Banner O'Brien

by Linda Lael Miller

  “You look like hell,” commented Bessie, sitting back on the bed and crossing her shapely legs at the knees. “How about a drink?”

  Adam leaned against a bureau and folded his arms. She must be freezing to death in those net stockings and that skimpy satin thing with the laces up the front—what the devil was it called?

  “Bourbon,” he said, at length.

  Bessie stood up, poured the requested refreshment. “Isn’t Red giving you what you need?” she crooned.

  Adam’s stomach turned within him. O’Brien was giving him what he needed, all right—and a lot that he sure as hell didn’t. But he’d be damned if he was going to discuss his wife with this whore.

  Bessie came to him, held out the drink. If his silence bothered her, she didn’t let on.

  “It’s been a long time, honey,” she said.

  The bourbon curdled in the pit of Adam’s stomach. “Yeah,” he said, scowling into his glass.

  Bessie’s hands came to his shoulders, familiar, skillful. “Don’t worry—Bessie remembers what you like.”

  Adam shrugged free of her, turned away. There were business cards on a table nearby, and he took one up, reading the gilt script, not comprehending a word. Bessie might remember what he liked, but did he? All he could think of was Banner and the way she could fling him beyond death and then resurrect him again.

  Idly, for something to do, Adam tucked the card into the inside pocket of his suitcoat.

  Bessie stood behind him, wrapped her arms around his waist. “She’ll never know,” she assured him perceptively. “And I promise it will be good.”

  “It might be good,” Adam rasped, in exasperation, as he freed himself again, “but it would be stupid as hell. I’ve got to go home.”

  Bessie was pouting as he handed her money; it was the first time he’d ever paid her. “It was going to be a wedding present!” she protested.

  The irony of that made Adam laugh gruffly as he strode toward the door. “Thanks anyway,” he called, over his shoulder, as he left the room.

  * * *

  Banner Corbin slept through the night, though not soundly. She half-expected Adam to come pounding at the door, at any time, or even break it down.

  Her rest was a shallow and unsettled one, and toward morning she dreamed that Adam and Lulani were making love in the cabin’s solitary bed.

  Neither of them even cared that Banner was outside, in the wind and snow, freezing to death.

  Chapter Eleven

  HUMMING, FRANCELLE MAYHUGH SAT DOWN AT HER desk, smoothed the skirts of her best dress, and uncovered her typewriting machine. Beside her was a stack of notes and letters, all scrawled in Adam’s nearly illegible hand.

  He came into the office as she was struggling over a dry treatise on someone’s gall bladder. Francelle remembered all the delicious gossip Marshal Peters had recounted the night before, at her father’s dinner table, and felt a surge of wild and glorious hope.

  “Good morning,” she sang.

  Adam scowled at something on the wall behind her, as though she were transparent, and ran one hand through his hair. He clearly hadn’t had a restful night; for all his grooming, there were shadows under his eyes and his mouth was taut with strain.

  “Have you seen my wife?” he snapped, for all the world as though he was accusing Francelle of hiding the hussy somewhere.

  “No,” said his secretary, with dignity. “If you don’t know where she is, how would I?”

  Adam looked ominous for a moment, then sighed. “How indeed?” he rumbled, and then he went to the little stove in the corner and helped himself to the coffee that was always ready but never appreciated.

  Francelle stiffened in her chair. “Marshal Peters came to dinner last night,” she said, cautiously.

  Adam lifted his coffee mug, offhandedly disdainful. “Hurray,” he said.

  A flush blossomed in Francelle’s cheeks. For a man whose wife might have a spare husband, he was a cocky soul. “The marshal was telling Papa and me about that Irishman—Mr. Malloy?”

  To her carefully hidden satisfaction, Adam stiffened. For once in his life, he was noticing Francelle Mayhugh and listening to her, too. “What about him?”

  Francelle shrugged. “He’s a ne’er-do-well, according to Cam Peters. A drunkard and a brute.”

  Adam looked dangerous now. “And?”

