Much as he hated the buck for taking his Whit from him, he had to credit Major Townsend for treating him fairly. But the other federals hadn't bedded his only daughter. They'd have no reason to show justice or mercy to a known distiller like himself who had refused to sign a recanting pledge. He'd probably find himself in one of those frozen pits soon. And if he didn't come out of it, he at least wanted to know that Whit would be all right.

A movement at the side of his vision made Black turn and he watched the Iron Major approach slowly and stop. It took a moment to register that he wasn't staring at Black, but past him, to Whitney's retreating form. He'd obviously seen them together. Black watched the frustration, the smoky, reluctant need in the major's eyes and prayed he read it rightly. It was a man's need for a woman... one specific woman, a special woman. It would have to be enough. He turned to watch Whit threading through the soldiers.

"You'd better take care of her," he growled with telling thickness. When he looked up, the major met his gaze.

"I will."

A commendation, at least. That was Colonel Gaspar's crowing assessment of what Townsend could expect for his sterling work in cleaning out the festering sore of treason, Rapture Valley. Garner blinked and his mouth opened, worked briefly, then shut. A commendation... for letting a bunch of backwoods rubes and clucks bargain and humiliate him into total military impotence? For letting his volatile carnal cravings take complete control of his honor, sense of duty, and mission? For being caught, literally, with his breeches down? For arresting his own father-in-law after a bout of unbridled passion with his Jezebel bride?! The whole idea of being decorated for such a fiasco was perfectly appalling, and that fact alone was probably enough to insure it would come to pass. Fate seemed forever bent on handing him success with one hand, and perversely wrenching it away from him with the other. It seemed a fitting irony that the reverse should occur now... rewards and laurels, when they were the last thing on his mind.

As soon as a report was filed and the prisoners were secured, Major Townsend surprised Gaspar with a request that he be released from the duty of the march back to Maryland. He cited the presence of his bride, and the "inconveniences" such a march would inflict upon her. The colonel smiled an oily, obvious smile, relishing his knowledge of how the inconvenience of a backwoods bride was inflicted upon the gentlemanly major. And after a weighty pause, he agreed.

Whitney learned of their imminent departure when Garner appeared back in camp to announce that long-overdue pay was delayed yet again, that rations were short, and that he was turning command of the unit back to Lieutenant Brooks. Whitney protested and pleaded and resorted to down and out bargaining: "... after pa's trial..." Then: "a week... all right, four days!" And finally "... two days and that's my final offer!"

"Tomorrow!" he growled, glancing furiously at the lurid interest on the faces of his men as they gathered to watch.

"I won't go until I'm ready."

"The hell you won't," he declared. "I'll take you, kicking and screaming, if necessary." But as Garner started for her, intent on removing her bodily, Laxault's burly frame intervened like a moving wall. He glared stolidly into Garner's angry face, then turned to Whitney, giving Garner his back.

"You go on, Miz Townsend. We'll see to yer pa." A chorus of agreement from the rest of Rapture's erstwhile enemies sent tears rolling unexpectedly down Whitney's face.

The morning they left Pittsburgh, Whitney appeared for traveling, garbed in her breeches and boots, and Garner looked her up and down and went granite-jawed. He insisted she change into skirts, or he'd haul her bottom back up the stairs of the inn and dress her himself! She seethed openly, stomped back up the stairs, and vengefully pulled a skirt on over her breeches. It was an omen, she growled disgustedly. He was apparently going to try to make her act like a "lady-wife" now. Well, she wasn't a lady. She was a trader and a distiller and a Daniels... and he'd just have to get used to it. After all, it was his idea to drag her off to Boston with him in the first place.

When they got to the stable where their horses were kept, round-faced Benson was standing by the door, his rusting musket on his shoulder and a faithful-beagle look on his face. He explained that the Lieutenant had given him his walking papers early, figuring he might not survive the march back to Maryland... and he "jus' wondert if n the majur might be needin' the services o' a gentlemun's gentlemun."

Garner's eyes closed and he shuddered. "What do I look like, Brother Benevolent?!" When he opened his eyes, Benson was scratching his head, trying to recall if he'd ever heard of the fellow.

"D-dammit-" Garner growled. The longer he stayed in this wilderness, the more pests he seemed to pick up. He jabbed a finger toward one of the two packhorses and ordered, "Mount up!"

