Grace needed to pay.
* * * *
I wiped my brow and thrust the shovel into the brown mound of new dirt over the pups’ grave. Twigs broke between the cabin and where I stood.
I turned to find Mama.
“What are you doing out here?” Though I didn’t want to scare her, I couldn’t hide the alarm from my voice.
“He helped raise the pups when Marmalade couldn’t do it. I don’t know if you know how much time he devoted to nursing them. It was sweet to watch him work in the fields, lift heavy equipment, and huff and puff around here like a burly bear, and then witness him handle those pups with the gentleness of a nursemaid. Someone knew this would hurt him.”
I patted the red dirt down over the pups and propped my arm on the shovel.
“He carries on as if he thinks it was a random act, but I see it in his eyes. I’m worried for you. If Grace is this dangerous, what else is she capable of?”
“Let’s not get too carried away. It was probably cruel children from a neighboring farm. I can think of a few who are that vicious.” I smiled and squeezed her arm.
Of course, she was too smart to not make the conclusion that it wasn’t coincidence. Only a few days after we buried the horses, we were now burying our pups.
“Just watch yourself. I have a bad feeling.” Mama wrung her apron in her strong, work-worn fingers. She did that a lot lately.
I hated that she worried so much. If there was anything I could do to make her life easier and worry-free, I would find it.
“I promise.” The moment still wasn’t right to tell Mama of the wild plan Mrs. Rollins had concocted. As superstitious as she was, I was afraid between it and all the horrible incidents on the farm lately, we’d have to pry her away from her Bible.
She believed in signs and omens. Something like this would definitely send her off to extra hours on her knees beside the bed.
Chapter 9
Blue light cascaded over the waterfall’s base, transforming the rocks and water to a misty gray and silver. A large boulder beside the water’s edge protruded out of the ground. On the flat spot on the top, my boots stuck up like two misplaced feet. The low hanging mimosa blooms gave perfect cover for a late night bath.
Placing my white shirt over a limb, I slipped out of my britches.
Annabeth wouldn’t appreciate meeting up with me if I smelled of the barn and hog sweat.
I was a half an hour early so she wouldn’t find me unclothed.
Standing on the bank of the large silver pool, I considered my entrance. Toes curling over the side of the rock, I shoved off and broke the cool water with my cupped hands. When I rose to the surface, I found sturdy footing on the side farthest away from the house. My torso poked out of the water. Running my hands through my hair, I was refreshed already.
“You never brought her here? Not even once?” A sweet voice barely sounded over the roar of the falls.
I swung around.
Annabeth’s long flowing hair covered her shoulders and floated around her arms in the water.
Rendered speechless, I almost slipped on the slimy stones under my feet. Had I taken in a mouthful of water? I couldn’t breathe.
“I thought this was what you wanted.” She sounded more like her sister than I ever thought she could. The innocent look in her eyes was so much different. She begged me for something I had dreamed over and over about, but it wasn’t right. Not yet.
“We shouldn’t be here, like this, alone.” I’d imagined this moment to be much different. I wobbled and slipped as I stepped back. The water was quicksand as I tried to swim backward. “You shouldn’t be…”
“You don’t want me?” She took a step toward me. Tempting me. Causing me to remember all the dreams. All the nights I’d lay awake, hoping she’d come to me. But now we were at odds with each other. I couldn’t do something to make matters worse.
I wanted her more than anything, but I wanted everything to be right. Not for me, but because after all she’d been through, after all we’d been through, she deserved me, without all the bad stuff attached.
Taking a chance in sending her back to the house infuriated with me, I slid around her and swam to the rock with my boots on it. Behind the rock, I peeked out. “How long have you been here?”
“Long enough.” She smiled a devilish smile. Pushing back through the water, she found a level boulder she could sit on and yet still be shrouded in water. “Now isn’t this interesting? You’re shy with me, but with my sister—”
“I wasn’t naked when I was with her.” I slipped on a rock and skinned my knee. “At least while I was conscious.”
“You thought you’d get me out here, sweet talk me, and everything would go your way?” The purple light of twilight gave her an ethereal glow. “I ruined your plans.”
“I just wanted a dip before you got here. You know that this isn’t the way I do things.” My breath came in jagged, painful spurts. Her being unclothed and so close sent unfamiliar aches through my stomach to my loins.
“Oh, isn’t it? Aren’t I just getting to know the real Colby Kinsley?”
I shuddered. The summer air was suddenly cold. The full moon looked like a dinner plate floating in the water between us.
“What is it you want to know about me, Annabeth?” Irritation threatened the start of an argument when that was the last thing I wanted. My mouth just started, and all the things I’d ever really wanted to say to Grace spewed at Annabeth. “You want to know how it felt afterward? I wanted her off me, away, so that when the sweat dried, and the feeling of disgust waned, I could vomit until I was cleansed of her.”
The smug look on Annabeth’s heart-shaped face blanched to a white sheet of parchment.
What had I just said? A million butterflies rushed at the walls of my stomach as the deafening roar of the waterfall filled my ears.
Annabeth didn’t blink or move.
I rushed toward her in the water.
