Wanton Angel

by Linda Lael Miller

  When he did, his eyes were haunted. Eli didn’t seem to see Bonnie at all. “God in heaven,” he said hoarsely, his face ravaged, “nothing has ever hurt me as badly as feeling my son’s life slip away and not being able to help.”

  Bonnie’s knees wouldn’t support her. She sank to one of the marble benches set about the garden, looking at the pink buds on Genoa’s favorite rose tree but not really seeing them. She was seeing herself in New York, hurrying in from the cold, full of the comedy revue she’d just seen at her favorite theatre.

  The housekeeper, Mrs. Perkins, had met her in the middle of the staircase, and Bonnie had known instantly that something was dreadfully wrong. She’d run past Emma Perkins, past the room she shared with Eli, into the nursery.

  And Eli had been there. He’d been sitting in the wicker rocking chair, holding the baby, rocking back and forth. Endlessly back and forth. When his eyes had lifted to Bonnie’s face, they’d been empty of any expression at all.

  “Where have you been?” Eli had demanded in a voice as empty as his eyes.

  Bonnie hadn’t answered; she’d been too stricken. When she’d reached out for her son, Eli had withheld him from her.

  Now, almost three years later, sitting on a bench in a beautiful, fragrant garden, Bonnie could hear her own scream, feel it tearing at her throat. She swallowed hard and wiped away her tears with one sleeve of her calico dress.

  The sense of Eli’s controlled grief was crushing. She watched helplessly as he struggled to contain emotions that refused to be held in check any longer.

  He began to pace back and forth on the stones of the patio, fighting. Fighting. But Eli’s face was contorted, he was losing the battle.

  Finally he stopped pacing. He threw back his head and a cry of tormented rage, throaty and primitive, rent the gathering twilight. It was as though Kiley had just then died in his arms.

  Without thinking, Bonnie rose from the garden bench and made her way toward Eli. When she reached him, she gathered him into an embrace and held him as he wept. In silence and utter misery, Bonnie shared his pain.

  A long time later, when Eli’s sorrow had lost its shuddering violence and become a healing quietness, they walked, arm in arm, toward the pond. Though darkness had fallen, there was a full moon and a path of silver lit their way.

  It was Eli who broke the silence that had arisen between them, and his voice was still raw, still broken. “I can’t lose Rose,” he said.

  They were standing beneath a whispering willow tree, and the shadows of its tiny leaves moved against Eli’s face. Bonnie felt a deep and terrible sadness. “She’s a very healthy child—”

  “That isn’t what I mean, Bonnie.” The golden eyes were the eyes of a stranger, just as they had been that terrible December night, nearly three years before. “I want my daughter to live under my roof.”

  Bonnie’s hand slipped lifelessly from Eli’s arm and she stared at the rippling waves of darkness and light moving across the pond. “There’s no use pretending that I can stop you. We both know that any judge in the country would side with you.”

  “I don’t think you understand, Bonnie.” Eli’s voice was still ragged, but his strength and his dignity were clearly returning.

  Bonnie’s temper flared. She’d lost one child and now she was about to lose another. Her fists clenched at her side, she glared up into Eli’s shadowed face. “Damn you, Eli, don’t patronize me! I know a threat when I hear one!”

  “A threat?!”

  “Yes! You blamed me for Kiley’s death—you made my life unbearable—and now you’re trying to punish me again by taking Rose away! Oh, God, Eli, how can you be so cruel?”

  Eli’s face, a picture of bewilderment, slowly hardened into an expression of cold, bitter fury. “Is that what you think? That I’m trying to punish you?”

  Bonnie was desolate, and she turned away, unable to bear the look on Eli’s face. “I know that’s what you’re doing,” she said.

  “You actually believe that, after all that’s happened between us since I came back to Northridge?”

  Bonnie tilted her head back and looked up at the stars. “Yes,” she said. She remembered another night under the stars, near a flooded river, and added out of pride, “Don’t you see? I was only using you, the same way you were using me. I wanted a lover, and I took one.”

