Straight For The Heart Read online

  “I'm not perfect,” she admitted softly. “But I am content with who and what I am.”

  “And what are you? A proud, stubborn woman who refuses to let herself fall in love with a man who clearly worships the ground she walks on. A woman who would, for all the wrong reasons—including that of ignoble martyrdom—be willing to sacrifice herself to a slimy, weasel-faced carpetbagger instead? If that isn’t the perfect irony, I don’t know what is.”

  Amanda sighed extravagantly. “Not you too. Is that what all this is about? Me and Josh?”

  “All this is about wanting to see you happy and safe.”

  “I am happy. And I’m perfectly safe here at Rosalie.”

  “Hiding behind your widow’s weeds,” he added pointedly.

  “I’m not hiding. And I stopped wearing black last year, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Only because it confused and upset Father, not because you wanted to appear in public without your armor.”

  Amanda squared her shoulders at the stab of truth that came with her brother’s words and turned away, climbing the two wide steps that took her into the summerhouse. She walked to the center of the small pavilion and paused in the blue-white shaft of moonlight that filtered through the broken slats of the roof. Her hair, bleached silver by the uncertain light, tumbled around her shoulders in a soft cascade of loose curls.

  Watching her, Ryan’s heart ached with pride for her beauty … and at the same time cursed Alisha for sharing it, for despoiling it somehow. Amanda should have been the one marrying a baron or a duke, even a king, by God. She was honest and unselfish and good. Her smile could brighten the gloomiest of days, her laugh could lighten the darkest of thoughts. How rarely she smiled these days, however. In spite of the brave front she showed most of the others—that of the good daughter, the loving widow, the embodiment of Southern grace, pride, and honor—there was a streak of loneliness in her a mile wide and a fathom deep, its flow as strong and turbulent as the currents in the Mississippi. She deserved to be happy. She deserved to be unafraid. She deserved to be loved, for God’s sake, even if he had to rap her on the head, bind and gag her, and prop her at the altar beside Joshua Brice.

  If that was what she wanted, that is.

  “Are you in love with him?” Ryan asked quietly.

  “Josh and I grew up together,” she replied without turning. “We have known each other all our lives.”

  “But are you in love with him?”

  Amanda felt her cheeks grow warm despite the cooling dampness in the air. “I … don’t know.”

  “Well, you don’t hate him, do you?”

  “No, of course not. I mean, he has almost been like another brother to me. He was one of Caleb’s closest friends and …” Her voice trailed off miserably and her head bowed under the weight of her thoughts.

  “And you are worried he thinks he owes you some kind of loyalty because he was with Caleb when he died?”

  The silvered waterfall of her hair rippled slightly as she shook her head. “No. No, it isn’t that. Not exactly.”

  “Then what … exactly … is holding you back?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I feel for Josh. I don’t know what he feels for me.”

  “He’s here nearly every other day putting up with Mother’s attempts at subtlety and Alisha’s lack of it; he must feel something. Has he asked you to marry him yet?”

  “No.”

  “Would you agree to marry him if he did ask?”

  “Why? Are you planning to hold a shotgun to his back if he doesn’t?”

  “I would if you wanted me to.”

  Amanda lifted her shoulders and dropped them again. “Why is everyone so eager to see me married off again?”

  “Because it’s time,” Ryan said gently. “Because you need a husband … and Verity needs a father.”

  She twisted her hands into the folds of her shawl and pulled it closer around her shoulders. Verity Leigh Jackson was a month away from her fourth birthday. She was the only good thing that had come out of the hardships, terror, and deprivations of the war, and Amanda’s love for her was as fierce and uncompromising as her love for Rosalie.

  “Josh adores her,” Ryan pointed out.

  “Everyone adores her, that doesn’t count.”

  “She held his hand the other day. And talked to him … without leaving his ear full of spit.”

  Amanda frowned and looked over. Verity’s infancy had not been one of carefree days and lush excesses. A tiny, delicate little thing at birth, she had been born into a world of gunfire, tramping boots, rough language, and leering, unshaven faces that belonged to strangers who were as likely to shout at her as kick her out of the way. Even now, with the war behind them, she spoke mainly in whispers and took to hiding in dark corners if there were tall, booted men around.

