Twice Loved (copy2) (6 page)

“But he could ... could take everything from you!” “Mother, how could you think such a thing of Rye!” How

typical of Dahlia to be concerned about such a thing at a time like this. Laura sprang to her feet and began pacing.

“Laury, you mustn’t get yourself worked up. Are you feeling all right? I’ll have to speak to Dan about getting you some drops to calm this—”

“There’s nothing wrong with me!”

But to a woman who could conjure up a convenient ache at the mention of anything disagreeable, it seemed imperative to discover an ailment. She came forward, attempting to press a palm to Laura’s forehead, but Laura adroitly sidestepped.

“Oh, Mother, please.”

The fussy hand dropped. The pinched face with its everpresent expression of suffering seemed to take on several new wrinkles. Frustrated by her mother’s inability either to cope or sympathize, Laura felt perilously close to tears.

Oh, Mother, can’t you see what I need? I need reassurance, your cheek against my hair. I need to go back with you into the past so that I can sort out the present.

But Dahlia had never been a calming influence; whatever had possessed Laura to believe she would be now? Dahlia’s flustered twittering only made things worse, and Laura was not surprised when her mother drifted to a chair, rested the back of her hand against her forehead, and said, “Oh, Laury, I fear I have a frightful headache. Could you mix up a tisane for me? There ...” She fluttered a hand weakly. “On the shelf you’ll find some valerian root and anise. Mix it up ... with some water ... please.” By now she was breathless.

Thus, Laura found herself administering to her mother instead of being comforted, and by the time she left the house on Brimstone Street, she herself had a headache. She returned home to pass a tense afternoon reflecting upon the past and worrying about the future.

When Dan returned at the end of the day, his eyes scanned the keeping room as if he half expected to find Rye there. He hung up his jacket and caught Laura’s glance from across the room, but neither of them seemed able to speak.

Dan’s stare followed Laura as she put supper on the table, but throughout the meal the strained atmosphere remained while they avoided the subject of Rye Dalton.

But in the evening, Josh, with the intuitive accuracy of a child, shot a question that hit two marks at once. Dan was sitting at a small oak desk with a pen in his hand when Josh leaned across his lap and asked, “Why did Mama get scared today when that man was here?”

The entry on the ledger sheet went awry. Then Dan’s hand stopped moving over the page, Laura’s over her crocheting. Their eyes met, then Laura dropped her gaze.

“Why don’t you ask Mama?” Dan suggested, watching the red creep up Laura’s cheeks while he wondered again what had gone on between the two of them when Rye first got here.

Josh galloped over and flung himself across his mother’s lap. “Are you scared of that man, Mama?”

“No, darling, not at all.” She ruffled Josh’s hair.

“You looked like you was. Your eyes was big and you jumped away from him like you make me jump away when I get too close to the fire.”

“I was surprised, not scared, and I did not jump away from him. We were talking, that’s all.” But guilt flared Laura’s cheeks to an even brighter hue, and she could tell Dan was studying her carefully. She lit into her crocheting as if the doily had to be finished by bedtime. “I think it’s time you marched your soldiers to the shelf and got your nightshirt on for bed.”

“You and Papa wanna talk grown-up talk, huh?”

Laura couldn’t hide her smile. Josh was a bright and witty child, though there were times when she’d cheerfully have gagged him for his innocent comments. But there was a new discomfort between Laura and Dan that would have been there with or without Josh’s remark, and as the evening rolled on toward bedtime, it became more and more palpable. By the time they retired to their room, Laura felt as if she were walking on fishhooks. And to make matters worse, there was the problem of disrobing.

Clothing of the day was styled for ladies with maids; both dresses and whalebone corsets were laced up the back, so it was impossible to don or doff them without aid. Laura had protested when Dan insisted on her purchasing such dresses instead of making her own, but he had a fierce pride in his ability to provide for her, thus she’d obliged and bought the inconvenient garments, though twice daily she needed his assistance to get the infernal things on and off.

But tonight she felt a disquieting reluctance to ask the favor, though it had come to be part of their bedtime ritual, as automatic as the pinching of the last candlewick.

