Angelfire

by Linda Lael Miller

  Bliss slid the fruit bowl toward Sam. “Help yourself,” she said. “I’ve got bread, too, and cold meat—”

  Sam looked so grateful that Bliss got up from her chair to find the bread and meat right away. While he ate, the sailor related all that he knew about Peony’s attackers, which wasn’t much. The maid and cook had been out the night it happened, and the ordeal was long over before Mrs. Ryan was found.

  “You got a rifle here?” he asked as he finished both his story and his food. “Won’t be safe, two women alone.”

  “No rifle,” Bliss said, then bit her lip. Jamie hadn’t said good-bye, let alone given her instructions about what to do in an emergency. He’d only said that Dog would take care of her. She patted the animal’s massive head and frowned distractedly.

  “Well, I’d stay and look after you ladies,” Sam said apologetically, “but I’ve got a ship to catch.” A bright smile lit his face. “She’s a trade ship now, is the Elisabeth Lee, but once she was a whaler. Aussie she is—out of Sydney Town—and I’ve got myself a berth.”

  Sam’s enthusiasm was such that Bliss allowed herself to be distracted from her dilemma for a few minutes. “And where will you be going?” she asked, truly interested.

  “To San Francisco, in the States, missus, by way of Fiji and the Hawaiian Islands.”

  Bliss sighed. San Francisco, the city she had dreamed of so often. “That’s wonderful. You’ll see such grand sights.”

  “I will at that,” Sam agreed. Then, with great ceremony, he took a watch from his pocket and opened the case. “Got to go, now, missus. When the train comes through from Wellington, I’d best be at the station with my ticket in hand.”

  Bliss gave him a letter she’d written to her mother, along with a few coins, and he promised to mail it as soon as he stepped off the ship.

  When Sam had rumbled away in his hired wagon, the house seemed bigger and much emptier. Bliss looked in on Peony, who was sleeping fitfully, and then went outside to free Caesar from his washtub prison.

  He ruffled his feathers, squawked once, and strutted away, a changed rooster.

  That task tended to, Bliss put her hands on her hips and looked out at the surrounding green hills, trying to guess where the flock might be, hoping to see a curl of smoke twisting against the sky.

  At sunset, she fed the chickens and the barn animals before coming inside to light lamps and make sure the doors and windows were soundly locked. She was frying potatoes and onions at the stove when Peony came in, looking worse than she had earlier.

  “Have you heard from Jamie yet?” she asked pitiably.

  Bliss shook her head, thinking to herself that life certainly had its odd twists and turns. Here she was, cooking supper for a woman who might well have been her husband’s mistress. “Sit down,” she said.

  Peony obeyed, keeping to the edge of her chair. She smiled wanly when Bliss set a pot of fresh tea in front of her, along with a clean cup and saucer and a bowl of sugar.

  “I’m afraid we haven’t any milk,” Bliss apologized. “I’d have sworn there was a cow in that barn when I got here.”

  Peony poured herself a cup of tea and added sugar, still smiling. Bliss thought it was remarkable that she could do so, after what she’d suffered. “Jamie told me that he found you sleeping in the hay, but I thought he was just spinning one of his yarns.”

  Bliss added eggs and a tin of hash to the concoction she was frying, stirring them in vigorously. Now that it was dark outside, she missed Jamie even more keenly. “Tell me,” she ventured, without meeting Peony’s eyes, “how you met him.”

  Peony was silent for a long moment. “If Jamie didn’t tell you,” she answered finally, “I’m not sure I should.”

  Bliss got two plates from the shelf and set them on the table with resounding thumps. “That’s just the trouble around here,” she fussed. “Nobody wants to tell me anything.”

  “You do deserve to know, I guess,” Peony conceded, albeit reluctantly. “Jamie and I were friends in Australia, before we ran away from the man who had made us his slaves—Increase Pipher.”

  The forks, knives, and spoons Bliss had taken up clattered back into their drawer. After taking the potato, egg, hash, and onion mixture off the heat, she sat down at the table, all her attention fixed on Peony.

  The story was long and grisly. Increase Pipher was the same man who had scarred Jamie’s back with his whip all those years ago. By setting fire to Pipher’s cane fields, Peony had managed to divert the plantation owner’s attention long enough to free Jamie from the tree he’d been bound to, lead him away, and tend his wounds.

