For Zachary, a powerful tether grew, swirling, spiraling, connecting all of them. He exhaled with the beauty of the miracle of life reflected to him in the mirror of another loving and caring human being. His heart became a compass, the needle spinning true north. A protective web of emotions expanded in his chest. To guard them. To keep them safe. To vanish the poisonous distrust that had claimed his soul.
“What are you going to name her?” he asked, mystified with the spell woven around them.
An elderly woman rushed into the room, saw his damp clothes, and glared at him as if he were the devil incarnate. “Name her? Dear God. The baby has arrived?”
Chapter Two
Six years later…New York City 1876
Six years had passed since that critical day in Missouri. In that lucid time between wakefulness and sleep Elizabeth dreamed of her dark-haired frontiersman. Oh, those piercing eyes. Never had she fathomed anything like the blazing color of his eyes, too luminous to be blue, gleaming in the flickering firelight like two flaming cobalt ingots. Eyes that displayed discernible intelligence, but they were also hooded with sadness and skepticism. Baffling indeed.
Laying on her massive four-poster bed, she gazed up at the gilt plasterwork, playing the “what if” game in her mind. What if she had met him under normal circumstances? What if he’d courted her and they lived a happy life raising their children in a quaint farmhouse?
She sighed, surveying the rich furnishings of her room all done in robin’s egg blue and white, a chintz of trailing fleur-de-lis designs to cover the delicately stuffed chairs. Yet her wishes were like a ship sailing on the horizon. Sometimes coming nearto shore with the tide, never landing, never out of sight, always on the horizon. Her dreams mocked her to death by time and reality. She punched her pillow, searching for the last pleasant fragments of her dream where he caught her wrist and pulled her near, held her close to his chest. She wasn’t afraid. She felt so safe cradled in his hold.
Even now, she could feel her heart throbbing in her flushed cheeks. Oh, how she’d peeked at him when he thought she was sleeping. Saw the fineness of his male shirtless form from behind. Achilles, the warrior, he was.Primal masculinity, tall with wide shoulders, narrow waist, lean, an amazing specimen of manhood. She frowned. Long scars trailed across his back and one down his leg. She bit her knuckle. What had happened to him?
His face, she remembered, was not soft. If she were a sculptor, she would have cut his likeness in sharp angles, crafting it to evoke confidence, nobleness, persistence. She’d add a touch of mercilessness, stubbornness, and arrogance to further define him because that is what she imagined.
The deep timbre of his voice had been hypnotizing, sinfully rich, a melodious nameless drawl that made her toes curl, and at the same time carried the most inspiring, epic, and gentle sound she’d ever heard or thought about.
What she did remember of her frontiersman was his kindness and compassion. He’d saved her life and that of her child. He hadn’t abandoned her like her family. He stayed, delivered her baby, held her hand when she needed comfort.
One regret was that she had never learned his name. Oh, to see him again. To feel his strong arms about her. That would never happen. Must never happen. He knew her most shameful secret.
She rose, her toes sinking into the thick pink and blue Aubusson carpet and padded to a spray of whitechrysanthemums amid wide feathery ferns in a deep turquoise cloisonne vase.
Fiona, her Irish maid bustled in, breaking into her sweet reverie. “I ordered mums instead of roses for your room. I’m told they symbolize luck, love and happiness.”
Elizabeth fingered the soft snowy petals. Her senses reeled. Was there a connection to Fiona’s suggestion as claimed, or a forewarning? She shook her head.
“What gown do you wish to wear today? The weather is bright and sunny. A grand day. I’m thinking for the ribbon cutting at the orphanage, the peach-colored Worth gown that has just arrived from Paris. The gown so complements your coloring.”
Her maid chattered on without hesitation. If words were chrysanthemums, Elizabeth would have a shipload. “The peach gown will be fine.” A treasure trove of new gowns had been ordered from European designers, Worth, Pingat from Paris in addition to a scattering of emerging American designers all commandeered by her mother to package Elizabeth and sell her off.
She rose and thrust her arms into a proffered satin robe and sat down at her vanity. While her maid brushed her hair and chatted away, Elizabeth’s concentration drifted to that fateful day when her daughter had been born. What a whirlwind. A wetnurse had been employed and then came the awful separation from her baby, her heart breaking with the role she had to play. To be removed from the infinite love she possessed for her daughter had been death.
Per her father’s instructions, her cousin had procured a private railroad coach to take Elizabeth to New York. How awful it was traveling without her daughter in her arms. How her swollen breasts ached to feed her baby, leaking, and soaking her dress.
Upon arrival home, no one had seemed to care. Emotional vampires, draining the blood from her. Why had she expected anything different than before? A numbness had controlled Elizabeth, staying in her bed, very still and empty, the way the eye of a hurricane felt.
“To keep your story straight, did you study about Europe in your absence? Can’t risk a scandal,” her mother had whispered, ushering her to a parlor full of socialites.
“How was your trip to Europe?” Mrs. Aston had crooned at a tea party.
Like a pet dog trained to do tricks, Elizabeth had lifted her lips, moving dully in the center of her mother’s meaningless social gatherings. “Lovely. Paris this time of year has so much charm.”
As a cat with a warm saucer of milk, her sister, Louise had gloated over her new husband, Roderick Hawkes—Elizabeth’s former fiancé. He raised a disproving brow. Louise had told him everything.
She had come back to her shame and pasted on a smile. Be a good girl.
You are a big disappointment, Elizabeth.
Oh, how those words from her father reverberated through her even now.
She pushed the hurt away and focused on a past communication from her cousin, detailing how the stranger who had delivered her baby had come to call the next day and was most determined to see to Elizabeth’s welfare and that of the baby. A nuisance. She described how she’d closed the door, but he stuck his boot in and shoved inside. He refused to take no for an answer and searched the house. Her cousin had explained that Elizabeth had gone with her husband. His fury had been an understatement.
Elizabeth had understood his anger with the falsehood after telling him she didn’t have a husband. A stab of guilt pawed at her breast, the consequence of a lie. A lie so enormous it outshone the sun and the moon. Even though he was kind and heroic toward her, Elizabeth had the distinct feeling he was a man no one dared to cross. She shrugged. Never would she see him again. Why the terrible sense of foreboding?
