Wanton Angel

by Linda Lael Miller

  Bonnie set a knife and fork on the table, along with bread and butter, and put a lid on the skillet. Her father liked his eggs cooked clear through. “Have you anyone in mind? To become your wife, I mean?”

  “Oh, there’s always a widow or two willin’ to tie the knot with a man of business. I don’t imagine I’ll have much trouble findin’ myself a bride.”

  With furious motions, Bonnie measured tea leaves into the yellow crockery pot. She considered crowning her dear father with it and then decided that violence was not the answer. “That’s it, then? After all this time, you’re just going to waltz in here and take this store away from me, and never mind all I’ve done to keep it going?”

  Busy masculine eyebrows arched in a frankly dissipated face. “You’re a married woman with a man to look after you. A rich man, at that. What do you want with a mercantile anyway?”

  Bonnie wasn’t about to go into detail. The story was too complicated and too personal. “A lot has happened that you know nothing about.

  “Little wonder, that,” complained Jack Fitzpatrick. “Not a word from you since you wrote me that the boyo passed on.”

  Any mention of Kiley, however indirect, could be counted on to take the starch out of Bonnie. She took the plate from the table and began filling it with fried eggs. “I’ll wager it was the money you missed, rather than my letters.”

  Her father looked truly hurt when she met his gaze. So hurt that Bonnie turned away to the sink and pumped water into the teakettle with more industry than the task required.

  “Daughter.”

  Bonnie set the teakettle on the stove with a clatter and whirled to face her father, her eyes snapping with a rage she could barely contain. “Don’t you speak to me as though I were still a ten-year-old in a patched dress and pigtails! I’m a grown woman and I’ve kept this store going singlehandedly. You owe me more than a ‘thank-you-very-much,’ damn you!”

  Jack was tucking into his eggs, but his eyes danced when they stole sidelong glances at Bonnie’s pink face. “I’m glad to see that nothin’s broken your fine Irish spirit, girl. Glad indeed. Eli McKutchen would’ve had me to deal with if you weren’t in such fine fettle.”

  Brave words, she thought, but she said nothing. Her spirit was not in such “fine fettle” as her father seemed to think. With a sigh, she sat down at the table.

  “Where is Mr. McKutchen anyway?” Jack asked through a mouthful of fried eggs and fresh bread. “And how did it happen that he allowed his wife to stoop to keepin’ store?”

  Bonnie set her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her hand. “I left him after Kiley died, Da. We were divorced.”

  Jack Fitzpatrick choked on his dinner, probably thinking that now he’d have a grown daughter on his hands, and him seeking a wife. “Divorced?” he croaked.

  “Oh, don’t worry. We were married again last night. And you have a granddaughter.”

  Jack looked wildly about for something to wash down the food lodged in his throat. “Fast work, that,” he said, after Bonnie had mercifully provided him with a glass of water.

  She smiled but made no effort to clarify matters. Let Jack Fitzpatrick hear the story piecemeal from the town gossips. “I’m sure you’re tired,” she said, opening the kitchen door to leave. “I’ll leave you to rest yourself.”

  “Bonnie—”

  She stepped outside and closed the door behind her. The dressmaker was waiting at the base of the stairs, a large box in her arms.

  Bonnie took the box containing her scarlet silk dancing gown, said a gracious “thank you” and walked away. Unable to face the crowd at Genoa’s house, most notably Eli, she followed an impulse that led her in the opposite direction.

  Earline was waiting when she got as far as the rooming house, leaning lazily against the recently added railing of her porch. “Going back to the Brass Eagle already?” the woman crooned.

  Bonnie stopped, clutching the cumbersome box in both hands. “I can’t think why that should interest you, Earline,” she said sweetly, her gaze fixed straight ahead, on the green-gray width of the river.

  “I hope you didn’t lie awake worrying about your man last night,” Earline went on. “I took real good care of him.”

  The box containing the scarlet dancing dress thumped to the wooden sidewalk and Bonnie left it there. “I’m so grateful,” she drawled, “that I could positively spit.”

  Earline laughed. She looked voluptuous and womanly in her summery dress, and Bonnie could imagine her taking good care of Eli. All too well. “A man shouldn’t be lonely on his own wedding night, now should he?”

