Wanton Angel

by Linda Lael Miller

  Bonnie squared her shoulders. “I am not here to inquire after—after a position. My name is Mrs. Eli McKutchen and I want to see Mr. Durrant immediately.”

  The redhead, clad in a scandalous blue satin wrapper that barely covered her thighs, looked alarmed. “Mrs.—oh my God—Forbes!” She scurried to the base of the stairs and shouted up, “Forbes!”

  A squirrelly little man, who looked as though he might be some relation to the creature working at the company store, appeared on the upper landing, his face red with proprietary umbrage. “Hush up, Dottie—Mr. Durrant’s working!”

  Dottie gestured toward Bonnie. “This lady right here is Mrs. Eli McKutchen. Did you hear me, Walter? Mrs. Eli McKutchen.”

  Walter paled and turned to scurry away. Moments later he was back, more composed this time, asking for the pleasure of escorting Bonnie to Mr. Durrant’s private office.

  So the Angel was back.

  Forbes Durrant checked his reflection in the glass surface of his desk, straightened his ascot, and smiled at himself to make sure there was nothing caught in his teeth. His light brown hair was in place, his shave was fresh, and his dark eyes betrayed none of what was written in the account books spread out before him. He closed the ledgers briskly and settled back in his chair just as Bonnie swept into the room.

  The years away from Northridge had been good to her. Bonnie had always been a beauty, but now she was a woman grown, and maturity gave her an intriguing refinement that appealed to Forbes. She’d developed curves that made a man’s hands ache to touch them, and Forbes let his gaze run over her contours with audacious leisure, thinking of the fortune he could make if Bonnie were willing to dance the hurdy-gurdy.

  Bonnie’s eyes were still wide and violet and fringed with coal-black lashes, of course, but they were no longer too large for her face. Her dark hair, always tumbling down her back when she was in pinafores, just begging to be pulled or dipped into the nearest inkwell, was bound softly into a knot atop her head so that the weight of it billowed out around her ivory face in a lush, glistening fluff of muted ebony. Forbes knew that the sun could catch in those sable tresses and turn them to fire.

  “Don’t stand up, Forbes,” she said wryly. “You were never a gentleman.”

  Forbes laughed even though a surge of heat passed through him, followed by a chill. “I never claimed to be a gentleman, did I, Angel?” He gestured toward a velvet upholstered chair facing his desk. “Sit down.”

  The scent of her—French lavender—carried across the room to further upset Forbes’s reeling senses. “There is no need for me to sit, Forbes. I don’t plan to stay long.” Bonnie’s fine breasts rose enticingly beneath the elegant ivory fabric of her dress as she drew a deep breath. “You will remove your—your merchandise from my store, Mr. Durrant. I am giving you exactly twenty-four hours to accomplish this purpose.”

  Forbes reached out, took a cheroot from a crystal box on his desk, lit it with a wooden match. “What happens, Angel, if I don’t meet your terms?”

  “Please do not refer to me by that name again.” Bonnie squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “You will meet my terms, Mr. Durrant, because that store is legally mine and we both know it.”

  Forbes was wondering what would make the wife of one of the richest men in America want to reclaim a shoddy, rundown storefront. Could it be that all was not bliss in the fabled marriage between the princess of Patch Town and the well-bred industrialist?

  Forbes felt a rush of satisfaction. So many things weren’t what they seemed, and if Bonnie McKutchen was in some kind of disgrace, her predicament could easily be turned to profit. No doubt, her tastes were on a level far beyond what the income from one paltry general store could meet.

  He sighed. This would have been a good time to stand up, but his involuntary response to the reality that was Bonnie McKutchen rendered the act inadvisable. “Upon your marriage—by the way, belated congratulations on your dramatic social advancement—the store became Eli’s. As did everything else you owned, Angel—pitiably little as it was.”

  Bonnie’s cheeks flushed a lovely apricot pink. God, Forbes thought, Eli McKutchen is a lucky son of a bitch.

  “I will not dignify that remark with a reply, Forbes Durrant,” Bonnie said coldly.

