Moonfire

by Linda Lael Miller

  Once the sugar cane had been harvested from both Seven Sisters and Duncan’s neighboring plantation, Reeve began to brood. Often, Maggie found him standing at a dark window, in the middle of the night, gazing toward the sea. She knew he was thinking of Jamie, and she worried. It was only a matter of time, Maggie was certain, until he would decide to go to New Zealand in search of his brother. Because of her pregnancy, he would surely leave her behind.

  On one such night, awakening to see Reeve standing at the bedroom windows, she got up, sliding her arms around his middle and letting her forehead rest against his back. He stiffened in her embrace, and Maggie wondered briefly if he’d started visiting Eleanor.

  Her eyes filled with tears, but she forced them back. She was smiling cheerfully when Reeve turned to face her. “Thinking of faraway places?” she asked softly.

  “And faraway people,” Reeve confirmed. His arms encircled Maggie, but he was not really with her. His mind and spirit were in New Zealand, with Jamie.

  “When are you going?” Maggie hadn’t planned to ask the question; it had simply popped out.

  Reeve tensed again, but this time his hands rose gently to the sides of Maggie’s upturned face, caressing her. He hesitated, then answered with a sigh of resignation, “Soon.”

  “I want to go along,” Maggie said stoutly.

  Reeve shook his head. “That’s out of the question, Yank,” he told her in a gentle voice. “And furthermore, you know it is.”

  Maggie lowered her eyes, lest he see the tears that had gathered there again. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

  Her husband held her, one hand stroking her back, moving the silken fabric rhythmically along her skin. “I won’t be away long, love, I promise. And you can pass the time in Sydney, shopping and the like. Wouldn’t you enjoy that?”

  Maggie was full of despair, despair she felt honor bound to hide. “No, I wouldn’t,” she answered stiffly. “But I do have business in Brisbane.”

  Reeve arched one dark eyebrow. “What kind of business?” he asked, his tone rife with suspicion. Maggie couldn’t think why he never trusted her not to get into mischief the moment he turned his back.

  She lifted her chin. “I’m going to speak to the people at the orphanage where Elisabeth was found. I want to know why she’s silent so much of the time.”

  Reeve let out a sigh. “Good luck, Yank. The best detectives in the country weren’t able to find that out. Leave it alone, Maggie—she was probably upset because her mother abandoned her.”

  Maggie had to admit that his theory was entirely possible. After all, being left was a small child’s greatest fear. “What do you suppose she was like?” she mused in a faraway voice. “Elisabeth’s mother, I mean.”

  His wide shoulders lifted in a shrug. “When and if I find Jamie, maybe I’ll ask him. We’ll set out for Brisbane in a couple of days, Maggie, and you and Cora and Elisabeth can travel on to Sydney from there.”

  Maggie stomped one foot. “No! Reeve McKenna, I’m your wife and I have every right—”

  He laid one finger over her lips, silencing her, and shook his head.

  In a sudden fury of indignation, Maggie knotted her hands into fists and batted impotently at Reeve’s chest. A sob escaped her, ragged and hoarse, and he lifted her into his arms. Sinking onto the side of the bed, Reeve held Maggie in his lap like a shattered child.

  She wept in earnest.

  To Maggie’s huge annoyance, Reeve chuckled, and his hand entangled itself in her hair as he held her against his chest in an effort to comfort her. “There now, Yank, it’s all about that baby growing inside you, isn’t it? Makes you pettish.”

  “The baby’s got nothing to do with it, you lout!” Maggie wailed. She sniffled noisily. “It’s your leaving, though I can’t th-think why I’m not overjoyed to be r-rid of you!”

  Reeve laughed and kissed her forehead. “Maybe you will be once I’m gone and you have the run of every shop in Sydney Town. You can see that friend of yours too—what’s her name again?”

  “Tansy,” Maggie answered grudgingly. She’d wanted her friend to come and live at Seven Sisters, but Tansy had refused because it would have meant leaving her intended. Acting on a mischievous hunch, she added, “I think I’d rather stay right here at home.”

  Reeve went rigid so suddenly that Maggie was nearly flung off his lap. “With Duncan Kirk living a stone’s throw away? Not on your life, Yank.”

  Maggie batted her eyelashes. “I thought Duncan was your friend,” she said innocently. “Don’t you trust him?”

