For a moment, Blair couldn’t understand why the man in her arms had called her by her sister’s name.
Remembrance came to her all too swiftly. With a feeling of sheer horror, she started to pull away from Lee. “I have to go home,” she said, and her voice showed all that she felt.
“Houston,” Lee said, “it’s not the end of the world. We’ll be married in two weeks, and then we’ll spend all our nights together.”
“Let me up! I have to get home.”
He looked at her for a long moment, as if he were deciding whether or not to be angry, but at last he smiled. “You can be as shy as you want, sweetheart. Here, let me help you with that.”
Blair couldn’t even look at him. It had been the most wonderful experience of her life, but it hadn’t really belonged to her. She had cheated her sister, cheated the man she was to marry, and lied to this man who …who…
Under her eyelashes, she looked at Lee as he helped her with her corset strings. If she wasn’t careful, she’d be back in his arms and, if he asked her, she’d probably board the next train with him and forget all about her obligations to other people.
“You certainly seem to know your way around a woman’s underclothing,” she snapped at him.
Lee chuckled as he held the taffeta petticoat for her to step into. “Well enough, I guess. Shall I do your garters for you?”
Snatching her hose out of his hand, she sat on a chair and began to roll them onto her legs, trying her best to ignore him. What in the world had she done? Houston was going to hate her. And what would Lee say when he found that his bride was a virgin—again? And what would Alan say if he knew? How could she explain to him? Would anyone believe her if she said that he’d touched her and after that she’d had no more control over her own body? Maybe all the things that Duncan Gates said about her were true.
“Houston,” Lee said, kneeling in front of her. “You look as if you’re about to cry.” He took her hands in his. “Look at me, sweetheart. I know how you’ve been raised, and I know you meant to stay a virgin until we were married, but what happened tonight was between us and it was all right. I’ll be your husband in very little time, and then we can enjoy each other as often as we want. And if you’re worried about the morality of what we did, I’m a doctor and I can tell you that many, many women who enter marriage have spent some time alone with the men they love.”
He was making everything worse. The man she loved was not the man she’d just made love to, and the man she was to marry had not taken her virginity.
She stood. “Please take me home,” she said, and Leander obeyed her.
Chapter 6
“Good morning,” Leander said with uncharacteristic jubilation to his father and sister, Nina, who sat at the breakfast table.
Nina, twenty-one and very pretty, paused with her coffee cup on the way to her mouth. “Then it’s true what I heard,” she said.
Lee helped himself to an enormous plateful of food from the sideboard.
“Sarah Oakley called first thing this morning and told me that last night at the reception you and Houston couldn’t take your eyes—or hands—off each other. She said that she’d never seen two people so in love.”
“Did she now?” Lee asked. “And just what was so unusual about that? I have asked the beautiful lady to marry me.”
“But there have been times when you looked as though you wanted to run away rather than stay with your lovely bride.”
Lee smiled at his sister. “When you grow up, baby sister, maybe you’ll know a little more about the birds and the bees.” As he put his plate down across from her, he reached over and kissed her on the forehead.
Nina nearly choked on her food. “That does it,” she said, looking up at her father. “He’s either mad or he’s finally fallen in love.”
Reed was leaning back in his chair and watching his son with great interest. When Lee looked up at him and winked, his worst fears were confirmed.
“You sure know a lot about women, Dad,” Lee grinned and Reed burst out laughing.
“I don’t think I want to know what that little exchange was about,” Nina said primly as she rose to leave. “I think I’ll call Houston and give her my condolences.”
“Tell her I’ll pick her up at eleven,” Lee said with his mouth full. “And I’ll bring a picnic basket.”
Reed stayed in his chair and lit his pipe, something he rarely did in the morning, and watched his son eat. Usually, Leander ate slowly and carefully, but today he was wolfing food as if there were no tomorrow. He seemed to be lost in a world of his own, a world of happiness and plans for the future.
“I’ve been thinking about that women’s hospital lately,” Lee said, as he bit into a two-inch-thick biscuit. “Actually, Houston made me think of it. Maybe it’s time that I start looking into building the thing, or maybe I’ll buy that old stone warehouse at the end of Archer Avenue. With some work and some money, that place could be just what I need.”
“Houston had this idea?” Reed asked.
“Not really, but she helped. I have to get to the hospital, and later I’m to meet Houston. I’ll see you.” He grabbed an apple and, at the doorway, he paused to look back at his father. “Thanks, Dad,” he said, just the way he did when he was a boy, and today he reminded Reed of the boy he’d once been, before he took on the responsibility of planning marriage.
All morning, Lee whistled at the hospital and his cheer was infectious. Before long, the entire hospital was smiling and grumbling less about the work to be done. The young prostitute who’d tried suicide the day before benefited the most from Lee’s good humor. He talked to her about the joy of being alive and then got her a position on the nursing staff at the women’s clinic, promising to watch over her and to help her in the future.
At ten minutes to eleven, he jumped in his carriage and drove downtown to pick up a basket that he’d had Miss Emily prepare at her tea shop.