Her hands were clasped around her knees as she stared at me.
I’d almost forgotten our nakedness when I stopped in front of her a few feet away.
She finally blinked, and her eyes widened as I moved in even closer. Her lips clamped shut as tears rolled down her cheeks. Her hands shook as she hunched down to cover herself. She looked around her as if she was suddenly aware that she was exposed and un-chaperoned with a man. Her eyes widened as they focused on me.
Night stole the last remnants of the day, and a cloud passed over the moon. The water deepened from silver to cobalt.
“I hate you.” Her voice was weak.
“I know.” I pulled her long hair around to cover the rest of her uncovered nakedness.
“You gave your soul to her.” Her voice was hollow. “And you didn’t even love her.”
I could have argued the point, but she slumped in a pitiful, stricken posture.
“Do you remember the day we sat beside the pond and you put a worm on a hook to prove what you were made of?” I glanced quickly to catch her expression from the corner of my eye.
The ghost of a smile twitched on her lips. She looked down and sighed.
I took her hand and clasped it between mine. “Well, I knew on that day, you were so much more than I could ever be. My father had to worm my hooks almost up until the few months before that day. You are so strong, Annabeth. You have this will that the forces of nature couldn’t battle. I witnessed it that day. You intimidated me. A sixteen-year-old princess who by all rights should have been repulsed to dirty her frock with worm guts. Oh, not you. You feared nothing. You’re strong enough to find the truth in all this confusion. I wasn’t willing, and I didn’t want her. Grace poisons everything she touches. She poisoned me. I need you to save me.”
“Then don’t marry her. Marry me.”
I scooped her off the rock and into my arms. Dragging her to the pond’s edge, the cool water cascaded from between our skin as our bodies collided against
the bank. She was so warm.
“You crazy girl,” I managed through the shock of our bodies touching so intimately. “This wedding isn’t for her.”
Annabeth scrambled to crawl free of me, but I wrapped my arms around her from behind. She sobbed. “But Mama’s planning a wedding and there’s already a guest list and—”
I rolled her back to me and held her face in my hands. “The ceremony is for you. You will be my bride. Not her. When we’re wed, we’re running so far away from this place, it’ll only be an occasional hiccup in your memory.”
Annabeth was so stricken her mouth fell slack.
I could no longer deny myself the taste of her lips. I lunged for her. When our mouths met, her lips were the inside of a rose petal and her breath a cherry breeze. I breathed her in and shuddered at her response.
Her wet arms slid around me and her nails grazed my scalp as she took handfuls of my hair and firmly but gently held my face to hers. She whispered my name over and over as she kissed me.
“I could say I love for eternity but the words aren’t enough,” I said against her hair.
Annabeth put her hands on my face and met my gaze. “Our souls are ever bound to one another?”
“Those words are just right.” In a deepening kiss, I lost my soul that night. I eternally and irreversibly belonged to Annabeth Rollins.
After I kissed her forehead, her cheeks, the elegant curve of her jaw and then her sweet lips, her gaze bore into me. A magnet inside her pulled me, and as if she felt the draw, she nodded, digging her nails into my lower back.
A cold knot fisting in my stomach, I dragged myself back.
“I have to practice control with you.” I was breathless. “When I show you the full extent of my devotion, you deserve much better than a soggy pond bank.”
“I want you to be so in love with me that you can’t stop yourself.”
“I’m so in love with you that I can do nothing but. Now go, before anyone suspects you’re missing.” I pulled away so she could flee from me.
Annabeth dove under the water toward a small pile of clothes waiting for her on the other side of the pond. The silvery moonlight slid over her milky white skin as she dressed. The sun nor the moon could stand beside her and be anymore glorious.
* * * *
To make Mrs. Rollins’ plan work, I had to be better than an actor in a Shakespearean drama to fool Grace. Luckily, she was too overjoyed about the occasion to push me for exclusive time. And Mrs. Rollins kept her so busy with wedding plans, there wasn’t much time for her to consider it. The one time she did, the excuse of needing to wait to be intimate again until after the ceremony if we were to follow tradition worked perfectly.
As the wedding approached, Annabeth made few appearances.
The most contact I had with her had been fleeting glances. So as far as I knew, the ceremony was still on, but we had taken the whole not-seeing-the-bride-before-the-wedding tradition to ridiculous levels.
Two days before the wedding, Grace found me in the parlor talking over some business with her father.
Actually, he was talking, and I was listening, or pretending to be. In the last few weeks, I’d never seen him so jubilant. And his breath didn’t smell of alcohol. I felt almost sorry for him. What if he’d been tricked as I had? What if after years he’d truly seen no other way out?
“I don’t regret sending you to school now. You’ll need all the education you can get when you take over the shipping part of the business.” With his hands in his suit pocket, he stared out over the grounds.
I nodded.
“Son, you will do great things.” He patted my shoulder and looked on with me at the fields where sharecroppers worked the apple orchards.
I wished I could be here to do the things Mr. Rollins went on and on about, but with his other daughter by my side. I’d have made many changes. Namely paying the sharecroppers what they were worth instead of just enough to keep them in Mr. Rollins’s stead.
