In the meantime, she marveled at her husband's largesse. Although Sera had never wanted for anything as long as Michael had been her guardian, Eden had seen, with her own eyes, the patches in the soles of Michael's black boots and the crack in the glass of his silver-plated pocket watch.
Her husband, it seemed, gave generously to everyone but himself.
Unused to baring her corset and bloomers to strangers, Eden blushed for nearly the full two hours that Madam Letitia's assistants fluttered around her with green satin taffeta, measuring sticks, and pins.
In all honesty, though, the heat lapping over her skin had been kindled by her husband. While she stood awkwardly on her stool, her composure challenged by the half-circle of mirrors that surely magnified her every freckle, he lounged in the velveteen chair directly across from her, his off-center smile an earthy enticement. She couldn't help but think that Michael had made an astounding change since his arrival in Louisville. Perhaps she simply hadn't known him well enough, but the man who sat watching Madam Letitia's legions strip, swaddle, and pin her, was certainly not the man who'd ducked his head and hurried past her on the sidewalks of Blue Thunder. If the young assistants hadn't been so flirtatious, Eden might have reveled in the pleasure Michael took in his voyeurism.
Unfortunately, the girls' interest in her husband was painfully clear: she received a pinprick each time Letitia's assistants cast hungry, covetous glances his way. One even called him "Mick."
Later that afternoon, while Eden was walking arm and arm with him through the commercial district, he sidestepped her question about the nickname, explaining instead that the girls had been raised in Lydia Witherspoon's orphanage, and that he'd convinced Madam Letitia to apprentice them.
He wasn't quite as artful about avoiding her "Mick" question the second time.
They had no sooner crossed the street to head toward a French restaurant, when a beautiful brunette in a crisply starched apron rushed out of the nearby boarding house.
"Mick? Oh, Micky, it is you!" she squealed as he turned in reflex. She hurried down the sidewalk, her dark eyes warmer than melted chocolate, her porcelain cheeks blooming a captivating pink.
Eden tried not to stiffen as the woman, her demure brown bodice straining over a pair of breasts that would have made a eunuch salivate, checked herself just one footfall shy of Michael's arms. Although Eden stood at Michael's elbow, the brunette didn't seem to notice. She was too busy clasping her hands and smiling with unabashed adoration at the man she'd called, "Micky."
"You've been away so long," she chided in an alluring alto. "And you sent no word of your return. Shame on you! Did it ever occur to you I might have filled your bed?"
Michael reddened, and jealousy spiked Eden's chest. She wanted to believe the brunette had been referring to a long-term lodging agreement; even so, Eden couldn't help but mark the double meaning in the woman's words. Had it been intentional?
"I've taken a room at a hotel, Sofia. With my wife."
Shock widened Sofia's eyes. "Your wife?" she repeated thinly. At last forced to acknowledge Eden, she managed a weak smile. "Oh. I see. That's... understandable, of course."
Sofia didn't loiter much longer. With a polite smile and a half-hearted invitation for dinner, she excused herself and headed back to the boarding house.
Eden made a concerted effort to keep the accusation out of her voice. "Let me guess. Sofia's another orphan."
He slid her a wry glance. "No. A widow."
She took the elbow he offered her. "And... you were one of her boarders?"
His dry smile didn't reassure her. "Briefly."
They walked several more paces in silence. The restaurant was a quarter-block away, and she sensed that he was using its proximity as an excuse to end their conversation. "You're not going to tell me, are you?"
"Tell you what?"
"What she meant to you. And why she calls you 'Micky'."
The gaze that met hers resembled a blue-black twilight. "Am I to be interrogated about every female acquaintance I've struck up over the last thirty-one years?"
She raised her chin. "You say that as if you have something to hide."
"I do. All men do. Premarital skeletons are best left in their closets, away from doting young brides. But if it eases your mind..."
He lowered his voice to a dark, throbbing murmur.
