The Irish Bride (16 page)

It was a completely new
sensation.

A little guilt crept into her heart
that Aidan had left to go find his own bath, but not so much that
she couldn’t enjoy this. It was probably just as well that he’d
gone. She would have felt very inhibited and self-conscious,
knowing that he waited on the other side of the painted screen, and
she would have been compelled to hurry through her washing, as she
had at Clare’s.

But more than that, tonight he’d
caught her looking at him, considering him in a way that confused
her. She didn’t love him. She still loved Liam, foolish or not. But
there was something so very male about Aidan O’Rourke that she
simply could not ignore. Other women had fallen prey to his charms,
but not her. At least not until recently. Even now, she felt a
restless awakening within her that made her long for his return and
wish that he could join her in the tub. It was an immodest thought,
one that popped into her head without warning or invitation. Lord,
he might have that effect on other women, but she hadn’t expected
to feel it herself.

At last, when the room had purpled
with shadows and twilight, and her fingers were as wrinkled as a
dried-out potato, she rose from the cold bath water and dried
herself with the towel. After she wrung the water from her hair, it
hung in long damp plaits down her back.

Then she realized that her nightgown
was tied in the square of old sacking that served as her bag, and
she’d left it beside the bed. She peeked around the edge of the
dressing screen, as if expecting to find someone there. Of course
that was silly. She was still alone. Wrapping the towel around her
torso, she lighted the two lamps in the room. Then she walked to
the bedside and bent to rifle through her things. It wasn’t as if
she owned so many possessions, but she had to take everything out
to find the blessed thing. The towel worked its way loose and fell
in a puddle around her feet. At last, she spied the nightgown’s
long sleeve and pulled on it.

At that moment a key turned in the
lock and the door opened. She looked up to see Aidan standing in
the doorway. For a moment they were frozen in the tableau: she
poised beside the bed, and he still gripping the doorknob. At last
she let out a squeak and made frantic grabs for both the towel and
the nightgown, but couldn’t seem to catch either. He stood there,
an expression of almost comical surprise on his face, staring at
her as if she were a leg of lamb at Easter dinner and he had not
yet broken his fast.

“
For the love of St.
Patrick, turn around!” she snapped.

Jolted into action, he leaped back
into the hall and shut the door.

Farrell pulled the nightgown over her
head, and a thin thing it was too. On the ship, she’d always slept
in her clothes, so modesty hadn’t been so much of a problem. Now
she grabbed her shawl to throw around herself. The night was far
too warm for it, especially with the furious blush scalding her
face and head, but she had nothing else to put on.

“
All right,” she called,
cinching the shawl tight. “You can come in now.”

Aidan poked just his profile through a
narrow crack in the door as if expecting a shoe to be thrown at
him. “Ye’re sure.”

“
Yes, yes, come in.” He
edged his way in and closed the door behind him. She stood rooted
to the spot beside the bed, feeling as awkward as she ever had in
her life.

She had trouble looking him in the
face, but when she did, she saw that he was blushing too, scarlet
all the way to his hairline. He was washed and shaved, his hair
still damp.

“
I’m sorry I didn’t knock.
At least ye didn’t scream. I don’t know how we would have been
explaining that.”

She faced him with her arms crossed
over her chest and her chin out. “Aye, well, I guess you’ll think
to knock next time.”

“
I’m glad ye didn’t have a
pistol. I’d now be searching the corridor for my brains or my
manhood.” He gave her a wry grin. “Although you might be thinking
both reside in the same place.”

Her arms dropped to her sides. He was
impossible! she thought, unable to stifle a hoot of laughter. He
laughed with her, and for the moment, the tension was
broken.

“
Ah, it’s good to hear you
laugh, Farrell, lass.” He walked around the bed to take her upper
arms in his big hands. “It’s like music, ye know?”

“
Is that more of your
blarney, Aidan?” she asked, trying to ignore his clean, soapy
smell, mixed with a bit of bay rum and the scent of him that she’d
come to know so well.

He gave her another smile, a soft one,
and said, “Nay, girl. It’s the truth.”

Whether it was or not, it was nice to
hear.

* * *

And wasn’t this the finest form of
torture God had ever visited upon one of His mortals? Aidan
wondered in the warm darkness. Here he sat in a chair with his feet
propped on a stool, dressed only in his underwear and listening to
the night sounds of New Orleans—a distant piano, soft laughter from
the street, a carriage rolling past. Meanwhile, his wife—a wife in
name only—lay in a bed not more than three steps from him, and he
dared not touch her. God was truly having a fine joke at his
expense because he’d been allowed to see this wife, a woman he’d
craved for years, wearing nothing but her long russet hair. Those
creamy arms and legs, full, rounded breasts with rose-pink nipples,
and a dark copper triangle at the apex of her thighs— He pounded a
closed fist on the arm of the chair, once, partly from frustration,
and partly to distract his thoughts. The promise he’d made to
himself the morning of Deirdre Connagher’s burial at sea had come
back to test his resolve as soon as he and Farrell first set foot
in this room.

Maybe it would be all right if they
made love. Women didn’t get pregnant every time they lay with their
husbands, he tried to reason. Then ruefully he had to admit that
Irish women seemed to. The street lamps below provided enough light
for him to make out her soft silhouette in the bed. He wished he
had the right to share it with her. But beyond his promise, he knew
that if he was ever to win her regard, it must happen in slow
steps. Farrell was not a woman who would take to being bullied, and
that wasn’t his way to treat women in any case.

At the public bath he’d visited
earlier, he was asked if he’d be requiring more than just the
bathing facilities. Had he been a single man, he would have taken
advantage of that offer. Even now he wondered briefly why he’d
chosen to remain faithful to this marriage when he knew that
Farrell was, in her heart, married to his brother.

