Wanton Angel (15 page)

Eli bolted forward, was ably restrained by a still-chortling Seth. “Eli, relax—”

“Relax?!” bellowed Eli, trying to round his friend and save the child.

Seth caught Eli’s shoulders in surprisingly strong hands. “Will you listen to me, you hulking idiot? Your sister is not about to roast this infant; it was born prematurely and it needs to be kept warm!”

Eli closed his eyes, feeling every inch the fool. Memories of the night his son had died swept over him, and he swayed under their impact. The grief, which had never truly left him, followed its wake, and he groped for a chair and then sank into it, his hands rising to cover his face.

“It’s Kiley,” Seth explained to Genoa in a low voice, and then he left the kitchen.

Eli struggled to control his emotions, stiffened when he
felt Genoa behind him, her hands resting gently on his shoulders.

“I’m so sorry,” his sister said in a soft voice.

Eli drew one deep breath after another, willing the trembling, based in the very core of his spirit, to cease. Finally it did. “I should be able to deal with what happened, Genoa,” he said miserably. “It’s been more than two years.”

Genoa’s fingers moved, strong and capable, forcing the taut muscles in Eli’s shoulders to relax. “The death of one’s own child is not an easy thing to come to terms with, Eli. For all that she has Rose Marie to love now, I don’t believe Bonnie has managed it either.”

Eli lowered his hands. He still felt a need to weep and rage at the injustice of Kiley’s death, though the anguish was subsiding again. Involuntarily, he trembled, knowing that the pain would return as fierce as ever.

Genoa swept into the chair beside his and caught one of Eli’s hands in both of her own. “I’ll never forgive myself,” she said quietly, “for not coming to New York when Seth wired me of Kiley’s passing. You needed me then, and so did Bonnie.”

“There was nothing anyone could have done, Genoa,” Eli said, his voice bleak. Bitterness filled the raw hollow in his soul where the pain had been. “And Bonnie recovered very nicely, it seems to me.”

“Bonnie did nothing of the sort,” Genoa responded immediately with brisk kindness. “She’s broken to pieces inside, just as you are. I declare, when I think of how you failed each other, both of you, I could spit!”

Eli stared at his sister. “What are you saying?” he demanded. “I didn’t fail Bonnie—”

“You did,” Genoa insisted. “And Bonnie failed you. For God’s sake, Eli, and for your own, face the truth!”

Eli remembered the distance that had arisen between Bonnie and himself that horrible night and ached. She’d come to him, shattered by the loss of her child and his, and he’d turned her away. Blamed her. There had been a strange, irrational comfort in blaming Bonnie. “What truth is that, Genoa? That my son is dead? That I’ll never see him again?” Unmanly tears were dangerously near; Eli choked them back. “Believe me, I’ve come up against that unholy
reality often enough. It haunts me every minute of every day.”

“Your son?” Genoa emphasized the words quietly. “Eli, Kiley was Bonnie’s son, too. Her loss was as profound as yours, don’t you see?”

As the room seemed to be closing in on Eli, he shoved his chair back and shot to his feet, all but smothering. “Enough,” he growled, striding toward the door and the fresh air and freedom beyond it.

But Genoa caught his arm in one hand and held on. “Go to Bonnie,” she urged her brother desperately. “Tell her how you’re hurting and let her tell you what she feels. It’s the only way you’re ever going to get past this, Eli. The only way!”

Eli wrenched the door open, his lungs dragging in clean summer air in despairing gasps. The pain was back, threatening to crush him. He shook his sister’s hand away with a vicious wrench of his arm and hissed, “In the name of God, Genoa, let me be—”

Genoa followed him into the yard, tears of frustrated compassion slipping down her face. “Stop running away, Eli, and let yourself mourn,” she begged. “Don’t you see that you’re poisoning your very soul by holding all that pain inside?”

“There is no pain!” Eli bellowed the lie, and then he stormed away toward the pond, driven by the very anguish he denied.

“How long has Eli been this way?” Genoa asked despondently, as Seth Callahan returned to the kitchen and began collecting his papers.

“From the first,” Mr. Callahan answered, his tone glum. “Emotionally he’s a volcano. The ground fairly shakes around Eli sometimes, but he will not allow himself to erupt.”

Genoa’s heart broke within her. “He’s afraid?”

Seth shuffled the papers into order, tapping their edges against the tabletop for something to do. “I believe Eli fears that if he lets himself fall apart, he’ll never be whole again. The problem is, of course, that it takes all his energies—and they are formidable, Genoa—to maintain the mere semblance
of sanity. The longer Eli refuses to give way, the more perilous the situation becomes.”

