Nobody's Angel (33 page)

He could almost picture himself being faithful to a woman like that. Quite probably, if he had her in his bed every night, he'd lack the energy, if not the will, to stray.

Was he thinking of marriage? That he should even entertain the idea surprised him. But what other course was open to him with a woman like Susannah? However different she was from the ladies he was used to, she was, indubitably, a lady. In some ways, the ones that really mattered, she was a far greater lady than those who ruled the
ton.

He could not use her as his mistress. Some unsuspected delicacy of mind shrank from even thinking of her in such a context, though he had bedded her twice, and damned hotly, too. But if he slept with her, she had to fall into one of two categories: mistress or wife.

Miss Susannah Redmon would never be happy as his mistress. Now that she'd given herself to him, not once but twice, she would be thinking in terms of persuading him to take her to wife. He knew how her mind worked as well as he knew his own.

She had said they'd talk on the morrow. Did she mean to propose? Managing as she was, that seemed quite likely. He wondered how she'd go about it. Picturing various scenarios made him grin.

Ian chuckled aloud as he wondered what she would reply when he told her he was really a marquis.

The entertainment value of that thought was his undoing. He never heard the door open, never saw the man who crept across the floor until suddenly, without the slightest warning, a huge dark shadow loomed over his bed.

His first, instantaneous thought was that Likens, the bastard, thought to exact some sort of revenge on him instead of Susannah, which suited him very well. His second was that Greer, the fool, still muddle-headed from drink, had followed them home and hoped to pay him back for that clout on the jaw.

The one foe he didn't consider, while his mind ranged with lightning quickness over various possibilities even as his body tensed for violent response, was precisely the one that, instants later, his attacker was revealed to be.

"This time you die, Derne," the specter growled, and a knife flashed as it hurtled down toward his chest.

Impossible as it seemed, his enemies had found him again.

32

Susannah was singing as she shaped dough into loaves not long after dawn the next morning. The tune had run through her dreams all night long, and even now she couldn't seem to get it out of her head. She could almost see Ian's face bending close to hers, just as it had when she had sung for him the night before. She almost could see the tender light in his gray eyes and the teasing smile that curved his beautiful mouth.

"Alas, my love, you do me wrong to cast me off so discourteously. . . ."

Not even particularly caring whether or not she was alone, she pirouetted once or twice on her way to pop the bread into the bake oven. As Ian had said, sin, like beauty, was in the eye of the beholder. Maybe dancing wasn't such a very great sin. And maybe he truly found her beautiful.

She was going to marry him. Susannah smiled giddily at the thought. She was going to take a chance on him, just as he had urged her to. She was going to do something daring, and dangerous, and probably foolish. She was going to grab life with both hands, while she had the chance. She was going to ask Ian to make her his wife.

There would be a scandal, of course, and the neighbors would buzz, and a few of the adamant sticklers among the congregation would look down their noses at her for a while, but Susannah had discovered, somewhere during the course of the long night, that she simply didn't care.

She wanted Ian, and she meant to have him. Take what you want, said God. Take what you want, and pay for it. Only this time, she wanted to be Ian's wife, and she was willing to pay the full price.

Anything.

What beautiful children they'd have, she thought dreamily as she added water to the kettle and hung it over the fire. Sturdy, black-haired little boys, girls with his perfectly carved features and gray eyes—or maybe they'd look like her. She would love them regardless, of course. But she hoped they would all look like Ian. How peculiar it would be, to find herself the mother of such a gorgeous brood!

Maybe a child had already started to grow within her. This time the thought excited her rather than filling her with dread. How wonderful it would be to have a child of her own—and Ian's—to love!

Pa would not object when she told him that she loved Ian and meant to marry him. She didn't even think he'd be too sorrowful, though she couldn't be absolutely positive about that. Ian was a bound man and a convict, after all. But Pa had never tried to keep her from doing anything she was determined to do, and he wouldn't— couldn't—stop her now. She hoped he wouldn't try. He liked Ian, after all, and she knew his primary concern was her happiness.

