Deborah Camp (3 page)

“You must understand, sir, that your wife was the only reason we allowed this adoption to go through. She was white, yes? Well, there you have it.” Mr. Charles spread his hands in an appeal. “You wouldn’t have been allowed to adopt if it hadn’t been for your white wife. We don’t allow breeds to have the children. Now that your wife is gone, the contract is void.”

“But I have paid,” Lonewolf insisted.

“The contract states that the money will not be returned if the contract is breached.
You’ve
breached it, don’t you see? You have no white wife. Your money is forfeited.”

Penny wailed when Mrs. Gadstone tried to force her back to the train again. Her tear-stained eyes sought Elise, and Elise made calming motions. If only she could get her little sister to understand that everything was fine …

“Don’t fret, child,” Mr. Charles said, smoothing Penny’s coppery hair. “You’ll be placed on the train and we’ll take you back to New York, where arrangements will be made for an adoption elsewhere.”

Elsewhere
? Elise turned stone cold as the import of what the escort had said dawned on her. Penny would be adopted by someone living God only knew where. Not near the next whistle-stop, probably not even in Missouri! How could she keep the family together that way? Panic bounced through her head, scattering her logic, separating her common sense from her wildest impulses.

Penny’s eyes swam with tears and her trembling sob slashed at Elise as if with the bite of a whip. Through the pain and panic, an idea bloomed; an
idea so preposterous, Elise knew she must act on it without further contemplation or she’d lose her nerve altogether.

Feeling as if she were living a nightmare, she moved forward, her body numb, her mind whirling like a windmill in a hurricane. She sensed Mr. Charles’s regard as she stopped beside the Indian. Slipping a hand into the crook of his arm, she looked up at Lonewolf’s brooding features and actually managed a smile.

“What’s the problem, darling?” she asked in a voice that gave not one hint of the turmoil inside her. “Didn’t you tell this man that you have a new wife? Didn’t you tell him about me?”

S
he didn’t look like a whore to him, so he figured the woman had lost her mind.

Gussied up in a fancy town dress of dark blood red and wearing a hat right out of a mail-order catalog, she bore the mark of the upper crust. Laying a hand over hers, he tried to disengage himself from her grasp, but her fingers tightened on his arm and went digging for bone. For a little thing, she had one hell of a grip.

“What’s this? Who are you?” Mr. Charles asked, echoing the questions spinning in Blade’s head.

“Why, I’m Mrs. Lonewolf,” the lady in red said with such certainty that she almost convinced Blade of it. “And I’m going to be this little girl’s mother.” With that, she scooped up the orphan and bussed her freckled cheek. “Penny, isn’t it? I’m Elise St.—Lonewolf.” She beamed at Blade, then back at Mr. Charles. “We’re newlyweds.”

“Newlyweds?” Mr. Charles repeated, his tone dripping with doubt. “Why didn’t you tell me about this new wife of yours, sir?”

Blade had never seen a face so perfect. She was so pretty, he blinked, not believing his own eyes. He shook his head, snapping out of the spell the
auburn-haired witch had cast over him. “She’s not my—”

“No, she’s not yet,” the woman interrupted, “but she will be ours soon.” She hugged the child, and the youngster responded happily by dropping her sticky, half-eaten sucker and wrapping her dimpled arms around the woman’s neck. “You have a white wife—me—so the adoption can go through without a hitch. Isn’t that wonderful?” She narrowed her eyes, urgency shining in them. Blade knew she was trying to tell him to go along with her crazy talk, but he had no intention of falling in with her. He had enough troubles.

He cleared his throat and started to turn away from the woman, but she edged closer to his side. “Mr. Charles, this orphan is promised to me, but I don’t know what this lady—”

“Why, if it isn’t Mr. and Mrs. Blade Lonewolf!”

The warm, incongruous greeting cut through Blade’s explanation and he found himself staring, slack-jawed, at Dixie Shoemaker. The plump matron, who ran Crossroads’s boardinghouse and claimed Airy Peppers as her first cousin, placed herself between Blade and the lady lunatic. Blade resisted the urge to strangle her.

“What are y’all doing in town?” she asked Blade, then gasped with delight. “Oh, is this the orphan you and your new missus are adopting? She’s precious! Why, she sort of looks like you, Mrs. Lonewolf. Don’t you see a slight resemblance, Blade?” Dixie turned her round face toward him and pummeled him with her flinty-eyed glare. “Take a good, hard look.
Now
.”

