Patricia Potter (51 page)

Sophie shrugged. It was obvious she wasn’t going to answer the obvious question, why she was involved in the Underground Railroad.

Meredith knew she had no right to ask, to persist. So she went to another question. “Is there any news?”

“The town’s being turned upside down by bounty hunters and the sheriff’s men. They’ve closed every road, and they’re searching every boat. They even came searching here, but a bottle of good whiskey dulled their efforts.”

Meredith’s eyes widened. “Lissa?”

“They didn’t get that far,” Sophie said with amusement. “And she’s a redhead now. No one would recognize her from the broadsides they showed me.”

“The
Lucky Lady?”

“Damaged some, but fixable,” Sophie said. After an extensive search, she related, the boat had been allowed to leave for New Orleans, and repairs. Jamison had convinced the law that he knew nothing of the captain’s nefarious activities.

“Aren’t we dangerous to you?” Meredith finally asked Sophie.

Sophie shrugged. “No one will ever find the secret room. And you, are you making any headway with our stubborn captain?”

“He doesn’t want me,” Meredith stated frankly.

“Oh, I think he does. Give him time,” Sophie advised softly before turning away so Meredith couldn’t see the doubt in her own face.

But time didn’t seem to help. Cam wavered between life and death for several days. She and Lissa nursed him when the doctor wasn’t there. Meredith knew that Quinn had refused to let the doctor tend his own injuries, and she had insisted that she do it herself. He allowed it indifferently, never flinching as alcohol cleaned the cuts around his throat and chest. His eyes were clear and cold, and his mouth set in the arrogant half-smile she had seen on his face months earlier. She had learned to distrust that smile.

His manner was as distant as if he inhabited another world and looked upon the residents of this one with bemusement. Only once, when Meredith turned suddenly, did she see the raw agony in his eyes before he was able to push it back somewhere in his soul.

He appeared relaxed, his body folding easily in a corner of the room. But Meredith knew his background well enough now to realize what hell it must be for him to be confined in the small room. It was a measure of his enormous self-discipline that he did not prowl it like a caged animal.

The tension, however, was palpable. She could feel it sizzling in the room, alive and dangerous and begging to be released.

Meredith thought about ways to bring down the walls he had so securely reconstructed around himself. Blowing a trumpet, she noted wryly, would not be a wise move at this point. So she plotted an entire military campaign, complete with retreat, advances, and flanking movements.

The retreat maneuver started when she seemed to accept his decision.

“I’m going back,” she announced one morning.

“Back where?” Quinn narrowed his eyes.

“To Vicksburg. I’m going to keep working with the Underground Railroad.”

“To hell you are!”

She shrugged. “You said you’re going on alone. If you’re going your own way, then I’m going mine. I might even marry Gil. No one would suspect
his
wife.”

“What about Lissa?” The question sounded strangled.

“Oh, I’ll go with you to Canada and see her settled with enough money to keep her comfortable. Then I’m going back home.”

“Bloody hell you are!”

Time for the flanking movement. “You’ve already said that,” she observed tranquilly. “You have to do what you have to do. Well, so do I. I never should have agreed to go West with you. People need me.”

I need you.
The words hovered unspoken in his mind. He was leaning against the wall, his hands pressed behind him. His fingers dug into the rough wood as he sought to restrain perilous words from spurting out, like lava from an exploding volcano.

“It’s too dangerous now,” he said, forcing calm reason into his voice.

“Why? No one’s seen me. They’ve only seen a black groom. No one can connect me with Lissa’s escape; no one knows she’s my sister, and the Meriweathers will say I’ve been with them or visited other friends.”

She was right, damn it. They had been bloody careful about protecting her. Too bloody careful, he realized now. He couldn’t stand the thought of her going back into danger. She had been lucky thus far. He knew luck eventually ran out. He had only to turn toward Cam for evidence.

He looked down at Cam’s restless tossing figure. “Isn’t this enough?”

“Nothing is ever enough if you want something…really want it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Quinn said roughly, angrily.

“Then tell me,” she challenged, now attacking. “Tell me why you’re so afraid to live.”

“All right,” he retorted fiercely. “You want to hear. I’ll tell you. You asked about Terrence. I’ll tell you about Terrence. He was the best friend I ever had. He never gave up. Never. We would escape someday, he was sure. And he made me sure of it.

“But there was a guard who developed a particular dislike for me. God knew it was easy for him to express it. There were rules against everything. Talking between prisoners. A look deemed disrespectful, a moment’s pause in cutting trees or hauling logs. The British had some rather creative punishments, including a pit filled with water. They would lower you into it and leave you there for days. If you went to sleep, you drowned. After one stay there, I was weak and stumbled as we were hauling logs. The guard started beating me with a club, and Terrence went after him. He accidentally killed the man.

“It didn’t matter that it was accidental. Terrence was accused of murder and sentenced to die. They whipped him to death. Every morning for three days, they dragged him to the post while all of us were forced to watch. Every morning they gave him one hundred lashes and dragged him into a dark cell where his wounds festered, only to be opened the next morning. He died on the third day.”

“Dear God,” Meredith whispered.

“I decided then, sweet Meredith,” he said cruelly, “that there was no God.”

“Oh, Quinn…” It was all she could manage at the moment. The horror was too great, the hell in his eyes too vivid.

“But you haven’t heard it all, Meredith,” he continued tonelessly. “I wanted to die then, but something, perhaps it was Terrence’s last words, wouldn’t let me. I lived for him, to escape as he had planned all those years. And I did, with the help of my family who had sent a detective to find me. He had sent a letter back saying that he had located me, and would soon be able to help me escape. My father and oldest brother stayed in New Orleans, even after a smallpox epidemic broke out. They sent Brett upriver. But they wanted to be there to welcome me home, and they caught the sickness. They both died a week before I arrived in New Orleans. Like Terrence, they died for me. Like Cam almost did.” He allowed the words to soak in, to penetrate every pore of her body, every corner of her soul.