"While I was still at the university, Sofia became a young immigrant widow, desperate to feed two toddlers and appease her husband's creditors. When one of them gave her... an infection, she was too ashamed to visit a doctor. I only happened to deduce her condition, because one of the"—his voice dripped acid—"gentlemen had been bragging about their liaison in the saloon. Shortly afterward, he returned from the privy complaining of... difficulties there. So I looked up her address and took my valise. She was in a bad way."
Eden swallowed, and those dusky eyes pinned hers.
"When she was strong enough to work, I convinced the boarding-house owner to hire her as a cook so she could pay her debts and keep a roof over those babies' heads." Michael halted, reaching around Eden for the brass handle on the restaurant's door. "Satisfied?" he demanded softly.
She nodded, feeling the heat of his stare to her bones.
Reflecting back on that conversation, Eden found another reason to love her husband. He was willing to champion anyone who needed him—widows, orphans, raccoons—and yet he shunned all praise for himself. His kindnesses were surely the best-kept secret in Kentucky. Why, half of Louisville seemed to owe him some debt of gratitude. The moment the train conductor had recognized Michael, the man had marched them straight up the row of Pullman cars, insisting that they take the plushest compartment at no extra cost because Michael had once set the man's broken leg so well that he'd suffered "nary a limp."
Then there'd been the paddlewheeler's captain. He'd invited them onto the bridge of the ship, chattering enthusiastically about his son, a university student now, but a ten-year-old when Michael had saved him, diving into the murky waters of the Ohio to breathe life into his lungs.
At the hotel, the wealthy owner had arranged for fresh fruit and flowers to be brought to their room every afternoon with a gratuitous bottle of champagne. Apparently Michael had counseled him not to take his own life following a crushing loss at the racetrack.
Clearly, Michael was well loved in this town. He grew less guarded and more lighthearted under that affection, as if the dark cloud of Blue Thunder had finally rolled beyond the horizon. Eden wondered how much this new, easygoing Michael owed to six days of relaxation and romance, and how much he owed to Louisville itself. If the city represented to him all that was curious and carefree, then surely Blue Thunder was his prison sentence.
Being well-traveled herself, she marveled that Michael had suffered for so many years in a community where the ghosts of his mother, brother, and father eroded his peace of mind. Part of her understood the need, even yearned for the opportunity, to settle in a place that she could call home. On the other hand, didn't Michael ever dream of life beyond the graveyard that Blue Thunder had become?
She worked up the nerve to ask him that very question on the last night of their wedding tour.
He shifted behind her, the broad plane of his naked chest cradling her spine. She loved the erotic contrast of his rock-hard musculature beneath the downy softness of his hair and the way his arms and thighs possessively hugged her. They sat entwined on the window seat in their hotel room, the casements thrown wide, the stars shining down. All of Louisville slept; not a single light could be seen winking beyond their lovers' sanctuary, although somewhere, across the glittering black expanse of the Ohio River, she heard the distant clang of a boat's bell.
"Oh, Michael." She snuggled closer, sated and dreamy, but melancholy too. She didn't want their wedding tour to end, didn't want to return to the gossip, the stares, the small-minded judgments so rampant in Blue Thunder.
In fact, a dark, elusive premonition niggled her mind every t
ime she entertained the idea of their return, and no amount of yearning for Aunt Claudia, Sera, or even Stazzie was able to dispel it. "I hate that our honeymoon's almost over."
She dropped her head back against his shoulder, letting him stroke her hair. The rhythm of his great, calloused hand soothed her in a way that was profoundly primal—as primal as the pleasure that pooled inside her each time he stole her breath with his slow, tender lovemaking.
"Do we have to go back?" she murmured wistfully.
She could almost feel his smile somewhere above her in the warm, velvet womb of the Kentucky night.
"I'm afraid so."
"But... I like it here."
"It is beautiful, isn't it?"
She sighed, watching the stars glow. If she squinted and called on her imagination, she could discern the rugged limestone bluffs of Indiana against the horizon.
