by Susan Ward
His laughter made her crazy. She tried to hit him again and he managed to catch her arms. She began to fight harder. He tried to choke back his laughter.
“Let me go,” she said through her struggles.
Varian pulled her down to him. “Merry. Stop it. Stop fighting me. I adore you.”
She jerked out of his arms then, her heart beat a frantic rhythm, her eyes round with frustration. “Adore me? You kidnapped me, you keep me your hostage, play your nonsensical games with me, and now you have the audacity to order me to stop fighting you. How dare you say with perfect seriousness that you adore me? I at last understand why I do not understand you. You are deranged.”
There was a faintly apologetic pause. Then, he said, “I admit that ours has not been a conventional courtship.”
The last thin thread of emotional steadiness fled Merry as she met his warmly animate gaze. Her blood flamed in answer, but logic steadied her with the warning not to trust him.
“Court me, indeed. I don’t know what this new game of yours is, sir, but I will not play it.” Her fingers had curled back into fists.
His response was not one she welcomed. She had amused him. She tried to hit him again and Varian rolled onto his side to avoid her tiny fist, then trapped both her wrists in a single hand. He studied her impassively. Finally he said, “You don’t have to hit me to protect your virtue, Little One. I can see this won’t be a simple adjustment. Though I never anticipated the adjustment to be so difficult for you. You have been pursuing me for months, my dear. This is your game we play.”
Merry puffed up like an over-inflated balloon. “That is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard.”
She jerked her arms free from his hold and sprang to her feet above him. Against her better judgment, she dared to look down on him.
A smile warmed the black depths of his eyes, in a way she had never seen before. “Be fair, Little One,” he whispered affectionately. “We have to find some way to settle your fate. I have decided to be obliging to your wants.”
She shook her head, with no reasonable thought on how to manage him. “You could oblige me back to Falmouth.”
Varian’s smile this time was breathtaking, lush with emotion. He lifted a hand, his fingers moving in a gentle tease over the delicate curve of her bare calf. “Love, it is the only option you have left me with. Total surrender to Merry. Battle done. Now, give me your mouth, Little One, and let me adore you.”
The feel of Varian’s fingertips on her leg was an unfortunate distraction. “I do not wish to be adored…” and before Merry could finish her words, he was kissing her again.
~~~
Last night they slept together, her body curled into Varian on the floor. The next morning Merry woke without him. She sat up, rubbing her eyes, to find a quilt laid across her and pug soundly sleeping in the space where Varian had been. She touched the floor. It still held his warmth. It had not been long since he’d left her.
There was something very intriguing about the night that had just passed, about slumbering against the firm flesh of a man, feelings his arms holding her, and listening to the pattern of his breath moving in concert with her own. Her quickening pulse warned she had already followed him too far into the web he was spinning. Still, Merry could not stop herself from pushing pug aside, to lean into the pillow and find the whisper of his scent there.
There bloomed a hungry ache deep within her that never freed her of her yearning for him. Yet oddly, without her knowing how it had come to be, the trapped feeling of loving Varian had vanished with the night. She felt a change in her body, a wild giddy weightlessness, since she knew it was not only possible to feed her hunger, but her want to feed it was shared by him as well.
Knowing it was possible to surrender to her desire for Varian—that he wanted her to—was a dangerous thing. She resolved to avoid him and stay busy this day.
She worked with the sisters on recipe books, neatly trimming the handwritten sheets and pasting them onto the pages. She took a morning walk with them in the fields and continued her lessons on tobacco planting. By midmorning, she could not count the number of times she carefully peeked to see if Varian had returned from wherever he went each morning.
Last night he had told her he adored her and held her through the night. This morning he had left her before she woke. The question—what drew him away every morning—changed after the darkness spent in his arms. What drew him away from her? That made it a mystery Merry was more than a little anxious to solve.
After they finished their walk in the fields, the women found a morning tea awaiting them in the front garden. The garden was shaded of vine climbing trellises and magnolia trees in purple bloom. The flower beds were brilliant of color with opening buds of roses, pansies and wildflowers.
The sisters went eagerly to the benches.
Merry glanced at the meticulously raked walkway. “Where does the Captain go each day?”
Aline, busy with teapot in her grubby fingers, nodded with her head toward the east. “Up that small rise to the top of the hill. It’s a long walk. You would do better to be patient and wait for his return.”
Patient, Merry was not.
She soon found herself climbing the gradual incline of the path that disappeared beyond the carefully tended grounds of Winderly. The landscape was lush and natural, though even here, far from the main house, the walkway was expertly tended. It seemed to go endlessly into the forest, and she more than half suspected Aline had been right, it would have been better not to have started this.
Perspiration beaded Merry’s upper lip, and she wished she’d taken Aline’s worn straw hat since the sun high in the sky was blistering today. She’d been walking over an hour before it occurred to her she had no idea what she’d find, and that it was definitely not among her wisest moves to give into her impulse to discover the cause of Varian’s mysterious absence each day. After the night she had passed in his arms, she did not trust her heart not to behave foolishly.
