Willow: A Novel (No Series)

by Linda Lael Miller

  Willow knelt and began digging through the trunk at the foot of her childhood bed, hauling out trousers and a shirt to replace the black sateen dress she had been wearing since morning. “Daphne, just shut up and change your clothes, will you?” she snapped. “It will be dark soon.”

  “Do you really believe for one infernal minute that Gideon and your father are going to allow you to go riding? Now, of all times?”

  Willow shimmied out of the hateful, restrictive dress and began pulling on the trousers. She paused long enough to fling a second pair across the room to Daphne. “Papa and Gideon won’t even notice that we’re gone,” she said. “They’re shut up in Papa’s study, both of them, drowning their sorrows in whiskey no doubt, and they will probably stay there half the night.”

  Daphne looked appalled. “Willow, how can you be so callous, so, so blithe! I thought you loved Steven!”

  “I do.”

  “You mean you did,” insisted Daphne.

  Willow sighed, tugging on her riding boots. “I mean I do,” she corrected firmly.

  Daphne went completely white. Then, at last, she began divesting herself of her dress and petticoats to don the trousers and shirt Willow had tossed her.

  * * *

  Gideon folded the telegraph message and tucked it into the inside pocket of his coat. Jack Roberts had heard about Daphne’s affection for Steven Gallagher, most likely from Hilda, and he was on his way to Virginia City. Probably, it was already too late to send a return wire and inform him that the danger to his daughter’s virtue had been permanently removed.

  Having wandered outside into the garden encompassing one side of the judge’s property, Gideon sat down on a marble bench. What with everything else that was going on in his life right now, he really didn’t need a confrontation with Daphne’s father. On the other hand, he was going to have to explain everything sooner or later anyway. It might as well be sooner.

  “Señor?”

  Gideon looked up to see one of Maria’s cousins standing near the lilac bushes, his hat turning nervously in his hands. “Yes—Juan?”

  “I am Pablito,” said the boy stoically. “Señor, I come to tell you that the señora—Willow—she rides toward the hills.”

  Gideon was alarmed. “Willow? Is she alone?”

  “No. She is with the other señorita, the one who visits here.”

  “I see.” Gideon ground out the words.

  Pablito looked worried. “You will not follow them? Bring them back home?”

  Gideon sighed. If going riding would help Willow deal with what had happened to her beloved older brother, and to the younger ones, he wasn’t about to get in her way. Nothing he’d said or done so far had been of any comfort and, besides, she was with Daphne.

  There was some comfort in that.

  “No,” he heard himself say. “Let them go.”

  Approval flashed in the dark eyes—along with something else that was harder to recognize and define. “Sí,” Pablito said, and then he turned and left the garden as quietly as he had entered it.

  Gideon sat for a while longer and then rose from the bench. It wouldn’t be right to go chasing after Willow, yet he couldn’t remain in or near this house much longer, either. The sense of loss was oppressive.

  First his mother, whom he missed more than he’d expected to, and now Steven and his and Willow’s young half brothers.

  Would the dying stop now? Gideon wondered.

  He thought briefly of his brother, wondering where Zachary had gone without so much as a word of farewell, let alone explanation. But he was used to the distance between himself and his brother, whether that distance was measured by miles or by the human heart.

  Finally, at a loss and not one for sitting still, he decided to walk to the office that had been his until he’d resigned the day of Steven’s death, to see how the new marshal was getting on.

  Lot Houghton had seemed a good man to Gideon, a stalwart sort who could handle the rigors of such a job. Today Houghton greeted his predecessor with a shy smile and a hoarse “howdy.”

  “Afternoon,” replied Gideon, removing his hat.

  “Have a chair, Mr. Marshall,” urged the young lawman. “I’ll get you some coffee.”

  Gideon took the chair but declined the coffee, wishing that the cattle he’d bought for the ranch would arrive so that he could herd them or brand them or something. He’d always had plenty to occupy him, and he wasn’t used to having to look for things to do to kill time.

  “I was sorry about the judge’s boy,” Lot ventured. “The others, too.”

