“Yep,” David confirmed. “Unless she changes her mind.”
“Is there a chance of that?”
“Of course. There’s always a chance.”
“She won’t change her mind,” Reese said confidently. “She needs the money too badly.” But he decided to sweeten the deal.
For the next half-hour, Reese asked David very specific questions about the house in Richmond. And each member of the household.
Chapter Seven
“Do you want to talk about it?” Tempy asked suddenly.
“Talk? About what?” Faith turned to face her aunt. They were sitting at the kitchen table, relaxing after clearing away the remains of the Christmas feast.
It was quiet. Hannah and Virt were napping, and Agnes was busy knitting a scarf in the corner of the parlor. Joy was pretending to serve tea from a miniature tea set to the dolls seated in tiny chairs at a tiny table in another corner of the parlor.
Faith observed the procedure from a distance, carefully noting the differences in the two dolls seated at the table. On Joy’s right, sat a baby doll with real blond hair and an exquisitely painted bisque face. Her arms and legs were made of the same bisque. She was dressed in a beautiful nightie made of white eyelet lace. On the left, sat Faith’s offering, a small cloth doll with brown embroidery floss for hair and a carefully embroidered face. She was dressed in a blue gown made from scraps of uniforms and a white pinafore made from one of Aunt Tempy’s petticoats.
Faith had spent many hours lovingly crafting the doll long after Joy had been put to bed. She was the best Faith had had to offer and she would probably still be under the Christmas tree if Aunt Virt hadn’t pointed her out. In her excitement over all her wonderful brightly wrapped packages, Joy had completely overlooked the plain, brown-wrapped packages at the back of the tree.
Faith wished now, that she had put them away. They couldn’t compete with all the wonderful things Augustus Jenkins had delivered.
Tempy studied Faith’s face as she watched Joy at play. “She’s a little girl, Faith. It’s her first real Christmas and she’s thrilled with all her new toys. Just as you were thrilled with your first doll.”
“I know, Aunt Tempy, it’s just that I wanted to give it to her. I wanted to be the one to provide all these gifts.”
“Didn’t you?” Tempy’s gray eyes were demanding an answer.
“He did,” Faith said resentfully. “I had nothing to do with it.”
“Really? I’d say you had a lot to do with it. I presume these gifts are from David Alexander. He seemed quite taken with you.”
“No,” Faith told her. “They’re from Reese Jordan. David Alexander might have suggested them, but they all came from Reese.”
“Reese?” Temperance probed a little deeper. “You didn’t tell me you were on a first name basis with your future employer.”
Faith saw the concern in Tempy’s face. “There was a lot I didn’t tell you, Aunt Tempy. I didn’t know how.”
“I’m listening now, if you want to talk about it.”
“Reese Jordan wants me to have his child.” Faith dropped the news quietly and carefully, as if to muffle an explosion.
Tempy’s mouth formed a perfect O, and her command of the English language momentarily failed her. When she finally recovered her power of speech, her voice was an astonished whisper. “He what?”
“He wants me to have his child. The Richmond advertisement contained a mistake. He isn’t hiring someone to provide for his heir. He’s hiring someone to provide the child. In his words, to conceive it, carry it, deliver it, and hand it over to him—forever. And he’s willing to pay me very well for the service.” Faith stood up and began to pace around the kitchen, stopping every now and then to straighten the cups in the cupboard, or to restack a dish. “When I arrived at the Madison Hotel, his suite was full of women applying for the job. I stood in line half the day before I saw Reese Jordan, from a distance, but I never got the chance to speak to him. And I never would’ve had a chance at all if fate hadn’t intervened.”
“What happened?”
Faith took a deep breath and began to relate the chain of events that had led to her first meeting with Reese Jordan. She held nothing back except the uncontrollable mix of emotions she had experienced when Reese Jordan kissed her. The memory of his kiss and the feel of his hands intimately tying the strings of her corset still had the power to make her blush.
“He saved you from a thief, took you to dinner, and offered you the job of his…his…companion all in one evening,” Tempy observed sarcastically when Faith had finished talking. “He sounds like a scoundrel.”
“Oh, he’s very charming and very persuasive when he wants to be.”
“Most scoundrels are.”
“And yet there is something about him,” Faith murmured. “He showed me the ad in the Washington paper. He chose to tell me the truth when he could have very easily set out to seduce me.”