  Together, with Jamie only half-conscious much of the time, the two of them had made their way to Brisbane, riding in farmers’ wagons when they could, traveling on foot when there was no other choice. In the city, Peony had sold the jewelry Pipher had given her—she freely admitted that she’d been the man’s mistress, despising him all the while—and bought passage for herself and Jamie on a ship bound for New Zealand.

  In Auckland, though, they’d come to a parting of the ways. Jamie had taken up with a sheep thief of considerable renown—Cutter—and gone back to his larcenous ways, while Peony had sought out a married cousin and asked for help.

  Eventually, Peony had married a shipping agency owner named Ben Ryan—her eyes misted over with tears when she talked about him—and they’d been blissfully happy together. Alas, he’d died of an illness after only a few years.

  Bliss got up when Peony fell silent, and busied herself brewing another pot of tea. She was just about to ask Peony more questions when Dog began to fidget. A moment later, she heard a noise in the distance.

  “A rider and a horse,” Peony said, but she didn’t sound pleased.

  Although Bliss hoped the rider would be Jamie, she was struck by caution. Suppose, she thought to herself, the visitor were Increase Pipher, or one of his henchmen, come to find out whether the house was unguarded?

  Putting a finger to her lips to bid Peony to be silent, Bliss took a cast-iron skillet from the pan cupboard and started toward the front of the house, Dog traipsing along at her heels. She could barely see the stranger in the gloom, through the parlor window, but she knew this was not Jamie, nor was it anyone else she was acquainted with.

  The man was very tall and broad in the shoulders, and he dismounted with an easy grace that said he was accustomed to riding. As he strode toward the house, Bliss saw the moonlight catch in hair as black as a politician’s heart.

  She held her breath as the man came up onto the porch and knocked resolutely at the door.

  Dog barked hysterically, but Bliss bit her lower lip and glared Peony into silence when she would have called out

  “I know you’re in there,” the man shouted, knocking harder. “In the name of all that’s holy, open the door! I didn’t come all this way to stand in the cold, dammit!”

  Bliss drew a deep breath and let it out again. Obviously, the night visitor wasn’t going to go away just because she was ignoring him. “Who is it you want to see?” she asked in a clear, if tremulous, voice.

  The man swore. Roundly. “Jamie McKenna, that’s who,” he answered angrily. “And when I do, I’ll teach him to treat a guest this way—”

  A light went on in Peony’s eyes. She grasped Dog by the scruff of the neck, and before Bliss could stop her, she’d unlocked the door and swung it open.

  Dog, that traitor, welcomed the man with a benevolent yap and then dashed out through the open doorway to chase something. It was clear that Bliss could depend on no one but herself to defend hearth and home.

  She swallowed hard as she lifted the skillet high in the air. Peony had probably made the same rash mistake in Auckland, inviting those terrible men right inside her house.

  “Bliss, no!” Peony cried, but it was too late.

  The skillet crashed into the back of the man’s head—he was so big that Bliss had had to rise up on her toes to strike him—and he crumpled to the floor, unconscious.
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  “Oh lord,” Peony wailed, disappearing into the kitchen and returning almost immediately with a lamp. She knelt awkwardly beside the man and opened his coat and the collar of his shirt, revealing a medallion exactly like Jamie’s except that it hung from a golden chain instead of a string of rawhide.

  “Don’t stand there like a ninny,” Peony hissed when it became apparent that Bliss had been rendered speechless. “Get a cold cloth. You’ve just beaned your own brother-in-law!”

  Bliss dropped her skillet and scrambled into the kitchen, where she ladled water into a bowl. Then, after grabbing a clean tea towel, she hurried back to the parlor, where Jamie’s brother was stirring on the floor and murmuring ominous things in a brogue.

  “Would you be sister to a Yank with a penchant for playactin’?” he asked cryptically, looking up at Bliss with bewilderment in his aquamarine eyes.

  Baffled, Bliss simply shook her head and spread her hands.

  “The lady who clouted you is your brother’s wife,” Peony said as he got to his feet, one hand lifted to his head. “Bliss, this—unless I’ve missed my guess—is Reeve McKenna.”

