In a Stranger's Arms Read online

  “If you can tell me where I might find Mr. Forbes, I don’t mind hunting him up for myself.” She glanced around to make sure no one else was within earshot. “How are you feeling these days, Bobbie? The work around here isn’t too much for your constitution, I hope.”

  “Better too much work than too little, ma’am.” He flashed a rueful grin. “Never reckoned how good it would feel to earn a week’s pay.”

  For the first time since she’d met him during her honeymoon with Del, the boyish young fellow looked like a grown man.

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Caddie glanced down at the ledger and strongbox. “That’s why I’ve come, as a matter of fact, to pay everyone their wages.”

  She didn’t mention her nagging worry about finances. Since taking over the bookkeeping, Caddie had come to wonder if they’d hired more folks to work than they needed. Would the business turn a profit before they exhausted Manning’s resources?

  Bobbie’s grin stretched wider. “I’d better not hold you up, then, or I won’t be too popular around here. You’ll find Mr. Forbes in the shop yonder, doing some joining work on a batch of chairs.”

  She must have spoken a few polite words of parting to the young man, but afterward Caddie couldn’t remember. Nor did she recall Bobbie Stevens walking off to the mill. For she turned toward the woodwright shop and caught sight of Manning. The shop, the mill and everything else around her seemed to melt away, leaving only the solid, focused figure of that one man.

  Absorbed in his work, he paid her no heed, but carefully fixed a caned seat to a chair frame. Rays of bright June sunlight pierced the leafy canopy of lofty elms and dappled the clearing below. Through the wide door of the shop, they shimmered over his crisp profile and his large, deft hands.

  With strength, skill and patience, those hands had refashioned a life for Caddie and her children. As she watched her husband’s hands move over the wood in a kind of caress, a strange pleasant warmth rippled through her flesh. Her imagination stirred with fancies of his long brown fingers tangled in her unbound hair or whispering over her bare skin.

  He glanced up and their eyes met. The air between them fairly crackled, the way a comb pulled through wool threw off tiny sparks and shocks on a winter night. Their marriage was nothing but a business arrangement to him, Caddie sternly reminded herself. If she had a particle of sense or pride, she’d want to keep it that way.

  She’d always possessed a generous measure of sense and rather too much pride. They came to her rescue now, stiffening limbs that wanted to melt like butter in the sun. Infusing her slack, dreamy features with brisk reality. She forced herself to approach him with sedate steps.

  “I hope this isn’t a bad time to do the payroll?” Caddie willed a cool, businesslike tone into her voice when it threatened to turn soft and breathless.

  “No. It’s fine. Just fine.” The tension of his stance and the stiff, grave set of his expression contradicted Manning’s words. “Would you mind sitting outside if I bring a chair and a table for you? Better light out there, and you won’t end up with sawdust all over your clothes.”

  If he wanted her out from underfoot, why didn’t he just say so? “Very well. Outside it is.”

  Manning disappeared into the shop, returning a moment later with a chair like the one she’d watched him assemble. Forgetting the contrary feelings that pulled her heart like a mess of warn taffy, Caddie reached out and ran her hand down the long, clean line of it.

  “Where did you find this design? It looks good and sturdy, but not too heavy.” The chair’s clean, spare frame had an elegant simplicity. “I like it.”

  “I came up with the design myself.” Manning sounded as though he expected her to change her mind on that account. “It’s cheap and easy to build. The cane seat makes it comfortable to sit on and lighter to transport.”

  Thoroughly practical, just like its designer. Yet anything but ordinary.

  “Where did you learn to build furniture like this?” Manning didn’t answer.

  Perhaps he hadn’t heard her as he concentrated on finding a likely spot for her to set up.

  “Somewhere the breeze is calm,” he muttered to himself. “Don’t want papers or money blowing away.”

  He set the chair in a brightly lit spot then glanced at Caddie and pulled it back into the shade. “Don’t want you getting sunstroke. You look a little flushed already.”

  That wasn’t the sun’s fault, Caddie decided as Manning returned to the shop to fetch her a table.

