Straight For The Heart Read online

  Did this mean Alisha was having second thoughts about her upcoming nuptials? Amanda dismissed the thought without really giving it serious consideration. Alisha had set her mind on having the baron’s wealth and title. Nothing and nobody was going to get in her way.

  It had to be a lover, then, meeting her clandestinely in the shadows of midnight. Having a younger, virile beau would certainly explain why she was so indifferent to the criticisms heaped on Karl von Helmstaad. Nor was the notion all that shocking or difficult to accept. Alisha attracted men like a cake attracted ants. Armies of them had passed through Mississippi wearing the blue and the gray, and Alisha had thrived on the attention lavished upon her by both.

  Amanda turned her head slightly, catching the faint sound of tiptoeing feet in the hall outside the door of the adjoining bedroom. Her glance was intercepted by the ghostly reflection in the cheval mirror—a reflection that might have been Alisha herself save for the minuscule variances in their features. Amanda’s mouth was a shade fuller. Her nose was a breath thinner, her hair a glimmer lighter. All of their lives, however, they had been mistaken one for the other, and there had been no lack of suitors eager to win the favors of either twin when such things were considered to be of monumental importance. Moreover, truth be told, it had been a game of sorts to trade places with this beau or that—a game that had rapidly lost its charm when Amanda realized her sister was decidedly freer with the liberties she allowed.

  It was possibly one of the reasons why Amanda had accepted the marriage proposal from Caleb Jackson. His reserved demeanor had never appealed to Alisha, and she had found his strict sense of honor too stifling and far too boring. The Jacksons had owned the Mercantile Bank in Natchez, so the families had both been pleased when they had announced their intentions to marry on his next furlough home. Amanda had, it seemed, always done the right thing, the expected thing.

  Caleb Jackson had been her husband for four days and nights. He had been both gentle and painfully modest, reluctant to vilify her in any way, mortified by the jackrabbit urgency that always ended with him drained and trembling helplessly in her arms. The experience hadn’t exactly left her singing the praises of passion and desire, nor had it left her with more than a lingering impression of bony arms and legs tangled together in the sheets.

  Joshua Brice was neither bony nor modest. He was lean and hard and exuded a vitality that could not be easily dismissed … or, she suspected, too easily forgotten.

  Amanda’s gaze sought its own accusing stare in the polished surface of the mirror.

  She had not meant to be quite so candid with Ryan in the garden earlier, but she had spoken the truth when she had admitted she could scarcely recall Caleb’s face anymore. She had to rely more and more on the daguerreotype of him she kept on the bureau, a glossy gray-and-white image of a stiff-backed young man proudly standing in his Confederate uniform, too wary of the newfangled photographic process to spare a smile.

  When she had been told of his death, she had held his picture against her breast and wept for the loss. She had wept over Stephen and Evan too, and the countless other friends, neighbors, and acquaintances whose names appeared on the long rolls of casualty lists. After a time, their faces had all started to blend together, and Caleb's had started to fade.

  Was Joshua Brice partly to blame for this growing apathy? Was it because Josh was here and real and vibrantly alive that she could conjure his handsome face in the blink of an eye?

  There was no answer forthcoming from her reflection, and Amanda’s gaze slipped down the length of the shapeless cotton nightdress she wore. It was mended in places and so threadbare the muted glow from the lamp was strong enough to outline the shape of her body beneath. It was the same shape as Alisha’s, with the same voluptuous fullness across the breasts, the same slender waist and long, lithe legs. So what was different about them? Why was Alisha returning breathless from a tryst in the garden while she stood in a dark bedroom resenting it?

  Maybe Ryan was right. Maybe she had been hiding behind her widow’s weeds too long. Josh cared for her. He would love and protect Verity as if she were his own child. He was not afraid to bend his back to the land or to be seen with calluses on his hands and dirt under his fingernails. She was comfortable in his company. While it might not be love she felt for him, it was certainly a deep fondness.