  Eli swore, then wrenched Bonnie around with such force that she collided with his chest. His lips were drawn taut across his teeth and his eyes flashed in the moonlight like those of some dangerous beast. “In that case,” he breathed furiously, “you might like my terms. One way or another, Bonnie, I’m going to raise Rose as my daughter. But she needs a mother and for that reason, and that reason alone, I’m willing to marry you.”

  “You’re willing?!” Bonnie had never been so insulted in all her life. “Why, you pompous, arrogant, insufferable ass! I wouldn’t marry you again for anything in the world!”

  Eli’s face was rigid with loathing. “I think you will. Because you don’t want to lose your daughter.”

  “Do you know how reprehensible you are?” Bonnie bit out, proud even in her defeat. Finally, she was forced to say, “I’ll marry you, because of Rose, but I’ll never be a wife to you, Eli. I swear I’ll never share a bed with you!”

  Eli laughed and turned to walk away. “I’ll bed you whenever I want to,” he promised over one shoulder, as Bonnie’s face burned. “Of course, Earline will be fulfilling some of your duties, so you needn’t worry too much.”

  Livid, Bonnie crouched, searching the bank of the pond for a rock. By the time she found one suitable for doing murder, Eli was safe inside the house.

  CHAPTER 23

  BONNIE STOOD A long time beside the moonlit pond, turning an impossible dilemma over and over in her mind. How might she take Rose home to the mercantile without first going inside the McKutchen house to fetch her?

  There seemed to be no answer but to slip inside the parlor and pray that Eli would not be there, waiting to prevent her from slipping away with her daughter.

  Cautiously Bonnie approached the house through the garden. Light from the parlor windows fell across the shrubbery and flowers in golden bars, and she took great care to keep to the shadows between. The French doors were unlocked.

  Bonnie peered inside, hoping to see a clear track between herself and the little girl sleeping peacefully on the window seat. Instead she saw Seth and Eli standing in the center of the room, arguing in hushed voices, while Rose was nowhere in sight. She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to think, and when she’d calmed herself she was able to hear parts of the discussion going on between Eli and his friend.

  Seth was red in the face and so agitated that he actually tore off his jacket and flung it away. Then, incredibly, he even loosened his celluloid collar. “—Inexcusable behavior—I won’t be a party to such a thing—”

  Bonnie carefully opened one of the French doors in order to listen. Eli’s words, though spoken quietly, carried into the cool, fragrant shadows of the garden.

  “I’ve tried everything else, Seth. Everything.”

  “This is coercion!” Seth answered forcefully. He looked ready to engage in fisticuffs, should matters come to such a pass. His eyes shifted suddenly toward the French doors, and Bonnie, realizing that she had been seen, ducked away to crouch behind a forsythia bush.

  She heard no more, but that didn’t matter, because Bonnie knew all too well what the altercation between Eli and his lawyer was about. Eli had related his plan to force Bonnie into a sham marriage and Seth, a decent, upstanding man, was adamantly opposed to the idea.

  Aware that few people defied Eli McKutchen with any success, Bonnie offered a silent prayer that the argument in the parlor would last for a few more minutes, then dashed around the back of the house and through the kitchen door. “Don’t either of you dare give me away!” she whispered to Genoa and Lizbeth, who were having a cup of tea at the table. Before anyone could answer, she raced up the rear stairs to the
second floor.

  There were a number of rooms where Rose might have been put to bed, but Bonnie, operating on intuition, went straight to the master bedroom, which, despite his long absence from Northridge, had been considered Eli’s private domain ever since his twenty-first birthday.

  Rose was nowhere in sight, but the door to the small sitting room adjoining the bedchamber stood open, a faint glow of moonlight shining within. Bonnie slipped through the doorway.

  The sitting room had always been an inviolably masculine place. Eli, like his grandfather before him, had often retreated to this room to think. There were still books on the shelves, and the familiar chair and settee, both upholstered in rich Moroccan leather, remained, but a subtle transformation had begun. A brass daybed had been brought in from Genoa’s room—Rose slept upon it now—and the covering at the windows, somber velvet draperies as Bonnie remembered, had been replaced with white eyelet curtains.