Ian was what made her happy.

Happy. Susannah realized that she'd forgotten what it felt like to be happy. Not since before her mother had died, when she'd lain in bed in the mornings and awakened to the smell of breakfast cooking and the sounds of her mother singing as she moved about the kitchen, had life seemed so full of possibilities. For a long time now her world had been leeched of joy. She'd done what she had to do, gotten through each day, picked up the standard that her mother had dropped. She had given unstintingly to those she loved. But she had not been happy.

She'd been resigned, rather. Sometimes content. Certainly ready to settle for the half-loaf that she had thought was to be her lot. To raise her sisters in lieu of children of her own. To keep her father's house rather than establish her own home. To watch as, one by one, her sisters found love, married, and had children. To be left, in the end, on the shelf and alone.

But Ian had changed all that. He had exploded into her life like a cannonball, and nothing had been the same since. She had not been the same since. She much preferred the foolish, reckless, and even sinful woman she was with Ian to the dried-out spinster she'd been before.

Maybe she would even let him teach her to dance.

At the thought, Susannah giggled. She was still giggling like a girl when Ben walked into the kitchen. Biting her tongue to stop her laughter, looking across at him almost guiltily, Susannah saw that he had not brought in the sticks for the fire. Instead, his hands were empty, and his fingers clenched and unclenched nervously.

"Somethin's amiss," he said without preamble, before she could question him. His thin young face wore an expression that Susannah had never before seen on it.

"What is amiss?" she asked, leaving off pouring molasses into a crock for the table to stare at him. A cold fear began to fill her heart, though she couldn't say exactly why. It was just a feeling, a bad feeling. . . .

"Connelly ain't nowhere around, and his cabin looks like a hurricane's been through it. I think he's gone, or been took, or somethin ."

"What?"

Susannah stared at him for the space of a heartbeat while a peculiar iciness spread throughout her body. She put down the molasses bucket almost too carefully and walked to the back door. Once there, she lifted her skirts clear of her feet and ran.

Ian's cabin was indeed a shambles. The door hung on its hinges, the bed was turned on its side, and the mattress had been flung across the room and ripped so that its cornhusk stuffing covered everything. The rest of the furnishings looked as though they had been flung about by a madman, or by someone in a furious rage. The pitcher and bowl from the washstand lay shattered on the floor. Even the mirror that hung above the washstand was broken.

Ian was not here. Nor was he in the barn, or the fields, or anywhere else that Susannah, in that first frantic rush, thought to look. By the time she returned, still almost running, to the cabin, the entire household was gathered there, talking among themselves.

"Something's happened to Ian!" she said, mounting panic sharpening her voice as they clustered around her.

"Now, Susannah, you don't know that," Sarah Jane said.

"Maybe Mr. Greer did something to him." Mandy sounded scared.

"Or Jed Likens," Em said.

"Craddock ain't never come back," Ben looked nervously around. "It's been a long time, too. Maybe whatever got him got Connelly."

"Ben! You hush your mouth!" Sarah Jane sounded almost fierce.

"We have to search for Ian." Susannah was striving to remain calm. She had to remain calm, for Ian's sake, and think. It was clear to her that a terrible struggle had taken place in that cabin. Maybe a fight to the death—though with whom? And who had won? If Ian had been the winner, where was he? She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering despite the already stifling heat.

"You don't know that anything bad's happened to him, daughter. Maybe a bear got in here, or a bunch of raccoons." The Reverend Redmon turned back from studying the inside of the cabin, took one look at Susannah's white face, and put an arm around her shoulders. His expression told her that he didn't put much stock in his own suggestions. There was something else there, too. She could see it in his eyes, feel it in his touch—he had just realized how she felt about Ian. But there was no condemnation in the gentle hazel gaze, and his touch was warmly comforting.

"Yes, I do. I can feel it," Susannah said. It was the truth. Deep inside her she could feel it beginning already, the sharp ache of loss. She remembered it from when her mother died. Only now it was a thousand times worse.

