Wanton Angel

by Linda Lael Miller

“Talk isn’t going to accomplish anything, Seth. We need action.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Those poor bastards in Patch Town must be up to their knees in river water, after last night’s storm. Get them out of there.”

  Seth made a rude harrumph sound. “And put them where, Eli? In your sister’s parlor?”

  Eli ignored Seth’s questions, sensible though they were. “Get some lumber and start building those new cabins we talked about. On that stretch of land south of town. I want sewers and washrooms and be sure to leave room for kitchen gardens and the like—”

  “Am I to hire help or just make a morning of it all by myself?”

  In spite of his goose egg and the niggling knowledge that Bonnie had spent the night with another man, Eli laughed. “Hire help.” He tried to sit up, groaned and fell back to his pillows again. “What did you say you hit me with?”

  Seth chuckled and left the room without answering

  After a very long time, Eli managed to maneuver his way out of bed. Cleaning up and dressing were interminable processes, and by the time he’d gotten himself downstairs, he was in a foul mood.

  Genoa was in the kitchen again, with the shoebox baby, and she smiled at her brother, undaunted by his scowl. “You’ve missed breakfast,” she said.

  “I’m not surprised,” grumbled Eli, opening the icebox and peering inside. He found a milk jug there and pulled off its top, drinking directly from the bottle in a calculated effort to annoy his sister.

  Just then Eli noticed the small person sitting at the table, huddled inside a blanket. Genoa rolled her eyes as she spoke to it. “You must overlook my brother’s rudeness, Susan,” she said. “He has the manners of a warthog.”

  “Damnation!” Eli thundered, slamming the icebox door. First Bonnie had gone off to spend the night with some ink monkey on the other side of a raging river, then Seth had hit him with a bottle, and now his own sister was consigning him to the social status of a warthog! “Hellfire!” he roared, as an afterthought.

  The blanketed figure trembled.

  “Now, now, Susan,” Genoa said kindly. “Drink your tea and don’t be afraid of Eli. Despite appearances, he’s really quite harmless.”

  “Harmless,” Eli muttered, storming out of the kitchen and back through the house. They’d see how damned harmless he was when he got his hands on Bonnie and that lover of hers.

  Five minutes later, Eli entered the dining room of the Union Hotel and ordered breakfast. He made sure his table was near a front window, which afforded him a clear view of the street. If anybody approached Bonnie’s store, he would see them.

  His head injury having had no discernible effect on his appetite, Eli consumed two plates of fried ham, four eggs and six biscuits by the time a muddy buggy drew to a halt in front of the mercantile. With some help from her sweetheart, Bonnie alighted from the rig. She carried Rose Marie in her arms and smiled wearily, shaking her head at something Hutcheson had said.

  Eli tossed a bill onto the table and abandoned his breakfast, striding out into the sunny, rain-washed new day.

  “Papa!” Rose Marie crowed, extending both arms and wriggling in her mother’s arms.

  Both Bonnie and her swain stiffened. Bonnie tightened her grasp on the child and retreated a step, but Hutcheson turned and faced Eli squarely, and there was no fear in his bearing or in his eyes.

  Rose Marie began to squirm and shriek. “Papa!” she screamed, furious.

  Bonnie calmly unlocked the front door of the mercantile and disappeared inside.

  Hutcheson’s clothes were wrinkled, like Bonnie’s—they’d probably both been caught in the rain—and his hair stuck out all over his head. Despite all this, there was an unwavering air of dignity about him, and Eli liked him for it.

  “Maybe we’d better talk,” Eli said.

  Interested passersby were pausing in front of the mercantile’s spotless windows, pretending fascination with the goods displayed there. “Not here,” Webb replied with a long sigh. “Let’s go over to the hotel. I could use a cup of hot coffee.”

  Eli felt a muscle in his jawline jump, brought it under firm control. “Whatever you say.”

  “If you don’t stop screaming for your papa, young lady,” Bonnie hissed, shaking one finger in Rose Marie’s outraged face, “I’m going to give you the spanking to end all spankings!”

  Katie, always the peacemaker, made haste to interest Rose Marie in the oatmeal she’d prepared. “There now, our Rose won’t be needing a spanking, now will she. She’s such a good girl!”

