Elizabeth Grayson (13 page)

He changed his linen every other day, and when he was going to be with Ann, he always made sure he’d washed and shaved. He hadn’t imagined that Ann might find making love with him so—so revolting.

Instinctively he reached for her. “I wouldn’t expect you to lie with me now. Not while you’re...” Something that felt suspiciously like panic displaced the singe of her rejection. “But—well...I’d like more children eventually.”

Ann flinched away.

What was it about lying with him that Ann found so damn
distasteful?
Chase had barely completed the thought when the truth dawned on him. He wasn’t good enough to be her children’s father. He was a river rat, an orphan taken in out of pity. He had no pedigree, no schooling to speak of, no fancy manners. He was the man her father had bought for her because he couldn’t buy anyone better.

Something dark and caustic churned through his insides.

Not an hour before, Chase had stood down in the hold watching Ann sleep, feeling full and warm—and satisfied with his lot. Now she’d managed to drain away every dram of that warmth and pleasure. He felt hollow, vacant, disillusioned, oddly lost. Angry and impatient.

He stepped toward her.

“The future is what we choose to make it, Annie.” His voice resonated with convictions he didn’t even know he had. “I’m sorry I broke my word to you, but I’m not sorry it got me the
Andromeda.
I don’t regret marrying you, either. At least not the way you seem to regret marrying me.

“You’ve got to accept that what we did has bound us together. I’d like to make the best of that. I’d like to turn this into a real marriage. I’d like to make a life with you.”

When all Ann could do was stare at him, he brushed past her on his way to the door.

“Wait!” she called out, halting him. “Tell me you’ll keep your word. Tell me I can stay aboard the
Andromeda.”

He turned with his hand on the doorknob. “I told you I wouldn’t send you back unless you agreed to go.”

Ann gave an almost imperceptible nod. “I believe you.”

Chase jerked open the door and stalked out onto the deck. He didn’t give a damn what his wife believed.

Or at least that’s what he told himself.

chapter six

ANN STOOD AGAINST THE STARBOARD RAIL AND watched the peach and pink of the sunrise ripple across the paddle wheel’s wake. She’d been baking bread with Frenchy Bertin half the night, and now that his assistants had arrived to help with breakfast, Ann slipped out on deck for a cup of coffee and a breath of air.

In this last week they’d put Kansas City, Fort Leavenworth, and Nebraska City behind them as they steamed west. Now Omaha’s church steeples were disappearing in the distance, swallowed up by stands of cedars and cottonwoods. Rue said that because the river was high they were making good time, covering between fifteen and twenty miles a day. They’d only run aground twice since they passed the mouth of the Kaw.

Ann braced her forearms against the railing and turned her face into the cool dawn breeze. Though it was strong enough to ruffle the skirt of her gown and tug at her hair, it breathed the promise of spring. The trees along the bank were bursting, greening, humming with new life.

That humming seemed to resonate inside her, too. Her baby was astir this morning, stretching, quickening, quaking. Ann circled her palm at the crest of her belly and smiled to herself, still awed by knowing her child was growing inside her.

Though this certainly wasn’t the kind of life Ann had envisioned for herself, she was making her place aboard the
Andromeda.
She’d already learned to make bread and pies and fried cakes from Frenchy. She’d made friends among the steamboat’s officers and crew. Occasionally, she even stepped in to act as hostess to the passengers. Oddly enough, even bound by the ties of her marriage and her impending responsibilities as a new mother, Ann had never felt freer in her life.

She was down to the dregs of her coffee when she heard footfalls on the stairs and turned to see Chase descending from the Texas deck. The two of them had been tiptoeing around each other ever since the day they’d left Glasgow. Ever since Chase had defined what it was he expected of a wife.

Ann shivered remembering—angry with Chase for wanting the things he did from her, angry with herself for not being able to give him something that should have been so simple. But the one she was angriest with was her baby’s father, for the way he’d pursued her, how he’d treated her, the way he’d ruined her life. The way he’d ruined all their lives.

Deliberately, she shifted her attention away from Chase to where a heron was poised in the shallows fishing. She hoped her husband’s duties would take him elsewhere.

Instead he crossed the deck and paused beside her. “You want more coffee?” he offered.

She glanced at him and recognized a sharp impatience in his face, a need to get on with things, settle things between them.

Maybe she wanted to get on with things, too. So she shrugged, surrendered the thick ironstone mug, and waited for him to return from the kitchen.

