Broken Vows (27 page)

      
I wonder what Mama and Papa would say about his suitability as a husband now?
She tried to look away, to ignore the way he threw back his head and laughed, that same old blinding white smile, the gesture with those graceful, long-fingered hands, the unruly curl of night-black hair that fell onto his forehead. It was all so painfully familiar.

      
She had lived in virtual isolation these past years, far from friends and family back in Nevada. Amos had insisted. It was another means of keeping her in line. Mostly he traveled back to Nevada alone, leaving her and young Michael at their Washington residence. As she had watched her son grow from infancy into a bright, cherubic child, she always saw his father in him, a daily reminder of all she had lost. Yet she adored her son with a single-minded devotion. He was her whole life, the one good and perfect thing to come after Rory's betrayal.

      
It was not fair that he should reappear in her life once more, to disrupt it here. She shook as he drew nearer, realizing that he intended to speak to her. Her eyes swept the room, looking for Amos. He had vanished with several other senators into a smoke-filled corridor to discuss congressional business. She found herself actually wishing for once that he would reappear and save her from having to face Rory.

      
“Ooh, my dear, that devilishly handsome young rogue from your home state is coming this way. Surely, you know Representative Madigan? He's been cutting a wide swath through the ladies around the capital, I can tell you,” Bernice Gould whispered to Rebekah.

      
‘‘He's still an Irish upstart, I don't care how pretty his face—and he's a Democrat,” Bernice's friend interjected, as if belonging to the opposite party were tantamount to membership in the legions of Attila the Hun.

      
“I met Mr. Madigan several years ago,” Rebekah replied, trying to steady her breathing and not stare as he drew closer. A predatory smile slashed across his face, and Rebekah felt time and the world slip away when he spoke.

      
“Top of the evening to you, Mrs. Gould, Mrs. Stowe....” He hesitated just a moment before making his bow to Rebekah. “And Mrs. Wells. How good to see a familiar face from home. Would you honor me with this dance?”

      
Without giving her a chance to refuse, he swept her into his arms as the music started up, leaving the two matrons gaping in consternation. Gossip would soon fly thick and furious around the capital.

      
Rebekah stiffened as his arms went around her, but without creating a humiliating scene she could do nothing except dance with him. Amos would be livid when he heard. Just having him touch her, feeling his nearness, made all the old memories thrum through her body, as painful as a freshly lanced wound.

      
“Why are you here?” she asked before she could bring her chaotic thoughts into order.

      
“I'm the new congressman for Nevada. You do remember Nevada? Your home,” he prodded sarcastically. “I know you've seldom been there in recent years. Life in Washington seems to agree with you.”

      
"Wealth and power seem to agree with you." God, he looked as ruthless as Amos! The coldness in his eyes, the hard set of his face, were nothing like the young man who had loved her. He looked at her the way he would an opponent he planned to beat senseless in the prize ring. She missed a step.

      
“So, to the heart of the matter. Now that I'm nearly as rich and powerful as Amos Wells, do you think your family would approve of me?” His voice was silky, taunting.

      
Remembering her very thoughts when she first saw him across the room, Rebekah felt the heat steal into her cheeks. The nerve of the arrogant wretch! She would be the one to pay for his cruel little game when Amos learned of their meeting. “My family's approval no longer signifies. I wouldn't have you if you owned the whole damn Comstock!”

      
He felt her try to pull away, all stiff and breathless. The furious anger leaped between them like a flame in dry tinder. “Oh, no, you don't get off so easily.” His voice was silky but low and menacing as he whirled them toward a set of open doors. “Think of the scandal if you stalked away from me in mid-dance.”

      
She eyed the direction he was taking them, and her heart skipped a beat. “Think of the scandal if I don't!”

      
“Worried about gossip—or Amos? I imagine a man who bought a wife would be rather unreasonable.” He felt her flinch and knew he'd struck a nerve. “Not a marriage made in heaven?” He tsked sardonically as he slipped quickly behind the fronds of potted palms beside the door.

