Corbin's Fancy (26 page)

“Hello,” he returned, with a sort of exaggerated, biting patience.

Without another word, Meredith grabbed for her beaded handbag and her stylish parasol and fled.

Adam folded his arms and grinned again. “What did I say?” he asked.

Fancy smiled and shook her head. “I’m not sure. Whatever it was, our Meredith understood.”

“I hope so.” Adam replied, perching on the arm of an overstuffed chair and folding his arms. He was wearing a dark suit despite the warmth of the day, and somehow he managed to look perfectly cool. For a time, there was a companionable silence during which Fancy went on with her packing and repacking, her fussing and smoothing.

Adam broke the peace with a directness Fancy had already guessed was typical of him. “Meredith said she didn’t know what Jeff sees in you. Do you know, Fancy?”

Suddenly, Fancy’s throat was twisted and tight and her heart was beating too fast. “I don’t think I do,” she answered honestly when she could get the words out.

“He isn’t good enough for you, you know. Just the way I’m not good enough for Banner.”

Even if she’d had a week to think Fancy wouldn’t have known how to respond to that remark. So naturally she remained silent.

Adam smiled. “I knew you were right for my brother the minute you dived into the parsnips to catch that rabbit,” he said.

Fancy flushed at the reminder. “Right for him?” she whispered, truly confused but hopeful, too.

“My brothers and I are hard to live with, Fancy. We’re given to towering rages and grand passions and we tend to be attracted to women who are—well—unconventional.”

Fancy was even more confused than she had been before. In her mind, Amelie Rogers, Keith’s intended, represented the perfect Corbin wife. And she certainly couldn’t be described as “unconventional.” “Isn’t Banner—”

Adam chuckled. “Conventional?”

“Well—yes. I was sure that she would be.”

“Were you? Well, you’ve got a surprise coming, then. O’Brien is a spitfire.”

Fancy put one hand to her forehead and sat down. “Now that I think about it, a woman doctor would have to be spirited,” she reflected. And then she looked up into Adam’s face with wide and vulnerable eyes. “I’m not very spirited, you know,” she confessed as an afterthought.

Adam arched one raven black eyebrow. “Aren’t you?” he countered with gentle disbelief. “Jeff tells me that you’ve been on your own for several years, that you’ve traveled all over the territory performing. Do you really think that’s what ordinary women do, Fancy?”

Fancy felt an intangible light warming her mind, reaching into the shadowy parts of her spirit. “I suppose not,” she said.

Adam shrugged as though to say that his point was made and quietly left the room.

Fancy sat for a long time, alone in that sunny, spacious parlor, smiling to herself.

*   *   *

The train chortled into Colterville and came to a noisy stop, whistle shrilling, smokestack puffing. Fancy was reflecting on the changes in her life since she’d been here last and jumped in surprise when Jeff elbowed her gently in the ribs.

“I’ll get the balloon and put it on the next train,” he said. “I want you to go on to Wenatchee with Adam—I’ll meet you there tomorrow.”

Adam cleared his throat and looked out the grimy train window, pretending an interest in quiet, uninspiring Colterville.

“I’m staying with you!” flared Fancy.

“You’ll be safer with Adam,” replied Jeff, standing up in the aisle now. “Will you just do what I tell you, for once?”

“No!” Out of the corner of her eye, Fancy could see Adam’s broad shoulders moving in silent laughter.

With patronizing patience, Jeff bent to kiss her briefly on the mouth. “Frances, Frances, you do try my forbearance,” he said. And then he turned and walked away.

Fancy looked at Adam in silent question and he gestured for her to follow Jeff. “I’ll make sure your rabbit gets off the train,” he promised, his eyes dancing.

Impulsively, Fancy stretched to kiss his forehead. “My trunks? You’ll get those, too?”

He nodded. “Hurry, Fancy.”

Soaring on a swell of happiness and rebellion, Fancy leaped out of her seat and rushed down the aisle. Jeff was already a good distance up the road, so long were his strides, and he had almost reached the livery stable by the time Fancy caught up with him.

He whirled and glared at her, amazed at her audacity. “What the—you little—”

Fancy laughed and the train whistle shrieked, drowning out whatever else her husband had meant to say. Just as Jeff caught her elbow in a furious grip and started propelling her back, the train pulled out, Adam waving expansively from one window.

