by Shirl Henke
Hearing her at the door, he turned, glass in hand and asked, “Does Orlena forgive me for precipitating her, early bedtime?”
“She knows well enough she can only remain up half an hour past her little brothers,” Elise said smiling. “She was greatly mollified by that pretty quilled Osage necklace you brought her. You do spoil her outrageously.”
“Maybe it’s practice for having children of my own,” he said lightly, watching with relish the poleaxed expression on her face. “While I was upriver I got married again, Liza. Olivia St. Etienne is now Mrs. Samuel Shelby.”
She paled. “Oh, Samuel, no.”
Seeing her dismay, he set down his brandy glass and walked over to her in consternation. “I thought you favored the match, Liza.”
“Oh, I do, very much I do, but...”
“But what?”
Her shoulders slumped as she took his hands in hers. “Tish is alive, Samuel. She’s here in St. Louis with her stepbrother. They arrived several months ago. I had no way to send you word. I’m afraid the colonel’s lady has become quite the toast of local society in your absence,” she added bitterly.
Now he was the one poleaxed. “But the letter last spring said she had... Then that means—”
“Yes, your marriage to Olivia is invalid. Her guardian has been quite mum about her sudden departure last spring. Said she’d gone to visit relatives in New Orleans, but somehow I never believed him. Where is she now, Samuel?”
“At my house on Plum.” He cursed and pounded Santiago’s heavy oak desk. “If people ever find out we’ve been bigamously married, her reputation will be in shreds. Bad enough she has a panderer for a guardian.”
“What do you mean? Why did she vanish last spring?” Elise’s clear violet eyes studied her brother, who looked distinctly uncomfortable, much as he had when they were children and their father called him on the carpet for some infraction.
Quickly, not sparing his own culpability, Samuel outlined Wescott’s proposition to him, his acceptance and the dangerous aftermath. “So, after Micajah was able to rescue us from Pardee’s Osage friends, we headed back to St. Louis.”
Elise took it all in, not accusing or condemning. She knew her brother to be an honorable man who would not have taken advantage of an innocent girl under any circumstances, least of all one for whom he already had feelings whether or not he acknowledged them at the time. When he finished, she had decided upon a course of action. “I must bring Olivia here at once. She can stay as our guest until we sort out this tangle. That will spare her reputation and protect her from any claim of her guardian. You’ll have to deal with Tish.”
He sighed and finished off the brandy. “The divorce will take months.”
“I’m certain Olivia will wait, Samuel,” Elise consoled.
“But do I have the right to ask that? You know the stigma attached to a divorced man. As you said, the first Mrs. Shelby has made quite a splash among the city’s elite. They won’t forgive this easily—if at all.”
“I know Olivia will not care and anyone else who would hold you to Leticia Soames is not worth bothering about,” she replied crossly. “Now you go report to General Clark and Secretary Bates while I fetch Olivia here. We’ll concoct some story to give out regarding her absence while we wait for you and Santiago to return.”
“I must be the one to tell her about Tish, Liza. I owe her that.”
“I understand. I’ll bring her here and say only that you have something of moment to discuss with her. I’ll do my best to reassure her, Samuel.”
“What would I do without such a marvelous sister?” he said, kissing her forehead and hugging her.
She patted his cheek, noting the haunted look darkening his eyes. “We’ll work this out, Samuel,” she assured him. The good Lord knows you deserve a chance at the happiness our papa never had.
It was well past midnight by the time Samuel finished discussing the Indian situation on the Missouri with his superiors. Santiago, summoned by his wife, had arrived at Secretary Bates’s residence shortly after Shelby and remained there planning the expedition upriver. Now Samuel had to face Olivia. What would her reaction be? How could he ask her to endure the ugliness of a divorce as it dragged through the distant Virginia legislature?
When he arrived at the Quinn residence one lone light burned softly from the library window. He knew Olivia was waiting for him. Inside the house was deathly quiet. Elise, her children and the servants were all asleep. He walked down the darkened hallway and opened the library door.