"Have you ever thought about living in Louisville? I mean, for more than the few months you spent here each year while you were studying at the university."
He didn't miss a beat. "I have obligations in Blue Thunder."
She wrinkled her nose at his soft but uncompromising response. "Sera would love it here."
"Claudia would not."
She sighed again, defeated. He was right about Aunt Claudia. She'd been too stubborn to leave Blue Thunder during the hard times, when she'd been considered the town's pariah. Claudia wasn't about to quit the valley now that Henry Lucas's fortune had turned the tables and folks were kowtowing to her. Besides, she wasn't as healthy as she pretended to be.
"I suppose the orphans would miss you if you left," Eden conceded reluctantly. Not to mention Bonnie and Jamie...
"There is that, too."
She fell silent. She would go wherever Michael chose to go, of course. But after only six days of marriage, fear had entrenched itself on what should have been a wondrous journey. What if she was of no more use to her husband than the physicians who'd pronounced his doom?
That afternoon, Michael had grudgingly yielded to her pleas to introduce her to his physician. Peter Vandergraaf had surprised her: the blond, reticent Viking was the same age as Michael. Apparently they'd studied together at the university. She'd had to bite her tongue on her protest that Peter didn't have enough life experience to diagnose Michael's ailment, for the implication would have been that Michael didn't either.
And if Michael, who was six years her senior with four years of medical schooling to his credit, didn't have the wherewithal to determine his own illness, what would that say about her competence?
So Eden had listened politely, doing her best not to squirm as Peter recounted the tests he had performed on his colleague and friend. She hated that her stubbornness had forced Michael to sit through the discussion again. In spite of his cool, composed silence, she knew that Peter's findings, all of which were inconclusive, caused Michael a bitter frustration. Peter had done his best, just as Michael had. But neither of them could discover the cause for his vertigo or his bouts of weakness.
Sitting now in the circle of strength that was her husband's arms, Eden wondered if Michael's Chicago and Boston doctors were also classmates from the University of Louisville. In her opinion, Michael's mysterious condition called for someone... well, wiser. She wasn't at all confident that she possessed the requisite wisdom, though. She wished fervently that Papa and Talking Raven were alive to counsel her.
"You never did tell me why everyone in Louisville calls you Mick," she murmured.
"Papa hated it. So I preferred it."
This surprised her. She tilted her head back but could discern little more than the square of his jaw. "You didn't get along with your father?"
"Most of his life."
She was glad for the darkness. She was sure she must have looked like a carp the way her mouth had dropped open. "But after everything Sera told me, I thought you were close to him."
"Sera likes to think so."
"And she's been wrong all these years?"
"It's kinder to let her remember the family the way she wants to."
Eden knitted her brows, pondering this bombshell. If Sera had painted too rosy a picture about Michael's relationship with Jedidiah, then maybe her stories about Michael and their half-brother were wrongfully colored, too.
"Tell me about Rafe."
His chest rose quickly beneath her shoulders, as if he'd drawn a sharp breath. For what seemed like eternity, he didn't answer. He didn't even acknowledge her request. She might have become lost in the echo of his heartbeats if their tempo hadn't noticeably increased.
She was just about to try another tactic, when he finally spoke.
"He was Mama's favorite."
Of all the things he could have said, those four quiet words were painfully telling.
"But everyone says you were your father's favorite," she reminded him gently.
"I resented my father. For the way he treated Mama. She deserved better."
"You must have loved her deeply."
Again, silence.
She bit her lip, not daring to indicate the depth of her insight into the confused, wounded child that he must have been or the stern, dispassionate man he sometimes became. As a two-year-old, had he blamed himself for the bitter feuds that must have erupted between his mother and his father after Jedidiah learned Catriona had become pregnant by another man? As their firstborn child, had Michael learned to shoulder responsibility for the entire world? And later to blame his half-brother for his mother's unhappiness?
"Is... that why you hate Rafe?"
