Fair warning: There is a wee bit of steam, of the human and not humidity kind.
The glare from the noonday sun burned Scarlett's eyes, and she blinked into the haze of the perfectly pale blue inferno. The tinkling sound of a haphazard breeze flitted through the cottonwood leaves, reminding her of the stories her pa used to tell of tiny, unseen creatures whose magic filled the world with wonder. Ellen had always found some reason to interrupt her husband when he would delve into the folklore of his superstitious kin, her dulcet tones drowning out the blaring brogue. For Scarlett, the difference between saints and sprites seemed minuscule, and now that she had been forced to confront the reality that her mother was not the Virgin Mary, the distinction between her catechisms and Gerald's bedtime tall tales were next to nil.
Religion had been nothing but a ritual of fitting in for her; she had not even thought about attending Mass since her weeks with her Aunt Eulalie. After her interview with Kingsley, who wore a gold ring with a cross inscribed on his pinky, she felt even less inclined to seek out a priest and make confession. Surely, hypocrites must be more cruelly punished than heretics.
Rhett tightened his hold on her hand as he swiftly towed her along, weaving out of the bowing cottonwoods and into a dense thicket that smelled of white blossoms and minty pines. Yards and yards into the trees, perhaps a half mile or more, a small well with a sunken wooden roof squatted in a shrubby clearing of brambles and berries. The washed-out orange of the house was far beyond the nearby tree boughs, the entirety of the bustling plantation obscured, and even the sunlight struggled to break through the heavy canopy.
"No one will follow us here. It's quite forgotten," Rhett assured, but her body was set to fight or fly, the instinct to survive unhinged in her. In the unnatural quiet of this cluster of trees, her ears were opened to the noises all around, her senses as alert as a feline. Weirdly few mosquitoes buzzed in her ears. Sweat puddled in the folds of her clothing and in the creases of her limbs, spotting her face in a salty sheen. Before she could stop herself, she asked in a small voice, mistrustful of any screen of privacy.
"What happened this morning, Rhett?"
He looked to their intertwined hands, his bold gaze roving suddenly, piercingly from their connected fingers to her entire body, as suave and penetrating as his love-making had been last night. There was an air about him that was almost too cavalier, his stance almost too poised. She wondered if he had been avoiding this discussion, as she had been.
"I overplayed my hand," he replied after moment, adding a shrug. "Happens to the best gamblers from time to time."
Not this. Not more nonsense answers. She could not take a single cryptic word more! "No more damn puzzles!" she said in exasperation.
"I suppose jigsaw puzzles aren't the only form of puzzle unfit for you, Scarlett. I am sorry for that." Rhett held her face in his free hand, gliding his thumb across the dewy cheekbone. "I'll tell you as much of what happened as I am able, but I am not the only one with secrets to reveal." He inhaled quickly, and his eyes became flint. "How did my father touch you?"
Scarlett remembered something about her husband, or realized it for the first. He was dangerous, too. The realization rained down upon her as sweetly as a cool shower, breaking her terror into crumbles which washed away with the refreshing rain. Despite his recent defeat, the man before her was not a defeated man, and if anything, she suspected, much as the lethalness of an animal increases when it is trapped in a corner and wounded on its hide, Rhett was more dangerous this afternoon than he had been last night. Unwittingly, she reached out and ran her fingertips across a scar on his abdomen, the crescent shape shiny against the deep olive of his muscles. The scar had always been a mystery to her. He had always been a mystery to her.
"Scarlett, you accused my father of touching you. I need to know how." He stroked her cheek with his roughened thumb again. "Can't you tell me darling?"
Her heart responded to the feeling behind his last plea, and she fell into Rhett, resting her cheek against his inviting chest, his black curls a feathery pillow, the drum of his pulse and the whisper of his breath an accompaniment to the symphony of his voice. "Your father didn't do more than hold my hands and kiss my cheek."
Slowly Rhett encased her in his arms, and with as much patience, asked her about what else his father had said and done. In a tired, flat voice she responded to his questions, unburdening herself of all the heaviness of the last few hours, ending with her lonely, angry moment of waking up to an empty bed. Every few minutes, he shifted his hold on her in obvious discomfort, but his embrace remained steady, and she could not persuade herself to remove her body from the closeness of his. Rhett listened to her, without reacting—apart from a colorful stream of those curses she hadn't been able to catch for herself earlier, when she informed him of his father's plans for their baby, for their future babies.
