Lilac Spring (10 page)

They moved about the dance floor and Cherish began to lower her guard and enjoy the feel of his arm about her waist,
her hand in his. She was afraid to look at him, afraid of what she would find there—that same older-brother superiority, or worse, pity that she had been without a partner, or worst of all, indifference.

Instead she kept her gaze fixed over his shoulder, watching the other dancers whirling by her. She smiled, catching a glimpse of Charlie talking earnestly with Annalise, and wondered what he was saying to her. She’d tease Annalise about it tonight.

On an impulse she looked up at Silas to tell him about Charlie, and the words died on her lips.

Silas was looking at her in a way she had never seen before. It was as if for a split second the shutters had been lifted from his gray eyes and she could peer all the way down to his soul. It made him look vulnerable, needy.

She smiled tentatively, but the next instant he averted his gaze. She wondered whether she’d imagined that look. Had it been real?

“What were you going to say?” he asked, looking over her head.

“Uh—oh, just that it seems Charlie and Annalise are having a good time together.”

“Yes,” he replied, and she could see his gaze searching them out.

“You don’t mind?” she ventured.

He glanced back at her, a slight frown furrowing his brow. “Mind? Why should I mind? I’m the one who told Charlie to ask her for this dance.”

“You did?” She began to smile. “I thought you liked Annalise.”

“Why does everyone try to pair me off with Annalise?” The annoyance was clear in his tone this time.

“Well, you wanted me to befriend her, for one thing.”

He looked at her in astonishment. “I just wanted you to behave in the kind, decent way you usually do. That’s all. It doesn’t mean I’m sweet on the girl.”

“Oh.” She stopped talking after that and fixed her gaze on the lapel of Silas’s jacket, her touch tightening imperceptibly on his shoulder.

A deep joy welled up inside her, threatening to overflow.
Well, well, what do you know? He isn’t sweet on Annalise. And he was looking at me as if he cared about me….

When the dance ended, Cherish looked up at Silas with her sweetest smile and asked him for one more. That one turned into another.

By the time Silas got his wits back together, he realized he had danced exclusively with Cherish for more than half the dances.

F
or the next few days it rained. Cherish’s initial euphoria that she would be able to spend every day with Silas working on the Whitehall diminished as she realized all the men from the shipyard had to spend those days in the boat shop along with the two of them, working on the various small boat hulls.

“You still interested in boats, Cherish?” Ezra asked. “Thought after becoming such a fine lady, you wouldn’t want to get your hands dirty with this kind of work.”

She laughed, looking down at her hands. Gone were the long, buffed fingernails. “What, don’t you think I’m still a fine lady, even in my work clothes?” She glanced toward Silas as she asked Ezra the question.

Silas was studiously bent over the hull, transferring markings with a pencil onto a small scrap of paper, and didn’t seem to notice Cherish’s attention.

“Oh, you’d be a fine lady even if you were dressed in rags,” the other workman answered with a chuckle.

Cherish had noticed in the days following the dance that Silas seemed more distant than ever. He treated her with courtesy, but never uttered the least playful or teasing remark. Not
by a mere hint in his eyes did he reveal that she was anything more than a fellow employee of her father’s.

But her heart danced all the same. She kept going over the naked look she’d caught in his eyes and repeated to herself, “He
does
care!”

The question was, how much? She tried everything to discover this, without using the blatant tactics of before. Whenever the opportunity arose, which was often, she would ask for his assistance. But never by a glance or gesture could she discover that her proximity affected him at all.

“Silas, how does this look?” she asked him from the other side of the hull.

“Hmm?” he asked, his attention still on the numbers he copied down.

“Do you think I’ve beveled it enough?”

He came around to her side and crouched beside her. They looked at the plank she’d placed temporarily against the ribbing and observed how flush its surface lay against the vertical ribs. His finger indicated a slight gap. “I think it could use a little more bevel here.”

“Yes, I see.”

“How’s young Mr. Townsend?”

Cherish looked up at Ezra’s question. “He’s fine, I suppose.”

“Now, there’s a fine young gentleman. I bet he appreciates all that education you got overseas,” William put in from across the shop.

“The Townsends have a pretty operation over there in Hatsfield,” Ezra added. “I hear they’re going to expand their lumber shipments and need some more schooners. I wouldn’t mind hearing we got some orders from them.” He adjusted the pencil in back of his ear.

“I hear the shipyard up by the brickyard is closing down after this summer.” William shook his head sadly.

“Yep. Sad to see them go.” Ezra sighed deeply.

Silas didn’t participate in the conversation. He’d taken his figures over to the long piece of cedar that lay on a worktable.
She knew it was critical that the curve of the hull be transferred accurately to the plank of wood.

