Willow: A Novel (No Series) (9 page)

Her brother gave no indication that he had heard Willow at all, but he did loosen the pressure of the rifle barrel, allowing Norville to breathe a little more freely. Steven’s broad shoulders moved in a deceptively casual shrug.

“You wanted me, Pickering,” Steven said. “Here I am.”

Poor Norville didn’t know whether to reply or not. Wisely, he kept his peace.

Steven dropped the rifle; it clattered to the rocky ground at his feet. Instantly, however, his hands were at the front of Norville’s shirt, gripping the fabric, lifting the object of his ire completely off the ground. “I will warn you one time,”
the outlaw rasped, between perfect white teeth. “If you ever touch my sister or even speak to her in a manner I consider ungentlemanly, I will find you, Pickering, and I will kick your scrawny ass up between your shoulder blades, for a start. Following that, I will let my younger brothers—bless their hearts, they’re not all there, never have been—
I will let my younger brothers cut away any part of your anatomy they so desire
. Do you understand me?”

Looking sick, his skin a greenish gray, his brow beaded with sweat, Norville nodded.

Steven released him and his head swung in Willow’s direction. “Go home,” he ordered his sister. “Right now.”

Willow lifted her chin. Norville had reason to be scared of Steven. She didn’t.

“No,” she said flatly.

Norville was scrambling toward his own horse, left to graze nearby. The poor man was red to the ears he probably believed he had come so close to losing, struggling into the saddle, fleeing ignobly. The delighted laughter of both Coy and Reilly rang in the air.

The other man remained silent and watchful, the brim of his hat pulled down over his face, hiding his features.

Steven, meanwhile, strode toward Willow, his blue eyes blazing. He stood toe to toe with her. “You were actually going to give in to him!” he yelled.

Coy and Reilly reined their horses around and rode discreetly away, followed somewhat reluctantly by the silent stranger.

“It didn’t seem that I had much choice!” Willow shouted back, standing her ground.

They were nose to nose now, brother and sister, one’s will every bit as strong as the other’s.

“I can take care of myself!” bellowed Steven.

“Like hell you can!” screamed Willow.

With monumental effort, Steven calmed himself. He turned and walked away. “No more, Willow,” he said hoarsely. “Damnit,
no more
. I won’t have you bargaining with your virtue to protect the likes of me. I’m not worth it.”

Suddenly, there were tears in Willow’s eyes. She couldn’t help thinking of all the times he’d defended her against Jay Forbes and others, the small gifts he’d somehow managed to present, on her birthdays and at Christmas, the way he’d reassured her when she was small and frightened. “But I love you, Steven—”

“No more,” he repeated, in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper.

There was something so final in the words that Willow shivered. “Steven,” she began, but he was striding toward his horse, mounting it, bending to catch the dangling reins up in his hands.

“Sometimes I think it would be better for everyone if I turned myself in,” he said.

Before Willow could find words to refute this rash statement, Steven was riding away, soon to vanish into the trees.

Tears burning behind her eyes and aching in her throat, Willow caught and remounted her horse, which had wandered some distance away during the confusion surrounding Steven’s unexpected return. Dispiritedly, she rode toward home.

Not surprisingly, Evadne was waiting in the doorway when Willow reached the rear entrance to the house. “How dare you disappear like that, after the scandal you’ve unleashed on us all?” she demanded. “Willow Gallagher, how dare you?”

There was no point in reminding her that
Gideon
had been the one to ruin her wedding to Norville.

Too spent emotionally to defend herself, Willow simply stood there, in her trousers and her shirt and her boots, her hair slipping from its hasty braid, and awaited her stepmother’s lecture.

It was not forthcoming, for, just as Evadne opened her mouth to give vent to her obvious umbrage, Devlin rounded the western corner of the house. His blue eyes touched Willow with much sympathy, then swept, in rare warning, to his wife.

“I’ll have a word with my daughter,” he said flatly, mounting the porch steps.

Evadne flushed and then turned in a swirl of crisp sateen skirts to disappear into the house. The only outward rebellion she allowed herself was the distant slamming of the kitchen door.

“You’ve seen Steven,” Devlin guessed aloud, the moment he and Willow were alone.

Despite the fact that she’d been almost ten years old before even meeting Devlin Gallagher, or knowing that he was her real father, Willow found it impossible to lie to the man. Like Steven, he’d always been good to her, unfailingly generous. A firm but loving father.

She nodded miserably.

And Devlin looked uncommonly stern. “I don’t want you to go near your brother again, Willow—do you hear me? Steven is a marked man, and when justice catches up with him, I won’t have you caught in the crossfire!”

“Justice!” cried Willow. “You know as well as I do that Steven isn’t really a criminal!”

Devlin suddenly seemed very old, and his eyes were fixed on the distant hills. “It may be that we delude ourselves, you and I, because we love Steven and want him to survive.”

Willow had considered this possibility—and discarded it. Having lived nine years of her life in the company of Steven Gallagher, she knew him better than his father ever would. “Steven is not an outlaw,” she insisted stubbornly.

The weary blue eyes came searchingly to Willow’s face. A beat passed, and during that fraction of a moment, the conversation changed course. “You will be careful of Gideon Marshall, won’t you, Willow?”

