by Shirl Henke
She was pliant and willing yet there was an inexplicable sense of surprise and wonder in her responses that did not befit a belle of her apparent experience. Yet the hunger that he felt left no time for further consideration or caution. It had been far, far too long since he had lain with a woman.
As the enmity between him and Tish had grown, their physical hunger for each other had waned. Two years ago he had quit her bed when he learned that she had visited a notorious abortionist in Maryland. Sickened and desolate, he had never touched her since. When his physical needs became unbearable he betrayed his marriage vows with carefully chosen professionals. The encounters always left him with such bitter, sordid regrets that he seldom succumbed. Instead he buried himself in his dangerous work.
His compelling attraction to Olivia St. Etienne was utter madness. She was obviously from a good family, gently reared with the expectation of a proper marriage even if she did behave irresponsibly. There was no place for such a female in his life. Then why was he drawn to her with such an inexplicable longing? His hand, deft and sure, had found the small sweet enticement of her breast, cupping it through the soft linen of her jacket. When he rubbed his thumb against the hard bud of her nipple she cried out against his mouth and pressed closer to him in the mindless desire they shared. His fingers tangled in her thick, lustrous hair and he twined the curls around his fists like scarlet ribbons.
If he did not stop at once he would take her here in this filthy deserted cabin on the rough plank floor, rutting like the cur dog that lay quietly in the corner of the crude bare room watching them. This was insanity born of simple deprivation. Surely it couldn’t be anything more. With an oath he pulled away, supporting the breathless, dazed girl by holding her shoulders. He could feel a shudder of surprise rippling through her. She raised her head and their eyes met. Hers were wide and dazed, turned the deep green of a tree-shrouded forest pool.
The pull of her mute entreaty frightened him with its intensity. Without words she asked him why he had ended the passionate interlude. Without thinking he replied, “I’ve wanted to do that since the first moment I laid eyes on you. Don’t deny that you wanted it, too,” he added, stung by her wounded expression and his own guilt.
Shame washed over her in waves. Feeling her face flame, she raised her hands and pressed them to her cheeks, backing away from him. Dear merciful lord, what had she almost done—allowed him to do? “No, I am scarcely in a position to deny anything.” Her voice was hoarse, soft as if coming from a great distance. She could still feel his heat, the virile magnetic presence that held her in thrall. His eyes pierced to her very soul. She felt naked as he was, defenseless.
Samuel could feel her vulnerability and the pain of it hit him like a slap. He turned to pick up his discarded clothing. The shirt was a blood soaked mess which he quickly abandoned, attempting instead to slip his injured arm through the sleeve of the heavy uniform jacket.
Olivia watched him struggle with the stiff coat, then stepped closer and pulled the blood caked sleeve straight, helping him ease it over his bandaged arm. He shrugged the other arm into the uniform, then began to button it. She stepped back yet their gazes locked and held. When Samuel had completed the task, his arms dropped to his sides.
He continued to study her with those unnerving blue eyes. “I’m truly sorry,” he said stiffly. “You saved my life and I behaved abominably.”
“You dared nothing I did not allow,” she replied with candor, meeting his gaze unflinchingly.
“There is something between us, Mademoiselle St. Etienne, something quite remarkable...disturbing...and dangerous,” he said, groping for a way to express his tumultuous emotions without revealing too much.
She smiled wistfully. “Yes, I believe you are right.” Then appearing thoughtful she added, “Since I’ve already been as bold as any hussy, I may as well be even bolder. Don’t you think after all that has happened, you might call me Olivia?” Her bones melted when his face, so harsh and austere a moment earlier, split into a heart stopping smile.
Olivia. How classically lovely. It fit her perfectly. “Hussy you are not. Bold you definitely are. My name is Samuel, Olivia.” The sound of her name rolled off his tongue like song. Damn, he was bewitched! “We had better return to the city before you are missed by your family.”