  At least that’s what she assumed he meant to do. When several minutes passed with no sign of him coming back, Caddie set her ledger and strongbox beneath the chair and wandered over to a part of the clearing where she could see the big water wheel turning

  Leaning against the trunk of a tall elm, Caddie closed her eyes and drank in the peaceful murmur of the river. Gradually she became aware of two male voices in conversation. Something in their tone drew her closer to the mill and made her listen more carefully.

  ‘‘Recognized him the minute he visited our place asking after his wife and the children,” said a voice that sounded like Bobbie Stevens’. “When Ma came back into the house from talking to him, I asked why she hadn’t invited him to stay for supper. She told me he’d been killed back in ’64.”

  “I’ll take your word they look the same,” replied another man, possibly Jeff Pratt. “And you can take mine that they aren’t. Don’t sound a thing alike.”

  They were talking about Del and Manning. Caddie’s insides commenced to churn the way they had when she’d first laid eyes on Manning Forbes. Like Bobbie, she’d been so certain the man was her husband, mysteriously risen from the grave. In the weeks that followed, their physical likeness had struck her at odd moments. As she’d gotten to know Manning Forbes, however, she’d ceased to see the resemblance.

  “’Course he doesn’t sound the same, what with putting on the Yankee talk,” Bobbie protested. “He wouldn’t be the first soldier who got reported dead when he wasn’t. I heard tell of a fellow down Danville way who came home to find his family had put up a tombstone with his name on it.”

  “Plain foolishness, that is. Why in creation would he pretend to be a Yankee?”

  Caddie strained to hear Bobbie’s reply.

  After a pause that stretched her nerves taut, the answer finally came. “I never met a man who liked to win quite as bad as he did. Maybe this is just his way of landing on the winning side. Seems to be working, if you ask me.”

  As Caddie struggled to make sense of Bobbie’s preposterous suggestion, Jeff spoke again. “Whoever that man is, he isn’t Del Marsh. I’ll tell you something else. We both know another fellow who likes to win just as bad as Del did.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Del’s brother, Lon.”

  Jeff’s words sent a shiver through her.

  “Sorry to take so long fetching you the table,” Manning called to Caddie.

  At his words, she started. When she spun around to face him, a look of furtive guilt blazed on her features, as though he’d caught her in the commission of some shameful deed. Did she think he begrudged her a moment of peace and quiet?

  “There’s no rush.” He set a small table in front of her chair.

  Once he got a little time, he wanted to build Caddie a proper desk for bookkeeping. At the moment, he needed to concentrate on producing furniture for sale.

  Slowly, Caddie approached, her eyes trained on his face as if searching it for something. He’d caught her watching him earlier, but somehow that had felt different. For a daft instant Manning had imagined her gaze shimmered with desire. Or had he only seen a reflection of the hunger that brooded inside of him?

  In the full, uncompromising glare of June sunlight, Manning couldn’t fool himself about the way Caddie looked at him. Her gaze fairly crackled with interest, but not the carnal type. The wariness that had bristled from her when he’d first arrived at Sabbath Hollow had returned in full force, joined by suspi
cion and a flicker of fear she tried hard to mask.

  She knew. The certainty of it slammed into Manning like an artillery barrage at close range.

  Caddie stooped to retrieve the ledger and cash box from beneath the chair. “You didn’t answer my question, before.”

  “Question?” Manning heaped his tone with gruffness, praying it would camouflage the guilt. “I don’t recollect any question.”

  With deliberate care, Caddie arranged the ledger and cash box on the table, then settled herself on the chair. “Perhaps you didn’t hear me.”

  She ran her hand down one of the subtly tapered legs of the table, and Manning felt a prickling sensation down his own leg, as if she’d stroked it, instead.

  “I asked where you learned to make furniture like this.”

  An innocent enough query, but with this woman one question had an insidious way of leading to another.

  “Awhile back I told you I was a woodworker before I enlisted. Did you think I was lying?” He slapped at the top of the table—hard. “Here’s the proof I was telling the truth. Maybe now you can believe me and quit digging into my past.”

