The Scent of Jasmine Read online

“How can I compete with Grady?”

  Groaning, Cay pulled away from him. “You aren’t going to start that again, are you?”

  “How can I not?” Alex said. “All day on the boat it’s ‘Mr. Grady this’ and ‘Mr. Grady that.’ You never stop. And the way you look at him! I swear, lass, that today I nearly shoved the man overboard.”

  “Did you?” She was smiling. “There’s no reason to be jealous. He’s my boss, and I have to please him.”

  “Please him?”

  “With my drawings. He likes what I do, don’t you think?”

  “I think he likes too much about you,” Alex muttered.

  “If he likes me but thinks I’m a boy, that doesn’t say much for his manliness, now does it?”

  “As for that, I’m not so sure they do.”

  “Do what?”

  Alex stood up to finish dressing. “Think you’re a boy.”

  “You couldn’t think they know I’m . . .”

  “I’m not sure. They certainly don’t seem to mind when you and I slip away for hours each evening when I do my best to satisfy your insatiable lust.”

  She started to defend herself but instead laughed and stretched her bare legs out in front of her. “As for that, I think you need to work much harder. And more often. Yes, lots more often.”

  “I don’t think I can,” Alex said, looking at her legs. “In fact, lass, you’ve worn me out. What with the wee, silent ones in the mornings, the quick noisy ones when we slip away during the day, and the long, lazy ones in the evenings, I’m sure I can do no more than that.”

  “Can you not?” She ran her hand up his leg, curving her fingers around his calf, and going up to caress his thigh muscle that was hard and firm from a lifetime of riding horses.

  When she got to the top of his thighs and eased her hand between his legs, he dropped to his knees and kissed her.

  “I thought you couldn’t do any more.”

  “Maybe just this once,” he said, and Cay giggled.

  Three weeks, Cay thought as she looked up at Alex from the drawing she was working on. He was at the helm of their little boat, and to her mind, he ran it. At least he was all that she could see.

  In the past three weeks, they’d done many things, and a great deal had changed. For one thing, Cay’s body had hardened. Mr. Grady nor Alex, or even Eli let up on her physically. At the beginning, she’d had difficulty carrying the cases, but now she practically ran with them as they made their camp. Even the heaviest of the crates was easy for her to lift. At night, when she and Alex lay together in their tent, he’d hold her arms up and admire the muscles she was developing. “Won’t be long before you really will be a boy.”

  “I’ll show you who’s a boy,” she said as she rolled on top of him.

  With the noise of the alligators, the birds, and the frogs all around them, they didn’t bother to hide the sounds they made. A few times Alex had put his lips over hers to keep her quiet, but for the most part, they talked and laughed without fear of being heard.

  At the end of the second week, they’d stopped at a plantation, and she and Alex had slipped away to explore. The big house stood on a hill overlooking the river, and it had been Mr. Grady’s duty to spend time with the owner.

  “Think his father owns this land?” Alex asked.

  “Probably.” She gave Alex a sideways look. “When my mother hears that I had time alone with an Armitage and didn’t take advantage of it, she’s going to skin me alive.”

  “Oh?” Alex asked. “Do you mean this skin? This skin that you’re wearing now?”

  She pushed his hand out of her shirt, but her eyes told him that later she’d be more than willing to do whatever he had in mind.

  The plantation owner had cleared a wild orange grove of weeds and brush, leaving hundreds of trees behind. There was a big kitchen garden that was flourishing even though it was winter. “The heat and the bugs get everything in the summer,” the head gardener told them. “Gardening is backwards here.”

  All around them were great fields of indigo plants, all tended by slave labor.

  “My father agrees with President Adams,” Cay said. “There should be no slavery in our new country.”

  Alex looked out over the fields. “I think that here it’s a matter of economics rather than humanity.”

  After a hearty breakfast the next morning, they left early, and Cay was glad to get back to their boat. She’d come to like their small group—except for Tim. The boy continued to do what he could to make Cay miserable. Every time Mr. Grady praised one of her drawings, she knew she’d bear the brunt of Tim’s jealousy. For the first week, she’d had to check her bedding every night to make sure the boy hadn’t put something nasty in it. She’d found three plants guaranteed to give her a rash, two snakes (nonpoisonous), and six different kinds of disgusting-looking bugs.

  Cay had wanted Alex to step in and make the boy stop, but he’d just shrugged. “It’s what boys do to each other.”

  “Then I think it’s time you males stopped it. Here and now. If one man makes the effort to stop boys from torturing one another, then, eventually, it will spread to all of you.”

  Alex looked at her as though she were crazy. “And girls are better? When girls get angry, they don’t hit, they just stop speaking to one another.”

  “Yes, well . . .” Cay’s head came up. “That’s better than putting bugs in a person’s bed.”

  “Is it?”

  Cay didn’t want to argue with him. She just wanted horrible Tim to stop doing mean things to her. She decided to talk to Mr. Grady about it, but he refused to listen.

  “I can’t get involved in spats between boys,” he’d said as he walked away.

  Frustrated, Cay decided to take matters into her own hands. She was going to treat Tim like one of her brothers, specifically as she did Tally.

  The first time Cay had seen a snake slithering its way into their tent, she’d had to put her fist into her mouth to hold back her scream—and Alex had taken care of the matter. He put his foot on the snake, grabbed it just behind its head, and threw it down the hill away from them. The second time she’d seen a snake making its way into the tent, Alex had also captured it and thrown it out. But the third time, Cay didn’t bother him. She just did what he did, held it with her boot, grabbed its head, and carried it down to the river, where she threw it in. It was only when she got back to the camp that she saw that the three men were staring at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “That was a cottonmouth,” Mr. Grady said.

  Even she knew they were extremely poisonous.

  Mr. Grady said, “Next time, call one of us.”

  But Cay didn’t call anyone for her next snake, nor the next. But she did consult the books T.C. had in his trunk, and she made drawings of the most poisonous snakes and memorized them.

  At the end of the second week, she borrowed a big jar from Eli and filled it with little, nonpoisonous snakes, and one night she dumped them all at the foot of Tim’s blanket bed. He wasn’t used to Cay retaliating, so he didn’t find them until they were crawling up his legs. When she heard his shouts as she lay in the tent beside Alex, she smiled, and he asked her what she’d done to “poor Tim.” “Played his own game,” she said and began kissing Alex before he could ask more questions.

  After that, it was as if a war had been declared. When she saw an alligator head in the water, its body missing, she lugged it up the hill, hid it in the bushes, and the next morning before daylight, she slipped it partially under the tent Tim shared with Eli. When Alex awoke to screams from Tim, he looked at Cay lying peacefully beside him. “What have you done to that poor boy now?”

  She just smiled.

  Tim started to be more cautious in the tricks he played on her. He’d learned that there would be retribution for whatever he did to her.

  For Cay, what balanced her dislike of Tim was her growing affection for Eli. They were days into the trip before she realized that she’d unjustl