“I won’t say anything,” Eunice promised. “Mrs. Gower is such a fine woman. Maggie?” The blond woman turned to see where she was.
Sitting across the table, Thayer beside her, Maggie answered, “I’m here.”
“He would have killed us. He would have killed me if you hadn’t gone with him.” Eunice seemed stunned by the truth.
“Aaron’s right,” Maggie said. “We need to forget everything that happened. We have to keep it all to ourselves to protect Aunt Tilly and Uncle Chester.” And to protect Aaron and Phineas, she added silently.
“I’d like to go home,” Eunice told the others.
“I’ll take you,” Aaron said. “But first, I need to talk to Maggie.”
“You don’t have to take me, Aaron,” the widow said, placing her slender hand over his. “Just send someone for Papa. He can come and get me.”
“You could ride into town with us,” Maggie said. “Thayer’s going to take me to the Mobleys’ as soon as it’s good daylight.”
“Dammit, Maggie, we need to talk,” Aaron said. “After we talk, I’ll drive both of you into town.”
“You take Mrs. Arnold home,” Maggie said, defeated. “I want Thayer to take me. There are some things that only he can help me arrange.”
“Woman, you and I have got to talk. There’s too much that needs to be said between us.” He couldn’t understand what was wrong with Maggie. She was acting as if everything between them was over. Had Wesley’s death caused that much of a change in her feelings?
“I hardly think we can discuss anything with Eunice standing right here.”
“Eunice knows the truth about everything now. Why the hell are you fighting me on this?”
Eunice tugged on Aaron’s hand “We could all go in the other room while you two—”
“No!” Maggie said. “I don’t want to talk now. I’ve got to get to Jude. She’s bound to hear about Wesley’s death before I can get to Tuscumbia.”
“Then let me take you,” Aaron said as he stood. “We can have our talk on the way into town.”
“No. I can’t deal with anything else now,” Maggie cried as she ran to the door, flung it open, and rushed outside.
Aaron started to go after her, but both Thayer and Eunice called after him.
“There will be plenty of time later to tell her everything you want her to know,” Eunice told him. “She’s been through so much these last few days. I owe her my life. I . . . I feel badly about . . . well, about everything. Don’t push her, Aaron. She loves you, and she’ll still love you tomorrow and the day after that.”
“Eunice is right,” Thayer said. “I’ll take her to town and keep an eye on her. Give her a day or so, then come to her if you can tell her what she wants to hear.”
“You just remember that she belongs to me,” Aaron warned.
Thayer looked from his friend’s rugged face to Mrs. Arnold’s knowing eyes. “Oh, I see. You get some rest and clean yourself up. I think Maggie will be ready to hear what you have to say by tomorrow.” The young man laughed as he went out the door. Hesitating on the porch, he yelled back at Aaron, “Looks like I’ll just have to wait for Jude to grow up if I want to marry a beautiful redheaded Campbell.”
The sky was stacked with layer upon layer of thick, white clouds like a bed piled high with white cotton quilts. Although it was early afternoon, the dreary darkness caused by the rain clouds simulated early night. The day was warm and humid with an increasing hint of moisture in the air. The approaching rain lay southward, but its presence surrounded them.
Maggie stepped down from the buggy, knowing what she had to do, but dreading it all the same. In little over an hour, she and Jude would be on a train headed for Franklin, Tennessee. She had persuaded Thayer to telegraph his mother yesterday. He had tried to talk her out of going, insisting that she should talk to Aaron, but he had eventually stopped giving advice and simply did as she requested.
She did not want to see Aaron again; she didn’t dare. She might not be strong enough to resist him if he asked her to stay. For her child’s sake, she could not stay on here and be his mistress. Leaving was the only hope she had left.
“Maggie, you don’t have to put yourself through this if you don’t want to,” Thayer said tenderly as he assisted her down, holding her arm securely.
“I have to give my condolences to Aunt Tilly and Uncle Chester. You can see for yourself that the crowd is beginning to break up. I can’t leave without seeing them, without saying something.”