But tonight was different.

Dan set the candle on the commode table, untied his cravat and hung it on the bedpost, followed by his shirt. Laura, trussed up like a stuffed turkey ready for the spit, silently rebelled at women’s plight. Why did women dress in such absurdly restrictive clothes? Men had no such inconveniences with which to contend.

How she wished she might unobtrusively slip out of her things and into her nightie and quickly duck beneath the covers. Instead, she was forced to ask, “Dan, would you loosen my laces please?”

To her horror, his face went red. She whirled to present her back. After nearly four years of unlacing her, Dan was blushing!

He released the brass hooks down the back of her dress and tugged at the laces, which were strung through metal grommets along the back of her corset. She felt him fumble, then he muttered under his breath. When at last she was free, she stepped from the garment, laid her corset over the cedar trunk, and unbuttoned her petticoat. That left only her pantaloons, which buttoned at the waist, and the chemise—it tied up the front with a satin ribbon.

The wrinkles of her chemise had been pressed into her skin all day, leaving a crisscross of red marks that itched terribly. Often Dan teased her when she slid into bed and immediately began scratching.

But tonight all was quiet after they’d dressed in nightgown and nightshirt-standing back to back—and lay beneath the coverlets, with only the after scent of candle smoke remaining. From outside came the incessant wash of sea upon land, and from nearer, the cluck of a whippoorwill that always precedes its song. Again it clucked, and Laura lay in the dark, equally as tense as Dan, telling herself there were many nights when they went to sleep without touching. Why was she so aware of it tonight?

She heard him swallow. Her ribs itched, but she forced her hands to be still. The silence stretched long, until at last, when the whippoorwill had called for the hundredth time, Laura reached for Dan’s hand. He grasped it like a lifeline and squeezed so hard, her knuckles cracked softly, while from his side of the bed came a throaty sound, half relief, half despair. She heard the shush of the feather pillow as he turned to face her and ground his thumb into the back of her hand with possessive desperation.

When he finally spoke, his voice was guttural with emotion. “Laura, I’m scared.”

A thorn seemed to pierce her heart. “Don’t be,” she reassured, though she was, too.

There were things he could not say, would not say, understood things that neither had ever admitted but that were suddenly implicit between them.

During their childhood and adolescence it had always been the three of them, forever comrades. But it had never been any secret that Laura had eyes only for Rye. When news of his death reached Nantucket, Dan had suffered with her, the two of them walking the windswept beaches, knowing that particular torment reserved for those who mourn without the benefit of a corpse. Helplessly, they’d wandered, needing the proof of death’s finality. But that final proof was denied them by the greedy ocean, which cared little for man’s need to lay a spirit to rest.

During those restless, roaming days, Dan’s despair was shorter-lived than Laura’s, for with Rye gone, he was free to court her as he’d always dreamed of doing. But he lived those days under a mantle of guilt, grateful that Rye’s death had cleared the way for him, yet sickened by that very gratitude.

He had won Laura mainly by becoming indispensable to her.

She had awakened one morning to the sound of the ax in her back yard and had found Dan there, chopping her winter wood. When the crisp weather warned of imminent winter, he had come again, unasked, with a load of kelp with which to ballast the foundations of the house against the intrusive drafts of the harsh climate. When she grew cumbersome with pregnancy, Dan came daily to carry water, to fill the wood-box, to bring her fresh oranges, to insist that she put her feet up and rest when backaches riddled. And to watch her eyes fill with sorrow as she brooded before the fire and wondered if the baby would look like Rye. When she went into labor, it was Dan who fetched the midwife and Laura’s mother, then paced the backyard feverishly, as Rye would have done had he been there. It was Dan who came to her bedside to peep at the infant and smooth Laura’s brow with a promise that he would always be there when she and Josh needed him.

Thus, she grew to depend on Dan for all the husbandly support he was more than willing to give, long before he ever asked her to be his wife. They drifted into marriage as naturally as the bleached planks of ancient vessels drift to Nantucket’s shores at high tide. And if intense passion was not a part of Laura’s second courtship, security and companionship were.