She returned his earlier smile. He was clever at extracting information without revealing himself. “I have only my guardian, Samuel. Emory Wescott, a St. Louis merchant who is currently in the capital to attend to business matters.”
“St. Louis?” he questioned, caught off guard.
Olivia picked up on the surprised note in his voice and turned to him as they approached the phaeton. “Yes, that is where we reside, unless Uncle Emory takes me traveling with him.”
“Even a guardian so remiss as to allow his charge to go careening about the countryside unescorted will be upset if she’s at not home by dark,” he ventured as he helped her into the carriage.
“Not tonight he won’t. He is yet in Maryland, collecting some bills owed him,” she said with a mysterious smile. “As long as I present myself all packed and ready to travel home on Friday he will not note my absence. Anyway, ‘tis I who must see you home since I am the driver and you are the passenger. Now, let’s hurry so I get you home by dark.”
A smile hovered about his lips. “Such solicitude for my reputation! How can I refuse so generous an offer?”
* * * *
Dusk had settled over the city with a glittering cloak of frost when Olivia’s phaeton pulled up in front of the elegant three-story Georgian brick house that had been Senator Worthington Soames’ wedding gift to his beloved ‘Tisha-Belle’.” Samuel hated the looming monstrosity.
Olivia eyed it with amazement. “Your house is as grand as any I’ve seen, even in London,” she murmured, wondering how Samuel could afford it on a colonel’s pay.
He could see the questions looming: Mercenary speculation? Or mere curiosity? As the daughter of French émigrés she had grown up living with the grating reality of champagne taste and gin-swill income. Although it had always bothered him to admit the house and its lavish furnishings were a gift, he especially did not want to confess such to Olivia St. Etienne. Nor in their long and earnest conversation on the ride into the capital had he confessed that he was married. But what if he were free? Free to do what? Become involved with a wild young French hoyden who drew him like a wet hound to a warm fire?
“It is just a house. I don’t even own it,” he replied dismissively, raising her hand for a chaste salute. Somehow once he had pressed his lips to the jasmine scented silk of her skin, he could not release her.
Olivia’s fingers curled around his wrist while their eyes communicated in eloquent silence. He surprised himself by saying, “I’ll be posted to St. Louis within the month. Perhaps we’ll meet again.”
Her smile was dazzling. “St. Louis is not so large a city that you could hide from me. I shall delight in tracking you down!”
Leticia Soames Shelby stood behind a Brussels lace curtain at an upstairs window watching Samuel and Olivia say their farewell. Her eyes narrowed to pale golden slits as the sound of their laughter drifted up to her. “Such tendresse. Who is the red-haired tart?”
Her companion peered out in the gloom and swore as Olivia’s flame-colored hair danced in the light from the torch held by a servant who had come out to greet Samuel. “That’s the rig that rescued him! An expensive lightweight phaeton with those superb matched bays.”
Tish turned to face him with a scornful expression hardening her patrician features, robbing them of the doll-like beauty that always turned heads. “You mean to say you were foiled by a little slut—probably one of Samuel’s lightskirts?” she asked incredulously. Anger blazed in her eyes. She smoothed a hand over the arc of her hip, which was amply revealed through her sheer mull gown of pale blue.
Richard Bullock watched her move across the room, as aware as she of every inch of her voluptuous flesh. She
always had her “at-home” dresses made up from virtually translucent fabrics which she wore only for him in the privacy of her apartments. He wet his dry lips and stared enraptured as she waited for his reply.
“I don’t know who the chit is, but the way she was driving her phaeton on the Post Oak Road she is one hell of a horsewoman,” he said defensively, watching Leticia toy restlessly with one long silver gilt curl that hung enticingly across her cleavage.
People often remarked that they looked like sister and brother, for Richard, too, possessed the same pale hair and gold eyes. They were in fact only bound by marriage. Worthington Soames was widowed shortly after Leticia’s twelfth birthday. He had remarried a widow with an eight-year-old boy in the hope that she would give him his own son to claim his senatorial seat and carry on the prestigious Soames name. Richard and Tish were stepsister and brother, raised together with every advantage.