"I don't care what he wants, Rhett," she said, nestling into his warmth. Somehow he still smelled of the sea. "No matter what your father is offering. I don't want any of it. Besides, I'll inherit Tara. I don't need another plantation, regardless of what happens with you."
"How comforting for you, my pet, to have a plan in place should something happen to me."
She let his comment lie without a reply and stared up into his dark eyes, hoping to see in his face what she could not guess from his tone. "You aren't thinking of taking up your father's offer, are you?"
"Good lord, no!" he exclaimed, one side of his mouth wrinkling down. "But he wants something from me, for the first time in years, something only I can provide."
"Great balls of fire! It's my body that provides the babies."
"Yes but you're mine." He grinned at her with a possessiveness that sent her blood spinning through her veins and her heart skipping as if under duress, a duress she had only begun to experience in his presence and in his embrace. He drew her back to his chest, a slight tremor in his arms that she could feel but not fathom. "I intend on using his offer to my full advantage—before the offer to inherit a plantation means the same as an offer to find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow."
"What on the earth are you going on about?" she asked, her voice muffled in his chest.
"And here I thought I'd made a reference you would understand." A low chuckle rumbled in her ears. "Never you mind, Scarlett. This will work for our good. That is all you need to know. It's just as well to let you remain in your blissful ignorance."
"Don't talk to me like that. I had my fill of riddles from your family."
"Misunderstanding is the price you must pay to be married to me," he replied, twirling a strand of escaped hair back into her bun.
She frowned, recalling that Rhett's father had said nearly the same thing. There were just enough similarities between the father and son that she needed some space—from both of them. Rhett was languidly drawing circles on her back, content to stand here and hold her, bizarrely unhurried and at home, and she unscrambled from his embrace, as titillating as the ministrations of his fingers across the thin fabric of her dress had felt, and shuffled back a foot or two. Rhett stared at her, with those depthless, unknowable eyes, eyes that had witnessed a lifetime of mornings perhaps as harrowing as this one had been. Straightening her spine, she was about to ask for those promised answers, when Rhett's bark of a laugh cut her off.
"So you know about Rockwell's one indiscretion then?" he asked, jeering his brother but also somehow her. "I was rather proud of him for showing some freedom of spirit, and choosing to raise the bastards as his own. It requires the scruples of a true scoundrel to force the brats of a mistress into the arms of a barren wife. I never believed he had it in him to ruin two women at once."
"You're one to talk. After all you did to that poor Plimpton girl about the buggy, you might be more careful with your jibes about ruined women," Scarlett depreciatingly replied, annoyed that he hadn't seemed the least surprised by her earth-quaking news, and more than a little mollified that he could jest with such indifferent glee on a husband forcing a wife to care for illegitimate heirs. Why! It was only yesterday evening when she had wept to him over his past sweethearts and possible offspring. Bullishly she wondered what he would say should she tell him the one omission she had made in her retelling of her conversation with his father. She doubted Rhett could be as glib when confronted with her keeping a lover.
Unaware of the devilment enlivening her fine features, she gasped when Rhett drawled in her ear, his lithe body newly pressed against hers, his accent theatrical: "Fear not, fair wife, I vow to ruin thee with much more care."
She ought to slap him away, but there was such a merry mischief to his expression, his red lips spread in a sultry grin, that she dimpled blushingly at him, wanting to kiss him. She had never initiated a kiss—not even on that heady night when she had unbuttoned his shirt. In all her kisses from all her beaux, she had not once been the first to move toward the man. She glanced at her husband and that courage which she had brandished as a furious weapon for the better part of the morning utterly failed to rise to this dearer, more delicate challenge.
"How did you know about your brother? It isn't common knowledge," she said instead, with an air of false injury.
Rhett smiled down at her as if he had read her mind, giving her the moment. "It's more commonly known than Helena could ever survive to learn, but I am not exactly a commoner, either." His eyes lit with that secret mischief. "I hope you can find some empathy now for Helena in your wonderfully selfish heart."
"My heart isn't half as selfish as yours, or as hard as hers. She can't be blamed her for not being able to have babies, but beyond that, any woman who lets her husband make a fool of her in front of all her friends doesn't have a lick of my pity."
"If anyone is deserving of your rare sympathies, it is the other daughter-in-law to my father."