  “And,” dared Francelle, rising from her chair in a burst of righteous wrath, “he claimed to be married to your wife!”

  A muscle corded in Adam’s neck. “So I’ve heard,” he said, in a tone that was no less unnerving for its softness.

  Francelle was stunned. So stunned that she lost her composure and forgot her carefully rehearsed speech. “You know?” she cried. “Doesn’t it bother you at all, Dr. Corbin, that you might be wedded to a—a bigamist?”

  “Banner is divorced, Francelle. While it really isn’t any of your concern, I would appreciate it if you would pass that fact along to Cam Peters, your father, and all the other slobbering gossips in this town.”

  Francelle sank back into her chair, wounded. She had expected Adam to denounce his marriage, rage for a while, and eventually come to her for solace. She had not expected this staunch defense of a woman who didn’t deserve him.

  “Strange,” she said recklessly, “that Mr. Malloy disappeared right after he made the claim that he and Dr. O’Brien were married to each other. Isn’t it strange?”

  Adam finished his coffee, and only the slight movement of a muscle in his freshly shaved jaw betrayed his annoyance. “Why are you boring me with all this, Francelle?”

  The answer to that was complicated and painful to consider, so Francelle swallowed it. “I just thought you should know what is being said about your—your wife, that’s all.”

  “Thank you,” Adam said, with an acid grin and a half-bow, and then he was setting aside his cup, taking up his bag, leaving on his endless, infernal rounds.

  When the door closed behind him, Francelle laid her head down on her arms and wept because Adam didn’t know that she loved him and probably wouldn’t care if he did. What a good wife she would have been to him, if it hadn’t been for that shameless Banner O’Brien, who could not be content with one husband but had to have two.

  * * *

  Banner felt tired and very weak. “Good morning, Francelle,” she said with a sigh.

  Francelle glared at her. “Good morning!”

  “Is Adam gone already?”

  The girl nodded, assessed Banner, and smiled mysteriously as she went back to her work.

  Banner poured coffee and made her way back to the office. It was probably better that she hadn’t had to confront Adam today; she was in no mood for an explosion.

  At his desk, she took up a text on the constitution of the human foot and began to read. If there were no patients for her to see, she could at least learn something new.

  “Doctor?”

  Banner looked up to see Francelle in the doorway. “Yes?”

  The girl was fairly bursting with malicious amusement. “There is a woman here to see you.”

  It was rare for a patient to ask specifically to see Banner; most of them preferred Adam. She stood and straightened her skirts before following Francelle into one of the two examining rooms.

  “Hello, Mrs. Corbin,” smiled Bessie, the prostitute who had shown such interest in Adam that first day, on board the Silver Shadow.

  Banner sensed a challenge in the mundane greeting, but she returned the woman’s smile all the same. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve got a sore throat,” said Bessie, her eyes oddly veiled even though they were fixed on Banner’s face. “And my chest hurts, too.”

  Banner went to the door—perhaps she’d just imagined that this woman had not come about an illness—and asked Francelle to please fetch her bag.

  After an annoying delay, the girl brought the requested item and Banner drew out her stethoscope. “Have you been coughing?”

  Bess
ie smiled as she underwent a brief examination. “No.”

  The woman’s lungs sounded healthy to Banner, and when she inspected her throat, she found no cause for any sort of discomfort. Frowning, she stepped back from the table where Bessie sat and folded her arms.

  “Why did you really come to see me?” she asked.

  “I wanted to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “Your husband came to me last night.”

  Banner reeled, inwardly at least. Outwardly, she was composed. Disbelieving. Even magnanimous. “Is that so?”

  “Yes,” replied Bessie firmly. “If you don’t want to take care of him, there’s plenty of us that will. But I like you, Red, and that’s why I’m here. I want to help.”

  Banner said nothing; she was too busy remembering how she had moved out of Adam’s bedroom the night before.

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “No,” lied Banner.

  Bessie’s lush mouth formed a pout. “Then you just look in the inside pocket of the coat Adam was wearing last night, darlin’.”

