The Vow (20 page)
Reiver said, “It’s hard to believe summer’s over.”
“Yes.”
He waited. When she said nothing else, he added a few more platitudes about the weather, then stopped and placed his hand on her arm. “Is this what we’re going to do, spend the rest of our lives discussing the weather?”
Hannah hugged the shirts tight against her waist. “We can always discuss the children. Abigail can say her name now—at least the ‘Abby’ part of it.”
He recognized her irritating statement for the challenge that it was. “I’m pleased. No, don’t look at me as if I’m lying. I am pleased for her. But I don’t wish to discuss the children. I want to discuss their parents.”
“Then we should go inside.”
Once inside the foyer, Reiver checked to make sure they were alone, then ushered Hannah into the parlor and closed the doors behind them.
She stood there, still clutching Samuel’s shirts, still smoothing them nervously in a gesture that was beginning to annoy him.
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“I’ve suffered enough, Hannah,” Reiver said quietly. “You’ve had all summer to accept what happened and—”
“I’ll never accept what happened.”
Reiver’s temper flared. “Well, whether you can accept it or not, you are still my wife, with a wife’s responsibilities.”
Hannah turned paste white. “You are speaking of my responsibilities in the marriage bed.”
“I’m moving back into your room tonight.”
“Even if I don’t want you there?”
“I’m sure you’ll put your personal desires aside and do your wifely duty.”
He smiled wryly. “I promise you that I will be quick, and you won’t have to suffer my intimacies longer than necessary.”
“You would force me?”
Reiver shook her out of sheer frustration. “Damn it, I will not let you make me feel like some rutting pig, do you hear me?” When he saw her stricken look, he released her and fought to control himself. “You will obey me, Hannah. The longer we delay this, the rift between us will only grow wider.”
His decision made, he whirled on his heel and strode away before he noticed his wife’s shudder of revulsion.
When she was sure she was alone, Hannah pressed Samuel’s shirts to her face and breathed in the faint scents of paint, turpentine, and maleness. How was she ever going to endure Reiver touching her now, after knowing such sweet delight in his brother’s arms? She trembled, wondering if Reiver would be able to tell that another man had possessed her. Surely every curve, the texture of her skin, the very depths of her, would feel different and strange to him now. Surely her own body would betray her in some subtle way.
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She set the shirts in her lap and smoothed them absently as if she could coax out the answer to her dilemma. There was none, save the one she wanted to ignore.
The straw basket filled to the brim with rosy apples was heavy, but when Hannah thought of baking apple pies and how the calm, satisfying ritual would cleanse her mind—at least for a little while—she ignored the aching muscle in her forearm and marched resolutely along the path.
Then she saw Samuel.
He stood on the hill rising to her left, his feet spread slightly apart in a commanding and expectant stance, hands on hips, pale eyes alight with a mixture of triumph, desire, and reproach. A strong breeze sprang up out of nowhere, snapping his white shirt as if it were laundry on a clothesline and flattening it erotically against his chest and ribs.
Hannah envied the wind. She stopped, unable to smile and wave nonchalantly, helpless to drag her eyes away from his, even though they softened, giving her permission to flee.
She couldn’t.
Samuel walked down the hill, slowly at first, then faster as his impatience grew. When he reached her, he extended his hand. “That basket looks heavy.”
The moment she relinquished it to him, she regretted it, for now she had nothing to do with her nervous hands.
“Shall I walk back to the house with you?” he said. Without waiting for her answer, he began walking, and Hannah fell in step beside him.
They strolled without speaking, presenting the most innocent picture of a man carrying a basket of apples for a woman.
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Finally Samuel said, “I’ve missed you.” When Hannah made no comment, he added, “The last eight days have seemed like an eternity to me. I can’t sleep, I can’t work.” He chuckled, a dry, bitter sound. “Now I know what hell is like.”
She knew as well.
“Why haven’t you come?” he asked gently. “Couldn’t you get away?”
