by Rainbow
“A convict,” he said bitterly. “Lower than any animal. We were treated worse than one. An animal has value. Even a slave has value. We had none. The one objective was to strip every vestige of humanity from us. And they did. There’s so damned little left, so damned little.” He hesitated, his arms touching her so tentatively that she wanted to scream at him. She longed for that arrogant assurance that had enraged her so many times. She didn’t know how she could bear the pain of this other man, for it now was equally hers. She waited for him to continue, for more words that she knew were bottled in him.
“Could you really love a convict, a murderer?” The words were said almost indifferently, as if he knew the answer.
“I love you,” she said in an even voice, made so by immense will. “I will always love you. There’s nothing you can tell me, nothing that you can do, that will change that.”
“I don’t want you to love me,” he said roughly. “Don’t you understand? I don’t want you to. I tried like hell to stay away from you. I thought if I told you—”
“That I would run and hide? Dear Lord, don’t you know me better than that…now?”
One side of his lips twitched unwillingly. “Perhaps,” he admitted, partially to himself. “You don’t run from much, do you?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say that,” she replied with an uncertain smile. “It seems I ran from you several times.”
“You should keep running,” he warned.
“No. I learned my lesson when I slipped into the Mississippi. I’ve never been quite as cold…or as frightened, except perhaps when I was with you and those cold eyes bore into me.”
He arched one of his eyebrows. “They are the same eyes.”
“But not so cold,” she teased. “Not quite.”
“You’re changing the subject, damn it. I’ve never seen anyone quite as adept at it as you.”
And she was. She wanted to drive the shadows from his face, the harsh memories from his mind. Part of her wanted to know more, but he had exorcised enough devils this one night. Her hands went to his shirt, and started unbuttoning it.
He wanted to stop her, and then shrugged. He couldn’t hide his back from her forever. But it wasn’t, he immediately discovered, his back she was interested in. Her tongue was already licking the dark hair on his chest, her hands caressing the back of his neck. With a groan of capitulation, he lowered her gently to the bed.
Hours later, warm and contented with love, they lay on the bed holding hands. Their lovemaking had never been quite as exquisite now that secrets were shared, confidence given and understood. The actual consummation was secondary to the comfort, the quiet joy they took in merely touching, of being truly together without fear or suspicion, without haunting pasts lurking in the shadow. There was a freedom this time in their love, a readiness to say what needed to be said, to whisper love words.
As she did now. “I love you, Quinn.”
Only a remnant of his fears remained, nagging in the back of his mind. People close to me die. He tried to ignore it. For the first time since he was twenty-three, the sun was shining again. He could not give it up. He leaned over and nuzzled her mouth. “Would you marry me, Meredith?” The words came without intent, exploding from his heart.
She lifted her head and looked up, her eyes wide with surprise. But there was a sudden blazing joy in them too.
“I know you still want to find your sister, but if all goes well…” His voice trailed off. “There could be a child, Meredith.”
“That’s a lovely thought,” she said. “I believed I would never have children.”
“What about your Mr. MacIntosh?” he teased.
“I gave it a passing thought,” she retorted. “Especially after I met you. It seemed the only way to get rid of you.”
“That bad?” he asked.
“You were horrid.”
“I can still be horrid.” He grinned.
She nuzzled his chest some more. “I know,” she muttered. “But there are certain other abilities that…tend to outweigh some unfortunate character traits.”
He chuckled. “Would you like to enumerate them?”
“I like the way you laugh. When you mean it.”
“And when I don’t?”
She frowned. “It can be quite…chilling.”
“Good,” he said with satisfaction as one of his fingers played with the corner of her mouth. “What other things?”
She nibbled on him. “You taste good.”
“Hmmm. I like being tasted.”
“And you have an adorable dimple.”
He frowned at that. He had never liked that damned dimple, but then she lifted her head and licked it, and he started to reconsider.
When she finished, she looked up. “And then there’s that icy stare. You are very good at icy stares.”
“Not anymore,” he corrected her ruefully as he tried one and failed miserably. Quinn was amazed at himself. He had never felt so relaxed. He delighted in their light bantering, the soft warm companionship of it, the quiet but intense pleasure that flowed between them.
He leaned over and kissed the corners of her eyes in a wondering, disbelieving kind of way. “You didn’t answer me,” he finally said softly.
“Which particular question?” she whispered back.
“Will you marry me? You keep changing the subject.”
“Yes, oh yes,” she said slowly.
“Yes, you will marry me or yes, you keep changing the subject?”
“Yes, I will marry you.” This time she carefully pronounced each word.
“And you’ll tell me more about those things that outweigh my more ‘unfortunate traits’?”
She started to do just that, but then his tongue licked the nape of her neck until she could barely stand it. Tremors started rocking her body again.
And Meredith knew she didn’t have to say more as their bodies engaged in a very intimate conversation of their own.
Chapter 21
MEREDITH AND QUINN spent the rest of the night making plans. There were occasional interruptions as one started nibbling the other, and retaliation demanded a more substantial type of response.
