Bride of the Shining Mountains (The St. Claire Men) (33 page)

A little while later, Reagan found her way back to the garden.
Half expecting Jackson to appear, relieved and disappointed when he did not,
she flounced to the stone bench where he’d found her last evening—before their
moonlight waltz and the cataclysmic events that followed—and plunked angrily down.

“Marauding low-bred polecat,” she said softly. “Calculatin’,
manipulative parlor snake!”

The second expletive had barely tripped off her tongue before the
ornamental grasses behind the bench on which Reagan sat began to rustle.
Startled, Reagan sucked in her breath, spinning quickly around. She half
expected to see Jackson standing there, smiling sardonically down at her;
instead she saw a flash of tawny fur, and a pair of round cat eyes blinked at
her through the tall, waving fronds.

“You hidin’ from him, too, are you?” Reagan said. “Well, things
bein’ what they are, I can’t say as I blame you. Sometimes I get the urge to
hide too, or maybe just to run away somewhere—then I see his face in my mind’s
eye, laughing, serious, taut with anger, and I know that I could never run far
enough or long enough to ever escape him. He’s always with me, always right
here.” Eyes pricking with tears, she placed both hands over her heart, sighing
deeply.

“Oh, Josephine, what am I gonna do? As far as Jackson’s concerned,
I’m good enough to warm his bed, but not fit to wed, and I just can’t seem to
settle for less.”

Josephine gave up her game of hide-and-skulk, and slunk from the
bushes, leaping easily onto the bench to touch her nose to Reagan’s, for all
the world as if she understood and sympathized. Then, being the self-involved
creature that she was, she flopped down onto the bench beside Reagan and
insinuated her broad head into her mistress’s silken lap. “Would you like to
see Kentucky?” Reagan said. “I have a little cabin tucked up in the piney woods
where you and I could live quite handily. There’s lots of field mice for you to
chase, and butterflies in summer. You could be as wild as you wanted there, so
long as you shied away from the hunters’ rifles.”

She sighed again, the melancholy sinking deep into her vitals,
affecting
min
d and heart, so effectively erasing every trace of buoyancy from
her spirit that it felt like a leaden weight.

Home...
How she longed for it,
longed for the steep hills and pine-shrouded ridges, the primeval woods so deep
that even in this modern age there were places where a white man had never set
foot. Her kinfolk had been deeply rooted there for three score years, and it
seemed twice that long since she had last seen it.

Life in Bloodroot had been simple, devoid of the tension that was
forever swirling around her and the young master of
Belle Riviere
, and
it struck her quite suddenly that maybe if she went home she could sort things
out, once again know her own mind. Perhaps the simplicity of her old life would
act as a soothing balm to her troubled spirit, and perhaps if she were very
lucky, in time her wounded heart would heal.

How very odd that things should suddenly seem so clear. After
weeks of nurturing the futile hope of winning Jackson’s love, the path she
needed to take was suddenly plain.

She was going home... and no one and nothing was going to stop
her.

Something strange happened then. Her mind filled with images of
the simple log house in which she’d been born, she felt a prickling sensation
between her shoulder blades, and the queer, unsettling notion that she was no
longer alone insinuated its way into her thoughts.

Wondering if perhaps Jackson had entered the garden unbeknownst
to her, she glanced around, but saw nothing. The garden was still, silent,
waiting almost. The house’s stone facade gave away nothing, not a hint of the
activity within, unless one could count the lace curtain fluttering at the
upstairs window.

The sun broke through the gathering clouds just then, striking the
windowpanes before disappearing again.

Reagan frowned at the window. An open window did not reflect
sunlight; yet, if the portal was closed, then what had caused the movement of
the curtains?

She stared hard, but too blinded by the wish to see, she could
detect nothing out of the ordinary... and so she looked away, counted to five,
then quickly looked again.

Suddenly she saw it, the figure of a man standing by the window,
half-hidden by the filmy lace of the curtain. Not tall enough to be Jackson,
the shadowed shape seemed slightly bent, as if it listed to one side—from
favoring a weak limb, perhaps?

She watched for a long while, sensing the moment he turned away.
By now she knew the mansion upstairs and down, and she had little doubt that
the window opened onto Jackson’s father’s bedchamber.

Had it been the manservant, Antoine Garrett, who’d stood observing
her from the shadows near the window?

Somehow she did not think so.

In all the time she’d lived beneath the Broussards’ roof, Garrett
had barely glanced in her direction. It made no sense that he would spy on her
from his master’s apartments.

Yet if not Antoine Garrett, then whom?

The mystery seemed too great a tangle to solve, or perhaps it was
just the fact that a blinding pain had blossomed in her temples, the effects of
too much tension, far too much emotional duress.

She felt drained as she picked herself up off the bench and made
her way to the gallery stair, wanting only peace and solitude in which to
gather her thoughts.

As the afternoon waned and the garden shadows lengthened, Jackson
sat with his long, booted legs propped on the pale blue watered silk of the
divan, contemplating the dregs of his whiskey while his mother’s painted image
smiled benevolently down upon him from her station above the mantel.

Somehow Jackson could not meet her painted gaze without seeing
another pair of eyes, the latter of which were a smoky shade of gray and
thickly lashed. An entire decanter of whiskey had failed to wipe away the hurt,
the anger, the disappointment, and, lastly, the grim resolve that had flashed
in rapid succession behind those sparkling orbs. The liquor had also done
little to ease his own bewilderment.

