Nan Ryan (12 page)

Johnny sighed heavily. “All right, I’ll try it this one time, since there’s no one else to do it.”

And so it was that a half hour later, Johnny, dressed in black evening clothes and white ruffled shirt, sat astride a blue velvet vanity bench in Nevada’s cabin. And she, in her fancy apricot silk gown, sat on the plush carpet before him. Running the silver-backed brush slowly, gently through her long dark hair, he allowed his big left hand to follow the brush’s path over the crown of her well-shaped head and down her back, where the thick tresses fell just short of her waist.

Her head thrown back, her eyes closed, Nevada said, “You’re even better at this than Papa was.”

“Ah, now, I doubt that,” Johnny replied and kept to himself the fact he’d probably had more practice than her papa.

Johnny had known lots of women, had made love to dozens, and had lived for short periods of time with a number of them over the years. He was no stranger to a woman’s bath and dressing room and he had on more than one occasion obliged a breathless lover with her bath and shampoo. His gambler’s hands were every bit as dexterous with a bar of perfumed soap and a firm-bristled hairbrush as they were with a deck of glassines.

Too soon to suit Nevada, Johnny had brushed away all the tangles and had expertly pinned the heavy locks into shiny curls atop her head. She had wanted the pleasant intimacy to continue. She so enjoyed sitting curled on the richly carpeted floor between Johnny’s parted knees while he pulled the brush gently, slowly through her hair and followed its descent with his warm hand.

It was a lovely simple pleasure that caused her heart to sing within the tight bodice of her new apricot gown, and she smiled dreamily as Johnny spoke of inconsequential things, his voice deep, low.

The summer sun was setting behind the tall pines on the river’s eastern edge and the light streaming in the open portholes was a warm, suffused copper. The harsh croaking voices of the roseate spoonbills had already begun as night fell on the river.

All heads turned when the handsome pair entered the
Memphis Maiden’s
gaslit dining room moments later. Nevada, naive though she was, didn’t miss the fact that a half-dozen women were looking at Johnny with interest. She gave a willowy blonde in a daring white dress a scathing look, tightened her hold on Johnny’s bent arm, and hoped to high heaven he hadn’t noticed the forward woman.

He had.

After they had been seated at a table for two against the satinwood paneling beneath a flickering wall sconce of burnished brass, Johnny let his dark eyes move around the room, then allowed them to settle on the woman in the white gown. Stroking his mustache, he smiled almost imperceptibly and nodded his dark head in silent acknowledgment. And Nevada almost choked on the crawfish bisque when, midway through the meal, Johnny, effortlessly catching the attention of a waiter, said quietly into the uniformed man’s ear as he bent close, “Send a bottle of your finest Lafite to the lady whose table is beside the far potted palm. And give her this message.” Johnny whispered something behind his hand that Nevada couldn’t hear.

The waiter looked in the blonde’s direction. “Ah, the lovely Mrs. Harrison. Right away, sir.”

“Why on earth are you sending champagne to a married woman?” Nevada hotly demanded. “What will her husband think?”

Smiling lazily at the blonde, Johnny reluctantly turned his attention back to the girl across from him. “Eat your dinner, Nevada. I’m eager to get to the card parlor.”

“Will I go with you to the card parlor?”

He grinned, wiped his full mouth on a damask napkin, and reached for a cigar. “Certainly. You’re my Lady Luck.”

She brightened. And pointedly turned her head and gave the blond Mrs. Harrison a smug, triumphant smile.

In the smoky card salon on the steamer’s hurricane deck, Nevada promptly noticed that she was the only female. So did the gentlemen gamblers. Some sports cast admiring looks at her, others were openly annoyed. Johnny didn’t seem to care, so Nevada didn’t either.

Before Johnny took a seat at a table with four serious players ready for high-stakes poker, he pulled a chair up for her, just to the right of his, and sat her down. And Nevada felt heady with power when, settling himself on her left, he leaned to her, took one of her hands, kissed its palm, and placed it atop his right shoulder.

