Nan Ryan (10 page)

In Helen Courtney’s mind, he was directly responsible.

Kurt sighed, shrugged, and told himself there was nothing he could do about it. For a few splendid moments the golden-haired widow had almost forgotten to hate him. Now she was sorry she had. She was ashamed that she had allowed herself to enjoy the ride with him. Conscience-stricken for forgetting and laughing and allowing a murdering Yankee to put his arm around her.

Kurt shook his dark head and turned the winded Raider back toward the corral.

All he’d wanted was to make Helen Courtney happy, but he’d done more harm than good. Now she’d be more on guard than ever. Barely civil to him.

Kurt was right.

Helen purposely steered clear of him the rest of the day. She made it a point to avoid him. She was deeply ashamed of her aberrant behavior and wondered at her temporary loss of sanity. What if someone should find out? She shuddered at the thought. And she promised herself she’d never again be guilty of such appalling conduct.

Helen was relieved when the long, tense day finally came to a close. The effort to evade the Yankee and at the same time not let Charlie know—she didn’t dare risk upsetting the fragile little boy—had been wearing and difficult. Like walking a tightwire without benefit of a net. She was bone tired that night as she slipped on her nightgown. And it wasn’t from hard work alone.

Yawning, she sat down on the bed’s edge, took out the gold locket, and kissed Will’s picture. She turned out the coal-oil lamp, stretched out flat on her back in the feather bed, and flung her arms above her head. Her wayward cat hadn’t shown up, but Helen was too tired to care. Let him prowl all night—she needed some rest.

She closed her eyes, snuggled more deeply into the softness of the mattress, exhaled slowly, and waited for sleep. She could feel the tight, tense muscles in her arms and legs start to jump and uncoil.

Soon, floating in that pleasant semiconscious state somewhere between wakefulness and slumber, Helen was again astride a big powerful stallion and in the arms of a big powerful man. Racing the wind and laughing.

With a start Helen realized she was foolishly smiling. Her eyes came open and she shuddered. She slipped her hand underneath the pillow and felt the cold steel of her loaded revolver.

It was comforting to have protection at her fingertips just in case the Yankee had gotten any wrong ideas from this morning’s wild ride. Let him make one false move and she wouldn’t hesitate to use the weapon.

He came to her from out of the darkness.

He crossed the silent room while a gentle night breeze off the bay blew his raven hair back off his sculptured face. His green eyes gleamed with a hot intensity, and silvery moonlight touched the bare breadth of his smooth tanned shoulders.

He advanced with quiet, deadly determination and it was no mystery what he had come for. He had come for her. She had to save herself and do it quickly. But her limbs would not respond to the-message frantically sent by her brain. She continued to lie there unmoving while her dark seducer bore steadily down on her.

Her eyes wide, her heart throbbing, Helen finally managed to slide her hand up under her pillow. Her fingers touched solid steel, but refused to grip the pistol.

He reached the bed and calmly finished undressing. When he had shed his clothes and was totally naked, he stood there for a long moment while she struggled to make her forefinger close around the revolver’s trigger. The moon’s illumination highlighted his tall, leanly muscled form, giving him a godlike appearance.

A masterful god of love come to take her to paradise.

Helen’s heart raced madly in her chest when he sat down on the bed facing her. He caressed her cheek and she trembled at his touch. He leaned down and brushed her lips with his and she whimpered softly. His gleaming eyes held her gaze as he slowly, deftly undid the line of small buttons going down the center of her worn cotton nightgown.

With her hand still touching the pistol, she watched helplessly as he parted the opened gown, pushing it out of the way, bearing her breasts to his hot eyes. Her breasts immediately swelled and her breath began to come in anxious little spasms.

Slowly his handsome head lowered and he kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, her throat. And the first thing she knew, her fingers no longer touched cold solid metal, but warm smooth flesh.

Helen’s sharp nails raked anxiously down his back as Kurt’s hot lips moved over her flushed cheek to the sensitive spot just below her ear. Yielding to him, guided entirely by sensation, Helen forgot about the gun.

Her lips eagerly met his and her arms clasped him tightly. Kurt kissed a searing path along her neck as he lifted her off the bed and sat her on his lap. Their lips unerringly sought each other’s while Kurt finished removing Helen’s nightgown.

