“He tried to kiss me!” Tim yelled, stepping away from Alex and looking at him in disgust.
“I did no such thing,” Alex said as he grabbed his shirt and put it back on. “I was pulling a blanket over myself and I fell forward. If Tim wants to think that I was kissing him, that’s his own fantasy. Maybe he’s been alone too long.”
Alex refused to meet Cay’s eyes while he made up this lie.
“Tim, I think you should get back in the tent and let us sleep,” Mr. Grady said.
“I don’t want to sleep with him,” the boy said. “And I don’t see why I have to change tents anyway. I was fine with Eli.”
“You need to let me get some sleep,” Eli said. “Your snoring is enough to scare the gators. Young Cay here sleeps like a baby, and I need the peace he gives me. Let Alex take on your noises for a few nights.”
If Alex’d had any doubts that Eli and Grady knew Cay was female, Eli’s words would have ended it. Alex looked at Grady, but he wouldn’t meet his eyes. It was obvious that they knew of the fight—maybe not the cause—but they knew of Cay’s anger, and Eli had given her an excuse to get away from Alex.
For a moment, Alex debated whether he should admit the truth. If they all—except Tim, of course—knew what was going on, why couldn’t he say it out loud? But he couldn’t do that to Cay. He couldn’t admit that the two of them had been lovers. It wasn’t good for people to know that for sure, with all doubt removed. And, also, there was self-preservation. If they knew about Cay, they must know who Alex was. He didn’t want to have to sit around a campfire and answer questions about what had happened to him in Charleston.
“You keep your hands off of me!” Tim ordered Alex while looking from him to Cay, as though he wanted to say that there was something “not right” between the two of them. Grady wouldn’t meet the boy’s eyes.
“I think we should all get some rest,” Mr. Grady said. “And, Tim, if you want to sleep outside with the mosquitoes, that’s all right with me.” Turning, he went back into his tent.
Cay was smiling. She seemed to be enjoying Tim’s anger and the look of consternation on Alex’s too-handsome face. She gave an exaggerated yawn and looked at Eli. “Shall we go back in and get some sleep?” She smiled at Alex. “Good night, brother. I hope some bug doesn’t eat away that pretty face of yours. It would be a shame to mar such pulchritude.”
“Huh?” Tim asked when Cay was inside the tent. “What did he say?”
Eli was chuckling. “Nothing that was meant for you. Now go to bed, boy, and try not to keep Alex awake.” He went into the tent after Cay.
When they were alone, Tim looked at Alex in warning. “You touch me again and I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
Alex gave him such a hard look that Tim didn’t finish his sentence.
With one more suspicious look, Tim went inside the tent.
Alex was tempted to stay outside the rest of the night, but a mosquito bit him on the neck and as he slapped at it, he entered the tent. Tim was already asleep, and Alex heard what Eli meant when he referred to Tim’s snoring. The boy made a wheezing sound when he drew breath in, and it came out in a high-pitched whistle. At first, the sound made Alex smile. He’d been hearing it since they’d started the trip, but he’d thought it was a night bird. Now that he knew what poor Eli’d had to put up with for the entire trip, he wondered how the man had managed.
The next morning, when Alex got up as tired as when he’d gone to bed, he was no longer smiling.
“Best night’s sleep I’ve had since we started on this trip,” Eli said as he poured coffee into tin mugs and handed them around. “Not once did I wake up from hearing whistles and wheezes.” He slapped Cay on the shoulder so hard she nearly fell off the log she was sitting on. “I tell you, boy, you’re the quietest sleeper I ever met. If I could just find a woman that quiet, I’d marry her in a minute.”
Alex was sitting across from them and glowering at Cay, but she was ignoring him.
“Are you looking for a wife?” Cay asked Eli.
“I told Mr. Grady before we left that this is my last time on one of his gadabouts. In fact, I said I didn’t want to go on this one, but he begged me. ‘I can’t go without you, Eli,’ he said. ‘Especially not on this trip.’”
Alex looked at Cay to make sure she understood the significance of what Eli was saying. It was as though he was admitting that Grady, somehow, knew about Cay, and about Alex, too. They were to reach the trading post in just three days, and there they’d get horses and go riding south rather than on the flatboat. Alex couldn’t help but wonder what would be waiting for them at the post. A sheriff with handcuffs?
