From This Day Forward (7 page)

To be honest, she had provoked him, albeit unintentionally. She had meant to flirt with him but had only succeeded in angering him, and even when she'd realized how angry he had become, she hadn't been able to stop. Her innuendo and double-edged questions had pushed him beyond endurance. What had she expected? She'd cornered him and she had suffered the consequences. It was a mistake she would be careful not to make in the future. She wasn't about to give up, not just yet.

"Patrao
is not hungry?" Ines asked reproachfully.

Jason glanced up from his plate to see Ines standing at the end of the dining room table, frowning at him. He realized that he had hardly eaten a bite but had been rolling his food around on the plate instead. Dropping his fork, he pushed the plate away as if it were something odious.

"No, I'm not hungry," he growled. The clock on the wall struck the noon hour. "Where is Mrs. Sinclair?"

"She say she eats in her room." Ines cleared his plate away. "I am thinking you are not nice to her."

"Mind your own business, Ines," Jason growled, pushing his chair back from the table.

Ines snorted. "Man don't know what's good for him."

Jason stalked through the open dining room door, trying not to let Ines's words needle him. He'd always treated her more like a friend or family member than a servant, and now he was suffering the consequences. Now she thought she knew him better than he knew himself.

He just wanted to be left alone. That was why he'd come to the jungle in the first place.

There would be no activity on
the
fazenda
for the next three hours as the natives observed the customary siesta. When he'd first arrived in the Amazon Valley, Jason had tried to defy the midday heat. He'd soon learned the error of his ways from the exhaustion his labors produced.

Normally, Jason passed the time relaxing on one of the unused patios of the
beneficio,
napping beneath one of the several palm trees planted there if he'd had a particularly restless night. And even though last night certainly qualified, he knew he wouldn't sleep today. He strode out onto the patio, willing himself not to glance up at the door on the second floor. At the fountain, he splashed water over his face to clear his head, then ran his hands through his hair, slicking it back off his face.

Damn her. She'd turned the tables on him again. He'd meant to show her what he was, what he was capable of so that she would stay out of his way. He'd meant to frighten her, but when he succeeded, the self-loathing in the pit of his stomach had nearly devoured him. Maybe he didn't have a taste for violence any more.

You'll end up just like your good-for-nothing fa
the
r,
his uncle William Sinclair's voice taunted him from the past.
Just like your fa
the
r.

Could a man change his destiny? Could he escape his birthright?

A shiver trembled up his spine and set his neck to tingling. Someone was watching him. He jerked around to find Caroline sitting on a bench behind him. He released a sigh of relief mixed with displeasure. He'd been disappointed and even a little angry when she hadn't appeared for luncheon, but now he found he didn't want to face her again so soon. What could he say to her; how should he approach her? He'd be damned if he'd apologize.

"I don't mean to intrude," she said in a voice that dripped honey. "I usually spend the afternoons here reading."

She had donned a light cotton dress and come to the patio to pass the afternoon. It had not been her intention to force her presence upon her husband again. She didn't relish the thought of facing him so soon after her humiliation. But she'd spent far too much time fleeing to her room, and she wasn't about to do so now.

Jason ran a hand through his damp hair. He stared at her silently, and Caroline watched the changing expressions that always shifted across his face. At first, he seemed surprised to see her, surprise giving way to something she might have interpreted as gladness, if she didn't know how unlikely he was to be glad to see her. Whatever that emotion might have been, it quickly gave way to curiosity.

"I had no idea," he said. "I mean, that you spent the afternoons here."

"How could you?" Caroline asked. "There are many things you don't know about me."

Anger was getting the better of her, and she struggled for control. If she didn't tread lightly, she'd find herself baiting him again. She didn't want to drive him away, so she'd have to use another approach.

She turned the leather-bound book in her hand so that Jason could see the title on the spine. It was
Bleak House
by Dickens. "Your taste in books seems quite eclectic. Your library is extensive."

"I'm glad you approve. Please feel free to avail yourself of anything that interests you."

"I wondered if you had anything on coffee cultivation." Her eyes remained on the book in her hand, but she could feel the heat of his gaze on her. "I can't imagine that you would not. You've got everything from Russian history to Goethe to Jane Austen.... If I didn't know better, I'd think that every book in your library was a new edition."

"They are. It's my only requirement. Derek and his wife bought them on my behalf," he told her. "One hundred and twenty yards of books, enough to fill all the shelves in the room."

"You don't...?"

"I don't have time to read," he said.

The skill with which he told the lie chilled Caroline to the marrow. He was very good at it—at lying. How would she ever be able to know when he was telling the truth?

/ used to sneak and keep some of the money I made working at the sugar mill to buy books,
he wrote Derek.
I'd hide them under my bed and read them late at night after my father passed out.

The words of the letter leaped unbidden into her mind, jolting her with their significance. Compassion gripped her heart at the thought of that small boy hoarding the money he'd worked so hard for and using it to purchase books, books his father had burned more than once.

