His earlier plan—to keep an eye on her in order to prevent her delving into his business for her damned newspaper.
“There you are.” Mama Rachael paused beside them, then started to move off down the deck. “Such a nice night to be enjoying the moonlight. I’ll run along—”
“No.” Delta’s voice quivered.
Brett held her gaze, watched her turmoil.
“You two enjoy yourselves,” Mama Rachael insisted. “Take in the performance on the docks.”
“No—” Delta began.
Giving her no time to object further, Brett took her elbow in one hand, Mama Rachael’s in the other. “Come ladies, we’ll take in the performance together.”
Later he wondered at his sanity, but at the time his only consideration had been to prolong contact with Delta Jarrett. Why? He could not decide.
It must be self-preservation, he determined, steering the ladies by their elbows through the crowd and onto the docks, where he found them seats on a wooden bench near the front of the area set aside for a stage. With her in view she couldn’t very well snoop into his affairs, he reasoned.
But at the moment she wasn’t snooping into anyone’s affairs. She hadn’t uttered a single word since her last attempt to end their evening together.
Lanterns on poles ringed the area. Spectators approached from all sides, only a small portion of them passengers from the showboat. Men stood about in small groups, while women gossiped and children played tag in and out among the bales of hay and wooden benches. The air hung redolent with the hay and soft smells of summer.
Albert wandered among the crowd, selling tickets. Brett dipped into his pocket and paid for the three of them. When Delta objected, he responded.
“This is my evening, remember?”
She blanched. “Part of your attempt to apologize?”
He glowered at her, angered at her readiness to call his indiscretion to mind. “No, Delta. We’ve moved beyond my feeble attempts to apologize. You know that as well as I do.”
He watched a flicker of acknowledgment flash across her eyes before they again took on the melancholy that gave her such an air of vulnerability. He was hard-pressed not to gather her in his arms and hold her tightly against her fears.
He didn’t doubt a woman’s tendency to fear him. Even though he had never harmed a woman in his life, neither did he usually go out of his way to play the part of a gentlemanly suitor. It rankled him that he was doing so now.
Delta’s chaperon chattered on, oblivious to the tension between the two of them. “We will have our little game tomorrow, won’t we M’sieur Reall, even though we are scheduled to arrive at Cairo before lunchtime?”
“By all means, Madame Myrick. I wouldn’t miss our ti’ game.”
“We shall have to take advantage of every moment. My journey ends at Memphis, you know.”
Something turned sour inside Brett. His eyes darted to Delta’s. He held her gaze. “No, I didn’t know.”
“Not me,” she said. “Mama Rachael is staying behind to visit an old friend. I am—” She stopped talking in midsentence and turned toward the makeshift stage where Zanna had begun to introduce the evening’s performance.
“You’re what?” Brett prompted in her ear.
“I’m not getting off at Memphis,” she replied without turning her attention from the stage.
The melodrama began, but Brett continued to watch Delta, trying to sort out, to put a name to his emotions. His body’s reaction to a beautiful woman was understandable, but whatever the hell was going on inside his brain didn’t make a tinker’s damn worth of sense. He had no business getting involved with a woman, any woman.
But Delta Jarrett wasn’t any woman. And that fact troubled him more than the prospect of running into Canadian Mounties or United States marshals. A premonition clouded his mood. Whatever hold Delta Jarrett had over him would likely not be as easily evaded as the law.
When he saw her run her hands up and down her forearms a couple of times, he removed his jacket and put it around her shoulders.
“I don’t need this.” She reached to remove it, but his hands stilled hers.
He grinned, hoping to coax a smile from her. “That pantywaist of a leading man is about to come onstage,” he whispered. “I don’t want him gawking at your bare shoulders.”
She smiled at that and he settled down beside her to watch the melodrama, conscious primarily of her body so close, yet so unattainable.
“Such a nice gentleman,” Mama Rachael mused, leaning across Delta to pat Brett’s arm. “I told Delta you were a gentleman.”
