Morning Song (11 page)

To him, such a courtesy was commonplace. But Jessie, for the first time in her life, felt like a real young lady. Not like an unattractive, oversized tomboy at all.

If anyone should be so impertinent as to ask, you can say you slipped away to repin your hair," he was saying. Jessie nodded, once again unable to think of anything to say.

Faint strains of music from the house drifted out over the gardens. The scents of roses and lilacs vied with each other to form a thick, heady perfume. A raindrop fell, then another.

"Let's get you inside. It's going to rain." 89

Ruthlessly hurried, Jessie scarcely had time to worry about how she would react if she came face-to-face with Mitch or Jeanine Scott before he had whisked her onto the portico under the sheltering overhang. No sooner had they gotten under cover than it began to rain. In moments the gentle spattering had turned to silvery sheets, and the smell of rain overrode the perfume of the flowers.

"God, I hate that smell," Stuart Edwards muttered, and with a hand in the small of Jessie's back he urged her through the open French window.

XI

Inside, nothing had changed. Jessie hesitated, moving imperceptibly closer to Stuart Edwards' side as her eyes grew accustomed to the bright glow of the chandeliers. The band still played gaily. In the center of the floor, couples laughed and twirled. The gossiping matrons still sat in their chairs along the wall, the gentlemen held court by the punch bowl, and Miss Flora and Miss Laurel huddled near the opposite wall in the throes of what looked like a spirited argument.

Jessie glanced up at the man beside her. The candlelight played across his face, and for the first time that day she really noticed the scratches she had inflicted. They ran three abreast down each lean cheek from just below his eyes to his mouth, not as raw and red as they had been the night before, but definitely there. She wondered how he had explained them away.

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He must have felt her eyes on him, because just then he looked down at her. One corner of his mouth quirked up. The skin around those sky-blue eyes crinkled, and he smiled. Despite the scratches, the man was devastatingly handsome when he smiled.

"The rain's made your hair curl all around your face. It looks charming." It was a conspiratorial whisper, designed to hearten her, Jessie knew.

"It always curls. It's the bane of my life." Jessie was speaking at random, grateful for his effort but too nervous to take any pleasure from the compliment. Her eyes searched the crowded room. Celia danced by in the arms of Dr. Maguire, wiggling her fingers at Stuart and giving Jessie an appraising look that suddenly turned hard. But Jessie, preoccupied, scarcely noticed Celia. She was looking for Mitch, and found him, as she had expected, dancing with Jeanine Scott. Mitch saw her at the same time that she saw him. Lifting a hand in greeting, he bent his head to whisper something in Jeanine's ear. Jessie shuddered.

"I think they're coming over here," she muttered frantically, clutching at Stuart Edwards' sleeve.

"Then we'll just have to move, won't we?" he said cheerfully, and before Jessie knew what he was about, he had her right hand in his and his arm around her waist and was sweeping her onto the dance floor.

"What are you doing?" she hissed, effectively distracted from Mitch's doings as she stumbled over her rescuer's booted feet and all but fell to her knees. Only his arm around her kept her upright.

"It's called the waltz, I believe," he said, straight-faced. Luckily his hold on her was viselike for all its deceptive ease. She had no choice but to follow his movements. To her shock, she found 91

herself being twirled across the floor in what she hoped was an approximate duplication of the other dancing couples'

movements.

"Mr. Edwards, I can't dance!"

"Since we're soon to be closely related, I suggest you call me Stuart. And I may be mistaken, but you seem to be dancing quite adequately."

He smiled down at her charmingly. She stepped on his toe.

"Careful." He'd said the same thing to her in exactly the same tone once before. The memory threw off her budding attempts to match her steps to his. She stepped on his toe again, muttered a shamefaced apology—and found herself whirled about in a series of breathtaking turns that left her so dizzy that all she could do was cling to him, praying that she did not look as disconcerted as she felt.

She was as close to him as she had been that first night on the veranda when he had saved her from falling down the steps, and her perceptions of him were every bit as acute.

