Golden Flames

by Kay Hooper

  Victoria didn’t understand how it was possible to hurt so much and go on living. He would never listen now, she thought dully, never understand or believe. She lifted her chin and said softly, “Good-bye, Falcon.” Then she turned away with an effort that broke something inside her, and left the room.

  Falcon didn’t know how long he stood there, staring blindly at the spot where she had stood, the damning telegram crumpled in one hand and her veil in the other. Some terrible cry of rage and pain writhed inside him, tearing bloody wounds, and he wanted to smash something. Anything. He wasn’t conscious of the music that droned on and on, wasn’t aware that an occasional guest stepped into the room and then backed hurriedly out again. He wasn’t aware of anything but the turmoil of emotions that left him frozen in an anguish he didn’t even understand.

  Not his, never his. She belonged to another man.

  Lying, cheating. And still, it was in her eyes, that innocence, that peculiarly undeniable look of a lady. That look of gentler times, and fragile strength, and dignity. How? How? Pale and still, she had accepted his brutal verbal blows, and then she had gently said good-bye and walked from the room. A lady.

  His lips twisting, he looked down at the telegram and veil in his hands, then thrust them both into a pocket. He moved stiffly from the room, his entire body aching like something battered. He went back to the ballroom first, searching, but no stunning black gown, no fair beauty met his gaze.

  “Falcon?” Mary was at his side.

  “Have you seen Victoria?” The sound of his voice, calm and even, sounded strange to him.

  She touched his arm. “No, not since—Falcon, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I have to find her,” he murmured. He looked blindly around for a moment. “The desk clerk. He’ll tell me which room…” He absently brushed off Mary’s hand and left the ballroom, heading for the lobby.

  —

  “Mrs. Fontaine has checked out, sir.”

  “There hasn’t been time,” Falcon said.

  The desk clerk looked at him a bit warily, grateful there was a counter between himself and this man with the wild eyes. “She checked out, sir, just a few moments ago. The gentleman who was here when she arrived had arranged for a private coach to stand ready for her. She requested that most of her bags be sent on, and she ordered the coach.” He didn’t add that the lady had left still in her ball gown, a simple portmanteau in her hands and a black cloak thrown over her shoulders.

  After a moment, Falcon turned away and left the hotel. He stood outside for a long time, gazing off into the night.

  —

  Days later, Falcon realized just how stunning had been the blow Victoria had dealt him. The realization came with a gray morning and a grating hangover, and he sat for long minutes on the side of his bed, a pounding head held in both hands. He felt sick and shaken, his thoughts moving sluggishly.

  His Irish heritage and a naturally hard head, combined with a dislike of losing control of himself, made Falcon a man who could count the drunken nights of his life on the fingers of one hand; never before had he consciously and willfully drunk himself into a welcome oblivion.

  Disgusted with himself, he pushed the nagging pain to the back of his consciousness, fighting to ignore it. He rose, splashed cold water on his face. The small mirror showed him a face that was stubbled with beard, the mouth a thin, hard slash, and the eyes red-rimmed and hot. Grim, Falcon went to soak out the poisons in his system with a steaming bath, then allowed himself to be shaved—another occurrence he could count on one hand. With determination rather than hunger, he faced breakfast.

  It was only then, after pushing his plate away and drinking hot, strong coffee, that Falcon squarely faced his own violent emotions.

  He could still feel the jagged pain, though it had been confined to some dark corner of himself with the control built up over a lifetime of need. But the first shock of rage and bitterness had worn off now, and though he was conscious of the ache that wouldn’t go away gnawing at him, he could at least think clearly again.

  It was wrong, all wrong. The bile of his bitterness had washed over them both like acid, searing her attempts to explain, but now, in the tenuous but sane calm of passing days, he knew he should have listened to her. She had walked away from him, white and anguished, her eyes dark pools of blind agony, and he had known even then that hers was not the face of that heartless whore his cruel words had drawn for them both.

