Blaze (56 page)

"Fuck you, Jon Hazard!" Shiny wetness filled her eyes, frustration like suffocating cotton wool stuck in her throat.

"Thank you, ma'am, but I'll pass." His mouth was a thin, straight line, his voice low and brooding suddenly. Like I should have right at the beginning, he thought bitterly.

"You're afraid of me," Blaze asserted in a voice of discovery. There was a chink, after all, in his icy armor.

"No," Hazard replied, moving toward the window, provocation more real than truth at the moment. "I'm not afraid of anyone… least of all you, pet." Dousing the lamp, he pulled aside the curtains and threw up the window. "Now get your sweet bottom over here and perch it on this windowsill. I'll lower you to the ground." Tliming sharply, he snapped his fingers. "Now, bia, now."

Blaze moved. "I'm not finished with you," she said, approaching him, a renewed confidence growing in her heart, and placed her palm lightly on his.

Already intent on their departure, Hazard only absently replied, his fingers curling over hers. "I'm not finished with you, either, bia. Not for five more months." And pulling her close, he lifted her, one arm around her waist, and swung her out the window.

HAZARD'S gold bought them a carriage, a driver, and the best team of horses in New York. Within the hour they were headed west.

"They took all my money," Blaze told him when they were finally settled in the beautifully upholstered interior.

Hazard was sprawled on the seat opposite her, his eyes shut. "Doesn't matter. I've plenty."

"I don't mean that. I had to sign a power of attorney over to them for Daddy's inheritance. They threatened our child."

Hazard's eyelids levered half open over bruised, heavy black eyes and he looked at Blaze sardonically. "Forgive me if I find the story unlikely, after finding you at an abortionist's." His eyelids lowered wearily and he adjusted his head comfortably against the velvet squabs. "I'm not up to the melodrama," he murmured, already half dozing. "I've been on the road eleven days and without sleep for the better part of it."

And while Blaze stiffened at the unfair reproach, contemplating a suitably scathing retort to the rank injustice, she heard the rhythm of his breathing slow as he fell asleep where he sat. Even in her anger, her heart went out to him. How tired he looked. She ached to touch him, hold him, and comfort him, but he'd put up barriers that daunted even her. He felt she'd betrayed him, blamed her for the attack on the mine, viewed her as an enemy, as he had when she'd first gone up to his mine that summer morning months ago.

But she'd managed to change his mind then. Might it be possible once again? She loved him; that had never changed. And seeing him once again only strengthened that love. How could he talk about marrying Blue Flower? He was hers! Ten days, she thought, two weeks at the outside before they rejoined his clan, before he was reunited with Blue Flower. Certainly she mused, warming to the challenge, certainly it should be possible to reestablish her claim on his affection in that time.

Her anger was forgotten, borne away by a wave of tenderness, a restless intoxication only the man sleeping opposite her could evoke. We'll see, she thought, green-eyed possessiveness gripping her senses, who's first wife and who's second. We'll see if a second wife materializes at all. In her present frame of mind, her old assurance buoyed by Hazard's presence and her overpowering love, she wouldn't recommend anyone bet on it.

At the next stop, Hazard woke with a startled, quick alertness until he recalled where he was. He held his head in his hands briefly, hunched over his legs. Then he got up and left to see to fresh horses. When he came back and dropped into the same tired sprawl, Blaze quietly said, her blue eyes extraordinarily large in her pale face, "Could we please start over again? I love you. I always have. I'd never intentionally hurt you. Please believe me."

Hazard's gaze drifted over wearily. He looked at her, then looked right through her, his face expressionless. "The last time I believed you," he murmured, his soft voice grating suddenly with aversion, "I almost died. It was a sobering lesson, pet." He lifted a side curtain and glanced outside. "How far have we come?" His tone was conversational now, bland, Blaze's attempt at reconciliation dismissed.

"I want to talk about it, Jon. Tell me how you survived the mine explosion—how you got out. Were you hurt? You must have been. Tell me. I don't care how far we've come."