Tonight he smelled of rum punch and rain. His shoulder beneath her hand was wide and strong. Her eyes were on a level with his neck. It was very brown against the whiteness of his cravat. A faint black stubble shadowed the strong lines of his chin and jaw. His mouth was beautifully shaped, his lips a brownish shade of rose and firm-looking. His nose was straight, his cheekbones rounded and high.

Preoccupied with her inventory of his features, Jessie let her gaze drift higher. With a shock she saw that he was watching her, his sky-blue eyes twinkling with amusement. Jessie blinked, embarrassed to be caught looking at him, and hastily dropped her eyes. Her loss of concentration caused her to stumble over his 92

feet again. His arm tightened around her waist, holding her upright.

And it was then that Jessie made an appalling discovery. Celia had said that Stuart Edwards sent shivers down her spine. Suddenly, vividly, Jessie knew just what Celia meant. She dared not raise her eyes above his chin, terrified that her new awareness of him must be written on her countenance for him to read. Stiffening in his arms, she held herself as far away from him as she could, only to have him pull her closer impatiently. There was still the prescribed amount of space between them, but Jessie was acutely conscious of the strength in the arms that held her, of the hard muscles that lay beneath the immaculate linen shirt, of the sheer overwhelming masculinity of the man.

Forever afterwards, when Jessie remembered that dance, she remembered it as the time when she truly began to grow up.

"Smile, Jessie, or you'll have everyone thinking you don't like me," he chided in her ear, and twirled her about in the first of another series of dizzying turns.

"What else could she do? Jessie smiled.

XII

Veni, vidi, vici:
I came, I saw, I conquered. Julius Caesar had said the words once, and Clive McClintock repeated them with silent satisfaction as he stood solemnly before the flowerbedecked altar of the small church, watching his soon-to-be bride walk down the aisle behind her stepdaughter. The wedding march swelled, the spectators leaned forward the better to see 93

Celia in her bridal garb, and Clive smiled. Everything he had always wanted was headed his way.

As prizes went, Celia Lindsay and her plantation did not quite equal the riches of ancient Rome, but she'd do. Oh, yes, she would do very nicely. She was lovely, well bred, malleable, a lady. And rich. Very rich. Land rich. Without Mimosa as an incentive, Clive would never have offered marriage. Bed, maybe, but not marriage. He supposed, in a way, that the stepdaughter had been right when she had called him a fortune hunter. But he meant to see that Celia did not lose anything in the deal. Or the stepdaughter, either, if it came to that. He meant to do his damnedest to make Celia a good husband, and if ever a chit had needed the proverbial iron hand in the velvet glove, it was Jessica Lindsay. They'd both benefit from having him take control of their plantation and their lives.

The way things had worked out was nothing more or less than poetic justice. He'd vowed, that never-to-be-forgotten morning on the deck of the
Mississippi Belle,
that someone would pay for stealing his money. And that someone had turned out to be Stuart Edwards, who had unwittingly repaid what he had stolen by giving Clive something he no longer had any use for—his identity. And the unused portion of his life.

Assuming Edwards' identity was not something that Clive had originally set out to do, of course. Hoping to find anything that would lead him to Hulton and his money, he had shrugged off all offers of treatment for his hand to conduct a furious search of Edwards' belongings. He'd found a little cash, a few mementos—

and a letter. The letter he'd pocketed for its address: Tulip Hill Plantation in Yazoo Valley, Mississippi. Perhaps Hulton was headed there.

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Then Luce, with a doctor in tow, had found him and insisted that he let the man look at his hand. For days after that, Clive had done nothing but curse the heavens, drink, and search for Hulton and his money, both of which seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

When Clive finally got around to reading the letter and learned that it was from Edwards' two elderly (and slightly dotty, from the sound of them) aunts, he'd nearly crumpled the thing up and tossed it away as useless. But for some reason he'd kept it. Only later, after the best doctors in New Orleans had assured him that they'd done all they could, but that it was doubtful he'd ever recover full mobility in the fingers of his right hand, did he remember Edwards' aunts.

The knife thrust had severed nerves, muscles, tendons. He would suffer some degree of paralysis in that hand for the rest of his life.