Swearing—he clearly hated to be defied so flagrantly—Jeff wrenched Fancy off in the other direction again. Reaching the livery stable, he literally flung her down onto a bale of souring hay out front.

“Sit there!” he ordered. “Right there, God damn it! And so help me, Frances, if you move—”

“I won’t,” promised Fancy, in sunny, docile tones. But already the spiky hay was poking through her skirts in a very uncomfortable fashion.

Jeff waggled one index finger in her face. “If you do, I swear I’ll beat you.”

It was an empty threat and they both knew it, but Fancy wasn’t about to push. She had managed to stay here, with him, and that was all she cared about for the moment. “I promise I’ll behave,” she said sweetly.

“It’s a sin to lie,” snapped Jeff, and then he turned and marched angrily into the livery stable.

When he came out again, having rented a sizable wagon and a team of two sorrel horses, Fancy was still sitting obediently on that bale of hay, the picture of wifely submission. Except, maybe, for the violet sparkle in her eyes.

“Could I stand up now?” she asked, batting her thick lashes.

The proprietor of the livery stable looked at her in stark admiration. “Now there’s the kind of wife a man needs.”

Jeff reached out, his mouth losing an obvious battle with a smile, and wrenched Fancy to her feet. “Like he needs the black plague and high taxes,” he muttered.

Fancy was enjoying the game. “Have I displeased you somehow, darling?” she simpered, trying to look remorseful. “Oh, if I’ve been naughty—why, I just couldn’t live with that!”

The stable manager took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, moved to deep emotion by such a display of old-fashioned womanhood. “Glory be,” he said in wonder.

Jeff fairly flung Fancy up into the wagon seat. “Bullshit,” he muttered.

The drive to Eustis Ponder’s farm was a long one, and it was late afternoon when they arrived. Isabella scurried outside to greet them, her face alight, drying her work-roughened hands on her apron. Fancy leaped down and hugged the woman with unrestrained joy.

“Land, I’ve missed you, Fancy!” Isabella cried, returning the hug with equal exuberance. “Can you stay long?”

“Overnight,” said Jeff, busy with the horses. And when Eustis hurried in from the fields only moments later, the men greeted each other with almost as much enthusiasm as the women had.

Isabella had obviously hoped for a longer visit, but she was a woman conditioned to making do with what was offered and she ushered Fancy into the house for pie, coffee, and gossip.

“You look a mite happier than when last I saw you,” Isabella remarked when they were settled at the table.

Fancy was trying to enjoy each moment and not let her mind stray ahead to days when she might be alone again. “I am.”

“The way you love that man shines out all over you,” Isabella chirped. “Won’t be long till there’s a baby to bind you even closer.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said softly.

Isabella glowed, having caught some nuance from Fancy’s words and come to a conclusion of her own. “Mercy me, you’re late for the monthly, aren’t you?”

Fancy nodded. “I haven’t said anything to Jeff, though,” she confided. “I want to be absolutely sure first, and it’s too soon for that.”

Isabella’s strong, calloused hand came across the table to squeeze Fancy’s. “You make sure to send me a letter the day you find out,” she ordered.

Fancy promised that she would.

*   *   *

Jeff’s hand was cupped around Fancy’s breast, warm and insistent. The spare room was so dark that she could only make out the wheat-gold glint of his hair, the shadowy slope of his bare shoulder.

“Stop that!” she hissed.

“Why?” came the reasonably put response.

“Because I don’t want Eustis and Isabella to hear, that’s why!”

A long, chortling, and all-too-convenient snore came through the thin wall.

Jeff laughed. “Eustis,” he said, “is a true friend.”

Fancy was blushing so hard that it hurt. “Men!” she spat out.

The hand was stroking her breast, tracing the nipple,
making it ache. “Now where is that sweet, obedient, cloyingly compliant little chit that made a fool out of me at the livery stable today?”

Fancy squeezed her eyes shut, determined to ignore the sweet havoc he was wreaking upon her breast, to sleep. “I wouldn’t know,” she said.

Jeff rolled easily out of bed with a long-suffering sigh, pulling Fancy after him. Just as easily, he pulled her nightgown up over her head, flung it aside, and then kissed her, his tongue plundering her mouth until she was weak. To repay him, she knelt, and in kneeling, she came into power.

