Yesterday's Roses

by Heather Cullman

  That was true. Jake did have high standards in everything. “No. But—”

  “No ‘buts’ about it,” he interjected, shaking his head. “You are the best and I’m lucky to have you. Don’t you know that I grow breathless every time I look at you? That I’m dumbfounded by your beauty? Your kindness warms me and your intelligence pleases me. You’re the most worthwhile person in the world, and I’m proud to call you wife.”

  “Not nearly as proud as I am to claim you as my husband,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around his torso in a fierce hug. “I’m almost glad my father was such a beast. If he hadn’t moved his mistress into my mother’s house, I never would have answered Davinia’s advertisement for a lady doctor. And if I hadn’t come to San Francisco, I never would have met you. I can’t imagine what it would have been like living without your love.”

  Jake crushed Hallie close and kissed the top of her head. For a long moment he just held her, enjoying her closeness. He couldn’t imagine living without her love either. Finally he asked. “Is there anything you want from your Philadelphia home? Something special you had to leave behind?”

  She toyed with his chest hair as she considered his question. “My dowry,” she finally answered. “Right after we were married, I wrote a letter to my father’s solicitor informing him that I’d married and requesting my dowry.” Hallie shook her head. “I received a reply just this morning. It seems my father told him that I’d been murdered here in San Francisco and claimed Sinclair Mines for his own. The man thinks I’m a fraud.”

  “Sinclair Mines are your dowry?” Jake choked out. If that was true, he had married a very wealthy heiress.

  She nodded. “And the foundries as well. My great-grandmother, Jane Sinclair, who founded the operation, decreed that they were to be passed from mother to daughter upon the death of the former. She said that every woman deserved to have something of her own, some kind of security.”

  “Freethinking woman, wasn’t she?” chuckled Jake. “Just like her marvelous great-granddaughter.”

  “As are all the women in my family,” Hallie replied impishly. “And we all love those mines. In my case, since my mother died so young, the mines were to be passed to me upon my marriage or my thirtieth birthday, whichever came first. It’s all stated in the will. Unfortunately, my father has different plans. You see, my mother was an only child, as am I, and if I were to die, the mines would revert to him. And since no one has seen me in almost a year, well, everyone believes my father’s claims.”

  “I’m happy to have you with or without the mines, sweetheart.” It was true, for she was his greatest treasure. Jake stared down into his wife’s eyes. They were the color of fine cognac, and their expression of love warmed him inside every bit as much as drinking a snifter of the potent liquor. “I have plenty of money for both of us, and it pleases me to take care of you. However, seeing how much the mines mean to you, I’ll see to it that you get your dowry. All the monies will be yours to spend as you see fit.”

  “I love you, Jake Parrish!” Hallie exclaimed, covering his face with kisses. “Thank you! The mines have been in the family for three generations, and it would break my heart to see them fall into uncaring hands.”

  Jake caught her face between his hands, studying it intently. “I’m sorry that I’ll never be able to give you a daughter to inherit your mines.”

  “Perhaps you will.”

  He stared at her bleakly. How he wished that was true. Not a day went by that he didn’t bitterly curse his inability to plant a child in her womb. Sometimes, when he saw Hallie frolicking with Ariel, he wondered if he’d been fair in marrying her. It cut him deeply, knowing what she’d sacrificed for him.

  With a heavy sigh, he looked away. “You know I can’t—”

  “—perhaps you can,” she interjected. Reaching beneath the pillow, she pulled out the pessary. Her eyes glowed with anticipation as she explained the purpose of the device.

  Jake took the contraceptive from her and stared at it for a moment, his emotions warring within him. With a vile curse, he flung it across the room.

  “Damn her! All these years of hating myself for my inadequacies, feeling emasculated …” He sprang from the bed and began to pace the length of the room, the muscles bunching and releasing beneath his skin like those of a restless panther ready to pounce.

