Brigham didn't look at Devon, for the moment he couldn't bear the sight, and he knew Jake needed time and privacy to reassemble his dignity. His eyes swung to Lydia, taking refuge, hungry for the solace of her strength.
Charlotte and Millie were huddled in the doorway behind her, but Brigham couldn't think beyond that. His mind was reeling inside itself, off balance.
Lydia spoke gently to the girls, sending them away, and entered the room. Having her there was, to Brigham, like a gentle splash of cool water on a new burn.
“You'd better go and see if you can rustle up some supper,” she said to Jake, moving to stand on the opposite side of Devon's bed and touch his forehead with the backs of the fingers on her right hand. “The girls are hungry and tired, and they'll be wanting water heated for baths.”
Jake nodded, looking desperately grateful for something constructive to do, and shuffled out of the room.
Lydia's blue eyes rose from Devon's ruined face to Brigham's despairing one.
“Be careful, Brigham,” she said in a firm, quiet voice. “You can't control what you're feeling right now, I know, but you can manage what you're thinking. That's going to be communicated from your mind to Devon's, because you're closer than most brothers, and I can't stress enough how imperative it is that you believe in his strength and his will to recover.”
Brigham didn't absorb all of what she said, but somehow the words steadied his staggered soul, and he stood a little straighter. “I'll do anything to help him,” he said, staring at his brother's face, trying to will his own strength into Devon's broken body. “Anything.”
Lydia came around to where Brigham stood, the wet cloth still in his hand, and covered his fingers with her own, lightly. He felt a jolt of courage, and some other emotion, burst through his skin, invade his veins and spread into every part of him like fire.
“Fetch more water,” she said softly. She took the cloth from Brigham's hand, dipped it into the basin and began to bathe Devon's wounds with gentle deftness. “I'll need soap, whiskey, too, and lots of clean cloth—a sheet would do. Have Jake boil some sewing needles on the stove—Aunt Persephone must have left a few behind.” She paused, and when she spoke again, it was to herself more than Brigham. “I don't suppose you have catgut, so I'll have to use silk thread for suturing and watch very closely for infection.”
Brigham turned, moved awkwardly toward the door. An emotion he didn't dare unchain burned behind his eyes and constricted his throat.
Lydia gave Brigham a long and searching look, then came to his side and ushered him into the hallway. “Bring me the things I need,” she said, as if speaking to a shattered child. “And then it would be best if you went off somewhere, by yourself, and brought your thinking under control. If you do that, your feelings will fall naturally into line, and Devon will sense that. It will give him something to hold on to, a light to follow in the darkness.”
He raised his hand, touched her face lightly, and then went to do her bidding. He rounded up the items she'd asked for, from the whiskey to the sterilized needles, but it was much harder to leave Devon.
What would have seemed like silly, sentimental mysticism coming from anyone else made hard sense when Lydia said it. He could not allow himself to communicate the fear and horror he was feeling to Devon; the weight of those things might drag his brother down. So Brigham did as he'd been instructed, walking blindly through a drizzling rain to the cabin on the hill.
There, he lit a kerosene lamp, built a small fire on the hearth, and sat down in an old rocking chair—like the bed where Devon lay, near death, the rocker had been their mother's—his head braced in one hand.
Grimly, methodically, one by one, Brigham began aligning his thoughts.…
Devon was young and strong.
Devon had everything to live for. He had dreams, and people who loved him.
Devon would recover.
Lydia bathed Devon's wounds with infinite care, murmuring soft, reassuring words all the while. She stitched up the cut in his scalp, using white embroidery thread, and treated it with whiskey. With help from Jake, who had recovered himself at least enough to follow orders, she wrapped Devon's cracked rib cage, then felt his broken left arm with practiced fingers. It had to be reset, and Devon groaned at the pain, bringing tears of sympathy to Lydia's eyes.
She sent Jake to the icehouse, soothed Devon's dry lips with ice. “You're going to be fine, Devon,” she told her patient in a firm voice that would brook no disagreement. “You're strong and good and we need you here, Polly and Brigham, Jake and the girls and I—we all need you very much.”