“You could have sent a written message of sympathy.” Thayer walked with her as she moved closer to the large crowd surrounding Wesley Peterson’s grave.
The horse-drawn hearse still stood in front of a long procession of buggies and carriages and wagons. Every citizen in the town had made the trip to Oakwood Cemetery to pay their final respects to the good reverend. Maggie wondered how many of these people had known the man for the monster he had really been. Would any of them believe her if she were to scream out the truth? Poor Aunt Tilly. At least there was no reason why she should ever know.
Thayer led her slowly through the crowd, the two of them causing curious stares and hushed whispers. Gradually the mourners began to move backward, allowing the couple to make their way toward the graveside where Mathilda and Chester Gower stood speaking quietly with Brother Osborne.
This would only take a few minutes, then she could return to the Mobleys’, fetch Jude, and board the three o’clock train. Her life in this town was over.
Everyone was staring at her, whispering about her, but she didn’t care. She had come to lie to Aunt Tilly, to say that she was sorry Wesley was dead, when actually, she was relieved to know that he could never harm anyone ever again. If nothing else, his death had freed Daisy from her depression. When Maggie had told her, the young woman had fallen into her arms and cried for a long time. Then she had asked for her husband.
“How dare you come here, you harlot,” Mathilda Gower screamed, her fat body shaking with rage when she spotted Maggie standing near the foot of her beloved son’s open grave.
“Please, Aunt Tilly,” Maggie said. “I had to come to tell you how sorry—”
“You . . . your treatment of my son caused his death as surely as the fall from his buggy. You could have been his wife, but you chose to disgrace us all with your sinful ways. I gave your family a home, and how did you repay me?”
“Let’s go, Maggie,” Thayer said, tugging on her arm.
“Please, Aunt Tilly. Uncle Chester, I’m so sorry.” She pleaded. “I know how much . . . you both love—”
“Don’t speak to me about love, you whore,” Mathilda raged. “What do you know about love? My Wesley knew about the great love of God. He was far too good for you, but even after this whole town knew what you had done, he was still willing to offer you marriage. He was kind and forgiving. Your rejection destroyed him.”
Aaron could hear Mrs. Gower’s voice clearly above the whispered murmuring of the huge crowd surrounding the gravesite when he parked his carriage behind Thayer’s. Thank God that his friend had sent word for him to get to town as quickly as possible, and that Jude had told him where Maggie had persuaded Thayer to take her. Damn, whatever had possessed her to come to the graveside services for the good reverend?
“We were shocked when your little sister came to Wesley to plead with him to marry you,” Tilly shouted. “When she told him that you were carrying your lover’s child, she might as well have stabbed him in the heart. He was wild with grief.”
Crying, Maggie turned into Thayer’s arms.
“Come on. Let’s go.” Thayer held her close as the whole town watched.
Maggie was carrying her lover’s child, Aaron thought. My God, how long had she known and not told him? His child. His child growing inside of Maggie’s beautiful body.
“Look at this sinful woman. She’s a fornicator. She carries one man’s child and lives in another man’s house warming his bed,” Mathilda accused, her silv
er eyes alight with hatred.
“The hell she does,” Aaron Stone roared as he stepped into full view of the agitated crowd, all heads turning in his direction. “Maggie has never belonged to anyone but me. It’s my child she carries and my bed she warms.”
“Oh Lord,” Maggie sighed against Thayer’s chest. “It’s Aaron.”
“Indeed it is,” the young man said, smiling. “And about time, I’d say.”
The townfolk stood silently, amazed by the sight and sound of the giant of a man as he moved past them, straight toward Maggie Campbell.
Mathilda Gower, restrained by her husband’s tenacious grasp, glared at the man making his way to the maligned redhead.
“I love you, Maggie Campbell,” Aaron announced, his green eyes beseeching her forgiveness. “I want you to be my wife.”