  “You don’t play fair,” she murmured.

  “Life hasn’t been very fair lately. To any of us. It is your decision, however, to marry or not to marry.”

  “Thank you very much for saying so. I was beginning to think it was everyone else’s decision but mine.”

  “Mother is only concerned for your, ah, declining years.”

  “I am hardly hovering on the threshold of senility.”

  “A few years ago, you would have considered yourself to be on the threshold of antiquity, and an unmarried lady of so many years to be almost beyond redemption.”

  “I’ve been married,” she reminded him sourly, casting him a look that suggested she was not beyond boxing his ears. “And if I have to be ‘redeemed’ again … well … I would rather do it with my eyes wide open and my expectations grounded more firmly in reality.”

  “You were barely sixteen when you wed Caleb, and there was a war going on. What did you expect? Stardust and choruses of Hallelujah?”

  “Maybe just some honesty.”

  It was Ryan’s turn to frown. “In what way was Caleb dishonest? You knew he was returning to the fighting. You knew there was a chance he wouldn’t come back.”

  “No.” She shook her head slowly. “No, I didn’t know he wouldn’t come back. It never occurred to me he wouldn’t come back. It never occurred to him he wouldn’t come back and insofar as that goes, I guess we were both too young and starry-eyed to make promises we couldn’t keep.”

  “Promises? What promises?”

  She bowed her head again and the movement sent a shiver of silver light down the length of her hair. “He promised to kill every Yankee who dared set foot across the Mason-Dixon line. He promised to keep me warm and safe and happy, to fill me full of children who would comfort and keep us in our doting old age. And me? I promised I would love and cherish him forever.

  “Forever,” she repeated in a whisper. “It didn’t seem like so difficult a promise to make when we were surrounded by candlelight and roses, but now … now I can barely remember what he looked like. As for stardust and Hallelujahs, we were both virgins on our wedding night. Maybe if we’d had more time to practice, we could have apologized less and enjoyed it more. As it was, it was a lot of sweat and bother with nothing much to show for it at the end but wrinkled sheets.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Amanda,” Ryan muttered.

  “Well, it’s true. It wasn’t the grand, passionate experience I was led to believe it was supposed to be. It was clumsy and painful and … and rather embarrassing, if you must know.”

  “I never said I must.”

  “But you did ask.”

  “So I did. I guess I just wasn’t expecting as blunt an answer.”

  “Or that particular answer at all? Don’t worry, I don’t imagine every woman feels the same way. Dianna, for instance: You can just about see her heart leaping out of her chest every time she gets near you.”

  Ryan was thankful the darkness hid the flush that crept up his throat. Dianna Moore, the Judge’s daughter, was about as close as he would ever come to making a complete and utter fool of himself over a woman. She was beautiful, ge
nteel, sweetly tempered, with an inner radiance that made a man melt at the knees and stumble over the thickness of his tongue.

  “She loves you, Ryan Courtland, without a doubt or hesitation. Almost as much as you love her. She wouldn’t blink if you asked her to marry you tomorrow.”

  “I can’t. I can’t ask her to marry … this.” He spread his arms helplessly. “Or me. She deserves better. A fine home and servants, not reclaimed cotton fields and a husband who comes home at night looking worse than a slave, too tired to worry if the sheets get wrinkled or not.”

  “You’re doing it again,” she warned evenly. “Equating everyone’s values with Alisha’s. Do you honestly think Dianna cares if you have money or not? Do you think any of this matters to her?”

  “It matters to me.”

  “Then you deserve to lose her to the Yankee.”

  Ryan’s jaw tensed into a hard ridge. A “friend” had told him Dianna was being escorted around Natchez on the arm of a Yankee who had been an acquaintance of the Judge’s before the war. This “friend” also said the Yankee was as handsome as the devil himself, as rich as Croesus, and eager to ingratiate himself with the local populace by marrying one of their own.

