The Randolph Legacy (17 page)

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Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
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She looked away. He touched her hand. “Is this rude?”
“No more than thee lying in this shade with me, escaping thy brothers’ visit.”
He scowled. “They don’t come to see me. They come to put more doubts in Anne Randolph’s mind. And their wives take inventory so they can accuse me of stealing the silver, perhaps, yes?” He grinned. “That’s a very becoming hat.”
Judith lowered her head. “It’s Sally’s. I’ll tell her thee admires it. Eat.”
“I admire you.”
She put the cheese closer, trying to hide the pleasure she took from his open, guileless affection. But she must distract it, because they were alone. “Truly? Such an unfinished woman?” she tried. “I feel honored that Martha has decided to make a cook of me.”
He smiled, sipping his wine. She was not distracting him at all.
“She even trusted me with a certain taste you have for—”
“Corn bread!” he exclaimed, breaking off an end even as she uncovered it. “I thought I smelled it!”
His gleaming teeth tore through the crust with abandon, so opposite the slow, careful way he sometimes still chewed his food. His appetite was different out here under the tree, and with simple, hearty fare from Martha’s kitchen house.
His eyes sobered. “You deserve their trust, Judith. But I …”
“Thee?” She prompted his usually eloquent tongue.
“Why are they so good to me? If I am a Randolph, I am their oppressor.”
“Hardly that!”
“They allow me to play with the children, listen to their speech, their music. When I watch them dance, see their feet stamp out patterned rhythms, I think …”
“What, love?”
“That the black people call us with these rhythms, the way the ones in the hold of the
Standard
did.”
“You and your mother have Elwood tending beans instead of working in the curing barns. He is not dizzy there, and sleeps all night again, Martha says.”
“That’s not enough.”
He was torn, Judith sensed. His heart was beginning a painful, righteous struggle, just as she was leaving his sphere of influence.
“And you changed the subject!” he accused her suddenly.
“Subject?”
“You. The subject was Judith Mercer. And I don’t want Bible stories.”
“I know. Heathen,” she teased.
“Mais non.”
He set his jaw stubbornly. “I am a Deist, like Fayette, my father, my brother. My real family.”
“Thee is not fair to—”
“Confound you, woman, how do you do it?” he stormed. “Hush up and listen to me now. I need Judith stories to hold on to when you’ve gone home. They’re calling for you, aren’t they, in Philadelphia, that haven for lawbreaking, slave-stealing Quakers and runaways? And you miss your father.”
Tears stung at the corners of her eyes. “Thee needs to eat more,” she insisted. “Martha says—”
He knocked her offering from her hand. “Martha! Moses! Plagues, escape of the Israelites!”
“What?”
“There—in your Bible stories. Those are the ones you read them. Escape. Always escape from slavery. Have you planted the seeds of sedition in our people’s hearts?”
“‘Our people’?” she echoed.
“Yes, our people.” He advanced on her across the quilt, gracefully, his lame leg merely a part of his stealth. “Our people are treated better than you Northerners treat your hired hands, your city poor, even in mighty Philadelphia!” His accent changed completely, the French clip disappearing from his Virginia drawl. “Our servants are protected members of our household. We live as Abraham and Isaac and our biblical fathers lived, Miss Mercer, you must see the righteousness of that.”
He almost convinced her, until she realized he was parroting his father’s pronouncements too exactly. Judith giggled in relief. “Ethan, stop! You are being most disrespect—”
But his mouth was over hers, stealing a playful kiss, tasting of the wine, of the summer day. She must not allow this. She’d barely caught her breath before he kissed her again, longer, stopping only when the blast from her nostrils hit his cheek. He grinned wide. “Had you going, didn’t I, Judith Mercer? Had that indignation you cast at my brothers, my poor invalid father—I had it fired!”
She whacked his shoulder soundly. “Deceiver!” she accused, trying to cover her hot blush. The sun had given his skin a healthy glow, and had streaked a few flaxen highlights through his chestnut hair. Randolph highlights.
The smile disappeared. “What else is left the powerless but deceit?” he asked quietly.
She touched his face. “Oh, Ethan,” she whispered. “What have I done? Where am I leaving thee?”
“Don’t leave me, Judith. Don’t leave me here.”
He pulled the loose tie under the straw hat and knocked it from Judith’s head in one fluid motion. Her lips parted. He cupped his hand around the back of her neck where her hair was carefully braided inside the white cap. “Judith,” he whispered ardently, “save me from dinner conversations filled with biblical patriarchy and the fluctuating price of tobacco.”
Kisses. Swift, stolen kisses to her chin, cheek, earlobe. “In return …” He took her weight fully into his arms, arms strengthened by his control of the horses. He purred against the weave of gray homespun and shift, through to her skin.
He must talk, she must make him talk—not this sweet, warm sound that was filling her being with yearning. One hand went to her hip, pulled her closer against his freshly muscled thigh, another gift of his father’s horses. “In return, let me please you,” he whispered against her neck. “Let me spend my life pleasing you.”
He lowered his head. With only the slightest touch he rubbed his cheek against the nipple of one breast. She felt both grow hard, responding.
No
. His shoulders. There, beneath her hands.
Push, Judith. Push him away. Say no, even if it causes pain. He doesn’t understand. He is a man—young, French, beautiful, so beautiful and strong and scented with desire
. It was her responsibility.
Shoulders, Judith, not hair
—not lacing her fingers through his hair, pulling him closer, feeling his tongue’s caress through the weave of her bodice.
“Ethan, this is—”
“What, love? What is it?”
She gasped, her blood singing. “Wondrous.”
No, not what she’d meant to say, not at all. And what was this sudden, languid drowsiness in her limbs, this triumph in his eyes? He laughed, kissing her sweetly behind her ear, then along her neck as his fingers wove along her gown’s seam, then lifted the hem to caress her legs beneath. It began again, the delight, the desire for him to be impossibly close. Inside her. What was he doing? Something carnal, something a French whore had taught him. Judith Mercer didn’t want such things. She wondered who she was.
She was in his shimmering web, her bodice as wet as a nursing mother’s, her gown up past her knees, her pumping heart caught between joy and fear. Did he know that? Yes, he knew. He stroked her cheek with his long, leather-and-honeysuckle-scented finger. With infinite care he replaced the hem of her skirt to her ankles, though his breathing was ragged, like her own.
Judith had felt his young, powerful urge to continue, to spread her legs and put himself inside her. Even the terror of that, of her ruination, had melted like snow under a summer sun. Why? Because his guileless eyes told her she was safe. Only joy was left. Judith felt her love for this man, who could perform that miracle, deepening.
Could she do these things to him in return? She reached for the elegant jawline that matched his mother’s, took it between her hands. She kissed him—long, hard, fervent. She was soaring, but did not recognize the vision. Was this his dream she’d been cast into? Was he joining Fayette atop the mizzenmast?
The kiss ended. They stared at each other for what seemed like a lifetime. Finally, Ethan’s startled look left, and he smiled that shared-secret smile of their first meeting. “I feel a part of my soul missing, Judith Mercer. And I’ll haunt you for its return in Heaven, Hell, or Philadelphia.”
She began to cry.
His eyes turned almost black. “What are you doing?
Sacre-bleu
, stop that!” he demanded.
She tried, but the torrent only got worse when she heard Betsy and Alice, the ships he’d made them held over their heads, singing down the pathway.
“ … L’on y danse, l’on y danse …”
Ethan sat up, pulled the handkerchief from his waistcoat and threw it at her. “Each time we kiss, you cry! First your father sees this, now my nieces! They will be sure to report
tout de suite
to my sister that I leave you howling. You’re giving me a terrible reputation!”
“I’m sorry,” she implored, blowing her nose. “If it had only not been
‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’
!”
He grunted. “It’s the only song I know without scandalous lyrics. What else was I to teach them?”
“Oh, Ethan,” she said, sniffing.
“Don’t ‘Oh, Ethan’ me, you silly woman. If it were not for the sweetness of your kisses and the fine weave of your hair for my masts, I’d send you home to your father!”
“Would thee?” she demanded, wading up his fine coat. “Is that what I am? A mouth to kiss? Hair for thy masts?”
“Breasts,” he assured her. “Your breasts are very fine, too. Even clothed.”
She stood, threw his coat to the ground, and trampled it. He laughed. “Better, better,” he murmured. “Alice, Betsy!” he called out to the little girls. “Guard me from this wild woman!”
But Alice leaped to Judith’s side. Her sister fisted her hands at her hips as she gazed down at him. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Uncle Ethan, you’ve been very naughty!” Betsy pronounced.
He cast Judith a sidelong look, and caught her hot blush in its sights, she knew.
“Naughty,
petit chou
?”
“Because you are outside riding so long!”
“Mama says you must come home!” Alice commanded. “You must change clothes, to look more proper, for Uncle Winthrop’s gone to fetch Dr. Foster from the docks.”
“Jordan! He’s here?”
Judith watched Ethan’s face brighten in anticipation of seeing his friend again. Sally, Dr. Foster, his mother—she was leaving him with a triumvirate of allies to ease his entry into the life of a family he might never remember.
Alice took her hand. “You’re so cold, Judith,” she whispered, concerned.
“I’m always cold, little one.”
“Not always,” Ethan reminded her, with his mischievous boy’s grin.
“Take Judith home,” Betsy commanded Alice. “I’ll call Aaron to fetch Uncle Ethan.”
Judith walked a few steps before she turned, looked back at him. How was the afternoon’s sunlight slanted to make his face glow like that? she wondered. The glow made him seem so vulnerable, much more than his lame leg had ever accomplished. His eyebrow arched to the hair rakishly pulled back from his forehead. Had she done that?
“Go on, go on,” he dismissed her.
 