But Cay wouldn’t look at Alex, didn’t acknowledge his hint to her. Her attention was on Eli. “I think I have the perfect wife for you.”
“Do you?” Eli asked, his voice interested.
“I don’t think that now is the time—” Alex began, meaning to cut her off. If, by chance, they didn’t know she was female, her matchmaking would give her away for sure.
Again, Cay paid no attention to him. “She’s Uncle T.C.’s goddaughter.”
“Miss Hope?” Eli asked, his eyes wide in wonder.
“Then you know her?”
“I had the pleasure of her company on one instance when I was with Mr. Grady. A very handsome young woman.”
“Then you know about . . .” Cay hesitated.
“Her leg? I do. But have you tasted that woman’s apple pie?” Eli was dousing the breakfast fire. “I always wondered why a fine lady like her wasn’t married.”
“Then I take it you haven’t met her father.”
“T.C.?”
“Ah,” Cay said, “I see that gossip travels well. No, I meant the man who was married to Hope’s mother, Bathsheba.”
“You mean Isaac Chapman.” There was no mistaking the dislike in Eli’s voice. “He once cheated me out of nearly a hundred dollars. When he dies, the devil will be richer.”
“What did you do when you found out that he’d stolen money from you?” Cay’s voice was curious.
“I’m ashamed to say that I hit him in the face, but then I took him to court, where I defended myself, and I won. The judge made him pay me back the money, pay the lawyer’s fee, plus give me another ten pounds for all my trouble.”
“Well done!” Cay stood up. “I think you’ll do nicely. Hope asked me to bring her back a husband who could stand up to her father, and it looks like you can.”
“Isaac Chapman won’t let me marry his daughter,” Eli said.
“Yes, he will. After I tell Hope about you, she’ll make him agree,” Cay said. “Oh, but there’s something special she asked for.”
Eli snorted, as though to say he knew there’d be a catch. “She’ll want a young, handsome man like Alex here, not an old duffer like me.”
“Hope asked for a man who wouldn’t fall asleep on his wedding night.”
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.”
He smiled at her perception. “Aye, I did. Is that so bad?”
“Actually, it is.” She turned to glare at him. “You judged me to be so shallow that I could only care about a man if he looked a certain way. I was put on trial even though I had risked my life to save you. You were a convicted murderer, but I judged you for what I saw, not what I’d been told. Now will you go away so I can do my work?”
Alex got up, and when he turned away, he caught a glimpse of Eli looking at him with sympathy.
Cay punished him for the entire three days it took them to get to the trading post. She would hardly look at him, rarely spoke to him, and, more or less, acted like he didn’t exist. She even pretended she couldn’t understand his accent. Alex hadn’t realized it, but for the entire trip he’d talked in his Scottish accent and she had translated for him—until the others had come to understand him. Even Tim, who was no great shakes in the brain area, had started saying, “Och aye, an’ dornt Ah ken it.”
But when Cay was angry at Alex, she coolly said that she had no idea what he was saying, could he please speak English?
It was Eli who stopped the fight that seemed to have no end. He caught Alex alone, away from the others. “Tell Cay you were wrong.”
“What?” Alex said, looking up from the rifle he was cleaning.
“Your brother. Tell him you were wrong.”
“But I did.”
“Tell him you were wrong on the day you were born and have been wrong every day since.”
“But—” Alex began.
Eli shrugged. “It’s up to you, lad. But to be wrong and to have always have been wrong is the only way to solve this. Take it from a man who used to want to be right at all costs. And look where I am today. Alone. Traveling with a bunch of men. My three brothers have eighteen kids.” Turning, a load of firewood in his arms, Eli went back to the camp.
Not that Alex had any more doubt that the men knew Cay was a girl, but Eli’s words cinched it. Alex’s first thought was to go to Cay and warn her, but his next thought was that he was past caring what the men on this trip knew. If it would make Cay stop being angry at him, he’d go to her on bended knee in front of them and beg. “And tell her I’m wrong,” he said aloud. He still felt that he wasn’t fully wrong. Not totally, but maybe . . . On the other hand, maybe he hadn’t been 100 percent in the right, either.