He came back with two cups of steaming coffee. “So how did the baking go last night?” he asked, leaning against the rail beside her.

Before she answered, Ann took a sip of the coffee. He’d made it exactly the way she liked it, sweetened sparsely with sugar but thick with cream.

“Well enough, I suppose. We baked thirty loaves of bread and twenty-five dozen yeast rolls.”

No wonder she was tired.

“And you never baked before you came aboard the
Andromeda
?” He sounded a little incredulous.

“Baking isn’t the kind of thing they teach at Miss Amelia Farnsworth’s Academy for Young Ladies.”

What kind of proper young woman would enjoy dusting her hands with flour or indulge in something so vulgar as plunging forearm-deep in bread dough? Nor would anyone at Miss Farnsworth’s have thought to teach their girls something so eminently practical.

“I do quite enjoy it, though,” she volunteered.

The way the dough swelled and grew made the simple mixture seem almost alive. The resilience of the stuff beneath her palms awoke something basic and earthy in her. She liked how her muscles warmed as she worked, liked the thick ripe smell of yeast, and the heat of the kitchen.

She liked Frenchy’s company, too. His frank, Gallic view of the world, his perspective that, as a man who was no better than he should be, forgave everyone else their weaknesses. Ann found his unquestioning acceptance a great relief.

“Frenchy says I’m ready to try baking a batch of bread on my own.” She could hear the faint buff of pride she gave those last three words.

“Could you make a couple loaves to give my mother when we stop at Hardesty’s Landing?” he asked her.

Panic slithered along Ann’s nerves. Even the baby shifted and squirmed, as if the prospect of meeting Chase’s family unnerved her as much as it did her mother.

“Will we reach Hardesty’s Landing soon?” Ann managed to ask.

“With any luck, we’ll be there day after tomorrow.” Chase’s voice rose with what Ann supposed was eagerness. “We’ll tie up there for the night.”

From the things Rue said, Ann had the impression that the Hardestys were a large, unruly lot; blunt, rowdy, simple folk. People so unlike the ones Ann had known in St. Louis and Philadelphia that they might as well have come from the dark side of the moon.

What Rue had told her made her curious about the Hardestys, yet she needed Chase’s reassurance. Would they accept her as his wife, with no questions asked?

Ann slid him a sideways glance. “Will you tell me about your family?”

Chase braced his elbows on the railing and slid a slow speculative glance at her. “Well, we’re a mongrel lot; I ought to admit that outright. There are fourteen of us children altogether: six born to Ma and Pa, and eight strays.”

Ann could tell by the smile that feathered the corners of his lips that he liked talking about them.

“And which are you?” Ann already knew the answer, but she wanted to hear the story from Chase himself.

He sipped, shifted, shrugged. “I was the first stray Pa brought home for Ma to raise. He found me holed up in the firebox of a burned out cabin. My whole family had been killed.”

“How old were you?”

“Two or three.”

Glancing at Chase, Ann could imagine the child Enoch Hardesty had taken home to his wife. Chase must have been skinny, tattered, and smudged with ashes and soot. He’d have had a head of matted red-brown curls and wary eyes. Even Ann, who wasn’t sure she had so much as a scrap of maternal instinct, would have wanted to gather up that frightened little boy and make him hers.

“I wasn’t old enough to remember a thing about my first family,” he continued. “Not so much as their name or what they looked like.”

Ann could hear a rime of regret in his voice and felt compelled to speak, though she hadn’t intended to reveal anything about her early life to him.

“I don’t remember my father, either. I wouldn’t have any idea what he looked like except that Mother had their wedding photograph. Rupert Pelletier was a lawyer; a very prominent man in Philadelphia. Or so Mama said. All I know for sure, is that he didn’t leave so much as a penny to keep us when he died.”

It was why her mother had married James Rossiter, how they’d come to live in St. Louis. In a way, her real father’s lack of resources was the reason she was married to Chase Hardesty today.

Or at least one of the reasons.

When Chase didn’t volunteer anything else about his childhood, Ann’s thoughts returned to the prospect at hand.

“So how many of those fourteen brothers and sisters are likely to be at Hardesty’s Landing when we get there?”

He paused to wave at a group of children striding along the bank, probably on their way to school.

“Pretty much everyone should be at the house, except Quinn, who’s away at medical college,” he answered, “and my sister Millie. She and her husband Sam are proving up a homestead someplace in Nebraska.”