He shifted in the chair, trying to
find a more comfortable position so that he might forget the hard,
heavy ache low in his belly. Finally, he got up and searched
quietly through his kit and located the flask of his da’s poteen.
If he couldn’t satisfy his hunger for Farrell, maybe he could put
it to sleep with a dose of whiskey. He uncorked the bottle, took a
large swallow, and welcomed the merciful fire of the “angel’s
tears” as it slid down his throat. Tomorrow, he vowed, tomorrow he
would learn about getting them to New York or Boston, somewhere
permanent where they could put down roots.

Eventually, his tight muscles began to
loosen and he dozed, drifting in and out of a hazy landscape of
half-dreams, where a woodland goddess with a flowing gown and two
yards of red hair succored the land with grace and
goodness.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The next morning, Aidan woke in the
chair as sore and stiff-muscled as an old man. The day already
seemed hot, and then he realized that Farrell’s shawl covered him
from waist to mid-calf.

She was up and dressed, and sat at the
little writing desk, scratching a pen across a sheet of paper.
Obviously, she had covered him, not wanting to look at a man in his
drawers. He watched her for a moment as her hand moved busily
across the surface. Now and then she paused to dip the pen in the
inkwell.

“
What are you writing
there?”

She glanced up at him, a bit startled.
“I’m sending a letter to the family back home to tell them we’ve
come safe this far.” She paused to look at the lines she’d written.
“I wish there was a way to learn what has happened to them. With us
moving around like Romanies, it will be months and months before we
know.”

“
We did the best thing we
could for them.” Absently, he smoothed the nap of the worn
upholstered chair arm with the palm of his hand. “We did the
only
thing we could. All
we can do is hope that they’re well, and have faith that they are.”
Hope was what had sustained Aidan through the dark times and even
now kept him looking forward instead of back. But he was more
inclined to action than to trust in wishing. Still, it was all he
could think of to tell Farrell, and it was all either of them could
do now.

She tapped the end of the pen against
her chin. “I suppose you’re right. But I’ll feel much better when
I’m someplace where I can have a letter from them.”

“
Then I’d best be up and
about. We’ll find a place to get breakfast, then I’ll start asking
around about passage North.” He threw off the shawl and Farrell
returned her attention to her letter, carefully keeping her eyes on
the paper. Her cheeks had bloomed with a very becoming pink, and he
smiled as he passed her turned back.

He knew from living in the cramped
quarters of an Irish cottage there was very little that remained
private. She was no stranger to men or anyone else in various
stages of undress. But he found her embarrassed innocence
endearing. Arousing in fact.

God, he’d better not entertain notions
like that this early in the day. Last night had been difficult
enough, and there was no sense in starting his morning with
thoughts that would only torture his mind and body.

The serving women had come for the tub
shortly after his return last night, and now the washstand stood
behind the dressing screen. After he washed and dressed, they found
a little restaurant, La Maison Café, that served them tea,
sausages, and something called beignets, sweet, fried pastries that
tasted wonderful.

After, Farrell returned to the hotel
room to finish her letter and Aidan began his search for transport
North. It had long been his experience that a good place to gather
information was in a pub. He walked down the street to a barroom
with a name that made him grin—Lass of Killarney.

He stood in the doorway, waiting for
his eyes to adjust to the dim interior. It smelled vaguely like the
pubs back home, full of cigar and pipe smoke, the rich, warm odor
of ale and the sharper tang of whiskey. Flowing through the open
back door at the end of the bar came the acrid stink of piss from
the outdoor jakes. Except for the large painting of the naked
lassie hanging behind the bar, which no pub in his experience could
have afforded, it was fairly familiar.

The patrons were slightly less
disreputable-looking than the ones at The Rose and Anchor in
Queenstown, so he crossed the floor to the bar.

“
Sure, and after she had her
way she wanted to have another go, and me dead from her efforts.
Dead, I swear to ye, Jack. She brought me back. She could do things
to a man that would make his eyes roll back in his head. My heart
stopped entirely at least twice, it did!” The storyteller, a big,
broad-shouldered man with carroty hair, sucked down the entire
contents of his ale mug in one gulp, then dragged his forearm
across his mouth. He shook his head regretfully. “I do miss that
old girl. She was even more entertainin’ than her
daughter.”

“
Ah, Flanagan, if I wouldn’t
go broke, I’d give you free ale just to hear your stories,” Jack,
the barkeep said, laughing. “Your heart stopped.
Har-har!”

“
So it did! Maybe it was
three times, at that!”

In a land where even English sounded
like a foreign language, Aidan’s ears immediately picked up the
welcome sound of a homegrown voice.

“
And what will yours be?”
Jack asked him, still smiling over the other man’s
story.

“
I’ll have what he’s
having,” he replied and nodded at the burly Irishman.

Flanagan looked at Aidan. “I take it
ye’re not from these parts.”

“
Nor you—I can understand
your speech.”

The other man gave a hearty bark of
laughter. “Aye, I know what ye mean. I’m Colm Flanagan, most
recently from Philadelphia.”

“
Aidan O’Rourke. I’ve just
come from County Cork with my wife.” He put out his hand, which
Flanagan wrung in his own beefy paw.

“
County Cork, is it now?
Well, keep your valuables safe because there be Yankee tricksters
in every port, eager to take severe advantage of the newly
come.”

Aidan nodded. Charles Morton had told
him the selfsame thing. “As I’ve heard.”

“
I’m from Strokestown in
County Roscommon meself, but I haven’t seen it these eight years
past.”

“
Ah, ye’d have left during
the famine, then.” Aidan took a big sip of the ale put in front of
him.

“
Aye. Eighteen-forty-seven
was a terrible year, you might remember. My family were tenants of
Major Denis Mahon.”