Just a Kiss Away

by Jill Barnett

  “Why are you doing this?” she called out to his back.

  “Because those men would have hurt you.” He jerked her around another series of corners.

  “You threatened to cut my throat,” she reminded him.

  “Yeah, but I was just trying to save my skin.”

  Before she could respond, he dragged her over a cobbled street, and it was all she could do to keep on her feet. “Sir! Sir! Please stop!”

  He jerked to a stop, had the gall to drop his shoulders as if he were frustrated, and turned slowly around, his look all irritation. “Now what?”

  “If you weren’t about to kill me, why are you kidnapping me?”

  “Kidnapping you?” He scowled. “I’m not kidnapping you. I’m saving your sweet neck!”

  He wasn’t gonna kill her or kidnap her. She sighed with relief. Then his words registered.

  “Save me from what?”

  “Those soldiers would have used you to get to me.”

  “But I don’t even know you.”

  “Right, but they don’t know that, and they wouldn’t believe you if you told them. They would just figure you were lying, question you over and over until they’d finally get fed up and get rid of you.” He took her arm and started to move. “Now let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Back inside the city. Then I can get you to whatever hotel you belong in and out of my hair.”

  She stiffened at his rudeness, then dug in her heels to try to stop their motion, but he dragged her three feet before finally stopping. She drew herself up and told him, “But I’m not staying in a hotel.”

  He spit out a vile oath, and then very slowly, as if speaking to a foreigner, he asked, “Where are you staying?”

  “The Binondo District.”

  “Okay.” He nodded, taking in a long breath for patience. “That’s in the opposite direction.”

  She agreed, but he wasn’t looking at her because he appeared to be counting under his breath. Her brother Jed acted like that, except he was a southern gentleman.

  The Yankee madman clamped on to her arm and took off again, running so fast that he all but dragged her over an even rougher stone walk.

  “Would you please slow down!”

  He ignored her and dragged her on. Her heel caught on the jutting edge of a stone and broke. “My shoe!”

  He hauled her a few more feet, then thankfully stopped and turned around. She hopped on one foot while she tried to ram the heel back in place. “My heel’s broken.”

  He glanced at his hand for a brief moment, then said, “Disarmed, huh?”

  She frowned. What an odd thing to say . . . but then, everyone knew that Yankees didn’t think like normal people. She decided to try to make him understand. “Sir, you don’t seem to understand—”

  At that instant he picked her up in his arms.

  “Put me down!”

  He ignored her and headed south.

  “Pay me some mind!”

  “I didn’t know you had one.”

  She fumed, but remembered a lady didn’t show her anger. It was beneath her. She did what she’d been taught. She didn’t speak to him.

  Five minutes later she realized that was exactly what he wanted, and she gave up on acting like a genteel lady. She’d tell him off.

  “You’ve broken my shoe,” she complained, breaking the silence.

  He ignored her.

  “My new fan’s gone.”

  More silence, and he whipped around another corner so fast her head spun. It took a moment for her to try again. Remembering her drafty drawers, she added, “My dignity’s been completely shattered.”

  “Good,” he finally said. “Then you won’t mind this.”

  He threw her over his shoulder, clamping his tree arm ‘cross the backs of her thighs just as she screeched. With each jog, his hard shoulder now jabbed her corset into her ribs. It kept her from finding the breath to yell. She stared in a dizzying blurr at his hard back, her only view, and she almost gave up, until she remembered one more thing.

  She managed one deep breath and raised her head away from his broad back. “I’ve lost my parasol!”

  He never broke stride, just continued down the street, muttering some fool thing that sounded like “There is a God.”

  Eulalie had twenty-seven bruises. She counted every one while she bathed. Her arm had marks from that man’s tight fingers; her wrist and shoulder ached from being pulled like taffy all over Manila. She sank lower into the tepid soapy water, hoping it would soothe her. Instead, her ribs cried out. She’d forgotten about them, briefly. Earlier, she’d been absolutely sure that every fool one of her corset stays had left permanent indentations on her rib cage.

