Elizabeth Grayson (12 page)

As he stood looking down at her a strange fullness rose beneath his sternum—a sweet, expanding warmth that was not unlike pride or possessiveness. As if here was someone to hold fast and cherish.

But then, Ann had made it abundantly clear she didn’t want to be either held
or
cherished. At least not by him.

Still, she’d settled in aboard the
Andromeda
contentedly enough until he’d made arrangements to send her home. She’d taken a terrible chance to escape that fate. If Goose Steinwehr hadn’t intercepted her, there’s no telling where she might have gone or what might have happened to her.

Crossing noiselessly to where she lay, Chase knelt beside her makeshift bed. “Ann,” he whispered. “Annie?”

When she didn’t stir, he reached out and stroked her hair.

She bolted awake hissing and scratching, flailing like a creature possessed.

Chase jerked back as she struck out, but Ann kicked at him, curled her fingers into talons, and tried to rake his face with her fingernails. He caught her wrists and pinned them at her sides. Taking care not to hurt her, he leaned over her and held her down with nothing more than the breadth of his body.

Her eyes shone wide and fierce. Her breathing raged in her throat. She twisted beneath him, lost in some desperate fury.

“Ann!” He spoke harshly, piercingly. He refused to give ground. “It’s all right, Ann. It’s Chase. Stop, now! Stop! You’ll hurt yourself.”

She strained against him, gasping.

“Ann!”

Either his words or the sharpness of his voice finally penetrated the miasma engulfing her. She hesitated, gave a grunt of recognition, then shuddered and went still.

Though she lay immobile, Chase could still hear the stark, feverish hitch in her breathing. He could feel her muscles coiled and flexed, ready to explode with frenzy.

“It’s all right, Annie,” he crooned to her. “You were having a bad dream, but it’s over now. No one’s going to hurt you.”

Ann blinked as if to bring the world into focus around her. Then all at once she seemed to realize where she was.

“I won’t board the
Iowa Princess
!” she cried, trying to wriggle free of him again. “You can’t make me!”

“It’s too late for that, my girl,” he said, still holding her immobile. “The
Iowa Princess
left a good long while ago.”

She hesitated, trembling under his hands. “It’s gone?” she asked and sought the truth in his eyes.

When she realized he hadn’t lied to her, he felt her tension drain away. “That’s better,” he mumbled and released her.

Ann sat up and glared at him, rubbing at her wrists. “So, am I going to be allowed to stay aboard the
Andromeda
? Or is missing the
Iowa Princess
only a reprieve?”

Chase braced his hips against one of the adjoining crates and studied her, taking in the defiant line of her jaw and the fear that lay dark at the backs of her eyes. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen fear in her, only now he intended to find out what it meant.

“So, Ann,” he asked, easing closer. “Are you afraid to go back to St. Louis? Or were you leaving the
Andromeda
so you could meet the baby’s father?”

“The baby’s father?” Ann gave a sniff of bitter laugh. “Good God! No!”

“Then what is it about going home that frightens you?”

“I’m not afraid.”

But she was. Though she faced him with her back straight and her chin high, it was a hollow gesture. One not of pride but of protection. But from what?

“Is it the commodore, Annie?” Chase pressed her.

“I told you I don’t trust the commodore,” she answered with a lift of her brows. “Why do you think I keep running away?”

“Keep running away?”

Ann dipped her head. He was suddenly sure she’d said more than she intended.

“Did you try to leave St. Louis before you boarded the
Andromeda
?” he persisted.

She compressed her lips for a moment before she conceded. “Last fall I got as far as Memphis before the commodore’s men found me and brought me back.”

That’s when she’d gotten pregnant,
Chase reasoned. Ann had either run off with a man she thought she loved, or been seduced while she was on her own. It explained so much.

What it didn’t explain was why she was so eager to get out of her father’s grasp. What did she have to fear from him?

Chase considered the possibilities. A single conclusion presented itself. “Does he hit you, Annie?”

She stiffened reflexively.

Something in that faint involuntary response made his belly crimp. “Does that son of a bitch hit you?”