"No, I don't suppose you do." He took a last look before dropping the curtain back into place. "I think we can outrun them, though," he added as though her pleading questions had never been uttered. "Sorry to disappoint you, Boston," he finished, flashing her a brief glance, "but we're going to gain fifty miles on this route."

"Damn, Hazard," Blaze exploded, "there's no reason for me to side with Yancy. If you weren't so stubborn you'd understand. Yancy and Mother would as soon see me dead now, too. Can't you see that? Then all the money would be theirs without any legal maneuvering. And I want the baby, Jon. I do. Ask Curtis Adams. I willed everything to the baby!"

"So you say," replied Hazard, a shade of exasperation entering his deep voice. But the phrase "Willed everything to the baby" jarred momentarily against the solid wall of his defensive armor.

"Damn you, it's true."

He had had two hours' rest. Because of necessity and the bringing together of the ragged components of his self-command not entirely drugged by fatigue, he was awake, but shadowed by a hovering temper. He shot her an irritated scowl, all her arguments overridden by his temper. "It's also true that I'm only here because I was able to chip my way through eight feet of greenstone before I starved to death." A muscle clenched along his jaw. "It's also true," he said very softly, "your note greeted me on my escape. I can't begin to describe the indelible feelings it etched on my liver."

"How can I convince you I didn't leave that note!" She was looking at him with a kind of hurt anger, aligned with a bravura challenge. "Why would I leave a note, anyway, if I'd had a hand in with Yancy?"

"Protect yourself, I suppose. Hell, don't ask me to figure you out. I gave up on that quite a few weeks ago."

"Talk to Hannah. She'll tell you. She'll tell you about mother and Yancy and how I wanted to die when I thought you were killed."

Hazard looked at her wearily. "Hannah? Who's she? Another one of your cohorts?" He shook his head. "Give up, Blaze. None of it means a thing to me."

The carriage lurched momentarily as the horses settled into a gallop, but even that didn't move the lounging indifference of Hazard's posture. "I'm your wife," Blaze insisted, impatient with his obstinate disinterest. "Doesn't that mean anything?"

"You won't be for long… if I choose," came the expressionless reply.

"Meaning… ?"

"All I have to do is put your things outside the lodge and the marriage is dissolved."

"Damned convenient for you men!"

"Oh, no, you misunderstand," he mildly corrected. "A wife can do the same to a husband."

Blaze sniffed, mettlesome and moody as her husband when the spirit moved her, becoming increasingly piqued at Hazard's detached attitude. "Maybe I'll choose to exercise my option."

"As you like," he said in clipped accents. "All I want is the child."

"And if I want it too?"

"Don't make me laugh," Hazard scoffed. "Remember, I found you at Madame Restell's."

"It was the only time in three weeks I'd been allowed out of my room. I went because it was my only chance for freedom, but I took my black pearls with me," she insistently went on, "to barter that freedom from Madame Restell. These pearls are worth twenty times what an abortion would have brought her. Madame Restell would have accepted, I know, Jon. As God is my witness, I want our baby. How many times do I have to tell you I wasn't planning on going through with the abortion?"

"You haven't enough breath to convince me," said Hazard, his patience slipping. "Put on all the airs of affronted motherhood you choose. Cast those soulful Madonna eyes on the world at large. Weep tears of modesty and shame. Take up with the carriage driver once we hit St. Joe… But kindly, spare me the theatrics!"

"You're impossible!"

He frowned. "We're impossible." Then he shrugged negligibly, as he might have in the early days of her captivity. "I said it the first day at the mine. I was right then and right now."

"And in between?" Blaze significantly reminded him.

The shrug this time was tossed off, one shoulder only rising slightly. And dismissive. "An unfortunate lapse in judgment." But his thoughts dwelled on the memories.

"How can you call our love an unfortunate lapse in judgment?"