  Josefina had said the bath would help, and it did. But she couldn’t help but remember the housekeeper’s face when the Yankee toted her home. He had charged like a bull through the wrought-iron gates, across the tiled courtyard, and up the stone steps, which accounted for some of her bruises. Then, instead of knocking like most humans, he’d kicked on the heavy doors until poor, stunned Josefina pulled them open.

  “You’re home,” he’d said and whacked her on the derriere. “All safe and sound.” Then he deposited her in front of a stunned Josefina. “And you’re out of my hair,” he rudely added before he spun around and was out the gates before Eulalie could do more than see straight.

  The little housekeeper had said there were more and more of his type living here since the Spanish relaxed the trade laws. She said she shouldn’t have let Eulalie go off by herself, which prickled. It was just like being at home with her brothers. Now Josefina would probably start watching over her.

  She rose from the tin tub, dried off, and put on her pink ruffled lace dressing gown. Then hairbrush in hand, she brushed her long hair, letting it spill freely down her back to dry. Josefina had brought her a plate of sliced mango, bread, and cheese to tide her over until dinner. The meal was to be delayed until her father’s return.

  Picking up the tray, she sat in a high-backed caned chair and placed the tray in her lap. The silence hit her. It was so quiet. She heard no sounds from the street because the house sat on the back of the property. Her nervousness grew. With five older brothers there was always noise at home. Hickory House was not a quiet place. She tapped her foot on the floor to give the room some sound.

  With knife and fork, she cut the fruit and delicately placed a piece of it in her mouth. Very slowly and carefully she chewed, making sure her lips never parted. She swallowed, then looked around the empty room.

  At home she always had polite dinner conversation with one of her brothers. It was a lady’s tool to kill the time between bites, assuring herself that she wouldn’t overeat. But there was no one to talk to. She took another bite, chewed and swallowed again. The food hit her nervous stomach like a cannonball. She set the tray aside and paced the room, wondering what her father was like.

  Finally bored into action, she went downstairs to his study. She paused outside the double doors, a little nervous, a little excited, a little scared. One deep breath and she went inside, closing the door behind her. She leaned back, the door handle still in her hand, and she took in the room. It was dark, the only catches of light being those that filtered through huge shutters on the wall of windows opposite her. As her eyes adjusted to the dimness she could see well enough to cross the room and open the sliding wood shutters. Light flooded the room, and she turned, hoping the place would give her some insight to her father.

  But the room was not much different from the study at Hickory House. Carved wood bookcases lined two walls, and there were the requisite oxblood leather chairs, the large, flat-topped desk, and a huge but faded carved rug. All the masculine objects and ornaments were there, from the large brass-bordered gun case to the misty odor of tobacco. Nothing special. Nothing that said, “I’m your daddy.” Nothing that helped her. In fact, as she looked around, the excitement and anticipation that had driven her for weeks suddenly faded like
the rich colors in that rug.

  She walked over to the desk, hitched her hip on one corner and looked at the globe, remembering how many times as she was growing up she’d looked at the pale colored splotches that represented her father’s new posts. As she got older, she’d looked up the countries in Collier’s, trying to imagine her father amid the colorful images described in the encyclopedia. But her image of him held no vivid color; it was little more than a sepia-toned figure in a photograph, like the one she kept near her bed at home. She had vague bits of remembrances of him, but seventeen years had dimmed those memories.

  At times, alone up in her rooms at Hickory House, she’d imagined what her life would have been like if her daddy had been there and if her mama hadn’t died. She knew it would have been different, and she wasn’t sure if her fantasies came from a deep yearning for something she’d never had or from boredom with what she did have.

  Her brothers loved her in their own way; she knew that, and that they cared for her. They took their duty seriously, so much so that there were times when she felt smothered and chained. As a child she’d dreamed of a mother’s gentle hand and soft words. Someone who smelled like gardenias and would hold her against a soft neck to make the childhood hurts go away.

