Rebecca Hagan Lee (38 page)

She closed her eyes and gave a trembling sigh as she heard James answer her most fervent prayer. Tears stung her eyes. She couldn’t stop them. Since the night she had allowed James to carry her to his bed, Elizabeth had promised herself she wouldn’t build castles in the air. She promised herself that she would take whatever James offered and not wish for more. She told herself that she could live for the moment, that she could survive in a state of limbo, but Elizabeth had known all along that those promises were impossible to keep. She simply wasn’t a moment-by-moment person. She’d spent her whole life searching for a way to belong. People to belong to. But James Craig was the first person in her life who had ever taken her in his arms and made her feel as if she belonged there.

James rubbed the pad of his thumb over her bottom lip, gently caressing the plump flesh. “My own,” he whispered again, in reverence, in awe. He scooted Elizabeth to the edge of the rocking chair and kissed her tenderly, before deepening his kiss and kissing her senseless.

When he released her, Elizabeth opened her eyes and found herself staring into James’s dark blue ones. She met his gaze, her love for him shimmering in her eyes.

“If you’re willing,” he began, “I have an idea how we can pass the time until we get sleepy.”

“Does your idea include a rocking chair?” she asked teasingly.

“No,” James shook his head. “I was thinking more like a chaise longue and a blanket on the balcony beneath the stars.”

“Stars,” Elizabeth repeated.

“I can’t offer you any more than that,” he said softly. “I can’t offer you the rest. Not until … Not yet.” He studied her face, his intense gaze searching for a clue what she was thinking.

“I’ve always fancied myself as a stargazer,” Elizabeth told him. And she certainly appreciated James’s unique stargazing techniques.

“Elizabeth.” Suddenly serious, James framed her face with his hands. “Please, understand that what we have now—at this moment—will have to be enough.”

“It is,” Elizabeth told him, silently promising herself that she’d make it enough.

A WEEK LATER
James caught the flash of dark magenta skirts out of the corner of his eye as Elizabeth hurried past the open door of his study toward the kitchen with the large brown-paper wrapped package he’d picked up from Kellerman’s and brought home to her. He glanced up from his stack of financial reports and assayer’s assessments and called out to her. “Elizabeth?”

She paused in the doorway.

“Did the dolls come in?”

Elizabeth marched into his study and came to a stop beside his chair. She ripped the remainder of the paper from around the bundle, then reached inside and grabbed hold of one of the dolls and thrust it in his face. “If you call this
abomination
a doll!”

“Christ!”
James uttered another more vicious oath and recoiled at the sight of it. Although it had a cloth body and two porcelain arms and two porcelain legs and a face
and was dressed in a silk brocade robe, to call it a doll was a generous exaggeration. Elizabeth was right. The object she held before him was a grotesque abomination of what should have been a child’s toy. The porcelain face was painted a sickening yellow, the eyes were mere black slits, the nose was broad and flat, and the mouth was a scarlet leer. The sly, malicious and faintly evil expression on the doll’s face was a vicious caricature of a Chinese woman that bore even less resemblance to Ruby and Garnet and Emerald than the Caucasian dolls upstairs. Only the thick black hair resembled the Treasures’ and it was elaborately braided and lacquered in the manner of a lady of the Emperor’s court. James had seen plaster reliefs of stylized Chinese temple” dogs that were prettier. “Who made these? From where were they shipped?”

“Mr. Kellerman ordered them from a toy supplier in New York City,” Elizabeth told him, holding the doll by one tightly-bound foot, before turning it upside down so she could read the manufacturer’s mark pressed into the porcelain at the base of the doll’s skull. “But according to this, the faces were manufactured by Pearson’s China Works of Chesterfield in England.”

James pinched the bridge of his nose and rubbed his tired eyes before he looked up at Elizabeth. “Is that how the people in Chesterfield see my daughters? Is that the way the people here in Coryville see my daughters?”

Elizabeth saw the pain, the confusion, and the outrage on his face and answered honestly. “I don’t know anyone in Chesterfield, but I suspect there are some people there who believe this is an accurate depiction of Chinese women because they’ve been taught to fear and ridicule foreigners who look and speak differently. As for the people here in Coryville, only the stubborn and ignorant and cold-hearted could fail to see beyond the color of the Treasures’ skin and the shape of their eyes to the little girls they are.”

James raked a hand through his hair in frustration. “You would think a
China
works would know better.”

