Sweet Savage Eden (26 page)

He found what documents he sought and slammed the drawer shut. He strode across the room to the door. “Lymon!” he called.

Jassy, standing there in her shift and petticoat, gasped in protest. “Don’t you dare call Lymon, and don’t think to vent your wretched temper upon me. I’m not decently clad, and I tell you, I will not have it—”

“You!” he seemed to growl, coming to her quickly and setting his finger upon her chin to lift it. “You, my grand lady, will not tell me anything. You will sit still and await my convenience.” He lifted her up by the waist and cast her in a flurry of her petticoats upon the bed. Tears stung her eyes, and she swore at him, and she wondered how, after the previous night, he could still be so carelessly rude to her. By then Lymon had reached the room, and she backed against the headboard, pulling the covers to her. She sat in brooding silence as Lymon assisted Jamie with the final touches to his packing, for he had been nearly prepared for the voyage. More servants arrived to carry down the heavy trunks, and when they were gone, Jamie at last turned to her. He leaned upon his desk and crossed one booted foot over the other, and his arms across his chest. “I had thought to have more time to express the vehemence of my determination. Lymon will see to it that a coach is prepared to
bring you to London with your immediate household in time for the
Sweet Eden
to sail. You are free to bring your horse, Mary, if you desire, for you will definitely need a mount in Virginia, and as you seem attached to the creature, you may bring her. I know that you are still totally against the voyage, but I stress to you, my love, should you not arrive upon the
Sweet Eden
, you had best pray that your remains rest at the bottom of the sea, for I swear it will be a better end than what I shall have in mind.”

She did not know if it was his words, or the insolent way in which he said them, but her temper seemed to burst and shatter, and she’d have gladly torn every last hair from his dark, arrogant head. She leapt from the bed in a blur of motion and flurry and catapulted herself against him, her fists flying, her words incomprehensible, her nails bared. She came in such distraught passion that he was unprepared, and her palm and nails caught his chin and drew blood. She was scarcely aware of it, though, or of the leashed rage that grimly tautened his flesh over his features. He caught her hands and dragged them behind her back, and she swore on in a vengeance, suddenly very lost and confused, and hating him fiercely. “How dare you, how dare you speak to me this way, how dare you continue to abraid and abuse me—”

“Abuse you, madame? You know nothing of the word! Alas, perhaps I do abuse you! I drag you away from the china and the crystal, and the elegance of the manor. And you do covet fine things, do you not, milady?” He pressed her ever backward as he spoke. She stared up into the smoldering blue fire in his eyes, and the battle was still with her.

“Yes! Yes!” she cried. “You thought that if you married a tavern wench, she would not care that you brought her to a barbaric mud pit! Well, you are a fool, for I shall hate it with every breath in my body, just as I hate you—”

“Despise it, Jasmine, but find yourself there. And you may despise me, madame, but so help me, you will not forget me, or that I command your life, ever.”

“No? I have forgotten you already!” she swore violently.

He had reached the foot of the bed. and she was startled when he suddenly cast her free, shoving her upon it. He loomed over her, and she had been a fool not to realize the tempest of anger, or that the blaze in his eyes had come from anger to something more. Stunned and dazed, she struggled up to her elbows.

“Lady, we shall see that you do not forget me!”

“No!”

She struggled fiercely, slamming him hard in the chin with her elbow. He grunted in acknowledgment of the pain, and it was then that she saw the blood she had drawn upon him. She cried out, in a fury to avoid him, to twist away from him. His mouth ground down hard upon hers, and his body pinned her to the bed. There was nothing tender about his kiss, it was brutal and punishing, and still, it was searing in its heady passion. She felt a warm rush about her, the male scent of him, the unyielding strength of his arm. The pressure of his knee increased. She freed her lips from his, breathing in ragged gasps. He caught tendrils of her hair, golden in the sunlight, and wound his fingers into them, then found her lips again. She twisted from him, tears stinging her eyes. “No, you will not! You cannot order me about and have me at your whim. You will not—”

“But I will, madame,” he said grimly, “and when I am done, you will never dare jest that you have forgotten me, not for a single moment.”

“Bastard!”

“Nay, I married the bastard, you will recall. The scheming, grasping little wench who yearned for my money. How ironic! But, madame, think of it! None in the New World will know you as anything but a very grand lady, indeed. You may reign over the savages supreme!”

“Get off me!” Jassy raged. “I have paid for this bargain, and dearly. I hate you, and I hate you—I hate you atop me, and—”

“Do you? Last night I was convinced otherwise.”

“You, sir, are the one who called me a magnificent actress! Get off me!”

“Never, madame, for you will give me my due—”

“I owe you nothing—”

“At my leisure, my dear wife. The bastard, the actress, the whore—you have come to perform very well. Let’s see if we can draw such a performance again!”