  Bonnie lit a lamp and looked about her with a growing sense of betrayal. An elaborate dollhouse, some eight feet long and fully furnished down to tiny coal scuttles and china dishes—a relic of Genoa’s privileged childhood—sat where Eli’s desk had been, waiting to enchant Rose in the morning—as the pony had already enchanted her and, before that, the magnificent doll.

  Approaching the dollhouse, Bonnie ran a trembling hand over its roof of tiny shingles. There was a library, with infinitesimal books on minuscule shelves, and wee crystal chandeliers hung from ceilings with intricate moldings of rosettes and cherubs, making fairy music in the draft. With a sigh, Bonnie straightened.

  It wasn’t the fact that she could never give such toys to Rose Marie on her own that hurt so much. She knew that love was what children thrived on, not ponies, not beautiful dolls, not dollhouses fit for display in the world’s finest museums. No, what gave Bonnie pain was knowing that Genoa, heretofore her staunchest friend, had been a party to Eli’s plan. She must know that the brass daybed had been brought here from her own room, and unpacking all the precious furnishings of the dollhouse, not to mention putting them in place, would have taken hours. It was a task too delicate for clumsy masculine fingers.

  Numb, Bonnie blew out the lamp and turned away, leaving her daughter to sleep, undisturbed. On entering Eli’s room, she was only mildly surprised to find Genoa there, sitting on the edge of the first bed that Bonnie had ever shared with her husband.

  Genoa had the good grace to look sheepish. “I know what you must be thinking—”

  “I’m sure you do,” Bonnie agreed. “How could you, Genoa? For so long, you were the only friend I had, the only person I could really trust—” Her voice fell away, and she leaned back against the framework of the doorway to the sitting room, her arms folded. “Rose Marie is far too young to play with such a dollhouse,” she went on after a long silence. “She’s likely to eat everything that will fit into her mouth.”

  The lamp flickering on Eli’s bedside table splashed Genoa’s McKutchen-blond hair with golden light. She let Bonnie’s remark about the dollhouse furnishings pass. “Rose belongs in this house, Bonnie. Just as you do.”

  Bonnie smiled, even though amusement was the last thing she felt. She supposed it was some sort of hysterical reaction, her smiling like that, for the expression felt foreign and awkward on her mouth. “You must feel very strongly indeed, Genoa, to betray me this way.”

  “Eli said there’d be no reasoning with you,” Genoa sighed. “I should have listened to him, I guess.”

  “By all means,” Bonnie replied tartly, “listen to Eli. He’s a man, so he must know best!”

  Genoa sniffed. “You are being deliberately difficult, Bonnie McKutchen! You love Eli—you admitted as much to me only a few hours ago—and yet you refuse to cooperate with him in any way!”

  “I may have loved Eli then, but I hate him now. He’s put me in an impossible position—I can either live with him as his wife or lose custody of my child. That’s some choice, isn’t it?”

  Genoa went pale. “Are you going to agree to his terms, Bonnie?” she asked in a small voice. “Or will you run away?”

  “If I were going to run away—and I can’t think where I could go to get out of his reach—I certainly wouldn’t confide in you, Genoa. I’m going to marry Eli, and then I’m going to make him wish to high heaven that he’d never been born.”

  Looking as though she’d been slapped, Genoa stood up and walked toward the door. There she paused, her thin back rigid, her hand on the knob. “Martha’s boy has gone for the reverend. I could have the carriage brought round if you want to go home and fetch something suitable to wear.”

  Bonnie looked down at her plain calico dress. “Considering the circumstances, this will do just fine,” she answered coldly.

  Genoa flinched as though a snowball had struck her back, then walked out.

  Twenty minutes later, in the main parlor, with Genoa, Lizbeth and Susan Farley for witnesses—Seth had apparently stuck by his resolution to have no part in the debacle —Reverend Beam remarried Bonnie to Eli McKutchen. The elderly clergyman had performed the first wedding ceremony as well, and he read the holy words in a stern voice, his white eyebrows bobbing up and down when he came to the part about letting no man put asunder what God has joined together.

  When it came time for the customary kiss, Bonnie turned toward Eli with a resigned sigh. She had decided to permit her reprehensible groom this one kiss, just for the sake of appearances.