  “Aye,” said Reeve, extending a hand toward Bliss with comical caution. “Named you Bliss, did they?” he muttered, as an aside. “Fancy that.”

  Peony was still smiling. Either she thought it was funny that Bliss had brained her own kin by marriage, or she saw him as protection against the evils that might be lurking in the night. “I’m Peony Ryan,” she said, taking Mr. McKenna’s arm. “Your brother and I are great friends.”

  “Your brother and I are great friends,” Bliss mimicked under her breath as she followed the two into her kitchen. Even with a brand in the middle of her back, that Peony had a way of taking over a situation.

  In the kitchen, she made fresh coffee and offered Reeve a meal. He accepted the former and declined the latter, saying that he’d eaten at the hotel in town.

  “I’m sorry,” Bliss said once she’d completed her duties as hostess and joined Peony and Reeve at the table. “Jamie’s in the hills somewhere, with his sheep, and I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

  Reeve grinned, showing teeth as white and straight as Jamie’s. “And ’imself leavin’ a new bride all alone,” he said, his brogue growing more intense by the moment. “It appears ’e needs a talkin’ to, that little brother of mine.”

  “He usually does,” replied Bliss, with a smile, and Reeve laughed.

  “So that’s the way of it, then,” he said.

  “You must forgive Bliss,” Peony said with a pointed look at the mistress of the house. “She thought you were a hooligan.”

  Reeve rubbed the back of his head and winced. “Seems like she’d be equal to any no-gooder that might ’appen along,” he observed.

  Bliss glared at Peony, but abstained from commenting on the fact that it was better to be safe than sorry. She was smiling warmly again when she turned her attention back to her brother-in-law. “Jamie tells me that you have a wife and two children.”

  Reeve looked baffled for a moment, as though he’d misplaced his family and couldn’t think where. “Oh yes,” he finally said. “There’s Maggie—that’s me wife—and Elisabeth and J.J.”

  Just then, there was a scratching sound and a plaintive whine at the door. Bliss recognized Dog’s plea for admission instantly and crossed the room to let him back inside the house. “You’re no watchdog,” she said, patting the animal’s head, “but I love you.”

  Dog wasn’t supposed to eat in the house, but Bliss was in the mood to flaunt Jamie’s rules. She gave him a generous helping of the potato hash.

  “He wanted to make sure Peony and I were all right,” Bliss explained, giving Dog the benefit of the doubt, when she turned and found Reeve and Peony looking at her.

  “Aye?” Reeve countered. “And what was ’e to do if you weren’t?”

  Bliss remembered the day Dog had saved Jamie—and probably her as well—from Bert Dunnigan and his men, along that isolated road leading away from the inn. “You’d be surprised what Dog can do, if there’s real danger to contend with,” she said, watching fondly as the creature ate.

  At least there was someone in that house who liked her cooking.

  Dog wandered into camp, exhausted, just after sunrise the next morning. Someone had made a makeshift collar of braided rags and tied a rolled piece of paper to it with a bit of string.

  “He looks terrible, don’t he?” Cutter asked, frowning, as Dog nuzzled him and then went to Jamie.

  Jamie drew the paper free, a mingling of alarm and amusement spinning in the pit of his stomach. “Bliss probably forced ’er cookin’ on the poor bastard,” he said, to hide his fear.

  “Thought I smelt onions on his breath,” Cutter observed, scratching his head.

  Jamie got to his feet and flung the note into the campfire. “That dirty bastard—” he spat.

  “What is it?” Cutter wanted to know. He was content to remain where he was, sitting on the cold ground in front of the campfire. All around, sheep baahed ceaselessly.

  Jamie was striding toward the tree where the horses were tethered. “Increase put ’is name on me friend,” he replied, over one shoulder. “Now, I’m going to put mine on ’is ass!”

  Cutter rose from the ground and trotted toward Jamie. “Now, don’t go doin’ anything hotheaded and stupid, Jamie boy.”

  Jamie’s horse was ready to ride before he replied through his teeth, “I’m done waitin’, old man. I should ’ave gone after that bleeder long before now.”