When the new Mrs. Soames failed to provide the requisite heir before passing to her reward, the senator had turned his ambitions to his beloved daughter. Whatever “Tisha-Belle” wanted, she received, including Colonel Samuel Sheridan Shelby, who was now proving to be a grave mistake. One she planned to remedy with Richard’s help.
“Forget the worthless little nobody driving that carriage. Tell me why you failed to kill Samuel.”
“I had him pinned down. Bloodied the bastard, too. He had nowhere to run until that carriage came flying around the curve in the road. I tell you, Tish, no one knows about that deserted old road except Shelby. I have no idea how she happened on us before I could finish him.”
“You apparently bloodied him right enough,” she said, slightly mollified as she thought of the blackened stain on her husband’s left sleeve.
“We can hope he’ll take the red poisoning from it and die,” Bullock said lightly, watching her pose for him before the cheval glass in her dressing room. No one knew he was admitted to her private quarters except for Tish’s personal maid, a slave girl who had been raised with her on her father’s tidewater plantation.
“We cannot leave his death to chance,” she rebuked sharply.
“Don’t be angry, my pet. You know I can abide anything but your displeasure,” Bullock wheedled, gliding across the carpet toward her. He was whipcord thin and slight of stature yet a deadly swordsman, swift and cunning in duels, always ruthless when crossed—except for his stepsister who dared say or do anything she wished to him.
Tish studied his intense narrow face with its sharply chiseled almost feminine features, then reached out and pressed her heavy milk white breasts against the perfumed satin of his waistcoat. He kissed her savagely, his thin fingers digging painfully into her heavy golden hair as his mouth ground over hers. She rocked her hips against his pelvis and chuckled low in the back of her throat when she felt his erection pressing into her belly. Then she broke away abruptly, turning back to the mirror. He stepped up beside her and they gazed into its silvery surface, two perfect golden figures.
His lips nipped and bit at her neck, leaving small angry red marks that stung. She liked him to hurt her when he made love to her. A low ragged moan tore from her throat, exciting him past endurance, but when he reached up and began to tear the fragile muslin of her low-cut bodice, she stopped him.
“No, not now,” she said breathlessly. “You know how dangerous it is with him in the house. He might walk in on us and kill you.”
Richard scoffed. “He hasn’t set foot in your quarters for two years.”
“But he’s been shot. It’s my duty as his wife to attend him,” she said mockingly, feeling him stiffen when she said the words “his wife.”
How Richard hated being reminded that Tish had shared another’s bed. She had seduced him when she was seventeen and he a stripling lad of thirteen, teaching him well, turning his boyhood adoration into something far more intense and binding. She had learned at a tender age how to use sex not only for her own pleasure, but as a weapon. It always worked with Richard. But not with Samuel.
Samuel. She recalled the electric thrill she had felt the first time she had seen him, so tall and dashing in his uniform, so dark and rugged, the veriest opposite of pale, effeminate Richard. But her husband had become a bitter disappointment outside the marriage bed. The confrontation between the two of them yesterday afternoon replayed itself in her mind once more. She and Richard had been to her dressmakers to pick up her gown for the gala last night. Samuel had just returned home after months of absence, off on another odious secret mission.
They had another, of their endless arguments about the same old thing—his utter disregard for his political future. She had actually abased herself by undressing and trying to seduce him—only to be rejected with cool indifference! That was when she knew a momentous change in their lives was about to occur.
A tremor of genuine alarm had shivered down her spine when he said, “We have to talk, my dear...seriously. I suggest you slip back into that fetching little frock and have a seat. I’ll pour us a drink. I think before this is done we’ll both need it.”