  As Caddie flinched from his outburst, Manning felt like a fool and a bully. He didn’t want his thwarted attraction festering into hostility, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. Staying on an even keel with this woman required the skill of a lumberjack rolling a wet, slippery log beneath his feet.

  Though tricky and dangerous at times, it made him feel more alive than he could ever remember.

  Caddie began to sputter in protest, but he cut her off. “I’ll start sending folks out to collect their wages.” Manning consciously softened his voice in a tacit apology. “I’d better get back to work if I want to have anything to pay them with next week.”

  Marching back into the shop, he sent a couple of young women out to get paid. Once Caddie was fully occupied with them, Manning blew out a shaky breath. He needed to put some distance between him and Caddie. Shore up his self-control. Remind himself of what he had at stake.

  A chance at redemption that he couldn’t afford to lose.

  Administering the payroll kept Caddie’s thoughts productively engaged until quitting time, for which she was grateful. The force of Manning’s outburst, and the all-too-familiar look on his face, had added fresh fuel to the glowing embers of doubt Jeff and Bobbie’s conversation had stirred up. When he was angry, Manning looked most like Del as she remembered him.

  But he couldn’t be! Caddie slammed the lid of the cash box closed, as if to imprison her suspicions with the dwindling pile of silver and greenbacks. Watching the workers take their leave and Manning lock up for the night, she clung to Jeff Pratt’s certainty when her own faltered.

  Bobbie Stevens’ speculations were too preposterous to entertain. Weren’t they?

  The hollow sensation deep in her belly told Caddie otherwise. She remembered how Del had often put on a Yankee accent to mock their undeclared enemies in those tense years prior to the war.

  Suddenly afraid of Manning in a way she never had been when she believed he was a perfect stranger Caddie didn’t wait for him, but headed back to the house on her own. When the soft pad of footsteps and rustle of branches told her he’d caught up, her pulse quickened.

  Behind her, Manning cleared his throat. Did he plan to apologize for snapping at her? Del wouldn’t. Anytime he’d done something sure to anger or offend her, he’d simply picked up and gone away for a few days.

  Hunting with some of his cronies. Visiting a cousin in Westchester. Taking a stallion to service a mare down in Charlottesville. Returning only when he’d calculated enough time had passed to cool her temper. It would have cooled, all right. Congealed into another hard layer of resentment that encased and smothered whatever love she’d once felt for him.

  “I have to go away for a little while.” Manning’s quiet words thundered in Caddie’s ears.

  She wanted to turn on him and demand an explanation, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. What if the scales of self-delusion fell from her eyes and she could no longer pretend not to recognize Del?

  “I’ll put young Stevens in charge while I’m gone,” he continued. “I told him to clear any important decisions with you first.”

  “How long do you expect to be away?” Caddie tossed the question back over her shoulder, all the while telling herself it shouldn’t matter.

  “Can’t say for sure. I need to find a market for the lumber and furniture we’re producing. I’ll try Washington first. Move on to Baltimore if I have to.”

  When Caddie couldn’t find her voice to say anything more, Manning overtook her in a couple of long loping strides. “Getting this place back on its feet is costing more than I figured. We can keep afloat for a while, but the business is going to have to start paying some of its own expenses.”

  His reasoning made perfect sense. Why, then, did she get such a strong sense he was telling her less than the whole truth?

  “I don’t imagine you’ll have much trouble finding buyers for the furniture—it’s so well crafted.” Caddie risked a quick sidelong glance at Manning. “Besides, I never intended you to support Sabbath Hollow as a charity.”

  For a carpetbagger, he’d put far more money into the plantation than he could expect to get back out anytime soon. If she hadn’t known better, Caddie would have sworn he’d envisioned their business as a charitable scheme to rehabilitate the veterans and dependants of Mercer’s Corner.

  But that didn’t tally. Nothing about Manning Forbes tallied with what she expected. She was tired of trying to solve a riddle she couldn’t even put into words.