The journey was difficult at times, impossible at others. At first, Garner tried to secure nightly lodgings in barns belonging to suspicious and resentful hill farmers, who took one look at his once-glorious federal uniform and wanted nothing to do with him or the cash money he offered. Whitney watched his reined gentlemanly fury at their refusal with a perverse mixture of empathy and glee. She would have bargained them lodgings, but Garner went livid, hauled her away, and forbade it in the most emphatic terms. They spent two exceedingly miserable nights in the icy, early November rains, before Garner relented and allowed Benson to try bargaining them a bit of hay in a dry barn loft for the night.

Things were terrible indeed between them, and the closer they came to Boston, the harder Garner pushed the pace. Whitney assumed it was because he was eager to see his "almighty Townsend" family. It was in fact, however, avoidance of his unbearable desire for her delectable self that drove him straight into the jaws of his kin. He had determined that the only way to live with Whitney Daniels and her devastating effects on him was to avoid her as much as possible. And avoiding her at night in crowded inns where they shared a room, and ignoring her over campfires built for three were exercises in pure bodily agony.

When they reached New York, he hired a coach to carry them the rest of the way in a more civilized manner, and in greater haste. They would stop only for meals and changes of horses. But the jostling, rocking motions of the coach soon rocked the exhausted Benson to sleep and Garner found himself facing her alone again, knee to very warm knee, across a very quiet coach. With each passing hour, his mood darkened another shade and his body grew more rigid. His hands soon clamped his muscular thighs like tourniquets and his jaw was set like Townsend mortar. Every sigh, every blink of her feathery lashes, every unconscious lick of her luscious lips sent volleys of heat shooting through him.

Whitney read her own dread into his black mood, and believed his tension was produced by the prospect of facing his family with the circumstances of his forced marriage. And it finally occurred to her to ask a few questions about these "Townsends" among whom she would be required to make her life.

"The household consists of my father, my cousin Madeline, my grandfather, and myself," he ground out, adding with a huff, "... and now, you."

She bridled at his disdainful inclusion of her. "No brothers or sisters?"

"One brother, dead in childhood. My uncle died some years back and his wife soon followed him, leaving the Whitney recalled the pain of losing her mother and felt an instant bond with little Madeline. "And do they do anything, your Townsends, besides 'being rich'?"

Garner tore his eyes from her and stared out the coach window into the cold sunshine. "We have a large family business... which centers on the manufacture and sale of... rum."

"Rum?" she sat straighter, her mind working. "You mean Townsends manufacture rum? But rum is hard spirits... that would mean you're-"

"Distillers," he ground out irritably. And from the corner of his eye he saw the way her jaw loosened and the way she blinked and blinked again as if trying to absorb the unthinkable thought.

It shocked her into complete silence. Garner Townsend was a distiller, from a family of distillers... just like her! The knowledge rumbled around in her head for a few minutes and finally released a full wave of warmth through her. In some crazy way, it fit. And it probably accounted for the consuming fascination he held for her. Some part of her had recognized the distiller in him and responded to it in the most basic way imaginable. She should have known he was a distiller, she chewed back a smile, from his kisses... they packed the wallop of a double jolt of whiskey... or possibly rum.

And his family were distillers, too. A second wave of relief poured through her, and the awful tension that had been collecting in the middle of her dispersed. The knowledge suddenly made his fancy house full of strangers seem less foreign and far more accessible. A family of Boston distillers didn't sound nearly as bad as a family of Boston aristocrats, even if they were one in the same.

Sergeant Laxault returned to his camp outside Pittsburgh with a grim report. "Wull, we seen 'er pa," he growled, settling his burly frame onto a log beside the lieutenant, in front of a smoky campfire. The men of Major Townsend's old unit collected quickly to hear what had happened to their prisoners. "An' it looks like they been thumpin' on 'im, alright."

"Looks like a piece o' raw meat," Dem Wallace added angrily. "We never shoulda turned him over to 'em." A wave of shocked anger went through the men.

"We had no choice," Lieutenant Brooks interjected resentfully. "Colonel Gaspar ordered it. There's nothing we can do about it."

"Ye mean, jus' like there ain't nothin' we can do about no pay?!" stringy Ralph Kingery demanded.

"An' no rations?!" Dem Wallace added furiously. "We jus' have to sit here and starve an' freeze?! The hell I will. I'm due rations!"

"We shoulda stayed in Rapture," came lanky Ned's whine. "At least there, we had us decent food!"