“Not if all they have heard are the horror stories. Not if
all they’ve ever seen are these grotesque dolls or equally grotesque drawings or paintings or descriptions they’ve read in travelogues. Not if they’ve never met any Chinese. You showed me that.”

James stared at her searchingly. “Tell me, Elizabeth, am I wrong? Am I like Don Quixote tilting at windmills? Am I desperately trying to make silk purses out of sows’ ears?”

He was and he wasn’t. He couldn’t change the whole world, or the attitudes of the people in it, in one lifetime. James knew that as well as she did. But he’d made a fine start. He’d changed
her
attitudes. And she would change Lois Marlin’s and the others in town like her. And in time the Treasures would touch more lives and open more closed minds. In the end that was really all one man and one family could do. And if what he was doing was tilting at windmills, then the act of tilting was all that mattered. But Elizabeth didn’t say those things to him. She said what she knew he wanted—and needed—to hear. “That’s absurd,” she told him roundly. “Everyone knows that to make a silk purse, you must start with the finest thread from China.”

In that moment James knew that if he didn’t already love her, he’d fall desperately, hopelessly in love with her.

Elizabeth smiled at him. “Could you do things differently? Could you feel any differently?”

“No,” he admitted.

“Then how can following your heart be wrong?”

“Is that what I’m doing?” he asked, even though he knew she was right.

“I hope so,” Elizabeth said softly.

James sat silently for a moment, marveling at the woman who had followed her heart, then opened it and welcomed him and his children inside. “I know silk when I see it,” he said. And when he opened his arms, Elizabeth walked into them.

“What are you going to do with them?” James asked, sometime later, as Elizabeth stuffed the Dragon-faced Lady, as he’d dubbed the doll, back into the bundle and started toward the door of the study.

“I’m
not
giving them to Ruby and Garnet and Emerald. I’m taking them to the refuse bin in the kitchen where I intend to bury them.”

“Why not return them to Kellerman’s and get your money back?” James suggested.

Elizabeth raised both her eyebrows at that. “You don’t seriously expect me to allow these dolls to be sold to anyone else, do you?”

James chuckled at the fire in her eyes and the indignation in her voice. “No. I don’t guess I do.”

“Good, because I’d hate to have to disappoint you.”

“You, Elizabeth Sadler, could never disappoint me.”

“That’s what you say now,” she replied smartly. “What will you say in forty or fif—” She broke off abruptly and hurried out the door before James could answer.

JAMES FOUND HER
hours later, upstairs in the bathroom of the nursery. She had on what looked to be one of her oldest camisoles and pair of drawers and one of the Treasures’ oilskin bedsheets wrapped around her waist. A large bottle of India ink, a sheet of very fine emery cloth, a pair of scissors, a stack of old towels, and a box of paints were spread out within easy reach. Two naked dolls with wet and shortened black hair and faces eerily covered in a thick layer of wax and bodies wrapped in oilcloth lay on a folded length of toweling amidst a tangle of red, blond, and brown human hair on the floor around her. As he watched, Elizabeth leaned over the bathtub and dipped the head of the third doll into a bowl of diluted ink, then carefully combed the ink through the strands with a toothbrush.

“What in the hell are you doing?”

Elizabeth didn’t even pause in her work as she answered him. “I promised Ruby and Garnet and Emerald a doll of their own and I intend to see that they get them. And no bloody China factory in Chesterfield, England, is going to keep me from doing what I said I’d do when I said I’d do it!”

James’s shoulders began to shake as he watched Elizabeth
destroy the red-haired Parisian fashion plate he had bought for Ruby to transform her into a raven-haired Chinese beauty. A chuckle formed in his throat as Elizabeth continued her monologue. He coughed to disguise it.

“I thought about leaving their hair long,” she said. “I know Chinese women have long hair, too, but I want to make these dolls look the way the Treasures look now. And contrary to what I was led to believe back at the jail before we arrived in Coryville”—Elizabeth cast James a pointed look over her shoulder—“none of the Treasures has hair long enough to braid yet.”

James gave up all pretense of coughing. Instead, he threw back his head and roared with laughter.

“What’s so funny?” she demanded, swiping a lock of hair off her cheek with the back of her hand.