  “Thanks,” Gideon replied. He hadn’t know Steven, really, only having met him once, but he felt the loss because Willow and the judge did. “Did you know Steven?”

  Lot grinned sadly. “Sure did.”

  “What did you think of him?”

  The young man, in the midst of setting out his belongings, put a daguerreotype of a plain young woman and a plump baby on the shelf behind his desk and paused to admire it. “Liked him,” he said succinctly.

  “Even though he was a train robber?”

  “He wasn’t no train robber,” the lawman parried defensively. “He only took things to devil his old man.”

  “Steven Gallagher killed Mitch Kroeber,” Gideon reminded the new marshal quietly, hoping the days ahead would be peaceful ones, not only for Houghton’s sake, but for the woman and the baby in the picture. “And the loot he took that day belonged to the passengers, not to Devlin.”

  “That weren’t Steven, that done that robbery and that killing,” came the flat and certain reply.

  “Kroeber called the man Gallagher.”

  Lot pulled a face. “Hell, if you’d lived here any stretch of time at all, you’d know old Mitch was half-blind. This feller was just somebody that looked like Steven.”

  Gideon knew a deep sense of disquiet, though he couldn’t quite figure what had spawned it. “Do you know of anybody who looks that much like Gallagher?” he asked, almost afraid of the answer.

  “Sure,” said Lot, riffling through a stack of wanted posters and then extending one to Gideon. “Here’s one right here.”

  Gideon took the tattered poster and studied the drawing in amazement. The face sketched on it belonged to a man named Silas Blanchard, and he was wanted for a list of crimes as long as the railway between there and Butte. If the witnesses were frightened, and he was wearing a mask, Blanchard probably would resemble Steven Gallagher. “You ever seen this man?”

  “No, I was just looking through these after I took over the job and I thought this feller reminded me of somebody. Showed it to my Alice, when she brought over my lunch earlier today, and she said she reckoned he bore a real strong likeness to Steven.”

  Again Gideon felt uneasy, though he couldn’t have explained why. Twilight was coming on, and he wondered if Willow and Daphne were back from their ride yet. “Kroeber kept a record of every crime committed while he was marshal, according to Judge Gallagher,” he reflected. “Mind if I take those journals of Kroeber’s home and look them over? I’ll bring them back tomorrow.”

  Lot, who looked more like a farmer than a lawman, with his open, friendly face void of suspicion, seemed amenable. “Can’t see what it would hurt,” he said, tilting in his chair to the three dusty books Gideon had mentioned. “You see that you bring those books back here, though, like you said. Mitch’s family will want them for remembrances, most likely.”

  “Thank you,” Gideon said, with a nod in place of a promise, rising from his chair to take the journals and his leave.

  “My sympathies to the judge and Miss Willow,” replied Lot Houghton. His farmer’s face was ingenuous, burned red by the sun.

  Gideon nodded and left the marshal’s office. Climbing into the waiting buggy, he remembered the parcel containing the music box and the mechanical monkey he’d bought for Willow, then bent to reach under the seat and see if it was still there. It was.

  With a sigh, Gideon released the brake lever an
d set Mitch Kroeber’s journals aside to take up the reins. He’d feel like a fool giving Willow a toy monkey; what in hell had possessed him to buy a thing like that in the first place?

  Passing the Gallagher house, Gideon considered stopping by to make sure that Willow and Daphne had returned safely from their ride, then decided against it. They had to be back. Daphne would have pitched a fit the moment it started getting dark and insisted on going home.

  In his own kitchen, out on his lonely ranch, Gideon lit a lamp and started a pot of coffee perking. Then, after assuring himself that Willow needed this time with her father, he sat down at the table, opened one of Kroeber’s remarkably detailed logbooks, and began to read.

  Again and again he found entries mentioning Steven Gallagher. He’d stopped the train twenty-eight times in the past five years, and if Mitch Kroeber’s neatly written account could be believed, he’d never taken so much as a nickel that didn’t belong either to Devlin Gallagher himself or one of his companies.

