Chapter Six
Sante Fe, New Mexico
The little cottage, no bigger than a hole in the wall, had never seemed as inviting as it did now. Arielle pushed open the door, dragged her tired, throbbing feet into the sparse room. The single narrow bed in the corner welcomed her and she collapsed onto it.
“Oh Caleb, my body aches,” she moaned.
She heard his footsteps on the floor and then the door close behind him. “It has been a trying day,” he agreed with her.
“If I wash another dish once more,” she started to say.
“You’ll get used to it. It’s part of our mission.”
Arielle sat up wearily. “Our mission? We haven’t discovered anything yet.”
After three days, they were no closer to discovering who had threatened Matthias’s life. All she’d done was backbreaking work from sun up to sun down. The governor’s mansion, though not as big as her home in Arabette Grove, was a horrible place to clean.
If she ever got back home, she’d tell Brutus to increase the maid’s pay.
As always, when she thought of her home, she fingered the brooch her father gave her. She missed him, even more so now than she did before. Missed the small things she’d taken for granted. The freedom she’d always had.
Here, in Sante Fe, people looked through her. They dismissed her without any concern. Watching one of the other servants, she very quickly adapted to being neither seen or heard until requested.
“What were the women talking about this afternoon?” Caleb stood over her.
Pushing strands of her hair away from her forehead, she sighed. “There’s going to be a party tonight.”
The thought of getting back on her feet and having to serve again made her want to cry.
“I know that. What else? What about Anna Wilder? What did she say?”
Remembering the buxom, blonde-haired women with the waspish tongue, Arielle sat up. “I wasn’t able to catch everything but I know she made a disparaging remark about Matthias and the governor.”
Anna Wilder completely detested the governor. She learned that yesterday when the woman had been invited as a guest for the tonight’s party. At first, Arielle couldn’t understand why the governor would invite a woman who couldn’t stand the sight of him or Matthias.
Then she learned, as she helped unpack the woman’s luggage and drew out yards and yards of material and hung them up, that her late husband had been a supporter of the governor.
“One must keep up appearances,” she said to one of the other ladies who had joined her, a Mrs. Julia Abernathy. “To think he gave the deputy representative position to him. How shameful.”
“Do you think she would be willing to kill him?”
Arielle tapped her lower mouth. “I’m not sure. I sense she loathes Matthias but not enough to kill him. However, I do suspect she is hiding something.”
“Why?”
“I can’t put my finger on it exactly, Caleb. You told me to go with my instincts. I asked myself, why did she come if she had no wish to be here?”
Caleb pulled up the one chair. “Go on.”
“At home, I’ve declined invitations for various functions. Why didn’t she? Even though she said she had to keep up appearances, something about it doesn’t ring true.”
“Then she’s not completely off the suspect list then.”
“No. What about you, Caleb?”
“I was able to watch the sheriff. Matthias was able to send me over to the saloon on some trumped-up errand. The sheriff and Sam Meredith were talking in low whispers. I couldn’t catch what they were saying. Yet, the way the sheriff kept going at the bottle, I know something’s up.”
“I agree. Papa always said never trust a drunken man.”
He glanced back at his notes. “That only leaves Captain Gerard King and Mr. Aaron Roberts. When I met with Matthias earlier today, he told me they had also been invited to the party tonight.”
“Will you be serving with me tonight?”
Caleb nodded. “I’ll be there.”
“I’m glad, Cher.”
At the unconscious use of the endearment, Arielle’s head dipped. “I mean, Caleb.”
“Call me what you like, Arielle.”
Her head jerked up at the deepened sound of his voice. “I didn’t mean to.”
He gave her a crooked grin, the first she’d ever seen. It made him look different. And sent her heart to pounding in her chest. “I’ve seen the way Bronco practically melts when Claudette calls him that. I wondered, how it would be if you—”
He let the sentence fade away but Arielle took the sentiment for what it was. A sign that Caleb was seeing her as more than just a spoiled, free colored girl.
It made her all the more determined to find out who was Sorcha.
The first time she heard him whisper her name was the first night they arrived in Sante Fe. There’d been nowhere to go for the sake of modesty so she’d been forced to change while he kept his head averted. When they lay down in the narrow bed, she’d tried to keep some space between them but it was impossible. Caleb wasn’t going to sleep on the floor. And Lord knew she needed some sleep.
“Why don’t you just let me hold you and then we’ll be more comfortable?” Caleb had whispered in her ear. She stifled the little involuntary tremor that had gone through her and allowed his arm to rest along her waist.
Surprisingly, she’d fallen to sleep in a short while.
When she’d awakened in the middle of the night, it was to the thrashing about of Caleb’s body. He moaned and shook. Sweat beading his brow and his face contorted in anguish.
She tried calling his name but it was to no avail. Whatever nightmare he was experiencing held him captive. Then his eyes opened. Although wide and stark against the darkness of his skin, they were staring at the ceiling, unseeing. “Sorcha!”
The way he said this woman’s name, full of pain and loss, it had shaken her.
