Whispers of Heaven (17 page)

It seemed such a familiar, intimate thing to do, to sit so close to a man, her legs spread wide by the horse, her body touching his so intimately, her hands riding low on his hips. She could feel the heat of him through the coarse cloth of his shirt, feel the supple leanness and hard strength of his man's body, moving gracefully with the rhythm of the horse. She was intensely, achingly aware of him, not as a simple groom but as a man. A man who had risked his life to save her own, then risked it again, to save a friend. A man whose half-naked body fascinated her and intrigued her and left her wondering what he would look like without any clothes on at all.

A man whose very nearness made her heart race with an exhilarating, treacherous rush of forbidden excitement and unbidden, impossible desire.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

That night, the wind blew warm and wild and fierce, and Jessie put her cloak on over her nightdress and went out into the storm-wracked darkness.

She stepped out of the shelter of the veranda, and the wind slammed into her, stealing her breath and snatching so viciously at the billowing folds of her wrap that her knuckles ached from the strain of trying to clutch the cloth to her. The air was full of dust and the roar of wind crashing through the trees in the park and the smell of coming rain, although the moon still shone fitfully through breaks in the jumbling, turbulent clouds. Dried leaves scuttled ahead of her down the brick garden path and she quickened her step, not knowing where she was going, feeling only the need to throw open her soul to the wildness of the wind and the restless dangers of the night.

She cut across the grass, the earth cool and damp beneath her bare feet. When she reached the rippling, moon-glimmered expanse of the pond, she stopped, one arm looping around a low branch of the old apple tree she had climbed so often as a child. At some point in the week or two since shed come home, the apple blossoms had all shriveled up and blown away. She hadn't even noticed their passing, but she felt now a great aching sadness at their loss.

She looked back at the house, rising so big and strong out of the darkness. She knew and loved each arched recess, each soaring chimney. Yet it all looked, somehow, different from the way she remembered. Or perhaps it wasn't different, she thought, sucking the storm-charged air deep into her lungs. Perhaps she was the one who had changed, or at least her situation had changed. Because in a subtle but very real sense, the house was no longer hers, or at least it soon wouldn't be, not in the way it had been through all her growing-up years. If she married Harrison, she would come here only for brief visits, as a guest, and then she would go away again.

And then she wondered at herself for the thought, because of course she would marry Harrison. She had always known she would marry Harrison. He had been her closest friend since childhood, and he would make an ideal husband for her future. Everyone said so. He was gentle, handsome, well- bred, and wealthy. Their lives together would be a familiar and therefore comfortable round of all that she had ever known. And if a dangerous, unwanted voice dared to whisper that such a future might not be what she really wanted, that didn't mean she had to listen. She didn't need to let herself—
shouldn't
let herself—remember the way a certain pair of Irish green eyes could light up with laughter, or the forbidden, unexpected way her heart beat fast and her breath caught whenever those eyes met hers.

She stiffened suddenly as a long, lean shadow moved from beneath the stone arcade of the veranda and passed out into the moonlight; a familiar shadow that wound its way purposefully through the parklands toward her, not stopping until he was close enough that the moon cast his silhouette across the wind-tossed water.

He was still dressed as if for riding, in knee-high boots and doeskin breeches, for they'd been out until long past dark, the men, visiting the glade where she'd been attacked and arranging to have an Aboriginal tracker brought in to study the site in the morning. He'd come in too late for dinner, so that he'd simply ordered a tray and retreated to the library with a bottle of brandy. She hadn't seen him since.

"Care to tell me why you've suddenly developed this disturbing predilection for wandering off by yourself?" Warrick said, gazing across the shifting surface of the pond.

The wind blew her loose hair into her face, and she brought up one hand to catch it. "How did you know I was out here?"

He dropped his chin to his chest, but not before she caught the slow smile that curled his lips. "I saw you. From the veranda."

"Perhaps it's that kind of night," she said, trying to keep her voice light. "It calls to the restlessness within us."

He swung his head to look at her over his shoulder, his gaze hard. "Are you restless, Jess?"