He whispered close to her ear, “Sweetheart, be a good girl and sit here quietly beside me. Keep your hand on my shoulder for luck, and I’ll win us some money.”

She did and he did.

When they left the card parlor three and a half hours later, Johnny had seven thousand five hundred dollars in cash and banknotes stuffed into the inside breast pocket of his black evening jacket, and Nevada was gloriously proud because he credited her with his win.

The moon had risen over the river and the humid, heavy air had cooled. It was a lovely romantic night and Nevada, after hours of sitting at Johnny’s side, looked forward to a leisurely stroll around the ship’s decks.

But Johnny took a gold-cased watch from his pocket, flipped it open, and said, “Bedtime, Nevada.”

“No! It couldn’t be. What time is it?”

“Almost eleven.”

“That’s early! Good Lord, I haven’t gone to bed before midnight since I was ten years old.” She smiled and took his arm. “Let’s walk in the moonlight and listen to the sounds of the river.”

“Not tonight,” he said. And he took her straight to her cabin and left her there, barely taking the time to say good-night.

Inside her quarters, Nevada frowned with displeasure. And noted that when Johnny left he didn’t enter his own cabin next door to hers. He walked off in the other direction. Curious, Nevada went at once to the porthole and peered out. She was still there when almost an hour later she heard Johnny’s unmistakable laughter. Squinting out into the night, she saw him.

He stepped up to the railing thirty yards from where she stood at the porthole, the moonlight glittering on his jet-black hair and shadowing half of his dark face. And he was not alone.

A tall, slender woman with silvery hair and a white shimmering dress draping slender curves was with him. She came to stand before him looking up into his eyes. She put her hands on his white shirtfront and her tinkling laughter carried on the quiet night air.

Nevada’s mouth fell open with shock and anger and envy when one of Johnny’s arms slid around Mrs. Harrison’s slim waist and he pulled her to him. He lifted her chin with his thumb and forefinger and bent to her.

Johnny kissed Mrs. Harrison and she molded herself to him, wrapping her bare arms around his neck to pull his dark head down. It was a long, slow, smoldering kiss that left the jealous observer trembling with emotion.

Eyes riveted on the embracing pair, Nevada thought she might be ill when one of Johnny’s lean dark hands slowly slid up from Mrs. Harrison’s slim waist to the undercurve of her breast. His long fingers cupped and caressed the woman’s satin-draped bosom, and Nevada’s own breasts ached and her nipples tingled with sensation as though Johnny’s hand were touching her.

The couple left the railing and, to Nevada’s horror, they headed in her direction. Not daring to breathe, she moved away from the porthole as they passed within a foot of where she was standing, her back pressed to the wall. And her pounding heart froze in her chest when she heard the cabin door next to her own open.

Johnny’s cabin.

They went inside together. The door to Johnny’s stateroom closed behind them. Nevada strained to hear. She quietly stole across her darkened cabin to the satinwood door that connected the two staterooms. Angry, confused, jealous, she slowly, carefully put her hand over the silver doorknob, gripping it with shaking fingers. It wouldn’t turn.

The door that had been open all afternoon was now firmly locked.

No!
Nevada’s tortured brain screamed.
No, no, no!

Then she heard Johnny’s voice murmuring words that she couldn’t quite make out, followed by high feminine laughter that filled her with loathing. It was a tinkling sound of undiluted joy, as though Johnny had said—or done—something that thoroughly delighted the sophisticated Mrs. Harrison.

Johnny’s deep male murmurings continued. So did Mrs. Harrison’s delighted feminine laughter. So did Nevada’s almost unbearable agony at hearing the pair. She felt as if she would surely scream at the top of her lungs if that damnable giddy laughter didn’t stop at once!

And found when the laughter finally stopped that she wished with all her heart it would start again. Far, far worse than the sound of Mrs. Harrison’s laughter was the rustle of clothing, the gentle sighs, the breathless voice murmuring, “Johnny, Johnny.”