  He still had the telegram, knew the name and location of Morgan Fontaine’s ranch. He had to go after her, had to hear the explanation she offered. His jaw was aching, and he knew his teeth were locked tightly. She was his, she belonged to him. He’d take her away from her husband, kill the bastard if he had to.

  Why hadn’t she told him she was married? Was her marriage a troubled one, was that why she had come to New York? How could she look so innocent, so damned untouched? How? He would have sworn that she had never even been kissed with passion, never been held and touched as he had held and touched her.

  He ran a shaking hand through his hair. The tenuous sanity was slipping, pain and bitterness and yearning tugging at him, pulling him into a black pit of anguish.

  He had to go after her.

  —

  “You look the way I did after El Paso.”

  With a scowl, Falcon looked up to find an old friend standing by his table. The dining room was nearly deserted, and none of the few patrons paid the slightest attention to the new arrival. And though he had not seen this particular friend for months, Falcon, characteristically, made no overt gesture of greeting.

  “In El Paso,” he said, his voice dry and the scowl fading, “you worked your way through every girl in Miss Amy’s whorehouse and drank half her whiskey. In three days. Next to you, I’m a saint. Sit down, Andrew.” With a tremendous effort, he fought his way through the tangle of emotions to concentrate on business. The gold, always the damned gold.

  Andrew Murphy, grinning, sat down across from Falcon. He was a man of about Falcon’s age, cheerful and fun-loving; few had ever guessed that beneath his friendly eyes and ingenuous ways lay a methodical brain and a nose for devious plots—of which he had unraveled many. He was whipcord-lean and sunbrowned, and only his warm smile made his thin face handsome.

  And, like Falcon, he was a government agent of many years.

  “I will,” Andrew said briskly, “have to speak to the boss about you. It’s obvious that those Texas boys are wearing you down. You look like eight miles of bad road, lad.”

  “Thank you,” Falcon responded in his most polite tone.

  Andrew sighed in a long-suffering way, unsurprised to find his old friend as stoic and unrevealing as ever. “All right, I won’t ask what’s happened to ravage that noble face.”

  “Too kind of you.”

  “Right, then. We’ve got the list, Falcon.” In keeping with policy—open conversation and casual meetings being less obvious than anything surreptitious—Andrew made no attempt to lower his voice and spared not a glance for the other early-morning patrons of the dining room.

  Falcon was equally casual. “Have we? Anything interesting?”

  “Damned annoying, more like. See for yourself.” He passed a folded sheet of paper across to his friend. “Takes us years to track down that so-called ‘power circle’ out of Charleston, and when we finally get the names, most of the bastards are dead. Of the three left, two are unaccounted for, and only God knows where they are. The third is living blamelessly on his New Mexico ranch. A very successful ranch, so I’m told, and has been for fifteen years. From all we can gather, it’s unlikely that he was involved, even though he was in Charleston during April of ‘63.”

  Since Falcon remained silent, his gaze turned downward to the paper he held, Andrew went on. “The Bureau did its usual thorough job in investigating the rancher’s finances, and came up with a depressingly successful picture. Seems this lad made his money in Europe somewhere, possibly by piracy on the high seas,
but it’s been thirty years and who knows? Anyway, before the war, he went to live out in the western territories. They speak highly of him out there, and there’s never been the faintest smell of anything crooked. Everything honest and aboveboard as long as he’s lived there.

  “He didn’t fight during the war. He’d have been in his forties then, so that makes sense. Seems to have been a Southern sympathizer, and married a Southern girl young enough to be his daughter several years ago. But there’s not a trace of that gold anywhere near him. Looks like the end of the trail, Falcon.”

  Without looking up, Falcon asked quietly, “The descriptions of the two missing men—are they accurate?”

  Andrew looked at him curiously, alerted by something in that still voice. “As accurate as possible after all these years,” he confirmed.

  Read Talbot. A large man, black-haired, with thick shoulders and a black eye patch. Gus Rawlins. Tall, thin. Brown hair and eyes. God knew who the third man in the bookshop had been. A henchman hired for a kidnapping?

