There were only flowers there, turning their faces to the sun.
***
Ash hadn't come to luncheon or dinner, and Kathryn finally demanded to know what had caused this latest rift. Charlotte watched as Cabot tried to brush off the whole thing as typical of Ash's overreaction to something that was completely insignificant. Like twenty-two years of guilt.
If Cabot fooled Kathryn, it was only because she was begging him to whip the devil around the stump and he was more than willing to oblige. Kathryn, even as she appeared to accept Cabot's words, still insisted on sending Maria to make sure that Ash was all right. And she appeared less than content with Maria's report that her younger son was huddled with Moss Johnson in the carriage house poring through stacks of paper.
Kathryn told Maria to take off her wet coat and apologized for having sent her out on a wild goose chase in the rain. When the girl was gone, she turned to Cabot. "What do you suppose they could be working on?"
Cabot was quick to answer that between them they hadn't as much sense as a box of rocks, and added that whatever they came up with couldn't be worth more than a hill of beans.
Maria, her hair still damp, rushed to offer Charlotte more peas, managing, as she did so, to drop a note in her lap. Ask Cabot about the progress on the coffee beans, it said.
"Speaking of beans," Charlotte said as innocently as she could, "did your man ever find out anything further on Sam Greenbough's sale of those coffee beans?" Of course the note made no mention of love. Wasn't that what they'd agreed? And wasn't Ash just honoring her request? she thought as she balled up the note, covering the noise by rubbing her fork against her plate.
"My man, as you call him," Cabot said carefully, "found that the beans were sold in Sacramento for ten times what Greenbough told Ash. He didn't cover his tracks as well as he thought, apparently."
"Well, some people are better than others at hiding things," Charlotte said with equal care. "For years."
"People in glass houses..., Charlotte," he started for her, but she wasn't playing.
"I think it would be a sin if someone did something and let someone else take the blame," she said instead.
"You mean Sam Greenbough?" Kathryn asked. She was aligning her silverware with meticulous care.
"I mean that a man who doesn't own up to something for which he is responsible isn't much of a man," Charlotte said, baiting her husband.
"What's good for the goose..." he started.
"Are you accusing me of something?" Charlotte asked. Let him spit it out, dammit! Nothing happened in Whittier Court that he didn't know, after all.
"No." He said it firmly, simply, with finality.
Kathryn broke the ensuing silence finally. "Things look very bad for Ash, don't they?"
Cabot nodded. "They do indeed. This may be one fire I can't pull his chestnuts out from."
***
She'd worked with Cabot until ten, the strain between them palpable as they went over Ash's case from every angle they could think of. They had Greenbough where they wanted him, right in the hot seat. Apparently Sam was convinced that his wife and Ash were involved and that he was "owed" as a result. He'd just been helping himself to his due. Even if it was true, which Ash had assured them it wasn't, and which she, as opposed to Cabot, believed, it gave Sam a motive for setting up Ash.
And then there were the suppliers who were benefiting from the shortages the fire created. She'd outlined them all for Cabot and he'd nodded, so she assumed that they, too, could help, even if Cabot wouldn't say as much.
Provided the police didn't try to pin the second fire on him, Ash had a chance, small, but real, of clearing his name, though she knew he wanted more. Didn't they all want to know who really did it now that Selma had been hurt? Of course, the rest of them weren't facing the blame.
The big hole in their case was that even though Cabot's man had checked out every brothel within a carriage ride of the bay, he'd turned up no one who remembered seeing Ash Whittier that night. Many of them, though, swore they knew him on sight, Cabot was quick enough to tell her, as if to say he'd told her just what kind of man his brother was.
He was the kind of man who'd let a one-eared rabbit share his sleeping quarters, while Cabot would banish it to unseen realms. The kind of man who would bring her gifts and pay her compliments and hope she was happy and do what he could to make her so. She had already learned what kind of man Ashford Whittier was, and it made her all that much more desperate to find a way to prove him innocent.
