The Vow (41 page)
She smelled faint traces of alcohol on Reiver, but Benjamin reeked of a woman’s cloying perfume;
Hannah stared at her son, rage and reproach in her eyes. He looked away.
She turned her attention to Reiver. “You’ve taken my son to a whorehouse!”
Her sixteen-year-old son had lain with a whore.
Hannah’s hand trembled so violently that she had to set down the lamp on a nearby table. “Benjamin, go to your room. I have to speak with your father in private.”
Emboldened by his rite of passage, Benjamin said, “I’m going to stay. This concerns me as well.”
“Do as I say!”
He lowered his head in a defiant gesture reminiscent of his father. “I am not a child. You can’t order me to my room as if I were five years old.”
“Do as your mother says,” Reiver said calmly.
“But, Father—”
“Leave us. It’s late and it would be better for all concerned if you went to your room.”
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Hannah suddenly felt helpless. They were allied against her, two reasonable men against a hysterical female who didn’t understand their masculine natures.
Benjamin glared at Hannah as if she had stripped him of his newly won manhood but obeyed his father and went upstairs. Hannah took the lamp and headed for the study. She would have Reiver’s head for this, so help her God.
Inside the study, Hannah set down the lamp so hard, the flame jumped and flickered. She whirled around to face Reiver when she heard the door shut. “You depraved bastard, taking a boy to a whorehouse!”
Reiver raised his hands. “Calm down.”
Hannah backed against the desk, her fingers gripping the edge as if it were Reiver’s throat. “Calm down? I could kill you.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.” He eyed her warily. “Benjamin is not a boy.
He’s sixteen years old, the same age I was when I had my first…experience with a woman.”
“Why was it even necessary?”
“It’s part of becoming a man.”
“Part of becoming a whoremaster, you mean.”
Reiver turned red with anger. “I don’t expect you to understand, but this is a part of any young man’s education. He should be as skilled in the bedchamber as he is in business.”
“You’ve mined him.”
“On the contrary. I’ve made a man of him. I know you’re determined to protect him, to keep him an innocent boy forever, Hannah, but whether you will admit it or not, he is a young man, and it’s time you started treating him as such.”
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She stepped away from the desk and clenched her hands into fists. “I do not regard him as a child, but neither do I think he’s ready to go fornicating his way through the bedchambers of Connecticut!”
“You have so little faith in him.”
Shaking, Hannah headed for the door. “When some poor girl appears on a doorstep with Benjamin’s illegitimate child, don’t expect me to raise this one.”
Reiver caught her arm as she passed. “Right or wrong, it’s done, Hannah.
Accept it. Otherwise you will drive your son away.”
Hannah jerked herself free. “I won’t forget this.” She stormed out of the study, slamming the door behind her.
Hannah’s wrath lingered as if it were a palpable presence, causing Reiver to sigh and shake his head. Women…they just didn’t understand men and their needs. He poured himself a glass of apple brandy and stretched out in his favorite chair.
If Hannah hadn’t been waiting up for them, she never would have known what he and Benjamin did tonight. He supposed Davey tattled on them. There were times when he honestly disliked his younger son, with his exasperating demands for absolute fairness and equal attention. As Reiver had discovered long ago, no parent ever loved all his children equally, and he couldn’t help loving Benjamin best. Davey was too much Hannah’s son.
He smiled. Benjamin, on the other hand, was exactly like his father. Tonight, when Reiver had introduced him to the Countess and her beautiful women, Benjamin had approached them with the reverence and curiosity of an acolyte eager to be initiated into a secret and mysterious ceremony.
Later, after Reiver had attended to his own pleasure, a smiling Countess informed him that his son had been an apt pupil. Just like his father.
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Reiver finished his brandy, rose, and extinguished the lamp. He wished he could say something to appease Hannah, but she was too angry and upset to listen to reason.
Perhaps she would listen tomorrow.
Hannah slept fitfully that night and awoke before dawn. A heavy gray fog pressed against her bedchamber window, mirroring the despair she felt smothering her.