  For E. Forrest Wainright, on the other hand, she felt only disdain. An admitted speculator and profiteer, he had made his fortune during the war selling black-market goods to fools who were willing to pay exorbitant prices for silk underpinnings and English wool. He had come to Natchez two years ago from Charleston where, it was rumored, the military government had begun to frown on his less than lily white business ventures.

  Wainright would never bend his back to the land; he was far more interested in buying up every spare acre he could lay a hand to then turning around and selling it again at a 500 percent profit. He had been trying to buy Rosalie for several months now but had met a formidable obstacle in Ryan’s stubbornness. Wainright was unaccustomed to losing at any match of wills, and Amanda guessed it was no longer even a case of wanting the land so much as wanting to see the Courtlands humbled.

  He was arrogant, possessive, and cold-bloodedly ruthless. Amanda was decidedly uncomfortable in his company, but then she had stopped believing in stardust and Hallelujahs long ago. Marriage to Joshua Brice might make her and her family happy. But marriage to Forrest Wainright would keep them safe.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A lone rider was coming slowly up the winding approach to Rosalie. Amanda strained to see through the soupy fog, having heard the hoofbeats long before the horseman came into view. It had rained all night and well into the morning, and the August heat pressed down from above while the earth steamed sulkily from below; anything trapped in the middle—people and objects alike—ran wet with moisture and fought the urge simply to wilt where they stood The silence, save for the sharp chirping of crickets and the shrill hum of cicadas, was equally oppressive. This was the time of year when the fields should have been echoing with the singing and wailing of the slaves harvesting cotton. The steady barking of dogs should have caused as much of a clamor as the children running around the open-pit barbeques where sweat-slicked, grinning slaves stoked the fires for smoking meat. The skies should have been a bright blue, the cotton a snowy contrast as it was baled and stacked in the flatbed wagons to be transported to the jetty.

  This morning, like so many others, the fields were too muddy to venture into and were empty but for the shifting blanket of fog.

  Amanda grudgingly left the only corner of the wide veranda where a hint of a breeze was teasing her skin. A slender hand adjusted the errant wisps of blonde hair at her temples for the twentieth time, then smoothed the folds of her skirt so that the carefully stitched patch along the hem did not show.

  Her cheeks were dusted pink, not entirely due to the heat. As much as she tried to deny it, she was impatient for Josh’s arrival, and as she walked to the edge of the veranda, she visualized the long, pebbled laneway flanked on both sides by towering cypress trees, their boughs bent and trailing beards of gray moss.

  If she closed her eyes, she could picture the grand avenue as it had once been, with the velvet lawns and sculpted parterres that formed a circle of elegant plantings enclosed by the crushed stone drive. Now, of course, there was only ruin. The shrubs and roses in the rotunda had long ago been trampled into the ground, and the only tree left standing close to the house was an ancient oak, its topmost branches glossy and arched like an umbrella.

  The sound of hoofbeats came closer, the crunching distinct and slowing as the rider emerged from the milky wisps of fog. And as the visitor himself took shape, Amanda’s anticipatory smile was transformed slowly into a thin, compressed line of shocked disbelief.

  E. Forrest Wainright savored both the reaction and the hard pulsing response that rippled through his own body. The one identified immediately which twin stood before him
so fetchingly dishabille in the heat and humidity; the other was purely a physical reaction to something so perfect, so exquisitely beautiful, a man would have to have ice water flowing through his veins not to feel himself rise to the occasion.

  “Mrs. Jackson.” He doffed his tall beaver hat as he reined his horse to a halt at the foot of the steps. “A pleasant surprise, by any measure.”