When she'd tried once again to broach the subject of herself and Ash, Cabot had thrown up his hands and admitted that they weren't getting anywhere. He'd told her she was tired and sent her off to bed like an errant child who had tricked him into letting her stay up late by inventing a problem where there had been none before. In the way he always did with her, with silence, with deaf ears, with unseeing eyes, he also made it abundantly clear that he did not wish to discuss or hear about her relationship with his brother.
And so she'd brought her notes with her to her bedroom to try yet another way to see what it was that they had missed that would prove to the world what she already knew about the gentle man who left a flower on her chair each morning, who put one of Mrs. Mason's cookies by her bed each night. But sitting by the window and watching the candles flicker in the carriage house hadn't brought any of the answers she needed.
She waited for Cabot and Arthur's voices to fade, heard the servant bid his master good-night, and listened for the door next to hers shut tight. If he called out to her tonight, asked her into his room, she would simply ignore him. Pretend she was asleep. Wish she were dead.
The rap was faint at first, dismissible. Coward that she was, she climbed into her bed and hid from it. A stronger tap sent her head beneath the pillow.
Faint though it was, she could still hear his voice calling her name.
"Yes?" she said finally, sitting up on her bed and hugging her pillow against her chest. "Did you need me, Cabot?"
"I just wanted to tell you not to worry," he shouted through the wall. "Get a good night's rest and we'll tackle the problem in the morning."
Warily her body came back to itself—her shoulders let go of her ears, her toes uncurled, her heart returned to beating. And with all of that came a calm she couldn't remember feeling in all of her adult life.
Cabot wouldn't ask to touch her again. She was sure of it.
"Charlotte? This is what you want, isn't it?" he asked in the silence she had left to him.
"Yes," she called back to him. "Thank you, Cabot."
Relief flowed through the wall, and she wondered which of them felt it more.
"Good night, then," he said more softly.
"Good night," she agreed, pushing her bare feet into the slippers by her bed and reaching for her robe before she quietly pried open her door and ventured out into the dark hall.
***
"What about some target other than us?" Ash asked Moss, grasping at straws that turned to dust in his hand. "Maybe someone whose business would be hurt when they didn't get their stock. If we presume for a minute that the target wasn't me, or G and W—"
The carriage house door opened a crack, and he signaled for Moss to be silent. While Cabot's chair could never make it to the outbuilding through the mud, one couldn't be too careful. He was not about to put his fate into his brother's hands again.
A tiny head peeked around the door. "Davis?" he asked. Would Cabot have sent Davis to spy on them? Davis was surely bright and would do anything for Cabot, still...
"Ash?" Even with a quiver in it her voice was unmistakable.
"Charlotte? What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?" he asked, as if he hadn't had on his mind the thought that maybe, just maybe, she'd come to him again, despite everything. "Moss is here," he warned.
"Are you working on your case?" she asked softly, stepping out into the light to glow there like some angel. "Can I help?"
"Come and si
t down," he said, pulling himself from the stupor her presence always seemed to put him in. "Moss, give her a blanket. It's damn... I mean it's a little cold out here."
"Mmm," she agreed with that Cheshire-cat smile he found so irresistible. "Damn cold."
He could have sent Moss home, but he wasn't looking for one night with Charlotte. He was looking for a lifetime together, and if he had to sacrifice tonight, well, so be it.
"I'm thinking that we could be looking at this all wrong," he told her over his shoulder, figuring it would be better not to look temptation in the face—not when it had lips like that and when the top two buttons of her nightgown seemed to be—he caught his mind on a hook and reeled it back in. "What if they were actually trying to ruin someone else's business with the fires—or even just the first fire—and were using the second fire as a cover-up?"
It was a thin rope to hang on to, more like a slender thread, but it was a direction to work in, and Lord knew he needed some hope, no matter how slim.