A gambler's hands were his livelihood. Since boyhood Clive had been able to do anything with cards; sleight of hand was something at which he'd excelled. The quick dexterity of his fingers had enabled the onetime "dirty bowery boy" to provide himself with the trappings of a comfortable, sometimes even luxurious, existence. A few more years, and he would have been set for life.

But no longer. His means of earning a living had been stolen from him along with his money. Losing the mobility in his right hand was far worse than being robbed.

It was only after weeks spent alternating between drunken selfpity and even more drunken rages that the idea had come to him. He had searched frantically for the letter and read it again, carefully this time.

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Edwards' aunts owned a cotton plantation, which undoubtedly meant that they were rich. And they were prepared to leave the whole kit and caboodle to their nephew if he would only come and visit them. They were old and lonely, and he was their last surviving male relative. They loved him already, although they hadn't seen him since he was a babe in arms.

There was more on that subject, three pages worth with the lines crossed and recrossed so many times that it made making sense of the letter difficult. But Clive managed to grasp what to him were the essential facts: two not-quite-sane old ladies, with no other relatives in the world, were prepared to leave their (vast) worldly goods to their nephew if he would only visit them. Unfortunately for them, their nephew was dead. But Clive was not. Stuart Edwards had robbed him of forty-five thousand dollars and his livelihood. Stuart Edwards owed him. Clive never let a debt go uncollected if he could help it. That there would be a few unanticipated problems in the execution of his scheme Clive never doubted, but he also never doubted that he could overcome them. In his many years of living by his wits, he'd learned, by and large, that people saw only what they expected to see, and believed most everything they were told. If he were to present himself to the two doddering old ladies at Tulip Hill Plantation as their prodigal nephew, who was there to say him nay?

Racking his brain for what he could remember of the dear departed, Clive recalled that Stuart Edwards had been tall, with black hair. Clive had no idea of the color of the fellow's eyes, but if the old ladies hadn't seen their thieving nephew since he was an infant, they probably wouldn't know that detail, either. 96

Besides, the chances that Edwards' eyes had been blue were fifty percent. Not bad odds, if it came to that.

And if there should by chance be any question about his identity, Clive had the letter, addressed to himself as Stuart Edwards in Charleston, South Carolina, as proof that he was whom he claimed to be. That and an agile brain, which had never in twenty-eight years failed him. Deceiving two old ladies should be ridiculously easy. Besides, he'd probably make them a better nephew than Stuart Edwards, thief and would-be murderer, ever had.

Clive had planned to visit with them for a while, establish himself in the neighborhood as Stuart Edwards, and then, when the old ladies passed on to their reward (from the sound of their letter, it couldn't be too long), come back and collect his inheritance with the entire community to vouch for who he was. The best plans were always simple ones.

Indeed, everything had gone even better than he had expected. Miss Flora and Miss Laurel had fallen on his neck from the moment their majordomo had announced who he was, and accepted him instantly as their nephew. Not a single question had been raised as to his identity.

The only catch was that the two old ladies, for all their dottiness, seemed to be in the best of health. It was brought home forcibly to Clive (from the Misses Edwards' chatter about their long-lived antecedents) that it might be a considerable number of years before his scheme could come to ultimate fruition. Not that he wished the old ladies any harm, but . . . And then he had met Celia Lindsay, wealthy widow.

Until her exact marital and financial status had been made clear to him by Miss Flora, the cannier of his two aunts, Clive had 97

paid her scarcely any attention. Her looks were well enough, but certainly nothing to catch his eye amongst a bevy of dewy-fresh debutantes.

But a wealthy widow had much to recommend her. And a wealthy widow who was doing her utmost to lure him into her bed made it almost ridiculously easy.

Clive was nothing if not adaptable. Instead of waiting for the Misses Edwards to pass on to their reward, he would change his plans. He would turn his much-heralded charm on Mrs. Lindsay, sweep her off her feet, and wed her and her plantation without further ado. Thus would he acquire the land he had always dreamed of, and a way of life he had never even thought to aspire to.

He quite liked the idea of Clive McClintock—no, make that Stuart Edwards—Esquire, gentleman planter.