The Scent of Jasmine Read online

  Alex’s hands unclenched. He was glad to hear her anger and her jealousy. “I kissed her just that once, when you were hiding behind the cupboard and saw it. Other than that, I didn’t touch her, and I can assure you that I didn’t sleep with her. Thanks to you, I was able to look past what had attracted me to her and saw the person. She never quit swearing that she didn’t know I was put on trial for her murder, but there’s no way she could not have known. Nate went to that little town in Georgia where she ran to right after what she did to me, and the newspapers there were full of the trial. The editor even had a record that she, under the false name she used there, had subscribed to the paper.” He took a breath. “I could hardly bear to be near a woman who was capable of what she did to me.”

  “I know,” Cay said. “Nate wrote us about how much you disliked her. But my brain and my heart don’t seem to be connected. One hears and understands, but the other feels.”

  When Cay slid her foot toward him, he touched her ankle, encased in a silk stocking. When she didn’t move away, he put his hand on her foot.

  “Did Nate tell you that her husband’s nephew is alive? She hadn’t killed him, just knocked him unconscious. The men in Charleston who’d been searching for her were from her husband. He wanted her back.”

  “Nate wrote me everything.” There was emphasis in her voice, letting him know that he, Alex, had never written her even once. But, through Nate, they had communicated. “So she’s back with her husband?”

  “Aye, she is.” Alex removed her shoe and began to caress her foot. He knew that Nate had been writing and telling Cay what was going on, but there were some things that Alex had saved to tell her himself. “I talked to her husband in private and told him all that the woman had done to me. I even made Megs tell him the truth about her early life and how she lied to meet him. But he already knew it. She hadn’t told me, but she’d worked in his kitchen when she was a girl, and he remembered her. He knew who she was when she showed up at his house wearing the clothes of his cousin’s daughter. It didn’t take much for him to figure out what had happened.”

  “And he forgave her?”

  “More than that, he loved her. He told me that he’d married the first time to please his father and he’d hated his rich, aristocratic wife, but the second time he married to please himself.”

  “So they’re happy?”

  “When Nate and I left, Megs was carrying his child.”

  “Nate’s child? Father won’t like that at all!”

  For a moment, Alex was confused, then he began to laugh—really laugh. It started inside him, rumbled up like a volcano erupting. He had forgotten her way of constantly making jokes about everything. He’d had a year of nothing but seriousness, of little laughter, as he cleared his name and dealt with judges and lawyers and Megs. He’d soon found that her beauty was a poor replacement for someone who wanted to make him feel good.

  His laughter relaxed him, and Alex’d had all he could take of Cay’s refusal to look at him. Her painting of the pond looked like something a color-blind child had drawn, what with its purple ducks with their blue beaks swimming in a pink pond. His hand went up her leg, and in the next second he pulled her down onto the grass beside him, and he began to kiss her face and neck.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said. “Every second of every day, I thought about you and wanted to be with you. Nate read me the letters you and your mother wrote to him, about every party and every dance you went to. Your mother even wrote about your damned shoes wearing out from so much dancing.”

  “I told her to put that in,” Cay said, her eyes smiling as she looked up at him. Her hands were on his cheeks, feeling the smoothness of his face. She knew she’d probably show him the hundred or so pictures she’d drawn of him from memory in the last year. No matter how many men she met or how handsome they were, all she ever saw was Alex.

  “I thought maybe you did, but I told myself, no, that my darling Cay could never be that cruel.”

  “Me cruel? You invented cruelty. The Spanish Inquisition could take lessons from you. My horrible brother wrote every word that you two found out about that . . . that woman and her stupid husband. He should have hated her! Are you sure she didn’t murder that girl in the carriage? Maybe she—”

  When Alex kissed her, she stopped what she was saying. He moved his lips from hers, and looked at her, his eyes searching her face, memorizing it, as he smoothed her hair back. “I thought of that, too, but her husband knew about the accident. One of his workmen had already seen it, and the husband was on his way there when Megs showed up at his door, saying she was the dead girl. He was amused by her audacity, and it wasn’t long before he was in love with her.” Alex’s voice lowered. “Who can understand love?” He ran his thumbs over her eyebrows, smoothing them. “I agree with your father, and if you had any sense at all, you’d take Armitage up on his offer to marry him. He’s much more your class and—”

  “My mother told me the truth.”

  He looked at her curiously. They were lying on the ground, and he was half on top of her, but he was too heavy for her to move. “The truth about what?”

  “About her and my father.”

  “And what truth would that be?” His voice showed his amusement.

  Cay pushed at him to get him off of her. “If you’re going to lie to me and act like you didn’t know the true story, you can just go back to wherever you were and stay there! You said, ‘They were the most ill-matched couple in all of Christendom,’ so I know that you know the whole story.”

  “How in the world do you remember every word of a sentence that was spoken over a year ago?”

  She ignored his question. “I’m not going to be treated like a little girl anymore. Not by you or anyone else!”

  Alex began to kiss her neck. “You mean your mother told you about your father being dirt poor and your mother wallowing in gold? That truth?”

  “By all that’s holy, but I think you’re already laughing at me. I’d think that you’d at least put that ring you bought on my finger before you began making fun of me.”

  “I couldn’t wait.” He put his leg over her thighs.

  She turned to look at him, taking in the sweet familiarity of his face and thinking how very much she loved him—and always would. On the ship home, her mother had told her in detail all that she and Cay’s father had been through before they married. All her life, Cay had been told sweet, perfect stories—lies, actually—about their courtship. But the truth had been very different, and Cay had been shocked to hear about the many similarities between what her mother and she had been through. When her mother told her about shaving Angus and seeing that he was handsome under all that hair, Cay told about throwing shaving water in Alex’s face.

  “Just dirty water?” her mother asked. “I shot at your father and nearly killed him.”

  Wide-eyed, Cay had listened to every word of her mother’s story.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Alex asked.

  She started to tell him what she’d been told, but now was not the time. Instead, she glared at him. “If you think you’re going to use me before marriage, you have another think coming.”

  “Use you? I remember a time when—”

  With a hard shove, she rolled out from under him and held out her left hand. Her expression told him what she wanted.

  With a sigh of defeat, Alex sat up. “What makes you think I have a ring? Ah, yes, Nate. He’d see no reason to keep the fact that I bought you a ring a secret.”

  “Of course my brother told me what you were up to, even to your trips to London jewelry stores. And he told me about that woman’s husband giving you horses, and that you purchased the farm from my father. Nate said you wanted to rename it McDowell’s, but it’s going to be called Merlin’s Farm or I’m not going to live there. Did my brother tell you that Uncle T.C. took my paintings from the Florida trip to London to present to the African Association, but they said a female couldn’t have painted