Just then her father entered the boat shop. “Gentlemen, if you want to step into the office before you break for dinner, I’ll have your wages for you.”

“We’ll be right there!” came a chorus from the workers. Silas acted as if he hadn’t even heard. He continued working on the plank he was measuring for the hull.

Cherish removed the frame and took it to the workbench to sand out the curve some more on its inner side. As her hand worked back and forth over the smooth wood, her mind continued pondering the impasse with Silas. He’d been so elusive since the dance, she sometimes wondered if he was avoiding her.

But then why had he danced exclusively with her?

After he’d collected his wages, Silas pried up one of the wall-boards in his room. He reached all the way down into the dark space and pulled up a metal box. Using a key on a string around his neck, he unlocked it and lifted the lid. Inside lay tightly bound bundles of greenbacks and other paper currency and stacks of gold and silver coins.

Carefully he loosened the string around one bundle and added the bills he’d just been paid by Winslow, then retied it and set it back in with the others. He sat looking at his hoard a few minutes longer, thinking of the years of toil it had taken to accumulate what filled the box.

He had very few expenses. Winslow provided him with room and board, and Mrs. Sullivan kept his shirts and trousers usable until she could literally mend them no more, and only then did he outlay the money to replace them. He didn’t drink, didn’t gamble, as the men in the yard did on a Friday night. He didn’t court, and had put all thoughts of marriage aside until such a time as he had his own shipyard.

Now, inexplicably, a wave of despair gripped him as he measured his pile of savings against his years of sacrifice. It occurred to him that just one of Cherish’s gowns from Paris cost more than all the money he had in his tin box.

He rubbed a hand across his forehead, trying to stave off the doubts. What did he have to show for all his years of saving? A pitifully small pile of coins and bills. He remembered the young men and women at the grange dance. Young men and women he’d grown up with, now beginning to court, making plans to marry, start families of their own, setting up in business or working their family farms, building their fishing boats. For the first time in his life he began to envy them.

Never had anything tempted him to stray from his single-minded efforts until now.

He couldn’t—
mustn’t
—let an insane, wild, impossible longing for his employer’s daughter cause him to shift his focus from his goal. Silas relocked his box and replaced it in its hiding place, his precise movements in jarring contrast to his disorderly thoughts.

Saturday proved warm and sunny. Cherish knew things would be quiet down in the boat shop, as the men had gone back down to work on the yard. Although she normally didn’t work in the shop on Saturdays, she had asked Silas to spend a few hours there in the afternoon to work on the Whitehall.

He was already there when she arrived. He was fitting a plank onto the hull. Cherish looked with satisfaction at the Whitehall. It was coming along nicely, planked almost halfway.

“Hi, there,” she said, advancing toward the hull. “Need a hand?”

He glanced at her briefly before returning to the job. “You can hold that end down.”

She complied, content to watch as he concentrated on fitting the plank against the one on top of it and determine if its angle fit snugly enough against it. Judging that it didn’t, he straightened.

“Okay, you can let go. I’m going to bevel this one a bit more,” he said, indicating the angle with his fingertips.

Cherish got to work on the opposite side of the hull with a plank of her own. They worked together steadily. She would look across at Silas from time to time, hoping to catch him
looking at her again as he had during the dance, but her efforts were in vain.

“Any plans to go over to Hatsfield anytime soon?” he surprised her by asking.

“No. Why, do you?”

He glanced at her then. “No.”

They had worked some more when he asked, “No plans for the weekend?”

“None at all,” she replied, clamping down one end of her plank.

“That’s not like you.”

“Why shouldn’t I spend a quiet weekend at home?”

He shrugged. “No reason. It’s just you’ve had something going every weekend since arriving home. Last week Annalise came here. I thought you might be going there this weekend.”

“No. I didn’t receive an invitation.”

“If you had, would you have gone?”

She looked up, wondering why he was being so persistent. “I don’t know. I kind of like how this weekend has turned out. We’ve gotten to do more work on the Whitehall, for one thing. Haven’t you liked that?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

She suppressed her irritation. He could be annoyingly casual at times. So casual one hadn’t the least idea what he really thought.

He bent over a plank, directly across the keel from her. A thick wave of golden hair fell over his forehead. On impulse Cherish reached over and pushed it upward with her fingertips.

He flinched, dropping the pencil he held. “Please don’t do that, Cherish,” he said in a quiet, firm voice.

She drew her hand back as if it had been slapped. Was this the boy she’d grown up with, who’d been her best friend, the person she most admired, the one who was patient, kind and teasing? Her eyes welled up with tears.