  Forbes chuckled, then sobered. He’d heard all the gossip about Bonnie over the years, and he knew that her little boy had died during the winter just past. That was an experience that would have broken a lot of women, but Bonnie still had her spirit and he admired her for that. Besides, there was always the possibility that she had Eli’s blessing in coming back to Northridge, and he couldn’t risk offending the lady’s powerful and probably indulgent husband. “The store is yours, of course,” he said calmly, though his mind raced through a sheaf of possibilities.

  If Bonnie wasn’t here with Eli’s blessing, if he’d thrown her out, for instance, or if she’d flown the coop of her own accord, her husband might not be inclined to protect her. It went without saying that she would fail in business—she hadn’t the experience required for any sort of enterprise. When that happened, the Angel might just be open to other possibilities, like dancing downstairs in the Brass Eagle Ballroom.

  As though reading his mind, Bonnie gave Forbes a look that would have seared an elephant’s hide and swept out of the office, leaving him to memories he’d been trying to hold off throughout the interview.

  Since it was safe to stand up, he did so, and strode to the liquor cabinet, where he poured himself a double shot of brandy. The potion didn’t wash from his mind the pictures of Bonnie as a bride, any more than it had the night he’d irrevocably lost her to Eli McKutchen.

  Forbes smiled, despite the lingering pain. Bonnie was here and McKutchen was elsewhere. If his employer and unknowing benefactor had been in Northridge, he would have been among the first to know it—and maybe the loss wasn’t irrevocable after all.

  He sat down at his desk again and began making a list of the colors that would look best on Bonnie. He’d already estimated her measurements with a practiced eye.

  When the pertinent statistics had been recorded, he cupped his hands behind his head and settled back in his chair. He had only to see that the Angel’s little venture failed. That was all.

  In the meantime, he’d have the gowns made up and delivered to the Brass Eagle.

  CHAPTER 4

  BONNIE WAS GONE.

  Eli had had more than a month to absorb that fact, but the house that had once been so full of her laughter and her quick temper and her outrageous political opinions was a constant and merciless reminder. He was sick and he needed his wife and she was gone.

  Seth Callahan, Eli’s lawyer and closest friend, had given his assessment of the situation often enough: It was Eli’s own fault that Bonnie had taken flight like a scared bird. Hadn’t he virtually deserted her after Kiley’s death? Hadn’t there been that string of nameless, faceless women to whom he’d turned for a comfort that eluded him even now? Hadn’t he gone off to war with no real thought for Bonnie’s feelings? Eli knew now that he’d been throwing an emotional temper tantrum from the moment his son’s life had slipped away.

  He closed his eyes tightly against the memory, his hands clasping the arms of the invalid’s chair he’d been confined to even after his return to the States. Before that, he’d lain in a Cuban hospital for nearly six months.

  Kiley filled Eli’s mind, despite efforts to keep him out, and he could feel the warmth and substance of the baby against his shoulder again, feel the gentle trembling that had preceded the child’s death.

  Eli opened his eyes again, to replace the images with the ordinary accoutrements of a sickroom—the basin, the carafe containing the icy water he expected to crave for the rest of his natural life, the books and the newspapers and the chair where that blasted nurse sat, twenty-six hours a day, just staring at him.

  The doctors said that yellow fever, when one was fortunate enough to survive it, that is, required a long period of
recovery. There was one consolation: Eli would now have a lifelong immunity to the disease.

  Bonnie crept into his mind. Why didn’t she come back? She should be here with her husband, not three thousand miles away in Northridge, doing whatever she was doing.

  Eli sighed and wheeled himself over to the small desk between the windows. He reached out for the latest chatty and innocuous letter from Genoa and read it again, troubled by the sense of some unspoken inference that all was not well where Bonnie was concerned.

  He crumpled the letter in one hand. He was imagining things, that was all. He missed Bonnie, he loved her more deeply than he had ever realized, but he was willing to permit her this episode of independence if that was what she needed. On the other hand, if she was up to some foolishness …

  Eli tossed the crumpled letter across the room and it bounced off a photograph of Bonnie, Kiley and himself, taken at Fire Island the summer before the boy’s death. For a moment, his grief returned full force, so intense that Eli was dazed by it.