Scarlett pursed her lips in reply. The recital of her conversation with Kingsley had been too much for her, as the image of her rascally husband in chains had been. The entire day had been too much. It had been too much. It was still too much. And it wasn't finished. Rhett had not told her about his side of the day's events. The story for why they hid in a wood within the boundaries of his banished inheritance still remained unknown to her. Without any more explanation, however, he jogged away and rummaged in the brambles, withdrawing a replica of the carpetbag that Rebekkah had toted around this morning. He unzipped it and his brown face sparked with a wry humor, "Always reliable," he muttered.
Scarlett approached to where he crouched and peeked over his sinewy shoulder, realizing that it was not only a replica but the very same bag. Three empty canteens rolled around the bottom of the bag, as did a pair of Rhett's shoes and stockings, some more sailor garb, several more honey cakes, and a flask of whiskey. Rhett uncorked the flask, swilled half of it down in one swallow, and handed it to Scarlett.
"No, thank you," she declined with a sneer. Ladies did not drink hard liquor, and certainly not ladies carrying a child.
"One day I will get you properly drunk on cognac and see if I can't contort your Irish prudishness into French plaisirs d'amour, however, for today, I would appreciate it if you would simply pour the remainder of the brandy over my back." He hopped to his feet, towering over her, and smiling down at her in that well-worn way of his that made her equal parts amused and annoyed—and warm in the blood.
"I'm not going to get drunk to give you something to laugh at me about," she said curtly, swiping the flask from his open palm. Her stomach had been emptied of its contents, and her mood was beginning to reflect her gnawing hunger, eating away at whatever stores of perseverance she might have called upon, her courage and her temper never higher than when the threats posed were of a physical nature.
She sashayed around to his rear, stuffing that urge to flee at the task, suddenly thankful that her belly ached from neglect. A lump rose in her throat, a tangible, unmoving scream, at the detail of his wounds up close and in the daylight, but she sucked it down, and poured the amber liquid over his expansive back. Rhett tensed as the brandy sizzled over his welts, but thanked her in a deep sigh.
With gleaming eyes, he turned around and lifted the flask from her grip, pouring the last drop onto his waiting tongue. The single drop trickled out and Rhett rolled it around his mouth, growling in an animalistic way that spiked something earthy in Scarlett. He dabbed the flask at her. "To be clear, pet, I don't want to get you drunk to laugh at you. I want to get you drunk to lay into you and see how far you've fallen from your mother's ideas on the holiness of the marriage bed."
"God's nightgown! I'm your wife!" she cried, using her pa's favorite exclamation to cover her humiliation.
"Precisely," Rhett silkily replied.
Chuckling at her expense, he leaned over and grabbed a few more items from the bag, tossing some cakes at Scarlett, and picking some berries and mint leaves for "extra flavor." Greedily she caught the cakes, fisted the berries and mint, and retreated against the spindly bark of a willow tree, settling herself in a gap of the curtained leaves.
Rhett devoured a honey cake in one bite, as he shook his clothes out from the bag. He was in a mood this afternoon, as if spending time at his childhood home had peeled away some maturity of years and presented her with the raw, ornery young man who had been brash enough to lose his birthright. Since their escape, an excitement hovered about him, and a giddiness at their reprieve. She needed to take back some control of the day, and his off-hand foreign words and scandalous threats, his most recent joke reminding her of some of the nastier insinuations of his father, inspired her ire in a way totally removed from her indignation from the past couple hours. It was a fire which burned to cleanse, which heated her in an invigorating way.
Food, Scarlett decided, was better at setting spirits right than anything else, better than talking or singing or praying—and she disinclined to cross herself for her irreligious thought. In fact, she decided food was even better than any tawdry delights in which Rhett intended to involve her. All too soon, that racey aside was tested. Satisfied of soul and stomach, her hunger took on a different hue, almost to spite her.
She ate her cakes, watching Rhett with an unmasked fascination. He had never been so comfortable in his actions, so commonly casual in his behavior in front of her. Friendly-like, he told her about the origins of this neck of woods, describing to her the rudimentary cabin that once stood a few yards away, built by the first Butler settlers, and their discovery of the wild mint whose scent repelled mosquitos.