“And now there is the smelter—”

Seth sighed. “Yes. And Bonnie.”

Genoa took a handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt and dried her eyes. “Yes. Bonnie. Whatever can we do to help them, Seth?”

Seth removed his spectacles and rubbed his myopic eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “Very little, I fear. I pray that when Eli reaches the breaking point, Bonnie will be there for him. He needs her desperately.”

Genoa shuddered, hugging herself. “I do believe the world is collapsing around our ears, Mr. Callahan. Bonnie is very, very strong, but for all the brave show she puts on, she’s just as badly wounded as Eli. I’m not sure she has the strength to help anyone else.”

Mr. Callahan sighed again and put his spectacles back in place. “You may be right, my dear,” he said, his voice husky and distracted. “May heaven help us all.”

They sat quietly on a blanket spread over the ground, Webb and Bonnie, Rose Marie sleeping soundly between them. Her heart in her throat, Bonnie busied herself putting leftover food back into the picnic basket, having already washed the plates and utensils inside the house, at the kitchen sink.

Webb stopped her nervous motions by cupping one hand under her chin. “Bonnie,” he said, with gruff gentleness. “Look at me.”

Bonnie trembled and raised her eyes to Webb’s kind, handsome face. Again she willed herself to love him, again she failed. Her whole soul hungered for Eli McKutchen, much as she wished things to be otherwise.

“You don’t love me,” Webb guessed, without bitterness or rancor.

Miserably Bonnie shook her head. “Not the way a wife should love a husband, Webb.”

A short silence fell. Rose Marie fretted in her sleep and Webb touched her little back with one hand, settling her.

“You still love Eli,” he said after a few moments.

Bonnie nodded. “Against all good sense and all reason.”
She paused, the pain and fear and despair nearly overwhelming her. “H-he hates me, Webb. He’s planning to take Rose Marie away from me.”

Webb tensed. “Did Eli tell you that himself?”

“No. Genoa did,” Bonnie confessed, and her dignity, so long her strength, was broken at last. One tear slid, tickling, down her cheek. “I’ll die without Rose. She’s all I have.”

Rose whimpered in her sleep as Webb smoothed the child’s tangled hair. “You won’t lose her, Bonnie. I won’t let that happen.”

“There isn’t anything you can do to stop it,” Bonnie insisted, dashing at her wet cheek with one hand. “Eli will win. He has money, power, influence—”

“And he knows that Rose Marie is his daughter?”

Webb’s question surprised Bonnie. “Yes.”

“Suppose we said that she was mine? Suppose you married me, and we told the world that Rose Marie was my child?”

Bonnie’s eyes widened, even though she had considered this approach herself. “You would do that? You would claim Rose—you would still want to marry me, even knowing that I don’t love you?”

Webb shrugged and, though he smiled an ingenuous smile, his blue eyes were dark with pain. “You might come to love me, Bonnie—someday. Stranger things have happened, you know.”

Bonnie lowered her head, stricken. Under the circumstances, Webb looked very good to her; he was a warm, dry place to run to while rain lashed at the ground, but he was truly a wonderful man who deserved so much more than Bonnie could give him. “I would be cheating you, Webb. Suppose—suppose I never forget Eli?”

“I’m willing to take that chance, Bonnie. Marry me—let me prove that I can make you happy.”

Impulsively Bonnie reached out and grasped both his hands in hers. “Webb, will you think of yourself just once? Suppose I don’t make you happy? Suppose you end up hating the sight of me?”

“I could never hate you.”

“Yes, you could!”

A cool wind was blowing up from the river, and Bonnie
shivered. The sky had clouded over and a light spattering of rain began to fall, ending the conversation and sending both Webb and Bonnie into frantic activity. While Bonnie snatched up the picnic basket, Webb roused Rose Marie and hurried toward the shelter of the house.

They waited in the living room, hoping the rain would let up. It didn’t.

“Unless you want to be stranded here,” Webb said diplomatically, “we’d better leave.”

Involuntarily Bonnie’s eyes lifted to the ceiling. Webb’s bedroom was directly above. For all that she was considering marrying this man, she had not once imagined sleeping with him. How could she have overlooked something so fundamental? She blushed hotly when she saw that Webb was watching her, reading her thoughts.

“Let’s go,” she said, too hastily.

