The Scent of Jasmine Read online

  Cay wanted to rattle off the list of credentials of her artistic education, but she made herself keep quiet. His remark about the laundry reminded her that he knew things about her family that must have come from someone who knew them. The logical person was Uncle T.C., but she’d never known him to talk about much of anything except plants. Whatever the source, Alex knew personal, private things about her and her family. However, it was strange that Alex didn’t seem to know that Cay could draw and paint. Usually, she had a sketchbook and pencils with her. She rarely went anywhere without the means to draw what she saw, but on the night she met Alex, she’d been going to a ball, so her drawing equipment had been left at home. And since then, everything had been so new and strange that she hadn’t thought much about art.

  Now, it seemed that Alex’s not knowing about her might be a very good thing. “You said that anyone could draw. If I remember correctly, you said, ‘How hard can it be?’ Can you draw?”

  “A bit,” he said. “Believe it or not, I had a drawing master who trained in London.”

  “You were meaning to take on the job of recorder for yourself, weren’t you?”

  “I thought about it.” Alex was smiling.

  She wanted to kick him! What else had he kept from her? “How about if we both do a few drawings and let Jamie decide which of us will record this trip for posterity?”

  Alex kept smiling. “Lass, I should warn you that I was the best in my class at drawing.”

  “Were you?” she asked, trying to sound impressed.

  “Aye, I was. I liked going out into the heather and drawing the animals I saw. If I hadn’t been a horseman, I could have . . .” He shrugged. “What training have you had?”

  “Mrs. Cooper’s Academy for Young Ladies,” she said quickly. “We used to paint china teacups.” This was true, but she didn’t tell him it had been when she was four and she’d painted her family’s portraits on the cups—which had made her mother hire the first of several private drawing masters.

  “Did you now?” He was smiling so hard it was nearly a smirk. Alex was confident that he’d win any artistic competition. If his sister was good at art, Alex was sure Nate would have told him so, and since he hadn’t, Alex figured that she’d had only a little training. Teacups! She had no idea what a journey like this required. She had to be able to draw fast and accurately.

  “Is it a deal?” she asked. “We’ll have a competition and we’ll let Jamie be the judge. If he says that I’m no good, then I’ll return to the boardinghouse and stay there until Tally comes for me. Is it a bargain?”

  Alex frowned. She was saying all this with such confidence that he thought there was a trick. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing. I just want to go with you and I’m going to do my absolute best to outdraw you. If you’d suggested pistols at dawn I might try to do that, too.”

  “All this so you can go with this man Armitage?”

  “That and other things.”

  “Tell me, lass, is it the man or his money you want?”

  For a moment, she had to fight the urge to slap him, but she refused to sink to his level. “His money, of course, since, according to you, I want to marry men even though I have no love for them. Maybe you think I’m incapable of love. Is that what you think? That I’m too coldhearted to love anyone?”

  Alex was blinking in confusion. “How did we go from drawing to cold hearts?”

  Cay threw up her hands in disgust. “You’re an idiot, and worse, you’re a male.” She moved past him with a gesture that said she was sweeping aside her skirts so they wouldn’t touch scum like him.

  Alex leaned his head back against the wall of the building and looked upward. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that maybe he’d just agreed to let her go on a very dangerous trip into the wilds of a jungle. And the worst of it was that he had no idea how it had happened.

  Sixteen

  Alex watched Cay walk toward the dock. Her head was up, her chin out, and she walked with the determination of a man about to enter into a fight. In spite of himself, he couldn’t help feeling proud of her. It was impossible to believe that this was the same girl he’d first met.

  But his pride in her didn’t quash his resolve to keep her from going on the trip. He couldn’t tell her that the real reason he didn’t want her with him was because he knew that if they spent more time together, he wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off of her. He couldn’t spend more days watching her strut around in her snug little breeches and not touch her. Since they were supposed to be brothers, they’d no doubt be expected to spend the nights together in a tent. How could he do that?

  When they’d first started traveling together, Alex had been so angry, so full of rage and hatred, that he could have slept next to a dozen naked women and not taken advantage of what they offered.

  But Cay, with her bright outlook on life, her belief that anything could be done, had changed all that. But Charleston and what had been done to him there now seemed something that wasn’t real and had never actually happened.

  He watched her smiling up at Grady and telling him that she and her brother were to have a competition to see if she would go or not. Alex didn’t like to feel smug, but he was sure he’d win. He’d always been good at capturing on paper the likeness of whatever he saw. He hadn’t told her, but his father had brought watercolors back from a trip to Edinburgh, and Alex had made many pictures of landscapes. He knew he’d be good at what Grady wanted for the trip, so winning was going to be easy.

  What would be difficult was consoling Cay when she didn’t get to go with them. He imagined a sweet scene where she was crying and he’d comfort her. He’d be firm but sympathetic, and tell her it was for her own good. He was sure she’d eventually understand that he was right.

  Tomorrow morning they’d part, and there’d be tears in her pretty eyes and he’d remember them throughout the perilous journey. His hope was that while he was away, Nate would find some answers, and when Alex returned, maybe he could clear his name.

  When he was no longer tainted by injustice, he’d get his horses back, and he’d go north to Virginia to find Cay. If she wasn’t already married to some cold, unappreciative boy who would never find out what she was really like, he would . . . He liked to leave that thought to the future.

  Cay was waving her hand toward him, wanting him to come forward. It looked like she had the competition set up to begin. Smiling, Alex went toward the dock.

  “Is this all right?” Mr. Grady asked, nodding toward the two work stations he’d had Eli and Tim set up. Wide boards had been leaned against crates, large pieces of paper on them, pens and ink beside them.

  “Young Cay wanted a pan of water,” Mr. Grady said to Alex. “Do you need one?”

  Alex had no idea why she wanted water along with her ink, but he shrugged it off as he sat down on a crate, put the pen and ink beside him, and picked up his makeshift easel.

  “Since, as you know, we’ll be traveling,” Mr. Grady said, “it’s sometimes necessary to record things quickly, therefore, this will be a timed documentation. You will have three minutes to draw what you see. Whether it’s the dock, a person, or a bird, is up to you. I just want to see what you can do in a short time.”

  Cay sat down on the rough wood of the dock, her legs folded, and looked at the blank piece of paper. Everything that her teacher, Russell Johns, had yelled at her ran through her head. When he’d first arrived in America from England, just two years before, he’d been destitute. He knew no one, and her mother said he had a broken heart, but not even she could get him to tell her what had happened to make him so unhappy. Her mother had hired Mr. Johns to teach her daughter, but, truthfully, Cay didn’t think she’d ever pleased him. He wanted someone who devoted her life to art, but Cay didn’t want to do that. Now, she could hear his voice as he gave her lessons in drawing pictures of movement. “Draw faster!” he’d shout. “Do you expect your brothers to sit still and wait for you?” Cay had learned how to