"I had time to reassess it, dear wife, those five days underground, chipping my way out. Do you know what a calculated guess is?" He didn't wait for her to answer. "That's what my shaft to freedom was. I could have just as well been off five or ten feet and died in there. That sort of experience tends to temper one's love. Like an asp bite, it's deadly."

"Say what you will," Blaze replied, bold and assertive, "I'm not leaving after the baby's born. I never left you by choice and I never will. I might as well warn you now, so there's no misunderstanding. With the pattern of error and misinterpretation in our relationship, I'd just as soon avoid any more."

His eyes met hers and held them for a long time, but she didn't flinch or look away. He was reminded of the young virgin he'd told to leave so many months ago. She'd given him the same solid look and said she was staying.

That flat, blue-eyed gaze was Blaze Braddock and determination and Jon Hazard Black's wife. Its undeni-able familiarity provoked the first fissure in Hazard's armor of resentments, invisible yet to a consciousness nursing a moody bitterness, but a fracture nonetheless. "Fair enough," he said. "I'm warned." And perhaps in self-defense against an inexplicable pulsing sensation of warmth stirring his nerve endings, he added, "Remind me to warn Blue Flower as well. I hope you two get along." The words were cynically said.

"Bastard."

"That's a yellow eyes epithet," he said, a thin smile curving his fine mouth. "Try again."

"I'll scratch her eyes out. She won't stay long," Blaze tightly declared.

"I'll have to protect her, then."

"I suggest you protect yourself as well."

Hazard's dark brows rose fractionally, his mouth twitching into a wider smile. "Is that a threat, sweetheart?"

"Read it any way you like, dear, dear husband," Blaze sweetly replied, more determined than ever to see that Hazard never married Blue Flower. If he thought she intended to share him with another woman, he was seriously deluding himself. She had no intention of placidly handing him over to another woman. And if Hazard had examined his own feelings more closely, he would have recognized the same possessive sentiment. Blaze belonged to him; no other man could touch her. And while the conscious impetus for his racing journey east had been his child, submerged beneath the intricacy of his rancor was the selfsame territorial imperative.

THEY boarded the Michigan Central and Great Western Railway at Niagara Falls. Hazard reserved one of the new Pullman hotel drawing room cars, splendidly luxurious and well appointed, but insisted on locking Blaze in whenever he left her alone.

"I'm not trying to get away from you," she protested, one time when he returned from his regular round of reconnoitering.

"And you won't," was all he said, pocketing the key, his voice as guarded as his expression. "We agree on something at last."

"We'd agree on a lot more if you weren't so perversely intolerant."

"Not intolerant, just practical. I remember all your sweet talking from before." There was a bitter set to his mouth and his dark, thick-lashed eyes were forbidding. "And I had five extremely long and painful days underground to remind me about your style of sweet talk. Lunch?" he said coldly, and handed her a sandwich with such indifference that nothing more was said in the compartment for some time.

While Hazard kept Blaze confined, he maintained a low profile as well. Yancy was bound to be on their trail. Sooner or later. And he never worked alone. Bullies never did.

The second day, Blaze had one of her rare bouts of morning sickness, and when Hazard brought in her breakfast on a tray, she took one look at it and bolted for the tiny bathroom.

He opened the door she'd slammed shut and took in her green-faced misery for a silent moment before he reached down to help hold her steady while she vomited. After, he carried her to her seat and settled her comfortably with two pillows behind her head. "Are you sick often?" he anxiously asked.

"No," Blaze weakly replied. "Hardly ever. I think it's the movement of the train. Junior's objecting," she added with a wan smile.

"I'm sorry," Hazard quietly said.

"About Junior?"

"No, it's too late for that. I'm sorry about your sickness. If there's anything I can do…" His concern was sincere.

Blaze wanted to say, Forgive me for everything… for the mining company, for mother, for Yancy… but even in his tender attention, she felt the constraint and she didn't dare. "Don't bring breakfast in before ten," she said instead with a light smile.