  He was very glad when the door suddenly opened to admit a blustering Seth Callahan.

  A small man with red muttonchop whiskers and goldrimmed spectacles, Seth was overdressed for the weather as usual. Under one arm, he carried a thick packet, wrapped in paper and bound with twine.

  “Good day,” he said, with a slight nod. Seth was always proper.

  Eli was not. “How the hell can you go around in a starched collar in weather like this?” he demanded testily.

  Seth sputtered and fussed with the packet. “Never mind that. It is imperative that you read these papers!”

  Frowning, Eli unwound the twine and tore away the wrapping. Inside, he found bundles of letters from citizens of Northridge and smiled. Ah, yes, the busybody contingent. He could depend on them for up-to-the-minute information.

  The members of the Friday Afternoon Community Improvement Club had written a twelve-page discourse concerning Bonnie’s behavior, all twenty-seven of them signing with a flourish. Indeed, in form if not content, the document was reminiscent of the Declaration of Independence.

  The entire diatribe boiled down to one disturbing statement: It was a scandal for a woman in Bonnie McKutchen’s condition to live alone over a storefront and entertain unmarried callers such as Webb Hutcheson and Forbes Durrant.

  The paper rattled a little as Eli set it aside on the bureau. “What the devil do they mean by ‘her condition’?” he demanded of a flushed and nervous Seth, who was now stationed a full six feet away and had the air of a man about to run for his life.

  “Read the others,” Seth urged.

  One by one, Eli read the remaining letters. Many didn’t concern Bonnie at all; they were from men who worked in the smelter yard and had solid complaints about their wages and working conditions. Others only touched on Bonnie, but the phrase “her condition” turned up over and over again.

  And then there was the letter from the doctor. He stated outright that his fee for attending Mrs. McKutchen was fifty-six dollars, which should be remitted in total before her delivery.

  What Eli had not allowed himself to suspect before was distilled to brutal fact by the doctor’s words. Bonnie was pregnant.

  How could she stay in Northridge when she knew what another baby would have meant to the both of them? There was only one explanation and Eli wasn’t sure he could bear it.

  The child wasn’t his.

  He gave a cry of rage and pain and moved to fling all the papers off his lap, all except a fat envelope that probably contained more bad news.

  “It appears we’ve made a mistake,” Seth put in hoarsely, “in appointing Mr. Durrant to manage the McKutchen holdings at Northridge. According to my inquiries, he’s been abusing his authority for some considerable time and the workers despise him.”

  Eli had a blinding headache, and his stomach roiled. “Do you think I give a damn what that pissant does?”

  “Eli, you read the workers’ letters. There’s a strike brewing, for God’s sake!”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Eli—”

  “I want to divorce my wife, Seth,” Eli said, meeting his lawyer’s eyes.

  Seth flushed and lowered his own gaze to the envelope that remained in Eli’s lap. “I’m afraid that won’t be necessary,” he said.

  “What?”

  Prying at his high collar with three fingers, Seth edged toward the bedroom door, opened it, stood poised in the chasm. “Mrs. McKutchen,” he said, “has already divorced you.”

  At first Eli was quiet, too stunned to react; he simply watched Seth Callahan’s Adam’s apple try to fight its way free of that constricting collar. But then, as he thought of Bonnie’s baby and traced it back to conception, he gave a bellow of rage and proceeded to clear every surface in the room. He overturned most of the furniture, shattered every lamp, reduced the basin and pitcher to shards of glass, destroyed the mirrors and even the windows.

  Only the picture taken on Fire Island, before the end of the world, remained unharmed.

  In early October, Eli sailed for Europe. He visited England and Scotland, France and Italy, Germany and Belgium, lingering as long as he could bear to in each country, recuperating, gathering strength with every passing day.

  For over a year, cables from Seth kept him apprised of the havoc Forbes Durrant was wreaking with the holdings at Northridge and, in the spring of 1900, Eli could no longer ignore his responsibilities toward his grandfather’s company.

  He dreaded seeing Bonnie again, at the same time craving the sight of her, and for all this he decided that, since she was no longer his wife, she would be easy to ignore.