"Hell, we're all hungry!" Laxault growled like distant thunder and stood to face them. After a long moment, a crafty glint appeared in the grizzled sergeant's eye. "We be sittin' here, nursemaidin' th' evidence aginst Miz Townsend's pa... and dyin' o' thirst an' hunger. We got us a oppor-toonity here, boys. There's plenty o' soljurs that did get paid who're jus' as thirsty as us. I say..." he waved them closer and lowered his voice to river-gravel level, "we sell 'em some o' old Black's brew. We git money fer food, an' git rid o' the evi-dence aginst old Black in the boodle."

"Ohhh... no!" the lieutenant protested, scrambling to his feet. "Tampering with evidence... it's... not right."

"Neither is them beatin' old Black," Dem Wallace declared with a determined scowl.

The men rumbled agreement, their eyes narrowing, their anger rising at the thought of four bountiful barrels of marvelous Daniels whiskey being used in evidence against their maker. There was something purely unnatural about it, they decided. And with the innate craftiness of hungry men, they overwhelmed and persuaded Lieutenant Brooks to turn a blind eye while the barrels were "spirited off" by "scurrilous persons unknown." And in a final act of rebellion against an arrogant officialdom that had used and abused and abandoned them, they bribed a guard to carry Black Daniels and Charlie Dunbar a bottle of the illegal, untaxed "evidence" as well.

The streets of Boston were cold, dark, and silent as the coach rumbled over the cobblestones toward the fashionable Beacon Hill part of the city. An occasional streetlamp cast weak beams through the windows, illuminating Whitney's sleeping form in dim golden flashes before Garner's troubled gaze. It was the middle of the night, and his studied frown expressed second thoughts about his decision to continue driving, even though it meant arriving home in the dead of night.

The coach rumbled down Beacon Street, past the grand Hancock mansion, and soon reined up before an imposing Georgian brick house, set back from the street by a carriage turn that led straight to a raised front portico with sweeping sets of steps down each side. Garner emerged from the coach onto the portico and sent the driver around to the side entrance to rouse the staff.

Shortly there was a rattle and a thumping behind massive white doors, which duly swung open. Garner carried Whitney's limp form past a white-haired fellow in nightshirt and cap, who was wrapped in a hastily donned robe and holding a fully lit candelabra.

"Master Garner! Sir-" the butler's eyes widened with alarm on Garner's rumpled state and several days growth of beard... and on the burden he carried.

"Do we have guests?"

"N-no, sir."

"Good. The blue room, across from mine, send someone up to build a fire," Garner ordered quietly. "And see the fellow asleep in the coach settled in the servant's hall for the night."

The butler startled and hurried after him with the candles. Garner carried her up the sweeping stairs and down the wide upper hallway to an elegantly carved door. The butler, Edgewater, lurched ahead to open it for him and he strode into a grandly furnished bedchamber to deposit her on a large draped bed. The butler stood by, dumbstruck, as his young master proceeded to divest the young woman of what he saw as a rather hideous felt coat and a pair of very worn boots, then carefully dragged the expensive brocade counterpane and down quilt from beneath to tuck around her gently.

"Tomorrow morning," Garner turned on the incredulous butler, "Mrs. Townsend is not to be disturbed before half-past eleven. Then see she's brought a full morning tray and a tub of hot water for bathing. I shall require the same for myself at half-past nine." He pulled one lighted taper from the butler's blazing candelabra and lit the candles on the marble mantel. He turned and found Edgewater staring at Whitney's unconscious form.

"Mrs. Townsend, sir?" A pair of hoary, imperious brows lifted.

"Mrs. Townsend," Garner asserted with authority. "If you take my meaning, Edgewater." The staid butler jerked a nod and hurried out to see to his instructions. Garner sighed raggedly. He'd just negotiated the first of several hurdles in this latest homecoming.

The next morning at half-past seven, a tidily starched and black-coated Edgewater met a sleepy servant in the upper hallway and relieved him of the morning tray bound for the Master Byron Townsend's chambers. Ordinarily it was a lesser servant's duty to deliver the tray, draw the brocades, and awaken the master, but on this morning, the fastidious butler was determined to do it himself. He let himself into the princely, polished chamber and deposited the tray on the laquered table near the carved marble hearth. He stirred the fire to life and laid on another log.

"Half-past, sir," he leaned discreetly near the edge of the master's bed, then withdrew to tug back the heavy, crimson brocades and open the shutters to admit the dawn.

