Courting Trouble by Jenny Schwartz Page A

muffled their footsteps as Esme wove a path to the empty fireplace. She pushed a panel to the side of it, and a narrow door swung open.
    “Ingenious.” Despite their troubles, he admired the way the door hid in plain view, the casual eye distracted by the fine carving of Australian flora and fauna in the woodwork. Kangaroos leaped, bandicoots scampered, golden wattle nodded gently, elegant gum leaves and nuts were scattered randomly.
    “Father enjoys the game of it. He read about secret passages in old English houses and decided he’d include one in his house. A friend carved the panels.” But her voice lacked its customary energy.
    Emotional exhaustion.
    She descended a metal ladder fixed to the opening. “Just a moment till I find the candle and matches. Then you can pull the door closed before you descend. There’s a handle in the bottom half of the door. Ah, here we are.” A match scraped and light flared, then held steady. “There’s also a bolt, to hold the door secure.”
    He stepped onto the ladder. The door shut silently and he slid the bolt across before descending.
    Belowground the air was fresh. Ventilation shafts. Aaron Smith, Esme’s father, was an experienced miner; he’d know about introducing good air and extracting the bad.
    The mansion was built on a limestone ridge, and Aaron had quarried down, the pick marks showing in the soft stone. The room was compact but efficiently arranged, the space dominated by a large worktable with a stool and a comfortable chair squeezed in beside it.
    Esme set aside the candle and lit a kerosene lantern, adjusting its flame and standing on tiptoe to hang it over a hook clearly designed for that purpose
    As soon as her hands were free, he took her into his arms. There was nothing of passion and everything of tenderness in their embrace. He’d wondered if she needed him. The answer was in her response to the workshop fire and in the tiny shivers that still ran through her body. He rubbed his cheek against her hair.
    “I don’t know how we’ll work this out,” she said.
    “I’ll deal with Nazim,” he vowed.
    “Him?” She lifted her head, startled. “I’m talking about us.”
    “What about us?” he questioned cautiously.
    “You and me.” She smoothed a wrinkle in the shoulder of his jacket. “I…I learned today how important you are to me.”
    “You’re important to me, too. I’m sorry I lied to you, sorry I didn’t think how you’d fear for Ayesha and your other Indian friends. I was thoughtless but not uncaring. Sweetheart—”
    She covered his mouth with her hand. “Please, this is hard for me. Just listen.” Her hand left his mouth. “I didn’t think it would be so difficult to be a suffragette and be courted. You’re a good man, Jed Reeve, and you share my values, my belief in universal suffrage. I thought we had enough in common that our lives—” She broke off. “I thought we’d grow easier with each other as we courted.”
    “We have, haven’t we? You know me now.”
    “Yes, but…neither of us know how to deal with me. Being a suffragette, I mean. That’s why you dreamed up your fake assassination plot. You were trying to find a way to court me. I understand that now. You wanted to reassure me that you could let me face danger—only it was a pretense of danger, because your instinct to protect is so strong. Other women would prize that protectiveness. But I’m scared of being less. Everything twists around the fact that I don’t know if I can be me and love you.”
    His arms fell away. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean I love you, but I think we’re doomed.”

Chapter Ten
    Doomed. The little room under the Smith mansion seemed to echo with Esme’s voice. Doomed, doomed, doomed.
    Esme had to have seen the fury in his expression because she slipped away on the heels of that outrageous final pronouncement. Her father’s secret workshop had a second exit, via the cellar, and she vanished before Jed realized her