The Scent of Jasmine (30 page)

“Outside of Virginia. Outside of this country. Take her to Italy and get her an Italian drawing master. I don’t think she knows how talented she is. I can see Charles Albert Yates paintings hanging in museums around the world.”

“I see.
C.A.Y.
Yet another thing you know about her that her family doesn’t.”

“I have to go and get some sleep,” Alex said. “Do I still have the hotel room?”

“I kept Cay’s room open for you. I believe you know where it is.”

Alex grinned. “Aye, that I do.” He stopped at the door. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through all this without Cay’s humor. No matter how bad things were, she made me smile.”

“She does that to all of us. As soon as she learned to talk, she made jokes.”

“And drew.”

“Yes. She drew and painted everything. You should ask Mother about the time she painted the drawing room wall.”

“I would love to. There’s something I wanted to ask you. Cay often talks about her mother’s great beauty. Is she as pretty as Cay says?”

“Better. She’s older now, but she still stops men in their tracks—much to my father’s annoyance.”

“Cay thinks she isn’t as pretty as her mother is.”

“And what do you think?” Adam asked.

“I think God was smiling when He made Cay.”

“That’s what we all think. Will you write her?”

Alex’s hand tightened on the door handle. “I don’t think so. I want to give her time to make up her own mind. The idea of a bad marriage scares her, so I want her to be sure of what she decides to do.”

“I’ll tell her the truth of what happened and where you went and why.”

“Thank you,” Alex said. “You know, I thought you were going to be different than what you are. Or maybe it was just jealousy at hearing your name morning, noon, and night. I’m beginning to think that you’re worthy of being Cay’s brother.” With a smile, Alex left the room, closing the door behind him.

Adam stared at the door for a few minutes, then went to the desk to start writing a letter to his mother. He planned to comply with Alex’s wishes about exposing Cay to other things, and to other people in her life, but Adam knew who he wanted for his brother-in-law, and he was going to work to see that it happened.

He began the letter.

Twenty-seven

ONE YEAR LATER

Edilean, Virginia, 1800

Cay was sitting by the pond not far from the house, an easel in front of her, a watercolor tablet on her lap. She was idly painting the pretty little ducks on the water, the cattails growing along the edge, and the—

The smell of jasmine reached her, and she couldn’t help but close her eyes in delicious memory. The scent brought to mind nights full of hot, humid air and making love for hours.

When she opened her eyes, she saw the form of a man reflected in the water and instantly knew who he was. She tried to still her heart, which had started pounding, and worked to control her urge to leap up and throw her arms around him. It had been so very, very long since she’d seen him.

“I saw Tim,” she said and tried not to stop painting.

“Did you?”

The sound of his voice, so very familiar yet at the same time sounding like something from the faraway past, made her pulse race. His accent had mellowed, and that made her want to cry. She’d missed that change. Had his
wife
taught him how to speak like an English gentleman?

“I did,” she said. “He didn’t recognize me, so I flirted outrageously with him, and I asked about his trip into the wilds of Florida.”

Alex put a large bouquet of jasmine by her easel where she could see it. Pinned to the stems were the three diamond stars and her pearl earrings that she’d left behind when they went to New Orleans. Alex knelt on the grass beside her, but she still didn’t look at him. “And what did he say about that trip?”

“According to Tim, he saved my life half a dozen times.”

When Alex spoke, there was laughter in his voice. “And what did you do to that poor lad for saying that?”

Cay didn’t look at him but kept painting, as though his presence meant nothing to her. She didn’t realize that she was painting the pond pink. “I did nothing whatever. However, later, he did have a most unfortunate accident with a rowboat. It seems that a poor little snake—well, not so little—had crawled inside the boat with him. Tim was so agitated that he fell into the pond. I had no idea he couldn’t swim, so Tally had to dive in and save him.”

Alex sat down on the grass. “He must have been glad Tally was there.”

“Tim said he was saving Tally.” She took a breath and began to fill in the sky with pale green paint. “Hope and Eli got married two months after they met.”

“Nate told me. You were right about that match.”

“Thankfull came to visit me, and Uncle T.C. happened to be here at the same time.”

“That was a stroke of good luck. Did the twins come with her?”

“Aye, they did,” Cay said, realizing she was slipping into the Scottish brogue that they’d always used between them. “And my mother found husbands for them.”