 
E
than watched the straight, even skirts of Judith’s pearl homespun glide against her form. Had he done too much there, on the quilt? As strong as she was, there was that part of her so fragile. Had his hunger frightened her even as she rose to her pleasure?
Worry superseded even the pride he felt at having helped Judith accomplish—What did Clarisse call them? A woman’s rushes. Every properly instructed man should be able to help a woman find many of these rushes before he seeks his own fulfillment between her thighs. He thought of her languid smile. Yes. Little deaths. Rushes.
They were part of courting, seduction. The man must be a very good lover, because women didn’t need men, Clarisse said. His hands and tongue and kisses were letting Judith know he as a husband would be worth all the pain that would also be part of their lives. But was it the same for American women? What about Quaker ones? He must ask Sally these things. Sally would know, and guide him.
Was Clarisse speaking the truth about his leg not being of consequence to the women who loved him? The Randolph brothers sneered behind their hands at his riding being good exercise for half a man. Is that why he’d continued with Judith on the quilt? To show her he was not half a man? His face flushed with shame at the possibility. He must ask her forgiveness, if this was so.
It would change. It would all change after today. Jordan Foster had come. He had the skill to do what was necessary to help Ethan walk again. He needed only to get past the barrier that was holding the physician back. Ethan must convince him to do the things needed, no matter the cost.
He would dance with this woman Judith Mercer, Ethan silently promised the air between them. He would dance, and wed, and together they would climb ladders of delight. Perhaps children would come of their climbing. Children as beautiful as Sally’s. His niece tugged on his arm.
“Think of what Dr. Foster would suppose once he saw you not only riding, but with me in your charge. He would have to help you!”

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