by Susan Wiggs
“You’re all in a dither.” Mary settled the baby in Hestia’s plump, reaching arms. “What is this all about?”
“Some unpleasantness I was just discussing with your husband. I sent the sheriff after some riffraff and he did nothing, said there was no law against a man minding his own affairs. I wanted that scoundrel ridden out of town on a rail—”
“Who?”
“A logger. Goes about getting drunk and beating innocent citizens, but the sheriff wouldn’t arrest him for it.”
“Why ever not?” Mary felt a rise of indignation.
“Because the victim was his wife, can you imagine?” Hestia said.
Mary remembered the woman with the bruised face. She felt a flash of outrage, then leaned over and hugged Hestia. “She’s staying here, isn’t she?”
“Livvie Haglund is living here. She won’t go back to that lout. I simply won’t allow it.”
“Ollie Haglund hasn’t tried to see her?” Jesse asked.
Hestia’s florid cheeks paled a shade. “Actually, yes. I—he gave us a bit of a fright, but Fiona happened to be here, and she ran him off with Captain Swann’s whaling harpoon. I worry, though. What if that horrid man comes back? He’s the size of an ox, and twice as ornery.”
Jesse rose from the fringed couch and set down his cup. “Ollie won’t be back.” He strode from the room. There was a swish and a thud as he opened and shut the door behind him.
Mary stared after him. “He’s going after that Haglund fellow.”
“I suspect he is.” Hestia smiled with grim satisfaction.
“What do you suppose Jesse will do?”
“Dear Mary, I don’t think we want to know.”
* * *
Jesse’s knuckles were split and raw, and wearing gloves chafed them, so he drove home with his hands exposed to the freezing November air. When he came in from putting up the buggy, he could feel Mary’s eyes on his hands.
“I’d best go wash up,” he said.
“Supper’s on. Abel Sky brought us a salmon.”
As he stood at the washstand with his hands plunged into the cold water, he thought how amazing it was, having a beautiful woman putting supper on the table. Having someone to talk to, someone to listen to. Someone to worry about and laugh with and fuss over.
He squeezed his eyes shut and sluiced water down his face and neck, then scrubbed himself mercilessly with a towel. Scowling, he clumped down the stairs and took his place at the dinner table.
“Davy’s sleeping like the dead,” said Mary. “The outing must’ve tired him today.”
Jesse didn’t reply. He never knew what to say when she spoke of the baby.
She eyed his torn knuckles as he ate. “Whatever it was you did,” she said, “I’m sure Hestia and Mrs. Haglund are grateful.”
“It’s bad business for Hestia to be giving sanctuary to women like Livvie Haglund.”
“Is it then?” Mary asked with a flash of her old temper. “And what would you have her do, stay with her brute of a husband until he does something permanent to her?”
“Of course not,” he said. “But if Hestia starts taking in women fleeing their husbands, the husbands are bound to get in an uproar over it. I can’t run them all off.”
“No one asked you to.” She stabbed at a bit of roasted salmon. “But there should be a place a woman can go and know she’s safe.” She looked him in the eye. “Don’t you think so?”
He said nothing.
“Sometimes being safe is the dearest wish of a woman’s heart.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Word is bound to get out that Swann House is safe for women like Livvie Haglund.”
“Uh-huh.” Jesse looked out the window at the swaying tops of the towering trees. He knew what Mary was doing, and he wondered if she was doing it on purpose. She was drawing him into the life and the heart of the community. For years he had lived at its fringes, a distant, dignified presence, acknowledged but never included.
In just a few short months, she had induced him to celebrate the centennial, help establish a community at Swann House, run off an abusive husband. It had all happened without consulting him. Without seeking his approval. It had simply happened.
He finished his supper and Mary started washing up. “Let me,” he said gruffly, nudging her aside. “You go sit a while in the keeping room.”