  “My, my, big brother,” Amanda mused, signaling an end to the conversation as she descended the stairs of the summerhouse and started walking back toward the house. “So easy to pontificate on the choices someone else should make … but how difficult to take it when the finger is pointing at you.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Alisha Courtland stretched and purred with delicious contentment as she listened to the rush of leaves stirring in the wind. It sounded like muted applause and made her skin tingle, adding to the heated waves of satisfaction already flooding through her body. It had been a performance worthy of applause, and absently she let her fingers trail across her full breasts, down the smooth indent of her belly, and finally, with a kind of adoring fondness, into the moist, silky thatch of curls at the juncture of her thighs.

  She was still throbbing, and so dewy her fingers slid through the golden triangle and elicited a moan of pleasure. “You’re only asking for more trouble by doing that.” Alisha smiled lazily and turned to admire the sleek, hard body reclining alongside her. His skin was glistening from the strain of his own performance—one equally deserving of rapturous applause. A large, callused hand covered hers and brought it to rest at the base of his belly, and she felt a thrill course through her blood. He was not as completely spent as she might have expected him to be, and even as her fingers wrapped teasingly around him, there was a distinct stirring of interest.

  “I suppose we must get dressed soon,” he murmured with genuine reluctance. “Though I’m in no hurry to leave.”

  Alisha snuggled against the curve of his body and draped a cool, bare leg over his. “Nor am I. But we have been out here for well over an hour and I might be missed.”

  “You’ll be missed more if you leave now,” he said huskily, pushing himself up into her hand.

  She laughed and released him, then sat up and gave her tousled mane of hair a shake. The exhilaration she was feeling was due to more than just the wild lovemaking of the past hour. There was the added element of risk, daring to do it so close to the house, that had aroused her to unbelievable heights. They were in the summerhouse, and although it was late and most of the manor was in total darkness, she could see the ghostly silhouette of the gabled roof and tall, jutting chimneys etched against the sky.

  She suspected … no, she knew damned well she had screamed at the peak of her orgasm, despite his efforts to keep her mouth covered with his, but she had seen no flicker of light, no glow of a lamp moving from room to room.

  “It would serve them right if they heard me,” she muttered petulantly, still bristling over the heated exchange in the parlor.

  “What?”

  “Oh … nothing.” Alisha glanced down at her lover and smiled through the ribbon of heat that slithered between her thighs. He was broad across the shoulders, his muscles incredibly well defined from the hours he spent working under the broiling sun. His hair was auburn, his eyes jade green. In all, he was a handsome specimen of pure animal magnificence—with his clothes off.

  Dressed, he became a reflection of his position in life: the fifth son of a man who had lost everything in the war. A well-bred Southern gentleman, he had been raised to excel in riding fine horses, drinking good whiskey, and charming beautiful women into compromising positions. Stripped of his home, his horses, and the money to buy anything more than cheap, raw spirits, he still possessed the magnetism to find his way between Alisha Courtland’s thighs, but he could hardly hope to aspire to anything more. As much as she enjoyed his body, Alisha could no more have considered a more serious tie to Joshua Brice than she could to a common field hand.

  “Has anyone ever told you that you resemble a cat when your eyes are half closed like that?”

  “Not recently,” she purred.

  “You behave like one too when your claws are bared and you feel the need to defend your territory.”

  Alisha’s body tensed perceptibly as Josh’s hand slid up the length of her thigh. “I wasn’t aware I was being challenged to defend anything tonight. If you truly prefer Amanda over me—”

  “If you truly preferred to marry me instead of that larded German toad,” he countered with a growl, “neither one of us would have to sneak around in the dead of night.”

  “We don’t have to now,” she said in a pique. “I can just go on back inside and—”

  He rose up beside her and silenced her with a kiss that was deep enough, long enough, brutal enough to scatter any thought of resistance when he pushed her back onto the crush of clothing that had served as their mattress. His hand glided to the top of her thighs, winning a husky groan as he stroked deftly through and into the pearly folds of flesh. He slipped two fingers inside her and, after a few moments of teasing pressure, thrust them deep enough and hard enough to bring her hips rising up off the floor with a raggedly mouthed oath.