She wouldn’t let him see that he’d hurt her. As he bent to pick up the pencil, she backed away from the boat hull. She’d
taken only two steps backward when Silas looked up and noticed her tear-filled eyes. Quickly she turned.

“I’m sorry, Cherish. I didn’t mean to talk to you that way.”

She kept walking, needing to get out of the room.

“Please, Cherish.” The first note of entreaty she’d heard all week sounded in his voice. “Don’t go. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She’d reached the door and held the doorknob. “You didn’t upset me,” she said in her most controlled voice. She would turn the knob and walk out.

Instead, she said, “You know, the other night at the grange dance you behaved almost like your old self. I was just standing there looking at everyone dancing and having a good time, and I realized they’d all grown up and gotten on with their lives while I’d been away. Most young men and women were paired off. I was beginning to feel a little like a freak. Despite all of Papa’s good intentions, he might have given me a little too much education, and now I don’t fit in anymore. I sometimes think he’s given me so much polish, I cause a glare.” She gave a bitter chuckle.

“When you walked over and asked me to dance, you were like a hero coming to my rescue.” She sighed and continued addressing the doorknob. “I don’t know, Silas, since I’ve been home I’ve felt as if I can’t do anything right around you anymore.

“I give up, Silas. If you’re too blind, too unfeeling to notice that I—I care about you…” Here she faltered, but plowed on resolutely. “Well, I’ll have you know, Silas van der Zee, I don’t need your affections.”

As the seconds dragged by and he said nothing, she began to feel stupid. Abruptly she turned the doorknob.

In the still second before she pulled the door open, he began to speak. “You say I’m unfeeling.” A low laugh reached her ears. “Is it unfeeling to say how much I’ve wanted to kiss you since that day my lips accidentally touched yours? That I’ve been thinking of little else but that since?”

Cherish turned slowly, mesmerized by his quiet confession, her hand still on the doorknob behind her. Silas stood the way
she’d left him, on the far side of the upended hull, the compass and pencil in his hand.

“You say I haven’t noticed you’ve become a woman. Oh, Cherish, how can I help but notice it? Every time you pass near me and I smell the lilacs in your hair, I’ve got to hold myself from reaching for you—

“Every time your arm brushes against mine it sends a current through me.

“Every time you innocently put your hand in mine like in the olden days, I want to hold you to me.”

Cherish released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Oh, Silas, I never dreamed…” She took a step toward him. When she was halfway across the room, he shook his head and said only one word. “Cherish.” It came out sounding like an anguished plea.

The tone encouraged her to keep walking. She skirted the hull that separated them. They stood only inches from each other. His Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed, but before he could say anything, she took the pencil and compass from his unresisting hands and dropped them onto the floor behind her. The dull clank of metal on wood was the only sound in the room.

“Show me,” she whispered softly.

It seemed to take an eternity, but slowly his face neared hers, his eyes closing, until finally his lips made contact once again with hers. She leaned into his lips, placing her hands against his chest to steady herself on her tiptoes. His heartbeat thudded under her palm. She grabbed his shirt, afraid of losing her balance.

His lips pressed against hers as his hands cupped her shoulders. Their bodies touched nowhere else. At that moment Cherish was fused with him in time forever. This was what she’d waited for, dreamed of, prayed for—all her preparation and obedience over the years coming to fruition in that single contact of hands and lips.

In the next instant she discovered that whatever had held Silas in control, whatever had made her suspect him of be
ing unfeeling, had snapped. He kissed her as she’d never dreamed of being kissed. Kissed her as she’d never heard of being kissed by her flirtatious friends. His was no gentlemanly peck on the cheek, or soft brushing of lips as the first one had been. This was more intimate than anything she’d ever imagined. After her initial shock, Cherish yielded to him, determined to destroy every barrier that existed between them.

As soon as his lips touched hers, Silas knew he should stop. He should have withdrawn after a gentle and chaste kiss. But he couldn’t. One touch of her, one whiff of the sweet scent of her, one look into the wide-eyed innocence of those smoky-blue eyes, and he could no longer contain himself. Like a piece of dry wood hitting the fire, his feelings ignited and Silas felt himself being consumed in a conflagration that he couldn’t understand, that hadn’t been of his own making, and that he certainly didn’t know how he’d come out of alive—but none of it mattered in those moments as his mouth sought hers.

She was springtime—newness of life, hope, warmth and light all rolled into one earth-shattering sensation.

She whispered his name, as her small hands flattened themselves against his cheeks. He opened his eyes. She was like a blind person reading someone’s face as she touched his cheeks and jaw and temples, grazing his skin with her fingertips.

When her fingers reached his eyelids, he closed them again, whispering against her ear, “Tell me about all the suitors you’ve left scattered across the Continent…the princes and counts… there must have been dozens.”