He felt bad for doing it, but he followed her when she left the camp to take a privacy break and waited in the shrubs until she was on her way back. When he stepped out of the bushes, she gasped.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said as contritely as he could manage. “I just wanted to tell you that . . . that . . .” He drew his shoulders up. “That I was wrong.”
“About what?”
“All of it. Everything.”
Cay narrowed her eyes at him. “Is this a trick?”
“This is a plea to get you to forgive me,” he said. “I lied to you, I admit it. It won’t happen again. And I misjudged you. I did think you were a frivolous girl who’d never had anything bad happen to her. But I’ve known women who wanted me only for the way I looked, so it was nice to see you start to, well, to like me even though you thought I was old and ugly. But it was all selfish of me, and I was wrong. From beginning to end, I was wrong. Totally and completely and absolutely wrong. Please say you’ll forgive me.”
“All right,” she said, and started to walk back toward the camp.
Alex caught her arm and pulled her to face him. “All right? Is that it?”
“Do you want more? You did a truly bad thing to me and I—” Alex cut her off as he pulled her into his arms and kissed her.
She had missed him horribly, more than she would ever tell him. She’d missed the smell of him, the feel of his skin on hers, his actions, his habits. All of it was part of her, and she’d had to keep away from him for so long that she felt as though she was missing half of her body.
She kissed his beautiful face and felt the sharp prickle of his whiskers on her cheeks. There was a trickle of sweat running down one cheek, and she couldn’t help it, but she licked it away. The sweat and the very male whiskers on her tongue sent waves of desire through her.
“Cay, I’ve missed you,” Alex said. “Don’t leave me again. Please don’t leave me. I need you so very much.”
She put her head back, and he ran his lips down her neck. She’d thought that she’d feel differently when he touched her because now she knew what he looked like. It was as though he’d always worn a mask before, but now he was at last fully naked, and she thought he would be a different man to her. But he wasn’t. With her eyes closed, he was the same man she’d spent many hours with. They’d laughed and loved together, and now they’d fought together. They’d come full circle.
Twenty-two
“It’s sweeter now,” Alex said. One hand was on Cay’s bare shoulder, and the other was just touching the water of the stream.
“What is?”
“Us. You and me. What’s bet
ween us is better now.”
Lifting up, she looked into his eyes. Their bodies were naked, and they were snuggled together in the tall grasses about a mile from the camp. Tomorrow they’d reach the trading post, and a new portion of their journey would begin. “What if we never went back?”
“You mean never leave this paradise and never return to people and noise?”
Around them the birds and the ever-present alligators were nearly deafening. Smiling, she put her head back down on his shoulder. “I just have a feeling that something is going to happen.”
Alex started to say some words to quieten her worries but decided instead to tell the truth. “Me, too. But maybe I feel that way because of what went on before. Just when I thought I had everything, it was all taken from me.” What he wasn’t telling her was that he had that indefinable feeling that he’d inherited from his mother. Something was about to change. Whether it was for good or bad, he didn’t know. It had always puzzled him that he hadn’t had a premonition about his wife’s death.
Cay was silent for a moment. “Do you wish you hadn’t been through all this?”
“Of course! The stench of that jail cell will haunt me for the rest of my life. What was said about me at the trial, no man should have to hear, and—” He stopped talking when Cay sat up. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. It’s just getting cool is all.” She began to wrap the cloth about her breasts.
“I wish you didn’t have to wear that thing.” Alex helped her fasten it. “If it weren’t for Tim, I think you could wear your ball gown and the others wouldn’t be surprised.” When Cay still didn’t say anything, he turned her to look at him. “Something’s bothering you, so out with it.”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “It’s just that if all of . . . of what happened, hadn’t, you and I wouldn’t have met.”
When she looked at him, he knew what she was saying. She was asking him if he wished he had Lilith back rather than her. But how could Alex answer that? Lilith had been his wife. True, it was for a very short time, but they had loved each other from the first moment they saw one another. There was something about that initial feeling of love that overshadowed the more realistic relationship that he and Cay had.