  It was indeed a pity, she lamented inwardly, but how could she, Alisha Courtland, possibly allow herself to become the wife of a fifth son of a bankrupted plantation owner? A lover, yes, but a wife? His father had turned them all into sharecroppers, for pity’s sake, barely scraping together enough of a loan to rent out a miserly few acres of what had once been their own sizable plantation. Josh had, naturally and honorably, pleaded with her to marry him, but she had had more than her share of tired old dimity frocks and red, chapped hands. Josh was handsome and virile and insatiable—exactly the kind of bedmate she craved physically. Karl von Helmstaad, on the other hand, was old and rich and infatuated with her. He owned a grand and stately manor that was sorely in need of a woman’s extravagant touch, and if his generosity thus far had been any indication of things to come, he would be more than able to provide her with a lifestyle that would keep her young, beautiful, and pampered forever.

  She also needed Karl Kristoffer von Helmstaad for another important reason. It had been three months since the first glorious tryst with Joshua Brice, and God only knew how many times they had been together since. She did not know on which occasion she had been careless enough to let his seed take root within her, she only knew her time had come and gone and she needed an obliging husband quickly. Karl was convenient, gullible, and as impatient to be done with the civilities as she pretended to be. In three weeks’ time, she would have a rich, doting husband, a father for her unborn child, and a lover who would go to almost any lengths just to hear her cry his name in ecstasy.

  She gasped it out now as the wet heat of his mouth closed around her nipple, suckling the flesh with the same lusty rhythm his fingers were using to debilitate her senses elsewhere.

  Defend her territory, indeed! As if it needed defending from her cloyingly naive, ingratiatingly wholesome twin. Why, it almost brought a laugh to her lips to imagine Amanda sprawled naked on the floor of a ruined summer-house, her body running w
et with desire, her breath coming in broken gasps, her hips moving in a blur beneath a man who grunted words of encouragement at each clenching shiver.

  It did make her laugh each and every time she remembered pressing her ear to her bedroom wall and listening to the sounds the bride and groom had made on their wedding night. Polite conversation. Polite whispers. A sudden and oh-so-brief sawing of bedsprings that ended in more polite murmurings. She doubted if either Amanda or the doting, doe-eyed Caleb Jackson had even taken off their night-clothes.

  Alisha would miss none of them. Not the simpering silliness of her mother, not the exasperating foolishness of her father, or the glowering hostility of her brother. Most decidedly she would not miss Amanda. In fact, when the time for pretenses was over, it would give Alisha immense pleasure to tell her dear sister that her beau had only been playing a game—a game Alisha had devised and encouraged shortly after she and Josh had become lovers.

  “I can’t deceive Amanda by letting her think I am courting her,” he had protested. “I can’t give her false expectations.”

  “Amanda expects nothing from you but your friendship. She never has and never will. It is only the rest of the family we will be deceiving. They are so determined to see me wed to Karl, they would spirit me away at the first hint of rebellion.”

  “I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

  “Do you love me, Josh? Do you?”

  “You know damn well I do.”

  “Then you mustn’t abandon me now. Oh, please, Josh! It was Ryan’s idea to arrange the marriage with Karl. He knows the baron would not allow his wife’s family to become homeless and destitute, and it is Ryan’s intention to save Rosalie at any cost—even my happiness.”

  “How can he force you into the marriage when he knows you don’t love the man?”

  Alisha had bowed her head sorrowfully. “Land. Property. The honorable Courtland name has always been of supreme importance to Ryan. He is adamant the plantation must be saved. And as much as I loathe what I am being forced to do, I cannot stand by and see my family driven off our land. The d’Ibervilles have lived here since the Trace was just a footpath between Natchez and Nashville, and the only boats on the Mississippi were birchbark canoes. I cannot stand by and watch my poor mother cruelly turned out of the house where she and her mother and her mother’s mother were born. I just can’t! You couldn’t either, if the situation was reversed. If it was you the family hopes depended upon, would you be able to run away and leave them? Would you be able to live with the guilt and the pain, knowing you had left them in ruin and despair?”