She dressed quickly. No one else stirred at this hour, not even the maid firing up the kitchen stove. She wondered how Reiver and Benjamin could sleep so soundly after their night of debauchery.
Hannah pulled on her shawl and went outside. She ignored the wet grass dampening her slippers and trailing hem as she hurried down Mulberry Hill.
The homestead suddenly loomed out of the blurry mists like a ghost on some godforsaken English moor. A light shining in an upstairs window distracted her, but only momentarily. Hannah kept on walking and didn’t slow down until she came to the path that ran through the woods.
She hadn’t gone twenty feet when she heard footsteps behind her.
“Hannah, wait!”
She turned to find Samuel coming down the path. His tousled hair and absence of a jacket told her that he had left the homestead in pursuit of her.
His eyes, as ghostly as the fog, regarded her with concern. “What are you doing out here at this hour?”
Hannah burst into tears.
Samuel moved toward her, his arms extended. Then he remembered Reiver and stopped short, his arms falling helplessly to his sides. “Why are you crying?”
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Hannah took several deep, shuddering breaths to compose herself. “Reiver took Benjamin to a whorehouse last night.”
Hannah told him how they had gone off to Hartford after James’s wedding and their condition when they came sneaking in at one o’clock in the morning.
“It was disgusting.” She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. “There was my baby reeking of some whore’s perfume and Reiver looking as if he had done something to be proud about. Samuel, if I had had a gun, I swear I would have shot him.”
Samuel placed an awkward hand on her arm. “I don’t think Reiver intended for you to find out.”
“How could I not find out!” she wailed. “The Benjamin who walked through that front door had changed so much, I’d have to be blind not to realize that something catastrophic had happened.” She leaned back against a nearby tree, letting the rough, damp bark bite into her spine. “It was just too soon for him to lose his innocence. Too soon!”
Samuel broke off a twig from a nearby tree and twirled it. “When I turned sixteen, Reiver did the same with me, and later, James as well. You could say that it’s a tradition with the Shaw men.”
“Don’t you dare defend him, Samuel Shaw!”
“Benjamin isn’t a little boy anymore, he’s a young man, and there’s nothing a young man hates more than being treated like a child by his parents.”
“He’s grown away from me. I could see it in his eyes last night, this smug, superior air that dismissed me as nothing more than a mettlesome woman to be humored and ignored.”
“Hannah,” he said gently, “do you remember your reaction when you first saw the portrait I did of you?”
She fell silent, thinking back. “Yes.”
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“Well, you’re seeing in Benjamin what I saw in you, the same sensual awakening.” He shrugged helplessly. “It’s not disgusting. It’s part of becoming a man or a woman.”
She rested her head against the tree trunk and listened to the calming sound of water dripping off nearby branches. She looked at Samuel standing in the middle of the path. In an unguarded moment desire warred with restraint on his perfect features.
Hannah stepped away from the tree toward him. “God, how I’ve missed you!”
He stepped back a pace. “Hannah, don’t.”
Distraught and emotional from the events of the previous night, she reached for him. “I need you.”
He caught one of her wrists, but his strength was no match for Hannah’s determination. She slid her free arm around his waist and drew him toward her with a contented sigh.
He stood stiff and unresponsive. “Hannah, you’re not being fair to me. This is wrong.”
“Hold me, Samuel. Just hold me. There can’t be anything wrong with that.”
She rested her head on his chest, listening to his strong, steady heartbeat. “I don’t care if it’s right or wrong. When I lost your child, I thought I’d—” She stopped, appalled.
The fog thickened around them until the woods disappeared. All Hannah saw was Samuel’s bloodless, anguished face staring down at her. His lips moved, but he spoke not a sound.
“Forgive me,” she said, stepping away. “I vowed never to tell you.”
“A child?” His voice trembled. “You were going to have my child?”
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“It could have been Reiver’s, but I wanted it to be yours.” She pulled her shawl more tightly about her. “It happened not long after Reiver banished you.”