He gave a low moan and tried to lift one hand, and Lydia knew then that he was conscious—not being able to look into his eyes, she hadn't been certain—and had probably been awake throughout the entire ordeal.
She bent and kissed his forehead lightly, her throat aching. She was remembering Devon as she'd first seen him, standing in the doorway of his room in that San Francisco hotel, hair rumpled, eyes sleepy, lips curved into a polite scowl. After that she pictured him on the roof of his general store, framed by the blue and silver flicker of the Sound, a hammer in his hand, grinning down at her.
“The next few days will be very hard, Devon,” she whispered, gently smoothing back his hair, which was still damp from the washing she'd given it. “You'll want to give up and quit many times, but you mustn't do it. If you leave now, the good things you're meant to do will never happen. Children won't be born, whole branches of the Quade family will never exist, and the contributions they would have made will be lost.”
Some instinct made her look up then, and Lydia saw Polly standing in the doorway, trembling, her clothes rumpled and her hair tousled by wind and wet with rain. Her hazel eyes were big as the lid on Jake's flour barrel, and she was holding onto the doorjamb with both hands, looking as if she'd fall over the threshold at any moment.
Lydia moved swiftly to her friend's side, gripped her arm. “If you come in here crying and carrying on, Polly Quade, you'll undo all the progress we've made,” she whispered. “Unless you can be strong—stronger than you've ever been before—Devon would be better off without you.”
Polly's fevered gaze seemed to devour the man she loved. She bit her lower lip and finally nodded. Then, after drawing a breath, she stumbled toward the bed, took Devon's good hand in both of her own. She bent forward and kissed him very lightly on the mouth, but said nothing.
Lydia moved a chair into place, and Polly sat, never letting go of Devon's hand.
“Miss McQuire?”
Turning, Lydia found Millie standing in the hallway, her Brigham-gray eyes wide. She touched the child gently on the shoulder.
“Yes, Millie?”
Millie swallowed. “Is my uncle going to die?”
Lydia slipped her arm around the little girl and guided her toward the rear stairway, which led down to the kitchen. She had seen too much death to regard its treachery lightly, and to misguide Millie would be no kindness. “I hope not,” she said. “For tonight, the best thing you and Charlotte could do to help would be to have your suppers and your baths and go off to bed without fighting. When you've settled in for the night, think of your Uncle Devon as he's always been. Go to sleep seeing him well and whole in your mind. Can you do that?”
Millie considered for a moment—Lydia's suggestion was not, after all, one that could be undertaken without some thought—then nodded. “I'll speak to Charlotte,” she said, in a very grown-up voice.
Lydia bent and placed a soft kiss on Millie's crown, just where her lovely dark hair parted. “Thank you very much.”
Charlotte was waiting at the base of the stairs, looking every bit as frightened as everyone else. She'd overheard Lydia's conversation with Millie, apparently, for she said, “I'll let Millie have the first bath, and I'll read her a story, too. Might we see Uncle Devon in the morning?”
“Perhaps,” Lydia answered, touching Charlotte's pale cheek in a gesture of reassurance. “We'll discuss
that at breakfast. Agreed?”
Millie and Charlotte looked at each other solemnly, then at Lydia. “Agreed,” they chorused.
Once the water had been poured for the girls' baths, to be taken in the privacy of the spacious pantry off the kitchen, Lydia could no longer withstand the subtle force that drew her toward the back door. A soft, pattering rain was falling as she stepped out onto the porch, setting a kerosene lantern at her feet while she draped the cloak she'd bought in San Francisco with Devon's money, over her shoulders. She raised the hood, lifted the lamp, and looked upward, through the dense timber and underbrush, toward the cabin. A single light flickered through the foliage and the gray rain, guiding her.
Lydia's lamp nearly went out several times, despite her efforts to hold it steady, and more than once she tripped and almost fell over a root or branch lying in the path. The thorns of blackberry vines caught at her skirts and reached beneath to snag her stockings and scratch her calves.