“Everyone?” Ann asked weakly. She hadn’t imagined she’d be immersed in the Hardesty clan quite so deeply.

“And
their spouses and children,” he added.

“If there are so many, how will I ever keep everyone straight?”

Chase must have seen how intimidated she was by the prospect, and tipped an encouraging grin in her direction. “I expect once we sit down to supper, you’ll sort us out. With so many of us being adopted, there isn’t enough family resemblance that you’ll get confused. Except for the twins, of course.”

Ann nodded thoughtfully, then turned her face to the sun. Though she dreaded asking, it would be easier to put her concerns into words now, rather than later.

“What—what are you going to tell your family about marrying me?”

He didn’t hesitate. “I’m going to tell them the truth.”

She turned and looked at him in spite of herself. “Is that wise?”

His gaze moved over her, a half-amused, half-quizzical expression on his face. “I learned before I was out of short pants that Ma finds out everything anyway. Besides, it’s not as if we can hide the fact that I’m in command of the
Andromeda,
or that you’re carrying a child.”

She turned to him, seeking either reticence or regret in those deep blue eyes. She didn’t find either. But then, maybe the truth didn’t frighten Chase Hardesty the way it did her.

“Besides,” he went on, “Rue can’t keep a secret to save his life. Everyone in Hardesty’s Landing will know everything about us half an hour after we tie up.”

Ann clasped her half-empty cup between her hands, thankful for its lingering warmth. “What—what will they think of me once you tell them?”

Chase seemed to chew on the answer a little bit longer than he had the previous one. “No two of them will see our marriage the same way, and they’ll make no secret of their opinions.”

He reached across to curl those strong, rough fingers around her wrist. At his touch, that odd awareness lit in her again. But this time it also awakened a ripple of confidence, the sense that if he was with her, she’d be all right.

She liked the way that felt.

“You know,” he continued very softly. “It doesn’t matter what they think; it’s what
I
think that’s important.”

His fingers tightened. She looked up and saw a world of expectation in his eyes. She saw the conviction that they could make something good and strong and satisfying from their marriage.
If they tried.

But what that would require made Ann’s palms sweat and her knees wobble. She disentangled herself from his grasp. She might have stepped away if there hadn’t been one last question she had to ask.

“You promised you wouldn’t send me back to St. Louis unless I agreed to go,” she began, her voice wavering just a little.

“I did promise that.”

“Are you planning to leave me with your family at Hardesty’s Landing, instead?”

Chase studied her for one long moment before he answered. “You’re not their responsibility,” he answered. “You’re mine. But I do need to know one thing before we settle this.”

Ann nodded, wondering what condition he was going to put on her future. “What is it?”

“How far along are you in your pregnancy?”

Ann flushed to the hairline. How could he speak so frankly about things married women discussed only in whispers? She knew why he was asking and realized that if she meant to stay aboard the
Andromeda,
she was going to have to lie to him.

“I’m four months along,” she said, her cheeks going hotter. She was a full five months pregnant and moving closer to six.

“That means the baby will be born in ...”

Ann calculated hastily. “August.”

Chase let his gaze glide over her, studying, assessing. Ann resisted the urge to shield her swollen breasts and wrap a protective hand across her belly.

His mouth narrowed ever so slightly. Ann held her breath.

Finally Chase nodded. “By August the
Andromeda
will be running in and out of St. Louis. We’ll find a place for you to stay in town so you can be near a doctor when that baby comes.”

Ann went light-headed with relief. Chase was going to keep his word. He was going to let her stay aboard the
Andromeda.
He wasn’t going to make her go back to the town house at the end of the run.

“Thank you,” she whispered, her voice thick with gratitude. She wished she could have been honest with him about the baby, and about why this meant so much to her. “Staying aboard the Andromeda makes me feel ...”

Safe, she almost said, but it was more than safe. Being aboard the
Andromeda
meant she was no longer running away, no longer alone. It made her feel as if she was part of something or well down a road she’d been needing to take.

“Being aboard the
Andromeda
makes me feel as if I’m moving toward something, something I’m supposed to do or be or have.” She shook her head in what might have been confusion. “I can’t go back, and it’s being here with you and the others that convinced me.”

She looked up at him to see if he understood, and saw warmth and concern in those deep blue eyes. Warmth and concern and a kind of confidence in the future she wished she shared.

“I’m only trying to do what’s best for you.”

“This is what’s best for me.” She spoke the words softly, but with deep conviction. “And it’s best for the baby.”