  Eli made no effort to kiss her, however. He turned away instead and signed the waiting marriage license with a grim flourish. More than a little embarrassed, Bonnie signed, too.

  Lizbeth was looking on with bewilderment, while Genoa would obviously have preferred to be anywhere but in that room. The Reverend Beam hastened away as soon as he’d been paid and Eli looked blatantly restless.

  In fact, of the wedding party, Susan Farley was the only one who looked truly happy.

  “Well,” Eli said expansively, to everyone in general and no one in particular, “I’m off to celebrate. It isn’t every day a man gets married.”

  Bonnie gaped, watching in disbelief as Eli checked his cufflinks and tugged at the sleeves of his suitcoat. Both Genoa and Lizbeth wore stunned faces, but Susan Farley piped up, “There won’t be anyone to look after Webb tonight, except for that flighty Katie. Would you mind much, Mr. McKutchen, if little Samuel and me went as far as the mercantile with you?”

  Eli smiled, every inch the accommodating gentleman. “I’ll hitch up the buggy and meet you out front,” he answered cheerfully. One would never have guessed that he’d just taken a bride, and Bonnie didn’t know whether to be relieved or furious. With dignity, she walked out of the parlor, across the entry hall and up the stairs.

  Susan Farley was right behind her, collecting her infant son from the room they shared. She was humming happily as she prepared to rush back to Webb.

  Enlightened, Bonnie silently wished the young widow Godspeed and made her own martyrlike way into the master bedroom. She looked in on Rose, and then got ready for bed. Genoa—thoughtful creature—had set out a toothbrush and a tin of polishing powder on the bureau for her. Carrying these to the bathroom down the hall, Bonnie took her sweet time brushing her teeth and washing her face, but the inevitable could only be delayed for so long, and she finally returned to the bedroom.

  She had half expected Eli to be waiting for her there, ready to demand his conjugal rights, and Bonnie had been rehearsing her refusal, but the room was empty.

  With a sigh, Bonnie took off her calico wedding dress, turned back the covers and climbed into her lonely marriage bed. Hands cupped behind her head, she stared up at the ceiling and waited.

  After an hour or so, the lamp on the bedside table began to flicker and smoke. Bonnie sat up, lifted the china globe and blew out the flame.

  When she was settled again, her mind immediately filled with memories of the first night she’d spent in this very bed. She’d been a virgin bride, full of love and anticipation and
fear, and Eli had taken great care in deflowering her. Deliberately, thoroughly, he’d taught her pleasure, and she’d been in such a fevered state of joy by the time he entered her that the pain passed almost unnoticed …

  Now, once again a bride but no longer a cherished virgin, Bonnie lay alone in the darkness, her heart as sore as her pride. Sure, she’d told Eli that she wouldn’t let him so much as touch her if he forced her into this disastrous marriage, but there was a part of her that hadn’t meant those words, a part that craved his caresses and his possession.

  An invisible clock on an invisible mantelpiece ticked away the minutes, and Bonnie tried her best to go to sleep, but the war between her pride and her love for Eli McKutchen kept her awake, tossing and turning. The clock chimed eleven and then twelve and then one.

  Finally Bonnie fell into a fitful sleep. She dreamed that she and Eli were making love on a warm bed of grass, beside a river that had nearly claimed their lives, and awakened in a state of heated misery to find that it was morning.

  Eli’s side of the bed was empty.

  Muttering because she knew that if she let go of her anger for so much as a moment she would cry enough tears to flood the Columbia River all over again, Bonnie got out of her bed and dressed hastily.

  A quick peek into the adjoining room revealed that Rose Marie was already up, probably having breakfast with her doting Aunt Genoa.

  Seething, Bonnie brushed her hair and pinned it up, washed her face and rinsed her mouth, then stomped down the rear stairs to the kitchen. Only Martha was there. “Good morning, Mrs. McKutchen,” she said, busy at the stove. “Miss Genoa and Miss Rose Marie are in the garden, enjoying the sunshine.”

  Miss Genoa and Miss Rose Marie are in the garden, enjoying the sunshine. How normal those words sounded, and how horribly abnormal Eli had made this untenable situation by staying out all night long.