But this time she didn’t soften. In fact, he thought she stiffened slightly, as if in silent resistance to his charm. He felt a faint stirring of alarm. If Sudie wasn’t on his side anymore... But that was ridiculous. He’d always been able to get around her before. He was just out of practice.
He reached out a hand to her. “You’re about the only woman I know who gets prettier as she gets older, Sudie. How do you do it?”
As he had expected, she smiled, although it wasn’t the smile he was used to. This one was harder than the one he remembered, but maybe she’d grown hard while he was away. But she took his hand in both of hers. Her palms were rough and callused, just the same as he remembered, and he found that comforting.
“You always did like pretty womens,” she observed.
“But you’re my favorite,” he swore. The only one who had ever truly cared about him.
“I didn’t know you was courtin’ Miss Lori ’fore you left,” she said, and her smile vanished.
Bitch! What business of hers was it? But of course he didn’t say that. She was still his only true ally in this house.
“I wouldn’t call it courting exactly,” he said, loathe to have even a slave think he’d ever been seriously interested in that little whore.
Still holding his hand in one of hers, she reached over with her other one and stroked his forehead. “But you said she promise to wait for you. She must’ve thought you was gonna marry her.”
He frowned, remembering how he’d thought the same thing, at least once or twice. The memory of sweet little Lori had been a comfort to a lonely soldier. But she’d forgotten him the minute he was out of sight!
“It was always Adam with her, wasn’t it?” he said, not realizing he’d spoken aloud until Sudie replied.
“Why’d she take up with you then if she wanted your brother?”
Stupid bitch! All women were stupid bitches, no matter what color they were! “Because she’s a lying little whore, that’s why! Always making eyes at Adam, but when I wanted to meet her, she came, didn’t she?”
“You met her some place?”
Eric gave her a disgusted glance. “You don’t think I went calling on her, do you? A Ross, going to see a piece of trash like that? Of course I met her some place!”
“I bet she was easy to trick,” Sudie said, and when he looked up at her, he saw the admiration in her eyes.
He grinned, basking in it. “So easy, I almost felt guilty!”
“How’d you do it?” she asked, leaning forward eagerly, still holding his hand and stroking his face, just the way she’d always done when he was a little boy.
“I gave her a note,” he admitted, almost chuckling with the recollection of how easy it had been.
“You must’ve said some pretty things to make her forget about Adam,” she guessed.
But he had been much more clever than that! “She though the note was from Adam,” he bragged. “She thought he was the one who wanted to meet her!”
Sudie’s eyes widened with surprise and, he sensed instantly, disapproval.
“What kind of a girl would meet a man alone?” he demanded in his own defense. “I told you, she’s just a cheap little whore. And when I showed up instead of Adam, she didn’t mind a bit! She was just as happy to spread her legs for me, wasn’t she?”
“Was she?” Sudie asked, still frowning.
“What did she tell you?” he asked, suddenly suspicious.
“That you forced her,” Sudie said.
“Lying little bitch!” he fairly shouted, bolting upright on the bed. “I never forced a woman in my life! Oh, she put up a little fuss—they always do so they can claim they’re ladies—but she wanted it. She wanted it more than I did! And when it was over, it was me she loved, not Adam! And she said she’d wait for me, that lying bitch.”
“There now, don’t get worked up,” she soothed, easing him back down again. “You’ll bring the fever back. Just lay still for a while. Then I’ll fix you a nice hot bath and bring you some clean clothes. If you’re gonna be up and around, you gotta be decent,” she added with an odd smile.
She looked strange, as if she wanted to cry even though her lips were smiling, but Eric figured he must be mistaken. Sudie wasn’t upset. Why should she be? Gently, she laid his hand back down on top of the blanket and turned away from the bed. She closed the door softly behind her when she went out, just the way she always did. So he was right and nothing was wrong.
Except that Adam had married Lori McClintock.