  Falcon cleared his throat of some obstruction. “There was a rumor of a falling-out among these men. Do we have anything more on that?”

  “Well, we’re pretty certain of it. Seems to have happened about the time you figured the gold got through the blockade. April of ‘63. Our New Mexico rancher there left Charleston about that time, and the others seemed to have either left as well or turned on each other, foaming at the mouth.”

  After a moment, Falcon looked up, and Andrew knew instantly that his deduction had been wrong. It wasn’t the end of the trail; somehow, to Falcon, the names on that paper represented the beginning, the beginning of something bitter and painful.

  “What?” Andrew asked quietly.

  Hard, remote, green eyes dropped briefly to the paper, then lifted again. Falcon’s voice, when he spoke, was level, almost toneless, hiding whatever it was he felt. “I’ll need the necessary authority to go into New Mexico. Everything documented, giving me all the power possible. If this rancher is as popular as you say, it won’t be easy to bring him out of there without a bloodbath. And I may have trouble anyway; his foreman sent Mrs. Fontaine a wire a few days ago, saying he was missing. I’ll have to be a federal marshal. And I’ll need federal warrants for Morgan Fontaine’s arrest, and the arrests of these other two.”

  “You’re that sure?” Andrew, cut from the same cloth as the man across from him, wasted no time in questions or astonished exclamations; he spoke as if the possible solution to the mystery of a million-dollar gold shipment stolen years before was only mildly interesting.

  And Falcon, knowing very well that his instincts were undependable where the name of Morgan Fontaine was concerned, was nonetheless certain. He was sure, with a leaden certainty far more pain than pleasure, that a years-long trail was coming to its end.

  A man with a black eye patch named Read had paid for a night’s drink with a stolen, specially minted gold coin. And then he had slipped from a waterfront barroom and gone to a lonely bookshop, where two other men waited to execute a plan. The only customer in that shop had been a woman who was the wife of one of the men who had planned the theft of the gold shipment.

  Falcon had gone into that shop, intent on following a tenuous lead, never knowing that he had indeed been closer to the gold than ever before. And those men had never realized that the man who had blundered in and spoiled their plot was a far more deadly danger to them than merely a witness to a botched kidnapping.

  Victoria. Morgan Fontaine’s wife. How had they found her? Chance? Hearing her name perhaps, and making the connection? And they had planned to kidnap her, possibly use her to force Fontaine to give up the stolen gold—twice stolen. And how many years had they searched, just as Falcon had, for a man quietly ranching in New Mexico?

  The kidnapping had been aborted because he had entered the shop, but Read had gotten the address, and they had gone directly to the ranch in New Mexico. And Victoria had received a telegram later saying that her husband was missing. Had he run when they got too close? Or had they found him, taken him? Was Morgan Fontaine alive or dead?

  Was Victoria wife or widow? What would she find waiting for her in New Mexico?

  And where was the gold, the gold that had shadowed so many lives for so long? Did Victoria know of it? Did she know her husband had likely acquired his wealth as a pirate before she was born, and had helped plan and execute a daring robbery during the war that had destroyed her world? Did she know her husband was a hunted man, hunted by co-conspirators he had apparently betrayed, hunted by a government agent who had so nearly seduced her?

  A government agent who was, even now—

  “Falcon?”

  “I’m sure,” he said.

  II

  Chapter 1

  NEW MEXICO

  Victoria stumbled back with a harsh sound and turned to lean against her horse, dry sobs tearing at her throat. She felt cold, icy-cold, and her mind was numb. Her shaking hands held on to the finely tooled leather of the saddle fiercely, and her stomach churned.

  She should get her rifle from the scabbard and signal the others, she knew. Every man on the ranch was searching, just as she had been searching. This was the second day. She would explain to them that Buck had shied nervously at the mouth of the ravine, arousing her suspicion, so she had urged him on. And that the horse had picked his way warily, snorting, shying, until she had finally seen what he had sensed or smelled.