Ann’s gaze rose to his. “My stepfather has never laid a hand on me.”

Chase didn’t believe her. In his years aboard the steamers, he’d seen women beaten by the very men who ought to be looking after them. He’d seen how those women held themselves aloof and cringed when anyone touched them. He’d seen them hide their bruises and heard them lie away their fears because they were ashamed to admit that their husbands or fathers mistreated them.

Chase eased closer. “I need to know if the commodore beats you. I need to know, Annie, so I can protect you. So I can see that he never—”

“The commodore doesn’t beat me!” she shouted at him.

Somehow her denial made Chase even more certain that he did. Knowing it sanctioned the protectiveness he’d felt from the moment he laid eyes on her.

Though he weighed his words before he spoke, he knew they were inevitable. “What if I said you didn’t have to go back to St. Louis unless you wanted to? That you could stay aboard the
Andromeda.”

“Do you mean it?” Ann asked and raised her gaze to his. But before he could tell her that’s exactly what he meant, she glanced away. “But then, you said you’d refuse to marry me, then went right ahead and broke your word.”

He
had
done exactly what she said, and never bothered to explain why he’d changed his mind. He hadn’t once considered why Ann might want to leave her father’s house; he’d just kept threatening to send her back.

“I swear,” he said and lay his hand across his heart. “I won’t make you go back to St. Louis against your will.”

Ann nodded warily. “All right.”

“That doesn’t mean,” he continued as he rose, “that I’ve given up trying to convince you that you’d be better off there than here.”

“I won’t go back!”

He shook his head. “You don’t know the wild, empty country ahead of us. How far we’ll be from civilization.”

“Don’t underestimate me, Chase.” Ann slipped off the crate and faced him. “I might surprise you.”

It wouldn’t be the first time, Chase thought. As if to prove it, Ann climbed the ladder out of the hold with considerably more agility than he’d expected.

Goose Steinwehr was pacing when they reached the main deck. Chase gave him a quick reassuring nod, then started shouting orders.

“I’ve given command of the
Andromeda
over to Goose and Rue,” he explained as he escorted his wife to the captain’s quarters. “They’ll get us underway while you and I get a few things settled.”

HIS WIFE. GOOD GOD! SHE WAS HIS WIFE! CHASE THOUGHT as he closed the cabin door behind them. Somehow, until this moment, he hadn’t really thought of Ann as being his wife.

Of course, he’d agreed to marry her, and they’d spoken their vows. She’d taken up residence here in his cabin. She’d even let him hold onto her last night when he’d needed to be close to someone. Yet she’d remained a stranger.

Why did she feel like his wife this morning? Why did this
marriage feel suddenly so real to him?

He heard the steamer’s whistle hoot and felt the floor shimmy ever so slightly beneath his boots. The
Andromeda
was backing down. It hung for a moment in the current, then surged ahead and into the channel.

Knowing the steamer was underway, Chase turned to where Ann had settled herself in the medallion-backed armchair to the right of the settee.

“Ann,” he began, drawing in a breath that still tasted of smoke. “I think it’s high time I explained some things to you.”

“What things?” she asked warily.

“Why I broke my word to you, for one.”

“You told me you’d do what I wanted.”

He could hear the catch of disillusionment in her voice, even now. A sharp residue of regret grated painfully between the man he thought he was and what he’d done.

“I did tell you that,” he acknowledged, lowering himself onto the settee. “After I left the parlor that first day, I went directly to your father’s study. I told him I wouldn’t marry you and refused command of the
Andromeda.”

“But then you changed your mind.” The disillusionment in her voice deepened to reproach.

Chase compressed his lips, wondering if he could explain things he wasn’t entirely sure he understood himself.

“When I got down to the levee,” he went on, deciding to try, “Boothe was just bringing the
Andromeda
in from her inaugural run. Just looking at her, just watching how neatly she nuzzled up to the levee—” He sighed and ruffled his singed hair. “Boothe invited me aboard to look her over.”

“To taunt you with him having her.”