Instinctively, he was quiet, not banging the dishes or sloshing the wash water as he poured it into the sink. In ways he could not begin to count, the baby had changed his life.
Despite his efforts to be quiet, a little mewling cry came from the room off the kitchen.
“Would you get him for me?” Mary asked.
She was always doing that. Finding excuses for him to pick up the little tyke, to smell him and handle him and build up such a fierce yearning it was almost unbearable.
“My hands are wet,” he said.
She rose from the settle and slipped into the bedroom. He could hear a soft murmuring as she picked up the baby, fed and changed him. Every moment she was in there, he imagined the sight he would never get used to, could never get enough of—Mary with her breast bared, suckling the baby.
He stalked out onto the porch and started taking deep gulps of cold air. It was a blustery night, but clear. Magnus was on watch, and the beacon swung its arc in long, regular blinks.
There were things Jesse didn’t remember about falling in love. With Emily, he had been too young, too naive, to feel the depths he felt now. To feel the pain and the ecstasy meld and become one. To feel a yearning that cut as sharp as a knife.
Perhaps he had never felt that for Emily. Things were simpler with her. They came from the same world. He’d been a promising young man, she a well-bred lady from a good family. There had been no challenge, no obstacle. Just the love, which soared like a bird for a few short years, then crashed into the sea.
It was happening again, but differently this time. He was a different man. A man who knew what it was to love and lose. And there was nothing simple in the way he felt about Mary. Nothing easy about the situation they were in. She wanted him to be a father to the child of his rival. She thought he had it in him to do that.
She wanted him to be stronger and nobler than he could ever be. She expected it. She believed in him. He tried to show her that he was a bitter, selfish man undeserving of her faith, but again and again she tried.
When the wind freshened and chilled him through to his bones, he went back inside. Mary was on the settle, holding the baby. Jesse built up the fire in the hearth, put on his spectacles, then opened the book he was reading—a depressing French novel that was all the rage. The evenings when he wasn’t on watch, like tonight, were the worst. He didn’t quite know what to do with himself. Usually he read for a while, until Mary bade him good-night and took the baby off to bed in the downstairs room.
“Jesse?” she said.
“Yes?”
“I’d like to ask a favor of you.” She cleared her throat and waited until he turned and looked at her. Then she went on. “I wonder if you could be teaching me to read.”
She never ceased to startle him.
“To read.”
“I’d like to learn. Is it very hard?”
“I’ve never taught anyone to read before. Why do you need to know right now?”
“I just want to start.” She propped her feet up on a wooden stool and laid the baby on her thighs so that he was staring up at her. The look on the lad’s face made Jesse want to touch the baby. He didn’t, of course.
“Right now?” he asked. “This minute?”
“There’s no reason to delay.” She looked down at the solemn face of the baby. “I want to read stories to Davy one day.”
Jesse experienced a rush of guilt. She didn’
t believe he would ever read to the lad. And she was right. He, who’d had nothing but books for his companions the past twelve years, was not willing to share his one passion with the child. It didn’t matter right now, when the lad was so little, but it would matter soon, before Jesse knew it.
“I can tell him stories, of course,” Mary said. “I remember all the tales Mum used to tell. But I want to read him new ones. Will you help me?”
He knew he would hate himself for doing it, but he went to the long wall shelf and took down an old, well-thumbed volume. The smell of musty pages and ink wafted upward as he opened it and sat beside Mary.
“This was a favorite of mine when I was a youngster.” He flipped to the endpapers. “‘Happy Christmas to Jesse, from your grandparents, the Morgans,’” he read from the inscription. “I was four years old when they gave it to me.”
“Was it, then? And what’s it about?”
“A collection of stories. The best one is this—’A Tale of Peril in the Cave.’”
“Would you read it to me?”
“Now?”
“Aye, now.”
Jesse pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose and began to read. He had the oddest sensation, as if this moment had happened before. And it had, in a way. He vividly remembered his father coming into the nursery when he was a lad, sitting by the bed and reading from the book. That was probably why Jesse loved it so. Not because the stories were particularly good, but because he associated the book with the sweetest memories of his childhood.
