Captured by Love (Michigan Brides #3)(8)

“If only the war would end soon,” she whispered.

She rested the shovel against the wall of the tiny shed Jean had helped her construct and reached for the bucket of muck.

And if only she’d married Jean before he’d had to leave the island.

Jean had been willing, had in fact preferred it so that he wouldn’t have to leave his mother on the farm alone.

But at the time she’d only been sixteen. And her stepfather, Ebenezer, had refused and then accused Jean of being a traitor for not signing the Oath of Allegiance to the British. It didn’t matter that Ebenezer had already made an agreement with Jean, that Jean had paid the exorbitant bride-price Ebenezer established.

In a matter of one day after the British invasion, Jean had become an enemy because of his unwillingness to compromise his American citizenship. Some of the islanders like Ebenezer had no qualms about switching their loyalty and supporting the British. They’d been allowed to keep their businesses and homes on the island. All the other American men had been deported.

In the two years Jean had been gone, they’d received several letters from him. He’d joined up with the American militia near Detroit and was helping to fight against the British to preserve the American independence that had been won thirty years ago.

Although Angelique didn’t really consider herself either British or American since her mother had been French Canadian and her father Scottish, she’d decided to side with the Americans for the sake of Jean and Miriam.

“Oh, why did Jean have to leave?” she whispered, lifting the bucket and lugging it across the hen house, through the door and into the bright sunlight that bathed the afternoon with glorious warmth.

She tried to conjure up the image of Jean—his gentle features and his fair skin and hair, so much like that of Miriam—but she caught only a glimpse of him before Pierre’s weather-bronzed face flashed into her mind, along with his handsome grin and the devilish mischief in his eyes.

She couldn’t deny that Pierre had always been the more handsome and dashing of the two brothers, that he’d been the one to capture her heart, to make her laugh even when she’d had nothing to laugh about, and to fill her with unexplainable longing.

“Pierre is a louse,” she said into the spring air, dragging in a fresh breath. “He’s a selfish louse. No, I don’t want to see him again. And no, I don’t miss him.”

But even as the words slipped out, she knew they weren’t true. One glimpse of Pierre yesterday had been all it had taken to unleash a swarm of eagerness for her erstwhile friend.

The back door of the inn squeaked open again, this time revealing Betty’s thin face. With a furtive glance over her shoulder into the kitchen, Betty opened the door wider and stepped outside.

Angelique hefted the bucket higher and moved toward the necessary.

Had Ebenezer sent Betty outside to check on her?

Out of the corner of her eye, Angelique could see the young woman put one hand on her protruding belly and one on the small of her back. She didn’t know how many weeks Betty had left before giving birth, but from the looks of it, the time was growing near.

“Ebenezer left,” Betty called after her.

Angelique stopped, surprise charging through her.

Betty’s shifting gray eyes kept returning to the open door, as if she expected Ebenezer to barge through at any moment. Not a single strand of Betty’s hair hung outside the plain white mobcap she wore. Her unadorned collar stretched high up her neck, and the hem of her skirt covered her feet all the way to the tips of her toes—just the way Ebenezer expected.

Angelique’s fingers went involuntarily to her own high collar.

Even if her life under Ebenezer’s care was oppressive, she couldn’t complain about his extreme standards for modesty. The plain, unattractive attire kept away unwanted attention on an island populated mostly by men. It also kept her from becoming anything like her mother.

And of course the high collar had kept Ebenezer from seeing the bruises around her neck. She could only imagine his anger if he’d discovered them. As it was, she kept waiting for the quartermaster to pay Ebenezer a visit and tell him that she was doing more than fishing during the early morning hours.

She prayed he’d been too drunk to remember the encounter.

“I saved an extra piece of bread for you,” Betty said.

Angelique hesitated, resisting the urge to press her hand against her aching stomach. “Why don’t you eat it?” Angelique said. “With the weight of your babe, you have much greater need of it than me.”

She didn’t think Betty was a day older than sixteen and seemed much too young for a man like Ebenezer. But after his last wife died in childbirth, he’d needed another woman to do his washing and cooking and to tend the customers who stayed at the inn. It was much cheaper to have a wife do those duties than to hire someone.

And it was much more convenient for satisfying his lusts.

Angelique cast her eyes away from Betty to the garden plot, to the rich dark soil she’d recently hoed and readied for planting.

She hated that her tiny dormer room rested above Ebenezer’s. And she hated that in the silence of the night she could hear his awful grunts as he sated himself. It had been that way with her own mother, and the next wife, and now with Betty.

If only Ebenezer could be completely satisfied with his wife. In the spring and summer after the Indians arrived on the island, she often caught him lurking down by their camps and on more than one occasion sneaking an Indian woman into his room.