Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [81]
Dominick froze, staring.
Kendall laughed, head thrown back. “Don’t look so surprised. It’s my duty to know what goes on in my town.”
Then why didn’t he know who would betray America by selling her young men to the enemy?
The answer was obvious, sickening, making Dominick feel as though he’d been hit as hard as Trower had been. He should have thought of it, of the ambition that would make Kendall need money. He’d been blinded by the man’s kindness to him and the high regard in which everyone held him.
Even now, as he retreated to the kitchen, his back intact, Dominick dismissed the new idea as preposterous. Kendall wanted to run his country, not destroy it. Should war come, a war that would surely destroy the United States of America as a nation, Kendall would hold no power. On the contrary, he might be in danger as a leader of a conquered nation.
Unless he held friends in high places. High British places.
Dominick staggered to a chair and dropped into it like a stone tumbling off of a cliff. He speared his fingers through his hair, dislodging it further. He needed rest before his brainbox exploded with more ridiculous notions.
“I’ll fix your hair for you.” Dinah slipped up behind him and gathered his hair into her hands. “Oooh, it’s soft.”
“Stop that.” Dominick jerked upright, dislodging her fingers with a painful yank on his scalp. “I’m in enough trouble without Kendall thinking I’m trying to ruin his kitchen maid.”
“I just never knew a man’s hair could be so soft.” Dinah gazed at him with big, limpid eyes.
“You, missy,” Dominick scolded, “need to pay more attention to your Bible. Modest behavior is a virtue.”
“And since when do you refer to Scripture?” Letty stomped in the back door, her apron full of eggs.
“Perhaps this morning’s work has given me my faith back.” He spoke with flippancy yet felt an odd tug at his heart, as though he wasn’t being entirely facetious.
God had spared him a flogging. Yet without the freedom to move around at night or get to his rendezvous on June 21, the same night as the fete, he was likely to serve out his indenture without redemption at the end.
Unless the evidence he sought lay under his very roof.
21
______
The storm was going to ruin her roses.
Tabitha stood at the kitchen window and frowned at the streaks of rain down the multiple panes of glass. The scarlet of her roses shone against the gray background like blood, something she’d seen too much of during the night.
Raleigh’s blood staining Dominick’s shirt, staining the cloth of the sofa, staining her hands. Head wounds always bled profusely and made them look worse than they were. She’d seen many in her life. Mrs. Wilkins’s had been the latest before Raleigh’s.
The most recent and the worst.
Tabitha shuddered in memory of that terrible wound. She’d tried to stitch it, but the woman had writhed so much in her pain, Tabitha couldn’t keep the skin together or aim her needle. In the end, it hadn’t mattered. Mrs. Wilkins died, and Harlan Wilkins set out on a trail of vengeance toward Tabitha.
As Raleigh had Dominick?
She couldn’t believe it. No, she didn’t want to believe it. Whether or not she could depended on whether or not she believed Raleigh had changed in his two years away. Lately she couldn’t seem to believe in anything, not Raleigh’s goodness, not Dominick’s honesty, not God’s interest in her.
Weary, feeling as though she carried a load of bricks on her shoulders, Tabitha leaned her brow on the cold windowpane and wished for the sweetness of the roses, their fresh scent beneath her nose, their delicate flavor under her tongue.
He looks at you like one of your candied flower petals. Raleigh’s words echoed in her head, and her cheeks grew warm despite the rain-chilled glass beneath her brow. Something about that remark was unseemly, yet her mind drifted to that brief kiss, stolen but not demanded back. Worse, not regretted. Worst of all, enjoyed.
She couldn’t possibly think of marrying Raleigh and have such indelicate