Delta grimaced beside him, and he laughed. “Thank you, madame. I can use your help in convincing the m’moiselle of that.”
Delta seemed to relax during the performance; she even laughed from time to time. But when the show was over and Mama Rachael announced that she was off to have a nightcap with the Humphrieses and Menefees, Brett felt Delta tense.
“Don’t worry about M’moiselle Jarrett,” he quickly assured Mama Rachael. “I will see her safely to her cabin.”
“No—” Delta began.
Brett gripped her arm. “Oui. I’m your escort for the evening, responsible for seeing you safely back home, which in this case is a stateroom on the cabin deck of the Mississippi Princess, a showboat—”
He continued to prattle in an inane manner until they arrived on the cabin deck. Reaching her stateroom, he drew her around the corner to the stern, where they had met so unceremoniously the evening before.
“Now, do you mind telling me what has you running scared?”
She refused to meet his eye. “Nothing.”
He gripped both her upper arms, his fists easily circling them. “I’m not stupid, Delta. Something I did offended you. And don’t mention last night,” he warned. “What we shared outside the dining hall took us far beyond that event, mistake though it was. What we shared outside the dining hall was the beginning of something neither of us will be able to let go unless we explore it further.”
When she didn’t answer, he pulled her to him and kissed her like before, gently, tenderly, completely. But she resisted, and unlike earlier, he wasn’t able to coax her into yielding to the passion he knew she felt.
She didn’t outright reject him, however. Her hands crept tentatively up his chest. And when he lifted his face inches from hers, her fingers found his lips, traced them, and he saw tears roll down her cheeks.
He kissed them away. “God’s bones, Delta, don’t fight it. I’m not some demon from out of the night.”
She stiffened in his arms as suddenly as if a bolt of lightning had struck her. She pulled away. At first he thought she intended to turn and run from him, like earlier in the dining room. But she didn’t.
Instead she removed his jacket and handed it back to him. “This won’t work, Brett. I can’t see you again.” Before he knew what had happened, she turned and ran for her cabin.
Angrily he headed for his own stateroom on the promenade deck, looking neither left nor right, seeing only Delta’s frightened expression. For it was fear he had seen in her eyes. Fear, stark and cold. He couldn’t recall ever having frightened a woman before, but that fact did nothing to lessen the guilt that gnawed inside him like a beaver felling a pine tree.
And the guilt angered him. It dredged up emotions he had struggled to put behind him for the last ten years. Had he fled his home, forsaken everything he held dear, only to return with nothing but a heart filled with guilt? The same old sickening, debilitating guilt?
Unlocking the hand-painted door to his stateroom, he flung it open and stomped inside. Pierre and Gabriel lounged in the two club chairs, whiskeys in hand.
“What are you doing here, Gabriel?” he snarled. “Did anyone see you come in?”
“Non.” Gabriel exchanged amused glances with Pierre, although Brett could tell immediately that Pierre’s amusement didn’t extend beyond the fake grin on his face.
“You’re getting carried aw
ay with this femme journalist, non?” Pierre questioned.
Brett tossed his jacket across the back of the settee. He crossed the room and poured himself a drink.
Pierre pursued the issue. “It’s dangerous, I tell you, exposing yourself on the front row of a public theatrical performance.”
Brett emptied his glass in one gulp and refilled it. Taking a modest swallow, he set the drink aside, loosened his tie, and began removing the studs from his shirt. “Closer we come to Louisiana, the more care I’ll take. Right now, I think it’s best to keep an eye on her.”
“An eye?” Gabriel taunted. With two fingers he grasped the end of Delta’s white gloves that peeked out of Brett’s jacket pocket and pulled them free. “Keep your eyes on her, oui, my friend. And what else?”
Brett jerked the gloves from Gabriel’s hands.
Gabriel shrugged, lifting his eyebrows suggestively. “What you think, Pierre? They aren’t her drawers, non.”
“For truth, they will be next time,” Pierre muttered.
