Ethan wiped away the colored water that clung to his thick eyelashes. His red hair was plastered across his forehead, and the indigo’s sediment splotched his upper lip like a mustache. With visible effort she tried to preserve her grave demeanor. But it was hopeless. She began to laugh, unable to stop despite the unholy gleam she saw in his eyes. “We are a pair, aren’t we now?” she managed between laughter-stricken gasps.
“Oh, that we are,” he growled. Then, unexpectedly, his hands gripped her shoulders. His mouth captured hers in a ravenous kiss. This elemental passion was what she had wanted, had been starved for, and she returned the kiss, her hands sliding over his shoulders to draw him near, to feel his heart thudding against her own erratically beating heart.
The primitive odor that enveloped them was like a sensual stimulant, so potent that she cared not when he pressed her down into the wash of indigo. The blue-red sediment lapped gently about her ears and streamed her loosened hair to the foaming surface. Yet she was aware only of the intense urgency that filled her. She understood now that powerful drive to mate.
“Ethan, my husband,” she murmured against the rough-textured skin of his jaw. Her fingers slipped up to caress that shriveled spot that marked his cheek. “I want— I can’t help myself. I want you, Ethan.”
His brilliant eyes searched hers. “Thee is certain?”
Her laugh was low and husky. “You have to ask me?”
Startling her, he swept her up against him and rose to his feet. He staggered beneath the weight of her sopping wet skirts. “I’m not a little woman,” she said in a small voice.
“So I notice,” he groaned as he carried her from the vat house. “But thee is just right for me. Between us,” he puffed, “we shall breed Goliaths.”
She blushed, then despite her embarrassment and his frankness, laughed. One bucklcd pump fell from her bobbing feet. Another few yards and the other pump plopped. Through eyelashes spiked with indigo she saw Icabod’s double chins drop in surprise as Ethan strolled past him. Farther on, Peter paused in his hoeing to stare.
“Everyone is watching,” she said, burying her burning face in the hollow of his shoulder.
“Good,” he grunted. “Jane, thee weighs more than a cask of rum!”
Her head snapped up. “Sir,” she said with exaggerated dignity, “the bigger the better!”
He chuckled, and her breath caught at the beauty in his smile. How—when—had he bemused her, bewitched her, so that she forgot all else, even Terence?
His boots echoed on wood planking. “In you go.”
“What-?”
Suddenly she was sailing in space to splash unceremoniously in the river. Shock raced through her. “Ethan!” she floundered. “I can’t swim!”
A heron took wing at her screech. Above her on the dock, Ethan laughed. “The water is only waist-deep.”
She got her footing. Her skirts billowed about her with the lily pads. Pushing her wet hair off her face, she looked up at him. The shirt and boots were already stripped from him. Astounded, she watched as he shucked one stocking at a time—and then his breeches. “Ethan!”
“ ’Tis time thee knew.” He grinned.
“I already know!”
A small grimace pleated his mouth. “Thee knew the pain, not the pleasure.”
From between splayed fingers she peeked at the nude giant above her. The mahogany skin ended at his pelvis. Then pale white—and the thick brush. His organ stood boldly erect, throbbing, taunting her. Her mouth parted. A strange hunger took hold of her. Her tongue flicked at her wet lips.
His mouth curled in a pleased smile, a smug smile, that irritated her. Still, she could not take her eyes from that veined, tumescent object of male beauty. He dived smoothly, shallowly into the water and surfaced just beyond her. “No,” she sputtered as he waded purposely toward her. “Not here, surely!”
“Aye, here. Now.” He caught her shoulders and steadied her. His eyes held hers while his fingers began to unfasten the myriad buttons. “This time I intend to make it right between us, Jane.”
She could not answer. The water lapped coldly about her upper thighs. What if it was to be a repeat of that first night? He unhooked the dress and drew it down over her shoulders and past her hips. His arm encircled her waist as he lifted her, drawing the gown and undergarments from her legs. They floated free, then buoyed with the eddying wash of the river toward shore.
