An Improper Situation (Sanborn-Malloy Historical Romance Series, Book One) (5 page)

As she settled in behind her desk, Charlotte mused on the fact that the warmth she felt was not just from the coffee. It came as well from the innate feeling of peace and security of having another living being—three of them—in the house with her.

She had missed this feeling when Thaddeus left and then forgotten it, but now that it had returned, she welcomed the sweet remembrance and thought perhaps she’d try to make the most of this unexpected visit from Reed Malloy and his two charges.

That was what she thought until all hell broke loose around one o’clock in the morning
.

Charlotte was out of bed and on her feet before she was completely awake. Her heart was pounding uncomfortably and her hand shook as she fumbled to light her bedside lamp, before covering it with its glass chimney. Then she heard the scream again, followed by Lily’s voice, yelling.

Charlotte threw open her bedroom door and bounded down the hallway, colliding with Reed Malloy. She felt herself bounce off of his hard chest, and she nearly dropped the oil lamp.

“
What in blazes is going on?” she asked, as they responded to the commotion coming from the children’s room. “The children are waking snakes!”

“
Thomas has nightmares,” Reed explained, as he threw open the children’s door. Charlotte took the scene in instantly over Reed’s shoulder, her lamp illuminating the children. Lily was kneeling on the bed, yelling at her little brother who was thrashing around in the bed clothes. He screamed again.

Reed was beside him in an instant. He took hold of both of Thomas’s shoulders and raised the boy to a sitting position. He shook him gently. Before long, the little boy was awake, blinking with large, startled eyes. Then Lily hugged her brother.

“Was it the same?” Charlotte heard the little girl ask. Thomas nodded, and the two of them curled together, snuggling down in the sheets. It tugged at her heart. How much harder it must be for them to lose their parents than it had been for her. She had been six years older than Lily and had not been carted halfway across the United States to a stranger’s house. Only to find themselves unwanted, she thought, the guilt welling up in her at once.

They seemed all right on the surface, but, of course, inside, they must be vulnerable and bewildered. And they looked so small in the middle of the four-poster bed.

“Is there anything I can get you?” she asked, still clutching the light in front of her as if it were a beacon. Thomas yelled ice cream and Lily giggled. Charlotte was amazed at their resiliency.

“
I was thinking more along the lines of warm milk,” she offered.

“
I think that would be a good idea,” Reed agreed, turning to strike a match, which he held steadily to the wick of their bedside lamp. A soft, amber glow filled the room.

Reed followed Charlotte out into the hallway.

“You might catch cold going downstairs dressed like that,” Reed said as she reached the top of the stairs.

She turned to him, saw where his gaze was falling and looked down.

“Oh,” she gasped. She was in her shift of the softest white lawn. And with the light in front of her as she led the way, he’d been able to see clearly the shape of her figure from behind. Now he was no doubt getting a good look at the front of her. She blushed scarlet, thrust the lamp into his hands, and disappeared into her room.

Of course, he had been perfectly respectable, wearing a set of black silk pajamas, even if they did emphasize the firm shape of his muscles when he moved.

Hearing him go down the stairs, Charlotte leaned against the back of her door, feeling a strange tingling in her stomach  . . . and lower. She wondered if she should bother to join him. In a moment, she groped in the dark for her robe and threw it on before heading for the kitchen.

Reed was already stoking the fire in the wood stove when she entered. She went to the cold storage and took a bottle of milk from where it lay nestled in the ice and straw.

“Has Thomas been having nightmares long?” she asked, measuring out two cups of the frothy white liquid into a pot. When no answer came, Charlotte looked up at Reed.

He was taking in her new attire with a disconcerting glance from her head to her feet, which peeked out from beneath the hem. Charlotte wiggled her toes self-consciously until his gaze returned to her face.

“You’re wearing a banyan,” he remarked, which she thought quite rude.

“
My father’s,” she muttered, smoothing her hands over the outrageous peacock blue silk of her Indian gown, as she called it. There was nothing subtle about the rich purple curlicues woven through the damask, but when her mother’s robe wore out, Charlotte had naturally decided to make use of her father’s morning gown. She had long forgotten such a thing might be considered improper.

Reed shook his head abruptly as if to break up his thoughts and then addressed her question.

“I found out about Thomas’s nightmares for the first time on the train. We had a sleeper car from Baltimore,” he continued, as he took the pot from her and set it on the stove. “Lily told me that he has been having them since they moved from their own home to their grandmother’s. Thomas barely knew his father, so his death wasn’t as traumatic.”

He ran a hand through his hair, making it stand up on top.
“Both feel the loss of their mother greatly. I think it’ll just take some time, and they need to feel secure—not as though they’re being shuffled around.”

His pointed look made her flush again, not with embarrassment this time but with shame. This man had expected her to be that security for them, and she had let them down. Mutely, she pointed to the pot where the milk was starting to bubble, and he turned away. She sighed.

“The sooner you take them home, Mr. Malloy, the better.”

“
Home!” he echoed, his voice harsh. “They don’t appear to have one at the moment. You know, I didn’t even hesitate when Ann asked me to put you down as their guardian should anything happen to her. In your writings, Miss Sanborn, you seem far more compassionate than you are in person. But perhaps you care more for the plight of unknown farmers than you do for your own family.”

He poured the steaming milk into two cups and, with another scathing look at her that again took in her ridiculous outfit before resting on her scarlet face, he walked past her down the hallway.