Suddenly all Brett wanted was to be left alone. Delta’s rejection, for whatever reason, had left him defenseless. He needed to regain his wits. He felt as though he had just come off a big drunk and needed to sleep it off.
Motioning to the door, he half-playfully ordered, “Get out of here. Both of you. I need some sleep.”
The two men rose.
“What about tomorrow?” Pierre questioned at the door.
“Tomorrow?” Brett asked. “Same as always. As soon as we arrive at Cairo, you, Gabriel, will check out the town. If it looks safe, bring two horses to the docks. Pierre and I will ride up to Cave-in-Rock.”
“While I keep my eye on the boat, sure,” Gabriel said.
“And on M’moiselle Jarrett,” Brett added before he even thought. After a brief pause to consider the plan, he continued. “Keep her in your sights at all times. I want to know if she asks questions about me, what she asks, and from whom she seeks such information.”
Delta stood beside Zanna the following morning watching the Mississippi Princess round the hairpin curve called Dogtooth Bend and steam into the port of Cairo, calliope blaring. The town sat on the point of a long, flat V of land where the Ohio River joined the Mississippi. The port was crowded with a fleet of great white boats emblazoned with the letters U.S.M.
“The mail packets,” Albert explained. “The post office’s Great Through Mail has been a big help since the war.”
Delta checked her tapestry portfolio for the article she had written on Cape Girardeau. “I’ll be glad to get to Memphis where we can stay awhile,” she told Zanna. “I’m beginning to feel like a war correspondent, posting articles from a new battlefield every day.”
“After a while it begins to feel like a battle,” Zanna agreed. “Three days in one place will definitely be a luxury.” She handed Delta a basket the chef had prepared for their lunch. “Time for me to go to work.”
While Zanna organized the cast for the parade through the streets of Cairo, Delta studied the passing countryside—trees and water as far as the eye could see. She tried to recall the captain’s instructions about her interviews. First, she would meet with the postmaster. He—Captain Kaney was certain—could give her names of other citizens of the fast-growing metropolis to interview.
Nat spoke from her left shoulder. “See where the two rivers merge?”
Looking down, Delta watched muddy red and brown waters swirl together like batter in one of Ginny’s marble cakes. Her emotions eddied in much the same manner. Nat made her nervous, but she decided it wasn’t so much Nat himself, as the thought that Brett might be watching them.
The brass band blared; the boat nudged the dock. Deckhands scurried to lower the gangplank. Nat took her elbow and ushered her into the crowd of cast members.
“You and that gambler were getting thick as thieves last night,” he observed following her onto the rickety gangplank.
“We certainly were not.”
“I saw him put his coat around your shoulders. I’ll bet you let him kiss you goodnight.”
She turned to glare at him, but Brett’s words when he covered her shoulders came to mind and she smiled in spite of herself. “That’s none of your business, Nat.” Gathering her wits, she lowered her voice. “If you’d tend to your own business, you wouldn’t have reason to worry about mine.”
“My business?” he called above the band. “You mean Elyse?”
She nodded. “Did you have that picnic?”
His grip tightened on her elbow. When she looked up to protest, he was grinning. “Now, that’s my business.”
“Good.”
“Seriously, Delta, I hate to see you get mixed up with that gambler.”
“Why?”
“I told you he’s dangerous.”
They had stepped off the gangplank onto the dock when he made the pronouncement. Zanna was issuing last-minute instructions for the parade and the concert at the far corner of the city hall. The fiddler had taken up his usual place beside the gangplank, plying his instrument with such vigor that bow strings flew about his face.
Delta stopped dead in her tracks. “How is he dangerous?”
“He just is,” Nat hedged. “I can tell a criminal when I see one. Reall’s got that hunted look about him.”
“Do you know for a fact he’s a wanted man?” Passengers jostled her from behind, pushing her toward Nat, who caught her arm.
“Not for fact, but—”
“Then don’t spread gossip,” she demanded above the cacophony of crowd noise, band music, and fiddle.
Nat grinned. “So, you are taken with him.”