She stood paralyzed before him, while he lowered his head to nuzzle the narrow valley between her breasts. Arms hanging lifelessly at her sides, she stared sightlessly at the great willows and red oaks that bent from the river’s far side toward them, as if to share in this tryst. His lips found one turgid nipple, wrinkled with cold and fright. But his mouth was warm, sucking the fright from her. Tentatively her hands laid across the wide expanse of his tendon-ridged shoulders. Without conscious thought her pelvis arched toward him, only to spring back at the press of the hard shaft.
He lifted his head. “ ’Tis right. And natural. And it will be beautiful. With thee it will be as never before for me. And for thee.”
Desperately she wanted to believe him. She trustingly let him take her hand and move it downward to encircle the girth of his rigid member. He was well favored by nature. Her thumb and forefinger could not meet, but when hesitant, she moved curious fingers along its great length, he groaned. “Ah, Jane.” He caught her wrist. “Thee must stop, or my seed shall be spilled vainly.”
She grinned, hating to release this newest wonder, but his questing fingers found that cavern that had once before known pain. Her thighs squeezed tight. “No,” she whispered, feeling a wave of humiliation wash over her.
He disregarded her plea. His arm, a steel bar now, balanced her against the lazy lap of the water, while his leg prodded her thighs apart. “Aye, Jane,” he husked. “Hold me. Put thy arms about my neck and kiss me. 1 need to know thy love.”
She did as he instructed, for she needed him, too. There was no denying her need, for his finger encountered the moisture, which was so much more viscous than the water that swelled and rippled about them. Now two fingers lubricated her, and her lids fluttered closed, her lips parted with the exquisite feelings that creamed through her.
He withdrew the source of her pleasure, and she moaned discontentedly. “Not yet,” he murmured against the base of her throat.
With her anchored against him, he waded ashore and lowered her onto the grassy slope. The sun fingered her sparkling-wet flesh, until Ethan’s magnificent body blocked out the sunlight, blocked out everything. “Ethan”—her arms raised to enfold him against her—“hurry . . . please.”
Yet he teased her, testing the still virginal-tight entrance with the tip of that pulsating part of him until she arched and embedded him deep within her. They came together in the flare of mutual need and response. Later her soft cry of fulfilled passion mingled with the raucous evening song of the swallows and robins.
And, as she drifted in that mellow world of his after¬love, a love that left her soft and melting, she knew it mattered not that he might love another. It was her that Ethan would be coming to each night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Ethan stared at the message from Samuel Adams in Philadelphia, forwarded by Dickey Lee. But Ethan’s thoughts drifted elsewhere—to the river earlier that afternoon. Once again he felt the way the tension eased from Jane’s limbs, and he remembered thinking that he liked the way her slender body molded his in all the right places . . . her head fitting perfectly into the hollow of his shoulder, her breasts lodging just below the rise of his chest muscles, her hip bones cushioned by his thighs. Susan was so much smaller—it would have been difficult to turn his head and find her lips waiting as close as Jane’s had been.
For so long he had wanted this woman who had caused him such trouble from the very beginning; who tempted him and swore at him, and fled from him.
His hand trembled as he recalled the flatness of her belly and how the muscles there flex
ed at his touch, not in recoil but in response. His mind’s eye saw again the full, faintly veined breasts and the spun black hair that whorled softly at the apex of her legs. The mating with her had been as none he had ever known.
Susan ... it was the last time he would think of her . . . Susan would have been crushed beneath his weight. But Jane—surely she had been meant for him.
He forced his attention to the communique—innocent- seeming if intercepted. Without the mask, the entire letter read:
You will have heard, sir, I doubt not long before this that Sir Thomas Gage’s armies have retreated from Boston. We all feel that Gage’s spies learned that the French may help us. However, we know Gage has commissioned his armies to occupy New York. Also, a highly trained spy reports that the British have been planning to execute our soldiers that they hold prisoner. Of course, Washington is furious at this breach of war conduct. No one knows the general’s grief at this act. As to our agent’s identity—keep your tongue still. Thus we hold our eyes and ears ready to serve the United Colonies. And thus through your efforts and ours we shall bind together to form a network of one indivisible nation.