  Their path emerged from the woods onto the sweeping meadow that sloped down behind the house. Off in the distance, Caddie could see Tem and Varina at play. The children wobbled around on pairs of stilts Manning had made for them. Where he’d found the time, Caddie couldn’t guess.

  Varina must have spied them coming, for she leaped off her stilts, letting the poles fall where they might, and raced up the hill to meet Manning and Caddie. Tem and his faithful Sergeant followed not far behind.

  The tightness in Caddie’s chest eased, and the knot deep in her belly began to untie itself. What else in the world mattered, so long as her children were happy?

  Varina pelted up to them, gasping for breath, a triumphant smile glowing on her small flushed face. Seeing Caddie’s arms loaded with her ledger and cash box, the child threw herself at Manning instead. He swung her up onto his shoulder while she squealed and giggled.

  “Mama, Papa,” she crowed. “Guess how many steps I can go on my stilts without falling down?”

  Caddie wasn’t sure what possessed her to reply as she did. Perhaps she needed to refute out loud the ridiculous suspicion that her first husband and her second might be the same man. Or maybe it was guilt that a Yankee carpetbagger could make her blood heat and her loins ache in a way the loyal Confederate father of her children never had.

  “Varina Marsh, that man is not your father! You know very well some Yankee killed your real pa.”

  Those poisoned words had scarcely left her mouth before Caddie wished she could suck them back in again. Even if they sickened her almost to death.

  A look of hurt displaced Varina’s bright smile, fused with righteous indignation, as though she’d been harshly and unjustly punished. Manning’s eyes held nothing but hurt—a bottomless ocean of it like a dog whipped and told he was bad for the hundredth time in as many days.

  Never in her proud life had Caddie felt so ashamed.

  Chapter Ten

  FIRST LIGHT CAME early with the approach of summer, but Manning woke even earlier. After the tense silence of last night’s supper, he couldn’t bear to face an awkward parting this morning. If the children questioned when he’d be coming back, Manning wasn’t certain he’d have any answers to give them. Looking into their small faces, he might end up making promises he didn’t dare keep.

  With quiet movements he collected his few belongings a
nd stuffed them into a sturdy canvas rucksack. At the very bottom he placed a small latched box containing his papers. On his wedding night, he’d removed a certain letter from his shirt pocket and placed it in the box for safekeeping.

  He hadn’t wanted to risk Caddie or Miss Gordon finding it among his laundry, but he couldn’t bring himself to destroy it, either. Though it had served its purpose in helping him track the Marsh family to Sabbath Hollow, he still needed it to remind him of his debt and his promise.

  As he tiptoed past the children’s room, Manning almost gave in to the temptation to push their door ajar and... do what? Stand beside their beds, feasting his hungry eyes on Tem and Varina while they slept? He’d barely have enough light to make out their shapes under the quilts. Blow a kiss or whisper a word of goodbye they might hear in their dreams? The dog would probably start barking and wake everyone.

  With only a slight hesitation in his step, Manning kept going down the stairs and out the door. Across the newly repaired porch and back to the stable, where he harnessed his gelding and Caddie’s old mare to the buckboard.

  Birds piped and trilled in the cool half-light and beads of dew glistened on the grass as Manning drove around to the mill. There he loaded samples of cut lumber and furniture, then headed east to peddle his wares.

  How often, Manning asked himself as he drove toward Washington, did two of the best and worst moments of a person’s life crowd together in the space of a minute?

  When Varina had called him Papa, pride and happiness had swelled so rapidly in his heart it had pained him. In those few sweet seconds, he’d guessed how a fledgling bird must feel the first time it abandoned its safe, dull perch and soared skyward.

  Then Caddie had taken aim and shot him down. His spirits had plummeted back to the hard ground of real life. If his body had done the same, breaking every single bone, he doubted it could have hurt worse.

  Ever since he’d come to Sabbath Hollow, he’d been able to distract himself from unwelcome thoughts and feelings by keeping busy. Concentrating on practical matters over which he exercised some control. Fixing up the house, restoring the old mill, hiring workers, supervising the day-to-day operations. On a long wagon ride like the one he was taking this morning, what could a fellow do but think?