Courting Susannah (4 page)

Maisie smiled. “You did just fine. Didn't she, sweetums?” She made a face, and Victoria gave a chortling gurgle in response. “Miss Julia said you was a resourceful type, and she was right. Now, set yourself down and tell me, how was your trip?”

With that, Maisie took a seat herself, still holding the baby, in the rocking chair where Susannah had sat earlier, and Susannah drew up a short stool. “Long,” she said in belated reply. “Maisie, Mr. Fairgrieve—did he—well, did he know I was coming?”

Maisie chuckled. “Nope,” she said. “I see he didn't throw you out, though.”

Susannah put a hand to her breastbone in a mingling of surprise, consternation, and amusement. “Then it was you who sent that wire? Why ever—?”

“I promised Mrs. Fairgrieve,” Maisie said, and looked away into the distance for a long moment. “She wanted you here to look after the little one. I reckoned the mister would let you stay if you showed up.”

“Thank heaven he did,” she replied. “I'd have nowhere to go if he'd turned me away.”

“Oh, you'd have been all right. This is a big house. Lots of hidey-holes to tuck you away in, with Mr. Fairgrieve none the wiser. Why, me and Jasper, we rattle around in this house like two pinto beans in the bottom of a bucket and hardly ever run into another soul.”

Susannah closed her eyes for a moment, imagining herself haunting the place like a ghost, living a shadow life, avoiding contact with “the mister” at all costs. It was enough to make her shudder, for she was a creature of sunlight and fresh air. “You and Julia—Mrs. Fairgrieve—were friends, then?”

“I wouldn't say that,” Maisie said, rocking. “She was the mistress of the house, after all, and I was here to cook and clean. Neither of us ever forgot that. All the same, I felt mighty sorry for her, especially there at the end.”

“How—how did she die?” Susannah ventured, realizing she had been holding the question at arm's length ever since she'd received the wire nearly two weeks ago in Nantucket.

Maisie dashed the back of one work-reddened hand against her cheek. “It was a fever,” she said. “Came on sudden, right after this little angel here was born. She was gone, the missus was, before the baby was a day old.”

Susannah bit her lower lip, imagining the sorrow and shock of such a thing only too clearly. At St. Mary's, she'd seen many a mother and child perish, sometimes separately, often together. She braced herself. “Did she suffer? Julia, I mean?”

Maisie gave Susannah a long, measuring glance. “Yes,” she said. “She was a tiny thing, wasn't she, and she had a hard time.”

Susannah blinked back a rush of scalding tears. “And Mr. Fairgrieve? Was he kind to her?”

“He paced the hallway, like any daddy would do, but by the time sweet'ums here came along, Mrs. Fairgrieve had gone right out of her head. She didn't know any of us. Kept calling for her mama.”

Susannah sighed. Yes, she thought sadly. The mother who left her at St. Mary's all those years before and never looked back.

“Little while after midnight,” Maisie went on, her voice soft with sympathy and sadness, “Mrs. Fairgrieve passed on to the next world, and the mister, well, he left the house and didn't come back till the day they buried her. That was when I reckoned I ought to send for you, like the Missus asked me to—spoke up right after the first pain came, she did. Said I had to get you to come, no matter what.”

Susannah struggled to retain her composure. “Well,” she replied at some length, “The message took its sweet time reaching me.”

Maisie smiled. “You're here,” she said. “That's what's important. You take this baby to Mr. Fairgrieve's room to sleep, and then you go and rest up till supper. You look all done in.”

Susannah stood automatically and took Victoria from Maisie's arms. “The crib is in Mr. Fairgrieve's room?” she asked.

Maisie nodded, unfazed by the question or by Susannah's bewilderment, which must have been obvious. “Big room at the front of the house,” she confirmed. “The one with the double doors.”

Susannah climbed the stairs yet again, carrying the infant, and found her way to the master chamber. Sure enough, the crib was there, among towering, heavy furniture, so masculine in character that she knew immediately that Julia probably had never actually resided within these walls.

A trancelike weariness overwhelmed Susannah as she placed Victoria gently in the elaborate crib, with its drapery of gossamer silk, and she lingered there for a time, forgetting her surroundings, trying to make sense of the situation, the place, the man Julia had loved, and then hated, with such passion.

It all caught up with Susannah then, the pain of loss, the confusion, the effects of a long and difficult journey. She turned from the sleeping baby—she would return to her room and take a brief rest, as Maisie had advised—and then the floor and ceiling exchanged places. She stumbled, got as far as the bed, and lay down, her head reeling. Although she had every intention of rallying, she dropped off into a fathomless slumber instead and fell end over end into the sweet refuge of darkness.

The next thing she knew, the room was draped in evening shadows, and a strong hand rested on her shoulder. She looked up and was startled into complete wakefulness, between one heartbeat and the next, to see Aubrey gazing down at her. Because of the relative gloom, she could not make out his expression.

“I'm sorry,” she blurted, mortified beyond all endurance to be found lying prone on a man's bed—particularly this man's bed. “I must have—I don't know what—”

“Shh,” he said, and she heard amusement in his voice, and something more tender. “There's no harm done.”

Susannah bolted upright, and Aubrey stepped back, giving her plenty of room. She pressed the fingertips of both hands to her temples after setting her feet on the floor, trying desperately to reorient herself. She went immediately to the cradle and saw that the baby was gone. She panicked a little.

“She's downstairs with Maisie,” Aubrey said gently. Susannah had no right to be soothed by his tone, but
she was. Oh, heaven help her, she was. “There's a fine supper waiting for you in the kitchen.”