She tightened her arm around the branch, feeling the bark rough and cold through the thin cloth of her nightgown. "This afternoon was... unsettling."

"Near rape generally is."

"Please." She put out her hand as if to hold him off. "Don't you scold me, too. I've already had enough of that from Mother."

He let out a short huff of laughter. "Hell, I'm not enough of a sanctimonious ass to tell you off for anything you've done. You know that. Just like I know you're not here, now, because of what happened with those bushrangers. My guess is that whatever drove you out here tonight is the same thing that made you ride off alone toward the mountains this afternoon." His expression became serious, his gaze probing. "What is it, Jess? What's wrong?"

She let go of the tree and went to stand beside him, her arms crossed at her chest, her hands anchoring her cape closer to her body. She found she couldn't look at him and ask what she wanted to ask, so she stared instead at the choppy waters of the pond. "Do you know what you want out of life, Warrick?"

She looked at him then, and saw the bitter twisting of his lips that might have been a smile. "Hell." He let out his breath in a sound that was supposed to be a laugh, but wasn't. "I'm lucky if I know at any given moment whether I want a shot of brandy or a pint of bitters, let alone what I want out of lifer

"You did know, once."

He swung away from her to stare off into the darkened, wind-thrashed parkland, his shoulders in the flawlessly tailored riding jacket held painfully taut, his head thrown back, the fingers of one hand tapping restlessly against his thigh. "Did I? Oh, I thought I did, all right. I was going to sail every sea known to man, and then a few more no one had even discovered yet. I was going to be an officer by the time I was sixteen, and captain of my own ship before I was twenty-five." He paused, holding himself very still. "All boys have dreams. Not many of us get to live them."

"Some do."

He spun to face her, his eyes a little wild, his breath coming so hard and fast she could see it lifting the fine cloth of his shirt. "Do they? Cecil dreamed of growing up to make this estate bigger and more prosperous than our father ever imagined."

"Cecil died," she said quietly.

"That's right. Cecil died. And my dreams of going to sea died along with him. With him, and with Reid."

The wind blew between them, colder than before and heavy with the promise of the coming rain. "What do you think Reid dreamed of?" she asked, her throat suddenly tight.

"I don't know. He never said." Warrick took a step that brought him beside her again, his eyes narrowing. "Is that why you went to the clearing this afternoon? Because of Reid?"

"I'm not sure."

The wind blew her hair over her face, and he brought up his hands to gently rake back the tangled strands. "I thought you always knew what you wanted, Jess. Marriage. Children. This valley. And don't try to tell me you've suddenly developed a hankering to run off and study the geology of Outer Mongolia, because I won't believe you. You love this island."

"I do. It's not that. It's..." She wrapped her fingers around his wrist, gripping him tightly, straining to put her thoughts into words. "All my life, it's as if I've had this. .. this struggle going on inside of me. Between the Jessie who wanted to learn about things like botany and astronomy, and to gallop her horse faster than was considered quite proper for a gentlewoman, and the Jesmond who wanted to make Mother and Father happy by being the kind of daughter they could be proud of."

"You mean, by turning yourself into Catherine and Jane."

"No. Yes. I don't know. That's the problem. I don't know who I am anymore. Who I even want to be."

"Don't you?"

She found she couldn't answer him, could no longer even bear the intensity of his gaze, and bowed her head. It had begun to rain. She could hear the splattering of big drops, hitting the leaves of the trees and pocketing the surface of the pond. She felt the wetness on her cheeks, and didn't even realize she was crying until Warrick's arms came around her, pulling her tight against him, so that she felt the rumble in his chest when he said, "I'm sorry, Jess. Oh, God, I'm sorry."

Early the next morning, Warrick and Harrison assembled in the yard with the dogs and an Aboriginal tracker and the constable and his men from Blackhaven Bay. From the upper veranda, Jessie watched them milling about, the dogs barking in the crisp morning air, the men arguing, the horses tossing their heads and feeling their bits. She watched them ride off toward the cloud-covered mountains; then she went inside.