And now he was sharing them with Mary and the baby. The moment felt right, even though he knew it was wrong. He didn’t know how long he read, but he glanced out of the corner of his eye at the baby and saw that the lad had drifted off to sleep.
A ridiculous sense of accomplishment rose in Jesse, then redoubled as he felt Mary’s head droop onto his shoulder. He sat still, savoring the moment. He inhaled the scent of her hair and the milky odor of the baby and the soapy smell of the blankets.
And he felt something rare and strange inside him.
Happiness.
A denial leaped in his mind. He was not supposed to feel happiness. But he did. He did. The feeling panicked him. He set aside the book and gently took the baby from Mary. “Come, my loves,” he whispered. “To bed with you.”
She mumbled softly as he took her hand and led her off to bed in the downstairs room. Before he could stop himself, he bent and brushed his lips over her brow, then did the same to the baby.
It was the kiss that undid his soul. He fled from the room and headed for the sanctuary of his own, taking the stairs two at a time, yanking the door shut behind him. There was no candle; he had not stopped to get one. Only the watery bluish light from the autumn moon and the stars filled the emptiness.
He gripped the bedpost and breathed deeply for a long time, trying to turn back into himself. Into the cold stranger he had trained himself to be. But it was getting harder and harder.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard the door latch click. Mary stood there, the baby in one arm and her other hand holding a flickering candle. She wore a nightgown. Her feet were bare, her hair loose and flowing.
“Is something the matter?” Jesse asked.
“Yes.”
“What? Are you sick, or—”
“Nothing like that.” She raised her beautiful, supplicating eyes to him. “We don’t want to sleep downstairs anymore. We want to come back to your bed, Jesse.”
Her words slashed at him. The panic returned in waves. “The bed’s too damned small,” he objected.
Her face fell. “No, it isn’t.”
“I could hurt the little one, roll on top of him.”
“That’s ridiculous.” She glared at him. He glared back. Then her shoulders sagged. “You really mean that, don’t you? You don’t want us.”
He said nothing. If he tried to explain, he’d only hurt her more.
Her long red hair whirling, she turned, marched to the door and went down the steps. He heard her footsteps stomp all the way into her room and the squeak of bedropes as she settled into the bed.
Jesse let out a long breath he didn’t know he had been holding. He had to ask himself—did it hurt more to love someone, or to force himself not to love her?
And was there anything in the world more painful than hurting Mary?
She should just leave him. She shouldn’t stay and let him torment her. Fool woman. She wanted things from him he couldn’t give. She made him want to be so much better than he was. And that led to nothing but frustration.
Yet when he awoke the next day with a bold plan in his head, he shrugged off his doubts.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Mary banged around the house like a madwoman, scrubbing and polishing, chopping vegetables for a stew, making fresh bread and punishing the dough with her fists. When that wasn’t enough, she bundled Davy up and brought him outside with her while she worked in the garden. She laid him in the wheelbarrow and complained to him loudly while she dug in the dormant beds and cast away weeds.
“He’s got some nerve, he does, banishing us to the downstairs bedroom,” she fumed. “And disappearing at dawn without even a by-your-leave. Honestly, my lad, your da has got a lot to learn about being a da.”
What she refused to say aloud was that she ached for Jesse. She ached to feel his arms around her, his lips on her skin. She wanted him inside her, and she didn’t know if she would ever be that close to him again.
“The lout,” she said. “By the hand and arm on me, I’ll give him what for, see if I don’t.”
She worked furiously, neatening the beds and getting them ready for winter. The larkspur had yielded seed enough to make a glorious return in the spring. She pruned the roses and covered them with a blanket of wood chips. A flock of birds passed overhead, going south to warmer climes.
