Banner O'Brien

by Linda Lael Miller

  “No. You’ve been damning me as a rake and a rounder, though, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve been tending to you, Adam Corbin! I’ve been fetching and carrying and putting up with your impossible temper! I’ve been—”

  Adam smiled, his eyes dancing in his gaunt face. “You certainly have. Actually, I guess I should be flattered that you think me capable of bedding another woman.”

  “F-Flattered?” sputtered Banner, infuriated.

  He nodded. “Flattered,” he confirmed. “As I believe I told you once before, it would take a greater man than I to stray, O’Brien.”

  Banner lowered her eyes. It wasn’t the first time Adam had implied that her love left him too drained to seek solace elsewhere, and she didn’t know whether to be insulted or pleased.

  “Tell me why you stay with me, Shamrock, when your opinion of my integrity is obviously so low. Is it the child?”

  “Partly. But I would stay even if there were no baby.”

  “Why?”

  Banner thrust out her chin. “Because I am weak!” she cried, angry because he’d cornered her. Again.

  “Weak?” Adam chuckled. “You? Try again, O’Brien.”

  “It is my cross to bear that I love you, Adam Corbin. Against all good sense and reason, I might add!”

  He came to her, lifted her chin with one hand. “Yes. But love seeks its own purposes, doesn’t it?”

  Banner swallowed, cast about desperately for a more suitable subject. “Have you heard from Jeff?”

  “Yes. He met a woman in Seattle and we probably won’t see him again until Christmas. O’Brien?”

  “What?”

  “Kiss me.”

  “I absolutely will not!”

  “Not even if I promise to take you with me to the mountain tomorrow?”

  Banner stared up at him, searched his dear, infuriating face. “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow. It’s time this mystery was laid to rest—at least where you’re concerned. But you’ll have to help me carry the secret from then on, O’Brien. And be forewarned—it isn’t an easy thing to live with.”

  “What—”

  Adam touched her lips with his, lightly, teasingly. “Tomorrow, O’Brien,” he said, just before his mouth claimed hers.

  * * *

  The sky was a clear blue and the wind was warm. As Banner sat in the high seat of the buckboard, she could almost be happy that the truth was to be known to her at last. Almost.

  But familiar worries stirred the butterflies in her middle to full flight. If Adam presented her with a second family and a long, poetic discourse on his feelings for Lulani, she wasn’t going to be able to bear it.

  And even if it turned out that her husband had been faithful, by some miracle, the secret might still be a bitter and wounding one. Adam had warned her that, once everything was finally made clear, she might well wish that she’d never found out at all.

  As Adam lifted the reins of the buckboard, he searched her face, and she saw the crushing weight of what he knew in the depths of his eyes. “You can still change your mind, O’Brien,” he said.

  Banner squared her shoulders. “I’m going with you. Are we going to sit here in the barnyard all day?”

  He laughed and brought the reins down and they were off, winding and jolting up the face of the awakening mountain. Again and again during the long and uncomfortable ride, Banner marveled at the raw beauty surrounding them. The memory of a meadow strewn with bright orange wood lilies and wild daisies would sustain her, as would the fierce, complex love she felt for the man beside her.

  After some time, Adam finally brought the wagon to a stop in a clearing. There were still traces of snow here, and the wind was brisk, lashing at Banner’s skirts as her husband helped her down from the seat.

  “Aren’t we going to the cabin?”

  “No,” replied Adam, suddenly very busy with the horses and wagon.

  “Adam.”

  He paused, searched the azure sky, with its thin, patchy clouds, and sighed. “O’Brien, I—”

  She went to him quickly, took his arm. “Whatever it is, Adam, I’ll—I’ll try to understand.”

  Adam stiffened, and the motion of his lips was only a mockery of a smile. “Oh, you’ll understand, all right. You’ll understand. Just remember, O’Brien—you can’t ever tell anyone. Not Mama, not Jeff, not anyone. Understood?”

  “No!”

  “It will be,” he said, and then he stepped away from her again, and his shoulders were taut beneath his shirt and lightweight coat.

  Banner ached for him, for Lulani, for herself. But she waited in brave silence.