  “Get out!”

  The woman stood, studiously arranged her gaudy, fur-trimmed cloak. “I could tell you how to please your man,” she said, in a singsong voice that made Banner’s blood pressure shoot heavenward.

  “Thank you very much, but I think I know how to do that. Will you please leave?”

  Bessie swayed and swung to the door. “You won’t have to ask me again, sweetness—I got manners. Just remember to look in that coat pocket.”

  When the door had closed and she was alone with yet another grief, Banner lowered her head. Now she knew why Adam had not come to the guest room the night before, in one of his fine and typical rages. He hadn’t been at home.

  Perhaps he hadn’t even known about his wife’s grand gesture of defiance, or cared.

  Banner took a few minutes to compose herself and then marched past a smirking Francelle to take up the book she’d been reading. She wouldn’t enter Adam’s bedroom again—she wouldn’t. Not until he’d apologized and stopped seeing Lulani once and for all.

  But the coat was there—she knew it was—and it pulled at her like a magnet at shavings.

  Finally, because she knew she would have no peace if she didn’t, Banner left the office, climbed the stairs, and opened Adam’s door.

  The coat in question was easy to find; it had been flung down on the foot of the bed, which was neatly made.

  Even as she determined not to, Banner went to the coat and reached into the inside pocket. There was a card there, like the one she’d found in another coat, on a day when she’d been sure she would die, alone on a snowy mountain trail.

  She read it with tear-blurred eyes: “Bessie Ingram. Room 8 Silver Shadow. Discretion assured.”

  When she could move again, Banner let both the card and the coat fall to the floor. Then, with dignity and dispatch, she moved the rest of her things out of Adam’s room and into her own.

  * * *

  Adam knew what had happened before he lifted the coat from the floor or read the half-crumpled card that lay beside it. Despair ground in his stomach and clawed at the back of his throat.

  He was damned now, he thought, as he sank to the edge of the bed and braced his head in his hands. If O’Brien didn’t believe that Lulani wasn’t his woman, she wasn’t going to believe that he hadn’t slept with Bessie Ingram, either.

  Adam swore hoarsely and rubbed the nape of his neck with one hand; there was a fierce headache spawning there.

  After a time, he rose to his feet again, went to the wardrobe. It was as he had suspected; Shamrock’s things were gone.

  He sighed. He could go to her, drag her out of the guest room and back here, where she belonged, but what good would that do, really? He could not force her to love him, and that was what he wanted from Banner above all else.

  The house was dark when Adam went back downstairs, an hour later, to take refuge in his office. If he couldn’t sleep, he could at least read. Failing that—it would be hard to concentrate on the printed word, he knew—he could, in that quiet setting, sort out his tangled thoughts and emotions and come to some workable decision about O’Brien.

  In his small study, Adam lit a lamp, fell into the wooden desk chair, and assessed the books lining the shelves with disinterest. Banner’s name pulsed around him like the beat of a giant heart; he loved her, he wanted her, she was upstairs now, in a cold bed. A bed from which he had been summarily barred.

  Infuriated, he plundered the deep bottom drawer of his desk for a bottle and found one. Adam kicked his feet up, unscrewed the lid of the high-proof whiskey, and drank.

  With each swallow, his thoughts became more muddled. Adam began to consider what a truly unfortunate bastard he really was, with his stupid secret and his love for a woman who would spit stew all over him and fling the romantic skill of her former husband into his face at the slightest provocation.

  He lifted the bottle again; the firewater scorched his throat and roiled in his troubled stomach.

  “Adam.”

  He lowered the bottle and studied O’Brien, wondering if she was really there or if he had conjured her somehow. “Umm?”

  “What are you doing?”

  She was real, all right. And on the warpath, judging by the scornful and wifely looks she was hurling his way. “Drinking,” he said, and the word was oddly difficult to form.

  “I can see that. You should be in bed.”

  Adam arched an eyebrow and grinned. “I should indeed, madame. However, I’m not.”

  “Obviously.”