He looked over my shoulder and nodded to me. “I’ll leave you two to talk.”
“You’ve been distant as of late. You hardly act as a man preparing to take a bride. I should see at least some happiness in your eyes.” Grace sauntered slowly to the window, her emerald green skirts rustling behind her. She busied herself with straightening white gloves on her long slender arms and abruptly glanced at me over one of them. “Or are you getting cold feet?”
I started to shake my head, but the look in her eyes stopped me.
Where brown irises normally were, black filled the whole pupil. In the next instance, the brown reappeared. “Well?”
“I’ve not changed my mind, if that’s what you are asking.”
“What a travesty it would be if you didn’t show. I’d hate for you to miss the first day of our forever after.” Her tone was flattened, her irritating, vivaciousness gone. “But then it will happen whether you are there or not. Time and space will never separate us, Colby.”
I didn’t like how she’d said that.
Looking absently over the fields, she seemed to forget I was there. Something in the blue skies and sunlight caught her gaze as she stared off.
“I have some things to tend to in the barn.” I backed out the door afraid to turn my back on her when she was like this.
“Forever, Colby.” Her voice was hollow.
I had to find Mrs. Rollins.
* * * *
After sending word in a note with one of the house maids to Mrs. Rollins that we had a problem, I went to the barn and waited.
“You said it was urgent.” Mrs. Rollins rushed through the back side of the outbuilding.
“Grace is in danger of becoming completely insane. Before, she knew what she was doing. Now, I’m not so sure. Not only is she taking indecent liberties with your husband, her father, she’s talking nonsense and looking off into the distance as if she were seeing things no one else can see. And as crazy as it might sound, her eyes did the weirdest color change today. They went from solid black back to brown.”
Mrs. Rollin’s brow furrowed.
“I might just be losing my own mind having to spend so much time with her, but I just got the weirdest feeling that she was going to do something bad. I don’t know when. I just know. I fear for the whole household when she learns of my betrayal.”
“I’ve noticed she’s not as quick to spit orders and flagrancies around, yes, but I credited it to her feeling peaceful about the wedding.” Mrs. Rollins paced.
“Maybe Annabeth and I won’t have to leave here.” I stepped in front of Mrs. Rollins path. “If she thinks the wedding is for her, but learns at the last minute that it isn’t, she’ll lose the rest of the mind she’s so delicately holding on to. At which time you can commit her without having to lose the only daughter who really cares anything about you. Don’t you see? Given her dangerous behavior, any one of the servants would gladly agree that she’s insane.”
Mrs. Rollins’s face darkened and tears rimmed her eyes. “I can’t say I’ve never considered it, but with the recent happenings, I think you’re right. I’ll contact someone and let you know what I discover.”
She should have hated me for coming up with such a plot, but deep down inside she knew Grace needed serious help before she hurt herself or someone else.
Mrs. Rollins fled the stalls.
Annabeth stepped from the back of the barn.
My heart beat like horse hooves on the cobblestone drive. I hadn’t had a moment alone with Annabeth in days.
She watched her mother go. “What’s wrong? What were you and Mother talking about?”
For fear of someone seeing us, I stayed back, but it was increasingly harder to do. “If I didn’t have to spend so much time away from you, you’d know some things have changed.”
Annabeth’s face darkened. She clasped her hands at the waist of her dress. “Us?”
I turned on her. Glancing over her shoulder, I was sure no one was b
ehind her when I took her hand. Pulling her to the back steps of my cottage to the hidden bathing area, I scooped her into my arms.
In a quick movement, I kicked the tub to the side and pressed her up against the wall in the corner.
She giggled against my lips as our worlds collided.
Me, in my brown worn britches, white, tattered shirt and questionable suspenders, working to get as close against her, in her fancy, hand-tailored dress and perfectly set hair. We were a sight, but we matched. My dark skin against her olive complexion was something the most prominent painters in that time had failed to capture. Two things that weren’t supposed to exist in the same space but had a connection. Like light and dark, day and night, good and evil, because against her goodness I could only be evil. They all were polar opposites, but wouldn’t mean as much without the other.
With her forearms caught against my chest, her hands were at the base of my neck. Her mischievous fingers found a way to play at my buttons. I took her hands before she got the third button undone.
“I tested fate enough the other night. I don’t want to give God an excuse to keep us apart.” Pulling her hands to my mouth, I kissed each of her fingers. “And I do love you too much to control myself. I swear it’s something beyond me that gives me the strength.”
“You are a goody-goody, Mr. Kinsley.” Buttoning my shirt, she sighed and patted my chest.
A jolt of lightning shot through my heart when the back door creaked.
“Just the way I raised him,” Mama said as she happened upon us through the back door with a bowl of slop in her hands.
Annabeth gasped.
Mama smirked and ambled off the back steps. “Don’t mind me.”
“You didn’t tell me she was in the house.” Annabeth slapped my chest and backed up a step.
“You didn’t ask.” I kissed her nose, her cheek, and then her chin. “Now where were we?”
“You were calling me down for being a sinner and reminding me of my eternal fate if I looked upon you with lust.”
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