"Have you gone over the inventory that was lost?" she asked, pulling her chair up behind his and Moss's so that she could look over their shoulders at the lists they were making. Beside each name was a symbol Moss would recognize, and then a drawing of what it was they'd imported for that particular company. There were bottles, kegs, piles of rice, trees... or maybe those were pineapples. "I was thinking—did you lease any of the space to anyone else? Or maybe were you holding any merchandise for anyone? I think it's not very likely that those poor people who died were the target, do you? What about—"
"Whoa," he said. "If you're going to ask such good questions, you better be willing to wait for some answers."
"It's about time you took some interest in your defense," she said, getting up onto her knees and leaning against him to reach a pad and pencil.
He turned, and her face was inches from his own, lit by the lamp to an enthusiastic glow that could warm all of Oakland even on a night like this. "Oh, Charlie my love. We're gonna win this case. We've got to. I've too much riding on it now. And so do you."
Each prospect he and Moss offered seemed more farfetched than the last, but she didn't rule any of them out and offered one or two of her own. Could someone have been after Greenbough? How about those crazy temperance zealots? Could they have been after the Cuervo?
Moss was snoring lightly by around midnight, and noisily by one. At two Ash roused him and sent him on home, lists of possibilities for him to investigate stuffed in every one of his pockets. And then he turned around to watch Charlotte, hunched by the lamp, still scribbling, stopping for a moment to arch her back and stretch out her shoulders and arms.
If there was a more beautiful woman on the entire planet, Ash had never seen her, and he'd looked awfully hard, back in his old days, before this morning in Cabot's office when the world had righted itself and his demons had been washed away.
He didn't even hate his brother anymore, though he'd only trust the man as far as he could walk. If history meant anything, Cabot had a strong sense of self-preservation, and Ash didn't doubt that it probably extended to Charlotte as well. Charlie Russe could drive a man to steal, to cheat. It was what she had Ash doing, after all, lying to his brother, stealing the man's wife. It was what she had Cabot doing, lying to himself, cheating his wife out of love itself.
And his Charlie—caught in the middle by none of her own doing.
"Tired?" he asked, coming up behind her and rubbing her neck. "Should I walk you back to the house?"
She shook her head and put her pen down. Her first finger and her thumb were nearly black with ink, and she rubbed at them with her other hand.
"Then what is it you want, Charlie Russe?" he asked her, planting a kiss atop her head. While he had loved that chestnut mane, had wanted her from the moment he'd run his fingers through it, he hoped she'd never let it grow out again—so incredibly intimate was it to touch, and kiss, and nuzzle the short little locks. "Why are you still here?"
She twisted around on her chair awkwardly, her body obviously cramped from sitting on her knees all these hours, and turned her little face up to him. "I want to spend as much time as I can with you now," she admitted, her lip trembling as she fought off tears. "I'm so scared that you could get convicted. Ash, I won't be able to live with it. If you have to go to prison..."
"No one's putting me away," he said, pressing her head against his chest and rubbing at her back. Another minute of this and he'd break down and kiss her again, touch her. Another night of this and he'd take her, love her. "Let me take you back to the house now."
"No," she begged him, her words dancing against his skin beneath his shirt. "Let me stay with you longer. Don't make me go back."
"If I don't—" he began. He knew the catch in his throat and the ragged breath that ruffled her hair told her what would happen.
"Let me stay," she begged him again, and again, one tiny little stream of pleas against the boulder of his resistance. It was how the great canyons were made, and he was surely no stronger. Hadn't he told his brother he owed him nothing? Hadn't he meant it?
He allowed himself to taste her lips, lick the salty wetness of her tears away. He permitted himself the luxury of running his fingers across her soft cheeks, tracing her jaw, and trailing down her neck.
"Charlie," he said softly, the words getting lost in her neck, the edge of her gown, the perfume of her skin, "you should go now. You'll be sorry tomorrow."