As he laughed about boyhood misadventures in bramble scratches and berry over-indulgences, he filled the canteens, using the rusted well line, handing her one canteen, drinking his own, and using the other as an impromptu bucket. He hummed as he washed in the well water, wagging his wetted hair as a dog would after running through a shallow river, the droplets spraying across her bare arms. His filthy pants were stripped off in a single move, his untanned, toned backside strangely appealing, and her eyes melted emerald for the few seconds while she ogled his nakedness, forgetting in her exhaustion and enchantment to be embarrassed, until he pivoted around and the sight of his uncovered, unmissable masculinity filled her vision. Too delayed, she averted her bright gaze, and Rhett loped toward her, his sexuality unleashed.
"Dare it be true? The chaste, country belle has evolved into an open voyeur?"
"A what?" she asked, pinning her eyes on the top of the thatched well roof.
"A woman, or man, who enjoys looking, dearest, peeping lady."
"I wasn't looking. I was lost in thought."
"Even better. You've progressed from looking to fantasizing."
"I did nothing of the sort," she declared, daringly tossing her gaze back at him.
He sidled closer and stared down at her, a dripping, rugged pagan, one of those beautiful, nocturnal demons from Gerald's stories, his skin shimmering from the well water, his eyes shimmering darkly. Scarlett's heart hammered in a betraying thrill of anticipation; her tongue thickened with thirst, a thirst of a dormant desire. Kingsley's mocking insults nudged her to resist, to prove that she was a lady, to stubbornly reject the inevitability. What if someone came into the woods? What if they were being watched?
In the end, Rhett didn't give her the opportunity to deny him. Or she chose not to take it, forgetting those untouchably, pristine women set high on impossible pedestals, discarding her fears of exposing herself to an intruder's eye. He flung the canteen and half-eaten cake from her hand to the forest floor before he crashed into her, his strong, naked body walling her off from the distracting world. His damp, hard flesh pinned her against the rough bark of the tree. His mouth covered hers, consuming her, tasting of berries and mint.
Willingly she responded, careful of his injuries, stunned by the ramping of their carnal desires. He lifted her at her thighs as he lifted her dress, tearing away at her pantaloons with the same fevered disregard as last night. She should have screamed, but instead she moaned, the vestiges of her fears for his liberty and her life seeping from her at his heated touch. Instinctively she laced her legs around his waist and closed her eyes, waiting for that intoxicating pressure to fill her once more, but it didn't come. Rhett stopped kissing her, and her lungs heavy from lust, she met his wild eyes with her own chaotic gaze.
"Tell me again, Scarlett," he whispered, in a voice rich with tenderness, one hand firm on the nape of her neck, the other arm holding her against the tree. She knew what he wanted to hear, surprising even herself, her clap of understanding enhanced by her natural willingness to say those words, uncomplicated as she was in her desires to express her heart.
"I love you, darling."
He did not tell her the same; he did not give her time to feel mortified or ashamed or regretful for her confession. For this second confession, he kissed her with a completeness which only he could command. He pulled his mouth away, and his breath became hot gusts on her neck that matched the sway of his hips, answering the void of his absent declaration with a warm, pulsing fervor.
The frenzy of passion was gone as swiftly as it had arrived, as a summer storm that speeds over the sky, menacing the earth below for a matter of minutes, the clouds then hurtling away across the heavens and out of sight. Rhett kissed her once more, as insistent as it was brief, and walked to the branch where he had hung his clothes.
Scarlett smoothed her dress in a hopeless languor, her skin sticky from the day and their descent into primal madness. She stared at the thin, purple fabric, remembering the provenance of the gown and reddening at the recollection. Eleanor Butler was a lady, a complicated, collected, undeniable lady. Neither Rhett's mother nor any other well-mannered, soft-spoken female of her acquaintance would ever do what she had so easily done—be taken, no given herself up, like some wanton woman of ill-repute, like some low-down animal.
Rhett always seemed to want to push her in the opposite direction of whatever she had been taught as a young girl to do, some perverse unfinishing education, where bawdiness was applauded and brazenness expected. There were no lessons she had gleaned from her days at actual school or her tutelage by her mother and Mammy on what a wife should and shouldn't do with her husband that could possibly apply here. This was the re-education of her by Rhett. None of her teachers had planned on her marrying a man who was not a gentleman, a man who was determined to make her into the antithesis of a lady.
Scarlett was tempted to stomp and rage about as she had this morning—if it had only been this morning—cursing Rhett for using her body to serve his own needs, but peeking at him through the veil of her thick lashes, tracking her slitted gaze over his shredded back, hearing his deep grunt as he pulled his shirt over the evidence of his father's cruelty, she experienced an unusual pang of compassion, without the usual sting of derision. And maybe, she disarmingly wondered to herself, she had used him as well.
