Chapter 1
Chapter One
Elizabeth Amelia Taylor Spencer, eldest daughter of Edward Spencer, America’s wealthiest banker stood on a high muddy embankment of the swirling Meramec River.
She placed her hand on her swollen abdomen, her throat burning from the shame of her desolate confinement that downgraded her to be hidden in the far reaches of the frontier.
The thing growing inside her kicked hard on her bladder and she raised her eyes to the heavens blotting out her torturer.
Dark copper beneath a cloud mass morphed to lead, engulfing her, eradicating any hint of sun and surrendered a mutter of thunder.
Willows stood still their leaves pricked to the firmament.
It would rain again. For ten days it had rained, the sky pouring out its wretchedness, leaving the river roughed up with little waves like the flat side of a cheese grater and swollen beyond its banks.
Oh, to take one step. To fall into the whirling miasma. How easy. To end her disgrace and misery. To let the river waters carry her to the Mississippi. Maybe someone would find her body before it emptied into the vast delta of the gulf. Maybe they wouldn’t. She didn’t care.
How had she come with child? Why could she not remember?
The onslaught of vomiting that terrible morning in front of her mother had raised alarm bells.
As if she possessed a dreaded disease, Elizabeth had been quarantined to her room, the doctor confirming her pregnancy.
Accusing eyes. Pointing fingers. Her mother had been relentless.
How could her daughter have carried on so shockingly? Who was the father?
Elizabeth lost everything but the ability to cry. She lived in a reverse nightmare, except waking up did not release her from the nightmare. She woke up to the nightmare.
She wiped away a tear. She did not know the father.
At nineteen years of age, she was na?ve to the intimacies between a man and a woman.
Her mother had not believed her, and more hurtful, her father had not believed her.
Other than her parents, the doctor and her lady’s maid were the only ones who knew her horrid secret and had been sworn to secrecy.
Through her mother’s machinations, and a huge sum of money, she had been sent to live with a discreet elderly cousin at a remote Missouri farm until her confinement was complete.
She swallowed. The baby would be placed for adoption.
Elizabeth would return to New York City with her family’s reputation intact.
From a splintered cloud, icy rain fell, the droplets crumbling apart, and then abandoning its shattered pieces over her. Shattered herself, she welcomed it.
On an ancient and doubtful bridge nearly capped by the roaring violence of the flooded river, a man halted his horse and yelled to her.
She leaned forward. The wind gusted with passion, drowning his words.
Her skirts billowed like sails on a ship in front of her, propelling her forward.
The sodden earth beneath gave way. Elizabeth’s arms windmilled frosty air.
Sliding, tumbling, she stretched her arm, her backside plunging through slick mud.
She searched for a handhold to stop her fall.
A thousand needles stung into her pores as she descended into the river’s icy tentacles.
Her breath halted from the shock of it. The weight of her coat dragged her down, holding her there.
Swept along by swift eddying currents, she had no notion what was up or down, sideways, or forward.
Perhaps the strangest awareness was that she would drown.
Her shame would be no more. The universe sucked the world out in chest-squeezing panic, and a sense arose that the river held all the authority.
Darkness blanketed and blurred at the edges, in time with the river that heaved and devoured.
The baby shifted in her abdomen. A baby, not a thing. Her baby, and with the movement surged a desire to survive. For her baby.
Her coat was a deathtrap. She ripped at the buttons, shrugged free of the water-soaked garment, and kicked to the surface.
Coughing and sputtering, she sucked in gulps of air.
Someone was shouting. It was as if he were calling from another world.
All the while, the current swirled and eddied, sweeping her farther and farther away from the voice.
Teeth chattering, she looked back, scanned the horizon.
A dark head emerged farther down. He swam toward her in quick strides.
Slammed against a log, Elizabeth cried out, and clutched her abdomen.
Go with the flow. Don’t fight the river.
A tree limb hung low. Up ahead. More shouting.
Her numb mind said grab it. She reached up, stretched her fingers, hooked her hand in the fork of the tree.
Cold. Freezing water sluiced over her. How long could she hold on with icy water sapping her energy her arm breaking with the water rushing over her, and her stomach knifing in pain?
Just as she thought she couldn’t hold on another second, the man slipped next to her. “Put your arms around my neck,” he commanded. She dared not let go. He pried her fingers from the limb, placing her arms around him, and then hauled them along the tree’s branch.
On the shore, she vomited, and then cried out with a piercing pain.
“The baby is coming!” Her teeth clattered together. So cold. So very cold.
The wind howled in plowing sheets of rain, blinding her. “Take me home.” She pointed.
Zachary Rourke shook the rain from his eyes, picked her up, and headed east to where she’d aimed her finger. He whistled for his horse to follow. Couldn’t see a damned thing. What the hell was he thinking plunging into frigid river to save a woman, and one that was ready to hatch
He hated women. He possessed and cursed a vigorous scorn to all women except for his mother and sisters-in-law. He’d learned the hard way from one wicked, treacherous, scheming, and seducing woman.
“Help me!” she screamed and writhed in his arms. He had to get her out of the elements.
Deliver her to her home, and then wash his hands of her.
Couldn’t see in front of him, plunged ahead in the direction she’d indicated.
Embedded in his strong southern heritage was duty.
Helping a woman, especially one in the family way was part of a yoke that smothered him.
The girl’s teeth chattered so hard he thought her teeth would break. She was light as a feather, and young. Her hair was matted against her face, and she curled into his chest seeking warmth. Women were trouble. He had enough of women for a lifetime…at least one woman.
She screamed again, her pains coming faster and faster. He swore and quickened his pace. At this rate, she’d have the babe in his arms. For a half-mile, his long legs churned up the distance and beyond a veil of rain, he discerned a farm. “There’s a house up ahead.”