Jason was still hiding his books. He guarded his secrets carefully. How would he react if he ever learned that for the past year she and not Derek had taken his detailed lists and purchased the books he'd requested?

"The most I can manage is the month's worth of newspapers we get when the mail steamer comes up from Manaus," he was saying. "And why would you want a book on coffee cultivation?"

Caroline shrugged, trying to appear casual while her mind churned with unspoken questions. "I told you, I'm curious." She held his gaze for as long as she could, but something in those iridescent blue depths forced her to look away before he penetrated her very soul. It was the second time she'd experienced the sensation of being scrutinized, physically and emotionally, by those sharp, inquisitive eyes.

Opening her book to the place where she'd left off yesterday, she tried to dismiss him, but Jason would not be dismissed so easily. He stood still, studying her intently. She read the same paragraph three times without comprehension before finally lowering the book and gazing back at him.

"There are no seasons here," he told her, "not like you're accustomed to at any rate. There's the rainy season when it rains every day, and there's the dry season when it rains every other day."

She smiled up at him serenely, and he frowned and looked away. "I'm not at all what you expected, am I?" she asked.

Jason returned his gaze to her with a shrug. "I don't even remember what I'd expected any more. What about you? Am I what you'd expected? I mean, you must have had some kind of expectations or you wouldn't have come here."

Caroline felt her face burn as she remembered the fantasies she'd nurtured in New Orleans. She was twelve years old when her mother had died, so she remembered what it was like to have a complete family. And she remembered how it had been between her parents—the love, the laughter, the secret glances they shared that she didn't understand at the time. That was what she wanted, what she'd dreamed of. She wanted the kind of marriage her parents had enjoyed, a partnership.

Those dreams seemed quite ridiculous now. She sat in a tropical garden in the heart of the Amazon Valley surrounded by the pervasive jungle with her irascible, unrefined husband, a man who had been cut off from civilization for so long he'd reverted to behaving like a savage.

"I still can't understand why a young, attractive woman like yourself would want to live in such an isolated place," he said. "Or why you would marry a man you'd never laid eyes on. You're obviously not desperate."

"No," she agreed, "only lonely."

She'd been lonely since her father's death. Losing the love and camaraderie they'd shared had left her hungry for that kind of spiritual belonging. Foolishly, she'd turned to Wade Marshall to fill the void.

Her first husband had exuded taste and impeccable breeding, but his dissolute living had nearly destroyed them.

Studying her tall, ruggedly handsome husband, she had the inexplicable feeling that she could be happy with him, in spite of his lack of polish, social grace, sophistication. Somehow those things seemed unimportant, meaningless, even ridiculous.

"May I ask how old you are?" he asked, bringing her back from her reverie.

"Twenty-five."

Jason quirked a shocked eyebrow at her answer.

"You needn't look so shocked. Twenty-five is hardly ancient."

"That's true, but you.... I mean, you're so lovely, so..." His incendiary gaze seared her flesh and melted her composure. "Why didn't you marry before now?"

Caroline swallowed her fear. Finally, the moment had come, the moment she had been dreading since she answered Jason's request for a wife. The words in Jason's letter rose in her mind—"chaste, tractable, and of child-bearing age"—and her heart settled to her stomach.

"I didn't mean to pry," Jason said a bit defensively. "You yourself said that I know nothing about you."

"
I
...
I was married before," she confessed quickly before she lost her nerve, feeling as if she'd just admitted to murder or some other heinous crime.

His face hardened and he stood straight up, dropping his foot from the bench. "Derek failed to mention that detail," he said through clenched teeth. "Didn't he tell you what my requirements were?"

Fear began to coalesce into anger. Caroline clenched her fists to control her rising ire. "I suppose he thought we were suitable..." she lied. She knew she'd live to regret it, but she couldn't tell him the whole truth, not when he stood glowering down at her as if he'd like very much to throttle her.

"I'm sorry." She studied him, mesmerized by the bitterness etched across his taut mouth. A cold dread shivered through her body. "I'm a widow. That is... I'm not sorry I'm a widow, I'm sorry..."

Jason laughed without humor. "This must be Derek's idea of a joke."

"A joke? I hardly think so. I mean, if he knew how you would react, it would have been very cruel to send me all this way for nothing."
Tell him,
her conscience urged, but when she gazed into those fury-bright eyes, her throat closed.

"Well, that's exactly what he's done," Jason assured her, turning away as if to leave.

"Wait!" Caroline came to her feet, and Jason turned to face her expectantly. "You can't just walk away like that. Surely you didn't expect one of the fine families of New Orleans to send a young, innocent daughter to the wilds of Brazil."

"I have quite a lot to offer a wife," he assured her. "Or didn't my cousin tell you that? I think he did. I think that's exactly why you're here. You seemed overly interested in my financial status earlier."

Caroline bristled. She threw the book onto the stone table with all her strength, then stood glaring at him, hands clenched into fists at her sides.

"I never asked you about your financial status." She bit the words out. "If you'll remember, you volunteered that information."

"You did the calculations, Mrs. Sinclair."