That’s exactly what Boothe had been doing, though he hadn’t recognized it as that at the time.

“When I saw how graceful and well-designed the
Andromeda
was,” he went on. “When I realized how fast those engines would make her— When I took her wheel in my two hands—” He could feel the throb of that first contact in his palms even now. The conviction that the
Andromeda
was his destiny swept through him again. “I had to have her.”

He met her gaze head-on. “I went back and talked to the commodore that afternoon. He signed over ownership the morning you and I were married.”

She reached across and touched his hand. “He’ll never forgive you for this, you know. For depriving him of his first command. You’ll have to watch out for him from now on.”

“Boothe?” he asked, surprised by her warning.

He felt the tremor in her fingers before she took back her hand. “You don’t know how vindictive he is.”

But Chase did know. He’d been partnered with Boothe all of one season and watched him work his subtle cruelties on people who displeased him. Thinking back on that now, Chase couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Ann growing up in the same house as Boothe Rossiter.

“I know this doesn’t condone what I did,” Chase pressed ahead, determined to get this settled between them, “but I thought I could make things up to you.”

“And how did you mean to do that?”

Chase opened his mouth to say he was taking responsibility for a baby he hadn’t fathered, to assure her he’d look after her and that child for the rest of their lives. But in the instant before he spoke, Chase realized he wanted Ann and her child to be far more than an obligation.

The notion stunned him, shook him to the marrow.

He wanted Ann to be his
wife.
He wanted her to be his partner and his confidante, his companion and his friend. He wanted to make a life with her, have a home and children, something warm and permanent to come home to. The enormity of the difference between what he’d wanted a week ago and what he wanted now rolled over him and left him reeling.

He couldn’t say why he’d changed his mind. Certainly it had something to do with last night—that she’d treated his men with respect, that she’d done her part to fight the fire. That she’d tended him so diligently and offered the comfort he’d needed.

He leaned toward Ann, eager to paint his new vision of their life together in crisp detail. “If this run to Fort Benton is successful”—he could hear the burgeoning excitement in his own voice—“I’ll be in a position to buy a house when we get back. Maybe we could find a place a little way out of the city, something with trees and a garden where children can run and play.”

He could imagine coming home to her in a place like that, imagine her sitting in the shade of the arbor, waiting for him. Imagine how her face would light with welcome when she saw him.

“You’d give me a place like that?” she asked him, an almost unbearable wistfulness dawning in her eyes.

He nodded, encouraged, wanting it to be all right. “It could be a place where both of us—”

“Both of us?”
she echoed, stiffening.

He looked up, confused. Had she thought the house he was describing was just for her? Was her idea of their married life so different from his?

“The way I see it—” He pressed ahead, determined to forestall the resistance he could see hovering on her next breath. “—we took vows. We may not have taken them for the noblest of reasons, but we said the words. We made the promises.”

His mother’s admonitions about the importance of home and family rang in his ears, and Chase realized suddenly how much he’d been dreading facing Lydia Hardesty with what he’d done.

“We made the promises,” he insisted. “And it seems to me, we ought to keep them.”

Ann scrambled to her feet and backed away. “You’ve already got what you want! You got the
Andromeda
!”

“What I’m saying,” he clarified as he rose, “is that as long as we’re married, we should make the best of it. We should live together as man and wife.”

Ann gaped at him, her eyes gone wide.
“As man and
wife!”

From the moment he’d seen her standing at the parlor window, he’d been aware of her as a woman. He’d wondered how the curve of that graceful throat would feel beneath his fingertips, how that primrose-pink mouth would taste if he kissed her. He hadn’t considered what it might be like to bed her.

He hadn’t allowed himself to consider it.

But he sure as hell wasn’t prepared for the horror that dawned across her features at the prospect of being a wife to him. He might not be the kind of man that women mooned and sighed over, but he could be charming if he set his mind to it, damn it. The women he’d slept with over the years had never complained that he was hasty or inconsiderate of their needs. And he’d always either paid them well or bought something nice for them afterwards.