Olivia heard his footfalls at the front door and moistened her lips nervously. She knew it must at last be Samuel. There was something about the way he moved that she would always recognize, even in the dark. She had spent the past hours in desperate fear that he had changed his mind about their marriage, that he was going to make some provision and leave her, but then why bring her to his sister’s home?
Elise had gone to great lengths to reassure her of how much Samuel loved her. She pressed her fingertips to her aching temples, then smoothed the simple yellow muslin gown that her sister-in-law had given her. It fit quite well since they were both tall and slender. She had bathed and washed her hair, eagerly anticipating Samuel’s lovemaking in their own bed when he returned. Now she sat in a strange house, dressed formally for a confrontation with him...and she had no idea of how to react, what to do.
Oh, my love, what has happened?
When he stepped inside the room, she could tell at once that something was terribly wrong. Her heart seemed to stop beating as she stood up and took a step toward him, then stopped in midstride, afraid to fly into his arms. He stood ramrod straight, looking so splendidly handsome in his blue uniform, just as he had that first night when she had seen him across a crowded ballroom floor. And fallen in love at first glimpse.
He ached to take her in his arms, but he had no right. With his fists balled impotently at his sides, he struggled to regain control. “Livy...Olivia, I’m sorry Liza had to bring you here in the middle of the night this way.”
“What is going on, Samuel?” He stood across the room from her. But she knew they were separated by more than a few yards.
He nervously combed his fingers through his long shaggy black hair, pacing back and forth across the thick Navajo rug on the polished floor, trying to frame the words. There simply was no way to soften the blow. He forced himself to meet those fathomless green eyes and said, “Tish is alive, Olivia. She’s been here in St. Louis for months. Everyone knows she’s my wife. That’s why Liza had to get you out of my house before anyone saw you.”
When he spoke, the words at first refused to register, so great was the shock, but then they did, especially the last ones...before anyone saw you. “You’re returning to her, then,” she said flatly, numb with shock.
He blinked incredulously. “Going back to her? God, no! I despise her as much as she does me.” He walked over to her and took her in his arms, pulling her against his heart and holding tight. “You smell like jasmine,” he murmured against her fiery hair, kissing the tumbled curls and pressing them against his face.
“Then why did you have me—”
“Little fool,” he said fondly, relieved at her simple misunderstanding. “Livy, your reputation would be destroyed if word of a bigamous marriage got out, even an unintentional bigamous marriage. No one in St. Louis would ever receive you again.”
“Since I’ve already scandalized proper society at the racetrack, they probably won’t receive me anyway. I don’t care.” She looked up into his eyes, her own blazing with defiance.
“Well, I do care. Think, Livy. I wouldn’t be able to secure a divorce if you were implicated. The whole thing could become very ugly. Regardless, it will take months, probably a year. Her father is a very powerful man in Virginia and he’ll fight us every step of the way.”
Suddenly Olivia could feel his trembling. He was afraid for her. She reached up and stroked his cheek. “I don’t care how rumors fly or how long it
takes—whatever it takes, I will wait for you, Samuel.”
He felt her arms tighten around his neck as she pulled his head down to her and kissed him with a soft desperation that quickly turned to white-hot ardor. As always they were explosive together, melding to each other, bodies entwined as the kiss deepened and they felt themselves spiraling out of control.
His mind hammered a desperate message to his body. Stop before it’s too late. He pulled away from her in a sudden rush, holding her trembling lithe young body at arm’s length. Her lips were swollen with his kisses and her eyes dark, fathomless with passion and love. Nothing had ever been harder in his life. He struggled for breath, air searing his lungs in great gulps as if he’d just run the Osage gauntlet once more.
“I can’t—I have to go, Livy. If I stay...I have no right to lie with you...it’s not the way I want it to be between us. I want you for my wife, not my mistress.”