  “How she must have hated me!” he ground out. “And what a fool I was! I actually believed that she loved me once, that she wanted my child.” Jake smashed his fist against the marble mantle, painfully splitting his knuckles. Drawing a ragged breath, he buried his face in his hands.

  “But she did love you,” Hallie whispered, moving over to where he stood. Twining her arms around his waist and drawing him close, she added, “Don’t you know how impossible it is not to love you?” She rubbed her cheek against his chest.

  “I would hardly call letting me believe that I was inadequate a gesture of love,” he snorted. “Do you know how demoralizing it’s been, thinking that my seed was worthless? That I was less than a man?”

  “Poor love. Of course, it’s been awful,” she cooed, forcing his anger-stiffened body closer. “But I don’t think she prevented conception out of a sense of spite or cruelty. Not at first.”

  “Really?” He snorted again. “What’s your theory, pray tell?”

  “She was afraid.”

  “Of what, for God’s sake?”

  “Of dying in childbirth.” Hallie felt Jake’s muscles flex slightly at her pronouncement. Soothingly, she stroked the long line of his back. “During one of her bad spells, Serena believed that she was a child again. She huddled in her bed crying and clasping her hands to her ears, begging me to make her mother stop screaming. After she regained her lucidity, she explained that her mother had died trying to give birth to a stillborn baby. She told me she’d always feared giving birth, afraid that she too would die.”

  Jake pulled away from Hallie’s comforting embrace and walked over to the bay window. Silently, he stared into the lengthening shadows of the coming night. At long last he spoke “If only she’d trusted me enough to confess her fears. I would have understood. I knew how her mother had died, but when I mentioned a child of our own, she seemed pleased by the idea.”

  “I think she truly wanted your child, but was too afraid to take the risk.” Hallie moved to stand beside her husband. Taking his hands in hers, she whispered, “Perhaps in time, she would have let herself conceive. Or at least confessed her fears.”

  Jake gave the hands holding his a squeeze. Looking deeply into Hallie’s eyes, he asked, “And do you have any such fears?”

  “My only fear is that someday you might cease to love me.”

  “Never!” he growled, yanking her down onto the wide window seat and holding her close.

  “Good,” she murmured. “Because there’s nothing I want more than to give you children. At least a dozen, which should be plenty to breathe life into this big house.”

  “And I’ll enjoy making every one of them.” Jake laughed, kissing the tip of her nose.

  Hallie moved to straddle Jake’s lap and twined her arms around his neck. Moving her face close to his, she whispered, “I love you, Jake.”

  Jake stared into her eyes, mesmerized by the emotion blazing in their depths. “And you are, indeed, the woman of my heart.” Then he claimed her lips in a sweeping kiss.

  As their kiss deepened, Hallie could feel his manhood stiffen against her woman’s flesh. Gently, she rubbed against him in response.

  Groaning, Jake undulated his pelvis in sensual reply. He found the idea of taking his wife while she sat straddled across his lap highly provocative.

  Hallie broke off the kiss as he tried to penetrate her. “What’s this? Randy again already?” she murmured, reaching down to position his sex at her feminine opening.

  Inflamed by Hallie’s touch, Jake thrust hi
s pelvis upward and impaled her. “Just thought we should get a start on those twelve children,” he replied wickedly.

  Chapter 26

  “Fair as the moon, clear as the sun,” the man murmured, his gaze leisurely sweeping the length of the woman’s nude body. “Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon. Thy two breasts,” his lips curved into a sensual smile, “are like young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.”

  He leaned back against the Venetian dressing table and shifted his gaze downward to contemplate the woman’s softly rounded belly. Inspired by its perfection, he lifted his glass in salute, quoting, “Thy navel is like a round goblet which wanteth not liquor.” As he took a sip of strong claret, he looked yet lower, letting his gaze caress the voluptuous curve of her hips and skim the satiny length of her thighs. They too were flawless. With a rapturous sigh, he added, “The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.”

  Lying there in the middle of the bedroom floor, her skin moonlight pale and gleaming with the waxen sheen of a newly opened calla lily, Arabella Dunlap was so very beautiful in death.