Rhett finished tucking in his shirt, scooped up the bag, and strode toward her. She failed to meet his brassy gaze with any measure of equal audacity, slinking behind a braided sheet of willow leaves and bumping into the trunk, the texture of the bark flushing her cheeks with added color. Undeterred, he parted the foliated strands, hooked the bag on a branch, and halted impossibly close to her.
"You must forgive me again for my impetuosity, my dear," he drawled with exaggerated politeness, kicking at her rumpled pantaloons on the forest floor. "It seems I am unequal to the challenge of waiting for something as trifling as removing your underclothes with any consideration for their preservation. Next time in town we must buy the older variety without those irksome buttons."
"Fiddle-dee-dee," she said breathily. "I don't forgive you."
He flicked his eyes down at her bust line, and flicked his finger on her jutted chin. "And I don't care either way, but niceties must be observed. After all, what is society but politeness for the sake of predictability? Well, that's enough said about that, and brings me to the matter I promised you I would discuss, Scarlett."
The sudden shift in tone from seductive rake to calculating stranger so disconcerted her, sending a quick memory to her of the flat-footed randomness of her discussion with Kinglsey, or her circuitous conversation with Eleanor, that she stammered: "Wha—what?" and inwardly groaned: "Oh lordy! Here comes more nonsensical explanations and Butler blabbering!"
"I know that you are as innocent as Eve, for all your coquettish charms and, er, recent adventures in marital relations."
"I don't know how you can even claim that."
"I think you do know, else you could look me in the eye, and manage not to blush beet red, as you are so appetizingly doing right now. At any rate, I am going to have to overlook your persistent, albeit pleasantly pliable, sense of propriety. After I had convinced my father to sell me Rebekkah, or rather after my mother had called in her favor, I had to convince Rebekkah that to come with me and care for my petulant bride was worth leaving her post as the mammy to Rockwell's children."
"What do you mean you had to convince her?" questioned Scarlett.
"We are off to a rocky start indeed if you cannot accept what I say at face value. I might have anticipated suspicion from you about my intentions but not my explanations. My mother would only support my purchase of Rebekkah if Rebekkah were in favor of the trade. It is as simple as that."
"Nothing is simple with your people."
Rhett's eyes danced, and he gently brushed his hand across her budding womb. "Well be sure to include yourself in that grouping, my pretty helpmeet, because you are my people, as is Rebekkah. And she was not overly eager to go along with my plan, to swap the malleable twins of Rockwell for a spoiled, pugnacious belle of a backwoods Georgian county. Now swell up like a bullfrog, and tell me all the unsung virtues of your precious wilderness and your precious self."
"I will not dignify your rudeness with a direct reply," she airily retorted. "But to be clear, I had my pick of beaux from three counties. I would hate for you to think I was stuck with one county and you as my only options."
"Add conceit to your other admirable qualities," he laughed. "And I am well aware of how unstuck to me you were at the beginning of our relationship, my dear. Had I chosen to go a different way from the library that day, you and not my sister might be writing letters to Charles Hamilton."
"Perhaps you should remind yourself of that the next time you want to compare me to a toad."
"Bullfrog. The color is far more apt, but I will take your counsel under consideration. Now before I go on to what I was intending on explaining at the off, let me disabuse you of the notion that because I can wax on so calmly about your past admirers that I am willing to show the same reserve when it comes to any interest in you at present."
There was an instant intensity in his gaze, though he spoke lightly.
"I told you before my first voyage abroad that you could flirt and dance with whichever poor saps caught your fancy while I was away, but that you were forbidden from falling in love with any of the gentle blockheads. You haven't forgotten that, have you?"
"No, I haven't forgotten."
"Good, because since I came home to find that you had fallen for me of all people, an avowed blackguard, my trust in your judgement about the sort of man you are prone to love has, in a few words, suffered a fatal blow. I certainly expected you, in your youth and impulsiveness, to give your heart away as readily and rashly as you had done in the Twelve Oaks library, but I freely admit I never presumed I would be the replacement of the dull Mr. Wilkes, at least not the subsequent replacement."
"I'm not some lovesick girl who can't make up her mind," she hotly denied, his accusation that she frittered away her declarations riling her.