When she was as naked as he, he rose to his feet in the moonlight. Holding her in his powerful arms, he stood there kissing her until she breathlessly freed her lips from his and buried her face in his neck. She clung to him tightly, feeling as if all she had ever wanted was for this dark naked god of love to make her his own.

Kurt turned, put a knee on the mattress, and climbed atop the high feather bed with her in his arms. He sank back on his heels on the bed, gently laying Helen back across the pillows. He eased down beside her, his lips again seeking and finding, his hand touching her tingling body with a thousand deliciously different caresses.

Helen moved from one glorious level of ecstasy to the next as his warm wonderful mouth began an intimate excursion of her bare responsive body. Growing hotter and hotter with each touch of his sleek probing tongue, each nip of his flashing white teeth, Helen couldn’t lie still. While his roving lips paid homage to her aching breasts, her jerking stomach, her quivering thighs, Helen gasped and moaned and thrashed wildly about.

With Kurt’s dark face sinking steadily lower over her bare contracting belly, Helen became so excited her head tossed back and forth on the mattress. She savagely flung her arm out. Her hand struck something solid.

The carved wooden box on the night table crashed noisily to the floor, instantly awakening Helen.

Helen bolted upright, her heart hammering, her nightgown twisted around her waist. She lunged off the bed and fell to her knees on the floor. The contents of the wooden box had spilled out on the worn carpet.

A sob of shame escaping her trembling lips, Helen lifted the photograph of Will and pressed it to her wildly beating heart. Hot tears springing to her eyes, she sat there rocking back and forth on her heels, shivering with shame and mortification.

The graphically erotic dream had been so real, her face flushed hotly with guilt and frustration. It was as if the Yankee had really kissed her, touched her, feasted on her naked flesh. Still agonizingly aroused from the amazingly clear dream, Helen felt as if she had actually been unfaithful to Will. She hated herself for it.

She hated the Yankee even more.

Still badly shaken by the vivid dream, Helen stood unsmiling on the front veranda the next morning, a cup of hot black coffee in her hand. Thick morning mists shrouded the bay. The calm protected waters were completely veiled in dense, swirling fog. Across the wide inlet, Mobile Harbor was invisible.

Squinting fiercely, Helen couldn’t even make out the tall turrets of Fort Gaines, the solid new fort built during the war to protect the entrance to Mobile Bay.

She frowned, disappointed.

If the choppy Gulf waters beyond the bay were swathed in the blinding mists, there would be no river-boat arrivals or departures at the Mobile levee. Which meant Em Ellicott wouldn’t be getting home from New Orleans this morning as planned.

Helen set her enameled cup on the veranda railing. She withdrew Em’s last brief note from the pocket of her worn blue wrapper and reread it.

Dearest Helen,

I’m coming home as I can stand it here no longer! At 9
A.M.
Thursday, June 1st, I will step down onto the Mobile landing and so help me, if Coop is not there waiting, I shall hang myself. Or him, when I finally locate him. I’ll be out to the farm around noon. Unless Coop missed me so terribly he has at last come to his senses and can’t wait another day to marry me!

Love,

Em

Helen folded the note and put it back in her robe pocket. Her eyes again lifted to the fog-enveloped bay. The thick haze might not burn away all morning. It could be late afternoon or perhaps even tomorrow before Em showed up at the farm. Might as well get started on the laundry.

Helen moved to go back inside.

She heard something.

She stopped, turned her head, and listened. She could see absolutely nothing through the blanketing mists, but the sound of rapid hoofbeats striking the earth carried in the early morning silence. She shook her head in disbelief.

Northway and his stallion.

She shivered involuntarily.

The Yankee was exercising his blooded beast despite fog so dense you could hardly see your hand before your face. It was rash and reckless of him. A foolish, daredevil stunt if ever there was one. Highly dangerous.

Helen’s heart was pounding now. She swallowed and put a hand to her tight throat. Quickly she told herself it was concern for the priceless stallion’s safety, not for the man on his back. The disturbing dream had meant nothing! He meant nothing. She didn’t give a fig what happened to the irresponsible Yankee captain. Let him break his fool neck if that’s what he wanted!