“Did she?” Alex picked up one of the brushes from the wooden box on the ground and handed it to her.

Turning her head just slightly, Cay took the brush and looked at Alex’s hand, but not at his face. It was a hand that she knew so very well, and it had touched every inch of her body.

“I hear that Armitage came to visit.” Alex’s voice was serious.

“Yes, he did, and we had a long talk. He told me that he knew who I was on the trip. Not at first, but after he saw my drawing, he said he remembered me. He said he also figured out who you were.”

“I thought he did. I was afraid he’d have me locked up when we got to the trading post.”

“Jamie said he thought about it, but that he’d watched us and knew that you weren’t hurting me. Adam told him everything about what happened.”

“Your brother’s been a good friend to me.”

“He’s like that.” Cay used the brush that Alex handed her to paint the ducks purple. “Jamie asked me to marry him.”

“Adam wrote that to Nate and he told me,” Alex said. “When he read that to me, I went out and got drunk for three days, and I had to wait for nearly a month before a letter got to us saying that you’d turned him down.”

“My mother was glad, but my father thinks I’m an idiot.”

“And what do you think?” Alex asked softly.

“That I haven’t a brain in my head.”

Alex laughed. “I never loved you for your brain, anyway.”

His words made Cay’s heart pound so hard that her corset stays were straining. She wanted so much to look at him, but she’d had a year to think about her life and her future, and there were things that bothered her. “I heard that you and she spent a lot of time together in Charleston. I was told that you two make a beautiful couple.”

“And I heard that your mother introduced you to a thousand young men.”

“She did,” Cay said, smiling as she put a blue bill on a duck. “She took me to London, Paris, and Rome for eight whole months, and I met everyone. My father’s distant cousin married an earl’s daughter, so that makes their son an earl. They have little money and no estate, but he does have the title. My mother used every connection she could get to introduce me to every eligible bachelor in three countries. She wanted to take me to Vienna, too, but by that time she was so miserable from missing my father that I couldn’t take it anymore.”

“What did you do?”

“I got sick. None of the doctors were clever enough to figure out what was wrong with me until I finally
told
one of them. We conspired, and he informed my mother that I was suffering from such a severe case of homesickness that she had to take me home immediately. My mother packed and had us on a ship within twenty-four hours. The funny thing was . . .”

“Was what?”

“That when she got home, she was so ill that she had to stay in bed for four whole days—and my father was so worried about her health that he stayed in there with her.”

Alex laughed, and when he did, he reached out to take the hem of her skirt in his hands. He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think he’d laughed even once in the last year. Between the hell that he’d been through and the seriousness of Nate’s company, there hadn’t been much to laugh about. “And what about the young men you met?”

“Some of them were wonderful,” Cay said enthusiastically. “But some of them were horrible. I met a duke’s son who told me that if I asked him to marry me, he would consider it. I think he believed I should be flattered by his offer.”

“But you weren’t?”

“Not in the least. I went on enough picnics that I nearly turned into a basket. Opera, ballet, concerts. And dances! I must have worn out a hundred pairs of shoes with dancing.”

“And the result was?”

“What my mother wanted: marriage proposals, of course. My family is rich, thanks to what my mother came into the marriage with, and my father increased the money. Add that to the fact that I’m not difficult to look at, and that even the Englishmen admitted my manners didn’t embarrass them, and I had dozens of men on their knees before me.”

“And did you accept any of their proposals?”

She took a moment before answering. “I was so angry at you for leaving me behind that I wanted to. I fantasized about writing a letter telling you that I was very happy, madly in love, and going to marry a fabulous man.”

“But you didn’t,” Alex said, and there was the beginning of relief in his voice.

“No, I didn’t. But then none of the men knew
me.
They looked at me to see whether or not I’d fit into their lives. How many children could I bear? Was I capable of taking care of their estates? And my favorite was whether or not I would put up with their affairs. You know who was the only man I was truly attracted to?”

Alex tried to hold his frown back, but he couldn’t. “No, who?”

“One of the horse trainers on the huge estate of an Englishman who wanted to marry my dowry. He was a tall man, with broad shoulders, and lots of dark hair. The English called him a ‘wizard’ with horses.”

“A wizard?”

“I called him Merlin, and when we went out riding, I kissed him.”

“Did you?” Alex’s hands clenched into fists.