"Perhaps you are more constant than precedent suggests, but your exchange of affection has been swift, leading me to believe you are very much as temperamental in your loves as you are in your moods, and to your credit, I covet my current position with a quixotism which I am surprised still lingers in my heart."
He paused, grasping her by the shoulders with his strong, warm hands, and Scarlett craned her neck to look up at him, straining to understand the message hidden in his wandering explanation, her anger forgotten in the wayside of hope. Was he about to tell her he loved her? Her heart pattered at the thought, her breath a trapped gasp in her lungs.
"I wonder if you are prescient, my dear, calling forth the word toad. "I had rather be a toad, and live upon the vapor of a dungeon than keep a corner in the thing I love for others' uses." Not the most-off quoted speech by the Bard on jealousy, but a remarkably pat one for our purposes. For I did choose a dungeon over the prospect of sharing you with anyone. Not only that, but I threw away a week of planning, as well as the forfeiture of my peace and not a little pride, to make it clear to my father that you were not to be played with by him. You are my plaything, Scarlett, if that is what I want from you. My plaything. My pupil. My people. My wife."
A softness infused his hawkish features, a curious expression of amusement and astonishment, that plied her as putty in his hands.
"You are such a headstrong, insensitive girl, my dear. I thought I knew what I had bargained for in taking you on, but the tenacity of your bravery and the stridency of your love, born of a boundless selfishness, I fear, are greater and deeper than I had judged. No one but a person as willfully vain as you are could have demonstrated the temerarious single-mindedness to have satisfied my father's peak of interest in you into an outright admiration. Do you understand what I am saying?"
Scarlett shook her head, inadvertently relaxing her shoulders which he continued to massage with his hard fingers. He had said so many things, mentioning his secret plans and his pride, praising her for some of her worst traits and claiming to be jealous of her heart, but beyond that, talking at her, about her, but not to her, and most disappointingly, amidst all his words on love, he had not spoken them in reference to himself.
He smiled softly at her bewilderment, his grip on her slackening, as if only becoming aware of how firmly he had been holding her. "It means I have finally met my match, my darling wife—and that my father has at last met his reckoning."
A tear from the willow splashed onto the tip of her nose and in an oddly intimate gesture, he kissed the droplet from her. With a drawn-out exhale, he released her and took a step back, folding his hands in front of him. "Better not to tempt myself, or you truly will be as Eve, denuded and ravished with total disregard." He glided his gaze down to her abdomen. "Alas your fragility is not the only well-being I must consider."
Blushing anew at both his easy admission of his temptations and his oblique reference to her embarrassing, female condition, she said in a tremorous voice, "You really are shameless."
"And happily so," he admitted. "Now, onto the particulars of this morning and what I had planned verses what has transpired. Yes, I took you to the cabin last night with the foreknowledge that I would be using its bridge to transverse into the hallowed grounds of my father's kingdom, but my initial intention for doing so was not to defend your honor, but rather fulfill the promise I had made to at last wrangle Rebekkah into watching over you, which in the end, was the obvious inducement of keeping her within walking distance of her husband."
"That Eli you spoke about with your father? Is that how he was injured?" Scarlett pulled herself up. "Don't tell me you were fool enough to try and steal him out from under your father's nose—you could be hanged for that."
"Pax amica mea." Rhett waved his hand at her. "I came to assure Eli of my solid intentions to buy him in view of our prospective home in New Orleans, and attempt in person what my lawyers had failed to do via letters. I had reasoned that waiting until the day of our departure would provide me with a better chance of getting what I wanted from my father, as the immediacy of my removal from his beloved Charleston might sweeten the deal. His visit to you yesterday had more to do with reminding Rebekkah of what she had lost in coming with me than in believing I was open to him repurchasing her from me—although I don't believe my father would ever lay down money for her, no matter if she were to return to my brother's household or not."
"Your mother didn't seem to know a thing about Eli, when she talked to me about you showing up on her morning walk with her husband, and by her own account, scaring her witless."
"I would wager all the South's war chest that my harmless appearance never stole my mother of her ready wit, with the allowance that it did startle her. As for her failing to bring up Eli in her version of what happened and how much you needed to know, I struggle to see anything wrong or contradictory—she told me herself what she had related to you and how you had reacted."
Scarlett's forehead crinkled in confusion. "What do you mean your mother spoke to you? Why—why you can't mean she saw you chained up in that awful place and left you there?"