“It’s not that.” Hannah took a deep, shuddering breath. “Reiver has moved back into my bedchamber.”
Samuel stopped in his tracks and looked at her, a rare burst of jealousy distorting his features. “That explains much.”
She couldn’t reassure him by revealing how she had lain in her bed that first night, stiff with terror that Reiver would divine her secret the moment he touched her. She couldn’t tell him how she willed her mind into his bed while her husband used her body with the merciful quickness he had promised. Some things were best left unspoken, especially between lovers.
Hannah jammed her fists into her apron’s deep pockets and stared at the mills not far away. “I loathe his touch, but what right do I have to refuse him?
I’m no better than he is.”
“But you are.”
Hannah looked at him out of tormented eyes. “We can’t go on being lovers, Samuel, not while Reiver occupies my bed. I can’t jump from one man to the other, I just can’t. It would make me feel like a—”
“Don’t you dare call yourself that!” He set the apples down and reached for her, but Hannah bent over and grasped the basket’s handle with both hands, holding it between them as if she were offering him the fruit.
“You mustn’t touch me, Samuel! Someone may see.” Hannah’s gaze darted around nervously, then she froze. In the distance a man walked out of the
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throwing shed and looked in their direction before disappearing into the dye house. Hannah sighed in relief, but she was visibly shaken.
Samuel pried the basket from her stiff fingers. “Come back to the homestead with me. We’ll talk.”
She knotted her fingers together. “I—I have to get back to the house and bake pies.”
“Don’t act as though you must carry this burden alone. I’m just as responsible as you are, so share your misgivings with me,” he said, his voice soothing but insistent.
“Someone will see us.”
“You’re worrying needlessly. We’ll stay down in the parlor, and if anyone should come by looking for you, we’ll say that you stopped by to give me and James some of these delicious apples.”
“I—I can’t.”
“Why not? Are you afraid that once I get you into the house, you won’t be able to resist me, and we’ll wind up in my studio?”
“I’ve managed to resist you for eight days, haven’t I?” Both of them knew that wasn’t much of an accomplishment.
“Then you shouldn’t be afraid to come with me.”
Hannah didn’t reply, but when they came to the fork in the path, she hesitated for only a fraction of a second before turning right and heading for the homestead.
Once inside, Samuel set down the basket and turned to Hannah, but made no attempt to touch her, though he wanted to do that and more. “You’re safe here. We’re alone. No one will see us.”
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He failed to reassure her. Visibly agitated, she crossed the parlor to the window and looked out as if expecting Reiver or Mrs. Hardy to peer in. “I’m afraid I’m ill-suited to deception.”
“That’s because you’re so honest, Hannah.”
“I’m not. I’m an adulteress, no better than Cecelia Tuttle.” She sighed. “Now that I’m in the same situation, I can understand why she and Reiver did what they did, but I still can’t forgive him. I suppose that makes me the worst kind of hypocrite.”
“You’re nothing of the sort. You’re the kindest, most generous, most loving woman I’ve ever known, but your guilt is like some great cat-o’-nine-tails ripping away more of your courage with every stroke. You must overcome it.”
She grasped the windowsill until her knuckles turned white. “We must stop seeing each other, Samuel.”
“Do you mean that? Can you look me in the eye and tell me that you don’t want me?”
She turned. “It’s not that. It’s just that I live in fear of being caught and bringing disaster down on both our heads. I shudder to think what Reiver would do to you if—”
“That will never happen.”
“But it almost did.”
He stared at her. “You never told me. When?”
“Nine days ago. He caught me leaving here after we had just made love.”
Mad, passionate loving that had left her skin warm and rosy for the world to see.
“Fortunately I was carrying your shirts and made the excuse that I had just stopped by to retrieve them for mending.”
“Did he believe you?”
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“Yes.” Hannah closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “But I was so afraid he would see the guilt written on my face and know that I was lying.”
“I know all this secrecy and deception is torture for you, but you must not let your imagination anticipate the worst.”