  Amanda resisted the urge to turn and run into the house. The last time she had seen Wainright, he had just finished proposing marriage and had been wearing the imprint of her response on his cheek. It was not so much that he had dared to suggest marriage as an alternate way of resolving the Courtlands’ financial difficulties, but that he had done it in such a way as to make her feel as if she was just another piece of property that afforded him the possibility of a quick profit. It was time, he had arrogantly declared, for him to start thinking of putting down permanent roots, and there was no one more perfectly tailored to his needs than the great-great-great-granddaughter of Jacques Lemoyne, Seigneur d’Iberville, the French nobleman who had founded Fort Rosalie on the present site of Natchez.

  The union would not only ingratiate him with the old society of Natchez—something that would be as formidable to breach as the fossiled walls of Jericho—it would impress the powerful and influential members of the new Federal Government, who were more inclined to bestow political favors on those who seemed sincere in their efforts to make reparations with the South.

  The slap had come without thinking, as had her rather inelegant suggestion as to who and what she would rather marry in his stead. And now, even though her palm was stinging as if she had just struck him, he was smiling up at her with a lazy indolence that suggested the incident had only served to whet his appetite more.

  He was handsome in a stark, brutish way, with a high, wide forehead and a nose that would have done a hawk proud. Hair redder than flames flowed in thick, well-oiled waves to the top of his collar, a disconcerting contrast to pale white skin and copper eyelashes. He dressed expensively and always had a look of money about him—other people’s money—wearing it unashamedly in a land where the majority had to scratch from one meal to the next to survive.

  Without waiting for an invitation to do so, Wainright dismounted and casually tethered his bay to the hitching post.

  “A warm day,” he remarked offhandedly. “I suspect there will be rain again before too long.”

  Amanda was at a temporary loss. Was it only last night, her mind wandering in the wake of the passing riverboat, that she had actually contemplated marriage to this man?

  “I’m sure you've not ridden all the way out here to discuss the weather,” she said coldly.

  “I’m sure I haven’t either.” His watery hazel eyes lingered on the crisscrossed folds of muslin, staring at her as if he could see clear through the layers of her clothing. “You’re looking lovely,” he murmured, “as always. Not that such a simple, homespun frock does you the justice you deserve, my dear. Silk, I should think, in the same stunning blue as your eyes.”

  “As it happens, I prefer simple things, Mr. Wainright. Like simple answers to simple questions. Why are you here?”

  He mounted the wide, flat stairs until he stood a single tier below her, a level that put his eyes even with her bosom. “I don’t suppose you would believe me if I say I have come to prostrate myself before you in the hopes you will reconsider my offer of marriage?”

  Amanda arched a delicately shaped eyebrow and fought to keep her expression as civil as possible. “I don’t suppose I would.”

  He expelled a short, soft chuckle. “A pity, then, for I warrant we would make a most handsome couple.”

  “Marriages should be based on more than appearances alone.”

  “Do you also prefer your men with shiny round heads, protruding bellies, and hair growing out of the tip of their bulbous noses?”

  It was an apt description of Karl von Helmstaad, and Amanda bristled. “If they were not afraid to show affection, tolerance, and kindness, I would not be so quick to judge their outward beauty.”

  “My dearest Amanda—” He took her hand in his and raised it to his lips. “There is not a man alive prepared to show you more affection than I. And I assure you, I am a most tolerant man. My continued devotion in the face of such … overwhelming odds should be proof enough of that.”

  Amanda withdrew her hand and resisted the urge to wipe it clean on the front of her skirt. His only devotion was to money, to the acquisition of wealth and power regardless of whom he had to destroy or humiliate to get it. “I am in no hurry to marry again,” she said curtly. “And even if I was—”

  He closed his eyes and held up a thin white hand to cut off the rest of her sentence. “Spare me the details,” he laughed. “I have an excellent memory.”

  “Then I’m surprised how quickly you seem to have forgotten—” said a gruff voice behind them— “that I said I would shoot you where you stood if you set foot on our land again.”