Thayer loosened his hold as Maggie raised her head and pulled away from him. “But what about Eunice?”
“I told her two days ago.”
“That’s why . . . that’s why you sent for her?”
Aaron reached out and took Maggie in his arms, his lips raining tender kisses across her forehead. “Will you talk to me now, my love?”
She couldn’t speak because tears filled her throat.
“Get her out of here. I’ll go back to the Mobleys’ and see after Jude until you two get things straightened out,” Thayer said.
“Marrying her will change nothing,” Mathilda yelled when Aaron picked Maggie up in his arms.
Brother Osborne placed a restraining hand on Mrs. Gower’s shoulder. “Tilly, my dear, you must find it in your heart to forgive. It is what Wesley would have wanted.”
Within minutes, Aaron had Maggie seated in his carriage beside him and was motioning the horse into movement. One big arm still held Maggie at his side as he drove them away from the cemetery while an astonished crowd gradually dispersed.
“Where are we going?” she asked, not really caring as long as she was with the man she loved.
“To Thayer’s town house, so we can have some privacy.”
An ample smile of anticipation formed on her mouth. No one existed tonight except her and Aaron. He would take away the hurt. He would make everything all right again.
A low, flickering fire burned in the massive fireplace. The mellow sound of autumn rain echoed in the stillness of the master bedroom.
“Sometimes, I feel as if I’ve always loved you,” she said as she laid her head against his outstretched arm.
“I think I loved you from the first day we met,” he whispered, his finger circling her ear. “Oh, sweet Maggie, let me love you.”
“Aaron,” she moaned as his mouth hungrily devoured hers. When his kiss deepened, she responded with a passionate cry. Never had she known such an intense arousal as when his hands moved slowly over her body, lovingly caressing every inch of her compliant figure. While he fondled her swelling breasts, her hands moved across the manliness of his hairy chest.
“Please, Aaron, please . . .” Her voice quivered as an unrestrained longing coursed through her.
“You’re mine. You belong to me.”
“Yes,” she murmured, massaging the firmness of his muscular back. “I belong to you. I always have and I always will.”
Sighs of acute pleasure chanted from her swollen lips as his hands stroked the soft sweetness of her thighs while his hot mouth tempted first one and then the other of her budding pink nipples.
“I want you. I’ve wanted you forever,” he groaned.
She looked up into his face, which appeared as drugged with passion as she knew her own must have seemed. “I love you. I love you so.”
“And I love you, with all my heart, sweet Maggie. And I love this child.” He gently stroked the slight swell of her stomach. “Can you ever forgive me for being such a fool?”
Reminiscent of the first night they had made love, thunder echoed in the distance and blinding flashes of lightning illuminated the ebony sky outside, but Maggie and Aaron were aware only of each other. Naked in the dim radiance of the firelight, they eagerly succumbed to the mounting favor pulsating through their feverish bodies. His tender, persuasive lovemaking obliterated all the loneliness and pain, leaving only the knowledge that the final consummation of their passion was the only thing that mattered.
Even cocooned in a romantic stupor, Maggie knew Aaron’s hands and lips had ceased their erotic homage. She whimpered, “Aaron?”
“It’s all right,” he assured her, his big hand lifting her small ones above her head, pinning them there as his somber eyes adoringly touched her body with an intimacy as arousing as the feel of his fingertips on her skin. “I want to look at you, my love. I want to see what’s mine.”
She shivered as he let his gaze move ever so slowly, thoroughly inspecting the silky fall of her long, red hair lying against the pearly smoothness of her neck and shoulders, carefully examining the large, firm thrust of her peach-tipped breasts, then, almost reverently, staring at the fiery thatch between her milky white thighs.
“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world. Your body was made for my possession.”
“Oh Aaron, I want to give you everything.”
“You are everything,” he told her, his fingers brushing across her lips, over her proud chin down her long creamy neck. “I’m starved for the feel of your body beneath mine, sweet Maggie, and tonight I’m going to have a feast.”