  As a sensitive young girl on the verge of womanhood, with no confidence, she’d dreamed of a mother’s wisdom and experience. Someone she could emulate. Someone who knew how she felt when her brothers placed all those tags on her. They didn’t understand that it hurt to be thought of as too young, too fragile, and naive. It hurt to be thought of as a jinx and most of all as helpless, and she’d wanted someone who could make that hurt go away, or at least understand why it hurt her.

  But most recently, as a young woman, she’d dreamed of having a mother’s listening ear. Someone who’d really listen to her, who’d stand up for her against her brothers’ notions. Someone who would tell her about love and men and marriage, and someone to whom she could tell her deepest secrets and all those insecurities she hid. For as much as she tried to fight it, as much as she wanted to be otherwise, she knew she truly was afraid to be on her own. Things did seem to happen to her when she was alone, like today.

  Her purpose had been to go out and buy a fan. Instead she’d come home fanless and she’d lost her parasol, broken a shoe, not to mention almost getting her throat cut and being kidnapped. She just wasn’t very capable, and deep down inside she worried that maybe because she was inept, it was difficult for people to find something about her to love.

  She wondered, as always, if maybe she would have been different if she’d had at least one real parent. Her mother had died, so she couldn’t be there, but Eulalie tried desperately to be the exact image of what her mother had been, a lady. She wasn’t very good at that, either.

  But her father hadn’t died. He had chosen not to be there, and though she had tried to be like her mother, hoping that might bring him home, he’d never come. He’d written to her from all the faraway places, just as he had written to her brothers. But it just wasn’t the same. Her father had been there when her brothers were growing up. He hadn’t been there for her. And all her life she’d wondered why.

  She glanced around her father’s study. Seeing no answers there, she closed the shutters and crossed the room. Then she turned for one last glance at the study, shoulders down, a vacant, unsure feeling wedged in her chest, and she walked out of the room, more alone and more vulnerable than she had been in a long time.

  The note had arrived two hours ago. He was coming home. Eulalie paced the reddish plank flooring of her room for what must have been the hundredth time. She stopped and smoothed out the imaginary wrinkles on her dress. Though she’d worn it when she waited earlier, Josefina had pressed all of the wrinkles from the gown. It was pink—Calhoun pink, the color her mother had worn in the huge portrait that hung in its place of reverence above the drawing room fireplace.

  Eulalie had studied the dress in the painting; she knew every flowing line, every glimmer of shot silk, every scrap of imported white lace. She’d had the best dressmaker in Charleston copy the gown for her and had taken an hour to get her hair just so. Small pearl earrings hung from her ears. Lovely little French kid slippers with Louis XV heels graced her feet, and the hem of her whispering gown allowed for the little pink and red beaded shoe rosettes to peek out as she glided across the room.

  She grabbed her skirts and lifted them so she could get another glimpse of her slippers. She wiggled her toes inside the shoes and watched the beads catch the lamplight in the room. The rosettes twinkled back at her like winks from the stars.

  A loud clatter rang up from the courtyard. She dropped the skirts in a flurry of lace flounces and ran to the shuttered windows, but she could barely see a thing through the narrow wooden slats. She tried to slide the shuttered doors open, but they jammed. All she could see through the small opening was the center of the massive courtyard. Between the dark of night and the carved post rails of the long verandah outside her room, she couldn’t make out a fool thing.

  Her heart pounded drumlike in her chest, and she ran to the large oval mirror that hung over her lingerie chest. She stared at her image, looking for flaws. She had to look perfect. This first impression was just too important.

  But something was wrong. She frowned at her reflection, trying to figure out what was missing. The cameo. She’d forgotten her mother’s cameo. Some more noise clattered up from below, and she rummaged through her jewelry case until she found the cameo. Quickly she pulled it off its wrinkled blue silk ribbon and threaded it through a brand-new piece of pearly white velvet ribbon. Holding it to her neck she took in her image again. Now everything was perfect. She bent her head slightly forward so she could tie the ribbon loosely at the back of her neck. Then she looked up at the reflection.