  The man tapped his thumb spasmodically against the delicate stem of his glass and tilted his head to one side, critically surveying his latest victim.

  With her shapely legs carelessly thrown apart and her head pillowed on the ebony silk of her unbound hair, she reminded him of an erotic carved-ivory figurine he’d once seen in a Chinese curiosity shop.

  Just remembering that figurine was enough to make his pulse quicken and his breath come out in shallow gusts. Sweet, shameless Arabella! She had been his living incarnation of the lewdly posed ivory lady … so wanton, so exquisite in her wickedness. A temptress with the flesh of an angel and the soul of a whore.

  Lust not after her beauty in thine heart, he cautioned himself, shuddering at the sudden, fierce clenching of his loins. For he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.

  Emitting a tormented moan, he pushed away from the dressing table and stalked over to the prone figure on the floor. With glass still in hand, he knelt by her side. It was such a pity he’d had to kill her. In his own way, he had loved her. Trembling with something strangely akin to grief, he reached out and gently traced the shape of her parted lips.

  Shall I come unto you with a rod, or in love? she had purred, pursing those red lips with seductive query.

  Bowing his head in shame, his reply had never varied. A rod is for the back of him that is void of understanding. Thou shalt beat me with the rod, and shalt deliver my soul from hell.

  Grief choked the man like a fist to the throat, and the forgotten glass of claret slipped from his now slack fingers. The wine, expensive and darkly garnet in hue, splashed across the bright vermilion carpet, a monochromatic contrast to the drying crimson of Arabella’s spilled blood.

  How he would miss her ministrations, miss the bite of the switch and his own glorious response. How he would miss the feel of her silk-clad hands coaxing him to his final release.

  Unlike the other women he’d been with, Arabella had understood his special needs. She had understood that the flaccidity of his sex stemmed not from a lack of desire, but from the shame and guilt he felt over his own carnal appetites. Most important, she had understood his need to be punished for the weakness of his flesh.

  But it was necessary to kill her, he reminded himself. Her death was the final sacrifice in his crusade to right the terrible wrong done to him. And soon, very soon, sweet vengeance would be his. The reminder of his imminent victory was enough to chase away the sting of his regret.

  With the reverence of a knight paying homage to his liege, the man lifted Arabella’s scarlet-gloved hand to his lips and kissed her palm, unmindful that the fabric was sticky with his own spilled seed. He remained in that position for a very long time, safe in the knowledge that he had slipped into the house unnoticed, and aware that the servants knew better than to invade the sanctity of their mistress’s bedroom unbidden.

  It wasn’t until after he’d whispered a lengthy benediction that he gently dropped her hand back to the floor and started to rise. Then he stopped abruptly, half crouched over her lifeless body. In one smooth motion he stripped off her soiled glove.

  It bore the shameful testimony of his lust, it bespoke of sin. It was an abomination before the eyes of God, and therefore must be destroyed.

  It was a beautiful afternoon, with the sun beaming down like a cheerful smile and the breeze as gentle as the stirring from a butterfly’s wings. Colors, more vivid and prismatic than the paint on an artist’s palette, surrounded Hallie, mingling to create a collage of striking splendor.

  During the months since her marriage, Hallie had taken pleasure in restoring Serena’s garden, and now, on the last day of May, her efforts were gloriously apparent.

  Deep pink Sweetbriar roses nestled against creamy white Damasks, while pale yellow English Ramblers wept cascades of blossoms, creating a muted backdrop for the riotously blushed crimson Chinas. Centifolias of pale pink and Mosses tinted a rare deep purple merged amidst a hundred different varieties of roses, all abloom in a blaze of color.

  Wielding a pair of clippers, Hallie now busied herself with the taming of an errant rosebush which was threatening to obscure the garden path. Today, however, her mind wasn’t on her gardening. It was on one of her patients, a prostitute who had been viciously beaten and almost strangled.