Susannah could not face him, not then. He made light of finding her sleeping, no doubt with abandon, on his bed, but in many quarters, such an infraction, however innocent, was enough to lay even the best reputation to ruin. “Thank you,” she said, keeping her head down and hurrying toward the doorway at top speed. Thus it was that she compounded her offense by colliding with Aubrey with such momentum that she surely would have fallen had he not grasped her shoulders and held her upright.

“Susannah,” he said, “it's all right.”

Oddly, she found his kindness more difficult to endure than simple annoyance would have been, or even skepticism. “Yes,” she replied, with a sort of tremulous aplomb, addressing herself as much as him. “Everything is all right.”

He let her go then and stepped back rather quickly. For once, he was the one to sound awkward. “I'll carry the cradle to your room,” he said. “Then I'll see you downstairs at supper.”

She tried to speak and could not. Nodded and fled.

She felt his smile like a kiss on the nape of her neck.

Chapter 2

S
usannah McKittrick was nothing like Julia, at least on the surface, Aubrey decided as he watched his uninvited houseguest trying to eat her supper slowly and with a measure of decorum. His late wife had been fashionably plump, even before her pregnancy, and never one to deny herself any sort of pleasure for the sake of appearances.

Susannah, on the other hand, was thin, almost angular. Her perfect skin was pale, and it was obvious that she was half starved by the way her fork trembled as she raised it to her mouth. He wondered when she'd last taken a decent meal, but he had no intention of inquiring. Judging by the state of her clothing, she was practically destitute, and her pride might be all she had.

Most likely, she wanted to take Julia's child home to raise, though she hadn't said so straight out. She was, if he recalled correctly, from Nantucket. Perhaps, he reflected, drawing his brows together and watching as Susannah cautiously speared a second portion of Maisie's fried chicken, she expected a financial settlement of some sort. Provided that she was who she represented herself to be—a caring friend of Julia's—such a bargain might be an expedient solution to the problem. But suppose she was a swindler instead? He had no real knowledge of her character. She might abandon the child—or worse—once she had the money, and he would never know the difference.

Common decency prevented him from taking such a chance; he'd have her investigated before he made a final decision, and he knew just the man for the job.

For the present, she was attempting, without much success, to cut the drumstick on her plate with her knife, and the pinkening of her neck indicated that she knew he was watching her.

“Out here in the wild west,” he said, taking pity, “we eat fried chicken with our fingers.”

She glanced at him uncertainly, as if she thought he might be mocking her, and he took up a wing with his hands, to prove his contention, and took a bite. He thought he saw a tentative smile lurking in her gray eyes, though he couldn't be sure, for she lowered her heavy lashes right away, like a veil. But she set aside the knife and fork and nibbled at the drumstick with delicate restraint.

He felt something stir in the depths of his belly, watching her, and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “How long have you been traveling, Miss McKittrick?” he asked, in an effort to distract himself as well as to make conversation.

She looked at him solemnly, as if to determine his reasons for asking even so innocent a question. “I left Nantucket ten days ago,” she said after a moment's consideration.

“You don't seem to have much baggage,” he commented, refilling his wine glass. She had already refused his gestured offer to pour some for her with a shake of her head.

She lifted her chin, and her eyes darkened to a
stormy shade of charcoal. “I have very few encumbrances,” she replied flatly.

He'd said something wrong, though he wasn't sure what it was. Women could be very prickly creatures. “Julia owned a great many dresses,” he ventured to observe, hoping he wasn't insulting her. “They're in the armoire in her room. Help yourself to whatever you want.” He paused, cleared his throat. “You'll want to alter them, I suppose. Julia was—bigger.”

She surprised him with a wan but genuine smile that left him shaken and even more off-balance than before. He wasn't sure he'd ever recover from the sweet, fiery shock of finding her asleep on his bed. “That is very kind, but I don't suppose Julia's garments would be appropriate for a child's nurse. As I remember, her tastes ran to silks and laces.”

Aubrey frowned, recalling without admiration how delectable Julia had looked in her elegant, costly clothes and how she had used her singular charms to make a fool of him before the whole city of Seattle. “There might be a few more practical garments. Please—help yourself. She would want you to have her things.”

She continued to assess him, and though there was nothing untoward in her expression, he felt increasingly unsettled, as though in some unaccountable way she might be seeing far more than he would have chosen to reveal. A splotch of color blossomed on each of her cheeks. “You and Julia didn't—didn't share a room?”

He laughed, and the bitterness of the sound surprised even him. “That is an audacious question,” he remarked, provoked in a way that could not have been described as even remotely unpleasant, “for a woman who was wildly embarrassed to be found sleeping on someone else's bed.”

The blush intensified, then drained away, leaving pallor behind. “I have never been wed, Mr. Fairgrieve,” she
said evenly, “but I am not ignorant. I know that most husbands and wives share a chamber, at least in the early years of their marriage.”

“Julia enjoyed social engagements. She did not like to disturb my sleep, coming home at all hours of the night as she did, and so she asked for her own room. I was only too happy to oblige.”

“I see.” She spoke coldly, her food forgotten.

“I don't think you do,” Aubrey answered. He pushed back his chair and stood. What the hell was happening to him? He'd always kept his own counsel, and now here he was, airing his private grievances to a stranger. “Sleep well. You might get some noise from the alley in that back bedroom, but I'm sure the mattress is comfortable enough.”

She looked down at the half-eaten piece of chicken on her plate, longingly, he thought. “What shall I do if the baby awakens in the night?”

He thrust a hand through his hair. “Feed her and change her diaper,” he said. “If that doesn't work, fetch Maisie. She and the boy sleep downstairs, in the little room off the kitchen.” He let out a long breath. “Good night, Miss McKittrick,” he said, and, with that, he turned and left Susannah alone at his table.