"That's precisely what I mean. And it was the second time she did so, the first occasion happening shortly after my shackling. What else should she have done? You know who had possession of the keys. Clever as she is, she is no pick-lock. She gave me water, as she had done before, and as important, fresh news. She wanted me to be on my guard that my father was in a private conference with you, but that Rebekkah and she had made it to the cabin before any of the unseemly men who work for my father had managed to sniff you out."
Rhett's eyes warmed over and he touched the ruffle which framed her low décolletage, skimming his knuckle along her breasts. He moved his hand back to slide it into his pocket.
"She also informed me of the dress she had given you, which may I take the opportunity to say, is a shade of purple I hope to see you in again. The color offsets the cream of your skin in such a tantalizing way that I may not want you to wear the dress for anyone but me, and only in our bedroom."
"Then I would suggest you find me some other dresses in this color, otherwise it will be as ruined as..." she faltered under his disrobing gaze, the sass which had sprung up to conceal the fluster sputtering out.
"As ruined as you are or as ruined as your pantaloons are? One could argue they are part and parcel the same."
"Oh you are the vilest man I ever had the misfortune to marry!" she cried, all a-tizzy from his satiny innuendos and feathery caresses, despising how effortlessly he evoked desires in her which had been latent before their marriage and which drove her to crave things that burned and throbbed and pricked, things that made her want to burn and throb and prick, in this moment, wanting nothing more than to pierce her nails into his skin as he pierced himself into her body.
"Careful, Scarlett, if you stomp your foot or fail to curb your tantrum, I may yet have you on the forest floor as I had you against this tree. Damaged of body and ego as I am, my instinct is to fill my own cup before worrying over what you might need as a salve for your pain, despite my best efforts to not run rough shod over you and your burgeoning womb with my, er, ardor."
She hardly knew whether or not to trust a word he was saying, but it was the second time he had joked about his diminished pride and she began to think there must be some authentic hurt behind the bravado. Perhaps she would have found his imprisonment belittling if she had stumbled upon him without first discovering who had bested him, but knowing the villain who was responsible for his temporary demise made his unflappable cool and incorrigible humor all the more impressive. Oh! She mustn't fall apart so easily for him, and surrender every ounce of respect.
"See if I care how you feel," she said with forced spit.
He rubbed his jaw ruefully. "There is too much truth to that, which makes your love for me all the more entrapping. Distraction seems to be your secret weapon. I think the generals should send you to the front lines and draw the Yankees' attention away from our brave lads in grey. I cannot stay on topic, and am as bad as a concupiscent school boy—"
"What sort of school boy?"
"Concupiscent, as in perpetually desirous, my lovely barbarian. In short, I blame your bedraggled appearance for my rattled focus."
Miffed by his comment on her literacy and looks, Scarlett reflexively petted her hair and fluffed her skirts, while Rhett smoothly went on:
"Suffice it to say, you now know what my stated purpose was for coming back home, and that is more than I ever meant to bore you with, if my resentment had not bound up my more rational inclinations when you weepingly told me of my father's visit, and if my temper had not boiled over at his baiting, but it did bind, and it did boil. Eli, who had been waiting for my approach, attempted to settle the fight, although not until I had broken my father's collar bone and my mother's screams had alerted the taskmasters of a problem. Eli was hurt in the ensuing scuffle of horses and men, and I was summarily punished before all the Butler household, black, white, and otherwise—with the exception of Rosemary, who is currently residing at Rockwell and Helena's townhome."
And there it was, or all he was willing to divulge. Scarlett sighed, unaware of the singularity of his explanations, or the magnitude of his openness. She only saw a husband who still kept his feelings for her to himself and the vulnerability of her position as the half of a whole who had offered up her heart and admitted defeat. There was an awkward lull which drizzled in the sudden interlude, and a breeze which streamed through the willow tree, swirling the leafy strings as chimes on a porch. Scarlett smelled the watery willow, the fresh mint, and pines, and the natural, musky cologne of Rhett.
"What now?" she asked, as a child might, eager to move on, capable of forgetting. Thinking of the future, she turned her face to the shaded sky and estimated the hour.
He raised his heavy brows at her. "What do you want to happen?"
She watched the rise and fall of his muscular chest, entranced by the serpentine shadows of the branches as they played across his olive skin and blended into his black hair. Unthinkingly, she pushed away from the trunk and wrapped her arms around his waist, resting her head on his welcoming, implacable chest. He stiffened at her embrace, his lungs expanded in a stifled breath, and then pleasantly relaxed, securing her in the ripples of his arms.