There was such a sense here of the circle of life, a rhythm as regular as a heartbeat. How happy she could be in this place, if only Jesse would let down the wall he had put up.
He called himself selfish, yet he had opened his home to a stranger. He called himself a coward, yet he rode unhesitatingly into the waves to rescue drowning men. He called himself a hermit, yet he drove Ollie Haglund out of town for hitting his wife. Jesse Morgan was a bundle of contradictions, a hero who swore he was no hero, a man who swore he would never love, falling in love not just with his wife, but with another man’s child.
She knew it was happening. And Jesse knew it, too. That was why he’d been so prickly lately. But her patience wouldn’t last much longer.
She heard the rasp of a saw and a lot of pounding coming from the barn. She burned to know what he was about, sawing and pounding, not coming out to have lunch or even to say good day to her. Pride kept her from going down and checking on him.
When the sun began to set, she took Davy inside for a bath. He loved his bath, and he smiled all the time now, cooing with delight when she soaped his plump, silky body in the kitchen sink. She heard Jesse come in, but she refused to turn and look at him. It was up to him to make amends.
“I’ll just be finishing here,” she said tersely. “There’s fresh bread and stew, if you’re hungry. I believe Davy and I will go to bed early tonight.”
Jesse didn’t answer.
She heard a soft thud but resisted turning. Lifting Davy out of the water, she laid him on the sideboard and gently dried and powdered him, savoring his soft body and his ready smiles, the way his legs peddled the air as she pinned his diaper and put him in a fresh gown.
Finally, when he was warm and dry and cuddled contentedly against her chest, she turned to Jesse. He stood by the kitchen table, looking solemn and infuriatingly handsome. On the table sat the most extraordinary thing she had ever beheld.
“It’s a cradle,
” Jesse said awkwardly.
“Oh, my, yes.” Filled with wonder, she went to the table. It was made of fine-grained wood and shaped like a little boat, the rockers smoothed and sanded to perfection, the headboard carved with scrollwork.
“It’s for the lad,” Jesse added.
She couldn’t suppress a smile. “Yes.”
Inside, her soul exulted. This was his first gift to Davy. She traced her finger in the carved inscription. “Is this his name, then?”
“Yes. David Dare Morgan.”
His name. Jesse had carved his full name into the cradle. “And he’s to sleep here.”
“I would hope so. The thing was a lot of trouble to make.”
“We are a lot of trouble, aren’t we?”
The corner of his mouth flickered upward. “Uh-huh.”
“I never promised we wouldn’t be.”
The other corner of his mouth slid upward. “I guess I don’t mind so much.”
* * *
“Are you sure it’s all right?” Jesse whispered after the baby had been put down for the night in the cradle. He gritted his teeth for a moment, trying not to feel the torment she stirred in him. He hadn’t even touched her yet. They stood in his bedroom—their bedroom—facing each other and feeling somehow more awkward than they had the first time.
Christ. Wanting her was making him crazy. “I mean,” he said, fumbling his words, “you’re not going to be hurt by—”
“What hurts is the waiting.” She took his hand and guided it downward, over her stomach.
His nerve endings leaped like flames. This was the first time he had touched her intimately since she’d had the baby. How tiny she had become. Tiny here, at least. He skimmed both hands upward, over the incredibly generous swells of her breasts.
She was more lush and ripe now than she had been pregnant. There was a new, faint sweetness in her smell—milk and the baby’s skin and the subtle musk of blood and life, the scents that had overwhelmed him the night of the birth.
He watched his own hands in fascination. They were the hands of a stranger—the hands of a bridegroom—as they worked independently of his mind or will. One by one the little pearlized buttons down the front of her dress gave way beneath his fingers. He parted the chemise beneath like a veil, exposing the satiny globes of her breasts, so full, so incredibly full. And at the tip of one of them was a tiny moist gleam of milk. Jesse found the vision so erotic that he pulled in his breath with a hiss and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to keep from attacking her right then and there.