“’Fraid so, lass. It seems to have become a habit.”
She put her hands on his chest. “What if I promise to do nothing to . . . to stir your blood?” She took a step closer to him. “What if I swear that I’ll behave myself every moment of the trip?”
Alex put h
is hands on her shoulders and pushed her away. “One kiss and you turn into Eve. Get over there and do not touch me.”
Cay moved away from him, but she couldn’t conceal her smile. Alex was making her feel like a female. After what seemed like weeks of being thought of as a boy, with those awful girls pushing themselves on her, it felt, well, powerful to be considered a woman. It was lovely to feel desired, to be wanted.
She turned back to face him. “Please let me go with you, Alex. I’m sorry for your . . . your male desire, but I promise that I’ll do what I can to stop it. I’ll be nasty and hateful to you at all times, and I’ll kick you if you get within three feet of me. I don’t mean to bring up anything bad, but I saved your life. When you needed help, I gave it to you. That night, when neither Uncle T.C. nor Hope could go, it was me or no one else. I was very frightened, but I did it anyway. And except for the time when I tried to cut your throat, I think that, all in all, I’ve been rather nice to you.”
“What you’re saying is that I owe you.” Alex’s face was serious.
“Actually, yes.”
“Tell me, do you really want to go or are you that afraid of your brother?”
“Tally? I’m not afraid of him at all, but he will ridicule me, and make me feel truly awful.” She threw up her hands in frustration and turned away for a moment. “Don’t you see what this means to me? If I were to go home now, my father would never let me out again. He’d be so afraid that something awful would happen to me that he’ll lock me in my room and throw the key down the well. My maid would have to send food up a rope through the window.”
“Not to mention the chamber pot.”
“Ladies don’t talk of such things, and you can laugh all you want, but if I have to wait here for Tally to come fetch me, and for Adam and Nate to solve the murder mystery, my father will see me as someone who has to be guarded at all times. He’ll think that to protect me he’ll have to keep me under permanent house arrest.” She sighed in frustration. “In the end, he’ll probably marry me off to some Scottish cousin who can slay three dragons before breakfast.”
“To marry a Scotsman would be a fate worse than death?”
“You can laugh at me all you want, but I’m serious. If I can take your rampant lust for me seriously, I think you should take my problems just as seriously.”
“Rampant—” Alex stood up straighter. “All right, lass, tell me how going into the jungle will help you.”
“Maybe if I accomplish something, it will make my family overlook the fact that I ran across several states when men with guns were chasing me.”
“And drawing pictures will help you?”
“If they’re for a cause. I’d like my father to be proud of me. I’d like my future husband to have something to tell our children about.”
“The way you tell people about the fruit company your mother ran?”
“Yes, exactly. Several of the women who worked for her now live in Edilean, and they married men my father knew.”
Alex turned away from her. He did owe her, he thought. He might joke about it, but if it weren’t for her bravery, he wouldn’t be alive now. The real truth of it was that he very much wanted her to go with them. In spite of what they’d heard from her brother Adam—who Cay seemed to think was a saint put on this earth to boss mere mortals around—Alex had never felt safe about leaving her alone. He’d thought about all the bad things that could happen to her. Not everyone could have heard that her name had been cleared. What if someone realized that she wasn’t a boy but a red-haired girl? He’d want to know why she was in disguise, and it wouldn’t take much to think of the scandalous news that had come down the coast from Charleston. Alex didn’t like to think what would happen to Cay if she were confronted by someone who hadn’t heard the latest news.
Also, there was the personal side of it. He enjoyed her company. She made him laugh, made him feel good. On the day he married Lilith, he’d sat there with a glass of champagne, watching his beautiful wife moving among their guests and quietly talking to everyone, and he’d thought that he was the luckiest man in the world. Based on the number of guests and their good wishes to him, he thought he’d made a lot of friends since he’d been in America. He smiled as they laughed and drank to his health and future happiness. They’d slapped him on the back and talked about horses, and about investments they’d like to share with him. On that day, Alex had felt part of a world of rich, happy people. He was no longer the man just off the boat with three horses, his clothes dirty and ragged. He’d been Someone, a young man on his way up.
But the next day, Lilith’s body had been found next to Alex’s, and after that, everything had changed. The rage of the town had rushed the trial through. And while Alex was in that filthy jail, not one of his so-called friends had visited him. Only T.C. had shown up. Right away, Alex had asked for pen, ink, and paper, and T.C. had brought it. Alex had been obsessed with telling the people he’d thought of as his friends that he was innocent, that he would never have killed Lilith. He’d loved her so very much. He’d poured out his heart in the letters and T.C. had personally delivered each of them.
Not one person had answered his letter. In fact, Alex had made T.C. tell him the truth, that all the letters had been returned, unopened. No one wanted anything to do with Alexander McDowell after he’d been arrested. It seemed that no one had even considered the idea that Alex might be innocent.
After three weeks of frantically writing to people he’d met since arriving in America, he wrote to Nate. Maybe it was because they’d been friends since childhood and they’d tried hard to impress each other, but he didn’t want to admit to his friend that he’d failed—for that’s how Alex viewed it. He’d arrived in America sure that he could do anything, achieve everything. He’d had a lifetime with his father telling him of the opportunities in the new country. After all, it was where his father had made all his money. Many years before, Mac had been awarded a thousand acres of land through the Ohio Company, but Nate’s father, Angus, had persuaded Mac to sell the land to a Captain Austin, who was trying to accumulate an estate for the woman he loved. In the end, it proved to be the best thing Mac ever did, because the king of England never signed the papers. None of the thousand-acre plots were given to the people who held certificates of ownership for them. Captain Austin had lost everything.
For Alex, the new country had seemed to be a land of riches—until the morning after his wedding, when everything was taken from him, including, it seemed, the friendship of everyone he’d met. It was only after his new “friends” had shown their true nature that Alex swallowed his pride and wrote to Nate. The letter had taken weeks to write. T.C. was allowed to stay for only minutes at a time, and some days he wasn’t allowed to visit at all. He sneaked in pen and ink inside his boot, and lined his coat with paper. Alex would write as much as he could, as fast as possible. He told Nate everything that had happened, in as much detail as possible, hoping that there was a clue somewhere in the story. He knew that Nate’s mind would be full of questions. Was there a mysterious person who had asked Lilith questions? Not that Alex had seen. But then, he’d been so in love he noticed little but her. But there must have been someone, because a person had hated her enough to kill her—not Alex but her.
“Are you here?” Cay asked.
It took Alex a moment to come back to the present. His mind had been so into the past that he could smell the jail cell that had been his home for so many weeks. More than anything, Alex wanted to pull Cay into his arms and feel her healthy young body against his, to put his face in her hair.
When she seemed to know what he was feeling, to even understand, he made himself step away from her.
“You have your ‘wife look’ on.”