      
Rebekah twisted in his arms, now growing desperate. “Let me go!”

      
“What are you afraid of, darlin'? That you might still enjoy my touch more than all his money?” He swept her into the muggy Washington night outside the crowded ballroom and pinned her against the warm bricks of the embassy wall. “I like your perfume. Expensive. French, isn't it? And this...” His fingertips grazed the top of the elegant celery-green silk ball gown cut in simple, straight lines, unlike the billowing fuchsia finery in which he had first seen her decked out. “Understated. Tasteful. When did you stop letting Amos select your clothes...and jewelry?” he purred. The trespassing hand lifted the single strand of pearls gleaming luminously at her throat.

      
His touch sizzled through every pore, every nerve ending in her body, leaving her paralyzed, unable to think—only feel. And with that feeling came mindless remembrance—and yearning.

      
She stifled a sob, whether of misery or frustration, she—and he—could not discern.

      
Rory whispered a succinct oath and lowered his head, kissing her savagely, grinding his mouth over hers, his tongue probing at the tight seam of her lips until she opened for his pillaging. He plunged inside and felt her tongue collide with his. Her mouth was as delicate and sweet as he remembered. He dug one hand into the elaborate coils of her hair, holding her head immobile as he worked on the kiss. His lips, his tongue, his very breath demanded a response to the brutal invasion. She could fight him, bite him; he was beyond caring as the taste and scent of her intoxicated him with unbearable hunger.

      
Rebekah felt the anger in his rough caress and remembered all the times in their past when he had been that angry, that possessive, and had taken her so. Always she had given in to him. But now she was married to another because he had betrayed her.
Fool, fool,
she heard a voice whisper as her hands stole up his arms and her fingers dug into his shoulders. She molded herself against him, letting his tongue duel with hers, thrusting and dancing that old familiar ballet.

      
His hot, seeking mouth shifted position, slanting across hers at another angle as he pulled her yet closer, pressing his lower body against hers, pinning her against the wall until she could feel every muscle and bone. The swell of his sex probed against her belly, bringing forth a pooling heat, so long dormant, to spread in radiating waves as her starved young body remembered love. Rebekah heard the piteous whimpering yet did not recognize it as her own until he broke off the kiss abruptly.

      
Rory was losing control, drowning, drawn into the vortex of past remembrance, sweet remembrance. He itched to tear away the wisps of silk that clung so lovingly to her breasts and savage them with his mouth, to shove up her skirts and feel the velvety heat of her envelop him once more.
Witch!
What had begun as an attempt to punish her was ending as an exercise in self-torture. He pulled away, tearing a few strands of golden hair that clung to his fingers.

      
They stood a scant foot apart, staring into each other's eyes, revealing even in the murky darkness of the moonless night more than either wished the other to know. Panting for breath, shaking, they moved farther apart in silence, Rebekah sliding along the wall, Rory stepping back. She felt the sting of her torn hair. One heavy coil fell onto her shoulder. Breaking the hypnotic spell, she reached up and began to straighten the coiffure.

      
Easier for a woman to compose herself than a man, he thought bitterly, grateful darkness shadowed the still rampant erection straining to be free of his tight dress breeches. Damn, but he ached with wanting her! And she had wanted him, too, he knew it. “Old Amos must be a neglectful lover,” he said softly. “Perhaps I should have carried you into the British Ambassador's topiary and screwed you soundly.”

      
The barb struck home. Even though he could not know about her husband's impotence, Rebekah gasped in outrage at his crudity. Pain drove her to fury. Her hand flew out, delivering a stinging slap that rang out over the music from inside the embassy. “Don't you ever come near me again, Rory Madigan—or so help me God, I'll set the police on you!”

      
“Don't make any more promises you aren't able to keep, darlin’,” he taunted.

      
Her eyes glittered with unshed tears. “You're a fine one to talk of broken promises, you cheap Irish trash. Everything my father said about your kind was true!” She watched the fury darken his blue eyes and his jaw clench. For a moment, she thought he was going to strike her back. She braced for it, but the blow never came.