But maybe that wasn’t so bad, he decided, as he considered the situation anew. No matter what Eric might have thought when he’d been lonely and facing death, he never would have actually married Lori. Only a fool like Adam would marry to get what he wanted from a woman. But since Adam had been fool enough to marry her and bring her to live right in his house, now Eric could have her whenever he wanted her.
Lacing his fingers behind his head, he laid back and considered the delightful possibilities. Oh, yes, and wouldn’t she be grateful to have a real man again instead of a worthless cripple?
***
“What’s she doing here?” Lori demanded the instant she saw the slave girl Bessie had brought with her.
The girl, whose name she knew was Lucy because she was one of the potential wet nurses Sudie had presented to her weeks ago, had brought her own baby, and now stood uncertainly in the doorway.
“Mr. Ross sent her to feed Matthew,” Bessie explained.
“I’m feeding Matthew!” Lori insisted angrily and snatched her baby up from the basket where he’d been lying and hugged him to her, lest someone try to take him away.
“You won’t be for long if you don’t start eating,” Bessie warned. “I told you I’m afraid you’ll lose your milk, and then you’ll both get sick. If you want to make yourself sick, that’s your business, but you ain’t dragging a poor, helpless baby with you!”
“I’m not sick!” Lori insisted, feeling something suspiciously like panic rising painfully in her chest.
“Not yet, but if you don’t start eating—”
“I’ll eat! I’ll force myself! Adam Ross isn’t going to take my baby away from me!”
“Nobody’s gonna take him anywhere,” Bessie soothed her. “Lucy here’s gonna stay with us and—”
“No, she isn’t! You send her right back where she came from! We don’t need anything from Adam Ross!”
For a moment, Lori was afraid Bessie would point out that they were, in fact, dependent upon him for almost everything, but mercifully, she didn’t. Instead, she turned to Lucy. “Why don’t you wait outside for a minute while I talk to Miss Lori? Tell the driver not to leave just yet, until we get things settled.”
“You might as well tell them both to leave right now,” Lori said before Lucy was even out the door. “Because I’m not going to let her nurse my baby!”
“Then I better see you swallow some food, because if I don’t, I’m gonna have that big fella driving the wagon come in here and take Matthew away from you by force!”
“No!” Lori cried, hugging Matthew so tightly he squalled in protest, but Bessie only glared at her, and Lori was very much afraid she would be as good as her word. “All right,” she agreed at last. “I’ll... try.”
“Sit down,” Bessie commanded her. “We’ll start with some mush. That oughta go down easy.”
Lori nearly gagged at the mere thought and instinctively laid a hand over the burning ache in her stomach that had prevented her from eating for almost three days, ever since she’d understood just what kind of a man Adam Ross really was.
In a moment, Bessie set a bowl of the yellow goo in front of her. It was still slightly warm from breakfast, but it didn’t look the least bit appetizing. Bessie stuck a wooden spoon in it and lifted it to Lori’s mouth.
Once again, she felt the urge to gag, but she shifted Matthew into the crook of her left arm and snatched the spoon from Bessie. Giving her stepmother one last, defiant glare, she put th
e spoon in her mouth and forced herself to swallow the unappetizing glop of mush.
For one awful moment she thought it might come right back up again, but she made herself swallow a second one before that could happen. And when they both stayed down, she swallowed a third and a fourth spoonful. She kept glaring at Bessie who watched her as if she didn’t trust her for one instant, until, to Lori’s surprise, the bowl was empty.
Only then did Bessie sigh with apparent relief. “Well, now, if I’d knowed all it took was to get you good and mad, I could’ve done that days ago,” she observed and went outside.
She heard Bessie speaking to Lucy and Oscar and, in another moment, heard the wagon driving away.
“How could you have done that?” Lori demanded when Bessie came back inside, alone. “How could you have gone to him behind my back?”
“I had to do something before you starved yourself and that baby to death, didn’t I?”
Lori didn’t think she’d ever been this furious. “I wasn’t starving! Did he think that if he took Matthew, I’d come back to him?”