  When Eli’s ship docked in New York, Seth was waiting with evidence to the contrary.

  CHAPTER 5

  “WHERE THE HELL is Forbes?” hissed Dottie Thurston, standing beside Bonnie on the marble steps of the Brass Eagle Saloon and Ballroom. A train whistle keened in the distance; the four-fifteen was rounding the last bend in the river, drawing nearer and nearer.

  For some reason, the sound compounded the wire-tight tension that charged the spring air. Bonnie kept her eyes on Menelda Sneeder and her hatchet brigade and tried to smile companionably. “I don’t know,” she answered, barely moving her lips, “but somebody had better find him. And fast.”

  Dottie turned and, with a quick gesture, dispatched Eleanor on the mission. According to Bonnie’s hasty calculations, that left roughly a dozen be-rouged and perfumed troops to face the petulant multitudes gathered behind Menelda.

  “Step out of our way,” challenged Mrs. Sneeder, member in good standing of the Friday Afternoon Community Improvement Club, her eyes sweeping over Bonnie’s green silk dress and lingering, for one contemptuous moment, at her feather-fluffed bosom.

  Bonnie stood her ground and smiled harder. “Let’s be reasonable, Menelda—”

  “Don’t you dare address me by my Christian name, you—you shameless floozy!”

  Bonnie’s patience was ebbing fast. She was vaguely conscious of a growing crowd of spectators, men and boys who would not lift a hand to prevent a full-blown conflagration, should matters come to that. Perspiration prickled between her breasts and on the palms of her hands—Lord in heaven, wasn’t it hot for an April afternoon? She drew a deep breath and began again.

  “Is it ‘Christian,’ Mrs. Sneeder, to threaten innocent people—”

  The word “innocent” had been a foolish choice but, by the time Bonnie realized her folly, it was too late. The mob of corset-bound, ax-bearing townswomen was stirred to a new level of vexation.

  “Innocent?!” shrilled Miss Lavinia Cassidy, who worked in the public library three afternoons a week and was known to cherish hopes that a certain handsome smelter worker would give up his rascal’s life to court and marry her.

  Bonnie might have argued that she and several of the other women congregated behind her only danced with men, declining to do anything more, but she knew that the effort would be futile. These angry wives, mothers and
sweethearts believed the worst, and nothing short of a miracle would change that fact.

  “It is against the law,” Bonnie went on, stalling for time now, praying that Eleanor would find Forbes in time to avert total disaster, “to destroy private property. Now if you ladies would just go home where you belong—”

  The calico crowd buzzed like a swarm of bees and Bonnie closed her eyes for a moment, silently berating herself for once again choosing exactly the wrong words.

  Menelda Sneeder lifted her hatchet high in the air, rousing her followers to a fever pitch of righteous wrath with the motion. “This place of iniquity and sin shall not stand! Step aside, Bonnie McKutchen, you and the rest of those whores!”

  That did it. Bonnie lunged off the step, a crimson fog shimmering before her eyes. At her lead, Dottie and the others waded in and the resulting melee delighted the cheering spectators.

  Bonnie went directly for Menelda, wrenching the hatchet from the woman’s hands with a strength she hadn’t dreamed she possessed. After dropping the weapon to the muddy ground, she gave Mrs. Sneeder a push that sent her stumbling backward to land bustle first in the muck.

  With murder in her eyes, Menelda shrieked a war cry and struggled to her feet, her legs tangling in her voluminous skirts. She knotted muddy hands in Bonnie’s hair and pulled hard.

  Bonnie brought one fist up under Menelda’s chin, breaking the woman’s painful hold on her scalp, and was about to follow through with a right cross when an arm as hard as a horseshoe suddenly curved around her waist and gripped her against an indurate midsection.

  Startled at first, Bonnie went limp. Menelda Sneeder put out her tongue and hissed, “Now you’ll suffer for your sins, you painted hussy!”

  The jibe electrified Bonnie; she kicked and struggled and cursed, but the arm that restrained her was immovable, a manacle of bone and muscle. She tried to look back at her captor, but he held her so tightly that she couldn’t even turn her head.