Her eyes filled with tears at the memory. “The very day I learned I was with child, I lost it.” A child’s existence reduced to blood on the snow. “So cruel, so unfair… I didn’t even have time to love it. Then when I learned that I couldn’t have any more…” She raised her head. “So you see, you’re not the only one who is crippled.”
Samuel cradled her cheek in his hand, and she shivered at his touch.
“Hannah, I’m so, so sorry,” he whispered. “Dear God, why didn’t you write and tell me? I would have come back.”
“What good would it have done?”
“You wouldn’t have had to face such pain alone.”
She tasted tears on her lips. “I’ve grown used to it.”
That undid him. He stepped toward her, his right arm sliding around her waist and holding her as tightly as if he still had a hand. His pale eyes searched her face as Hannah entwined her arms around his neck and her fingers in his soft, silky hair.
“So beautiful,” he murmured, just before devouring her mouth with his own.
Hannah’s kiss flooded his parched soul like a sweet spring rain, and her eager body pressed along the length of his kindled the dormant fire within him.
He had been too long without her. He wanted to sheathe himself in her and love her, love her, love her.
Hannah took his face in her hands and showered his cheeks, his eyelids, his forehead with kisses, branding him as her own. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. I thought I’d die when Reiver sent you away.”
He silenced her by kissing her again, but her insistent fingers kept running over his chest, sliding down his ribs, seeking his belt buckle.
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Reiver’s face flashing in Samuel’s mind’s eye forced him to fling himself away from Hannah just in time.
“We can’t.” Panting, he put his hand against a nearby tree to support the weight that his shaking knees could not.
She stared at him out of soulful eyes, hugging herself. “I—I thought you wanted me.”
“I do, but I can’t betray my brother, not while I’m living here on his charity.”
Hannah’s eyes burned with anger. “Your staying here does not depend on Reiver’s benevolence. I want you here, and as far as I’m concerned, you may stay here for as long as you like. So you needn’t fear that Reiver will cast you out if you displease him.”
“I’m grateful.”
“I don’t want gratitude or humility. I want to see you proud and whole again.”
He looked down at his missing hand. “That might present something of a problem.”
“I meant whole of spirit.” When he said nothing, she stepped away from him and looked around. “It’s nearly dawn and the fog is lifting. I suppose I had better get back.”
Samuel fell in step beside her. “What are you going to do about Ben?”
Hannah sighed. “Apologize for treating him like a child.”
When she returned to the main house, she found Benjamin eating breakfast alone at the kitchen table. Hannah poured herself a cup of coffee and joined him.
He regarded her sullenly while she explained why she had been so upset with him last night, but when she admitted that she had been wrong to treat him 362
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as a child, his surliness vanished and he became the son she remembered, even rising to kiss her on the cheek.
Before he left for the mill, he kissed Hannah on the cheek once more, and she knew that her son had truly become a man.
Hannah stood in the same parlor that she had dusted, swept, and polished for Aunt Naomi and smiled in satisfaction. “I hardly recognize the place, Georgia.”
With the addition of wallpaper in tiny red roses, framed lithographs of seasonal New England scenes, and multicolored braided rugs scattered on the floor, the Bickford house now revealed a welcoming warmth that had been sorely lacking when Hannah lived there.
Georgia set down her tray. “This place was such a pigsty! Black fingermarks on all the walls, grease building up inside the stove, dirt ground into the floorboards…my Ma would’ve died of shame to keep her house that way.”
Hannah took the cup of tea Georgia proffered in a practiced, ladylike manner. “Knowing Nate as I do, I’m not surprised his wife was just as slovenly.”
Georgia looked around, beaming with pride. “Well, Georgia Shaw is the mistress here now, and she’s going to see that it stays a real home for my husband and babies.”
Hannah said, “And where is your husband? I checked the mill, but he wasn’t there, and I have to ask him if he’ll help me with a special project.”
Georgia blushed prettily. “Ever since we got married, James hasn’t been going in as early as he used to.”