His voice had been calm and his expression glacial as he handed her a goblet with over an inch of brandy in it. She had always been so sure of her plans, so sure of her husband. Brave, honorable Samuel, a dashing soldier. Perfect presidential material with some direction and polishing—which she and her father would supply. She had moistened her lips nervously, trying to read what lay behind the grim lines etching his face. “Don’t say you’ve found a Spanish señorita in the wilds of Florida—or some English pensioner’s daughter,” she said with forced lightness.
After taking a sip of his brandy he sighed deeply and began, “While I was hacking my way through miasmic swamps I did have a great deal of time to think. We’re on a collision course, Tish. I married a sweet girl who I thought would make a good soldier’s wife—”
“But that’s not fair! I would make a splendid soldier’s wife—if you were a soldier instead of some sort of agent provocateur skulking around the borders in disguise.”
“I’m afraid that’s the way I can best serve my country. There will be war soon, possibly against Napoleon, probably against Britain and her ally Spain—the latter two happen to occupy our northern, southern and western borders. No matter the lack of glory in it, that’s where I can do the most good.”
She had sensed something was seriously amiss, something even all of Worthington Soames’ money and influence could not fix. Surely he couldn’t have found out about Richard and me! It is not possible—I was so careful... Her thoughts had whirled frantically until his voice interrupted them.
“No use sugaring the medicine, is there, Tish.” His next words dropped like stones in the silent room as he said, “I’m asking Tom Jefferson to handle a petition for divorce.”
The shock of his plans to divorce her had rocked Tish to the very core of her being. Her life would be over, finished, done. She would be utterly disgraced, a social pariah, without hope of ever achieving the overweening ambition upon which her father had nurtured her. That was when she had decided Samuel must die.
“I could kill him right now, in his own bedroom,” Richard whispered against her neck, interrupting her troubling reverie.
“No, his man Toby is no doubt with him. We have to think, to plan something. Now that this first attempt has failed so miserably, he’ll be on his guard. Samuel hasn’t survived all these years as a presidential agent by chance. He is a very dangerous opponent.”
“Ah, but so am I, my pet...so am I,” Richard murmured softly.
Chapter Four
The courier lay sprawled on the muddy red earth, the rifle ball in his chest leaving a slow trickle of blood to pool around his body. It had been a clean, efficient kill in spite of the difficulty of the shot—the rider had been traveling at full gallop.
Richard Bullock rummaged quickly through the leather pouch tied behind his saddle, strewing the contents carelessly on the road while he kept an ear alert for sounds of any approaching travelers. It wo
uld be a waste to have to kill anyone else simply to silence them. He disliked waste.
Then his eyes fastened on the document he sought and he smiled serenely as he slipped it inside his jacket. This would give Tish the time she needed, the time he needed to complete his task. Samuel Shelby’s divorce request would not reach his old friend Tom Jefferson before the colonel began his long and dangerous journey to the Far West.
* * * *
Tish had been smiling and that always worried Samuel. He had expected tears and pleas if not outright threats to bring down the wrath of almighty Senator Soames on his head. Instead she had been reserved and cool, almost insolently amused as she watched him instruct Toby to pack his few belongings in trunks and send them to a storage warehouse owned by an old friend at the mouth of the Potomac.
“What damnable game is she playing now?” he muttered aloud as he tied the bulging saddlebags to his packhorse. As he completed the task, his wife’s malicious yellow eyes faded from his memory, replaced by a pair of mesmerizing emerald ones, slanted and sensuous, framed by a piquantly lovely face. “Forget her, you damned fool,” he chided himself. “Think of your mission.”
The journey ahead of him would be a long one, but he relished the prospect. First he would ride through the pristine rugged beauty of the Appalachian Mountains across the length of Pennsylvania to the frontier river town of Pittsburgh where he would begin a long water passage by flatboat down the tortuous Ohio River, then travel overland through the dangerous wilds of Indiana Territory to St. Louis which lay across the wide and mighty Mississippi.