When Ethan placed the mask with its hourglass cutout over the letter, a different message took shape:
I
have
learned that
Gage has commissioned
a highly trained spy
to execute
Washington
No one knows the
agent's identity—keep
eyes and ears ready
through your
network
Tiredly Ethan rubbed the back of his neck, while he assimilated the import of the message. This wasn’t the first time a rumor was out about an attempt on Washington’s life. Several months earlier the story went around that there was a conspiracy to poison him with green peas, a dish of which the general was especially fond, but that the housekeeper warned him in time to send the peas away untasted. Instead, the story went, the peas were thrown into a chicken pen and all the chickens died.
And there were other tales of assassination plots and planned kidnappings. But Adams specifically mentioned a highly trained spy this time. Apparently this was not to be one of the heretofore inept assassination plots. Nor a conspiracy. Only one man. A man willing to give his life? No, that kind was a fanatic who in most cases bungled the plot. A highly trained man did not waste his time—or endanger his life—with idealism. He would strike only at the moment that afforded success and a good escape . . . a time when Washington was the least guarded . . . a place that offered the quickest and surest flight.
The last—the place—was the easiest to determine. The place would have to be near the coast, for the assassin would be hounded down if he remained on the continent. He would be—
What if the he were a she? What if . . .
Ethan closed his eyes. His clever wife possessed the most ingenious talent for prevarication. She was the mistress of magnificent mendacity.
God help him, could he trust her?
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
For the women of the plantations along the Pamunkey and neighboring York and James rivers, wealth and its related social position were measured in terms of the careful facade of elegance and civilized manners that hid the tenuous nature of the economy that supported them. The sight of graceful ladies in heirloom jewels and old silks moving daintily beneath crystal chandeliers and the polite conversation emanating from formal drawing rooms were enough to establish Virginia society as a true child of the best society that Europe had to offer.
On a particularly warm June evening in 1776 the older daughters and sons of New Kent, on the Pamunkey, were gathered in the ballroom of the Chamberlaynes’ plantation, where George Washington first met the widow Martha Custis. The home of Martha’s family, the Dandridges, was only a few miles to the north, and nearby was the White House, an immense plantation where she had lived with her deceased husband, Daniel Custis. More Dandridge kin resided at the close-by Chestnut Grove, and her sister, Nancy Basset, and her husband and children lived at Eltham.
These Tidewater families watched their sons and daughters dip and curtsey as they performed the minuet, the Virginia reel, and the quadrille. The instructions had taken weeks, but the parents were extremely well satisfied with the results. Bartholomew Dandridge, Martha’s brother, watched with a critical eye while his young son bowed, as the dancing master instructed. Perfectly executed!
Thirty-seven-year-old Nancy Basset’s eyes beamed proudly while her nine-year-old Fanny moved faultlessly through the minuet’s intricate steps. The dancing master was a marvel! Handsome, obviously well bred, with an intelligence that could cover a wide range of subjects— and a perfect decorum with the older daughters of the Tidewater gentry.
She turned to her hostess, the Widow Chamberlayne, at whose home the itinerant dancing master was residing during the period of tutelage. “1 do declare, Mr. Carter should be the master of a plantation rather than a mere dancing instructor.”
The widow raised her fan before her mouth. “My dear, word has it that he is the scion of some titled lady. He was touring the colonies, when war broke out, and—can you imagine—he swore his allegiance to us. Forfeited his inheritance, rather than return to his Manor House, he did. We must do everything we can to make him welcome in the colonies.”
“Oh, most certainly,” Nancy assured her hostess. “When his instruction period is finished here, I shall recommend him to friends elsewhere. The Public Assembly will begin soon in Williamsburg, and the planters would be delighted with a gentleman of Mr. Carter’s stature and accomplishments. Why, when my sister returns to Mount Vernon, she could sponsor him in the Alexandria vicinity."