“So it’s true,” Miss Emily said, smiling and making her pink-and-white face crinkle into tiny tissue paper wrinkles. “Nina has been talking about her lovesick brother all morning.”
“My sister talks entirely too much,” Lee said, but he was smiling. “I don’t know what’s so unusual about my being happy, because I’m marrying the most beautiful woman in the world. I’ve got to go,” he said, as he rushed out of the shop.
He left his horse and buggy to the care of the Gates’s stableboy, Willie, took the steps two at a time and raised his hand to knock.
“You can go in,” came a voice from the shadowed side of the deep porch. “They’re expecting you.”
Leander looked into the shadows and saw Blair there, her face turned away, but he could see that her hair was straggling and her face streaked. He went to her. “Has something happened? Is Houston all right?”
“She’s fine!” Blair snapped, starting to rise.
Lee caught her arm. “I want you to come over here and sit down so I can look at you. You don’t look well at all.”
“Leave me alone!” she half cried, half shouted. “And don’t touch me!” She jerked away from him, ran down the stairs and out of sight around the house.
As Lee was standing there in open-mouthed astonishment, Houston came onto the porch, pulling on gloves of white lace.
“Was that Blair shouting? You weren’t having another one of your arguments, were you?” she asked.
Lee turned to her with a look of pure joy, his eyes going up and down her, as if he wanted to drink in all of her. “It was Blair,” he said in answer to her question.
“Good,” Houston said, “I was hoping you’d see her. She’s been like that all day. For some reason, I think she’s been crying. I thought you might know what was wrong with her. She won’t answer any of my questions.”
“I’d have to examine her,” Lee said, as he helped her into the carriage, but as soon as he touched her, he couldn’t seem to let go, and held onto her waist.
“Lee! People are watching.”
>
“Yes, of course,” he grinned, “but we’ll soon remedy that.”
He didn’t trust himself to speak much on the way out of town, only occasionally glancing at Houston, noting the way she sat so far to the side of the carriage, away from him as she always had until last night. He couldn’t help smiling to himself to think that this cool young woman was the same one who hadn’t been able to resist him last night.
He hadn’t slept much, but had lain awake reliving every moment he’d spent with Houston. It wasn’t so much the sex, he’d had that with women before and hadn’t fallen for them, but it was something about her attitude that had made him feel wonderful, powerful, as if he could do anything.
He drove them to a secret place he’d found once when he’d been called to set the broken leg of a prospector and been caught in a summer storm. It was a secluded place amid enormous rocks, with tall trees swaying overhead, a spring trickling out of the rocks. He’d never brought anyone here before.
He stopped the carriage, jumped out, tied the horse and went to get Houston. As he lifted her in his arms, he let her slide down and pulled her close to him, hugging her so that she couldn’t breathe. “I thought about nothing else but you last night,” he said. “I could smell your hair on my clothes, I could taste your lips on mine, I could—.”
Houston pulled away from him. “You what?” she gasped.
He touched the hair at her temples with the backs of his fingers. “You aren’t going to be shy with me today, are you? You aren’t going to be the way you were before last night, are you? Houston, you’ve proven to me that you can be different, so there’s no need to go back to being the ice princess. I know what you’re really like now, and I can tell you that if I never see that cool woman again, I’ll be even happier. Now, come here and kiss me like you did last night.”
Houston pushed free of him. “Are you saying that last night I wasn’t like I usually am? That I was …better?”
Smiling, he advanced on her. “You know you were. You were like I’ve never seen you. I didn’t know you could be like that. You’ll laugh at this but I was beginning to believe that you were incapable of any real passion, that beneath your cool exterior was a heart of ice. But, if you can have a sister like Blair who starts fires at the least provocation, surely some of it had to rub off.”
He took her wrist in his hand and pulled her to him, ignoring the way she resisted. He also ignored the way she tried to turn her head away when he put his mouth on hers.
The lips under his were unresponsive, held together rigidly, hard. At first, he was amused that she was trying to keep herself under control and doing such a damn fine job of it, but as the kiss continued, and she still made no response, he pulled away from her in anger.
“You’re carrying this game too far,” he said. “You can’t be wildly passionate one minute and frigid the next. What are you, two people?”
Something in Houston’s eyes gave him the first seed of doubt. But of course he was wrong. He took a step backward.
“That’s an impossibility, isn’t it, Houston?” he said. “Tell me that what I’m thinking is wrong. No one can be two people, can she?”
Houston just stood there and looked at him with stricken eyes.
Lee walked away from her and at last sat down heavily on a rock. “Did you and your sister trade places last night?” he asked softly. “Did I spend the evening with Blair and not with you?”
He barely heard her whispered, “Yes.”
“I should have known from the first: how well she handled that suicide and she didn’t even know it was the house I’d bought for her—you. I don’t think I wanted to see. From the moment she said she wanted to go on the case with me to see if she could be of any help, I was so stupidly pleased that I never questioned anything after that. I should have known when I kissed her…
“Damn both of you! I hope to hell you enjoyed making a fool of me.”
“Lee,” Houston said, her hand on his arm.