Her heart shattered with the bittersweet pain of his declaration. Once she had run from him because he wanted what she was now all too willing to give. But everything had changed. “You have all the right on earth...but I will wait, if that’s the way it must be.”
He smiled a wistful, lopsided smile that made her heart turn over and said, “I love you, Livy...and that’s the way it must be.”
Outside in the darkness a figure crouched behind the bare brushy branches of a lilac bush, watching the scene being played out in the Quinns’ library. He scowled in satisfaction when the lovers embraced passionately. So this was the woman Shelby had married, thinking his first wife was dead. It was obvious he would never go back to Tish.
“In any case, the colonel must die,” he murmured to himself as he watched the touching leave-taking going on inside.
Then he waited.
Samuel swung up on his horse and rode slowly down the street, lost in thought. He was bone weary. Nothing would have been more wonderful, more natural than to sleep with Livy’s soft warmth nestled against his body, but that was not to be. A deep, slowly simmering rage rose inside him, thinking of Tish’s scheming lies. He knew it had been her doing, this “mistake” about her death.
“God rot me, I still wish she were dead,” he muttered to the horse disconsolately as the big stallion’s hoofbeats plodded down the dusty street. When he turned the corner onto Plum he ducked his head to avoid a dead grapevine swinging from the locust tree overhead. At that same instant the crack of a shot erupted and the vine snapped in two, splinters flying from the force of impact.
Samuel wheeled his horse around and kicked him into a gallop, lying low against his neck as he rode directly, toward the wooded lot from which the shot had come. The undergrowth was thick, choked with dry blackberry brambles and tall goldenrod now autumn brown. By the time he had reached the site, he could already hear a horse racing down the next street, headed toward the waterfront. To the north First Street was crowded with buildings, tall warehouses and smaller offices and tanneries. Whoever it was would be long gone by the time he reached the road.
He was getting damned tired of being used for target practice, especially since all that had saved his life the past several times was blind chance. His assassin was uncommonly unlucky, but an accursedly good shot, whoever the hell he was.
Turning back his horse, Samuel girded himself to face Tish in the morning.
Chapter Twenty One
Samuel rode up to the front yard of the Parker mansion and dismounted. Tish waited for him inside. He could no longer think of her as his wife—not since marrying Olivia. It was a very fortunate thing Tish had considered his humble lodgings unworthy of being graced by her presence, else she would have found out about Olivia. The huge two-story stone monolith standing before him, built by a prosperous “Boston” for his socially ambitious wife, was grand enough to suit a Soames. The Parkers had welcomed Colonel Shelby’s lady into their home and introduced her to St. Louis society.
Scowling, he knocked on the door, knowing Tish would still be abed since it was scarcely eight a.m., an utterly uncivilized hour by her reckoning. A punctilious butler admitted him, then ushered him into the front parlor to cool his heels while Mrs. Shelby was informed of her long-absent husband’s return. He paced restlessly while he waited, anxious to have the nasty confrontation over.
Surprisingly, Tish came downstairs within a quarter hour, her hair in an artless dishabille of silvery curls, spilling over her shoulders. She wore only a lavender brocade dressing gown and soft carpet slippers.
“Darling, I’ve been absolutely desperate to see you! It’s been nearly four months since we arrived and no word from you. I was terrified you’d been killed!” She flew across the bric-a-brac filled parlor with arms outstretched. When he made no attempt to return the embrace but stepped stiffly back, she retreated a step with a wounded look on her face. “After I’ve risked life and limb traveling thousands of miles through the wilderness to reach you, this is the welcome I receive?”
“For a dead woman, you appear amazingly hale and hearty, Tish. How did you manage the resurrection?” he asked sardonically.
“You’re angry with me,” she said with a small moue, stepping closer again, letting her dressing gown gap open the tiniest bit as she shrugged one elegant shoulder. “The whole thing was a terrible misunderstanding. I wasn’t on the boat that went down, but I had planned to be. Daddy was beside himself when he received the news. By the time everyone realized that I hadn’t drowned with the others, the letter to you had already been posted. That’s when I decided to come to St. Louis in person.”