  The woman lay near death, her once pretty face savaged beyond recognition and her throat ringed with bruises—bruises that mirrored the unique, pendantlike configuration found on the necks of both Cissy and Serena after they’d been attacked.

  Hallie tossed aside a bush clipping with a shudder.

  What had shocked her most were the woman’s gloves. They had been perfect replicas of the red silk ones Serena had so loved, identical right down to the faux diamond buttons at the wrist closures.

  Cissy had also identified them as being like the ones she’d been asked to wear by her attacker, as had several of the other girls who had also serviced the depraved stranger.

  Yet no one had seen hide nor hair of the man in question since the night Cissy was beaten, and the police, who shrugged him off as just another dissatisfied customer, had never bothered to investigate the incident. However, when this latest victim had turned up in a respectable part of town, lying half dead in the gutter, they had been forced to take an interest.

  Jake, too, had taken notice. After being told about the gloves, he began to suspect, as did Hallie, that the same fiend who had assaulted the prostitutes had killed Serena.

  So strong were his suspicions that he now accompanied Hallie on her rounds to the brothels, questioning the madames and the girls, searching for the clues which had evaded him for almost a year. Not surprisingly, the women were more willing to talk to the handsome Jake Parrish than to the police.

  Despite the prostitutes’ help, Jake was still no closer to discovering the identity of the killer than he had been at the time of Serena’s death. There simply seemed to be no connection between her and the other two victims.

  At first Jake had thought that Serena’s opium addiction might in itself be a clue. After all, somebody had introduced her to the vice, for Jake had known Serena to be surprisingly naive about the darker aspects of life.

  Yet everyone close to the other victims had vehemently denied his suggestion that the women had had a weakness for the drug. It appeared that despite their unsavory profession, the prostitutes who had been assaulted were a surprisingly clean-living pair. Both were said to be teetotalers and regular attendees of the Ascension Tabernacle. Of course, as Coralie LaFlume had observed wryly, the women’s piety stemmed more from their fascination with Reverend DeYoung than with any real desire for redemption.

  “Damn!” Hallie swore as she pricked her thumb on a thorn. Sucking on her finger to ease
the pain, she stood back to survey her handiwork.

  “Hallie!”

  Hallie looked up to see Penelope scampering down the garden path, the laughing Ariel bouncing in her arms. Both woman and child wore straw hats which were extravagantly trimmed with a bounty of silk flowers. Jake had brought the hats home as May Day tokens, one each for Hallie and Penelope, and a miniature version for the baby.

  “Celine said you needed to speak with me?” Penelope was panting, breathless from having run across the wide lawn.

  “Yes,” Hallie replied, taking Ariel from Penelope. After depositing a kiss on the baby’s cheek, she set her on a soft patch of grass to play. “I thought you might be interested in hearing about my morning medical call.”

  Penelope dropped to the ground next to Ariel. “Not another one of those prostitutes? I do wish you’d be more careful where you go. I worry about you going to those wretched areas of town at all hours of the day and night.”

  “I’m safe enough. Jake or one of the footmen always accompanies me.” Hallie smiled, touched by the girl’s concern. She’d become quite fond of her beautiful sister-in-law during the last few months, and the women were now fast friends. Because of their friendship, Penelope had taken an interest in the new Mission House that Jake had built, and she now spent two afternoons a week teaching the Chinese girls deportment.

  “I did check on the girl who was beaten two nights ago,” Hallie added as an afterthought. “But she still hasn’t regained consciousness.”

  “It must be awful to lead such a sordid life,” Penelope murmured, gently wrestling a rose from Ariel’s hand. The baby was attempting to stuff the whole flower into her mouth.

  Immediately, Ariel’s fair skin flushed poppy red and her lips began to quiver with anger. She opened and closed her mouth soundlessly a few times before releasing an earsplitting howl.

  “Poor Sprite,” Penelope cooed, lightly tickling the baby’s stomach. “It must be a trial to have such a horrid Auntie.’-’ She pulled a silly face and made a growling noise, comically pretending to be the mean auntie in question.