In His Eyes(50)
Determined not to show the mortification that surely already reddened her face, Ella lifted her chin. “I told you I was not yet ready. I haven’t had the opportunity to pin my hair.”
His eyes darkened. “I like it falling free.”
She gathered the locks at her nape and tugged them to the front, her fingers seeking to undo enough of the knots to tame the disarray into a braid. “A man should not see a woman with whom he is not intimately familiar with her hair around her shoulders. It isn’t proper.”
His brows lifted, and mischief danced in his dark pupils. “Oh, but don’t you remember? You are my wife.”
Her fingers stilled and her pulse quickened. He didn’t think to use her ruse to take advantage of her, did he? Her fingers flew faster, and she tried to conceal a tremor that found its way into her voice. “Not in truth.”
He watched her, emotions parading across his face. Curiosity, attraction, confusion….
Ella turned her back. “If you will excuse me, I will pin up my hair, fetch Sibby’s medicine, and be down shortly.”
“I will retrieve the laudanum. You should see to the babe.”
She snatched a few pins from the dressing table and hurried back to the door. He still darkened the frame. “Well? Do you not know where it is?”
“I know.”
Infuriating rascal! Then why did he still stand there? “It is in her drawer.”
“I heard.”
“In the nursery.”
“Yes.”
She twisted the muddled braid at the back of her head and jammed the pins into it, scraping her scalp. Ella stepped up to him, crossing her arms over her chest. “Will you not allow me to pass?”
He stepped back, gave a small bow at the waist, and swept his arm out. “Certainly.”
She had to walk by him so closely that her skirts swept over the top of his mud-caked boots. Heart hammering, she fled down the stairs, the wood cold beneath her toes.
By the time she reached the parlor, her pulse thudded in her ears so loudly she couldn’t even hear herself think. The nerve of that man! Whether he saw her as a harlot or not did not give him the right to look at her that way!
Her stomach twisted. Though she must admit—even if she did not want to—that the appreciation in his eyes did not turn her blood cold as it should, but rather set it aflame. Nothing about the intensity of his gaze had been like the predatory gleam she’d so often seen from men. This was something…different.
Ella stepped into the parlor and halted. “Sibby! Why is Lee on the floor?”
Sibby lifted her arm from where it had draped over her face. “Major Westley done put him there.”
Ella crossed the rug and dropped to her knees, glad she didn’t have any crinoline to hinder her. “Why in heaven’s name would he do such a thing?”
Lee lay on the outspread quilt, wearing a different gown than the one she’d put him in this morning. He sucked on his tiny fist and looked up at her. “Why…?”
“He made sure the boy be dry, seein’ as I can’t be doin’ it and you was upstairs.”
Ella pressed her lips into a line. Major Remington had changed him? She reached down and rubbed his little face.
Sibby chuckled. “But he weren’t goin’ to change his napkin. Said that was for you to do.”
Oh, the napkin. She’d forgotten to fetch a fresh one from the nursery. “But why is he on the floor?”
Sibby lifted a shoulder. “I reckon he thought it be safer that way.”
Something within her lurched. Major Remington had done these things? The man who made his living killing had changed her child? Had worried over dropping him so he had made a soft place on the floor? Tears pricked at the back of her throat. “How did he do it?”
Sibby turned her head and regarded Ella. Her eyebrows lifted, and it seemed she understood what Ella really wanted to know. “He plucked that boy from the cradle and soothed his cryin’. He was abouncing him and talkin’ to him real sweet-like. Then he fixed him that little place there and changed him into one of the spare gowns I keep down here.”
Ella stroked Lee’s head. Major Remington, the Yankee devil, had so gently tended her son? Ella opened her mouth, but words would not come.
Sibby regarded her closely. “Yes ’um. I been knowin’ him for all of my life, and I ain’t never seen him treat anything so gentle. Was like he was afraid he were going to break that babe.”
Ella lifted Lee and cradled him in her arms and her heart lurched. That was what Lee should have had…a mother who loved him and a father who gently tended him. Instead, Lee would have an imposter mother and no father at all to teach him how to be a proper man. She snuggled him close and he began to cough, his little body shaking with the effort.
Ella turned worried eyes on Sibby. As the fear she’d struggled to contain within herself manifested on the other woman’s features, Ella’s heart pounded harder.
Oh, Lord. If he suffers because of my folly I shall never be able to forgive myself….
Tears streamed down Ella’s cheeks as she wiped the cool cloth over Lee’s heated face. He hadn’t eaten in hours, and refused each time they had tried to get him to suckle.
Ella made another pass around the nursery, past the bed Sibby watched her from, and back to the wash basin. It had been quite the task, but with help from Basil, she and Major Remington had managed to get Sibby upstairs once the medication had taken its effect and dulled the pain.