  The dark native face of a soldier appeared over her left shoulder. She opened her mouth to scream, but he placed the cold barrel of a gun at her head.

  And Eulalie LaRue, of the Belvedere LaRues, owners of Hickory House, Calhoun Industries, and Beechtree Farms, did the most ladylike thing she’d ever done. She fainted.

  Chapter 4

  The splintered door of the crude hut flew open. Yellow morning light as bright as the Chicago fire flooded the doorway, momentarily blinding Sam, who was hunched in a dank corner of the grass hut. Aguinaldo’s men entered, a long, thick bamboo pole slung over their shoulders. Hanging from the pole was a lump of rough burlap that wiggled and snorted and squealed like a stockyard hog.

  With a solid thud the men dumped the bundle on the ground, then pulled out the pole and crossed the room, slamming and bolting the door in their wake. The bundle didn’t move for the longest time, as if being dropped had knocked it senseless. It regained its life swiftly, with more kicks and blows than a slum street fight. The bundle rolled, and the burlap peeled away, leaving that pink flower of the South sprawled in the middle of the now dim hut.

  Sam groaned. He was wrong. It had been senseless to begin with.

  He shook his head and stared at his hands, bound almost prayerlike. Praying wouldn’t help. She was here, following him like that proverbial black cloud. Her muttering brought his gaze up again. She looked ridiculous—a mumbling bundle of pink and white lace that tried to wiggle into a better position. He took a deep breath, half in irritation and half in resignation. God had a sense of humor, but he wondered why he seemed to be the brunt of it lately.

  He watched her maneuver, a pink flurry of scoots and shifts, into a sitting position, not an easy task with her bound hands and feet, and made worse by her miles of frilly female clothes. They rustled louder than native oaks in a gale wind. But her mouth was the clincher. She talked under her breath the whole time. He had a hunch that he’d experienced his last quiet moment, but then suddenly both the rustling and her muttering stopped cold.

  “Oh, my Gawd . . .”

  Sam looked at her stunned face and silently waited, counting, one . . . two . . .

  “
What’s going on here?”

  Three seconds. “I suppose you could call it a revolution,” he said sarcastically. He rested his elbows on his bent knees, his bound hands dangling between, and he watched her face flash with every little thought: doubt, belief, fear, then worry. She looked around the hut as if she expected someone else to be there.

  Her voice barely above a whisper, she asked, “What’re they gonna do with us?”

  Sam shrugged, choosing not to tell her they’d probably not live out the week, if they were lucky.

  “Why do they want me?”

  “They want you because they think you’re involved with me. By golly remember the marketplace?” he said in a drawl.

  Her full lips tightened into a thin line. She didn’t like him mimicking her. He stored that knowledge for use later. She shifted her legs to one side, trying to get comfortable with all her frills. She looked him straight in the eye and as sweet as sugar asked, “Why would they ever think that you and I would be associated?”

  He just stared at her, didn’t move, didn’t blink. The little snob. He should have left her in the marketplace. He kept staring, trying to intimidate a little fear into her, or at least make her think about what she’d said. She still awaited his answer, a pure innocent look on her face.

  He shook his head and laughed to himself. Finally he said in a wry tone, “I guess they don’t know you’re not my type.”

  “Well, I should say so.” Her expression said she’d be about as likely to hitch her hooks into him as she would be to eat one of those three-inch-long cockroaches that had run around the edges of the hut last night.

  Leaning back farther into the corner, he watched her a moment. He could almost read her thoughts on her face.

  Ah, he thought, the lamp just lit. It had dawned on her what he’d said. She recovered nicely, once again making eye contact as she spoke. “You mean you’re not my type of beau. I understand.”