For the life of him, he could not seem to fathom how he might have
done things differently.

“Why must she be so cursed contrary?” he demanded, downing the
last of the amber liquid, allowing the crystal tumbler to slip from his
fingers. It landed with a soft thud on the carpet and rolled, coming to rest
against the gracefully curving leg of the divan. “Why is it not enough that I
am striving to please her?”

God, how distracted, how harried he sounded, thoroughly rattled by
a chit who’d been weaned on pride and abject poverty. Rising from the divan, he
went to the window, where he stood staring out at the gate, at the lawn, at the
street, seeing
her
winsome face.

He’d been but trying to give her the things of which she’d been
deprived until now, the pretty, frivolous things that women everywhere seemed
to cherish, but in all truth, that had not been his only motive. Some selfish
part of him he barely recognized had wanted to place the diamonds around her
neck and see their sparkle outshone by the warmth and affection in her eyes.

Warmth, affection, perhaps a modicum of love.

Love….

Mother of God, yes.

Love.

It was irrational. It was without a doubt a little more than
slightly insane. But there it was, out in the open and lying bare to his own
hard scrutiny.

He wanted her to love him, freely and with wild abandon, despite
his glaring imperfections, despite his many faults, despite his own misgivings,
and it vastly irritated him that she did not.

“I’ve gone out of my way for her,” he argued to his own reflection
in the windowpane. “I’ve done more for her than I have for any woman, felt
more, wanted more for her, at times even at the expense and sacrifice of my own
desires. Yet my sacrifice is unappreciated; my efforts fall on parched and
infertile ground.”

His reflection scowled, looking quite fierce, the angry, dashing
rake women could not seem to resist. “I give her the moon and the stars, and
she spurns me for it! Marriage. She wants marriage and babies, forever and
always! I ask you, what kind of thanks is that?

“It should be enough that I love her,” he said on a weary sigh.
Glancing slowly up, Jackson saw that the man in the glass was every bit as
startled as he. “Love her... Merciful Christ, is that what this burning misery
is?”

He groaned softly, the agony of a wounded beast, and, squeezing
his eyes shut, braced a hand on the windowsill.

The idea that he’d at last been caught, and by a snare of his own
making, shook Jackson to his very core, and for the millionth time since his
death he wished that Clay were here to offer a word of advice.

Clay had always viewed love, honor, and marriage with the utmost
gravity. Clay could help him make some sense of it.

But Clay was gone. And Jackson mourned his loss.

As it always did, his mind turned away from his own difficulties,
back to the puzzle that was his brother’s death, back to the last time he’d
seen Clay.

The scene was excruciatingly clear in his head—perhaps because the
whiskey had dulled his other senses, but it was lending his thoughts a
vividness he’d experienced only in his nightmares... and God help him, he gave
it free rein.

Closing his eyes against the light, Jackson saw himself leave the
fog-shrouded waterfront and enter the warehouse. And as always, the musk of the
furs washed over him in a seductive wave. There was comfort to be found in the
old place, a familiarity that was as solid and reassuring as was Clay himself.
For a moment he stood drinking it in, listening to the soft, almost
imperceptible sounds of a rustling movement coming from behind the cover of the
bales. The sound was brief, lasting mere seconds, no more, a rustling of cloth,
as if someone had shifted positions, then settled back into sleep....

The memory was sobering indeed, and in that instant the dulling
effects of the liquor shattered and fell away, leaving the sharp recollection,
the unshakable certainty that someone else was there that night, all
underscored by the wavering, whiskey-sodden voice of Whiskey Joe.
No, no, no. Not safe, Jack Broussar’. Not safe no more. Don’t go
there. Don’t go there....

In that instant, a few of the missing pieces of the puzzle that
had plagued him for months fell effortlessly into place. Turning away from the
window he slammed from the room, taking the stairs two at a time. He knew what
he had to do, and he could only hope to God that he could get to Joe before
Clay’s killer did.

The apartments across town were a shambles. The contents of the
old French armoire had been strewn about the floor. The drawers, torn from the
dresser, lay upended among the books and papers knocked from their shelves. In
the midst of the maelstrom of destruction stood Navarre Broussard, breathing
hard and looking quite the madman.

“Accursed ring!” he shouted to the room at large, giving a drawer
a vicious kick. “Where can it be?”

His shout died away, and the brooding silence settled on the room
once again.

Navarre paced the length of his parlor, kicking the debris from
his path, growing more and more agitated with each step.

Destroying his apartments had been an exercise in futility,
executed solely to vent his uncontrollable rage. There was nothing to be gained
by it; the gold signet ring he’d always worn, and which he had not seen since
the night he’d taken the life of his brother’s only son, was not to be found
within these walls.

It was crucial that he find the ring, the only fragment of evidence
tying him to Clayton’s untimely demise.

Catching sight of himself in the gilt-framed mirror suspended on
the parlor wall, Navarre stopped his pacing. “It must be in the warehouse
still. It could not have simply vanished.”

Yet seemingly it had done precisely that.

While his brother’s son had lain in his coffin in the
grande salle
at
Belle
Riviere
, and Jackson had hovered somewhere between death and despair in
these very apartments, his face forever marked by Emil’s anger, Navarre had
combed every inch of the warehouse.