“I told you, the girl was going to stay here with us. He don’t have no expectation you’re coming back to him.”
“Well, he better not!” Lori fumed, jumping up to pace. She shifted Matthew to her shoulder and began to pat him when he fussed at the change of position. “That... that cad!” she exclaimed furiously. “That low life deceiver!”
“You can swear if it’ll make you feel better,” Bessie said mildly.
“That son of a bitch!” Lori said, just to prove she could, no matter what Bessie thought. “How dare he pretend to be so good and kind and such a perfect gentleman?”
“You think he was pretending?” Bessie asked, taking the seat on the bench that Lori had vacated and watching her pace with apparent interest.
“Of course he was pretending! He wanted me to trust him! He wanted me to believe in him!”
“I expect he wanted you to love him, too.”
“Yes, he did!” Lori agreed in outrage. “Because he thought if I loved him, I wouldn’t care how he treated me!”
“And he was pretty mean to you, I guess. He beat you and starved you and kept you locked in your room and—”
“There’s worse things than that!” Lori insisted, wishing her face didn’t feel quite so hot.
“Is there?” Bessie asked. “Like what?”
“You know what! He didn’t believe me!”
Bessie nodded sagely. “He thought you was just a silly girl who let herself be seduced by his brother. But he could’ve thought worse of you, you know. He could’ve thought you was a cheap little hussy who wasn’t worth saving, but he didn’t, did he? And he could’ve thought he was too good for a girl like you, especially one who was already carrying another man’s baby. Instead, he married you. Took you for his wife and gave you and your baby his name and a fine home and treated you with as much respect as if you’d been his first choice of a wife.”
“Not with that much respect!” Lori defended herself. “I told him what really happened, but he didn’t believe me! He didn’t trust me!”
Bessie shrugged, as if this was of little importance, making Lori even angrier. “So he was wrong. Maybe he was even stupid and foolish. Lots of men is from time to time, Lori. Lots of women, too.”
“What does that mean?” Lori asked suspiciously.
“It means you was wrong, too, when you figured Adam Ross was perfect. He ain’t. He’s just a man, like all the rest, and he’s gonna be wrong sometimes. He’s even gonna hurt the people he loves sometimes, but that don’t make him evil or even a little bit bad. That just makes him human.”
“He betrayed me!”
“How? Because he made a mistake?”
“He took his brother’s word over mine!”
“He’s known his brother a whole lot longer than he’s known you,” Bessie pointed out.
“Then he should know what a liar Eric is!”
“How do he know you ain’t a liar, too? And you got more reason to lie about what happened than Eric did, too.”
“Stop it, Bessie! Stop being so...” She caught herself when she realized she was going to say “reasonable.”
“I just figured you needed something else to think about while you was planning ways to murder Adam Ross.”
“Bessie!” Lori cried, appalled. “I never—”
“Sure you did,” Bessie told her with a grin. “But that’s all right. Ain’t no wife in the world hasn’t given some thought to the matter of doing away with her husband. It can help you through the rough patches, so long as you don’t go through with it. I just thought maybe you’d like some reasons not to murder him, too. Remembering the good times might help some. If there was good times,” she added innocently.
“Of course there were!” Lori exclaimed, then caught herself again. She didn’t want to defend Adam Ross. She didn’t even want to think well of him after what he’d done to her. In spite of her intentions, however, she began to remember. The way he’d been with Matthew, so gentle and tender. The way he’d been with her, so patient and kind when she’d been terrified of his touch. The way he’d presented her to his friends, as if she really had been his first choice of a wife, and not someone he’d taken out of pity and duty.
Bessie was right. He had been good to her. Not perfect, perhaps, but then, who could have expected him to be? And when she’d left him, hadn’t he come after her? As if he missed her, when another man might have counted his blessings at being rid of a wife he’d never wanted in the first place.
“He wants to come see you,” Bessie said.