After he called her name several times, he’d gone back into the arms of slumber. Arielle had lain awake for a while afterwards, her thoughts churning at what she’d learned.
Who was this woman who haunted her husband’s dream?
“Arielle?”
Caleb’s voice brought her back to the present. “What were you saying?”
“What were you thinking about?” His voice had a gentle note to it. “Were you worried about the case?”
“No.” Should she tell him? There was something brewing between them. Over the past few days, their relationship had changed. Though the case had yet to be solved, at the same time, the longer they worked together, their animosity died way.
What was replacing it? Trust? Something more?
His hand reached out and cupped the side of her face. “What were you thinking about so hard, Arielle?”
She decided to throw caution away. “Who is Sorcha, Caleb?”
The tender feelings which had washed over him receded like the setting sun. Caleb removed his hand from the softness of Arielle’s face. “How do you know about her?”
Arielle’s mouth parted and her sweet breath blew across his face. “You cry out her name at night. You have for the past three days.”
Caleb jumped up from his chair and rubbed his hand through the short mat of his hair. He’d thought all that had stopped.
“Who is she?”
“She’s nothing to you,” he told her harshly. “She’s nothing to anyone anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
The memory was starting to unfold in his mind. Sorcha’s pale face pushing him out the door. Her gray eyes wide with fear…and love. “Go! Caleb, go!” Her lilting voice screaming at him to escape.
Dogs barking. Men shouting.
“Caleb, what is it? Tell me who she is?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said hoarsely.
“But I do,” Arielle insisted, the old haughtiness which had been absent for a few days back in her voice. “I need to know.”
He turned around. “Why?”
Arielle stared up into his face. “Most women take exception to hearing their husbands screaming another woman’s name in their sleep.”
“This is not a real marriage, Arielle,” he reminded her. Or was he reminding himself? The ease of their working relationship had lulled him into some wayward thoughts. Holding her against his body at night was a pleasant sort of torture.
“That may be.” Her arms folded. “But while we are married and working this case together, we need to be open about everything. And I want to know who Sorcha is.”
“There’s no need to know about her. She’s a part of the past.”
“No, she’s part of the present. Enough to where you cry her name at night. Tears fall out of your eyes and you sob yourself back to sleep.”
Caleb bit the inside of his cheek, embarrassment washing over him.
“I want to know who she is.”
Caleb turned his head away from the entreaty in her eyes. “We have to focus on the case.”
A soft, warm hand touched his rigid forearm. He jerked at the sensation. “Look at me, Caleb.”
Had she demanded it, he would have refused. Yet, her voice held no sound of command. It was gentle, vulnerable, and pleading. “Trust me with your pain, Caleb.”
“My pain,” he repeated. “In order to tell you about my pain, I have to tell you about Diane Whiting.”
Just the sound of that woman’s name made him twitch. He’d hated her so much.
“She’s the reason why I met Sorcha.”
“Tell me,” she urged him.
And so he told her. Starting with the way that his former master’s sister would pick her lovers from the field hands without her brother’s knowledge. Told her how whenever she picked one, she’d visited them and watch them like a vulture, her gray eyes latched onto them like they were a piece of meat. Diane would then, once she chose them, would use some excuse to take the men with them on an extended trip.
“Your former master never suspected anything?”
“No, Arielle, he didn’t. Diane Whiting was very clever. She never married so he just considered her a spinster.”
He went on to talk about the day he caught her eye. And how she began to watch him in the field. He knew what she was going to do.
“I didn’t want her attentions, Arielle. Whenever she went away with the lover she’d chosen, after a couple of months, she’d come back, alone. We found out that during her ‘trips’ after she was done with them, she’d sell them.”
Arielle gasped.
“I hated my life but I had no wish to be sent away from the only life I had ever known.”
“Go on, Caleb.”
Then came the night when the master had gone away unexpectedly. He lay in his cabin on the verge of sleep when the door to the cabin burst open. Diane Whiting stood there, dressed in some provocative thing which hung over her body. She told of how she had been watching him, wanting him.
“I tried to resist her. I knew if I ever got caught, I’d be killed. But she…tantalized me. Made my head catch on fire.”
Arielle’s face showed she understood what he had been unable to say.
The next thing he knew, the door burst open. The master stood there, shocked and angry. He’d snatched Diane Whiting away from him and had the overseers drag him out and toss him into an empty shed.
The next day, he’d been whipped within inches of his life. Though it had not been his fault, even the master knew that, he’d touched her.
“I knew I was going to be killed the next day, Arielle. I’d seen the rope being carried by one of them. Everyone knew. But I know some of the other slaves were going to escape that night. They’d been singing the songs in the fields about Moses going down to Egypt.”
He kept on with the story, telling how he with his back bleeding and body wracked with fever, went along with the others when Moses came to get them. That on the Road, he’d came to a station, and had passed out from the wounds. He’d awakened in a small room with a woman with bright red hair, pale freckled skin, and the kindest gray eyes he’d ever seen.