Feeling like a mule that had been clubbed to get its attention, Blade swung around to the young woman in red again. Yes, there was some resemblance
between her and the child she held so possessively … so what? The girl kissed the woman’s cheek and sniffed loudly, her tears drying, her sobs diminished. She seemed at peace in the woman’s arms. An idea fell into his mind like a stone into a lake, sending out ripples of apprehension. Was this child
hers
? His heart melted a little toward her.

“Is this your wife or not?” Mr. Charles demanded.

“Why, of course she’s his wife,” Dixie answered with a short laugh. “Tell him, Blade, so you can adopt this little girl and take her home.”

Dixie’s stern tone wasn’t lost on him, and the solution the other woman offered was tempting. He looked at Penny. He’d promised to make a home for the orphan he and Julia had paid for before Julia had taken fatally ill. The stranger raised her brows, giving him an arched look. She sure had grit, he thought, and if the child was hers, he wouldn’t be the one to separate them.

“She’s my wife,” he heard himself say while a voice deep inside his head called him a softhearted jackass.

“Not so fast,” Mr. Charles said, removing his eyeglasses and polishing the lenses on his lapels. “I must see some proof.”

“Proof? What proof?” both women chorused.

“A marriage license,” Mr. Charles said, smiling slyly. “Show me a marriage license and I’ll let you take the girl. Otherwise …” He shrugged and replaced his eyeglasses slowly.

“A license …” The lady in red shared a forlorn frown with the child.

Foolhardiness nudged Blade and loosened his tongue. He spoke even before he was aware of his actions. “We will fetch the license.”

“You will?” Mr. Charles asked.

“We will?” his fake wife asked.

“Oh, dear me,” Dixie murmured, her lips twisting with worry.

“Yes,” Blade answered firmly. “We didn’t bring it. It’s back at home, but I’ll have it here before the train leaves.”

“We’re leaving in an hour,” Mr. Charles said with a sniff of displeasure.

“Why do we have to prove anything to you?” the woman demanded of Mr. Charles as she continued to hold the orphan girl tightly and stroke her hair. “You didn’t question anyone else. You just handed over the children as if they were feed sacks!”

“Something isn’t right here.” Mr. Charles laid a finger against his long, thin nose. “I smell something rotten.”

The young woman tipped up her chin in a saucy gesture that made Blade want to grin. “It’s probably your breath. I smell it, too.”

Sassy little fox!
Blade regarded her with a hefty measure of respect, while Mr. Charles sputtered in speechless affront. Plucking the child from the woman’s arms, Blade handed her over to Dixie Shoemaker.

“You watch over her until we return,” he ordered, then captured one of the younger woman’s hands. “Come on. We have no time to spare.” He speared Mr. Charles with a glare. “We will be back with the license.”

Mr. Charles, his face still red from the woman’s insult, pulled his timepiece from his vest pocket and examined it. “Be forewarned: I won’t wait a moment longer than I have to. We’ll be leaving at eleven sharp.”

Blade leveled a forefinger at the small man and lowered his voice to a near growl. “You wait.” Then he strode toward the heart of town, tugging the woman in his wake.

As they turned a corner, she stumbled and gave a yank on his hand.

“Hey, hey, Daddy Longlegs, hold up! I can’t run a race in these skirts and petticoats!” She clamped her free hand around his wrist and dug in her heels to retard his progress.

He stopped in front of the bank to allow her to catch her breath and give him a moment to figure out if she was crazy, desperate or a little of both.

“Where are we going anyway? You live nearby?” She backhanded a stray lock of her auburn hair. “If you’re thinking of fetching your old marriage license, you can forget it. Mr. Charles will notice right off that the date is wrong. We told him we are newlyweds, and unless you and your wife married a few months ago, then we’re—”

“Why did you talk such foolishness to him?” Blade cut in, resting his hands on his hips and glaring down at her. She was a good foot shorter than he was, but she held herself erect and proud, getting the most out of each comely inch. “Why did you tell him you were my wife?”

“Because … well, because.” She pressed her lips together in a stubborn line of refusal.

“Why?” he demanded, bending at the waist until they were eye to eye. He figured the child was the woman’s illegitimate daughter, taken from her as payment for the sins of a fallen woman. The ordeal had left her touched in the head. When she didn’t answer him immediately, he wrapped his long fingers around one of her small wrists and shook her.