Her gaze drifted back to the tall, aristocratic-looking dancing master who had given up all to side with the American colonies. “How romantic and noble a gesture he made,” she murmured. “How romantic and noble a man.”
Yes, most certainly she would make sure that Martha was informed about the dancing master.
Later when the dancing master, Richard Carter, learned of Nancy Basset’s intentions, his lips curled in a lean smile. General Washington, he knew, had driven the British from Boston and was fortified now in New York. And the general’s lady was in Philadelphia with his old friend’s family, the Hancocks.
The dancing master found it quite convenient that she would very soon be returning to Mount Vernon. There was nothing to stand in his way now.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The cannons boomed on the green outside the governor’s palace, signaling that as of June 29, 1776, Virginia declared itself officially a free and independent commonwealth with Patrick Henry as its first governor. It was generally expected that the other colonies would declare their own independence the following week at the Constitutional Congress in Philadelphia, though the war with Britain had sputtered for fourteen months now.
Before the cannon’s smoke could drift over the green, the boats on the James River shot forward in the annual Tidewater Race. Sloops, yawls, shallops, ketches, and bateaux boiled the water. From the docks the ladies watched and cheered from beneath lacy pastel parasols, while the men and children loped along the river banks, trying to keep pace with the bobbing boats.
Jane strained to see Ethan’s gundalow, the very sailboat that had brought her to Mood Hill, tack with the sudden shift of breeze. Even after nearly two years in the colonies she still had not become acclimated to the heat of the Southern summers. The sultriness of the late afternoon brought a sheen of perspiration to her temples and upper lip. Certainly such an unladylike bodily function never overtook Margaret Peyton.
At the gala barbecue picnic earlier that afternoon the woman flirted outrageously with Ethan. Jane had returned from a stroll with Susan to a nearby quilting booth to find Margaret’s hand clasped about Ethan’s upper arm as she leaned into him, laughing saucily.
And that was another thing that bothered Jane—Ethan’s attitude. He had chang
ed since that afternoon he took her on the banks of the Chickahominy. Those moments when their bodies blended together in incredibly beautiful lovemaking, she experienced his profound tenderness and that undefinable joining of their two spirits. She was close to him then. Yet mere hours later she had found his dark, luminous eyes watching her . . . watching her as if part of her displeased him in some inexplicable way.
Faith, she knew he desired her. But a caution lurked in those sulfuric eyes. Perhaps she too obviously enjoyed those moments when he made love to her; perhaps genteel ladies such as Susan did not respond in such an uninhibited manner. But she could not help herself. She had sworn Ethan would never enslave her spirit, but he had done just that by mastering her through his lovemaking. She did not know if she loved him, but she did know that she wanted him with a desperation that equaled that illogical need she felt for Terence.
Even now she felt shamefully weak in her knees just thinking about Ethan. He merely had to look at her with those expressive eyes, and she found herself witless.
The boats reached the turn-about point far up the river, and were hauling about for the final leg downriver to the docks. Hand shading her eyes, Jane could make out Ethan’s gundalow two boats back from the fast-paced little catboat in the lead. Her heart raced with the gundalow. For those eternal moments he was her knight, his boat carrying her colors. Slowly the gundalow gained and passed the yellow-canvased sloop. The first two sailboats were close enough now for her to make out Ethan’s mahogany-red hair and his billowing black shirt. The catboat and gundalow were running stem and stem, and the cheers of the people about the docks were deafening. She found her hands locked about the parasol’s handle in a death grip.
Only at the red-flagged wharf did the gundalow nose out the catboat, and a roar went up from the crowd. Ethan was the winner of the regatta! He was hauled from the sailboat with a hero’s welcome. Several men pressed forward to pound his back, and Daniel and Bram offered their hands in a hearty shake. Susan stood on tiptoe to bestow a sisterly kiss on his cheek. Standing apart, Jane waited impatiently for Ethan’s eyes to acknowledge her.
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