He turned on her angrily. “If you know what’s good for you, you won’t say a word. I don’t know what possessed either of you to play such a dirty little trick, but I can tell you that I don’t like being the butt of such a joke. Now that you and your sister have had a good laugh at my expense, I have to decide what to do about last night.”
He half shoved her into the carriage and cracked the whip over the horse as they tore back into town. At the Chandler house, he didn’t get out but let Houston get herself, and all her yards of skirts, out of the carriage unaided. On the porch, waiting, was Blair, her face red and swollen from crying for hours on end. Leander glared at her with a mixture of anger and some hatred before he yelled at the horse and took off again.
He paused for only moments at his father’s house before mounting a big roan stallion and taking off for the mountains at breakneck speed. He didn’t know where he was going, but he knew that he had to get away and think.
He climbed with the horse until the animal could go no farther, then dismounted and led the horse, straight up, over rocks, across arroyos, through cacti and mean little underbrush. When at last he came to the top of a ridge, when he could go no higher, he pulled the rifle from the horse’s saddle, jammed it against his leg and fired it up into the air, emptying it. Once the air had cleared of screaming birds and gunsmoke, he yelled at the top of his lungs, giving vent to his frustration and anger.
“Damn you, Blair!” he shouted. “Damn you to hell.”
The sun was setting as Reed Westfield walked into the library. As he reached for the light switch, he saw the glow of one of his son’s cigars.
“Lee?” he asked, as he pushed the button for the lights. “The hospital was calling for you.”
Leander didn’t look up. “Did they find someone?”
Reed studied his son for a moment. “They found someone. What happened to the man who left here this morning? Don’t tell me that Houston regretted what happened last night? Women do that. Your mother—.”
Lee looked at his father with bleak eyes. “Spare me more of the advice about women. I don’t believe I can stand any more.”
Reed sat down. “Tell me what’s happened.”
Lee flicked the ash off his cigar. “I believe that, as they say, all hell is about to break loose in a few minutes. Last night,” he paused to take a breath and calm himself. “Last night, the Chandler twins decided to play a game. They thought it’d be great fun to switch places and see if they could fool poor stupid Leander. They did quite well.”
He jammed his cigar into an ashtray and stood, walking to the window. “I was fooled all right, and not because Blair did such a good job of pretending to be her sister. In fact, she did little more than dress like Houston. Blair assisted me in a medical case without my giving her any instruction; she was interested in my life, something Houston’s never cared much about; Blair asked me about my dreams and hopes for the future. In other words, she was the perfect woman whom every man dreams about.”
He turned back to look at his father. “And she was the perfect lover. I guess every man’s vanity wants a woman who can’t resist him. He likes to think that he can talk her into anything. So far, all the women I’ve known have been interested in the money I had in the bank. I’ve had women who weren’t interested in me when they thought I was a lowly, unpaid doctor, but when they learned that my mother was a Candish, their eyes began to sparkle. Blair wasn’t like that. She was—.”
His voice trailed off as he turned back to face the window.
“Houston isn’t interested in your money,” Reed said. “She never has been.”
“Who knows what Houston wants out of life. I’ve spent months with her and I don’t know anything about her. To me, she’s a cold woman who does nothing more than look pretty. But Blair is alive!”
He said the last with such passion that Reed narrowed his eyes. “I don’t think I like the sound of that. Houston is the woman you’re going to marry. I know Blair is a forward girl, and it’s a sh
ame about what happened last night, but I tried to warn you that that kind of thing could get you in trouble. I’m sure Houston will be angry, but if you court her enough and send enough flowers, she’ll eventually forgive you.”
Lee looked at his father. “And what about Blair? Will she forgive me?”
Reed walked to the big walnut desk that dominated the room and took a pipe from a box. “If she’s the kind of girl who’d sleep with her sister’s intended, then I imagine she already knows how to get over this sort of thing.”
“And just what is that supposed to mean?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. She’s been back East all these years, going to school with men, studying things she has no right to know anything about, and trying to be a man. Girls like her know from experience how to recover from affairs of one night’s duration.”
Leander took minutes to get his emotions under control. “I’m going to forget you said that, but I want you to know that if you ever say anything like that again, I’ll walk out the door and never come back. It’s none of your business, but Blair was a virgin until last night. And in two weeks’ time I mean to make her my wife.”
Reed was so flabbergasted that he just stood there opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water.
Lee took a seat and lit another cigar. “I think I’d better tell you all I know of what’s happened. As I said last night, for some reason, the twins decided to trade places so it was Blair I took to the reception. I had already planned to do my best to seduce her and, if I found her unwilling, I was going to break off the engagement. I think I was expecting to have to do that, since I was sure that no one, or at least not me, could break through that coating of ice that surrounds Houston.”
He held the cigar out, and a faint smile curved his lips as he remembered last night. “Within five minutes of being alone with her, I was so pleased with Blair that I never thought of questioning who she was or why she was behaving so differently. There was an emergency on River Street and she went with me, unlike Houston who always insisted that I drop her at one of her friends’ houses. We went to the reception and later to our house. Altogether, it was the most pleasurable evening of my life.”
Twin of Fire Page 6