My Darling Melissa by Linda Lael Miller

bedlam.
    “I’m sorry,” he told her.
    Fancy gave him a look that said he should be sorry and crossed their room to enter the adjoining nursery and pace the floor with Caroline.
    Jeff ached at the lack of understanding between himself and his wife, but he didn’t know how to cross the breach. He wasn’t even sure exactly what was wrong, but it had all started when Fancy had begun to share Banner’s consuming interest in the suffrage movement.
    He sat down on the edge of the bed he and Fancy had shared so happily and buried his head in his hands. The baby was settling down by fits and starts, and after several minutes had passed Fancy returned from the nursery, her arms empty.
    “What’s happening to us?” Jeff asked miserably, and shelooked away for a moment, gnawing at her lower lip, her dark violet eyes brimming with tears.
    “I don’t know,” she answered after a long time.
    Jeff rose and crossed the room to lay his hands gently on Fancy’s shoulders. He kissed her forehead and then said sadly, “We’d damned well better find out, hadn’t we?”
    “Will you be going to Port Riley tomorrow about Melissa?” Fancy looked up at him with a plea in her eyes.
    Jeff was at a loss as to whether she wanted him to stay or go; in the end, he had to risk being wrong.
    “No. Somebody told me tonight that I have troubles enough of my own, and I think they were right.”
    Fancy rested her cheek against his chest. Her back moved in a small, quivering sigh beneath his hands, and Jeff never knew if his choice had been correct or not.
    Keith was standing by the fireplace in the study when Tess joined him there. Her wild mane of brown hair fell freely about the shoulders of her wrapper.
    “You’re very late,” she said, putting her arms around him from behind and rising on tiptoe to kiss the nape of his neck. “And I’m absolutely furious.”
    He turned in her embrace, resting his hands on her hips and favoring her with an insolent half grin. “Is that so?” he intoned, kissing the tip of her nose. He gave her a little squeeze. “Can’t think why you’d be the least bit put out. After all, a woman’s place is in the home, and here you are, right at home.”
    Hazel eyes dancing, Tess gave her husband a poke in the stomach. “You,” she accused, “have been talking to Jeff again.”
    Keith sighed and shook his head. Suddenly his expression was serious. “What’s going on between him and Fancy, do you know?”
    Tess held Keith a little tighter for a moment and then stepped back. “Fancy feels that she and Jeff have enough children now, and she wants to take a more active part in community affairs—”
    “The suffrage movement,” Keith put in.
    Tess looked at her husband warily. He was in favor of granting women the vote, but he was also a Corbin, strong-willed, with a tendency to dominate at times. His preferences, where a wife’s behavior was concerned, weren’t always in alignment with his political ideals.
    She nodded. “Jeff’s solution is to keep Fancy pregnant, and therefore out of trouble.”
    Keith chuckled and shook his head. “That would be his logic.” He shrugged. “Change seldom comes quickly, Tess. And that approach has served men well for a long, long time.”
    Tess felt a self-conscious blush climb her cheeks. She and Keith had only two children, whereas Jeff and Fancy had four, and so did Adam and Banner. She wondered if her husband felt cheated.
    Keith curved a finger beneath Tess’s chin and lifted. “What?” he asked softly. Insistently.
    There was nothing to do but confess, and Tess knew it. “I was thinking that maybe you wish you’d married a different wife—one who could give you a houseful of children.”
    His eyes were so gentle that Tess feared to lose herself in their soft azure depths. “Ethan and Mary Katherine are a houseful of children,” he told her with a grin. Before he could kiss her, however, or even say that he loved her, there was a frantic hammering at