  “I’d sooner leave you in the care of a band of drunken pirates,” Reeve replied. “You’re going to Sydney Town, and that’s the end of it.”

  Though Maggie argued and even resorted to tears on at least one more occasion, Reeve’s decision stood. After three days of hectic preparation, they set out for Brisbane by way of the coach, Cora and Elisabeth accompanying them.

  The journey was uneventful, if exhausting, and Maggie was in a sullen mood as she got ready for bed at the hotel. The room she and Reeve shared had been theirs once before, on their wedding night.

  Maggie tried to turn away from Reeve when he touched her, so great was her anger and her fear, but his caresses, as always, set her afire. After a fevered blaze of loving, she lay still in his arms, wondering at the power he wielded over her. It seemed there was no way to defy him and thus retain some pitiful semblance of self-respect.

  Reeve’s ship was to sail early, and he was up and dressed when Maggie awakened. She sat up in bed, yawning.

  “How long will you be away?” she asked casually, averting her eyes so that Reeve wouldn’t see the plot of rebellion brewing there.

  “Long enough to find Jamie and work out why he’s stayed away these twenty years,” Reeve replied, his voice quiet. Firm. His aquamarine eyes transmitted a warning when Maggie finally dared to look into them. “Don’t even think of trying to stow away on board that ship,” he told her.

  Maggie’s last splendid hope was dashed, and her disappointment must have shown in her face because Reeve chuckled and shook his head.

  Maggie hurled back the covers and scrambled awkwardly out of bed. Although the baby would not be born for months, she was already losing the agility that came with being slender. “I can tell you why Jamie didn’t want to face you,” she volunteered desperately, “and then there’ll be no need to go!”

  Reeve looked at her with something disturbingly like contempt. “Only now, when it serves your purpose?”

  Maggie wanted to weep at his coldness and the distance she saw in his eyes. She thought she knew then how Loretta had felt when she’d been sent packing, and she wondered if the time was coming when Reeve would send her away too. She drew herself up. “Very well, then, I won’t tell you.”

  She started to turn away, but Reeve grasped her by the arm and wrenched her around to face him. “I told you that the day would come when I’d ask what you know about my brother, Maggie. That time is here.”

  Maggie bit her lower lip. Reeve was like a stranger; she couldn’t believe he was the same man who had loved her, who had tended her when she was sick. Tears burned in her eyes and Reeve’s hands closed over her shoulders and then fell away.

  “Tell me,” he rasped.

  Maggie’s knees felt weak; she went to the bed and sat down. “You’ve found Jamie again without even knowing it,” she said, dashing away her tears with the back of one hand. “He was the man who tried to rob you, right here in Brisbane a few years ago, and he has a nasty scar to show for it.”

  Reeve’s muttered exclamation seemed to fill the room. A moment later, without a good-bye, much less an apology for his high-handed behavior, he was gone.

  Maggie was crushed. She’d wallowed in abject misery for several minutes when there was a tap on the door and Cora came in at a dispirited invitation.

  “Good heavens,” the older woman gasped, peering into Maggie’s pallid face. “What’s happened?”

  Reeve has s
topped loving me, Maggie wanted to answer, though of course she couldn’t bring herself to say the awful, poisonous words aloud. “Nothing,” she lied. “Nothing at all.” She paused, drawing a deep breath. “Has Elisabeth had her breakfast? I’ve an errand to attend to, and I’d like her to go with me.”

  Cora’s concern still showed in her face. “She’s downstairs, Mrs. McKenna, with Eleanor.”

  Maggie stiffened as a distinct feeling of danger rippled through her. “Eleanor is here? In Brisbane?”

  “Yes,” Cora answered, looking surprised at Maggie’s reaction. “She’s on her way to Auckland this very morning. Says she has business there, with Mr. Jamie McKenna, mind you, though I can’t think what it could be—”

  Maggie’s alarm deepened. Though she couldn’t have given a specific reason, her trepidation went far beyond the fact that she didn’t want Eleanor traveling in Reeve’s company. She began wrenching on her clothes while Cora watched in amazement.

  “Don’t just stand there!” Maggie cried as she struggled with her shoes. They were never easy to put on, with all their buttons, but now that her ankles were swollen, they were impossible. “Go downstairs and make sure that Elisabeth is all right!”