"For you to take me away from here," she said. "I want to go home."
"And where is that?"
There was only one place that would ever be home to her, one place where she might make sense of the last couple months, to make peace about the man and the family to whom she had bound herself. She loved the man, but she did not know him. And the recognition of that fact as she leaned against him, sensing the pounding of his heart echoing against her body, made her feel a million times older than her sixteen years, and a million miles away from home. She closed her eyes and saw the endless rolling hills, the deep, piney avenues, and the dusty, clay paths. Before she embarked on their new journey to New Orleans, after they had dealt with his father, she had to go someplace else first.
"Tara," she answered looking up at him, her green eyes aglow with the warmth of her thoughts for home.
Something flickered briefly in his deep eyes, something almost foreboding. "In good time, Scarlett, I will take you to Tara. Before my next voyage, I will see you safely home."
There again, a note of warning, this time in the sound of his voice, at the word home. He kissed her cursorily on the top of her head and stepped away from her. The abruptness of his departure left her with a disquieting chill and she hugged herself, hugging her womb. Questioningly she stared at him, but his black eyes were not on her. She followed the trail of his gaze over her shoulder and drew up, folding her arms more tightly over her belly.
Rebekkah emerged from the shadows of the thicket, her uncannily familiar eyes scanning the scene, lingering on the piled pantaloons, before locking onto Rhett who, to Scarlett's consternation, grinned wickedly.
"Guess we ain't going to New 'Leans today," Rebekkah dryly observed.
"Guess not," Rhett replied. "I hope you enjoyed the show, though."
"Good laws, if'n I don' have nothin' better to do than spy on you. As soon as I done left you the bag, I scampered right quick on to the hotel. I know what it means to work. I jes' returned from the backways."
"Your loss." Rhett shrugged.
"Nigh on past a dozen years later and you still causin' more trouble than a hornet in a hat."
"Bah! More like a hornet in a hornet's nest."
"I s'pose some things is different," a rare smirk on Rebekkah's austere, rose-colored lips, "the woman you done brought here this time is yo' wife."
Rhett roared with a devilish laughter, and Rebekkah finally glanced at Scarlett, who had failed to react to the goading comment. The young bride wore a funny expression on her pink, perspiring face, an expression of a fumbling, dawning awareness that this was the first time she had ever seen Rhett and Rebekkah interact, and frankly, she did not know what to make of it. It was like watching two sides of a mirror have a conversation. Her wide, green eyes swiveled from the female reflection to its male counterpart, and this time, when she thought of how spookily the profile of her husband, and by extension, that of Rebekkah, reminded her of the fanciful descriptions of demons and sprites and fairies from her pa's ghostly, Irish tales, she crossed herself with a shudder, wondering if she shouldn't offer a prayer as well.
Rhett winked at her, a twinkle in his coal-colored eye, and she almost slapped her palms into a steeple and right then and there gabbled a Hail Mary.
—
Note: Thank you to all the thoughtful reviews. I love all your insights, and they make me think. I fear I have already lost the interest of some of you. Please review, if you can. They are like little hellos that brighten my inbox. And frankly I do give a damn what you think and how you react. I was remembering when I first started this story...so much has changed in the world and in my life. When I initially started writing GWTW fanfics I was having all sorts of fertility issues and found as much solace as panic in publishing my stories. Even anonymously it was difficult for me to commit to keeping my stories up and I took some of them down a couple times—it was a learning experience for me and an important one. Sharing my writing is hard but I'm grateful especially to this fandom for helping me to find my voice. And no, this isn't an oblique threat or anything of the kind that I am tempted to take my stories down again. I'm just in a musing mood. Stay safe and sane and healthy.
Also...it will be clear in the next chapter but no Rebekkah really did just arrive—she wasn't creeping on them! I had to make that cut...and Eleanor does explain herself later on...also...I do think Scarlett is selfish and that makes her as lovable as it makes her maddening...and if she were to have a sexual awakening by Rhett at such a young age, she would be very sexually active...was that too much steam? I tried to keep it "pg-13" as it is in the novel...I have wondered about doing a side story of their first time together in this story and calling it "A Bout de Smut," haha...but I don't know if I can write a lemony one-shot or not. Happy Wednesday! Two chapters in less than a week! I'm on a roll.