She had excellent timing, Samuel would give her that. All the theatrical gestures, the cajoling and tears—she could hold a stage with the best of them. Old Senator Soames always fell for it. So did Richard. So had he, at first. Shelby watched as she wrung her hands and moistened her lips with a pleading look in her eyes.
“We’ve both had time apart to reconsider our lives. I...I wanted to prove to you that I could change, could learn to make a home here in the West. You believed you had lost me forever and I’ve feared so much that you might have been killed... I must say your sister and that foreigner she’s married to weren’t at all forthcoming about where you’d gone or when you might return. They wouldn’t tell me anything.”
He arched one eyebrow cynically, standing with his arms crossed and feet braced apart. “You scarcely seemed to be pining away in my absence. Liza tells me you’ve become the belle of the Mississippi. Every prominent family in the city has feted you while I was upriver.”
“Well, I did have to meet your friends and business associates. If we’re to build a new life here—”
“We are not building anything, Tish. I told you back in Washington, our marriage has for all practical purposes been over for three years.”
“You can’t do this to me!” She almost stamped her foot, but restrained herself and forced the tears to well up instead. “I’ve done exactly as you wished. I’ve come to you in St. Louis. I risked my life traveling up that hellish, savage-infested river. I’ve given up Washington, broken poor Daddy’s heart leaving him the way I did—just for you, Samuel. All for you.”
“All too late, Tish. You know it, too. Is that why you concocted the lie about drowning? To buy yourself time so you could get here and insinuate yourself back into my life before the divorce bill was brought to the Virginia legislature?”
Tish paled, balling her hands into tight fists to keep from clawing at him. How had he guessed? When had she become so transparent to him? So careless of him as to let matters get this disastrously out of hand? She swallowed the bile rising in her throat and cried prettily. “How can you be so cruel? I have nowhere to go. Daddy will be ruined by the scandal of a divorce. He’ll disown me.”
“Your father would never disown his precious Tishabelle, not even if you sprouted a tail and horns and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue stark naked.” Samuel watched her growing frustration as all her well-rehearsed, teary scenarios failed, one by one. “Anyway, you’ll always h
ave Richard to console you. He is here with you, isn’t he?”
“You’ve always hated my brother,” she accused.
He shrugged. “Bullock may always do what you want, Tish, but I will not. Best you have him take you home to Daddy. I’m going through with the divorce.”
The words were delivered with flat finality. She stared at him with pale calculating eyes narrowed. “It’s her, isn’t it? That little French slut you took upriver with you—the one you thought you’d married.” Tish smiled in satisfaction at his lack of reaction. She had long ago learned that he never revealed his most deep-seated emotions. Richard had been right, damn it all. Her husband was well and truly lost to her.
“What do you think you know, Tish?” he asked carefully.
“I know everything. One of the prominent men I’ve become acquainted with happens to be the little fool’s guardian. Mr. Wescott has been most concerned about his ward’s absence. Imagine his horror to learn that she had contracted a bigamous marriage with my husband,” she finished in catty triumph.
Samuel’s guts clenched, but he fought to remain calm, although it had never been more difficult in his life. “You don’t intend to rusticate here in St. Louis, Tish,” he began; carefully neutral. He had to buy time for Olivia, to get Tish back to Washington, away from St. Louis where she could ruin his innocent love. “I’m frankly amazed you lasted for these few months.”
“Now that I’ve been reunited with my husband and his mission here is completed, I had hopes we might return to civilization.” She stressed the we maliciously.
“And if I don’t dance attendance on you?” His voice was low, deadly.
“Why, Samuel darling, it’s quite simple. I shall take shameless advantage of what the distraught Mr. Wescott told me and announce to the world that Olivia St. Etienne married you and lived as your wife thinking all the while that I was dead...which I most obviously am not.”