She spent the morning in genteel pursuits, embroidering a spray of rosebuds on the yoke of one of her nightgowns, and then reading
The Pickwick Papers
to her mother, who was suffering from nervous prostration brought on by the previous day's incident. In the afternoon, Jessie walked over to spend some time with Philippa Tate at Beaulieu Hall. She cut through the park, the way she had done so often as a child, enjoying the freshness of the rain-cleansed air and the sting of the cool wind against her cheeks.

She did not go near the stables.

The men came back late that evening, hot and tired and frustrated with their lack of success, for the night's rain had washed away the escaped convict's scent and much of his sign. Jessie stood in the hall, listening to their grumbling, and felt her heart lighten with a relief that both surprised and disturbed her.

But of course they went out again, the very next day. The morning dawned sunny and dry, and the constable was confident that the dogs would run across the "bolter's" scent before noon.

This time, she didn't watch them ride out, but went instead to the top floor of the house. There were eight bedrooms in the house that Anselm Corbett had built, for his family had once been large. She walked first to Catherine's room, then to Jane's. Neither room had changed much; the heavy mahogany four-poster beds and dressers, the washstands and hip baths, were all still there. Only the personal touches, the straw hats and seashells, the posy holders and silver-handled hair brushes, were gone, swept ruthlessly away by Beatrice Corbett, who could talk endlessly about the virtues of her dead children but could not bear, it seemed, to look upon anything that had once been theirs.

Standing in the middle of Jane's shadowed room, Jessie turned a small circle and tried to remember what the room had looked like when her sister was alive, only she couldn't.

They'd all caught the scarlet fever that summer—Catherine and Jane and Jessie. Catherine had been twenty-one and preparing to wed a wealthy merchant from Launceston, while Jane had been seventeen. Jessie remembered them both as quiet, composed young women, gracious and demure and properly subdued. But lately she'd begun to wonder if she really remembered them as they were, or if she remembered Catherine and Jane only as her mother liked to remember them, as her mother's words had painted them over the years. Once, when Jessie had done something particularly disgraceful, her mother had flown into a cold rage and said she wished Jessie had died that summer instead of her sisters. Beatrice never said such a thing again, of course, for rages were bad form and Beatrice seldom succumbed to them. But

Jessie had never forgotten her mother's words. And she never would.

Her chest tight with suppressed emotion, Jessie walked to the window and folded back the long cedar shutters, letting in the light. But even the sun couldn't warm the room; it remained cold and empty and dead.

For a long time, Jessie stood with her hands on the shutters, her forehead pressed against the glass of the French doors. Then she quietly closed the shutters and went back to her own room. Quickly, before she could change her mind, she put on her riding dress and went down to the stables.

"Anxious for a run, are you, boy?" Lucas stroked the young gray's cheek and laughed softly when the gelding shoved its nose against his chest and snorted as if in agreement.

Something made him look up then, toward the young woman who worked beside him saddling her mare in the warm, diffuse light of the stables. She wore a different riding dress today, this one made of a dark cloth of hunter green with a frothy jabot of lace at her throat and a nipped-in waist that emphasized the sensual flare of her hips. He supposed the other one must have been ruined by the rough handling the bushrangers gave her up in that glen, and he tried not to remember what she'd looked like, with her hair coming down and her dress torn, and her mouth soft and trembling with fear.

She didn't look soft or trembly today. There was a kind of coiled defiance about her, an almost determined recklessness that worried him. But then, she tended to worry him a lot, because he didn't quite understand her, couldn't predict her. She didn't always behave the way he expected her to, didn't say the things he would have expected a woman such as her to say. For she was not, he was beginning to realize, the woman he'd thought her to be. And that worried him more than anything else.

He'd learned that she wasn't simply capable of saddling her own horse, she actually preferred it. Whereas most women of her kind exaggerated their weakness and incompetence as a way of underscoring their femininity and gentility, she seemed to like the idea of being strong and capable. Strong and capable and smart. It was one of the things he liked about her, one of the things he admired about her. And he did admire her, even though he didn't want to. He'd thought her haughty and spoiled at first, and he knew that in some ways, she was. But there was so much more to her than that, so much more he'd have liked to come to know and understand—if he weren't a convict, and she weren't... who she was.