As in most marriages, there was one who loved more, and in this one it was Dan. Yet he was secure at last, for the rival who’d once claimed Laura was no longer there. She was Dan’s at last, and she loved him. He had never dissected that love, never admitted that much of it was prompted by gratitude, not only for his physical and financial support, but because he truly loved Josh as if the boy were his own and was as good a father as any natural father could be.

But when Dan had stepped into the house this noon and found Rye Dalton standing there, he’d felt the very foundation of his marriage threatened.

Lying beside Laura now, his throat ached with questions he did not want to ask for fear her answers would be those he dreaded hearing. Yet there was one he could not withhold, though his heart swelled with foreboding at the thought of putting it to her. His thumb ground against her hand. He swallowed and sent the question through the dark in a strange, tight voice.

“What were you and Rye doing when I walked in today?”

“Doing?” But the word sounded pinched and unnatural.

“Yes ... doing. Why did Josh say you jumped when he walked in?”

“I ... I don’t know. I was nervous, naturally—who wouldn’t be when a ... a dead man has just walked in your door?”

“Quit hedging, Laura. You know what I’m asking.”

“Well, don’t, because it doesn’t matter.”

“Meaning he kissed you, right?” When she made no reply, he went on. “It was written all over your faces when I interrupted.”

“Oh, Dan, I’m sorry, I really am. But he took me completely by surprise, and it didn’t mean anything except hello.” But she knew in her heart it did.

“And what about when you walked down the path with him—did he kiss you then, too?”

“Dan, please tr—”

“Twice! He kissed you twice!” He gave her hand a hurtful yank. “And what was the second time, another hello?”

She had never known jealousy from Dan before, for there’d never been cause. The vehemence of it quite frightened her as she frantically searched for a reply.

“Dan, for heaven’s sake, you’re hurting my hand.” Though he eased his grip, he didn’t release it. “Rye had no idea, when he walked in here, that we were married.”

“Does he mean to take up his old place as your ... husband?”

“You’re my husband now,” she said softly, hoping to placate him.

“One of them,” he said bitterly. “The one you haven’t kissed yet today.”

“Because you haven’t asked,” she said even more softly.

He came up on one elbow, leaning over her. “Well, I’m not asking,” he whispered fiercely. “I’m 
taking
 what’s mine by rights.”

His lips came down violently, moving over hers as if to punish her for circumstances that were not of her doing. He kissed her with a fierce determination to force Rye Dalton from her thoughts, from her life, from her past, knowing all the while that it was impossible to do.

His tongue plundered deep, wounding her with a lack of sensitivity she’d never before known from him. Hurt, she pulled sharply aside, making him suddenly realize how rough he’d been.

At once penitent, he scooped her tightly into his arms and crushed her beneath him, speaking raggedly into her ear. “Oh, Laura, Laura, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you, but I’m so afraid of losing you after all the years it took to finally have you. When I walked in here and saw him, I felt like I was back ten years ago, watching you trail after him like a love-sick puppy. Tell me you didn’t kiss him back ... tell me you won’t let him touch you again.”

He had never before admitted that he’d been jealous of Rye all those years ago. Pity moved her hands to the back of his neck to smooth his hair. She cradled him, closing her eyes, kissing his temple, suddenly understanding how tenuous his security was, now that Rye was back. Yet she was afraid to make promises she wasn’t at all sure she could keep.

But this much she could say, and say with all truthfulness: “I love you, Dan. You never have to doubt that.”

She felt a shudder run through him, then his hands started moving over her body. But at his touch came the wish that he would not make love to her tonight. Immediately, she was deluged with guilt for the thought. Never before had she even considered denying him. Dutifully, she caressed his neck, his back, telling herself this was the same Dan she’d made love with for three years and more; that Rye Dalton could not come walking up the lane and give her the right to turn this man away.

Yet she wanted to—God help her, she wanted to.

He ran his hand down her hip, pulled her nightgown up, and she understood his need to reestablish himself. She opened her body to him and moved when she knew it was expected, and held him fast when he groaned and climaxed, and hid the fact that she felt faithless to another for what last night would have been the most natural and welcome act in the world.