She counted his heartbeats, watched a shooting star streak across Scorpio. Somehow, the pulsing red sun at the heart of the constellation seemed significant. It spit and sparkled close to Mars.
"I don't hate Rafe. Not really."
"Not... really?"
Michael sighed, a long, weary sound.
"Rafe never had a chance under Papa's roof. And I wasn't much help to him. I was jealous about Mama."
She slipped her hand into his. Thick fingers closed around hers, holding on tight, as if drawing strength for a more shameful confession.
"On the day of her burial, Rafe and I quarreled at her gravesite." His voice roughened with the guttural, uncompromising tone she'd come to associate with his self-condemnation. "He never came home that night. I was sick about it, thinking he'd been lost in the snowstorm. I rode out the next morning, hoping he'd reached the orphanage. It was the first time I'd ever been in an orphanage, and I was horrified. All those children, all those sad, hungry eyes..."
A tremor moved through him.
"Anyway," he continued gruffly, "no one there had seen Rafe. And no one in town had heard from him. I thought he was dead. I blamed myself for... Christ, at least six months. Then one day he wrote to Aunt Claudia, bragging about the stage career that was making him famous." Irony edged Michael's voice. "Papa was livid. He'd always preached that thespians were drunkards and thieves. He vowed once and for all to wash his hands of Rafe's corrupt soul.
"But I knew, even if Sera couldn't see it, that Papa hated the thought of Mama's bastard being happy. The only way he could strike back was to forbid Sera to answer Rafe's letters."
Eden's stomach knotted. The more she learned about Jedidiah Jones, the more she marveled that Sera and Michael hadn't grown into bitter adults.
"Have you ever told Rafe?" she murmured. "That you don't hate him?"
"No."
She winced. His voice had been a quiet thunderclap.
"Why?" she persisted stubbornly.
"He hates me."
Every fiber of her being rebelled at this reasoning. If there was one thing that she'd learned, after watching Talking Raven suffer for years as an outcast from her people, it was that fear and hatred only bred more of the same.
"But you haven't set eyes on Rafe for what, ten years? How can you be sure his feelings haven't changed?"
"I'm sure."
She was hard-pressed not to shake her head at the finalit
y in his tone. Why did Michael let pride stand in the way of a reconciliation that might lead to some peace of mind? Pride was such a poor consolation for happiness.
"Well, I'd like to meet Rafe someday," she said firmly. "He's family. And I've always wanted family."
"You have Sera and Aunt Claudia," he reminded her more gently.
"Yes, I know, but... I always wanted a brother, too."
Michael grew contemplative. She imagined his dark expression; she envisioned the shadow of Jedidiah looming over him just as it must have during his childhood, when the preacher-turned-cuckold had deliberately spawned resentment between Michael and Rafe.
But Michael surprised her again.
"I always wanted a brother too," he said quietly.
Her heart went out to him.
"It's not too late, Michael." She turned as best she could in his arms. "You can erase Jedidiah's legacy. You can end the shame and bitterness and give an uncle to your children."
He grew impossibly still. The hammering of his heart became her only indication that he hadn't turned to stone. She couldn't say why, but uneasiness snaked through her innards. Maybe it was due to his stare, transformed to glittering black onyx by the shadows.
"Y-you do want children, don't you, Michael?"
He drew a shallow breath. The smile he gave her was so raw, so afflicted, her throat grew tight with tears.
"Of course," he whispered huskily.
"Michael, I—"
"Shh." He kissed her. His hands stroked and soothed her. In that masterful way he had, he made her forget all her questions, all her worries. He carried her to the bed, wrapping himself around her, loving her into the moment where there was only him and an aching kind of pleasure. He worshipped her with his body, bringing her to such a state of erotic frenzy that she sobbed his name, streaking across the heavens like the shooting star that had blazed over Scorpio.
It wasn't until later, much later, that the questions crept back to haunt her.
His Wicked Dream (Velvet Lies, Book 2) Page 22