“Yes.” Cay’s voice changed to anger. “Yes! While you were kissing your
wife
”—she sneered—“
sleeping
with her, for all I know, I kissed a man.”

Alex’s hands unclenched. He was glad to hear her anger and her jealousy. “I kissed her just that once, when you were hiding behind the cupboard and saw it. Other than that, I didn’t touch her, and I can assure you that I didn’t sleep with her. Thanks to you, I was able to look past what had attracted me to her and saw the person. She never quit swearing that she didn’t know I was put on trial for her murder, but there’s no way she could not have known. Nate went to that little town in Georgia where she ran to right after what she did to me, and the newspapers there were full of the trial. The editor even had a record that she, under the false name she used there, had subscribed to the paper.” He took a breath. “I could hardly bear to be near a woman who was capable of what she did to me.”

“I know,” Cay said. “Nate wrote us about how much you disliked her. But my brain and my heart don’t seem to be connected. One hears and understands, but the other feels.”

When Cay slid her foot toward him, he touched her ankle, encased in a silk stocking. When she didn’t move away, he put his hand on her foot.

“Did Nate tell you that her husband’s nephew is alive? She hadn’t killed him, just knocked him unconscious. The men in Charleston who’d been searching for her were from her husband. He wanted her back.”

“Nate wrote me everything.” There was emphasis in her voice, letting him know that
he,
Alex, had never written her even once. But, through Nate, they had communicated. “So she’s back with her husband?”

“Aye, she is.” Alex removed her shoe and began to caress her foot. He knew that Nate had been writing and telling Cay what was going on, but there were some things that Alex had saved to tell her himself. “I talked to her husband in private and told him all that the woman had done to me. I even made Megs tell him the truth about her early life and how she lied to meet him. But he already knew it. She hadn’t told me, but she’d worked in his kitchen when she was a girl, and he remembered her. He knew who she was when she showed up at his house wearing the clothes of his cousin’s daughter. It didn’t take much for him to figure out what had happened.”

“And he forgave her?”

“More than that, he loved her. He told me that he’d married the first time to please his father and he’d hated his rich, aristocratic wife, but the second time he married to please himself.”

“So they’re happy?”

“When Nate and I left, Megs was carrying his child.”

“Nate’s child? Father won’t like that at all!”

For a moment, Alex was confused, then he began to laugh—
really
laugh. It started inside him, rumbled up like a volcano erupting. He had forgotten her way of constantly making jokes about everything. He’d had a year of nothing but seriousness, of little laughter, as he cleared his name and dealt with judges and lawyers and Megs. He’d soon found that her beauty was a poor replacement for someone who wanted to make him feel good.

His laughter relaxed him, and Alex’d had all he could take of Cay’s refusal to look at him. Her painting of the pond looked like something a color-blind child had drawn, what with its purple ducks with their blue beaks swimming in a pink pond. His hand went up her leg, and in the next second he pulled her down onto the grass beside him, and he began to kiss her face and neck.

“I’ve missed you,” he said. “Every second of every day, I thought about you and wanted to be with you. Nate read me the letters you and your mother wrote to him, about every party and every dance you went to. Your mother even wrote about your damned shoes wearing out from so much dancing.”

“I told her to put that in,” Cay said, her eyes smiling as she looked up at him. Her hands were on his cheeks, feeling the smoothness of his face. She knew she’d probably show him the hundred or so pictures she’d drawn of him from memory in the last year. No matter how many men she met or how handsome they were, all she ever saw was Alex.

“I thought maybe you did, but I told myself, no, that my darling Cay could never be that cruel.”

“Me cruel? You invented cruelty. The Spanish Inquisition could take lessons from you. My horrible brother wrote every word that you two found out about that . . . that woman and her stupid husband. He should have
hated
her! Are you sure she didn’t murder that girl in the carriage? Maybe she—”

When Alex kissed her, she stopped what she was saying. He moved his lips from hers, and looked at her, his eyes searching her face, memorizing it, as he smoothed her hair back. “I thought of that, too, but her husband knew about the accident. One of his workmen had already seen it, and the husband was on his way there when Megs showed up at his door, saying she was the dead girl. He was amused by her audacity, and it wasn’t long before he was in love with her.” Alex’s voice lowered. “Who can understand love?” He ran his thumbs over her eyebrows, smoothing them. “I agree with your father, and if you had any sense at all, you’d take Armitage up on his offer to marry him. He’s much more your class and—”