  It was very late when Gideon closed the last book, but he was too riled up to sleep, so he just sat there at the table, drinking the dregs of his coffee and wondering about things and feeling anxious. Upon finding out that Daphne had witnessed the last train robbery and the murder of Mitch Kroeber, Gideon had, of course, questioned her. She’d said that Kroeber had called the robber Gallagher, but she’d also insisted that the late marshal had been wrong.

  At the time, because he’d already guessed that Daphne cared for Steven, Gideon hadn’t believed her. Willow and the judge, too, had had valid reasons for denying Steven’s guilt, and he had discounted their views as well.

  Now, alone in that dark and empty house, with the lamp burning low, Gideon felt more than just a hollowed-out kind of loneliness. He felt a growing conviction that Steven Gallagher had not been a vicious criminal but an angry, hurt little boy hiding inside the body of a man. Oh, he’d been a nuisance to the railroad, all right, upsetting their schedules, scaring their passengers, that sort of thing. But he wouldn’t have been hanged for that, nor would a bounty have been offered for his capture. And if a reward hadn’t been put up, Steven Gallagher wouldn’t be dead.

  Sick inside, Gideon took up the lamp and went out onto the back porch. There, he stripped off his shirt and filled the washbasin with tepid water that had been sitting in the sun all day and gave himself a bath of sorts. He wondered again if he should go back to town and fetch Willow, bring her home.

  No, he decided, after a long time. She probably felt that she needed to be close to her father now; if she wanted to be with Gideon himself, she would come to him on her own.

  Gideon had been in bed for about ten minutes when Willow appeared, big as life, wearing trousers and a man’s shirt and sitting down on the edge of the mattress with a sigh to haul off her boots. Her hair trailed down her back in a thick, single braid. Watching her, Gideon half-believed she wasn’t there at all, that he was seeing things.

  “Did I wake you up?” she asked blithely.

  Gideon stared at her, amazed. He couldn’t make out her expression, since there was only strained moonlight to see by. “Hell, it’s only two in the morning or thereabouts,” he rasped, furious and oddly shaken. “Why would I be sleeping?”

  The sarcasm in his voice didn’t seem to bother Willow. She pulled the braid over one shoulder and began to unwind it. That done, she took off her shirt and those god-awful trousers and crawled into bed beside Gideon in bloomers and a camisole, just as though she didn’t have a thing in the world to explain.

  “Where have you been, damnit?” Gideon demanded through his teeth. He raised himself onto one elbow and squinted, trying to look into her eyes.

  “Riding,” she said, sweetly. With a little yawn.

  “At this hour of the night?”

  She sighed contentedly and snuggled down into her pillow. “The moon was huge,” she said, as if that settled everything. “It was bright as day out there.”

  Gideon was about to explode when the sheets rustled and Willow suddenly reached out and splayed the fingers of one soft hand over his chest.

  “Make love to me, Gideon,” she said, chafing one of his nipples with the side of her thumb, causing him to groan involuntarily.

  His voice was so rough that it hurt his throat, coming out. “Willow, today—”

  “I know what happened today, Gideon. Believe me. And now I need to have you touch me and kiss me until I can’t see or breathe or think.”

  He understood and came to her, kissing her deeply. Her tongue immediately met his in a brief, spirited foray. Having lain beside her, wanting her and yet denying himself because of her loss, for three torturous nights, Gideon’s body was taut with hunger for hers. He trailed his mouth to Willow’s left breast and was greedy there, suckling the warm, hard tip, drawing at it with his lips, teasing it with his tongue.

  She arched her back in unqualified surrender, crooning. She caught fire so easily—a touch, a word, a look.

  It was one of the many things he loved about her.

  “Oh, Gideon. God, God, Gideon.”

  He turned to the other breast, not devouring it, not mocking it with whisper-soft kisses. It was an obedient little morsel, straining to be captured.

  “Have me,” Willow whimpered. “Oh, Gideon, have me soon.”

  Stubbornly, Gideon continued to pleasure the breast, to draw from it.

  “Oh, Gideon, please!” Willow wailed, clutching at his shoulders with frantic hands.