  He laughed. “I’ll go if you will, O’Brien.”

  Banner folded her arms across the bodice of her blue flannel wrapper, tossed her head toward the bottle, which had drifted wide of his body, though he was still holding it in one hand.

  “Why don’t you just put a nipple on that and take it to bed?”

  Adam frowned at the whiskey. “I think she’s making inferences about my emotional maturity,” he confided to the amber liquid.

  “And you call yourself a doctor!” harped O’Brien, her voice piercing the lining of Adam’s brain. “What if someone fell ill? Some help you would be!”

  Adam knitted his eyebrows together and studied O’Brien’s outraged and fuzzy countenance solemnly. “I’d send you,” he said.

  “Go to bed, Adam.”

  “Oh, no. Too cold. Too lonely.”

  “No doubt. Lulani is too far away to warm you, but you could always go to Bessie. After all, discretion is assured!”

  Adam laughed, which was odd, because he felt so broken and so miserable.

  “What kind of name is Lulani for an Indian, anyway?” fussed O’Brien, looking flushed and rumpled and damned appealing.

  “Lulani is not an Indian,” Adam muttered. “She is Hawaiian.”

  Now what the hell had made him say that? He brought the whiskey to his mouth and drank, to keep himself from telling the rest.

  “Are you going to stop visiting her?”

  Adam set the bottle down with a thump, lowered his feet to the floor, rubbed throbbing eyes with the fingers of one hand. “No.”

  O’Brien whirled and stormed away, and it was all he could do not to call her back and tell her everything.

  * * *

  One week passed, and then another. Adam did not come to the guest room even once, nor did he try to lure Banner back to his bed.

  On the twenty-second of February, he went off to the mountain once more. This time, however, Banner made no attempt to follow.

  “Why do you stay with him?” asked Melissa softly, her round, crystal-blue eyes trained on her sister-in-law.

  Banner ignored the question, at least momentarily. How could she answer, when she didn’t know herself? “Are you feeling better?” she hedged, tucking Melissa’s covers and refilling her teacup. “It’s a pity your visit had to be spoiled.”

  “I’ll be better tomorrow,” Melissa said with a brave lift
of her chin. “That’s the only good thing about cramps. They do go away.”

  Banner flinched. Cramps. When was the last time she had had cramps, or even a flux for that matter?

  Melissa frowned. “Banner? What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, no!” whispered Banner, pacing now, wringing her hands. “No, no—”

  “Banner!”

  She stopped, faced her sister-in-law. December. Banner had not bled since December, the week before she had come to Port Hastings from Oregon!

  “I’m all right,” she lied, to still the alarm in Melissa’s eyes.

  “You are not all right,” insisted the girl, setting aside her cup with a rattle. “Banner Corbin, you tell me what is the matter, right now!”

  Banner fell to a seat on the foot of Melissa’s bed. She was estranged from her husband, a husband she had been making halting, painful plans to leave. There was gossip about her and about Sean—who might return at any time. And now there was a very good chance that she was pregnant!

  “I think I’m going to have a baby!” Banner wept, covering her face with both hands.

  Melissa was there promptly, offering a hug and a tearful, “Oh, but that’s wonderful, Banner! Everything will be all right now—”

  Banner howled. All right? How could everything be all right when Adam was probably making love to Lulani at that very moment and Sean wanted to kill her?

  And it had been hard enough supporting herself, given the attitude most people took toward a woman doctor. What would it be like trying to earn a living for a baby and take proper care of it in the bargain?

  “Banner, don’t cry,” Melissa pleaded, holding her, rocking her like a child. “If Adam won’t care for you, Mama and Jeff and Keith and I will. We’re your family now.”

  “You’re Adam’s family.”

  “Well, we’ll side with you anyway!”

  Banner was not comforted. All the love in the world would not sustain her, if none of it came from Adam.

  * * *

  Determined to spare O’Brien and the rest of his family his black mood for once, Adam bypassed the house when he came down from the mountain and went to the Silver Shadow instead.