      
“You chose well—you're every bit the bitch to match a bastard like Amos. I'd wish you joy of him, but it seems he's given you little satisfaction.” An evil smile curved his lips as he looked scornfully at her.

      
Rebekah turned away and dashed toward the sanctuary of the embassy, wanting to die of shame for her brazen display, for her weakness, for his cruelty. And most of all, for their lost love. As she stepped through the door, his voice cut across the void between them.

      
“We'll meet again, Rebekah. And you will come to me. That's one vow I'll never break.”

* * * *

Nevada, 1874

      
Virginia City had always been an unbelievably ugly place to Patrick Madigan's way of thinking. He looked at the steep mountains towering above the town, bare and bleak, as raw as the disfiguring holes the mines had gouged in the earth. San Francisco—that was his town, with its wide streets and steeply rolling hills, situated high above the aqua-green grandeur of the Pacific. The violence and gaudiness had been bred out of the city by decades of civilization and permanence. Permanence was a virtue he believed Virginia City would never achieve. Even with its big brick buildings, there was always a look of instability about the town that never slept. That very insomniac frenzy indicated its tenuous hold on existence.

      
“You've grown too whimsically philosophical, Patrick, my man,” he muttered to himself, chuckling as he stepped away from the big bay window in the offices of Madigan & Madigan, Ltd. He had arrived yesterday to handle a timber contract for Rory while his younger brother was off in Washington. Would their parents ever have believed it—their youngest son a United States congressman?

      
Of course, Rory's election meant more work for both of them, but then work was all his brother lived for—work and revenge. Where had that carefree boy of childhood memory gone? After their parents and Sean died, Rory had been bewildered by the sudden tragedy, heartbroken to be separated from Ryan and him, but hopeful of their reunion. Their little brother had always been the most buoyant optimist.

      
Something—someone—had changed him. Even though Rory had tried to keep it secret, on one rare occasion when they sat up and drank late into the night, he had let down his guard and had told Patrick about her. Rebekah Wells. The beautiful young preacher's daughter who had thrown him over for Amos Wells' wealth and prestige. His brother's pain was like a festering wound that healed over but remained putrid, eating away deep inside. Rory's obsession grew, an obsession to eventually bring Wells' empire crashing down about his ears—to utterly ruin the man. And the man's wife.

      
Patrick, too, wanted Wells brought to justice. But Patrick saw in Rory's hate a dangerous cancer that would destroy him as surely as it destroyed their common enemy. And Amos Wells was their enemy. The ruthless greed of the silver kings and their banking cohorts was responsible for their brother Ryan's death.

      
Ryan had died in a mine shaft explosion deliberately set by the men who owned controlling interest in the mine. The practice was not unusual, especially on the Comstock, where mining speculations had reached frenzied heights—or depths, depending on one's point of view. Patrick had always thought California politics none too clean, but as one wag had said, “If California in '49 was the vestibule of Hell, then Nevada in the '70's was the throne room of Satan himself.”

      
Unscrupulous mine owners often suppressed the news of a rich strike so they could buy up all the market shares cheaply. To keep word of a new vein from getting out before they cornered the market, speculators would either hold the miners prisoner underground with bribes, or failing that, set upper-level explosives to seal off the lower reaches of the shaft temporarily. The word of such a “disaster” would further depress stock prices for the bankers and mine owners. Now and then, an explosion went awry, and the men trapped below were suffocated or gassed to death before help arrived to free them. Patrick had learned that was what had happened in the mine where Ryan died ten years earlier, but he had never been able to prove anything.

      
He had gone searching for his elder brother as soon as his ship docked in San Francisco harbor. He had located the Silver Lady mine where Ryan had been employed—two weeks after his brother had died in an explosion. Patrick had wandered numbly around Virginia City for several days as rescue workers dug out the bodies. While grieving, he had indulged in a bout of drinking in the local saloons. That was where he heard the whispers about how the owners, in collusion with the California banking crowd, had intentionally set the blast.