Jeff trembled, uttered a muffled groan and surrendered to the ruthless pagan who gave him no other choice.

Chapter Fifteen

F
ANCY LEFT THE PRIVATE COMPARTMENT WITH AS MUCH
dignity as possible, her head high. The train seemed to be careening down the tracks toward certain destruction and she had to grip the occasional seat back to keep from falling as she made her way along the aisle to her place.

Jeff, already resettled in his own seat, looked up at her with a salacious grin and then pretended to concentrate on the newspaper he had bought in Colterville.

Fancy glared at her husband in silent defiance and sat down opposite him. Beneath her stylish new traveling dress and her hand-embroidered camisole, the thoroughly tongued and suckled peaks of her breasts chafed.

“I warned you,” Jeff said in an amused whisper, crackling his newspaper once for emphasis.

Fancy stiffened, folded her arms across her breasts, and looked out the train window. They were traveling along the broad and angry Columbia River now, drawing nearer to Wenatchee with every passing second. “I didn’t think you were serious!” she hissed.

“You liked it,” said Jeff.

Fancy suppressed an untoward urge to plunge the sole of one shoe through that cursed newspaper of his. There was no denying that she’d enjoyed their brief and scandalous encounter in the compartment, but her pride was nettled, all the same.

She colored, remembering what had gone on in that tiny room. Jeff had all but dragged her back there and, once the door was closed, he’d calmly unbuttoned her dress, lowered her camisole, and taken his pleasure at her bare breasts. This with passengers and the occasional conductor walking by in the narrow passageway outside!

When he had satisfied himself at her nipples, Jeff had had the gall to divest her of her drawers and lift her onto the upper berth, so that she sat facing him, without hope of escape. He had then nuzzled his way into the moistness and warmth of her and brought her to a savage, gasping release with a calm greed that infuriated her even now.

Lowering his newspaper, Jeff smiled at her. It was as though he had been looking into her mind, marking the passage of her thoughts and the direction they took. “That was revenge for last night, among other things,” he said.

“Beast,” muttered Fancy, albeit half-heartedly. The train was thundering its way over an impossibly high trestle that seemed most unsteady to her. One look
down into the swirling currents and eddies of that dangerous river sent her bounding across to sit beside Jeff.

There was a look of tender tolerance in the ink-blue eyes that swung to her pinkened face. “The train isn’t going to fall into the river, Frances,” he said moderately.

“Fancy,” she corrected doggedly, clasping her hands together in her lap. Her skirts, freshly pressed that morning at Isabella’s, were now crumpled and somewhat dusty. Would anyone be able to guess, from her appearance, that she had just been ravished in a train compartment?

“Your thoughts might as well be written on your forehead,” Jeff observed, in a low tone that stirred that strange, wanton part of her to life again.

“Oh?” she said, trying to look nonchalant.

He laughed and shook his head and went back to his newspaper.

It was a relief to Fancy when the train jolted and shrilled to a stop at Wenatchee, for more reasons than one. The nearness of Jeff, the intangible power of his body over hers, had caused her a delicious sort of misery. More than once she’d considered taking his hand and leading him back to that compartment.

There were angry clouds in the summer sky, but the Corbin family was waiting at the ramshackle train station anyway, and Fancy’s first sight of them was alarming. There seemed to be so many of them.

“Courage,” teased Jeff, ushering her toward the group, his grasp firm but unhurting on her elbow.

A beautiful, fair-haired woman with delicate features and eyes as blue as Jeff’s hurried forward immediately.
“Is this our Fancy?” she demanded gleefully, casting only one glance at her towering son.

Jeff chuckled. “Yes, Mama, this is Fancy.”

Katherine Corbin flung her arms around her daughter-in-law and hugged her fiercely. “Welcome, welcome!” she cried. And then, still holding Fancy by the shoulders, she turned her head to look back at the others. “Look—isn’t she wonderful?”

Fancy swallowed, disconcerted. She had not expected such a warm greeting from a woman who had every reason to think her unsuited.

At that moment, the most beautiful woman Fancy had ever seen stepped forward, green eyes sparkling, cinnamon hair done up in a loose and appealing knot at the top of her head. “Wonderful is hardly the word, Mama,” she smiled.

“Fancy, this is Banner,” Jeff said quietly, and with a gentle sort of pride that stung his wife.