  But Maggie couldn’t wait for Cora to follow her orders. Hair flying free, shoes still unfastened, she dashed down the stairs ahead of the governess, through a lobby full of stunned wayfarers, and into the public dining room.

  Elisabeth and Eleanor were nowhere in sight.

  Maggie whirled, full of fury and fear, and collided hard with Duncan. Laughing a little, he steadied her by taking her shoulders into his strong hands.

  “So it’s true,” he muttered. “There is a beautiful harridan scurrying about this hotel with her hair falling around her waist and her shoes untied.”

  “She’s taken Elisabeth!” Maggie cried. “She’s—” Duncan’s face was instantly sober. “Who, Maggie? Who’s taken Elisabeth?”

  “Eleanor!” Maggie managed to cry. “She told Cora she had some business with Jamie McKenna—”

  Duncan remained thoughtful, and he spoke very slowly. “That means she’s boarding the same ship as Reeve,” he reasoned. “Elisabeth is safe.”

  Maggie tried to go around Duncan in pursuit of the child she loved as her own, but he stopped her, holding her fast by the shoulders. “I’ll take you to the wharf,” he said. “I have a carriage right outside.”

  “No,” Cora whispered, but nobody paid any attention. Maggie ran to the carriage and climbed inside without help. “Please,” she implored Duncan, who followed and settled himself comfortably in the seat across from hers, “tell the driver to hurry!”

  “No need for that,” he said, brushing off the sleeves of his impeccably clean white coat. “The ship has already sailed. Look at the horizon and you’ll see.”

  Maggie fairly dived for the window. There was a vessel on the horizon, as well as several at anchor in the harbor. The carriage, meanwhile, was moving away from the sea instead of toward it.

  She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. She’d let her guard down and this was what had come of it. After her first ride in a carriage with Duncan, Maggie reasoned to herself, she should have learned.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked coolly. Duncan smiled at the demand, examining his fingernails. “Home,” he said.

  Panic gnawed at Maggie’s insides, but she forced herself to remain calm. “My home is with Reeve,” she pointed out. “Now, stop this nonsense, please, and drive me to the harbor.”

  Without looking at Maggie, Duncan shook his head. “The trouble with you and me, my love, is that we’ve never had a chance to get to know each other. That’s why Eleanor and I worked this plan out.”

  Maggie’s eyes rounded. “You knew Eleanor was going to kidnap Elisabeth?” she asked in utter shock.

  Duncan bristled and, at last, met Maggie’s gaze. “Elisabeth is her daughter—it’s hardly kidnapping.”

  Maggie’s shock was consummate. Her mouth dropped open and she forcibly closed it again.

  Duncan laughed and the sound was low and harsh, frightening Maggie.

  “Elisabeth never let on,” she muttered.

  “That’s because she doesn’t remember.”

  Maggie locked her hands together in her lap and moved forward a little on the seat. “What happened, Duncan? Why is it so rare and difficult for Elisabeth to speak?”

  He hesitated, then evidently decided that there was no reason to keep the secret anymore. After all, he had Maggie and Eleanor had Elisabeth. “Eleanor had left the child before.” He sighed. “Often for weeks. That time Elisabeth must have guessed that her mother was never coming back.”

  Maggie thought back over all the days Eleanor had spent in Reeve’s household, both in Sydney and at Seven Sisters, and she was awed at the woman’s capacity to ignore her own child. Never once had Eleanor shown the slightest curiosity about Elisabeth, or affection for her. “Whatever could Jamie have seen in her?” she mused.

  Duncan only glared at her. He didn’t like being reminded of the man who’d plunged a knife into his shoulder.

  Outside the carriage, open spaces stretched in every direction. In the far distance two kangaroos hopped across the ground at amazing speed. “Take me back, Duncan,” Maggie said at length, in an attempt at reason. “Reeve will be furious if you don’t.”

  “Reeve is on his way to Auckland,” Duncan answered smoothly, and that seemed to settle that.

  “Reeve!”

  Some note or nuance of that voice was vaguely familiar. Reeve paused on the ship’s ramp and turned to assess the crowd gathered on shore.

  A tall man with fair hair and azure eyes stepped forward, one suntanned arm lifted in tentative greeting. A slender blond woman stood on tiptoe to kiss the stranger’s cheek, then walked away toward the ticket office.