It was dangerous for him to stay there. But his wounds were too severe. He’d almost died. He would have died if not for Sorcha, day after day caring for him. Risking her life for weeks on end.
She’d taken his anger and his mistrust and with gentle strokes of healing, had changed them into something more. Even when he should have left, when his wounds had healed, she asked him to stay. Giving him the basics of reading and writing. Helping with elocution.
“I knew we could never be, Arielle,” he said, uncaring of the tears that came down his face. “I knew the world we live in would never allow a man like me to be with a woman like her. She’d told me over and over that she loved me. Lord knows I loved her like I never had any other woman.”
“How did she pass away?” Arielle‘s eyes shone with unshed tears.
“She’d been hiding me in a secret room under her brother’s house where she stayed. I guess somehow he found out she was harboring a fugitive slave. The slave catchers came in the dead of night. She ran to the hiding place and told me to leave then. Pushing me into the night, she told me to run.
“The slave catchers were breaking down the door by then. And she tried to head them off. I remember hearing the gunshot rend the air and her scream.”
“Caleb!”
“I wanted to go back to her but I couldn’t. She died saving my life, Arielle.”
The silence had settled over them as his memories loomed larger than life, crowding the room like ghosts, wailing like unseen specters.
“Now you know why I cry her name at night, Arielle. Can I still trust you with my pain?”
Traces of tears trailed down her cheeks. He reached over and wiped them away from her cheeks. A droplet landed in a perfect sphere on his thumb. Watching her, he licked it away, tasting Arielle’s sorrow.
“Oh, Caleb. I had no idea.”
“You’re the only person I’ve ever told the whole story to, Arielle. Perhaps that was why I was so hurtful toward you when this case first started. You, born free, could never truly understand what this freedom means.”
“Perhaps not, Caleb.” Arielle sniffled, the tip of her nose red. She came toward him and reached up and swiped his tears away. “But at least I know. And you don’t have to be alone in your pain anymore.”
Her arms wrapped around his chest. A strange sensation of something falling away made his shoulders feel lighter. Caleb hesitated before he grabbed her closer. It felt so good to hold her like this in daylight, without the cover of darkness.
It was as if the light of day gave him the opportunity to see that the same woman who had come to the agency was not the one here in his arms. That woman from before could not have adapted to the life of a servant. She’d no clue of what it meant to hide in the background and gather information. That woman wasn’t in his arms.
She lifted her head and stared into his eyes. Those hazel eyes filled with sorrow…and something for him. Before he knew it, without being quite conscious of what he was doing, he bent his head and caught her lips with his.
Fire and honey. That’s what she felt and tasted like. From the expert moves of her mouth, she knew a great deal more of this than he did. So, he lifted her in his arms and went over to the chair. He never broke contact with her sweet lips, even when he sat. Shifting until he was comfortable, he let her take over.
Her kisses sent waves of fire up and down his body. Unlike what happened between him and Diane Whiting, this had no shame attached to it. With each brush of her lips, she made him crave more.
Finally, she pulled away. He could barely breathe but he grinned at the knowing, smug look in her eye.
“Aren’t you glad…I’m not really Matthias’s wife?”
Caleb shook his head, stilling his heart. “You’re something, Arielle.” He gave a quick kiss to her cheek. “Come on, we have a job to do.”
Chapter Seven
Caleb had been told to work in the kitchen for the party which would make it impossible for him to help her with gathering the evidence and the clues as to who wanted to kill Matthias Blackburn.
“You know what to do, Arielle,” he whispered quickly. “Go on and find out who’s trying to set history back, one death at a time.”
“All right,” she’d replied under her breath. Her heart soared. He trusted her to do the job and gather the information. She would do it to the best of her ability.
While Arielle served, she spied Claudette, dressed in a hooped skirt, making her way about the party. She’d overheard some of the conversation made by Matthias and the Governor. Thinking of what she just learned about Caleb, her admiration for Matthias went up more.
Making her way about to each table, she kept her eyes glued on the suspects. Though she and Caleb had thought there may have been other people, Matthias’s list of the suspects truly seemed like the best options.
Anna Wilder fanned herself with a large ornate fan, tittering behind it to another woman. “My husband would roll over in his grave if he saw how things were,” she told the woman. “And let me tell you, if my dear husband were still alive, he wouldn’t have stood for it.”
“It’s disgraceful,” the woman added.
Arielle carried the tray of small finger foods to the women. She wished she could upend it over their gowns but that was hardly advisable. Thinking that two months ago, she wouldn’t have thought twice about destroying a marble figurine to get her way, she had to grin inwardly.
“It’s probably the reason why his daughter has so suddenly disappeared,” Anna Wilder went on. “Just gone without a trace.”
Arielle, remembering how Caleb had told her that the governor was aware of their presence as Pinkerton agents, wondered if the disappearance of his daughter had something to do with Claudette and Bronco’s investigation.
“I’m with you, Anna.” The woman snapped her fingers. “Gel.”
An Agent for Arielle (The Pinkerton Matchmaker Book 12) Page 6