  “She’s such a McKutchen!” snapped Bonnie. Her hair was tangled and her clothes were rumpled, and she wanted nothing so much as to take a hot bath and sleep, but she wouldn’t be permitted the luxury because Eli and Webb were probably facing off in the street at that very moment. She had to get to them before yet another disaster could take place.

  Muttering, she stomped out of the kitchen and down the outside stairs, only to find the sidewalk empty except for normal traffic. She looked up and down the street, running one hand over her matted hair. Dear Lord, where had those two great oafs gotten to? She had to find them.

  Tuttle P. O’Banyon was busily sweeping the sidewalk, and Bonnie spoke to him three times before he reluctantly gave her his attention.

  “Have you seen Mr. Hutcheson and Mr. McKutchen this morning, Tuttle?”

  Tuttle reddened and his Adam’s apple moved up and down the long column of his neck. Clearly, he’d heard that Mrs. McKutchen had spent the night beyond the river with Mr. Hutcheson. There probably wasn’t a single person in all of Northridge who hadn’t been told the grisly tale. “Yes, ma’am.”

  It was all Bonnie could do not to stomp her feet. “Where?” she hissed.

  Tuttle gestured toward the Union Hotel with one bony hand and went back to his work.

  Walking into that hotel with her hair and clothes in such a damning state and the last shreds of her reputation gone was one of the most difficult things Bonnie had ever had to do, and she managed it only because there was no real alternative.

  She felt the eyes of waitresses and diners alike boring into her as she crossed the spacious dining room. Webb and Eli were seated at a table near the front windows, glaring at each other over steaming mugs of coffee.

  They sensed Bonnie’s presence at exactly the same moment and both of them stood out of deference to her, though Webb’s rising was the more mannerly. Eli looked wryly explosive, and Bonnie wanted to crawl under the rug when his eyes swept over her, taking in every wrinkle in her dress.

  “If you make a scene,” she said under her breath, as Webb drew out a chair for her, “I will kill you both. Is that understood?”

  “Perfectly,” replied Eli, staring down into his coffee cup.

  “We will work this through,” Webb insisted, “like rational adults.”

  “Dreamer,” Bonnie muttered.

  “I was just telling Mr. McKutchen here about our house,” Webb immediately announced.

  A sidelong glance at Eli put Bonnie on alert. “Our house?” she croaked, praying that Webb wouldn’t just leap into the deception they’d spent the night planning.

  “Yes, indeed,” Webb answered, beaming. His hand moved to cover Bonnie’s but withdrew under the instant heat of Eli’s gaze. “Bonnie and I have agreed that it’s time we stopped keeping our true relationship a secret.”

  Eli reached out for a table knife and Bonnie’s stomach did a triple backflip, relaxing when he only turned the utensil from end to end. “After last night,” he said in a dangerously polite voice, without looking at either Bonnie or Webb, “there can be no question of your ‘true relationship.’”

  Bonnie flushed. She hadn’t come to the decision to marry Webb easily—they had talked all night long—but she wasn’t prepared to feel shame. Fear, yes. Dread, yes. But not shame. “Eli—”

  His golden eyes swung to her face, full of menace. And the profoundest sort of pain.

  Bonnie would have called
the whole charade to a halt, then and there, if Webb hadn’t cut her off.

  “For reasons of our own, Bonnie and I thought it best to keep our marriage a secret. The fact of the matter is that we’ve been husband and wife for a long time.”

  Only Bonnie could have seen past Eli’s cold manner. He was humiliated. Wounded. “How long?” he asked.

  “Two years,” Webb answered kindly. Bonnie couldn’t have spoken if her very life had depended upon doing so.

  “Two years.” Eli sighed the words and, after a moment or so, his eyes linked with Bonnie’s. It was like looking into a nickelodeon; she saw his thoughts so clearly. He was remembering the night he’d bathed Bonnie, carried her to her bed, made love to her. He was remembering her responses and his own.

  Only the memory of the fifty-dollar bill he’d left behind in payment kept Bonnie from shouting that Webb was lying.

  Eli’s chair moved soundlessly over the carpet and, as he rose, Webb did, too.

