Willow: A Novel (No Series) (12 page)

Devlin sighed heavily and leaned back against his desk. “Willow,” he scolded. “That’s enough. Go back upstairs and—”

She whirled, glared at him. “Don’t you dare tell me to go back to bed!” she warned. “I’m not a child, to be sent here and there, seen and not heard.”

Devlin’s look was stern, and his sorrow was plain to see. “Leave us,” he said. “Please.”

Willow’s gaze swung, full of fury, back to Gideon. She was about to let loose with a tongue-lashing, but the words were stopped in her throat by the anguish she saw in his face. She knew then that Gideon had attacked her father because of this, because he was in terrible pain, and not because he’d meant any of the awful things he’d said.

One glance at Devlin revealed that he had understood all along.

“I’m sorry, Gideon,” Willow said softly. “About your mother, I mean.”

Gideon looked haggard; he was pale and his eyes were distracted and his shirt was so rumpled he might have slept in it. Yet he smiled. “I did like it better, I admit, when you called me Lancelot.”

Willow flinched, then felt color pound over her cheekbones. Oh, Lord in heaven, had she really said that? Had
she really called him by that silly, treasured name? “I guess I’ll go to bed,” she said, averting her eyes.

Devlin grasped the half-filled glass of whiskey on the edge of his desk and took a deep draft, then turned away to stand, shoulders slumped, at the window. Gideon and Willow might not have been within a hundred miles for all the notice he paid them.

Outside the study, in the darkened hallway, Willow looked up at Gideon’s shattered face and longed to comfort him, in the way a woman comforts a man. “I’m sorry about your mother, Gideon,” she said again.

Torment darkened his eyes to a deeper shade of green, and he rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “Why wasn’t I better to her, Willow?” Gideon asked hoarsely. “Why?”

Because she loved Gideon Marshall, no matter what he had done in the past or meant to do in the future, because he needed her, Willow lifted her hands to the sides of his face. “Hush,” she said, and when his lips fell to hers, with desperation, she welcomed them. Welcomed him.

When the kiss ended, Willow caught her husband’s hand in her own and led him slowly up the stairs. If Gideon wanted her now, she would give herself, without any regrets.

But, at the door of her bedroom, he balked. “Willow . . .”

She pulled him inside the room; slowly, in the silver light of the moon, she unbuttoned his wrinkled shirt, then removed it. “I love you,” she whispered, even though she knew that she shouldn’t have confided such a secret.

Showing no sign that he’d heard her, Gideon groaned
as Willow’s hands smoothed the mat of golden maple hair glimmering on his chest, stopping to toy with his nipples, caressing the powerful muscles of his shoulders and upper arms.

Acting strictly on instinct, Willow tasted one of the masculine nipples cosseted in toasty down and knew wonder and delight when it grew taut against her tongue. Gideon moaned; heartened, she stood on tiptoe, then caught his earlobe lightly between her teeth.

With a hoarse cry of response, Gideon took her face between strong hands and lifted it. “Willow, do you know what is going to happen if you don’t stop? If you don’t stop right now and order me out of this room? God help me, if you don’t tell me to, I won’t be able to go!”

“You did say we were going to live together as husband and wife, didn’t you?” Willow whispered back. “Just this very day, in fact.”

“Yes. And I behaved like an obnoxious idiot.”

Willow reached up to trace his taut lips with an index finger. “Hush, Gideon,” she said.

5

Devlin Gallagher finished his drink and set the glass aside resolutely. Then he made his way up the stairway to Evadne’s room, the room he had been barred from since the night Steven had appeared, with Willow and Maria, the servant woman, in tow.

A long time ago, now.

A decade.

He lifted his hand to knock, shook his head distractedly, and opened the door.

Evadne was awake. Devlin sensed that as he approached the bedside, struck a match, and lit the fancy globe lamp on the nightstand.

There were no words to say, not at first. For almost a minute, Devlin simply stood there, staring down at the ravaged face framed in dark, tangled hair, and saw accusations
flare in the eyes that had once adored him without reservation.

Devlin drew up a chair and sat down at the bedside. He had loved this woman once, in a comfortable, settled way. She had been a good wife to him, restored his faith in her gender, tried hard to accept Willow as a daughter.

He despaired, truly and deeply, at her suffering. “I’m sorry,” he finally managed to say, in a gruff undertone.

One side of Evadne’s face was slightly out of line with the other and she couldn’t speak. Still, it was as though she had shouted an ugly challenge; Devlin flinched and momentarily closed his eyes.

Cautiously, he reached out and took Evadne’s hand, held it. Even now, in this desperate hour, he could not find words to reach her, to comfort her. She seemed to hold herself apart from him in some inexplicable way.

He knew he deserved it.

His eyes clouded with tears of frustration and grief. Devlin kept his vigil through the night hours.

Just before dawn, with no fuss at all, Evadne Gallagher died.

*   *   *

Willow sat up in bed, arms wrapped around her knees, and studied the man sleeping naked beside her. Who would have thought, to see them in this intimate state, that they had not made love during the night? No, Gideon had talked, in the hoarse tones of bereavement, and he had even wept a little once, in Willow’s arms, but he had not taken her.

With a sigh, Willow ran one hand through her sleeptousled
hair. She had been so willing to come to Gideon as a woman, but now, in the light of day, she felt gratitude for his forbearance. It wouldn’t have been right, she supposed, for them to make love now, in this house where there was so much confusion and pain.