  Bonnie drew in a deep breath and mentally counted to ten. “I’m sure you think I’m heartbroken,” she was finally able to say. “To be perfectly frank, though, I was relieved that you took him off my hands. You see, ours is a marriage in name only.”

  Earline looked smugly unconvinced. “Sure it is, Bonnie. That must be why you’re about to climb over this railing and tear my hair out by the roots.”

  There was no way Bonnie could deny those words without being damned to hell for an outright liar. She bent, with as much dignity as she could muster, and picked up the box she’d dropped to the sidewalk. “You’ve lost Webb Hutcheson once and for all, Earline—I truly think he’s going to marry Susan Farley before the summer is out—and tormenting me isn’t going to change anything.”

  “It’s going to make me feel better,” Earline answered. “Not that making love to Eli McKutchen is such a terrible chore. He’s all man, that one.”

  To think I’ve made my way all this time, Bonnie marveled to herself, dancing the hurdy-gurdy, running the mercantile, getting myself appointed mayor. And all to be hanged for cold-blooded murder.

  She let the box fall again and started up the steps of Earline’s porch, only to be restrained from behind by strong hands that came out of nowhere and gripped her upper arms.

  “Angel, Angel,” Forbes’s voice scolded, flowing past her ear, smooth as warm brandy with sugar and cream. “Surely you don’t want to fight with Earline.” He paused and then added thoughtfully, “She must outweigh you by forty pounds.”

  Earline’s face went crimson. She forgot all about Bonnie in her indignation over Forbes’s remark and stormed into her house, slamming the screened door behind her.

  Bonnie calmed herself and turned to look into those familiar, impudent brown eyes. “It pains me to say it, but thank you, Forbes. I’m afraid I was about to disgrace myself.”

  Forbes reached down for the bulky dress box. “I was merely protecting my investment. That she-cat would have torn you to shreds and what good would you be then?”

  Suddenly Bonnie was angry all over again. “You simply cannot bear to be accused of kindness, can you, Forbes?”

  He smiled, tucking the dress box under one arm and using the other to propel Bonnie onward, over a sidewalk warped by the floodwaters. “Is that what I’m being accused of? How refreshing.”

  “You are really every kind of scoundrel!” Bonnie amended in a hiss, trying to dig in her heels and finding herself ushered along at an even brisker pace for her troubles.

  Forbes laughed. “That’s more like it,” he replied.

  CHAPTER 26

  THEY HAD REACHED the front steps of the Brass Eagle before Bonnie could get Forbes to listen to her. “I’ve changed my mind—about dancing, I mean.”

  Forbes’s eyebrows arched. He opened one of the doors and steered Bonnie through the entryway into the saloon itself, and they were in the kitchen before he answered. “That, as they say, is a fine how-do-you-do, considering that I was generous enough to agree to your outlandish terms.” He tossed the dress box onto the long trestle table in the middle of the room, and it made a resounding thump, but for all that Forbes did not look angry.

  Bonnie peered at him quizzically and then sat down on one of the long benches that stretched along either side of the table. Normally this room was a busy place, but that afternoon it was empty except for herself and For
bes. “I expected an explosion at the very least,” Bonnie admitted.

  Forbes swung one leg over the bench and sat astraddle, facing Bonnie. “Oh, we’re a pair, you and I.” He set one elbow on the table’s edge and disconsolately propped his head in his hand. “You love Eli, I love Lizbeth. And yet we seem to devote ourselves to driving them away. Why do you suppose that is, Bonnie?”

  Bonnie’s mouth was open. She had expected such honesty from Forbes about as much as she had expected her father to appear out of nowhere and take back the mercantile. In either case, she’d sooner have looked for God to part the Columbia River Tuesday after next, just for something to do. She sighed. “I don’t know about you,” she confessed miserably, “but I think I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid? Of what?”

  Bonnie shrugged. “I’m not sure. Eli just scares me, that’s all. Maybe because it’s so easy for me to let my happiness depend on what he says or does or thinks.”