"Tomorrow the world could end," she said, unbuttoning her gown until he could see the slight curve of her breasts through the opening. "And I don't want to die without knowing you love me."
"You already know that." He put his hands on her shoulders, massaging them and keeping her nightgown where he knew it belonged. "And what if the world doesn't end? What then?"
"Are you afraid I'll be sorry tomorrow if we do something here tonight?" she asked, the shoulder of her gown slipping and neither of them stopping it as it rolled down her arm. "Because I'm afraid I'll be sorry for the rest of my life if we don't."
"Honey," he said as she reached up and wound her arms around his neck, drawing him down toward her, drawing him in, holding him down beneath the surface with her until they were both drowning, "it's not something you'll be able to take back. Not something you can just tell yourself didn't happen."
"You don't want to make love to me?" she asked, pulling back while those huge hazel eyes searched his face. "Is that it?"
"I don't want to hurt you," he said, unable to stop himself from running his hands down her arms and dragging her gown along with them. As much as she wanted him, he wanted her that much more. But not at the price she'd have to pay if she thought she was doing wrong. "Ever."
"Is it going to hurt?" she asked, the slightest wince crossing her face.
He let go of her gown and backed away from her, letting a moan escape through his lips. He hadn't meant hurt her physically. Somehow he'd managed to forget about it being her very first time, had forgotten the fact that she was a virgin bride.
Her face fell. "That much?" she asked, and her throat bobbed as she swallowed.
Had he ever been with a woman for her first time? He didn't recall and couldn't believe it was something he'd forget. He shrugged his shoulders. "I've heard that it does," he answered honestly.
"But you've..." she said, those wide eyes melting places he didn't realize had ever hardened.
"Yes, I've made love," he admitted. "Too many times to too many women."
"Did it hurt them?" she asked, not seeming to be troubled by the fact that he'd actually done everything Cabot had ever accused him of—and then some.
"It only hurts once," he said. "Just the first time."
She ran her tongue over her bottom lip, thinking. "So then this must be your first time too," she said, uncoiling her body and stepping down from the chair. "The first time that it was for the first time."
Somehow it cleansed him just to be with her, as if her very breath could blow away his sins.
"I want my first time to be with you. I want every time to be with you." She shook her shoulders slightly and the white gown billowed about her and fell to the ground around her feet. "And if you do get convicted, then I want my only time to have been with you."
Her words were eloquent, moving. But the sight of her there, some sprite rising from the dirt floor—that was beyond all words.
He put out his hand to her and she grasped it tightly with warm fingertips. Willingly, she followed him to the bed, let him lift her and place her down gently on the cot, let him stare down at her nakedness while he pulled his shirttails from his pants and hurried out of his shirt.
It was a wonder to him that the world didn't stop revolving at the sight of her—that judges and lawyers continued their business when she was present in the courtroom, that merchants could still show their wares when she entered their shops, that butchers could speak with her about meat or tailors about clothes.
His world stood still.
While he turned his back and shimmied out of his trousers, she shifted onto her side and moved toward the far edge of the cot, making room for him. Looking over his shoulder he saw her fuss with the pillow, run her hand over the sheet, and bite at her bottom lip.
"Don't be afraid," he said, lowering himself to the cot and pulling her against him.
"I'm afraid for you," she admitted, shifting to fit snugly against him. "But not of you. I could never be afraid of you."
It was tight on the bed, but she was a tiny thing, and he rolled her onto her back and lay on his side, running his hands over her breasts, her belly, her thighs. In turn she touched his chest, and for a while he thought she was counting his ribs. He bent his head and kissed her lips, letting his tongue hint at what his manhood would do when she was ready.
All the while she continued to trace his ribs, but he had the feeling she was losing count often and starting over.
He drifted from her lips to her neck, from her neck to her collarbone. From there he traced with his tongue down the center of her chest and made a sharp left turn to grasp a small nipple between his lips.
Mittman, Stephanie Page 27