He looked at her stricken face and ached to hold her, but the telling had frozen him. His mouth curled on one side. “I won’t let you be my next victim, Meredith.”

“And I’m not already?” she asked softly. “You’ve already taken my heart. There’s little left in this body without it.”

Her words were like a dagger to his heart. His hand started to reach out, then dropped hopelessly. “I’ll not risk it,” he said simply.

“Damn you,” she said suddenly, and the emphatic tone of her voice made his eyes return to hers. “You have no right,” she said, “to make decisions for others.”

“I have every bloody right,” he roared, all his rage and despair bottled up in the words.

“You’re a bloody ass,” she said unexpectedly, unconsciously taking on his own oath. She groped for the panel in the wall, not wanting him to see the tears that were beginning to form in her eyes. She stepped through the opening, then slammed the door behind her, leaving him staring at the wall in stunned amazement.

“You
are
a bloody ass,” came a croaking sound from the cot where Cam lay, and Quinn spun around to see Cam trying to rise, his body, for the first time in days, free of sweat.

“Don’t interfere, Cam,” Quinn warned, although his voice was not quite as cold as he would have wished. He was, in fact, damned pleased to see the impertinence in Cam’s eyes.

“Daphne?”

“I didn’t…think we should tell her until we knew…”

“She had the right, Capt’n.” A long exhausted sigh came from deep within him. “You can’t protect everybody, not when they don’t want to be protected.”

“You…heard.”

“Enough. I made my own decision, Capt’n, to come after you. You didn’t. In fact, you ordered me not to.”

Quinn’s eyes hardened. “Not very good at following instructions, are you?”

“No. Don’t suppose I ever will be. That’s part of bein’ free. That’s what you gave me. Don’t complain about it now.”

“Damn your hide.”

“Don’t let her go, Capt’n.”

The plea surprised Quinn. They had always kept out of each other’s personal lives. He looked at Cam, and something in him lightened. Cam would live. Perhaps, just perhaps, the curse was broken. But he recalled Terrence’s broken body again. If anything happened to Meredith…

Cam saw the hope flare in Quinn’s eyes, then die. He turned over, and closed his own eyes, but not before he had the last words. “Damn fool.”

Daphne came that afternoon.

Meredith opened the door to the room, and Daphne emerged from the tunnel to go to Cam’s side. Quinn, sitting at a small table, a book in his hand, turned away from the reunited lovers. His jaw set and a muscle worked determinedly in his cheek.

But Meredith watched Cam and Daphne with unashamed longing.

Daphne knelt beside Cam, her small slender form delicate beside his large one, and as their hands met, Meredith thought she had never seen anything quite as tender, as loving. She wondered that so much love could be expressed with only a touch, a look.

Meredith’s heart was already aching, but she felt a new stab of sharp agonizing pain when she looked over at Quinn. With a set face, he studied a spider making a web in a corner.

She went over to him, placing a hand on the sleeve of a clean white shirt Sophie had found for him. “Come out to the tunnel with me,” she said.

He started to refuse.

“Please, Quinn. Give them some privacy.”

Quinn turned and looked at the two. They were oblivious to anyone else, but he knew he had to leave, for his own sake if not theirs. Being near the couple in love was too damned painful to bear. He nodded, following Meredith out the paneled door, closing it slightly, but leaving enough light so that they could see.

“Quinn.” The word was part love song, part plea.

It was too much for Quinn. With a groan, he bent his head, his lips ravaging hers in savage hunger and desperation.

Her lips opened to his, as rapacious as his own. Her whole body strained toward his in a frantic effort to convince him they belonged together. As Cam and Daphne belonged together. They had strength together, not weakness.

Her heart was pounding as never before, and her tongue reached into his mouth, seducing him until she could hear the moan start low in his throat, and feel the heat of his manhood as his body became taut against hers.

His lips, his hungry eager lips, moved from her mouth to her neck, then up her cheek. Like burning firebrands, they left trails of flame along their path until Meredith thought she would be consumed in their racing fury.

Then his arms were around her, holding her tightly against him as if his life depended on the sureness of his embrace. “Dear God, Meredith,” he whispered. And where his lips had been rough and angry, they now turned sweet and wistful as they explored once more every curve of her face and neck. Meredith could feel him tremble, and her soul and body ached with need as she felt the war within him.

She looked up to eyes churning with ferocious desire.

“I’m not going to let you go,” she whispered. “I won’t ever let you go.”

His eyes closed, and there was another moan, this time not of lust, but of pure animal pain. He jerked her away from his embrace and whirled around, disappearing back into the secret room, leaving her stunned and alone in the dark tunnel.

C
hapter 28

DAPHNE STAYED
by Cam’s side for the next two days, which made the small room immensely suffocating for Quinn. Love and tenderness were palpable, filling the room until there seemed no escape for him. Sweet and gentle words were whispered softly, yet he could hear every one, and each was like a nail being pounded into his heart.

He brooded. Although he was happy for Cam and vastly relieved at his recovery, it was all he could do to see a kiss exchanged and not smash everything within reach. Every once in a while, he caught himself holding his hands tightly together so he wouldn’t do just that.

Meredith had not returned to the room since she left two days earlier, and everything in him ached for even a brief glimpse of her. He saw Daphne and Cam clutch each other’s hands, and his soul yearned to touch a lock of golden hair, or soft cheeks, or a kiss-swollen mouth.