  Cutter’s voice was a raspy plea. “Jamie boy, you’ve got a wife to think about now—”

  Looking down at his friend from the saddle, Jamie countered, “And I’d best be thinkin’ about ’er, ’adn’t I, mate?”

  * * *

  The ride home took a bit over an hour, and Jamie was in the barn, rubbing down his lathered horse, when Reeve appeared.

  “Nice little wife you’ve got in there,” he said, folding his arms and leaning against one of the stall gates.

  Jamie didn’t know his brother well—they’d been apart for too many years—but he was glad to see him. And surprised, since Bliss’s note hadn’t mentioned his presence. “Thanks. Your Maggie is proof you ’ave good taste, so I trust your judgment.”

  Reeve laughed and then raised one hand to the back of his head, flinching as though his amusement had hurt. “Damn,” he muttered.

  Jamie put away the grooming brush, gave the gelding a pat on the neck, and slipped out of the stall. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked, frowning at his brother.

  “Maybe me judgment is good,” Reeve confided, “but me manners must not be. When I walked into your ’ouse last night, little brother, your lovely wife brought me to me knees with a fryin’ pan.”

  Despite everything, Jamie grinned at the image that rose in his mind and slapped his elder brother on the shoulder. “Man’s got to ’ave a care when ’e deals with Bliss,” he said.

  Reeve looked worried. “Can you imagine the mischief she and Maggie could do, if they put their ’eads together?”

  Jamie executed a mock shudder, but he knew the expression in his eyes was serious when he asked, “How’s Elisabeth?”

  His brother spoke gently. “Your daughter is fine,” he said. “You might come and see ’er now and again, you know.”

  Jamie sighed. “That would only complicate things.”

  Reeve shook his head as the two men left the barn and started toward the house. “Maggie and me, we decided it was best that she know the truth, Jamie. We told ’er about you and Eleanor.”

  Jamie stopped cold, staring at his brother, uncertain whether to be angry or relieved. “Dammit, Reeve,” he muttered, “you might ’ave asked me what I thought, at least. ’Ow can a little one like that be expected to understand, and ’er barely five?”

  “She understood,” Reeve assured him quietly. “Elisabeth needs to stay with Maggie and me, for now,” he went on, when Jamie had had a few moments t
o absorb his words. “Later on, when she’s older, I imagine she’ll want to know ’er father better.”

  Jamie looked toward the house, where Bliss waited, and his feelings must have been in his eyes.

  “You ’aven’t told Bliss about your past, then?” Reeve asked.

  Jamie sighed, lifting his hat with one hand and running the other through his hair. “The right moment never seems to come along,” he said. “God in ’eaven, Reeve, if I ever lost ’er—”

  “I know,” Reeve said. “I know.” Then he lightened the moment with a grin and, “It’s not so easy to lose these women after all. I’ve tried it with Maggie, and damned if she doesn’t find me every time!”

  Jamie laughed and, for a few minutes at least, he forgot that there was a monster lurking just out of sight, bent on destroying everyone and everything he cared about.

  Chapter 21

  JAMIE’S ONLY GREETING TO BLISS, WHEN SHE MET HIM HALFWAY between the house and the barn, was a polite nod of his head. She blushed at the rebuff, which was all the more humiliating because Reeve was there to see it.

  “Where’s Peony?” Jamie demanded the moment they’d entered the house.

  Bliss was determined to be reasonable about the whole matter. “I’ve put her to bed,” she answered, “in Cutter’s room. She’s—she’s not doing very well, Jamie.”

  His jawline was tight as he took off his coat and hat and hung them up. “Aye,” he said grimly, and then he started toward the downstairs bedroom.

  Bliss followed, at an eloquent nod from Reeve. If Jamie was aware of her presence, he gave no indication.

  He knocked lightly on the door of Peony’s room and entered at her feeble, “Come in.”

  “Jamie!” she cried at the sight of him, holding her arms out.

  Jamie sat down on the edge of Peony’s bed and embraced her gingerly, but with a tenderness that twisted Bliss’s heart and brought stinging tears to her eyes.

  Peony was sobbing and clinging to him, her face buried in his shoulder. “Oh Jamie, it was terrible—I was so frightened—”