She was about to turn back when she spotted a stone bench on a patch of green grass surrounded by bushes of yellow roses. Then not far beyond it, beneath the arching branches of trees, was a small chapel. There was just such a chapel at Merrick Hall, where her Grandmamma went every morning to pray in faithful devotion to her grandfather.
Merry felt her emotions commence to frantically churn again. This she understood without effort, though finding the chapel was no more a comfort than what she had expected to find here.
It was another woman Varian went to each day. But it was not a mistress; it was his wife. And Ann held his heart in a way no flesh and blood woman could ever claim him. Indy had warned her about this. Indy had warned and been right about many things.
She could not stop herself from going to the entrance to see if Varian was inside. He was a lone figure on his knees, head bowed before God as he quietly prayed. Merry’s eyes rounded in surprise. The infamous pirate Morgan at pray. Seeing him thus rattled her in a way unexpected, and she cautiously eased back out of view.
Gathering her skirts up in her hands, she ran from the chapel. For some elusive reason, she stopped at the bench on the grass and settled herself there. The world was quiet all around her, so quiet she could hear the distant bird songs, the gentle swish of air from the valley below, and the sound of her own blood gushing through her veins.
She was anything but quiet internally, and could not begin to understand why this discovery distressed her. A man in pray. Her stomach was taut and tears burned behind her lids. What a foolish thing to become distraught over.
The sky was a rich oiled blue and the breezes licked with the rich scent of newly turned soil. Merry could understand the allure of this place, why Varian had built the chapel here and planted the small rose garden, which surely was intended for Ann. It was a peaceful place, of richly colored beauty and solitude. She was well aware Varian had loved his wife, and yet this confused her more than any other thing she had learned of him. What manne
r of man was Varian truly?
Some time passed before Varian exited the chapel. He settled on the bench beside her, his blood-warmed fingers a feather-light lay atop her hand. He didn’t speak and she couldn’t speak, but the quiet they shared had a strange kind of blending closeness to it.
Through the fabric of her gown, Merry could feel the long elegant muscles of his body, his awareness of her and what she now knew was a potent intimacy that was them. It came to her that what she was feeling was no surprise to him, he had felt them first and understood it, this blending closeness in the quiet that was them.
The wind tousled his hair, and in his sculptured face his black eyes had an intent, peaceful glow. Twice her eyes strayed to his face and then lowered in a shaken way. He was not angry she had followed him here. He had expected her to, and she knew he had wanted her to and had led her here.
His voice, though quiet, was powerful. “Why did you not come in?”
“I don’t know.” As she inspected his hand atop hers it occurred to her his stillness and quiet were deliberate. His question was not as simple as her answer and she added, “It seemed a private thing you do. I did not wish to disturb you.”
His smile was warm, understanding and very human. “All men, Merry, pray at the moment of their death. A wise man prays long before that moment.”
She sank her teeth into her lower lip. “It was not so much the praying, but why you pray that made me not wish to disturb you.”
Varian’s heavy lidded eyes widened in response. “I pray for wisdom, counsel, and forgiveness for many things in my life. You would not have disturbed me, Little One.”
It was a cleverly worded answer, true and yet evasive. Merry didn’t miss one nuisance. “You pray for her. To be close to Ann in the only manner left to you.” Her eyes shifted to the roses. “Just as you had this bench placed here and the garden planted. For her.”
In a low tone that was oddly devoid of emotion, he said, “Yes.”
A truthful answer, direct. It was the last thing Merry expected or was prepared to deal with. Her love for him, long denied, was urging her closer to him, even as it urged her to run from him.
Varian’s fingers tightened slightly around hers. “And now I sit here with you.”
That was far from a casual remark, and Merry felt her insides sharply adjust yet again. The tender parts of this man, potent with his sensitivity, were more dangerous than all the other parts of him. Merry looked away, as though to study the valley, so he could not see and read her thoughts in her eyes. Shay had been right. Being on land with the Captain was a curse, not a blessing. It was not Morgan who drew women to him. It was Varian.
Over her shoulder, she heard Varian say, “You need to be more careful, Little One.”
Merry didn’t look at him. Yes. More careful. But I am not a careful girl, Varian. You must have care with me.
Killing her thoughts, she turned her face and saw he was staring at her feet. She looked in the direction of his gaze. She’d climbed the path without her shoes, and there were cuts here and there on her pale flesh. She had not felt a single cut as it was made. It seemed to her a distressing omen underscoring her danger with him. She had cut her feet to ribbons following him and hadn’t even known she’d done it.
Not giving her time to react, Varian lifted Merry from the bench and said, “I will carry you back to the house, Little One.”
The mold of their bodies was so close, it was hard for Merry to tell which breath that passed between them belonged to her and which were his. The gentle care of his hold gave the sensation of floating downward on the path.
“I can walk,” she said.
Varian’s answering smile was soft and amused. “Don’t be foolish.”
Merry hid her face against his chest. Too late, Varian. I am a foolish girl. I am in love with you.
