Page 96 of Just Imagine
Cain turned, the carbine across his chest. “You even look like you’re going back there, and I’ll lock you up and throw away the key.”
“You’re hateful, do you know that?”
“So you keep telling me. Has it once occurred to you to ask me about what happened instead of throwing accusations around?”
“What happened was obvious.”
“Was it?”
Suddenly Kit felt unsure of herself. Cain was no coward, and he never did anything without a reason. The edges of her temper cooled, but not her anxiety. “All right, suppose you tell me what you had in mind when you left Magnus with a man who wants to see him lynched.”
“You’ve made me just mad enough, I’m going to let you figure it out for yourself.”
He began walking toward the house, but Kit jumped in front of him. “Oh, no, you’re not getting away that easily.”
He shifted the carbine to his shoulder. “Magnus hated your interference, and he’d have hated mine, too. There are some things a man has to do for himself.”
“You might as well have signed his death warrant.”
“Let’s just say I have more faith in him than you seem to have.”
“This is South Carolina, not New York City.”
“Don’t tell me you’re finally admitting your native state isn’t perfect?”
“We’ve talked about the Klan,” she said. “The last time you were in Charleston, you tried to get the federal officials to take action against them. Now you act like the Klan doesn’t exist.”
“Magnus is his own man. He doesn’t need anybody to fight his battles. If you knew half as much as you think you know, you’d understand that.”
From Magnus’s viewpoint, Cain was right, but she didn’t have any patience with that kind of male pride. It only led to death. As Cain walked away, she thought of the war, which had once seemed so glorious.
She fumed and stomped around for most of an hour until Samuel appeared, a grin on his face and a note from Sophronia in his hand.
Dear Kit,
Stop worrying. Spence is gone, Magnus is fine, and we’re getting married.
Love,
Sophronia
Kit stared at it with a mixture of joy and bemusement. Cain had been right. But just because he was right about this didn’t mean he was right about anything else.
Too much had happened, and all her feelings about Sophronia, about Risen Glory, and about Cain tumbled around inside her. She headed for the stable and Temptation, then remembered that Cain had ordered her not to ride the horse. A small voice told her she had only her own recklessness to blame, but she refused to listen. She had to settle this with him.
She stalked back to the house and found Lucy in the kitchen peeling potatoes. “Where’s Mr. Cain?”
“I heard him go upstairs a few minutes ago.”
Kit shot down the hallway and up the steps. She threw open the bedroom door.
Cain stood by the table picking up some papers he’d left there the night before. He turned to her, his expression quizzical. He saw that she was seething and lifted one eyebrow. “Well?”
She knew what he was asking. Would she break the unwritten rule between them? The rule that said this bedroom was the one place where they didn’t argue, the one place that was set aside for something else, something as important to both of them as the air they breathed.
She couldn’t break that rule. Only here did her restlessness fade. Only here did she feel . . . not happy . . . but somehow right.
“Come here,” he said.
