Abernathy nodded stiffly.
“Miss Matthews—Delia—is the daughter of my father’s brother, the product of his marriage late in life to a serving woman with designs on his pocketbook. When the little girl was barely walking her mother took off with a man of heftier income.” Gabriel paused to let this pathetic picture settle in his companion’s mind.
Since the colonel seemed to have forgotten the breakfast tray heaved at his chest, Gabriel embroidered the story. Delia became a misunderstood soul looking for love in a callous world. She had run away to join a traveling theater troupe, and Gabriel, as her closest male relative—her father having long since expired of a broken heart—had been searching for her ever since.
“I’d only last week received a hint of her whereabouts,” he concluded. “My mission is to see her restored to the bosom of her family.”
The colonel looked impressed. “I declare.”
Gabriel coughed delicately. “As I said, I’d nearly caught up with my cousin, and it was a simple matter to follow the trail of…shall we say, smitten officers and gentlemen.”
Abernathy smiled sourly. “The lady has a way of choosing her targets.”
“All the more reason to get her out of your hair, so to speak—” Gabriel eyed the egg yolk “—and return her to her home.”
“I must admit I don’t know quite what to do with her.” The colonel rose and went to the window. “I cannot allow my men to go unpunished when they compromise military information, and yet the lady hardly seems to have the mental discipline to remember what she heard, much less pass it into enemy hands.”
“Have you questioned her?”
“I tried, but with very little intelligible response.”
Gabriel grinned at the colonel’s back. “Perhaps if I spoke to her in your presence I might assuage your fears.”
“Yes, that’s the ticket.” The colonel turned. “Bowden!”
The young officer stuck his damp, sticky head around the door. “Sir?”
“Tell Miss Matthews we require her presence.”
Lieutenant Bowden looked as if he’d just been requested to shave a barracuda. He shifted from one foot to the other. “Yes, sir,” he said unhappily and disappeared.
Gabriel didn’t have to wait long before Delia exploded into the room, followed by Bowden, who muttered a lame “Here she is, sir” and beat a strategic retreat.
Delia Matthews in broad daylight was a sight to behold. She stood seething in the center of the room, onyx eyes snapping, fists planted on her generous hips. The tight trousers and coat she’d worn last night had been replaced by a dress with an equally tight and low-cut bodice. Gabriel was hard put to keep his clerical gaze above her neck. Colonel Abernathy didn’t even try.
She was the sort of woman whose company Gabriel most enjoyed—straightforward, without genteel coyness, secure in the power of her own beauty, yet sturdy and self-reliant. This was no hothouse flower of Southern aristocracy, ready to wilt at the threat of adversity and delighting in drawing blood with unexpected thorns. This woman was a gardenia, blooming in lush flamboyance—in fact, she even smelled like one.
She folded her arms. “Where have you been?”
Gabriel eyed his courier with grim admiration. “If I weren’t so glad to see you I’d turn you over my knee. What kind of trouble are you in now?”
Delia glared at the colonel. “If this nincompoop thinks I give two hoots how many guns come down the pike into this stinking little mud hole, it’s no wonder he’s here, instead of where the action is!”
“See here!” yelped the colonel.
Gabriel choked down laughter. “He’s just doing his job, Cousin Delia. And he said he might let you go, if you promise not to repeat anything Private Hubbard told you.” Gabriel let one eye blink closed.
Delia’s expression of outrage shifted to a blinding smile. “I told them it was a big misunderstanding. The private took me all wrong. I asked him if he was a good shot, and he started off on all this nonsense about guns. I didn’t understand half what he said.” She tripped across the room to take the colonel’s arm. Tears glistened on the ends of yard-long black lashes as she looked over her shoulder. “Cousin Gabriel, you understand why I got just a teensy bit upset when they arrested me? It was too humiliating!”
Abernathy ran a hand around the back of his neck. “Miss, if you want to avoid misunderstandings in the future, you’d best stay away from dens of iniquity like that riverboat.” He backed toward the open window. “Reverend Leland, Miss Matthews is released into your custody.”
Thunderclouds formed on the actress’s alabaster brow. “His custody—”
“Thank you, sir.” Gabriel hustled Delia out of the room.
They made it back to the Battle House as inconspicuously as was possible for a woman of Delia Matthews’s looks and temperament. As he secured a table in a corner of the sunny dining room of the hotel, Gabriel lost patience. “You’d best stop those languishing looks at every man in sight if you expect me to retain any scrap of credibility. We’re not even supposed to meet in public, and now I’ve had to invent a runaway cousin.”
Delia’s eyes blazed with resentment. “Your credibility? I’m the one who’s been under arrest for twelve hours.”
Gabriel froze in the act of hailing a servant. “Twelve hours? When did they arrest you?”
She lifted one milky shoulder. “Not long after the show. Turned out that baby-faced private wasn’t quite so naive as most of them.”
“Less than six hours ago you were not in the hold of the boat.” He said it out loud, hoping it was not true.
Delia spread her hands. “I’ve been under arrest since ten o’clock last night. Reckon there was some other woman running around loose on the boat.” When he found himself incapable of answering, her fingers fluttered to her mouth. “Oh, my. You gave the sermon to the wrong person, didn’t you?”
“Your perfume is gardenia. Not lily of the valley.”
After a strained silence, Delia leaned her head on her hand and regarded him with a quirk to her red mouth. “Fine pair we are, Reverend.”
“This is no laughing matter. What are we going to do?”
“We?” Delia’s fine black brows lifted. “I can’t deliver what I don’t have. You get the sermon back before my troupe moves upriver, and I’ll see it gets to the right hands. You don’t…” She shrugged. “You’re on your own.”
Camilla woke up feeling eighty instead of eighteen. Her head hurt, her feet hurt, and there was an evenly spaced row of bruises under her rib cage where the iron spikes of the fence had jabbed her. She rolled onto her back with a groan.
She’d argued with Portia for thirty minutes about who was going to be
