Chapter Thirteen The Wrong Train #2
His voice came out more wistful than he meant it to.
He wanted, with an intensity that frightened him a little, to bend down and kiss the tired, lovely face looking up at him from the shadow of the berth — eyes still holding both fear and something that looked almost like longing, tired as the drooping flowers still pinned at her collar.
He held himself steady against the wanting.
She was not his to kiss. Once she knew the whole truth of tonight, she would very likely never grant him that right at all.
"I'll try," she murmured, and then, with sudden concern, "But where will you be? Is your berth close by?"
"Not far — I had to take a spot in another car, everything's so full."
"Oh." Real worry crossed her face. "You're sure it's comfortable enough?"
"I'll be perfectly fine," he said, and felt a small, ridiculous joy at the simple fact of her caring whether he was comfortable at all.
The porter needed the space to finish the opposite berth, so he said good night, and she offered her hand in farewell.
He held it a moment longer than strictly necessary, a small, steady pressure meant as reassurance, then made his way back to the crowded day coach and folded himself into a hard corner seat, pulling his cap low over his eyes, letting the memory of that small touch wash over him in slow, warm waves unlike anything he'd ever felt before.
So this is love. And what manner of wretch was he, to let himself love a woman already promised — however cruelly, however falsely — to another man?
Romans 8:28 rose in him, unbidden, half comfort and half question: "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God.
" He wanted badly to believe it applied here, to whatever tangled, impossible situation he'd stumbled his way into. He wasn't at all sure it did.
Then the memory of her eyes, the small warmth of her hand, the particular catch in her voice when she'd asked after his comfort, would wash back over him, and for a moment he forgot the villain standing — as far as he knew — between them, forgot everything but the astonishing fact of loving someone this completely, this suddenly, after knowing her scarcely a day.
Gradually, as the night wore on, his racing thoughts settled enough to consider what he'd actually say to her come morning.
It was fortunate, in a way, that tonight's crowded chaos had made real conversation impossible — he couldn't have told her everything even if he'd tried, not with the message still undelivered.
If all went well, they'd reach Washington by morning; he could hold her off gently a while longer, deliver the cipher, and then, finally, lay the whole absurd truth before her and let her judge him as she saw fit.
His heart lifted painfully at the faint, foolish hope that she might somehow forgive him — though reason told him it was a vanishingly small hope.
Somewhere in New York, surely, there was someone she'd have chosen freely, if the scoundrel blackmailing her hadn't forced this marriage on her first. The best Graham could offer, once the truth came out, was his protection and whatever help he could give in bringing her tormentor to justice.
Whether she could ever trust a man who'd let her be bound, however unwittingly, to a total stranger — that, he had no way of knowing.
So the night wore itself away between hope and dread. Forward in the sleeper, Calie lay awake a long while herself, turning over the day's strange events, until somewhere near midnight a single thought rose up out of the dark with sudden, startling clarity.
She sat up straight, staring into the blackness of her curtained berth as though the thought were something she could actually reach out and hold.
It had come to her from an idle memory of the man's hair, dark and thick, curling loose across the pillow that morning as he slept.
And it struck her, all at once, that this was not Gregory Hostetler's hair at all.
Gregory's had always been thin, black, and faintly oily — the kind that collected itself into greasy little strings at the first hint of warmth, giving him, even as a boy, the perpetual look of a cat caught out in rain.
One particular lock at his crown had never once lain flat, however hard he tried to train it — his single point of real vanity, and his single unwinnable battle.
The hair she'd admired that morning, gilded by the rising sun, had done nothing of the kind.
It had waved close and warm against a well-shaped head, glossy and full of life, curling the way hair curls when it simply wants to.
Could ten years truly change a man's hair that thoroughly?
Could black become brown? Oil become shine?
Could hair that had always lain flat and thin suddenly grow thick and warmly curled?
She had no answer to the puzzle, but the shape of the question itself brought a strange, unlooked-for comfort as she turned it over in the dark.
Two facts stood plain before her now: he had denied writing the letters, flatly and without hesitation, and his hair — however impossible it seemed — was simply, undeniably wrong for the man she'd feared marrying.
Who, then, is he? Certainly her husband now, whatever else remained uncertain.
But if hair and deeds could both change so completely, could a whole spirit not have changed as well?
At the very least, she thought, drifting finally toward sleep, he was not the man she'd spent three terrified months dreading.
That much, at least, she could hold onto until morning.
At last, with that small, fragile comfort settled over her, she slept.