his head. “Which is why I warn you. Nothing—and I mean nothing—is beyond her deviant appetite.” Now, his gaze was hard. “Beware of her.”

  The moon was high when Camisha arrived at the meeting place. As she saw Ashanti, she thought: So this is how it feels, to know the man you love, loves you.

  He enfolded her in his arms, reassured by the sound of his heartbeat. “Have you decided?”

  “I want to marry you, Ashanti.”

  “Thank God. We’ll leave in an hour.”

  “No. I want to marry you here. I want Daniel to marry us.”

  “Daniel? But he’s not a …” Slow understanding came, and he muttered, “You mean a slave wedding.”

  “The vows these people take mean more to them than the vows people take before a priest in the twenty-first century.”

  “These people don’t have anything else,” he said bitterly. “You and I do. I want to be married in front of our families and our friends—”

  “What do we have? We don’t even have tomorrow. Listen to yourself—our families and friends? My family and most of my friends are in another time. I don’t know what I’m doing here, and I don’t know how long I’ll be here. But it won’t be forever.”

  “Why?”

  “This isn’t where I belong. For whatever reason, God put me in another time.”

  “Perhaps to be given an understanding of why the time you would someday live in must be changed.”

  “You can’t change the past. None of us can.”

  “But for you, this is the present! The future isn’t etched in marble. Those little children trapped in that concrete jungle you told me about, never taught the pleasure of accomplishment, just to be taught how to settle for whatever’s given them—they don’t have to be born that way. They can be educated and stop the cycle.”

  “For a few brief hours, you and I are together. We can’t guess when it will end. And I want to know that when I go back to the life I was given, I’ll know that once, I gave myself to the man whose love I was meant to know. And when I say the words that seal this wedding, I’ll thank God He gave me a man who deserved the vow.”

  Her voice caught. All those years, how many friends had she heard speak those words—till death do us part—without considering the grim origin of the vow?

  He brushed at the tears that streaked her face, and she swallowed and continued.

  “Just as the auction block can’t sever the vows Ruth made to Daniel, time will be powerless to destroy my promise to you. I’ll honor my vows until I draw my last breath.”

  Ashanti lowered his lips to hers, tasting her love for him, her uncommon fire and strength. At last he spoke. “As will I. And when the last breath leaves my body, it will be your name.”

  The night was cool and quiet when they started back toward Rosalie. The sudden sound of laughter rose up, only twenty feet away. Instinctively he pulled her into the shadows of the trees, a
nd they waited silently.

  The figure of a man emerged, wearing only breeches. A knot formed in her stomach as she recognized him: Manning.

  At his side was a woman she didn’t recognize, dressed in a sheer lace nightgown. The woman gave a low, throaty laugh as she stripped the shift over her head and jumped into the river. Manning followed her, fumbling with the buttons on his buckskins. She was shocked at the sight of the overseer, cavorting with the unknown woman where anyone could see.

  Ashanti swiftly pulled her away. “That must be the basest man ever to walk the earth,” he muttered.

  When they found Ruth and Daniel sitting outside their cabin, they stopped to tell them of their plans.

  “You gone jump the broom?” Ruth asked.

  “Yes,” Camisha said with a smile.

  Daniel retrieved a jug and a mug from the cabin, and they passed the wine, celebrating their good fortune and laughing into the night. At last Ashanti walked her back to the house.

  She climbed the servants’ stairs to the second floor, and she’d almost made it to her room when she heard a noise on the stairs below. She recognized the woman who’d romped naked with Manning on the riverbank. Sneaking up the back stairs!

  “Can I help you?” Camisha asked with a frown.

  The woman’s hair hung in dank strings, and her shift was damp, but pale green eyes glittered imperiously as she arrived at the top of the stairs. “I dislike your tone, wench. And yes. You may help me undress.”

  Camisha snorted. “I don’t think so.”

  The woman slapped her. The act was swift and stunning, and Camisha had to stop herself from slugging her.

  “You’re speaking to your mistress,” the woman lashed.

  I’m speaking to a slut of the first order, Camisha said to herself in dismay. This mess was Letitia Trelawney? Ruth had cried for hours over her abuse and still feared a flogging.

  Did the woman know Camisha had seen her at the river? Of course not. She made a hasty decision and bit her tongue. She bowed to the woman. “I beg your forgiveness, madam. I regret I’m not trained to assist such a fine lady as yourself, but I’ll find someone who is.”

  Letitia was mollified at this, and Camisha descended the stairs and roused a chambermaid to tend to the lady. All the while her mind quickly assembled facts. Above all else, one fact shone clear.

  The gray-eyed slave trader was about to receive his due.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Rachel squinted against the sun’s first rays the next morning. Camisha was humming as she dressed.

  “You’re pretty darn chipper this morning,” Rachel mumbled.

  “It’s my wedding day, honey.” Camisha laughed softly. “Shut your mouth, Rae. I can see all your fillings.”

  “Your what?”

  “You heard me. Me an’ my man, we’s jumpin’ the broom.” She frowned. “We drank some blackberry wine last night, and I have a screaming headache. Got any aspirin?”

  “Very funny.” Rachel threw her legs out of the bed. “You’re marrying Ashanti? And what’s this about … jumping the broom?”

  “Just get dressed. We need to get Emily up before all the blue-bloods start rousing.”

  They found Emily in her room, and as they dressed her, a maid arrived with a tray for her breakfast. The dish of apple butter brightened her mood. While she ate, Rachel and Camisha gathered the things Camisha had wanted for her wedding, simple gifts from Rachel. A bottle of perfumed oil, a bar of soap, a silken nightgown. They giggled over it, then returned to fetch Emily. She wasn’t in her room, and they began a swift search. “I hear her,” Camisha said, frowning. “Damn it, she’s in that woman’s room.”