  “Two years,” Eli marveled distractedly but, when his gaze locked with Webb’s, the air between the two men fairly sizzled with electricity. “You poor, misguided bastard,” he said in a low voice, and then he turned and walked out of the dining room and Bonnie covered her face with both hands and swallowed hard. She felt dizzy, almost to the point of fainting.

  “There was no other way,” Webb said gently.

  It was a long moment before Bonnie dared to speak. “Go away, Webb. Just go away.”

  “At least let me see you back to the store—”

  “You’ve done enough. We’ve done enough. Just go—I can get back to the store on my own.”

  Reluctantly, Webb left and, after a few more minutes, Bonnie slipped out of her chair and somehow made her way across the dining room, through the small lobby, into the street. She climbed the outside stairway of the mercantile—she might have crawled for all she remembered of the journey—stumbled into her bedroom and collapsed onto the bed.

  “Bullfeathers,” Genoa said briskly, turning from the blue vellum invitations she’d been addressing at her desk in the rear parlor. “If Bonnie and Webb were married, I would have known it. The whole town would have known it.”

  Considering the way he felt, Eli was strangely calm. “Why would they lie about something like that?” he asked, leaning against the mantel, gazing at his own reflection in the mirror above it but seeing images of Bonnie instead. Bonnie, lying beneath him, her face transfigured as they made love.

  Genoa’s answer was startling. “You forced them to lie, Eli. And I must confess that the fault is partly mine, too.”

  Eli whirled. “What?”

  “You were going to take Rose Marie away,” his sister reminded him. “Bonnie would do almost anything to prevent that.”

  “You told her?”

  “Of course I told her. Bonnie is my dearest friend.”

  “And I’m your brother!”

  Genoa closed her eyes for a moment and, when she opened them again, they were bright with blue fire. “Yes, Eli, you are my brother and I love you dearly. But what you planned to do to Bonnie was just plain cruel and I had to give her warning!”

  “Cruel? Has it ever occurred to you that I might have been trying to protect my daughter?”

  “You weren’t trying to protect Rose Marie, Eli—be honest with yourself if you won’t be honest with me. You wanted to hurt Bonnie because of Kiley, because she wasn’t waiting for you when you came home from Cuba.”

  Eli lowered his head. Much as he might want to, there was no way he could deny what his sister had said. He cared for Rose Marie, but there hadn’t been time for any sort of bond to develop between himself and his daughter. “They’ll say that Hutcheson is Rose’s father,” he despaired.

  “Of course they will. It would do Bonnie and Webb no good whatsoever to pretend they’ve been married all this time if they said otherwise.”

  A horrible thought possessed Eli. Bonnie would have been lonely and frightened when she arrived back in Northridge two years before. Maybe she’d turned to Webb Hutcheson. Maybe—

  Genoa shook her head, obviously reading her brother’s mind. “Eli, you oaf, you know that child is your own. Rose Marie has your hair, your eyes and, regrettably, your temper.”

  Eli remembered how Rose had squirmed in Bonnie’s arms back there on the sidewalk, shrieking for her papa. Yes, she was his, all right. He smiled.

  “Eli McKutchen,” Genoa demanded suspiciously, “what are you planning to do?”

  Apparently Genoa’s mystical abilities had deserted her. “Nothing,” Eli answered. “Nothing at all.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve got work to do, Genoa. Must be going.” He slipped his hands into his trouser pockets and grinned, feeling better than he had in a long, long time. The beads and tassels of Genoa’s portiere, usually a source of vast annoyance, hardly bothered Eli as he went through the parlor doorway.

  “Eli!”

  He paused, just over the threshold. “You have your hands full around here,” he called back, as an afterthought, “what with that young widow and her baby. Seth and I will be taking rooms at the Union Hotel.”

  The beaded portiere clattered as Genoa shot through the doorway. “The Union Hotel? Nonsense—Eli, this is your home!”

  Eli bent his head and planted a brief, blithe kiss on Genoa’s furrowed forehead. “I’ll send someone for my things,” he said.

  Genoa looked despondent. “I don’t understand. Eli, if you’re angry with me—”

  Eli laughed. “I’m not angry, Genoa. But it’s time I took hold and started straightening out my life and, to do that, I have to be in the center of things. In more ways than one.”