He kicked open a door. Yelled for the woman’s kinfolk. Nothing. An empty parlor, dining room and kitchen. He gritted his teeth. What kind of man would leave his wife alone when she was in a delicate predicament?
He strode upstairs and placed her on a bed. She lay pale, her breathing deep and laborious. He’d seen hypothermia victims and once they lost consciousness, their demise stayed a downward spiral.
“Where’s your husband?”
“I have no husband,” she wailed.
He went to the bedroom door. No sound. No one.
“My cousin must have gone to town and couldn’t make it back because of the storm,” the woman panted.
He had to get her warmed. As he moved to take off her blouse, her violet gaze clashed with his, startled and upset. “Ma’am, you are in a bad way, and I’m the only one that can help you. I’m worried about hypothermia. With all due respect–”
She nodded, her cheeks reddening. Keeping his eyes averted, he stripped off her sodden clothes, tossed them on the floor, covered her with soft, thick quilts.
He banked a fire, setting the room to a rosy glow.
When she napped between contractions, he sheltered his horse in the barn, and retrieved his knapsack.
She was sleeping fitfully when he returned.
He changed into dry clothes, laying his wet ones on the back of a chair in front of the fire to dry, and then hung hers on the armoire.
The woman woke screaming loud enough to make his ears bleed.
“I need a doctor!”
Zachary exhaled. There was no time to find a doctor. Birthing was foreign territory to him. Other than foals being born, he’d only witnessed one human birth by an Indian woman.
“I’m going to help you.” When he rolled the quilt up over her abdomen, exposing her legs, she pushed the blanket back down.
“It’s not proper.” She pressed her head back into the pillow with another breathtaking contraction.
How soft and vulnerable. He swept her bedraggled mop of dark honeyed wet hair from her forehead. When her pain passed, and it was only for a minute, she closed her eyes, breathing deep, seemingly unwilling to engage with life outside her body.
“When you get a birthing pain, I want you to look into my eyes, focus, breathe, melt the pain, be a cougar.” He whispered assurances to keep her going.
Outside the storm raged, spewing its wrath, the windows shaking with the incessant crack of thunder.
In the hallway, a clock chimed for the eleventh time.
Ten hours? Eleven hours? How long did babies take to come into the world? What if something was wrong?
In between pains, she opened her eyes and stared at him. “Don’t leave me.”
Her eyes were the deepest ocean, so fearful and uncertain. The violet hue carried his emotional currents, and before he could breathe, he drowned.
He knelt, took her hand. “Never.”
She possessed a refined, ethereal beauty. Her features were flawless, the nose straight and gracefully boned. Her stomach tightened again. When would her agony subside? Nothing could be more brutal for a woman.
He shoved up his sleeves, lifted the blanket again. No protest this time. She was in too much pain. He lifted her knees, saw the crown of the babe’s head. The woman held her breath.
“Push, Ma’am, Push.”
She lay exhausted. Faint and sweating and shrieking.
When her baby slipped out into his hands, the sound of the infant’s lusty cry was a pickaxe to the wall of cynicism he’d built around his heart.
“You have a girl, Ma’am.” He beamed, holding the baby up. “A beautiful baby girl.” He grabbed a silk ribbon from the dresser and yanked a knife from his soggy boot, cutting and tying the umbilical cord.
He lay the squalling baby on her chest. The woman shook her head. Didn’t she know what to do?
He looked her directly in the eyes. “The babe’s hungry.”
“I cannot. I cannot get connected to the baby.”
“You’re the mother. Of course, you can.”
“You don’t understand—”
No husband. She was going to give the baby up for adoption. “You can’t let her starve until you get a wetnurse.”
Her violet eyes teared. “I don’t know how.”
She didn’t know how? Every woman had seen a baby suckle.
Was she that sheltered? He rubbed the back of his neck.
Her voice was not midwestern. Cultured. Aristocratic.
She dropped the “r” sounds, the “aw” sounds thickening.
Like when she said town, it sounded like “tawn” and proper was “prawper”. Northeastern.
He cleared his throat and swooped the baby into his left arm. “If I may?” He lowered the quilt exposing one of her full breasts. She gasped, yanking the cover up to her chin. “Miss, I’ve seen your most intimate parts.”
She nodded, and he lay the howling infant next to her engorged breast where milk dripped.
The woman averted her eyes as he rubbed the nipple back and forth across the babe’s lips.
The baby latched on and quieted except for loud suckling sounds.
The room seemed to be eternally suspended as if his whole life had suddenly become ensnared in that moment.
The storm abated. With the dawn, glorious blazing colors of pinks, purples and blues streamed in radiant quartered patterns across mother and child.
Zachary inhaled. The immeasurable weight of a new and fragile life rose a startling and stark contrast to where he’d existed in twilight, a half-life of anger and shadow.
Caressing her newborn with undisguised pride, the woman smiled. She was a flower opening, blossoming for her own joy. Her mouth trembled as she reached up to touch his face with tentative fingers. “Thank you. Perhaps…somehow, I can keep her.”
“You’ll be like a cougar, Ma’am, protecting your daughter.”
For Zachary, a powerful tether grew, swirling, spiraling, connecting all of them.
He exhaled with the beauty of the miracle of life reflected to him in the mirror of another loving and caring human being.
His heart became a compass, the needle spinning true north.
A protective web of emotions expanded in his chest. To guard them.
To keep them safe. To vanish the poisonous distrust that had claimed his soul.
“What are you going to name her?” he asked, mystified with the spell woven around them.
An elderly woman rushed into the room, saw his damp clothes, and glared at him as if he were the devil incarnate. “Name her? Dear God. The baby has arrived?”