By the time she reached the cabin, she was drenched with rain, despite the cloak, and the flame in her lantern had finally guttered and died. She hurried to the door and pounded at it, a little desperately, with one fist.
Just when she was about to step over the threshold, uninvited, the door swung inward, creaking on untended hinges, and Brigham was standing in the chasm, tall, vital, struggling with God only knew how many conflicting emotions.
He stepped back, and Lydia hurried past him, making her way to the fire that blazed on the hearth. The metal lantern made a hollow sound as she set it on the rock floor in front of the fireplace, then she shrugged out of the cloak.
“How is he?” Brigham's voiced seemed to grate on his throat, like a saw chewing into wood.
Lydia whirled, realizing he thought she'd come bearing the worst possible news. “Devon's holding his own,” she said quickly, to reassure him. “It's you I've come to see about.”
His handsome face looked haunted in the weak light of the fire and the single lamp burning on a table next to the cabin's one window. “You shouldn't have left the house on a night like this,” he said coldly. “You might have run into trouble.”
Lydia sighed, draping her cloak carefully over the back of the one chair the room boasted and then plucking at the folds of her skirts and giving them a good shake in front of the fire. “If I were afraid of trouble, Mr. Quade,” she said lightly, “I'd never have dared to travel west in the first place.”
He looked at her for a long time, his throat working, then muttered, “Are the girls all right?”
She smiled. “Charlotte and Millie are behaving like little women. You should be very proud of them.”
He turned his profile to Lydia, standing beside her on the hearth, gazing into the flames as though they held him in some grim spell. “Devon is the best friend I've ever had,” he said after a long and pensive silence. “When we were little, I used to take his whippings for him, when he got into trouble. I couldn't stand to see him hurt.”
Lydia's heart tightened. She edged a bit closer to him, felt the heat of his body as surely as that of the fire before them. “Whippings?” she whispered, as injured by the thought of Brigham's pain as if the blows had struck her instead.
He grinned slightly, though there was certainly no joy in his face, and no humor. “I think those trips to the woodshed really did hurt Pa more than they did me,” he said. “His heart just wasn't in it.”
Lydia was only mildly pacified. “But he let you accept your brother's punishment?”
Brigham took a poker from its holder and stirred the embers in the grate. “I made sure Pa thought I'd been the one to do the mischief,” he explained. “And lots of times, I had been.”
Folding her arms, Lydia turned to Brigham. “I hope you don't believe in disciplining children in that primitive fashion,” she said. “I could not stand by and see Charlotte or Millie struck.”
He sighed. “Don't worry, Lydia,” he responded. “Neither could I. And that's probably the reason they run from one end of this town to the other like Indians on a raid.”
She never knew what accounted for the action, but Lydia let her head rest against Brigham's shoulder for a moment. The contact was orchestrated by a flash of lightning so close that its golden brightness glared in the room. For the length of a fluttery heartbeat, Lydia was unsure whether the combustion had come from within her or without.
Brigham turned to her, took her shoulders in his hands, gazed down at her in consternation, as if trying to formulate a scathing lecture behind those tarnished-pewter eyes of his. Then, with a low, strangled sound, he wrenched her close and kissed her.
The lightning broke its own rule then, striking for the second time in a single place. Lydia's spirit caught fire as Brigham's lips molded hers, prepared them for the fierce invasion of his tongue.
Lydia felt closed places within her tremble tentatively and then grind open, like stone doors in the ruins of some ancient castle. She didn't protest, couldn't have protested, as Brigham's hands cupped her buttocks through her skirts and petticoats, lifted her slightly and dragged her against him.
His masculinity seemed, for a short, breathless stretch of time, to be the home of the lightning that heated her skin and blinded her by the very intensity of its fire.
“Go back,” he gasped, thrusting her away from him, gripping her face now, instead of her firm bottom, which still quivered and tingled from the hold he'd taken earlier. “Go back to the house, Lydia. Right now.”