  That woman who happened to have given birth to her.

  An irritable mutter came from the room they approached. “Stop plaguing me, brat. Your prattle is making my head throb.”

  “But if you just taste it, you’ll see it’s so very—”

  They arrived just in time to see Letitia whirl on her daughter. She grabbed Emily and shook her until the small china bowl fell from her trembling fingers and shattered. Apple butter splattered across the rug, and the lady’s nightgown.

  “Now see what you’ve done!”

  Letitia raised her arm to strike Emily, and Camisha stepped forward, grabbing her wrist, her voice a harsh grate. “Pick on somebody who’s big enough to pick back, lady.”

  Letitia’s eyes glinted with green fire. “Take your hands off me.” The words dripped from her tongue like slow drops of poison.

  Emily was stunned, and her eyes shimmered with tears. Rachel pulled her into her arms, pressing her face against her apron.

  “You’ll be flogged for this.”

  Camisha’s voice shook with rage. “I’ve just about had it, watching you pick on every helpless creature who happens to cross your unholy path. You touch this child again, and you’ll get worse than a flogging.”

  With that, they carried Emily outside. As they soothed her in the gardens, Rachel remembered Grey’s words the day after Camisha was found, when he’d spoken of his wife.

  There is no human love in her.

  She remembered everything else she’d learned of Letitia Trelawney; how had he promised his life to such a person? Worse, how could he subject his daughter to her? It was unthinkable.

  By early afternoon, they joined the women out in the kitchen preparing the wedding meal as well as the evening meal for the Trelawney guests. Emily played outside with Sukey and Little Dan; they, along with Ruth, had been relieved from their chores to help Camisha with her wedding. Camisha snatched a small cake, biting into it. “Oh! Just like my grandmother used to make!”

  Breaking it in two, she shared it with Rachel. “What is it?”

  “The most heavenly crab cake you’ll ever taste.” Camisha moaned, her mouth full.

  “Now you stop that, or there be none left for supper,” Hattie said, shooing at her.

  Crestfallen, Camisha asked, “Oh, they’re for the visitors?”

  Hattie grinned, her face shiny with sweat. “No, they’re for you. Ashanti, he bought them crabs in town. Now go on.”

  “Let’s get you ready,” Ruth said. “You got a man waitin’.”

  In Ruth’s cabin, she gave Camisha a shy smile. Fine, delicate features were alight with a mixture of pride and humility as she struggled with her words. “Camisha, I knows you be a fine lady, an’ used to fine things. But … it would do me … honor if you’d wear what I wore when me and Daniel jumped the broom.”

  “Oh, Ruth, I’d be proud to.”

  “I took good care of it. You get on out of that fancy dress, and we’ll make you right pretty.”

  Camisha undressed down to her shift and stays. Ruth pulled a petticoat over her head, then another. “You be a free woman, but you seen what can happen when white men’s around, and I reckon they’s always gone be around. My mama, she be a dower negro down in Caroline, and when Heartbreak Day come, and we knowed I be sold, she told me that a day come when I be wanting babies of my own. Now, I’s gone tell you, just like Mama told me.”

  The younger woman spoke to her with a maternal, no-nonsense plainness that spoke of experience. Camisha understood what seemed to be a ritual, and although some of the girl’s facts might be skewed, the truth of it all in this age was unarguable, and she listened intently.

  “It all be on you to keep the family together. Your Ashanti, he might get sold away tomorrow. And if’n that happens, the children you got by him stays with you, if you be lucky. And they be yours long after they be gone.”

  “How do you live that way, Ruth?”

  “You just does.” She patted Camisha, then reached for the frock. Though it was a simple walnut-dyed cotton, its deep mahogany color gave it a subtle richness. She dropped it over Camisha’s head and began to hook the dress.

  “Some say it be better not to have little ones. You just breedin’ more souls for the white man to work to death. I say, they’s my children, and they always be, wherever we g
oes, wherever they goes. Just like my Daniel—he be my husband, no matter what. An’ the Lord, He watch over you, child, just like he watch over Joseph when his brothers sold him away.”

  Ruth reached for one last item on the chair—a worn but brightly colored scarf. Her eyes were grave. “My mama wore this in her hair when she was taken from the motherland,” she said, draping the cloth around Camisha’s shoulders. “She say it stands for the day we all be back together with our loved ones in Glory, when he wipe every tear from our eyes, and there be no more mourning, no more crying, no more pain.

  “Now don’t do that,” she scolded, brushing at Camisha’s tears. “That Ashanti, he gots the big mouth, but he be a good man. And he take care of you, best he can.”

  Her philosophical reassurance moved Rachel. How demoralizing it must be for a man whose most fundamental instinct was routinely denied him; men whose very instinct had become escape.

  “And he be mighty pleasing to the eye,” Ruth added, smiling.

  Camisha burst out in hearty laughter, wiping at her eyes.

  “Now, I’m gone go get my Daniel and tell him you be ready.”

  With that, Ruth left them alone.

  “You look beautiful,” Rachel said, hugging her.

  “Bet you never figured my wedding dress would look like this, did you?”

  Smiling, she gently brushed her finger against the soft scarf. “Camisha, have you ever wondered …”

  “What?”

  “What the world would’ve been like, if there hadn’t been slavery.”

  “Have I ever wondered?” Camisha burst out laughing. “Lord have mercy. Honey, this is just one tragic act in an epic drama.”

  “But if the Africans had been left alone, to live their lives the way they wanted, maybe America wouldn’t have so much strife now.”

  “No kidding. But if you’re imagining some white utopia—”

  “You know I didn’t mean that. I was honestly thinking about modern-day Africa.”