“You,” he said, laughing. “You cursing while you dip that poor wax-shrouded doll’s head into a pot of India ink. You with ink splattered on your undergarments and hair and face and hands …”

Her hands. Elizabeth looked down to find that while she’d assembled everything she needed to protect the dolls while she re-created them, she had forgotten to protect her hands. Her lovely creamy-skinned hands. She reached for a towel.

“That won’t do any good.” James laughed even harder. “India ink is indelible.”

“I know that!” Elizabeth snapped, carefully wringing out the doll’s hair before she wrapped it in the towel. “Why do you think I poured wax over their porcelain faces?”

“I couldn’t imagine,” James gasped, laughing so hard his sides ached.

“Stop it!” she insisted, pointing a threatening ink-covered finger at him. But his laughter was contagious and by the time Elizabeth got to her feet and marched over to him, her shoulders were shaking, her mouth was trembling, and hot tears formed in her eyes. Elizabeth didn’t know whether she was laughing or crying.

James held on to his side, pointed at her, and laughed even harder.

“This isn’t funny!” she declared, laughing and crying right along with him.

“That depends on how you look at it.” James caught her by the shoulders and turned her around to face the mirror.

A half-moon of India ink decorated her right cheekbone. Elizabeth was horrified. And he thought it was funny! The man she loved thought having a half-moon of India ink on her face less than a week away from her first scheduled tea for the women of Coryville was funny. “Bloody hell!” she squealed James’s favorite oath.

“It will wear off,” James told her. “Eventually.”

“Not before my tea!”

James bit his lips to suppress another wave of laughter. He remembered Elizabeth asking permission to host a tea for the Coryville Ladies’ League a week or so ago, but he’d forgotten all about it until now.

“It doesn’t look so bad, sweetheart.” He tried to placate her before she really burst into tears. “You’re beautiful no matter what. And this”—he touched the crescent of ink—“will probably start a new fashion trend. All the ladies will want one.”

“Oh, really?” Elizabeth whirled around in his arms and held up her stained hands. “And what do you suggest I do about these?”

“Wear gloves,” he managed before he burst into another round of laughter.

“All right. Fine,” Elizabeth announced, patting both sides of his face, “I’ll wear gloves and start a new fashion trend. What are you going to do?”

James turned to look in the mirror as he realized what she had done. His mouth fell open at the sight of the two palm prints on either side of his face. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that they were too big to be his daughters’ and too small to belong to him.

A wave of desire took him by storm and nearly sent him
to his knees. James turned to look at Elizabeth, recognized the smug satisfaction on her face for what it was, and wanted her with an urgency he had never known was possible. His blue eyes darkened as his body tightened in reaction, and he grew hard against the buttons of his trousers. “Elizabeth,” he murmured her name in a husky baritone layered with needs and emotion as he reached for her and lowered his mouth to hers.

Heat flared between them the moment their lips touched. His tongue plundered the depths of her mouth and Elizabeth’s tongue returned the favor. He groaned her name and Elizabeth felt his need pressed up against her, nestled against the softness of her belly. She reached up and shoved the silk robe off his wide shoulders, pushing it down his arms, where it hung suspended until she slipped her hands between them to untie the silk cord at his waist. James sucked in a ragged breath as she brushed his stomach with the back of her hand. He tangled one hand in her hair and deepened the kiss. He worked his other hand between their bodies and cupped her, pressing the heel of his hand against her silken mound while he massaged her with his fingers through the slit in her linen drawers. Elizabeth’s knees buckled at the contact, but James supported her weight. He leaned against the wall, wedging his knee between her legs while he continued to work magic with his fingers. His blood pounded in his ears, his heart raced, and his body trembled with the need to quench the fire flowing through him. James forgot about making love in his warm soft bed down the hall. Normally articulate, he forgot the soft words of love he had whispered to her before. He forgot to caress her. He forgot everything he’d ever learned about lovemaking except his one overwhelming, almost primal, need to-bury himself in her warmth. Now. He withdrew his hand from her long enough to force open the buttons of his trousers. His hard shaft jutted through the opening. Elizabeth wiggled closer, trying to press his length where his fingers had been. No longer patient enough to fumble with ribbons and hooks, James; reached for her camisole and ripped it
from neck to hem down the front until it hung open on either side of her magnificent breasts. He tore his mouth away from hers, then bent his head and laved the nipples of her breasts before latching on to one and suckling like an eager baby. Elizabeth whimpered with a mix of excitement, anticipation, and an incredible hunger for him. James recognized her sounds of passion.