At first, Eli showed his shock at those words, then he laughed loud and hard. “I can guarantee that I won’t do that. You can bet money on it that I’d never fall asleep while I’m in the bed with a strong, young woman like Miss Hope.”
For the first time that morning, Cay looked at Alex and gave a malicious little smile to remind him that he had fallen asleep on his wedding night.
Alex’s eyes widened at what she’d done, how she’d set up Eli just so she could end the conversation with a jab at Alex. That she’d use the night his wife was murdered was beyond what he thought her capable of.
When Alex saw Eli and Grady looking at him with an expression of both amusement and sympathy, he was positive that they knew everything.
Since they had enough food for a couple of days, Alex was allowed to stay on the flatboat that day, but he couldn’t get Cay away from the others to talk to her. His lack of sleep hadn’t put him in the best of moods, so when he did catch her sitting at the end of the boat with a sketchpad on her lap, he could hardly speak.
“You’re endangering my life,” he said
through clenched teeth.
“By trying to find Hope a husband?”
“Only girls matchmake.”
“My brother Ethan has introduced three couples to each other and they got married. You have odd ideas of what male and female can and cannot do.” She hadn’t so much as glanced at him.
“What did he do? Find husbands for the girls who had latched on to him? Was that his way of getting rid of them?”
“Yes.”
Alex had thought he was being sarcastic, but the fact that he was right startled him. “Cay . . .” He reached out to touch her arm, but she moved it away.
“If you don’t want anyone to know I’m female, then I suggest you stop touching me. And you definitely should stop kissing Tim’s neck.”
“I miss you,” he said, and there was genuine agony in his voice.
“And I miss the man I thought I knew! The liar with the pretty face is someone I’ve never met.”
“Cay!”
She turned to look at Mr. Grady, who was pointing at a bird with a long bill walking along the shore. “Yes, sir?”
“Did you paint him?”
“Yes, sir. I have four drawings of that bird.”
“Do you know its name?”
“No, sir, I don’t. I plan to give all the artwork to Uncle T.C. and let him figure out the names of everything. His goddaughter Hope has a fine hand for penmanship, so she can write the names on the drawings.”
“It seems that you’ve thought of everything,” Mr. Grady said with a smile before he turned away.
“He’s going to ask you to marry him,” Alex said from beside her.
“You’re ridiculous! He thinks I’m a boy.” When Alex said nothing, she glanced at him. “All right, so maybe they’ve guessed, but Eli and Jamie are too gentlemanly to say anything. Tim still thinks I’m a boy.”
Alex sat down on the end of the boat beside her. “That boy whistles all night.”
“That’s what Eli said.” Cay hadn’t let up in her drawing. She was quickly doing a watercolor of the curve in the river ahead of them, trying to capture it before the boat rounded the corner and the scene was gone.
“A person could squeeze that boy’s ribs in time to music and make an instrument of him. You could dance to his whistles.” He looked at Cay to see if there was any sign that she’d laughed at his joke, but he saw nothing. It wasn’t fair, he thought, that she could make him smile no matter how bad the situation was, but he didn’t seem to have the same effect on her.
“Lass,” he said softly, and his accent became very heavy, “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. I didn’t shave while I was in jail because I couldn’t. And I’m not the kind of man to brag that I’m not so bad to look at. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t have sounded vain, and I didn’t want you to think that of me.”
“No,” she said calmly. “You wanted to see if I’d like you even when I thought you were an older man, and so ugly you had to hide your face.”