Lydia knew very little in those moments; her emotions were churning and her mind was as muddled as if she'd been drinking hard cider. Despite the ferocious, burning aches opening like lakes of lava inside her, she did not think of giving herself to Brigham. She merely wanted to hold him, to be held by him, and temporarily turn her back on a treacherous and uncertain world.
She shook her head. “I'm staying,” she said, and slipped her arms around Brigham's waist. He kissed her again, kissed her until she was too dizzy to stand.
“Lydia,” he murmured, his voice ragged and harsh.
Lydia raised her hands to his shoulders, spread the fingers wide to feel the straining muscles beneath his shirt. Then she found his heartbeat, thumping against her palm, and a new excitement possessed her.
She began to unbutton Brigham's shirt, and he groaned a senseless protest but did not lift his hands to stop her.
Pushing the fabric aside, Lydia laid her cheek to the place where his heart pounded against his flesh, as if seeking some union with her, her own pulse. The coarse down covering his chest offered a strange comfort, one she couldn't have defined, and at the same time engendered even greater needs.
He dipped one arm beneath her knees, the other like a steel brace at her back, lifted her, held her close against his chest. “You shouldn't have come here,” he said.
Lydia didn't know whether he meant she shouldn't have come to the cabin or she shouldn't have come to Quade's Harbor, and she didn't care. She was under a greedy enchantment, and she wanted as much of Brigham as he would allow her. Her tiresome New England practicality had been thrust into a dark closet of her spirit, imprisoned there, and she had no desire to free it.
Brigham's gray eyes revealed both pride and pleas. Then, with another moan, he mastered Lydia's mouth with his own.
When the kiss ended, he laid her lightly on the quilt-covered bed. His touch was passionate, yet every bit as gentle as if he'd been handling the most precious, fragile porcelain in existence. Slowly, he undressed her.
When Lydia wore only firelight and the chill of a rainy night, Brigham began taking off his own clothes. Unlike the other masculine bodies she had viewed, his was whole, unscarred, and beautifully muscled. He was so magnificent that Lydia dragged in a deep breath and nearly choked on it.
He lay on his side next to her, his hand cherishing her breasts, each in turn, fondling the nipples until they were hard and eager. He caressed her neck and the underside of her chin, and then teased the flat expanse of her stomach, making th
e flesh leap and quiver beneath his fingertips.
Lydia closed her eyes and arched her head back as he ventured deliciously, dangerously, near the moist delta where her femininity was awakening. The sensible part of her raved and paced inside its closet, protesting, but Lydia did not, could not, heed the warning.
She felt as though this moment had been bearing down on her since the beginning of time; as though she'd been created to make physical music under this man's hands and mouth, like an instrument.
Brigham knelt between her legs, gently gripped her ankles, set her feet so that her knees were high and apart. Then he fell to her belly, kissing the taut-satin skin, teasing her navel with the tip of his tongue.
It was a scandal, and Lydia loved it. Her skin was moist with perspiration, her heart was racing, and her head moved from side to side as though in a fever.
When Brigham burrowed through the silken shelter guarding her womanhood and boldly took her into his mouth, she cried out in pleasure and thrust her hips upward off the bed. Brigham nestled his hands beneath her bottom, held her firmly to his lips, and continued to enjoy her.
A storm of ecstasy raged inside Lydia's supple body as she twisted from side to side, forward and back, reveling in the merciless flicks of Brigham's tongue and the drawing of his lips. She strained higher and higher off the bed, desperate to maintain the fevered link between them, an ancient and almost continuous cry coming from the depths of her being.
Still supporting her buttocks with one strong hand, Brigham raised the other to caress her breasts while the tempest thundered wildly within her. Her cries became frantic, the motions of her body more desperate still, and then, with a strangled sob, she fell in trembling relief to the mattress.
She lifted her arms to Brigham, fully expecting to take him inside her, to give him what remained of her innocence as a loving gift, but instead of taking her, he lay beside her again and fitted her close against his frame.
Yankee Wife Page 14