What she wanted was for Em Ellicott to get home. Anxiously, Helen again gazed thoughtfully in the direction of the Mobile docks. Nothing had changed. The bay was completely socked in. Em’s arrival would definitely be postponed.

Helen started back inside and she began to smile slightly. She’d bet everything she owned that Coop was taking no chances. He was in Mobile, on the levee, this very minute if she knew the sheriff.

A tall, lanky thirty-eight-year-old man with red curly hair graying at the temples, deep set turquoise eyes, a wide mouth, and a silver star pinned on his starched white shirtfront waited on the foggy Mobile levee, nervously twisting his hat in his big, freckled hands.

His name was Brian A. Cooper. Sheriff Brian A. Cooper. The tall redheaded sheriff stood alone in the swirling gray mists, reluctant to leave his post despite serious doubts that the morning paddle steamer from New Orleans would arrive anytime soon.

If at all.

The sheriff was afraid to leave.

Sheriff Brian A. Cooper, back from the war for less than six weeks, had been the most highly decorated Alabamian to serve in the Confederacy, a fact about which he was reluctant to speak. His ruddy face flushed blood-red with embarrassment when anyone else mentioned it.

But whether he liked it or not, Brian A. Cooper was an honored, revered hero in his hometown and the state of Alabama and throughout the entire South.

It was not from the closemouthed Major Cooper, but rather from his superiors—and his mates—that people had learned of his feats of derring-do. He had led charge after charge against the enemy. He was wounded three times. He was confined in a crowded Union prison before successfully escaping after five terrible months. He had suffered from hunger and cold in the winters, heat and malaria in the summers. Once he’d been left behind for dead when his defeated troops were forced to withdraw after a bloody battle in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The commander of the opposing forces had found him and taken him to a Union field hospital, where his wounds were tended. When his health was restored, Major Brian A. Cooper was traded to the Confederacy, exchanged for a high-ranking Yankee prisoner being held by the Rebs.

The men who had served under Major Brian A. Cooper swore no braver man ever lived. Union officers who came up against the daring Southerner held much the same opinion of the dauntless redheaded calvary major.

When finally the long bloody war was all over, Brian A. Cooper had turned in his major’s medals for a lawman’s silver star and stepped back into his old position as high sheriff of Baldwin County. Folks warmly welcomed him home, slapped him on the back, and said now they’d sleep better nights.

Their big war hero was not afraid of any man, all proudly agreed. And they were right. The man didn’t live whom Sheriff Brian A. Cooper feared. But the big, shy, soft-spoken sheriff was scared to death of one tiny, dark-haired woman.

Sheriff Brian A. Cooper had been “keeping company” with Miss Emma Louise Ellicott since the night they had met at an oyster supper in Bon Secour the summer of 1859. For the sheriff, the little fishing village of Bon Secour—“safe harbor”—proved to be anything but.

The sheriff had not been invited to the fancy summertime gathering for wealthy socialites. He’d been summoned to quell a mild disturbance. The trouble had ended before he arrived. But real trouble awaited the unsuspecting high sheriff.

He’d barely stepped into the light of the swaying Japanese lanterns before he found himself engulfed in swirling white organdy and dark flashing eyes and tantalizing perfume and feminine conversation.

He was a full head taller than Miss Emma Louise Ellicott and weighed twice as much, yet she managed to single-handedly surround him. The dark-eyed, dark-haired twenty one year old charmer had held him willing hostage all that evening.

And ever since.

So now Sheriff Brian A. Cooper stood in the thick fog on the Mobile levee and didn’t so much as consider leaving. He wouldn’t have dared. Sure as he did, the big white sternwheeler would come slicing through the mists with Em standing on the tall Texas deck. If she didn’t find him waiting, he’d be in the soup for sure.

Nine
A.M.
came and went.

The fog began to thin and blow out to sea. Patches of weak sun peeked through. Activity on the wharf picked up. Nine-thirty. Shafts of strong sunlight appeared. People started arriving from the hotels, some carrying luggage. Ten. Roustabouts began-loading docked cargo vessels for shipment to northern ports.

At five past ten the
White Camellia
steamed out of the wispy mists and into the warm sunshine, its whistle blowing loudly, its passengers lining the railing.