12

Her home for the past twelve years had been a small, sparsely furnished gatehouse. The drafty dwelling was at the front edge of a large river plantation below Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she had been born on a frosty morning in the winter of 1826.

When alone inside the once-deserted gatehouse Miss Annabelle Delaney managed to preserve for herself the world of her southern upbringing. Genteel, placid, romantic, sentimental.

While whistles of river steamers sounded on the waterway below and robins nested in the lower bowers of the ancient oaks surrounding the steep-roofed house, Miss Annabelle rose each morning before dawn. She went about watering the iris in the window boxes and polishing the scarred cherrywood table that had once graced the main house. And very gingerly dusting the matching pair of English porcelain vases that had been brought back from her father and mother’s London honeymoon.

If there were any possessions on this earth that meant everything to their nostalgic owner, they were those delicate, expensive, irreplaceable vases. Simply to touch their smooth perfection caused Miss Annabelle’s thin mouth to lift in a smile of pleasure.

While she worked each early morning Miss Annabelle hummed softly to herself, as though she had no more cares than when she’d been a happy young girl and lived in splendid ease in the big white mansion on the bluffs.

The mansion had been owned for more than a decade now by the Morgans, a large family of wealthy northern carpetbaggers who had bought the vast estate for a fraction of its worth shortly after the war. But the palatial white structure had been built by Annabelle’s grandfather upon his arrival from South Carolina in 1794, a wedding present to his fifteen-year-old bride.

One of the first of many such plantations to line the lower river, it was, and would always remain, one of the most magnificent.

Annabelle’s father, Winston, had been born in the master bedroom of the mansion. Thirty years later her older brother, Thomas, was born in the same tall fourposter and two years later, so was she. The last of the Delaneys to open his eyes on his first light of day on the plantation had been her adored nephew, the fair, blond baby, Samuel Winston Delaney.

When Sam’s mother had succumbed to the fever in the hot, damp summer of ’51, Miss Annabelle had stepped quite naturally into the role of mother to the adorable six-year-old boy. And she had loved Sam as though she had given birth to him.

The ten years that followed were the happiest, most contented of Miss Annabelle’s entire life. With fierce pride she watched Sam grow tall and strong and handsomer with each passing year. He was a pretty, slender sixteen-year-old when the War between the States broke out. Sam’s father, Thomas, enlisted immediately and Sam had wanted to go with him.

Thomas ordered him to remain at home, assuring Sam and Miss Annabelle that the war wouldn’t last but a few weeks at most. Sam was to stay behind, be the man of the house, and watch over Miss Annabelle. Sam obeyed. But when two years had passed and Thomas Delaney had been killed at Gettysburg and still the war raged on, Sam kissed his aunt good-bye and bravely marched off to fight for the Cause.

Miss Annabelle, dry-eyed and stoic, had stood on the broad gallery and waved a lace handkerchief while her last living relative hurried off down the oak-shaded drive, his handsome face still beardless.

From that moment on, every visitor to ride up the drive for a neighborly visit disappointed the woman who looked longingly down that road for hours on end, hoping that the next sound of horse hooves, the next clatter of carriage wheels, the next footfalls on the mansion’s wooden steps would mean that her nephew Sam had returned.

It happened when she least expected it. It was a cold, dreary Monday afternoon in November of ’63. The rain had started before daybreak and continued to fall into the dark, dismal afternoon. Miss Annabelle heard voices through a front window thrown open to the wide, protective gallery.

She turned her head and listened for only a second before leaving her upholstered chair that was pulled up close to the fire. She hurried to throw open the heavy front door, waving away Lucas as he came snuffling in from the back of the big silent house. Squinting out into the rain, she saw two bedraggled soldiers coming up the drive on foot.

Both were bareheaded. One was dark, tall, with jet-black hair. The other, slightly shorter and thinner, was blond. Very blond. Miss Annabelle’s heart began to pound as the pair drew nearer. Her eyes clinging solely to the slender blond man, she began to smile as her pulse quickened with elation. She’d know that distinctive Delaney walk anywhere.