  Genoa’s eyes widened. “You want to be near Bonnie!” she speculated, on a long breath.

  “That’s part of it,” Eli replied. And then he turned and walked out of the house. At sunset, when the second shift fought its way through the growing picket lines outside the smelter works, Eli was among them, dressed the way the workmen were dressed and carrying a dinner box.

  The work was harder than Eli would ever have imagined, but he stationed himself at one of the blast furnaces and shoveled coal into its hell-hot belly until his shirt was soaked with sweat and his muscles were screaming.

  The other men watched him surreptitiously as they tended dross pots and quenchers and sorted ore, and by the time the whistle signaling the dinner break finally blew, they were all but hopping with curiosity.

  Holding a sandwich in soot-blackened hands, Eli forced himself to eat. He knew the men were thinking that he’d drop any minute and he wondered if they weren’t right.

  By the time the shift ended, a full twelve hours after it had begun, Eli was so weary that he could barely walk. Somehow he managed to sign out, put his shirt back on, and stagger through the picket line. Seth was waiting on the smelter road with a buggy, but Eli pretended not to see him. The other men made it as far as their beds unaided, and he would do that, too.

  He was half blind with fatigue by the time he reached his room at the Union Hotel. Without taking the time to wash up or even remove his clothes, he collapsed onto the bed and slept like a corpse.

  Hours later, Eli was awakened by the grinding pain in his own muscles. Muttering to himself, he thrust himself off the bed and stumbled into the bathroom, where he ran a bath so hot that he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face for the steam. He sank into the scalding water with a grimace, willing to endure the burning heat because of the relief it gave his knotted ligaments.

  Soon enough, there was a discreet tap at the bathroom door.

  “Go away, Seth,” Eli moaned.

  “I have brandy,” Seth cajoled. “Imported. A double shot.”

  Eli reconsidered. “Come in,” he called back.

  Seth brought the brandy in and extended it to Eli in a crystal snifter, his eyes politely averted. “You’re a madman,” he said, not unkindly.

  “So I’ve been told,” Eli replied, after several gulp
s of brandy. “How long before I have to go back to that hellhole?”

  Seth drew his watch from a special pocket in his vest and consulted it with raised eyebrows. His spectacles were so fogged with steam that he had to look down his nose to see. “Approximately two hours, though whether or not you truly have to go back is certainly a debatable subject.”

  “I have to,” Eli confirmed grimly.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not going to have any credence with those men unless they know I can do what they do every damned day of their lives, that’s why. Don’t you see, Seth? To them, I’m just Josiah’s spoiled grandson. They know I’ve got money and they know I’ve never had my hands dirty before today.”

  Seth sighed. “I see what you mean.”

  “Good,” Eli snapped in reply. “That’s a comfort to me, Seth. A real comfort. Now, get out of here and let me die with dignity, will you?”

  When Seth had gone, Eli finished his drink and his bath and reluctantly got out of the bathtub. The chambermaid was going to curse him when she saw that the pristine white porcelain tub had been turned to a greasy black, but that was the way of it.

  Every muscle throbbing in protest, Eli dressed himself in fresh clothes, pulled his filthy boots back onto his feet and went downstairs, dinner box in hand. He consumed a fried chicken dinner in the hotel dining room and was back at the smelter in time to pass the grumbling strikers with the other men who worked the second shift.

  That night was worse than the night before. The air seemed hotter and every lift of the coal shovel sent searing pain streaking across the small of Eli’s back, but he worked on until the first whistle blew. This time he couldn’t make himself eat, even though he needed food almost as much as he needed rest. His throat closed over every bite he tried to take and he knew that he’d be violently ill if he did manage to swallow something. That would certainly undo everything he was trying to accomplish.

  “Better eat, Mr. McKutchen,” urged the young man who shoveled coal into the other furnace. “A body can’t hold up under twelve hours of work without somethin’ to keep the fire goin’.”

  Eli dropped the sandwich, made in the kitchen of the Union Hotel, into his dinner box. His colleague resembled a blackface minstrel, he was so dirty, and Eli figured he probably looked about the same himself. “What’s your name?”