  But she couldn’t move yet.

  She stared over the horse’s back, vaguely baffled because the day looked no different—and it should have. The sky was still cloudless, so blue it almost hurt to look at it; the air was dry and cool, and a slight breeze stirred the dust-dry earth. It was the kind of late fall Southwest day she had always loved, yet now it would always remind her…

  This time, the blood was only rusty spatters on the sunbaked rocks.

  The icy numbness spread over her slowly until she stopped shaking. Animals. Bastards! They weren’t human, to do that to a man. A good, kind man. Not even the Apaches tortured their victims as Morgan had been tortured.

  Victoria steeled herself with all the strength she could command, and finally released the saddle and turned away from her horse. She didn’t look at the remains of that poor body, but instead searched the area all around. The hoofprints of horses, she saw, shod horses. Not Indians, then, although she’d already guessed that. Three horses.

  She realized she was crying.

  The horses had gone west. She was west of the ranch house now. Had they kept on in that direction? If they had, their tracks could well be lost in the confusion of tracks left by the ranch hands and cattle during the normal course of ranch work and activity.

  She heard rough, gasping sobs, and knew vaguely that they were coming from her. They hurt her throat.

  What was that in the rocks? Hard to see—a dry rattle as the breeze tugged at it. She bent and retrieved a crumpled piece of paper, smoothing it out against her thigh. A handbill? Hard to see. She brushed a hand across her eyes, and her glove came away stained with wetness.

  The Frigate Ulysses, late of the War between the States, welcomes passengers as it departs Charleston harbor for Europe….

  Victoria looked at the date on the handbill, trying to think. Weeks. Just a few weeks away. Would Morgan’s killers be on that ship? There was a chance. Maybe the only chance she had. She would track them. If she didn’t find them quickly enough, she could wait for them at Charleston.

  She would wait for them.

  She folded the handbill carefully as she walked back to her horse, slipping it into her saddlebag. She fumbled at her rifle scabbard, finally drawing the Winchester out. She pointed the barrel up and fired a single shot, and then slid the rifle back into its scabbard.

  Then she sat down on a rock and waited for the ranch hands.

  NEW YORK

  Marcus Tyrone looked up from his desk as his office door thudded open. His rather cold, gray eyes searched the intruder�
�s face. He studied that handsome and sunburned face, unaware that the habitual chill of his gaze was somewhat trying to the younger man standing before his desk.

  “All right—what did I do wrong?”

  “Did I say you had done something?” Tyrone’s tone was mild, his eyes still coolly thoughtful.

  Long, brown fingers raked through silvery hair, and the younger man sank down in a chair before the desk, deciding not to await an invitation. “There must,” he said, “have been some reason you ordered me to report to you first thing. Marc, I’d like to get the ship unloaded and—“

  Tyrone pushed away the papers lying in front of him and spoke carefully; he was unwilling to raise hopes without first being certain that it was at least possible. “Jesse, do you remember April of ‘63? The gold shipment?”

  Jesse Beaumont laughed rather wryly, and lifted a hand to touch the crooked scar high on his right temple. “Remember? Hell, yes, I remember! That bastard got a knife in my ribs, then brained me with a rock. I must have been carried a mile downstream before I was able to crawl out. If it hadn’t been for a hard head and a little luck, I’d be dead.”

  Tyrone thought it had been more than luck; even now, he didn’t like to remember the condition Jesse had been in when, uneasy over the boy’s delayed return from delivering the gold to Morgan Fontaine, he had ridden inland from Charleston harbor to find Jesse crawling along a deserted road and bleeding his life away. He shook off the memory.

  “Before that, though, on your way back from delivering the gold, you had visited your family’s plantation?”

  Jesse nodded, eyes abruptly bleak.

  “You told me that you spent some time with Morgan Fontaine after delivering the gold to him. Did you tell him you were worried about your family? About your sister in particular? Wasn’t her name Victoria?”