“Yes. Yes.” Her voice was an inaudible sigh, her mouth a recipient of his lustful kisses.
His hands cupped the womanly fullness of her breasts, the sensitive peaks stiffening at his touch. His lips plundered the inner sweetness of her mouth, his tongue exploring before stirring outward to lavishly torment every nerve ending in her lips and jaw and throat. When his tongue reached the upward tilt of her engorged breasts, her body instinctively arched into the bulging evidence of his arousal, pulsating with undeniable need.
His mouth moved over her breast, his tongue flickering repeatedly across the rosy crest before encompassing the fleshy halo. A cry of abandoned longing came from the depths of her very being.
He calmed her feverish cries, whispering little love words over and over as his mouth made a pilgrimage lower and lower, nibbling passionately along the shapely curve of her hips, placing ardent, petting nips on her inner thighs, having used his hands to persuade those limbs to separate in urgent expectancy.
When he lifted her hips in order to bring her femininity closer to his marauding lips, she cried out. He soothed her again with his words. “Let me love, my sweet, my darling.”
She succumbed to his enticing words, leaving herself wantonly open to his rapturous nuzzling. It was as if tiny explosions were occurring throughout her body all at once, the intensity of her release was so great.
“Oh Aaron.” She trembled beneath him, her senses raw with pleasure.
“Now, sweet Maggie,” he said as he placed his massive body over hers, gradually impelling his manhood into her writhing body. “I’ll be careful, my love. I won’t hurt you or our baby.”
When he completed his penetration with one triumphant stab she moaned with the ecstasy of his possession, clinging to him, imitating his masculine plunges with feminine actions of her own. First she and then he fell into the fiery vortex where mind and body divide, both into their own euphoric paradise.
The morning came enclosed in the gloomy dullness of a day doomed to continual drizzle, but, for Maggie, the day was as pure and sweet as if the sun were shining and a thousand songbirds filled the air with their sweet music.
Aaron looked down at the woman lying in his arms, the woman he had made love with all night long, the woman who was carrying his child. “When are you going to marry me?”
“As soon as possible,” she laughed, patting her stomach.
“Do you want to move away from here, start over fresh somewhere else?”
“No. I love White Orchard. Besides, I think there are enough good people around here that we and our children can
have a happy life.”
“I agree,” he said, then kissed her on the forehead. “I’m going to write Martha and tell her that I’ve finally become a man. I’m ready to accept the inheritance my father left me.”
“You’ve forgiven your parents?”
“I understand my parents,” he told her, his lips covering her flushed face with tender kisses. “If Richard Leander loved my mother as much as I love you, then I know why he could never give her up.”
“Oh Aaron, we came so close to losing one another.”
“That’s all behind us. From now on, we’ll always be together. My affair with you is going to last a lifetime.”
“Yes, a lifetime and then some,” she sighed as their lips met in a kiss filled with love and promise.
Epilogue
No place on earth could be as beautiful as Alabama in springtime, and no one on earth could be as happy as Maggie was on this glorious May morning. It had been almost a year since that fateful day she and Aaron Stone met at the Chattanooga depot.
So much had happened since the past October when Aaron had professed his love and claimed her and their unborn child. Life was so good that, sometimes, she had to pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. Yesterday’s hopes and plans had died, but new and better ones had taken their place. She was married to a man who worshipped the ground she walked on. He had been treating her like fragile glass during the long winter months of her pregnancy and the six weeks since the birth of his son and heir. She was getting tired of it, and she intended to do something today to change things.
Master Richard Leander Stone had just been put down for his morning nap. She had spent well over an hour with her beautiful red-haired, green-eyed baby boy, nursing him, rocking him, singing to him. He was the joy of her life, but she had to admit that she wasn’t any more a fool over the child than his proud papa.
The thought of what she had planned for her husband sent her pulse racing. It had been weeks since they’d made love, and she knew he was as ready as she was for a reaffirmation of their physical passion.
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