Charlotte was mortified. She
was
compassionate! She was just unsuited to . . . to what? she asked herself, leaning her palms against the work table. To being motherly? What about wifely?
Couldn’t she love anyone?
Couldn’t she reach out and be like other people? Didn’t she need anybody? She thought of her parents, of Thaddeus—her Teddy—and of the years she’d spent alone.

She straightened. No, she didn’t
need
anyone. If she did, she would have been crushed years ago and would be a sad, lonely woman even now. And she was not. Not at all. Wearily, she climbed the stairs, pausing only to listen to the voices of Reed and the children. He was telling them a story. A lump rose in her throat. Teddy used to love it when she told him stories—it was something she’d always been good at.

She hesitated only a moment before going to her bedroom. She was not welcome in the room with her guests, not while the condemning words of Reed Malloy still reverberated in her mind, not while he blamed her for causing Thomas’s nightmares to continue. It was an odd sensation, feeling estranged in her own home.

*****

“
Mr. Malloy, this is intolerable.” Charlotte had waited until the children went out to explore their new surroundings after breakfast, but she could hold her tongue no longer. “It just caps the climax! You cannot simply show up unannounced—”

“
But we were announced,” he interrupted, moving to the sideboard to fill his coffee cup before sitting down at the dining room table. The remains of eggs, bacon, and potatoes were starting to stick to the plates.

She sighed.
“Granted, you sent me a letter informing me of the decision made by my cousin and
telling
me that you were coming. I still think it an odd and even unorthodox practice that I was not told of the guardianship when you drew up the will.”

Reed shrugged.
“Ann Connors had assured me that she’d asked you beforehand, which was why my letter may seem indelicate to you now. I suppose she was worried that you would turn her down. Be that as it may, these children are your relations. How can you think of putting them out?”

His sapphiric eyes bore into hers as if he was personally affronted by her seeming callousness.

Her fists clenched under the table in frustration.
Was the man such a thick-headed coot?
She knew she could tell him until she was blue in the face that she was not a suitable parent and he would just blindly carry on trying to enforce her cousin’s wishes. Even his words, attempting to play on her conscience and her sympathies, were nothing short of aggravating.

“
The Randalls thought nothing of putting my family out when my mother married my father,” she told him, thinking of Regina Randall Sanborn’s proud sorrow when she was cut off from her family.

Indeed, her mother had referred to herself with bitter humor as an orphan on more than one occasion, all because she married
“beneath her” according to some outdated class code. No one from the east had ever sent cards of congratulations on Charlotte’s and Thaddeus’s births, nor invited them to be a part of their world.

“
And so you repay the insult by shunning little children?” His eyebrows were up in exaggerated disbelief before forming that infuriatingly straight line of disapproval.

“
Don’t be ridiculous,” she countered. “I merely bring it up to show that . . . that I am not without understanding of their plight, though the circumstances are different. My mother was an adult, marrying a suitable man whom she loved and who loved her back.”

That was perhaps a slight misrepresentation of the odd and somewhat tempestuous marriage of her parents.
“But these are children coming to my care when I am neither skilled in parenting, nor willing to adjust my life for such a reason at this time.”

“
But you raised your brother,” Reed Malloy said quietly.

Her eyes darted to his. How much did the man know about her anyway? His expression was closed now—no condemnation, no judgment.

“I was forced to,” she said, her voice sounding dry. She smoothed her napkin between her fingers and swallowed. “We were poor as Job’s turkey, but I did the best I could under the circumstances. I will not be forced again.”

A wave of melancholy washed over her, and she felt as if, against all reason, she might cry. Resentment over her parents’ death, the hardship she and her brother had endured for so long, the pressure on her at such a young age as she’d struggled to keep them both clothed and fed, and then Teddy leaving her all alone—it had been so difficult.

Finally, she was moderately successful at the one thing that she cared about and that demanded all her time and concentration—only to find another horrible death had caused the cycle to begin again. Why did she always get the little end of the horn? Why must the lot fall on her to pick up the pieces? But then there was the very real dilemma of Thomas and Lily.

She wanted to have a conniption fit right then and there! Instead, Charlotte stood up, not looking at Reed’s face, which she was sure would hold only contempt for what he thought was outright selfishness.
“I have errands I must attend to.”

She should have returned to her writing, but she couldn’t. Forgetting her bonnet until it was too late to go back for it, she headed to Spring City on foot at a leisurely pace to clear her head. She walked barely noticing where she was, sorting out what adjustments would have to be made if the children stayed, thinking ahead to when they came of age and left her, probably to head east. She knew how that would feel.

Teddy had left at seventeen, and she had walked around the house for days wondering how she would cope with so much time on her hands, with no one to do for. She had already started writing by then, and she began to spend all her time at that endeavor, submitting to anyone and everyone who would read her work.

Eventually the hollow feeling had gone away. But the little ones would want her to open her heart again, without reserve—she knew that instinctively.

Without thinking about where she was going, Charlotte ended up on the opposite end of town, at the cemetery. There was a slight breeze blowing and she could smell the carefully tended grass and the fresh scent of wildflowers that bordered the area.

Pushing open the white gate of the fence that encircled the grassy plots, she headed for her parents’ graves, buried side by side, as they had lived and died.

John Sanborn, loving husband and father, and Regina Randall Sanborn, loving wife and mother.
That was supposed to say it all, but it didn’t. It didn’t describe the happy times in their home with a fascinating father and a beautiful and elegant mother, a genteel lady from Boston’s highest society.