Byron Townsend stirred in his warm bed and sat up quickly, rubbing sleep from his face with long, supple hands that continued back through dark, uncropped hair that was silvering at the temples. His long legs swung over the side of the bed and he blinked, appraising Edgewater's presence in his room.

"Has the paper come?" he asked, shoving his bare feet into kidskin slippers.

"The paper hasn't, sir... but Master Garner has." Edgewater busied himself with tying back the drapes.

"Home? You mean after I retired last night?"

"He and his party arrived quite late, sir," Edgewater intoned casually, transferring his attention to the tray, . where he poured a china cup full of steaming coffee.

"His party?" Byron reached for his robe but decided to take the cup of coffee Edgewater offered first, scrutinizing the butler's tight-lipped air. "He brought people home with him?"

"Hardly 'people,' sir. One military sort of person... not quite officer material, I should think. And of course, his bride. Will that be all, sir?" Edgewater dropped a cool little nod and turned to go.

"His what?" Byron's deep voice halted Edgewater in his tracks.

"His bride, sir." Edgewater turned back with a raised chin and an offhand sniff. "I believe he did call her 'Mrs. Townsend' as he disrobed her, sir."

"As he what? Disrob-" Byron choked it off, reddening, hardening before the frosty butler's gaze. "He's married? When did that happen... and who the hell is she? Who could he possibly have found to marry out on the beastly primitive frontier in the midst of a raging rebellion?! Good God-he went out there to put down this wretched whiskey insurrection, not to dally with the females and rut about... and get -" He halted and stiffened further, now resembling a ruddy stone monolith in both posture and color.

"Married?!" His volume increased now with each word. "How dare he-without permission?! A bride! God Dammit1 Where the hell are they?!" He tore past Edgewater, jostling him aside, and thrusting the sloshing cup into his hands. He strode down the broad hallway, his nightshirt flapping, and began pounding furiously on the heavy mahogany panels of Garner's door.

"Garner Adams Townsend-I demand you open this door! At once!" He paused, puffing and redfaced, then stormed inside, scouring the room, then the bed for his son and the questionable female connection. In the dim gray light, Garner lurched up, reeling and disoriented and clearly alone in the bed.

"Just where the hell is she, this 'bride' of yours?"

"Across the hall, sir," Edgewater offered smugly from the doorway. "The blue room, sir."

Byron stared at Garner's broad, bare chest and began to quake with impotent fury. "Dammit! How dare you do this to your family?!" He wheeled, and strode across the hall with blood pounding furiously in his head and filling his vision. And after three solid whacks on the door, he cursed again and used the handle, muttering, "It's forty-percent my damned house-"

Halfway to the bed he halted, watching Whitney rise shakily from the covers. Hair, light hair, lots of it... he could make out that much as she pushed up, rubbing her eyes and seeming confused. He stalked closer, peering into the gloom beneath the canopy and bed-hangings. Her light eyes stared back at him from a very striking feminine face.

"Who the hell are you?" he demanded imperiously.

"Well-who are you?" Whitney drew her chin back, blinking at his nasty tone, and casting a bewildered gaze around her. And where was she? She looked around wonderingly. In some big room... in a big, fancy bed. She looked down quickly and found herself dressed in her own shirt and skirt, and a quick feel beneath the covers confirmed that her breeches were still in place. How in Holy Hannah did she come to be- "Just what do you think you're doing, invading my wife's chamber like this?" Garner lurched into the room, bare-legged, bare-chested, still buttoning his breeches.

"Seeing for myself the results of your latest idiocy!" Byron tore his gaze from Whitney to impale Garner on it. "Married. Out on the bloody frontier. Good God."

"Yes, married," Garner stalked closer, "duly and legally so."

"Well it cannot have been 'honorably' done-else you wouldn't have come slinking home in the dead of night," Byron charged, coming unnervingly close to the mark with his thrust.

"A mere convenience of travel." Garner's jutting Townsend chin was matched by a stubborn-looking older version. "I was eager to be finished with the journey."

"Who is she?" Byron jerked a nod toward Whitney as she slid to the floor and came around the bed into the brighter light. He collected the details of her simple homespun skirt and mannish shirt and felt positively vindicated in his suspicions. "More to the point-what is she?"

Garner caught the shock on Whitney's face and his voice grated like a rasp on steel as he turned back to his father. "Out!" He stalked forward angrily, forcing Byron back out into the hall, using every bit of leverage his greater height permitted. "We'll discuss this later... not here... not now."

