The Scent of Jasmine Read online

  “To marry a Scotsman would be a fate worse than death?”

  “You can laugh at me all you want, but I’m serious. If I can take your rampant lust for me seriously, I think you should take my problems just as seriously.”

  “Rampant—” Alex stood up straighter. “All right, lass, tell me how going into the jungle will help you.”

  “Maybe if I accomplish something, it will make my family overlook the fact that I ran across several states when men with guns were chasing me.”

  “And drawing pictures will help you?”

  “If they’re for a cause. I’d like my father to be proud of me. I’d like my future husband to have something to tell our children about.”

  “The way you tell people about the fruit company your mother ran?”

  “Yes, exactly. Several of the women who worked for her now live in Edilean, and they married men my father knew.”

  Alex turned away from her. He did owe her, he thought. He might joke about it, but if it weren’t for her bravery, he wouldn’t be alive now. The real truth of it was that he very much wanted her to go with them. In spite of what they’d heard from her brother Adam—who Cay seemed to think was a saint put on this earth to boss mere mortals around—Alex had never felt safe about leaving her alone. He’d thought about all the bad things that could happen to her. Not everyone could have heard that her name had been cleared. What if someone realized that she wasn’t a boy but a red-haired girl? He’d want to know why she was in disguise, and it wouldn’t take much to think of the scandalous news that had come down the coast from Charleston. Alex didn’t like to think what would happen to Cay if she were confronted by someone who hadn’t heard the latest news.

  Also, there was the personal side of it. He enjoyed her company. She made him laugh, made him feel good. On the day he married Lilith, he’d sat there with a glass of champagne, watching his beautiful wife moving among their guests and quietly talking to everyone, and he’d thought that he was the luckiest man in the world. Based on the number of guests and their good wishes to him, he thought he’d made a lot of friends since he’d been in America. He smiled as they laughed and drank to his health and future happiness. They’d slapped him on the back and talked about horses, and about investments they’d like to share with him. On that day, Alex had felt part of a world of rich, happy people. He was no longer the man just off the boat with three horses, his clothes dirty and ragged. He’d been Someone, a young man on his way up.

  But the next day, Lilith’s body had been found next to Alex’s, and after that, everything had changed. The rage of the town had rushed the trial through. And while Alex was in that filthy jail, not one of his so-called friends had visited him. Only T.C. had shown up. Right away, Alex had asked for pen, ink, and paper, and T.C. had brought it. Alex had been obsessed with telling the people he’d thought of as his friends that he was innocent, that he would never have killed Lilith. He’d loved her so very much. He’d poured out his heart in the letters and T.C. had personally delivered each of them.

  Not one person had answered his letter. In fact, Alex had made T.C. tell him the truth, that all the letters had been returned, unopened. No one wanted anything to do with Alexander McDowell after he’d been arrested. It seemed that no one had even considered the idea that Alex might be innocent.

  After three weeks of frantically writing to people he’d met since arriving in America, he wrote to Nate. Maybe it was because they’d been friends since childhood and they’d tried hard to impress each other, but he didn’t want to admit to his friend that he’d failed—for that’s how Alex viewed it. He’d arrived in America sure that he could do anything, achieve everything. He’d had a lifetime with his father telling him of the opportunities in the new country. After all, it was where his father had made all his money. Many years before, Mac had been awarded a thousand acres of land through the Ohio Company, but Nate’s father, Angus, had persuaded Mac to sell the land to a Captain Austin, who was trying to accumulate an estate for the woman he loved. In the end, it proved to be the best thing Mac ever did, because the king of England never signed the papers. None of the thousand-acre plots were given to the people who held certificates of ownership for them. Captain Austin had lost everything.

  For Alex, the new country had seemed to be a land of riches—until the morning after his wedding, when everything was taken from him, including, it seemed, the friendship of everyone he’d met. It was only after his new “friends” had shown their true nature that Alex swallowed his pride and wrote to Nate. The letter had taken weeks to write. T.C. was allowed to stay for only minutes at a time, and some days he wasn’t allowed to visit at all. He sneaked in pen and ink inside his boot, and lined his coat with paper. Alex would write as much as he could, as fast as possible. He told Nate everything that had happened, in as much detail as possible, hoping that there was a clue somewhere in the story. He knew that Nate’s mind would be full of questions. Was there a mysterious person who had asked Lilith questions? Not that Alex had seen. But then, he’d been so in love he noticed little but her. But there must have been someone, because a person had hated her enough to kill her—not Alex but her.

  “Are you here?” Cay asked.

  It took Alex a moment to come back to the present. His mind had been so into the past that he could smell the jail cell that had been his home for so many weeks. More than anything, Alex wanted to pull Cay into his arms and feel her healthy young body against his, to put his face in her hair.

  When she seemed to know what he was feeling, to even understand, he made himself step away from her.

  “You have your ‘wife look’ on.”

  “My what?”

  “When you think of her, your eyes scrunch up into lines, and your body seems to droop. If that’s what love does to a person, I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  “It’s not love that did this. It was—” He broke off because he knew she was trying to get him to stop feeling sorry for himself. “You mean your Abraham doesn’t make you feel like this?”

  “Ephraim. No, but his son does.” With that, she left the clearing and went back toward the settlement.

  Alex stayed where he was, but he was smiling. “Be at the boat at five a.m. and have T.C.’s trunk with you,” he called after her. When she nodded but didn’t turn back to look at him, he smiled broader. Yes, the truth was that he wanted her to go with them because he just plain enjoyed her company.

  That he also . . . What had she said? Lusted after her? Something like that. Yes, that was a factor, too, but he knew he could control it. Later, once they got through this, and once his name was cleared, maybe they . . . He couldn’t think about the future. Right now, all there was was the present, and he had to live with the here and now.

  Seventeen

  The next morning, Alex had to work to suppress his amusement when, at 4:30 a.m., before full daylight, he looked up to see Cay sauntering toward them. Behind her came the twin girls carrying T.C.’s heavy trunk full of art supplies, and behind them was Thankfull, holding an old leather satchel and a big basket that he hoped contained food.

  Alex looked at Eli and saw that he, too, was about to burst into laughter at the sight of this parade, but Grady was frowning.

  “Yates!” Mr. Grady said in the voice of a commander, and Alex didn’t know which “Yates” he meant. “Tell your young brother that from now on, he’s to carry his own gear. We don’t allow parasites on this voyage, and if he can’t follow the rules, he’s to stay here.”

  Cay stood by the side of the flatboat and didn’t seem to know what to say. “They wanted to help me,” she mumbled. “So I, uh . . .”

  Alex dropped the ropes he’d finished tying and hurried over to her. “Say nothing,” he whispered in his deepest accent. “A boy wouldn’t explain.”

  “Right. Never explain. I’ll add that rule to my list.” She lowered her voice. “Along with rating kissing.”

  Alex knew she meant it as a joke, but he didn’t s