Quinn couldn’t take his eyes off her. He had never expected such acceptance, such unquestioning belief after he told her things he had revealed to few others. Both Brett and Cam knew very little. Brett knew, of course, because he was part of the family’s search. And Cam knew about the scars on his body. But Quinn had never been able to speak of those years; the humiliations had been too deep, the misery too profound, the guilt too intense. Even now, remembering, recounting, had been excruciatingly difficult.
But he should have known from her paintings that she had extraordinary instincts about the world about her, and unjudgmental compassion for the beings that inhabited it. In her role as a giddy-headed fool, she had shielded that part of herself so very well. Just as he had shielded himself.
It would be an adventure, prying open each little window to her. He wondered how many more surprises were in store for him. And he wondered how he could bear the separations that would be necessary. She had become so much a part of him, everything that made him whole again, that filled the empty aching places caused by loss and grief and guilt…and hate.
The want went so much deeper than his loins. It was in his soul, so very deep in the core of him. His hand traced patterns in her cheek, his eyes watching the happiness blaze in her face. It was good to give joy, to see as he held her the pleasure in her eyes. These feelings were new to him, and so precious.
“It will be exceedingly difficult staying away from you,” he said after a long silence.
Her hand tightened on his arm. Even the thought of separation was painful. Yet they had agreed that, for now, it might be necessary.
Quinn realized that Lissa was the first concern. He knew Meredith would never be really happy until she had righted her own past. After Lissa, if things went well, there might still be separations while he found someone to t
ake his place in the Underground Railroad.
Then, perhaps, they could go West. He had long turned his eyes in that direction in the event he were discovered and had to make a run for it.
But uncertainty hung between them. They had been together less than ten days, yet in that time she had become his life. Totally and unconditionally.
And, miraculously, he knew he had become hers. It didn’t even have to be said. He marveled at the communication that flowed between them without words. They were like two halves of a whole, finally together after a lifetime of seeking. He shoved aside any other thought, the insidious warning that would never quite go away but sat like a vulture, waiting.
They talked over plans to free Lissa. Murray, Kentucky, was approximately sixty miles from Cairo, according to Quinn, and they would ride there together. Meredith’s original thought was simply to approach Mr. Evans and offer a large sum for Lissa, but Quinn had discouraged that. If Meredith went there for the specific purpose of buying Lissa, and if Marshall Evans refused to sell, then a later escape would be traced back to her. Particularly, Quinn said, if the half sisters still resembled each other as much as Meredith believed they would.
It would be far better, he offered instead, if he posed as a horse breeder from Virginia who had been guided to the Evans farm. If Lissa was there, he would find her and make an offer. If it was not accepted, then he would help her escape. They would not leave Murray, he promised, without Meredith’s sister. But timing was important. The Lucky Lady would be in Cairo in one week on its way North. If all went well, she and Lissa could board the boat and travel upriver to St. Louis together while getting to know each other again. From there, Lissa would be helped to Canada.
There were many holes in the plan. Hell, it wasn’t even a plan. There was no time to allow, as he usually did, for every contingency. But it was the best he could devise on short notice, and he knew Meredith was not going to wait. He saw it in the stubborn set of her jaw, in the gleam in her eyes. She had simply waited too long already. If he didn’t help her, she would try alone. And she was inexperienced at the kind of stealth and danger presented by physically participating in stealing a slave. It was one thing to give information; quite another to run ahead of dogs.
And once Lissa was free, in Canada or wherever she wished to be…
“The Parson,” he said. “We will get Jonathon to marry us. It will serve him right for not telling me about you.”
“And me about you,” she agreed.
“I don’t think,” Quinn said thoughtfully, “he’ll be particularly happy.”
“Why?” she demanded.
Quinn shrugged, but he knew why. It would be for all the reasons he had already told himself: the danger to her, the danger to him, the danger to their usefulness to the Underground Railroad. That came first with Jonathon Ketchtower, the Parson. It always had. Quinn suspected the Parson realized Quinn would never allow Meredith to continue if they fell in love. Just as he must have known that marriage would also mean the eventual end of Quinn’s involvement. Rogue gamblers didn’t have loving wives.
He had been holding Meredith in his arms on the bed, and his arms tightened possessively around her. “I never want to let you go,” he said.
“I never want you to,” she replied, snuggling deeper into them. “I don’t know how I can bear ever being away from you.”
He hesitated. There were many things to say, to decide. “I’ve been thinking,” he said slowly, “about going West. How do you think you would like San Francisco?”
“But the Underground Railroad…?”
“Can do without you,” he said, his eyes once more growing aloof, distant. “The danger is too great.”
“But I can’t…”
“Have you ever been inside a prison?” he asked, his voice taut now, with none of the softness that had been there most of the night.
She shook her head, a lock falling over her forehead, and he brushed it gently aside. But his eyes blazed, and she knew he was seeing something else.