“Don’t you see?” Hannah cried in despair. “It’s only a matter of time before Reiver learns the truth. Or Mrs. Hardy. Or James. They’ll wonder why I spend so much time in the homestead. Or they’ll notice the way I look at you across the dinner table. They’re not blind or stupid, Samuel!”
He went to her and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. “Then we’ll go away together. Paris… London… Rome. Somewhere we can be free, where my brother will never find us.”
“And my children?” she reminded him bitterly.
“We’ll take the boys and Abigail with us.”
Hannah noticed his pointed inclusion of her daughter in their plans. “Then Reiver will surely hunt us down until he finds us, if only to claim his sons.”
Samuel dropped his hands and shrugged helplessly. “Then what are we to do? And don’t tell me that you will no longer come to me, my sweet Hannah, because I don’t believe that you can stay away any more than I can.”
“I must.” But when she looked into his eyes, all her fine resolve to resist him crumbled because he had enslaved her mind as well as her body. With a cry of surrender, she threw herself into his arms, and as his lips came down hard on hers, she knew she would risk and endure anything, even her husband’s unwanted intimacies, to experience Samuel’s love just one more time.
“No one will ever know,” Samuel promised through lips pressed against her cheek, her jaw, her chin. “We’ll be safe.”
But even as Hannah came alive beneath his questing mouth and hands, she wondered for how long.
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The following morning Hannah just finished breakfast when Reiver appeared in the kitchen, an irritated scowl on his face. “Back so soon?” she asked, for Reiver had just left for the mill a half hour ago.
“Mary Green is sick today,” he said, “and I need someone to show my newest employee how to prepare the silk for boiling.”
“I’d be happy to help.” Hannah dried her hands, took off her apron, and followed Reiver back to the mill.
When they entered the skein room, Hannah was shocked to see a fearful, nervous little girl of about nine or ten sitting at the table, chewing the end of one braid and staring longingly out the window.
She whirled on her husband, blue eyes flashing fire. “You’ve hired a child to work here?”
“This is Sally Bierce,” he said, ignoring her simmering rage. “Sally, Mrs.
Shaw will show you what to do.”
Hannah forced herself to smile and place a reassuring hand on the child’s shoulder. “Hello, Sally, how are you?”
Sally smiled shyly. “I’m fine, Mrs. Shaw.”
Hannah looked at Reiver. “May I speak to you for a moment?”
He nodded curtly and indicated his office.
The moment they were alone, Hannah said, “How despicable! That little girl should be in school, not working in a mill for twelve hours a day.”
A muscle twitched in Reiver’s broad jaw. “She’ll be working for only nine hours a day, and not on Saturdays.”
“For God’s sake, Reiver, she’s just a child! She should be outside playing with her friends.”
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He lowered his head defiantly. “Her father is sick and can’t work. Her mother came to me and begged me to take the child on. At least the twenty-five cents a day I’m paying her will keep her family from starving.”
Hannah just shook her head helplessly. “There must be some other way.”
“There is no other way. And don’t look at me as if I’m some kind of slave master. I’m not letting her do any of the hard work.” Reiver placed his hands on his hips. “What does she need school for, anyway? She’ll just marry and have children.”
Hannah bit back the retort that was on the tip of her tongue. “You won’t reconsider?”
“My hiring Sally is a humanitarian act. If she didn’t work here, she’d work somewhere else for someone not as considerate.”
Realizing that it was pointless to argue, Hannah whirled on her heel and returned to the skein room, where she showed Sally how to divide the silk into skeins and place them in the muslin bags for boiling.
But as the morning wore on and the child’s head dropped with weariness and boredom, Hannah vowed that if she were running Shaw Silks, she would never hire children.
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Chapter Nine
The hot, crowded ballroom bustled with people who had drifted upstairs from the parlor in search of music and movement. The sprightly scraping of a fiddle rose above the low rumble of conversation as several couples skipped and hopped around the room in an energetic polka, skirts swirling, faces flushed, and feet stomping.