  Reeve froze where he was, other passengers boarding the ship surging around him. “Jamie?” He muttered the name softly.

  As the man who might be his brother drew nearer, Reeve broke the strange paralysis that had held him and started down the ramp. His throat felt thick and his stomach jittery.

  Finally, the two men stood facing each other on the wharf. The stranger looked uncomfortable in his suit and fancy hat.

  “Hello, Reeve,” he said quietly.

  It was a moment before Reeve could speak. All the waiting and searching and hoping were behind him now; saints in heaven, this was Jamie standing before him.

  Jamie’s eyes misted over, though he was grinning in that cocky way that Reeve remembered so well. “I didn’t expect you to come to meet me,” he observed.

  Reeve’s anger was sudden and fathomless. “Damned if I did that,” he hissed, lapsing into the brogue. “I was off to New Zealand to find you and break your—”

  Jamie flung back his head and shouted with laughter. Reeve was overwhelmed by a raging joy that blurred his vision and made his eyes sting. He stood stiffly in his brother’s embrace for a moment before returning it.

  Eleanor watched the reunion, tightly clasping Elisabeth’s hand.

  Reeve and Jamie were face to face, two towering men with broad shoulders and an aura of power about them. It was that faculty, mainly, that had attracted Eleanor to each man in his turn. Her heart climbed into her throat as she waited for Jamie to turn and see her standing there, with his daughter. Her daughter.

  “So it was you that tried to rob me in that Brisbane alley, was it?” Reeve accused him, but his hands were gripping Jamie’s shoulders. The talisman he wore around his neck, a twin to Jamie’s, glistened in the bright Queensland sunshine.

  Eleanor felt an ache in one corner of her heart as she watched Jamie smile. “Aye, mate—that was me.” In a wink he was out of his jacket and rolling up one sleeve to show off the scar Eleanor remembered so well. “Made a job of it, didn’t you, now?”

  Reeve swore as he assessed the injury he’d done his brother.

  Elisabeth began to fret at her mother’s side, and Eleanor
knew it was time to step forward. She assembled a sweet expression and started toward Jamie, only to have the little girl at her side pull free and dash toward Reeve, shouting, “Papa! Papa!”

  Reeve’s face was a study in surprise as he lifted the delighted child into his arms. Frowning, he scanned the people milling along the wharf and on shore. “What are you doing here, shoebutton?”

  While Elisabeth was prattling out her answer, Jamie’s robin’s-egg-blue eyes at last found Eleanor. Instead of the welcome she had hoped to see there, though, she discovered a glacial hardness. This is our child, she wanted to scream out, but she didn’t dare. It was clear that Jamie still hated her, would always hate her.

  She turned from the scene on the wharf to flee, looking back only once. Reeve and Jamie were striding along a good distance behind her, engaged in an earnest conversation, Elisabeth riding happily on Reeve’s shoulders.

  On the path leading to the hotel Eleanor encountered Cora, who was blubbering and wringing her hands.

  “First you take off with little Elisabeth, and now Duncan’s gone and kidnapped Mrs. McKenna—where is that child, Eleanor Kilgore? What have you done with her?”

  Eleanor wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of one hand. “Elisabeth is with Reeve,” she said quietly. She didn’t ask where Duncan might have gone with Maggie, because she knew; she’d guessed his plan, seen it written in his eyes the moment he’d learned that Maggie was to be separated from Reeve for a period of time. Together, they’d plotted the rest.

  It wasn’t far, the little hideaway Duncan had taken for the occasion of winning the fair Maggie. Eleanor decided to go there and have vengeance on all the men who had scorned her: Duncan, Reeve, and Jamie.

  It would be so easy.

  “I shouldn’t have done this, Maggie, and I’m sorry.” Duncan was so contrite that his captive was hard put to be furious with him, though she knew she should have been. Her main concern was Elisabeth; she prayed that the child was safe.

  The small farmhouse Duncan had brought her to stood in the middle of a field of towering and neglected sugar cane, and Maggie settled herself at the kitchen table. There was just one room; from where she sat she could see both the bed and the cookstove. “You’re very fortunate that Reeve is on his way to Auckland, Duncan Kirk, because he’d have your hide for this.”