  Finally, Adam lifted his hands and cupped them around his mouth and shouted, and the word that echoed against the sky and the mountainside itself shocked Banner Corbin to the center of her being.

  “Papa!”

  “My God,” breathed Banner.

  Adam shouted again, and the sound echoed well into forever.

  Banner took Adam’s arm again, pulling. “Adam, your father? Your father?”

  Agony rose in his dark blue eyes, old and consuming and well-entrenched. “Lulani is Papa’s woman, Banner. Not mine.”

  “But—”

  He lifted his hands to his mouth again, bellowed, “Damn you, Papa, show yourself or I swear to God I’ll come looking for you!”

  There was a rustling sound in a patch of brush and blackberry vines on a hillside. “Go back!” shouted another voice, masculine and filled with the same pain Banner had heard in Adam’s. “Take the woman away!”

  “No!” roared Adam. “This is my wife! She’s carrying your grandchild! Don’t you want to meet her?”

  The answer was a swear word that might have been heard in Port Hastings, so heartily was it expelled. But there was more commotion in the blackberry bushes, and small rocks began rattling down the slope.

  Banner huddled against her husband and waited. Dizzying images whirled in her mind: Katherine, grieving. A big man stomping on his burning Sunday shirt. Jeff, Keith, Melissa, all certain that their father was dead.

  “How could he do this to them?” she whispered.

  “You’ll see,” Adam replied in a hoarse undertone. “Don’t go near Papa, Banner, but please don’t recoil either.”

  “Recoil? Why would I—”

  Just then, the man appeared. He was tall—taller even than Adam—and his shoulders must have measured an ax-handle across. His hair was dark, his eyes a pale, crystalline blue, like Melissa’s eyes, and Keith’s.

  But his face and hands were so horribly misshapen and discolored that Banner drew in a swift breath and stiffened.

  The monster-man paused at a careful distance, his eyes raking his son’s defiant frame. Neatly avoiding Banner, the azure gaze swept to the goods piled in the bed of the wagon. “Did you bring the medicine for Lulani?”

  “What do you think?” Adam snapped, his hands wedged into his pockets now, the physical breach between himself and his father remaining unbroken. “Papa, this is my wife, Banner.”

  Banner’s heart constricted as the big man’s eyes came to her face, reluctant, braced for revulsion. “H-Hello,” she managed, automatically holding out one hand and taking a step toward him.

  Adam immediately caught hold of her arm and wrenched her back. “O’Brien,” he barked, “you were telling me the truth when you said you went to medical school, weren’t you?”

  Taken aback and more than a little confused, Banner sliced one questioning look at her father-in-law, noted the swollen, distorted face, higher on one side than on the other, the webbed fingers and deformed hands, the patches of discolored pigment in his skin.

  Dear God, it couldn’t be—not here, not now. Not in these modern times.

  “Leprosy,” said Adam.

  Banner shook her head in useless denial, unable to help herself. Tears slid down her face. “Oh, dear God.”

  Daniel Corbin scowled at his son. “Are you happy now, boy? Or will you be dragging the rest of
the family up here, too, for a good look at the old man?”

  “Shut up, damn you!” Adam yelled, his face fierce with love and pain and anger. “You know I won’t do that!”

  A corresponding pain softened the hideous face. “There’s going to be a baby?”

  Somehow, Banner gained control of her whirling emotions and managed to speak intelligently. “Yes, Mr. Corbin. In September.”

  Daniel smiled. “September,” he reflected.

  Adam turned away suddenly, ostensibly to unload the goods they’d brought. But Banner saw the meter of his grief in his shoulders and shared it.

  “I love your son, Mr. Corbin,” she said boldly, shading her eyes from the sun with one hand.

  Daniel laughed, keeping his leper’s distance, memorizing the wife of his firstborn son with gentle eyes. “Good. Adam’s needed a woman for a long time.”

  Lulani came out of some hiding place and linked her arm through one of Daniel’s. Seeing her clearly for the first time, Banner took note of her flowing, raven-black hair, her nutmeg skin just beginning to wrinkle, her compassionate brown eyes.