“No!” She clawed at him anew, but he was in command, and she was pushed back, back—into the softness of the down mattress. It was quick, it was violent, and it was shattering. He secured her wrists as she swore and struggled, pushed up her petticoats and the linen of her shifts, and fumbled with the draw of his breeches. She didn’t think that she had ever despised him so fiercely.…

And yet when he took her, the fire had never been so brightly lit within her. Her struggles ceased, her hands were free, and she was sinking endlessly into the soft clouds of the bed. She cried out at the fierce impact of his thrust, and she shuddered. He paused, and then his lips lowered and took hers, and his tongue came warm into her body, as did his sex. She came alive, wild and desperate, and dug her fingers into his shoulders. She wanted him, more than she had ever learned to want him the night before. She arched for the feel of his hand upon her breast through the linen of her shift, and her hips shifted and moved and undulated in a fever. So much came so quickly. The soaring rise of sweet need, the thunderous beat of his deep strokes. She wound her limbs around him and held tight, straining against his body. His dark eyes loomed above her, and with a sob she pulled his face to hers, and her lips, curiously wet with the salt of tears, demanded something of his. He kissed her deeply, raggedly, and then tore from her, an anguished, shuddering groan escaping him. Fulfillment raged through her, cascading like a warm blanket of liquid sunshine, seeping through her limbs and into her womb. Little tremors seized her again and again, and then she fell down to earth once again, down to the tangle of sheets and linen and petticoats, and the man who still lay heavy upon her.

Wordlessly he pushed himself from her and rose. He straightened his breeches. She lay still, dead still, spent and dazed.

Jamie stared at her for one minute. She did not meet his eyes but stared at the canopy above her. He swore softly, vehemently, then turned from her. She heard him sweep up his hat and his doublet from his desk, and then his long strides bore him swiftly across the room. The door slammed in his wake.

She lay there a long, long time. She heard the coach departing below, and she heard the grooms and the milkmaids and the servants as they set about the business of the day.

She realized that she lay in dishevelment and shame, her shift and petticoats pushed up high to her waits, the sheets beneath her twisted and dislodged. Her limbs were so sore, she scarcely could move them. She drew them together, and she rolled over, and despite the June day, she began to shiver. He was gone, she thought dully. He was gone, and it would be many months before she saw him again.

She could run away, she thought, but she did not want to. She liked being Lady Cameron; she
needed
to be Lady Cameron.

No matter what it entailed.

She would not be on the ship, the
Sweet Eden
, she decided. He could rage and protest and swear and thunder all he liked, but he would be three months away on another continent. She would not go; that was all there was to it. She would not go.

She shivered, remembering his conversation with Hornby. She would be dragged aboard the ship if she did not walk upon it. Not if they couldn’t find her, not if she disappeared …

She lay there miserably with her arms curled about her chest, cold, her teeth chattering, despite the June sunlight streaming in. As time passed, she realized that she would be on the ship. Even across the vast distance of time and an ocean, she hadn’t quite the nerve to defy
him. He would hunt her down, she was certain, and he would find her.

Three days later, Robert and Lenore were duly married. Jassy sat in misery through the ceremony, then smiled brightly for them both.

That night she lay awake a long, long time, tossing and turning. As dawn came, she realized with horror that she missed her husband beside her. She missed the startling rapture he had taught her to feel. She missed the strength of his arms.

The next morning, she was summoned to her brother’s house. Jane was in labor. After fourteen hours, a beautiful little girl was born. Jassy came home exhausted, but happy.

A week later her happiness faded when morning sickness began to plague her. She lay in bed in terror, looking about her beautiful room. It would be one thing to bear a babe here.…

But hers would be born in the wilderness, with savages.

She hated Jamie fiercely.

But still, she was missing him. Every bit as passionately.

XI
   

T
heir crossing was one of the fiercest Jamie had ever endured. Storms beset them across the Atlantic and continued to plague them as they neared the American coastline. Heavy crosscurrents pressed the flagship of his four-pinnace fleet, the
Hawk
, ever northward. Jamie stood with Captain Raskin at the bow, his glass in his hand as he observed the distant shore beneath a gray day and a dripping rain.

“ ’Tis what happened to the Separatists, the ‘Pilgrims’ who left London late last summer,” Captain Raskin said morosely. “They meant to settle somewhere southward, in the land chartered as North Virginia. But the currents swept them northward to the point that John Smith had drawn as Plymouth on his map, and there they stayed.”

Jamie cast Raskin a quick stare. He wouldn’t have minded a side trip to the Puritan community under normal circumstances. He would liked to have seen how the men and women of the Plymouth colony were faring now that their first brutal winter was over and they had learned something of survival. In London he had heard that the death toll had been tremendous. He hoped that they were surviving well.

The death toll in the Jamestown colony and its surrounding hundreds had often been tremendous, he reminded
himself. And yet Jamestown had survived thus far, and with the plantations and hundreds arising along the peninsula on the James, the area seemed destined to endure.

The Pilgrims were escaping religious persecution, while the Jamestown settlers had come for more commercial reasons.

He had come for the adventure himself—and because his father had deemed it appropriate for a young man of his situation to see the world and seek his place. When he had first seen the land before the starving time of 1609, he had felt its draw. Within the Chesapeake Bay lay hundreds of fine natural harbors. The bay was fertile, and the Indians had proven that the fields were rich. The forests were verdant, and he had thought he had never seen a more natural state of the earth, nor a more beautiful one. The very loneliness, the very wildness of the land had excited him.

By 1613, he had turned twenty-one and taken over the trust his mother had left him. Wise investments, backing hardworking London merchants, had tripled his income. He had invested in the ships then, and his little fleet had carefully traveled the Caribbean, avoiding the Spaniards, who liked to claim the whole of the New World, and moving onward to the Bermuda colony and then back to England again.