Leaving Gideon sleeping soundly on his stomach, his broad back uncovered, Willow slipped out of bed, found a wrapper, and put it on. In the hallway outside her room, she encountered her father.

Knowing he was well aware that Willow had not spent the night alone, she lowered her eyes for a moment. It hadn’t been proper, sharing her bed with Gideon Marshall, but surely it hadn’t been wrong, either. They were, after all, legally married.

“Willow.”

The whispered word made Willow lift her eyes to her father’s face in questioning dread. He was still wearing yesterday’s clothes.

“She’s gone,” Devlin said raggedly, as the last of the night gave way to morning.

Willow swallowed hard and managed a nod. Then, with a strangled cry, she flung herself into her father’s arms.

He held her close and they shared a silent sorrow, totally in accord, and then they broke apart. Devlin went slowly down the stairs, his shoulders straight and strong, and Willow turned and forced herself back into the bedroom she had just left.

“Gideon,” she said, touching his bare shoulder, wishing that she didn’t have to tell him. “Gideon, wake up.”

*   *   *

It rained the day of Evadne Gallagher’s funeral, but almost a hundred people came to mourn, including Gideon’s brother, Zachary, who had arrived by train just that morning, after receiving a summons by telegram.

At the graveside, standing between her husband and her father, her face shrouded by the thick black veil Maria had provided, Willow studied Evadne’s elder son. Zachary was dark, an inch or so shorter than Gideon, and his clothes fit his well-made frame with tailored perfection. His eyes were a deep, compelling green.

Knowing that this was the man who had arranged the prank that had changed both her own life and Gideon’s, Willow wavered between anger and heartfelt gratitude. Though Zachary Marshall was clearly grieving as deeply as his brother was, he still managed to fling an occasional speculative look in Willow’s direction.

It was much later, at the Gallagher house, when he finally approached her. “My brother’s wife?” he asked, in a smooth, deep voice.

Willow was very conscious of Gideon, even though he was on the far side of the room, enduring the gushy condolences of one of Evadne’s friends. Not since the night of his mother’s death three days before had he shared her bed, touched her, or spoken more than a few words.

“Yes,” she said, though the word was, in many ways, a lie.

“You’ve changed,” Zachary remarked, in flat tones that betrayed neither approval nor disappointment. “I wasn’t sure you were the same person we knew in San Francisco.”

“The same gullible, smitten schoolgirl, you mean?” Willow retorted evenly, for it was easy to be angry now.

Zachary winced good-naturedly and his straight white teeth flashed in a brief, boyish smile. “It was a shameful thing to do,” he confessed. “How can I make it up to you?”

Willow was aware of this man’s fundamental charm and totally unresponsive to it. “Can such a thing ever be made up?” she asked, with a coldness that she couldn’t help, even though she knew it was entirely out of keeping with the mood of the day.

Zachary was about to respond to this when Gideon suddenly intruded, and the look he gave his brother was decidedly unfriendly.

“Zachary,” he said.

Zachary nodded in response. “Gideon,” he replied.

To Willow’s intense surprise, Gideon slipped an arm around her waist—an almost proprietary arm—and drew her close. “You’ve met my wife?” he drawled sardonically.

The dark-haired brother nodded again. “Under different circumstances, it would have been a pleasure.”

Gideon’s jaw went taut, and his grip on the glass of liquor he held in his free hand whitened his knuckles. In contrast, his voice was flat when he spoke, asking Zachary when he had arrived and where he was staying.

Zachary made some reply; Willow didn’t take note of it, because all her attention was fixed on Gideon’s face. The play of emotions she saw there was unsettling, even considering the loss he had just suffered. His hostility toward his brother went beyond the justified resentment of a childish jest, it seemed to Willow.

Finally, Zachary went off to another part of the crowded parlor, probably in search of more amicable company, and Gideon surprised Willow again by turning to her and muttering, “I’ve got to get out of here—I can’t breathe.”

Willow felt the impending loss of him, even for a few hours, like a blow, but she managed a comforting smile. It was a peculiarity of funerals that people insisted on clustering together just when the grief-stricken wanted most to be alone. “I understand,” she said.

He caught her elbow in his hand and ushered her through the mingling friends of Evadne Gallagher’s, toward the front doors. “Will you come with me, Willow?” he pleaded, somewhat after the fact, as he took her cloak from the coat tree and draped it over her shoulders.

There was nothing Willow wanted more, but she was conscious of her father, somewhere in the crowd, distraught and trapped among the mourners in the parlor, many of whom would take sanctimonious delight in dropping Dove Triskadden’s name wherever possible.

“But, my father—”

Gideon looked at once broken and annoyed. “Your father left half an hour ago,” he pointed out brusquely. “No doubt Miss Triskadden is soothing his tortured brow even as we speak.”

Willow flushed but did not speak in defense of Devlin Gallagher, for with this man at this moment, it would have been a waste of breath. Lifting her chin, she allowed her husband to escort her out of the house and down the walk to a waiting horse and buggy.

After lifting Willow into the creaky seat, Gideon
rounded the rig and climbed in beside her, taking the reins into practiced hands. His smile was given with an effort that tore at Willow’s heart. “I bought this the other day, Mrs. Marshall. How do you like it?”

Willow only shrugged, for a horse was a horse and a buggy was a buggy and there were weightier matters on her mind anyway. “What would you be wanting with a rig when you don’t plan to stay in Virginia City?”

“When did I say I didn’t plan to stay?” Gideon retorted as he guided the vehicle away from Devlin Gallagher’s house.