  Forbes took Bonnie’s hand and squeezed it, and there was a gentle smile on his lips. “You, the Angel? The mayor of Northridge? Depending on someone else for happiness? I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  Bonnie made no effort to remove her hand from Forbes’s. Their friendship might have been a contradictory alliance, but it was an old one and it was real. “Believe it, Forbes,” she said, “because you’re seeing it. If Eli really has been unfaithful to me again, I’m not going to be able to stand it.”

  “Again?” Forbes prompted, bending his head in an endearingly boyish way to look directly into Bonnie’s eyes. “What do you mean ‘again’?”

  In for a dime, in for a dollar, Bonnie thought dismally. “After our little boy died, Eli turned into a complete stranger. He wanted nothing to do with me.” She paused, remembering the way Eli had wept in the garden the night before, and her throat constricted into a burning knot. Forbes’s grasp on her hand tightened reassuringly. “There were other women.”

  Forbes’s dark eyes betrayed a quiet fury. “Go on.”

  Bonnie only shook her head, unable, for the moment, to speak.

  Again Forbes surprised her. He let her hand go and took a tender hold on her chin, making her look at him. “For what it’s worth, Angel,” he said huskily, “men usually don’t deal well with grief. We’re expected to be rock-ribbed and all that and keep our deeper feelings to ourselves. It’s possible that McKutchen did his mourning in the only way that he could manage at the time.”

  A single tear streaked down Bonnie’s face, and at the same time she smiled. “Are you admitting to deep feelings, Forbes Durrant?”

  He rubbed his stubbly chin with one hand. How he contrived to look unkempt and damnably attractive at the same time was a mystery best left to greater minds than Bonnie’s. “Oh, yes, Angel,” he said, with a husky sort of reflection, “I am. The night you married McKutchen—for the first time—I hurt so badly that I thought I was going to die of it.”

  Bonnie felt chagrin. “I’m sorry,” she said, averting her eyes again. “I never meant—”

  Gently Forbes cupped Bonnie’s face in his hands, one thumb brushing away the traces of the tear. He kissed her, not passionately, but in a tender way that was almost experimental. It felt very nice, that kiss, though it didn’t set Bonnie’s toes to tingling the way Eli’s kisses did.

  “I’ll be damned,” Forbes muttered a moment or so after the fact with a wistful shake of his head. “I really am in love with Lizbeth.”

  Bonnie laughed. “How am I supposed to take that remark, Forbes?”

  One of his hands lingered on her face, the thumb moving in a feather-light caress, but his smile was the brazen, mischievous one that Bonnie was used to seeing. “As a compliment, Angel. As a compliment. Loving you has been such a habit with me that I guess I half expected to forget my name or something—when I finally got to kiss you, I mean.”

  “Do you forget your name when you kiss Lizbeth?” she asked mischievously.

  Forbes groaned. “Yes. Among other things, like how to breathe and where I live.”

  His misery made Bonnie happy in a bittersweet and poignant sort of way. “Then I guess you’d better marry her. Next, you’ll be forgetting your bank balance.”

  Forbes looked pleasantly horrified. “That would be serious,” he agreed.

  Bonnie stood up, resigned. “For my part,” she said, “I’m through beating around the bush. I’m going home and talk to my husband.”

  “I could get my buggy and drive you there,” Forbes offered.

  Bonnie stood on tiptoe to kiss his whisker-rough cheek. “Thank you, but walking helps me think, and I’ve got a lot of thinking to do.”

  Forbes touched her hair, in a fleeting, tentative motion of one hand. “Good-bye, Bonnie,” he said gruffly. “And good luck.”

  “The same to you,” Bonnie replied quietly, filled with a feeling of sweet sadness. Who would have thought, she asked herself, as she left the kitchen by the rear door, that there could be pain in the ending of something that had never begun?

  Genoa’s house was quiet, though Bonnie could hear faint sounds of merriment coming from the direction of the garden. On such fine evenings, supper was often served outside.

  It was just as well, Bonnie thought, as she started up the wide stairway leading to the second floor. Her walk across town had done little to clear her mind and she simply wasn’t up to dealing with anyone except Eli. All her emotions, all her instincts were driving her toward him.