“No, Nat, but I won’t hear a person’s reputation sullied by someone who doesn’t know the facts. How would you like it if people spread the rumor that you’re a Casanova?”
He squeezed her elbow. “If you see me as a Casanova, Delta, I must be making headway.”
Before she could dispute his deduction, Zanna thrust a bundle of playbills into Nat’s arms. He scowled. “I wanted to show Delta Cave-in-Rock.”
“‘The play’s the thing,’ as Mr. Shakespeare said. You were hired to be a member of this cast.”
“Zanna—” Nat objected.
“We all double, Nat. Since you refuse to don a uniform and double in brass, you’ll have to double in promotion.”
“What is Cave-in-Rock?” Delta asked after Nat sauntered off and she and Zanna fell into step behind the band.
“It’s a large cave in the bluffs outside town. Actually, it’s quite a ride, I hear. Indians used to think the Great Spirit resided there. Recently it’s been home to outlaw gangs who raid boats along the Ohio River.”
“That’s right,” Delta recalled. “Someone mentioned it at dinner the other night.” She recalled, as well, where the goodly portion of her mind had been during that discussion—on Brett Reall. He had just become morose upon learning that she wrote for the Sun. A fact that had led her to believe him to be exactly what Nat claimed—a wanted man. A criminal.
Criminals. Outlaw gangs. She hadn’t dared to admit it to Nat, nor to another living soul, but she too felt certain Brett was a hunted man. The things he had said, why, he had almost admitted as much.
She had no business getting involved with such a man. Even though, as Mama Rachael had claimed, he knew how to act the gentleman, no telling what sort of criminal he would turn out to be.
But the truly frightening thing was the way she had begun to connect him to Calico Jack in her nightmare. She knew she shouldn’t allow herself to make such an outlandish association. She knew it was only coincidence that his lips were the same lips she saw in her dream, his kisses the same tender kisses as in her dream, that even his curses were uttered with the same oath.
His eyes weren’t blue, of course, like Calico Jack’s. And he didn’t brandish a sixteenth-century cutlass.
But he made her experience the emotions from her dream—frightening emotions that burned with the heat of passion, that pull
ed her toward some unknown pinnacle like a moth drawn helplessly to a deadly flame.
Some call him a pirate.
Reason told her Brett Reall had nothing to do with her nightmare. But he had brought the dream to life, had given it a physical dimension, a fact that would make it even more difficult to rid herself of the nightmare. No, she had been right to end the relationship before it began.
But it had begun. Following Zanna away from the showboat, she knew as much. Suddenly a familiar prickling tingled along the back of her neck, and she swirled to look back at the boat. Without thinking, she searched the decks for him, certain she would see him standing at the rail staring after her.
But he wasn’t there. And she didn’t see anything more of him for several hours.
By the time the parade and free concert were over and the playbills distributed, Delta had posted her article on Cape Girardeau to Hollis and conducted her interview with the postmaster in charge of the Great Through Mail. She joined Zanna and the cast on a grassy knoll opposite the city hall, where they spread a blanket and ate a leisurely lunch prepared by the Mississippi Princess’s chef—fried chicken, cold potato pancakes, apple turnovers, and lemonade. The sky was blue overhead, the sun warm, and Delta felt her sleepless nights begin to catch up with her. She yawned.
“Why don’t you catch a catnap while we set up for tonight’s show?” Zanna suggested while Delta helped her return the dirty dishes to the basket to carry back on board.
“I need something else for my article,” she objected. “The postmaster told me about an old stagecoach stop outside town. I think I’ll ride out there and take a look.”
“I’ll come with you,” Nat suggested.
Zanna shook her head. “We’ll never erect the set by showtime without your help, Nat.” She glanced around the group, musing, “Who else could ride with you?”
“I don’t need a chaperon, Zanna. I’m perfectly capable of hiring a horse and riding about a city as civilized as Cairo by myself. Besides, with the showboat in town everyone will be too occupied at the docks to pay attention to one lone woman.”
Sunrise Surrender--Jarrett Family Sagas--Book Three Page 9