And he was: the convict women in Australia, whose hair had been shorn, whose eyes had been dulled and faces made despairing. They paraded before him. And now, for this instant, Meredith’s face was among them, the lovely features distorted and old and drained. America was not Australia, but prisons were the same. And he didn’t think Meredith could survive it. As stubborn and determined and brave as she was, she could never survive, not intact. He certainly had not. Part of him had been destroyed, the innocent part. He had returned a shell without substance. Until now. He shuddered as he thought about her in prison, and tremors ran through his body.
He felt her hand on him, as if to bring him back from wherever he had gone. When he was finally able to look at her, her eyes were anxious, the golden lights barely visible under the mist of gathering tears. And they were, he knew, for him.
“Tell me,” she said in an achingly gentle tone. “Tell me what happened those years.”
He wondered if he could, if he should, bring the ugliness and despair into her life even for a moment. Yet he had to make her realize what was at stake, what could happen. He had to convince her, before he lost her as he had lost the others.
“The voyage,” he said finally, his voice harsh, devoid of emotion, “was as bad as anything you can imagine, and worse. Three months in the bowels of a rotting ship, three months of black hell. I was chained to another man, an Irishman. He kept me alive when I wanted to die, when my back was festering with infection and my stomach was swollen with hunger.
“He kept me alive with the idea of escape. We understood that the convicts would be sold, portioned out, so to speak, to settlers.” He laughed bitterly. “The British abolished slavery for the black man, but they were perfectly willing to enslave their own citizens for stealing a loaf of bread, or poaching, or, in many cases, because of their politics.
“But the military had other plans for us, for Terrence and me. While the others went to merchants and farmers, we were kept in chains and sent to a road gang where we worked from sunrise to past sunset. We pulled our own cage, a cage on wheels, where we slept chained to the walls. There was not enough room to turn at night.”
Quinn’s fingers bunched in a fist as he remembered the tightness, the enforced proximity of sweaty bodies, the helplessness as they were chained each night, the overwhelming loneliness for those things familiar, those things loving, those things clean and sweet.
Meredith was completely still, as if knowing the slightest move and sound would end his retelling. And he needed to; she could tell from the tense controlled monotone of his voice that the pain had been sitting there in him for a very long time and needed release.
“But Terrence never gave up,” he continued slowly, “and one day he found a nail in the road. A little thing, a nail, but he worked it and worked it, and finally one night succeeded in loosening the rivets in his ankle irons. Night after night, I worked on mine until they too were loose. The next day, when the guards were inattentive, we escaped.” Quinn paused, remembering the elation they had both felt and then the growing certainty of capture as they heard the dogs, and men on horseback, closing in on them. They had had two days of freedom before they were caught.
“When they found us, we were both whipped and then sent to Norfolk Island.” No two words could ever have been said with more hopelessness, and Meredith closed her eyes against the terrible emotion in them. Her hand clutched one of his, trying to absorb some of the raw naked anguish.
He took a long tortured breath and forced his lungs to release it, forced his muscles to relax. He could see his own horror reflected in her eyes, and he cursed himself while hoping it would pierce her confidence, the confidence that nothing could happen to her. Quinn held her tight. “The worst thing about prison,” he said finally, “is the loneliness, the dark hopelessness, Meredith. It’s something I don’t ever want you to know.”
Meredith felt there was more. Much more than what he was telling her. “How did you escape?�
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“Norfolk Island’s reputation for brutality shocked even the English,” he said. “There were more and more delegations visiting to ‘investigate conditions,’ and finally orders came to begin closing it down. I didn’t know it then, but my father had sent a man to help me escape. Still, no escape was possible from Norfolk. It was unapproachable except by water, and that was constantly guarded. But as Norfolk was drained of prisoners, I was transferred to the coal mines, and my father’s agent was finally able to bribe the guards and smuggle me aboard a ship as a sailor.”
“And your friend?”
Quinn’s body stiffened, and a facial muscle throbbed in his cheek. “He died.” Quinn said it so curtly that Meredith winced. Suddenly the wall was back between them, and she did not dare another question.
“I’ll be careful,” she whispered, trying to dispel some of the despair in his eyes.
His hands ran up and down her arms, and Meredith could feel the barely restrained possessiveness of each stroke. There was an emotionally charged violence in him, a taut awareness that belied the relaxed poise he usually wore like a cloak. She felt the need growing in him, in herself, a need to cast away the still-vivid memories and enduring anguish of the past. She felt his heart beating against her, and she raised her lips, touching his throat softly, feeling his pulse race. When their lips met, it was with hurricane force, growing in fury and screaming for a liberation that only they could give each other.
Afterward, Meredith lay quivering from the intensity of the sensations that had racked her body and the emotions that savaged her heart. She rested against him, once more listening to his heart, which had now slowed and was beating again with a steady evenness. The tension was gone from his body, and his hand wandered over her face with tender awe. There were still shadows in his eyes, and she wondered if they would always be there, but there was also, if not softness, a certain calm she had not seen before.
“You have the most wonderful, mysterious eyes,” she said, unashamedly bold.
He smiled at her. “Hmm,” he murmured. “I like yours too.” And to prove it he started kissing around at the edges of them.