  “You have not been lost on the mountain again, Mrs. Adam?” she asked, one side of her mouth rising in a smile.

  “No.” Banner smiled back, very much aware of Adam and the great clatter he was making as he unloaded things from the back of the wagon. “Thank you, for sharing your cabin that night—”

  Lulani nodded and then they both disappeared, she and Daniel, two exiles confined to the heights of a wooded mountain.

  After a moment of preparation, Banner approached her husband. “Adam,” she said softly, “I’m so sorry.”

  An angry sound ripped itself from his throat, and he ceased his needless stacking and restacking of the crates to turn away from her.

  “Was there really a boating accident, Adam?”

  He tilted his head back, was silent for a time, in his struggle to compose himself. “Yes. Wasn’t that convenient? It provided me with a way to deceive my family, lie to my mother. . . .”

  Banner wanted to hold Adam, but she knew she had to wait. “Daniel contracted the disease in Hawaii, didn’t he, Adam? When he went there with Jeff.”

  Adam ran one arm across his face, his back still turned to Banner. “Yes.”

  “Did he know before he left the islands? Is that why he brought Lulani back with him?”

  At last, Banner’s broken husband faced her. “Papa didn’t develop symptoms for several months after he got back. He’d been—involved—with Lulani during the visit. When we decided he had to live up here, he asked me to write to her and I did. She came to be with him.”

  “It must have been hell for you—knowing.”

  “It has been. Can you imagine what this would do to my mother, Banner? To Jeff and Keith and Melissa?”

  Banner bit her lower lip, nodded. She knew. And she well understood Adam’s reasons for guarding this secret so strenuously. Katherine would have refused to be separated from Daniel, no matter what—at worst, she would have contracted leprosy herself, at best, she would have been almost completely isolated from the rest of the world.

  As for Adam’s brothers and his sister, they would have had to choose between their good health and their parents.

  Too, the authorities would have gotten wind of the situation, eventually, losing no time in shipping Daniel Corbin off to the remotest leper colony they could find.

  “Weren’t you afraid, Adam? Afraid of being infected?”

  “Most people are immune to leprosy, O’Brien. You know that.”

  So, he hadn’t feared for himself. Well, that was typical. “Your mother and the rest of the family—especially Jeff—they were exposed, weren’t they?”

  Adam nodded, his throat working. “I used to have nightmares, O’Brien. I’d see their faces sliding out of place, their fingers growing together—”

  “Adam, stop. Stop.”

  His eyes were fierce and broken as they came to her face. “You wanted to know my secret, O’Brien. Here it is—ugliness and all.”

  Banner swallowed. “Adam—”

  He was pacing now, back and forth on the carpeting of dried pine needles and tatters of dirty spring snow. “You’ve been exposed yourself, O’Brien—that night in Lulani’s cabin—why do you think I was so goddamned mad at you?”

  Banner stopped him, with both her hands and all the strength she could summon. “I don’t have leprosy, Adam!”

  He shuddered in her grasp, a cry of raw grief rising from his middle to rattle in his throat. “O’Brien,” he mourned, groping for her.

  Banner held him close. “It’s all right,” she whispered, weeping. “It is, I promise.”

  “All right!” Adam raged, shuddering again, his face ravaged. “Damn it all to hell, O’Brien, it isn’t all right! What if—what if you—”

  “Hush. I haven’t contracted leprosy, Adam.” She lifted her hands to his face, soothing him, loving him. “Cry, my darling,” she said. “You’re a man, not a rock. Cry and I’ll cry with you and we’ll go on from here, together.”

  The splendid indigo eyes were bright with tears. “You’ll stay with me, O’Brien? You won’t leave me?”

  “Not ever.”

  At this assurance, Adam gave way to his grief. He wept in her arms, like a shattered child, his sobs raw and deep and terrible to hear. Holding him, Banner cried, too.

  When they had both recovered some composure, Adam touched the tip of Banner’s nose with a gentle finger. “I need you,” he said.

  Banner gulped, sniffled, dashed away the last of her tears with the back of one hand. “Here?” she whispered.