She pulled away from her father and walked inside the cabin. The chaos made her shiver, and yet she could not leave. There was something here, something that she was missing. . . . Picking her way through the mess, she touched things: an overturned chair, the upended bed, a pile of cornhusk stuffing from the mattress, the mattress itself. It was then, as she looked at the mattress, that she realized what had troubled her. The mattress had not burst. It had been slit open cleanly, as with a knife. A large, dark brown stain formed an irregular circle near the slit.

Scarcely daring to breathe, Susannah knelt and touched that stain. It was still damp.

"Blood," she said, horror rising in her throat and threatening to choke off all other utterance as she looked at the substance on her fingers. "Dear God, it's blood!"

"Susannah. Daughter, come away." From behind her, her father reached down and practically lifted her to her feet.

"It's blood, Pa! Ian's blood!" She knew it instinctively, with a deep, certain knowledge that she could not explain. Still staring at her stained fingers in shock, she was led unresisting toward the door.

"Be strong, child. God sends us no burdens that we cannot bear. If something has indeed befallen Con—uh, Ian, then you must strive to remember that it is His will."

"A pox on God's will!" Her passionate outcry caused her father's arm to drop from around her shoulder.

"Susannah Redmon, I am ashamed of you!" he said sharply, his gentle eyes suddenly stern as he condemned her for her blasphemy. Never in her life had her father spoken to her so or looked at her like that. But Susannah was too distraught to care. She could do no more than stare at her stained fingers and, despite her passionate disavowal, try to pray, as prayer was the only remedy she knew, the source of help in time of trouble that she had turned to all her life. Please, God, let Ian be all right. I'll give him up this time, I promise. I'll never lie with him again. I'll never dance again. I'll never question the teachings of the church again. Just let him be all right. Please. Please. Please. The cry ran feverishly through her brain.

Looking down into her whitening face, her father's ex- pression softened. His arm came back around her shoulders as he urged her out into the light.

"There, I know you didn't mean it." He squeezed her shoulder. "You're a good, God-loving girl. Sometimes the heart just rebels at The pain and suffering that are a mere mortal's lot in life."

"I just found him," she said brokenly. "I can't lose him now. I just can't, Pa!"

"There, there," the Reverend Redmon said. He sounded almost helpless in the face of his eldest daughter's misery. Always before it had been Susannah who had been strong, and he did not seem to know what to do in the face of her distress. Then, as he stared at her bent head, his spine stiffened, and he seemed to grow an inch or so taller.

He beckoned to Ben, who stood with Sarah Jane and Mandy and Em a little distance away.

"Go to town for the constable, and tell him to bring some men for a search," the Beverend Redmon said to Ben with quiet authority. It was the first time in years that Susannah had heard that tone from him, and she glanced up at him in surprise. Suddenly it was as if she were seeing him the way he used to be, before her mother's passing had torn the heart from him. She had forgotten how strong he had been then, strong despite the gentleness that had always been so intrinsic a part of his nature. When she was a little girl, she had thought that her pa was omnipotent. He was the most powerful, bravest, smartest man in the world, and she had adored him. For a moment, just a moment, that was the man she saw again.

"In the meantime, daughter, let us go into the house. We'll do no good by standing about here."

Susannah rested her head against her father's shoulder as they went.

33

Two months passed. Two months that were closer to hell on earth than anything Susannah had ever experienced. Two months of unrelenting misery, of an ache so deep that she could not cry, of grief so debilitating that it seemed as if she would suffocate under the weight of it. It took every ounce of strength and courage and stubbornness she possessed just to get through the hours from one gray dawn to the next. And with Ian no longer in it, that was the color of her world: an unremitting gray.

She very much feared he was dead, although every now and then a tiny flicker of hope would insist he was not. But if he was not dead, then where was he? That he had simply run off, as the constable suggested, she could not, would not, believe. He would not just leave her without a word. Not after what had passed between them. She was as certain of that as she was of anything in her life.