Once again, Lori felt the panic swelling within her. “Not yet,” she pleaded, holding Matthew more tightly to her. “I’m not ready to see him yet.”
“Don’t make him wait too long,” Bessie advised. “He might decide he’s better off without all the aggravation.”
***
Unable to concentrate on any one thing, Adam had been wandering aimlessly around the property all afternoon, eve since Oscar and Lucy had returned from the Mcclintock cabin to report that Lori had refused to allow Lucy to stay and Bessie had sent no message summoning him. He’d been pretending to supervise the various tasks but really just making a general nuisance of himself, harassing his slaves who were only trying to do their work in peace.
Finally, he reluctantly returned to the house where he found Sudie waiting anxiously for him.
“Massa Adam, can I talk to you?” she asked.
Adam couldn’t ever recall seeing her like this. She looked shaken and unsure of herself, as if her entire world had suddenly crumbled around her.
“Are you all right?” he asked in concern, instinctively taking her arm. “Is it Eric?” A worse thought occurred to him. “Is it Lori? My God, has something happened to her?”
“No,” she assured him. “Not that I know of. Please, can we go to your office?”
This must be serious indeed if she needed privacy.
“Certainly.” He held onto her arm, convinced somehow that she needed his support as they made their way down the hall to his office door.
“Sit down,” he urged her when they were inside, closing the door behind them.
Ordinarily, she would have protested. It wasn’t proper for her to sit in her master’s presence, but this time she sat without a word, sinking down onto the sofa as if she no longer trusted her legs to hold her.
“What is it, Sudie? Is Eric worse?” She had always been so devoted to his brother, this was the only thing he could imagine that could have upset her so much.
She looked up at him with eyes that seemed to have seen all the suffering in the world. “He ain’t sick, if that’s what you mean.”
“Then what is it?” he asked, sitting down beside her.
She had to swallow before she could speak. “He told me what happened.”
“What happened?” Adam echoed in confusion.
“With Miss Lori.”
Adam felt as if
all the blood in his body had suddenly turned to ice, and he couldn’t seem to draw a breath. He didn’t want to hear this, he knew he didn’t, but he couldn’t summon his voice to stop her.
“It was like she said. He forced her.” Speaking the words was an agony to her, but hearing them was worse for Adam. Dear God, what had he done?
“He admitted that?” Adam asked incredulously when he had finally found his voice again.
Sudie shook her head. “He still don’t think he done anything wrong. But from what he said...” She lifted a trembling hand to cover her mouth, as if she couldn’t bear to repeat the words.
“What did he say?” Adam asked, knowing he didn’t really want to know, certain the knowledge would only cause him pain, but equally certain that he deserved to feel it.
“He tricked her.”
Adam closed his eyes, remembering how Lori had told him the same thing and knowing now how she must have felt when he didn’t believe her. “How did he trick her?”
“Oh, Massa, I can’t!” she cried, laying her hand on his arm, as if she could somehow restrain him from making her tell.
Every instinct begged him to do so, but he said, “Tell me. Sudie. I have to know.”
Her eyes had filled with tears, and he watched in horrified fascination as one spilled over and slid down her cheek. An ancient memory stirred, one he’d never allowed himself to recall, and he knew that he had seen Sudie cry before, very long ago. He’d simply refused to remember because he’d also refused to remember why she had been crying.
“He give her a note. Ask her to meet him, except...”
“Except what?” he prodded as terror tied his insides into knots.
“Except she think the note from you. She had feelings for you, and you was the one she think she gonna meet that day.”
He made a strangled sound of anguish, too horrified at first to even comprehend. But his mind was too quick, and before he was ready for the onslaught of guilt, he understood it all. Lori had loved him. How many times had she told him that? And how many times had he refused to believe her. But she hadn’t told him about the note. Dear God, she could have destroyed him with that, but she hadn’t said a word! Why? Why had she protected him like that? He had no idea, but for a moment he thought the agony of it would kill him just the same.
From This Day Forward Page 33