“Ouch! Okay, okay! You don’t have to break my
bones! I’ll tell you the truth.” She studied the toes of her high-button shoes for a few moments. “Penny’s my sister,” she said, barely above a whisper.

“Your sister.” Her answer stunned him. He ran his gaze over the sheen of her hair, which was the color of polished cherry wood, and the faint dusting of freckles across her nose. Dimples poked at her cheeks, and her face was a perfect oval. His gaze continued its path down her creamy throat to the gentle swell of her breasts and hips. A beauty. He would have liked nothing better than to trace the shape of her body with his hands.

“That’s right,” she said, breaking into his lascivious thoughts. “What’s more, my brother was also on that train. He was adopted by an older gentleman with white hair and a black mustache. A grandfatherly type. A younger woman was with him, probably his daughter, and—”

“Judge Mott,” Blade supplied, his tongue feeling heavy in his mouth as his senses continued to riot.

“Is that his name?” She blinked her large blue eyes at him. “He’s a judge, is he?”

“He’s supposed to be. Retired.” He wrenched his attention away from the flutter of a pulse beating in her throat. “Why are you sneaking around?”

“I’m not supposed to follow them. The Society warned me not to, but I couldn’t let my brother and sister go without me! They are all I have left.” She clutched at his forearm as she leaned close to him, her body pressing into his. “Please, listen to me. If we can convince Mr. Charles that we’re married, then he’ll let you have Penny. Otherwise, they’ll send her somewhere else … far away from Adam and me. I want us to stay close. Can you understand, Mr. Lonewolf?”

He was agonizingly aware of her breast flattened
against his upper arm. Grappling for his self-control, he forced his thoughts away from her body’s fit against his, only to admire the pouting set of her mouth. His loins burned.

“You might have started something you’ll wish you didn’t have to finish,” he told her, his voice deeper, his words coming slow off his tongue.

A tide of pink rolled across her cheeks and she retreated a step. “I have no choice. Do you think we can fool Mr. Charles? Do you know of someone who can give us a marriage license?”

“Yes, I know of someone.” Cupping one of her elbows in his hand, he goaded her into a brisk walk. “A preacher right here at the Rugged Cross Church.”

“Ch-church?” Her voice broke. “You mean … you mean, a
real
church and a
real
preacher?”

He stopped at the steps leading up to the church’s double doors and captured her wrists to keep her from bolting. “A real church, a real preacher and a real marriage. I made a promise to my wife to make a home for that child, and I mean to keep it, even if it means marrying a stranger.”

Pulling herself up, she managed to look dignified and in complete control. “I, too, made a promise. I promised my brother and sister that we would remain close. Does this Judge Mott live near here?”

“He’s my closest neighbor.”

Her smile started in her eyes with pinpoints of light, then burst brilliantly upon her lips. “Splendid! This is turning out better than I’d dreamed.” Looking at the doors and the cross etched on them, she gathered in a breath and squared her narrow shoulders. “Shall we hasten to marry, Mr. Lonewolf? We don’t want that train to leave with Penny on it, do we?”

“No. Call me Blade.”

She bestowed a brief smile on him. “And I am Elise. Elise St. John.” With some hesitation, she extended her gloved hand. “A pleasure to meet you … Blade.”

He shook her hand, feeling the smallness of it and how his swallowed hers. Her gloves were black and of fine kid leather. Store-bought. Instead of letting go, he guided her hand to the crook of his arm and escorted her inside the silent church. Nothing stirred, so Blade cleared his throat noisily.

“Who’s that?” someone asked from the front of the chapel. Shadows shifted and a bald head shone briefly before Blade could make out the figure of the darkly clothed pastor, the very same pastor who had officiated the ceremony between him and Julia.

“It’s Blade Lonewolf, Reverend Casper. I’m wondering if you have a minute. I need to get married.”

The pastor chuckled as he came forward into a spear of multicolored sunlight that streamed through a stained-glass window. “Is that so? Married, eh? It’s April, but you’re too late for an April Fool’s joke.” The bald-headed man’s steps faltered as he spied the woman standing at Blade’s side. “Oh, and who is …” His jaw went slack. “You’re not fooling me, Blade Lonewolf?”