Whitney followed to the door as they argued, watching with shocked eyes between Garner and the man who looked enough like him to be his... his pa! Garner bested him by two or three inches in height, but their shoulders were of equal width and, in profile, their noses had the same straight slope and sharp tip and the same arrogantly flared nostrils. They both had brown-black hair, light eyes, and a tight facial musculature stretched over a strong, square frame. And when Whitney's eyes dropped to the gaping front of the fellow's nightshirt, she was a little shocked by the sight of familiar, dark chest hair, laced with strands of white.

"... wasn't time for a letter or other communication-" Garner growled defensively.

"Then you should have waited-put off the damnable vows-controlled yourself for a change!"

"What in damnation is going on out here!" came a raspy voice from just down the hall. Suddenly an old man, garbed in a nightshirt and sitting on what appeared to be a chair on wheels, burst from a door down the hall and rolled forward into the middle of the fray. He was rail-thin with thick, white hair and a lean, hawkish countenance inset with faded gray eyes. "What's all the bile-raisin' uproar this hour of the bloody morning?! Can't a man get any peace in the last wretched years of his life?!"

"Garner is home-" Byron said, then turned on the old man with combined fury and pain-after the old fellow banged into his unprotected shin with the sharp corner of the wheeled contraption. "Dammit will you watch that bloody thing?! How many times have I told you-"

"I can see he's home, lackwit."

"Merciful heaven!" a strident, girlish soprano sailed above the noise as yet another door opened and another white-clad, red-faced figure came hurrying out into the hall. "How is a lady to sleep with all this horrible racket? How perfectly thoughtless of you to argue outside my door when you know I always sleep until eleven!"

A blur of fine muslin and swirl of dark hair thrust into the heart of the confrontation, jostling Garner and his father apart and sending the wheeled old fellow back a bit. It was a young girl in a flounced white bed gown who planted herself in the midst of them with her hands on her waist and the gown slipping on her bare shoulder.

"Cousin Garner... I see you're home from your dreadful old wars," she observed. Her thickly lashed eyes narrowed disapprovingly on Garner's bare chest, then found Whitney and narrowed even farther.

"Go back to bed, Madeline," Garner's father ordered the girl, thrusting a hard finger toward the door she'd just exited. "This is none of your affair."

"Who's she?" Madeline tossed her dark head and crossed her arms over her chest, refusing to budge.

"Exactly," the old fellow in the wheeled contraption snarled, squinting and craning his neck to see past the girl to Whitney's embattled form in the doorway. "Who the hell is she? Did you catch him with some hot little piece-"

"A conniving little fortune hunter, no doubt," Garner's father sneered, turning on Whitney with a righteous gleam in his eyes. "It seems Garner married her out on the frontier and has now dragged her home... in the dead of night."

"Married?!" and "Married her?" the old man and Madeline chorused their disbelief.

"She's my wife," Garner took an intimidating step toward his father, his eyes now pale with anger, "and my marriage is my concern. It has nothing to do with you."

"Good God, Garner, you've married some backwoods trollop, of course it has to do with us!" Byron Townsend turned a burning stare full on Whitney. "At the very least it's a family humiliation... married out in the woods, in secret..."

"It was not in secret," Garner collected the shock on Whitney's face and began to quake with raw anger. "We were married by the son-in-law of my commanding officer, Colonel Gaspar... with her full family in attendance."

"Well, indecently quick, then," Madeline tossed with an arch, feline glance up and down Whitney's shape.

"Indecent, indeed," Byron sneered, raking her with his light Townsend eyes, pronouncing the judgment on both her marriage and herself.

Indecent. Whitney took the thrust square in the middle of her womanly feelings. Three hostile and belittling stares turned on her, adding fire to her very tender Daniels pride. These snarling, sneering aristocrats were undoubtedly the much lauded "Townsends"... Garner's family!

"Indecent?" she managed, coming out of her huddled stance with a fiery glow that was the spirit of Whitney Daniels, distilled. She raked a scathing, pointed glare across the expanse of bare muslin and bare skin that filled the hall. "Well now, if we're talking about decency, I think it's only fair to call to your attention that I'm the only person present who's fully-decently-clothed."

Byron jerked his chin back and looked down at his nightshirt in surprise. Madeline's mouth worked soundlessly as she tugged the neck of her nightdress together and reddened. And Ezra glared down at his own knobby, hairy knees and bare feet and let out a rather nasty wordless oath. There was an instantaneous flurry of muslin, feet, and wheels. And three doors slammed resoundingly.

Chapter Fifteen.