  And Adam threw back his head and gave a hoarse shout of laughter. “I promised my father food, medicine, word of the family,” he told her, when he could speak. “Not lewd entertainment.”

  Banner colored gloriously and stomped one foot. Inside her, there was a feeling of coming home after a long and difficult absence. “Adam Corbin, I didn’t mean—”

  “You did, too. You wanted to do it in the wagonbed, didn’t you, O’Brien?”

  “No!”

  “It’s not a bad idea, really,” he mused, raising one hand to his chin and pretending to ponder the prospect, to measure the space in the now-empty wagon with his eyes.

  In a fine fit of fury, Banner Corbin bunched her skirts in her hands and stomped to the wagon, where she pulled herself, with some difficulty, up onto the seat. “I swear I’ll take up these reins myself and leave you behind, Adam Corbin, if you don’t apologize to me this instant!”

  Considering his still-tender ribs, Adam swung easily into the seat beside her. “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry that you wanted to molest me in the wagonbed, O’Brien.”

  “I wanted to—Adam Corbin, you beast! I wanted to do no such thing!”

  Adam’s hands rose brazenly to her breasts, cupped them beneath her lightweight cloak. “You suggested it,” he reminded her.

  “I did—not!” Banner’s breath was burning in and out of her lungs, and her heart was careening about between her backbone and her rib cage. “For heaven’s sake, stop that!”

  Adam lowered his hands, assessed her wryly, and took up the reins. “Are you wearing your drawers, O’Brien?”

  Banner flushed as the wagon began the winding, rattling trip down that mountain road. “Of course I am!” she cried.

  “Liar,” retorted her husband, and when they’d rounded the next bend he stopped the team, wound the reins deftly around the brake lever, and turned to her.

  Once again, Banner Corbin was caught in an untruth.

  * * *

  They loved fiercely in the hard bed of that wagon, Adam sitting up, Banner on his lap. And their urgent cries hammered at the spring sky, painting a brazen rainbow there, in colors that were visible only to them.

  “How could you do this to me?” Adam teased when it was over and they were both breathing evenly again.

  Banner was still joined to him, her skirts fanned out around her
like a flag of surrender, and she moved to free herself. “You wretch—”

  Adam caught her at the waist with both hands, held her firmly in place. “There I was, minding my own business, and you compromised me. How will I face a knowing world, O’Brien? I’m tainted—”

  “You’re crazy,” Banner interrupted, her head falling back, her eyes closing, her breath quickening again as she felt him swelling within her.

  He nuzzled her exposed breasts, flicked at one nipple with his tongue. “Do you know how good you taste, O’Brien?”

  Banner moaned. “Stop it! We’ve got patients. . . . we’ve got to get back home.”

  “Umm-hmm.”

  “Adam!”

  He took suckle at her breast, languidly, lifting her with his hands, lowering her. The rhythm of his passion and her own was building again; the entire universe pulsed in unison with it.

  Banner was gasping now. “Oh,” she whimpered, riding the thrusts of his need even as he feasted greedily at one breast. “Oooooh . . .”

  Banner’s triumph came before his, in a blinding, spinning rush. She shuddered upon him, convulsed, and was still.

  And as her vision cleared, she saw the smoldering in his eyes, the age-old plea. She rose until she was almost free of Adam, fell back again, taking satisfaction in the passion that moved in his face as she did so. His head fell back and he closed his eyes, totally vulnerable, surrendering. A low, lingering growl rose from his throat as Banner worked her excruciating magic, pausing now and then to tease his lips with a breast.

  Adam’s hands came to her hair, groping, and his head moved back and forth in sweet delirium.

  Banner brought him swiftly, mercifully, to his own fierce victory.

  * * *

  Lulani found her man in the shed where they stored firewood, his head down, his great shoulders moving in suppressed grief.

  “Daniel?”

  He stiffened, dashed one hand at his great, misshapen face, which was beautiful to Lulani, unbearably beautiful. “Leave me,” he said.

  She stood fast. “You think now of the woman, Katherine?”

  Ever honest, Daniel nodded.

  There was no rancor in Lulani, no jealousy. Only a need to comfort and sustain. “It is I that have loved you, Daniel,” she reminded him.