“Damn,” Webb replied, with good-natured disappointment. And then he bundled Rose tightly in his suitcoat and bolted outside, leading the way to the buggy.

The road, if it could be called that, was already a mass of muddy goo, and it was barely visible for the pounding rain. When they reached the ferry landing, Hem and his helper were unhitching the team that worked on that side of the river.

“Water’s too damned high to cross!” the old man informed them. “You’ll have to wait till morning!”

Bonnie cast one frantic glance at Webb and saw that he was more than content to accept the situation. In fact he was grinning a cocky grin.

“Hem Fenwick!” Bonnie yelled over the din of the rain. “You take us across that river right now!”

“No, ma’am!” Hem shouted back.

Webb looked damnably smug. In the last analysis, it seemed, all men were alike. “We’ll drown if we try it, Bonnie!”

“Webb Hutcheson, people are going to talk!” Bonnie shrieked, and Rose, startled, began to wail and struggle in her arms.

Webb took the child onto his lap, soothing her. “That has never bothered you before, now, has it?” he retorted.

Hem looked delighted. “Whoo-ee, I’d like to be there when McKutchen hears about this!”

“It might lend a lot of credence to our story,” Webb reasoned quietly. Hem was frowning now, trying to hear what was being said. “We could even say that we’ve been secretly married for months—”

“Webb!” Bonnie wailed.

Webb patted her knee. “Now, now, dear, let’s be calm. Reasonable. We can’t cross the river without a ferry, now can we?”

“There’s a bridge downriver—” Bonnie speculated anxiously.

“Ten miles downriver,” Webb pointed out. “Bonnie, we’d never make it through. It’s getting dark and there isn’t much of a road even in the best of weather. Imagine how it would be now, in this rain.”

Sizing Hem Fenwick up in a long glance, Bonnie considered piracy. Following that, she weighed the possibility of swimming across the river.

“Think of Rose,” Webb said, spoiling everything.

Bonnie sighed, wholly defeated.

Chuckling, Webb turned the buggy back toward his house.

It was a night for surprises, Forbes Durrant thought to himself. He wouldn’t have expected McKutchen to patronize the Brass Eagle after all that had happened, but there he was, swilling whiskey as though he might be trying to put out a fire in his belly. Forbes could have told him, from bitter experience, that whiskey wasn’t going to cure what ailed him, but why extend the favor? Let McKutchen learn for himself that nothing could extinguish the Angel’s blazes, once she’d set them.

The second surprise was seeing Earline Kalb storming toward him. Even for a woman of her questionable reputation, entering a saloon alone was unthinkable.

Forbes gave her a mild assessment as she approached. She was a shapely piece and he wondered what it would be like to bed her.

“Earline,” he said with a nod.

She took in his bruised and battered face and smiled. “Forbes,” she returned cordially.

After refilling McKutchen’s glass, Forbes turned back to the woman. She was drawing stares all around. “How can I help you?” he asked.

“I’m looking for Bonnie McKutchen.”

The whole saloon went silent. Out of the corner of his swollen eye, Forbes saw Eli’s glass stop midway between the bar and his mouth.

“The Angel doesn’t work here anymore,” Forbes said moderately.

“She’s no angel,” Earline shot back, “and we both know it.”

Forbes shrugged.

“How about Webb Hutcheson? Has he been in tonight?”

Forbes allowed himself a quick glance in Eli McKutchen’s direction and saw that he was listening. Intently. “Sorry. Webb isn’t a regular customer. I don’t know where he is.”

“Maybe you don’t,” Earline allowed, “but you always know where the Angel is and what she’s doing, Forbes, and don’t try to deny it.”

“I’m not denying anything.”

“Pa took Webb and Mrs. McKutchen across the river this mornin’,” put in young Walt Fenwick, from beside one of the billiard tables. “Reckon they’re stuck over there for the night, ’cause of the rain. Don’t nobody need to worry, though—Webb’s got himself a fine house yonder and they’ll stay warm and dry.”

Forbes closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. When he looked again, he saw Earline grab a billiard ball and fling it at Walt’s head. Poor Walt dodged that, a baffled expression on his face, and whirled, only to collide with Eli McKutchen.

Eli caught the hapless ferryman by the lapels and lifted him clear off the floor. “Where exactly is this fine house?”

Forbes sighed and started to round the bar. He couldn’t afford any trouble; now that he was no longer managing the McKutchen holdings, the Brass Eagle was his only source of income. All the same he didn’t know what he was going to do once he reached Eli and the man he was about to strangle.