  Bonnie found her husband in the master bedroom, as she had somehow known that she would, sitting disconsolately on the edge of the bed. His head was resting in his strong, work-roughened hands, his fingers splayed in his rumpled hair, and he did not look up when Bonnie entered.

  She closed the door behind her and leaned back against it for a long moment, her upper lip caught between her teeth.

  Eli still didn’t raise his head. “I thought you would be spending the evening with your father.”

  “No,” Bonnie said with a sigh. “I don’t believe I’ll be up to having a chat with Jack Fitzpatrick for a while. I went to the Brass Eagle to see Forbes.”

  “Oh,” Eli said. That was all, just “oh.”

  Bonnie felt fiery disappointment. She’d expected a grand and passionate rage at the very least. Didn’t Eli care whether she danced the hurdy-gurdy in a scarlet dress? She was silent for a long time, not trusting herself to speak.

  Eli lowered his hands, but he had yet to so much as look in Bonnie’s direction. His magnificent shoulders were stooped, she noticed now and, in the last fierce rays of daylight pouring in through the windows above the bed, he looked drawn and strangely hopeless.

  At last Bonnie overcame the odd shyness she felt and approached the bed. Standing at its foot, she asked, “Eli, what is it? What’s the matter?”

  He turned his gaze to Bonnie with an effort, and she was stunned at the anguish in the depths of his eyes. “There isn’t any easy way to say this, Bonnie,” he said in a voice as ravaged as his face.

  Bonnie’s heart threatened to stop beating, and she put one hand to it. He was going to say that he’d lied before, that he’d shared Earline’s bed after all. She just knew it. Maybe he had even decided to have this second marriage annulled …

  “Sit down,” he said with an attempt at a smile, his hand patting the nubby white bedspread.

  Bonnie obeyed, mostly because she couldn’t trust her knees to support her, but she didn’t say anything because it was taking all the energy she had just to keep herself from crying.

  “There was a woman in Cuba,” he said. While Bonnie’s mind reeled, he uttered a sound meant to resemble a laugh, but falling far short. “Consolata was a girl, really—she must have been about eighteen when I knew her.”

  Bonnie reached out blindly for the bedpost and held on. She still couldn’t speak, but she’d given up the effort at holding back the tears that streamed down her cheeks.

  Eli made no move to touch Bonnie and that was a kindness, for she couldn’t have bor
ne it, but he went on talking, his voice taut with controlled emotion. “I liked playing soldier, Bonnie, and when I was asked to carry a dispatch to the southern part of the island, I jumped at the chance. I’d been in Santiago de Cuba all of six hours when I collapsed in a cantina—”

  “You had yellow fever,” Bonnie said stupidly, still gripping the bedpost. She remembered the day Genoa had showed her a letter from Seth, explaining that Eli had contracted the disease.

  Eli’s hand touched hers and then drew back to run through his hair. “A young girl named Consolata Torrez took care of me. I was out of my head most of the time and I don’t remember much even now, beyond cracked walls and a crucifix and the godawful heat.”

  Bonnie cleared her throat. “And Consolata?” she prompted miserably.

  Eli stood then, facing Bonnie. He pried her fingers loose from the bedpost and crouched before her, catching both her hands together in both of his. “I know you’re not going to believe me, Bonnie, but I wouldn’t recognize Consolata if I met her on the street. The only woman I remember seeing is you.”

  Bonnie had not intended to look at Eli again, but her eyes sliced to his face. She trembled with sudden fury, wanting to kick and scratch and scream. “You must think I’m every kind of fool, ready to believe any outlandish lie—”

  Eli closed his eyes for a moment. “No.”

  “You made love to that woman, didn’t you?” Bonnie spat, struggling in vain to free her hands from his. “You made love to Consolata Torrez and now you’re trying to say that you were so delirious with fever that you thought she was me!”

  “It began that way, Bonnie,” Eli said brokenly. “I swear it did.”

  Bonnie spoke archly, for all that she was sobbing by then. “And how did it end, Eli?”

  Eli might have been an actor, had he not been born to an industrial empire. He looked at Bonnie as though she’d run him through with a sword. “According to Consolata and her uncle,” he said after a long time, “it ended in disgrace.”