  Ryan stepped out of the shadowy front entrance of the house. The door had been left open to entice what little air there was to flow through the hall, and Amanda wasn’t sure how long he had been standing there, she was just relieved to see him. He had obviously come from the fields. His boots were caked with mud, his hair was wet and slicked to his forehead. His clothes clung in damp patches to his skin, emphasizing the bulk of muscle across his chest and arms that, in turn, left Wainright sorely lacking by comparison.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Wainright?” he asked.

  “I have come on official business, actually, although”— the pale eyes flicked to Amanda again—“it is always a pleasure to engage Mrs. Jackson in verbal intercourse.”

  He mouthed the words with such obvious relish, Ryan took an angry step toward him. “What official business can you possibly have with us? Rosalie is not for sale. Neither is my sister.”

  “Ah.” Wainright lifted his eyebrows more for effect than surprise. “So she told you I offered an amiable alternative to bankruptcy and foreclosure?”

  “She told me you proposed. She also told me she gave you her answer.”

  “Quite eloquently, yes indeed. And I wanted to assure her I held no ill feelings toward her … impetuosity. I find it, if anything, a more refreshing trait in women that they should be passionate in their convictions rather than dull and docile.”

  “I’m sure we’ll all sleep easier at night knowing you’ve forgiven her. Now, if that was all you had to say—”

  Ryan took Amanda’s hand and started to lead her back into the house, but Wainright’s voice stopped him.

  “Actually, I have a good deal more to say. And directly to the party responsible for the debts and mortgages incurred against this property. I presume that would still be your father?”

  “Presume all you want, Wainright. I have been entrusted with the running of this plantation—all quite legally, I promise you. So when I tell you I have no intention of selling, you can take it to be the final word on the subject.”

  “This legal authority extends to all matters pertaining to finance?”

  Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “It does, as if it was any affair of yours to know.”

  “As it happens, it is very much my affair,” Wainright said, smiling tightly. “You are indebted to the Natchez Mercantile, are you not? To the sum of nearly fifty thousand dollars?”

  He said the amount with an almost respectful awe in his voice, for most plantations had collapsed long before now on amounts that were minuscule by comparison.

  “You have a point to make, Wainright?”

  “The point, Mr. Courtland, is that your father signed several notes with the Mercantile. Notes supported by not much more than the strength of your father’s good name … and a certain familial connection.”

  He was referring, of course, to Amanda’s marriage to Caleb Jackson. But Horace Jackson, even if his only son had not married into the Courtland family, would still have extended the necessary fu
nds to William on little more than a signature, for Sarah’s father had been one of the bank’s original clients and the family had made substantial profits for the Mercantile for over eighty years.

  “You must be aware, however, that the bank has changed ownership in the last few months.”

  “Meaning the Yankee vultures have moved in and taken over. It has happened to most of the banks in the South— what of it? The terms of the loan are legal and binding, no matter who is in control.”

  “That would be true,” Wainright agreed, “if it were a business loan backed by solid assets as collateral. At the time, as I understand it, Rosalie was a ten-thousand-bale plantation, with several hundred head of prime Thoroughbreds in the stables. I have no doubt Rosalie was worth ten times the amount borrowed, but now? A flooded plantation on the brink of ruin is hardly worth the taxes being levied on the land assessment alone.”

  If Ryan had any inkling of what was coming, he did not betray it through any change in his expression.

  “Moreover, a personal note is little better than an I.O.U.,” Wainright explained blithely, “and comes due and payable upon the holder’s discretion.”

  “There are six months left in the terms of the loan,” Ryan said evenly.

  “The original terms, perhaps. But as I said, the bank has changed ownership since the notes were negotiated. The new management has found a shocking laxness in the area of outstanding debts, and has been prompted to sell some of the notes they deemed to be too high a risk to warrant keeping. In other words, they don’t believe there is a hope in hell of some of you Southerners coming up with the money you owe, so they have decided to cut their losses and salvage what they could. Your father’s notes were, needless to say, some of the largest, and although I will admit to being forced to pay a higher price than I intended, I still look upon it as money well spent.”