  He caused her to kneel in the middle of the bed, placed his hands full on her breasts, and began to attend her with soft, quick strokes of his tongue. She gave a choked, desperate gasp and began to move upon him, back and forth, up and down.

  She chanted his name in a fever of need, writhing, moaning when he plucked gently at the points of her ripe breasts, spurring her on.

  When he sensed that the most important moment was near, Gideon began to draw upon her earnestly. She gave a keening, wild-animal cry, stiffened, and then convulsed. He waited, and then parted her again and kissed her softly until a low, growling whine came from her throat.

  “No, oh, Gideon, not again.”

  “Again,” rasped Gideon, between kisses.

  “Ooooooh.”

  He tongued her thoroughly, then kissed, then tongued again. She was maniacal, writhing and pleading, clawing at the bedclothes with her hands. “Oh, stop—”

  “No,” he said gruffly, from the moist sanctuary of her sweetness. “I’m not going to settle for less than everything you have to give.”

  She whimpered and thrust her knees out wide and Gideon was greedy to the very last.

  * * *

  As always, there was a certain cautiousness in Gideon’s eyes when he was poised above Willow. No matter how obvious her yearning for him, no matter how feverish the moment, he never failed to await her bidding.

  “I love you, Gideon,” she whispered, “I want you. Now.”

  He moaned and she felt the heated strength of him touch her, ease inside her waiting body, so ready to receive him. “Willow,” he breathed, struggling to withhold the full length of his shaft. He seemed to be caught in her name, entangled in it. “Willow, Willow.”

  She was stroking his taut, muscular hips, urging him gently. “More, Gideon, please, more.”

  The planes of his magnificent face were shadowed, but she could still see the effort he was making to prolong the searing pleasure for both of them.

  Willow trailed the tips of her fingers over his buttocks and knew sweet satisfaction when he trembled and bit back a cry of undisguised need. “You think to make me plead for what you have to give, sir,” she teased huskily. “Instead, you force me to take it.”

  “Don’t, oh, Willow.”

  But she did. She gave a powerful, upward thrust of her hips, at the same time pressing him to her with her hands.

  “Oh, God,” he pleaded, but he was lost, forced to move with her by the savage demands of his own body and the sweet, soft treachery of Wi
llow’s. “I’ve needed you so much, oh my God, my God, slower, so much . . .”

  His senseless words were a sonnet to Willow, fanning the flames of passion inside her to ferocious, searing blazes. His powerful hands moved to grasp her bottom and guide her fiercely; where he had pleaded before, he now commanded. Again and again he withdrew his magnificence, sheathed it again.

  Willow thrashed and wailed beneath him, craving each thrust of his sword, welcoming it. Suddenly, she was racked, body and soul, by the fiery, pagan release he had driven her to. She shivered, flailing atop the flames of passion, and then glided slowly back to earth, weeping softly as she fell.

  Gideon continued to move upon her, but his control was very tenuous now. Soon, he, too, would be flung to glory, and watching that happen was a joy Willow craved as much as she had her own climax. She began to urge him toward the borders of heaven, with her hands, with soft, wanton words.

  Finally, a great shudder moved through Gideon’s frame. His eyes were closed and his head was thrown back and his lips were drawn tight across his teeth. His cry of triumph was a hoarse and lengthy one, infinitely beautiful to Willow. And as his hard body buckled against hers, helpless in the throes of his fulfillment, she whispered wicked promises to make the sweet suffering greater.

  At last, he was still upon her, exhausted. She ran her hands up and down the moist, muscle-taut length of his back until he was breathing normally again. When he lifted his face from the dark gold fan of her hair, there was a mischievous note in his voice.

  “Would you really take advantage of me on the piano bench, Mrs. Marshall?” he teased.

  Willow blushed in the deep darkness. “Gideon!”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “I was speaking in the heat of passion!” she protested, wildly embarrassed that she could have made such a brazen remark.

  “Nevertheless,” Gideon chortled, sliding down to bury his face in the lush fullness of her breasts, “I’m going to take you on the piano bench, Mrs. Marshall.”