CHAPTER THREE
Merry stayed in bed several days. The sisters had cleaned and bandaged her feet upon her return from the chapel. The burning sting of her flesh had miraculously faded after a single night. It was no doubt due to the vile smelling concoction April had prepared. It proved a remarkable cure, but Merry used the injury as an excuse to hide in her bedchamber from Varian.
She did not see Varian until the third night. He stopped at her sickbed to inquire on her recovery. Abruptly, he informed her that he would be gone to Richmond on the morrow. He made no explanation for his journey and the thought of him surrounded by fawning companions and lovers did not set pleasantly upon Merry. She could feel the ache of missing him and the ache, of what she reluctantly admitted was jealousy, though he had not even left her yet.
His visit was brief, no more than few minutes. His demeanor was courteous and distant. When the door clicked closed behind him, she sat in her bed, hugging her legs with her arms and sent a frantic plea to heaven to allow her someday understand him. The days spent hiding were a foolish endeavor since he had left her in solitude without argument. Now he would put even more distance between them by leaving her with the Devereaux sisters at Winderly.
The next morning she rose from her bed early and dressed quickly. She would go downstairs before Varian left, to breakfast with him. It seemed an important thing for her to do, though she knew not why. Nor did she know why she stopped at the mirror, pinching her cheeks to add a touch of color to her face.
Varian’s housekeeper was surprised to see her bouncing down the stairs and the Devereaux sisters were even more astounded by the vigor in which she entered the breakfast room.
At the table, Merry froze. The scones Varian liked in the morning were not among the morning fare and only two places were set. She frowned. Varian had already left and he had not even said goodbye to her. She felt her spirits drop and a strange kind of unease over having not seen him before his departure.
The routine resumed with her back in the care of the sisters. The days were long, the nights longer, and Winderly lost much of its magic now that the Captain was not here. The quiet lent to too much thinking for Merry.
Love had opened new depths within her and for the first time she thought to ask herself in a mature way what it was she wanted from life. The love of a man? Children? A home? Alone in the darkness with her thoughts, she began to understand a little more what her mother had always tried to tell her.
Nothing in life was ever as certain as you believed it, she thought to herself. Not yourself. Not the future, and she had thought she had known herself so well in Cornwall.
Four days hence, after restless nights and endless pondering, she knew with certainty only two things. She was sitting in the grass, on a sunny day, watching a celebration in the slave row on a Virginia plantation; and she was missing a man with an absolutely desperate ache.
Four days. It was too long. Merry missed him.
She reached into April’s basket and pulled out a spice cake. “I do not understand. Why is there a broom laying in the dirt?” Merry inquired, looking to Aline.
“The broom symbolizes home and hearth,” Aline explained. “It is their marriage custom. On one side of the broom they are separate and jumping the broom they become one in home and hearth. Husband and wife.”
April smiled and watched. “How wonderful it must be to be able to find your true love so simply. No courting ritual. No contracts. No jointure. Perhaps then we would have found husbands, sister.”
Aline propelled herself to a sitting posture. “Humdudgeon. I for one am thankful that marriage for us is such a daunting process. I’m sure it was the only reason we were both spared.”
April’s eyes sparkled impishly. “Don’t pretend you are not interested in romance, Aline Devereaux. I see those novels you read. We are women and we are all vulnerable to the same disease. Love.”
The sisters stared at each other and giggled. Merry turned her attention back to the celebration. The jumping of the broom done, the air was vibrating with the sound of fiddles and clapping. The dancing and the merrymaking had begun.
April sprang to her
feet and pulled Aline with her, and the sisters were soon gaily colored butterflies dancing in front of Merry. How sweet they are, Merry thought, but how sad their life, to know there is no hope to have more. Only this. Each other.
It was strange that the Devereaux sisters should live the life she had fought for in England, and now that she could see it, it should be a thing she viewed with despondency.
A tear stung her eye and rolled down her cheek. Merry had found love, but her fate was no less hopeless than this. Sitting in this pleasant daylight, she wanted to believe it was a hopeful thing and yet couldn’t convince herself it ever would be.
She did not belong here. She did not belong with Varian. Love him she may, but it would not bring any more joy to her than love had ever brought the Devereauxs.
April was right. They were all infected with the same disease, but the disease was fate.
The sisters were just gathering their blankets and baskets to return to the house when the sound of horse hooves caused the sisters to look toward the drive. Merry did not need to look to know who it was. The world around her had changed and she could feel that it was Varian. She held herself back from going to the edge of the drive with the reminder she too often made herself a fool over this man. If what they played now was her game then she would not jump first.
In their enthusiasm over the Captain’s return, the Devereaux sisters made a fast trek to the house, unmindful Merry didn’t follow.
Several minutes passed before Merry cautiously looked over her shoulder. The horse was gone. The drive empty. Varian did not come to her. He had gone into the house with the sisters.
She would not jump first.
Merry sank back down onto the grass. Time passed without notice. The sun was setting before she heard Varian. Beside her she could feel the displacement of air as his goliath body lowered until he was at eye level with her. He lifted her palm to his lips and kissed it. The touch of him leapt through her veins. What she felt in his touch, what she felt inside of herself, frightened her.