Willow was taken aback; for a moment it seemed that her father surely knew of the illicit pleasures Gideon had revealed to her that morning in the quiet hills. “What do you mean?” she asked, as a diversionary tactic.

“I mean that Gideon is on the board of directors of the Central Pacific Railroad, Willow. He’s a major stockholder. And he’s here to find Steven and see that he’s charged with train robbery, and most likely a whole slew of other things, too.”

Willow felt as though she’d been slapped. Inwardly, she reeled, but soon enough she accepted the truth in her father’s words. Gideon
had
shown a marked interest in Steven, now that she thought about it. And she’d thought he was curious about
her
.

A mingling of shame and rage turned her dirt-smudged cheeks crimson. To think she’d let that man take such unconscionable liberties with her person, to bare her breasts, to know her in ways only a husband should. Probably her surrender, such as it was, was just another joke to him.

Like their “wedding” two years before, in California.

Quickly, her father was there, drawing her into his strong arms, holding her. “I’ll have this farce of a marriage annulled, Willow,” he promised earnestly, “if you can just tell me that-that you and Gideon haven’t . . .”

Willow wept harder, overcome by this second betrayal of Gideon’s, and her father took this for an admission that the marriage had been consummated.

Still, he was patient. “There’s no annulment, then,” Devlin said bleakly. “I’ll make up the papers and we’ll go to the territorial legislature—”

Willow broke away from her father, ran sobbing into the house, and locked herself in her bedroom. She wanted more than anything in the world to be free of Gideon Marshall, but she also wanted to be his wife. God help her, she wanted more—much more—of the heated ecstasy that she had known with him that morning. Instinctively, she knew that she would never, in all her life, love another man as she loved Gideon, never feel
such brutal, sweeping satisfaction unless it was he who gave it.

The knowledge filled Willow Gallagher with despair.

*   *   *

Gideon had lain on his lumpy hotel room bed all day long, staring up at the ceiling and wishing that he’d never been born. Though he considered it time and time again, he could not bring himself to find a whore and end the torture.

Finally, though, as the sun began to set, he rose from the bed, washed, and brushed his hair. There was still time to send the wire the board of directors was waiting for, and then he’d go to one of Virginia City’s dozen saloons and get blind drunk.

Five minutes later, he entered the Western Union office and, feeling like Judas reincarnated, dictated the message that had to be sent:

HAVE FOUND THE MEANS TO LOCATE GALLAGHER. G.M.

It was that means, that whiskey-eyed, passionate means, that haunted Gideon as he left Western Union and entered the noisy, well-lighted saloon directly across the street. Gideon Marshall hadn’t cried since he was four years old; now, at thirty-one, it was all he could do to keep from it.

*   *   *

Wielding her sponge, Maria scrubbed Willow’s back with a ferocity born of love.

Willow, her single braid wound into a coronet on top of her aching head, sat stolidly in the ornate tub in the special bathing chamber just off the kitchen, enduring. “I want to die,” she said distractedly.

Maria spared her the lecture such a remark invited. “Pooh,” she said, scrubbing harder. “You will live to be a hundred.”

And every minute of it loving a man who would sell out my brother
, mourned Willow in silence.

Finished scouring Willow’s back, Maria deftly undid the thick golden braid and began the process of shampooing by reaching for an enamel pitcher and dunking it into the tub. “You must look especially pretty tonight,” she said brightly.

Willow groaned. “Why? I’m staying in my room from now until three years after the Second Coming.”

Maria shook her head, overlooking the irreverent remark, for reasons of her own.
“Sí,”
she agreed. “The señorita
would
expect a Third Coming, just for her.”

Willow was silent until after she had left the bathtub, long minutes and much scrubbing and rinsing later. She dried herself with a thick towel and took modest refuge in a flannel wrapper. “Why did you say I would have to look pretty tonight, Maria?”

“You are not the only one who suffers. Your father, he is wearing his heart in his eyes. He, too, is afraid and worried. If you do not go down to dinner and behave like a lady, he will have only the señora to talk to. Would you wish this on a man who has been so good to you?”

Willow sighed. “I wouldn’t wish that on anybody,” she said, with a broken sort of wryness. Once, she and Evadne had liked each other. Everything had been so
much easier then. “Why do you suppose he’s here at all, when he could be with Dove?”

Maria bit her full lower lip and would make no comment.

*   *   *

Gideon realized, with alarm, that he was losing his taste for hard liquor; he’d been nursing the same lousy, watered-down drink for better than an hour. To add insult to injury, he felt distinctly drunk.

It was late when the traveling peddler came into the saloon. He was a very tall man, with fair hair that stuck out from under his dusty bowler hat, and his suit, ill-fitting and assembled of a bright plaid, was an assault to the eyes.

Gideon swore under his breath and looked away, blinking.

As luck would have it, the drummer set his case down within an inch of Gideon’s left boot and jovially pounded on the bar with one fist. “A special!” he shouted to the bartender, in a thick Scots burr that seemed to roll on and on, like a wagon wheel racing downhill. “And one for me new friend here, as well!”

Was the bartender smirking a little? In his unlikely drunken state, Gideon couldn’t rightly tell. He peered into his glass, wondering if it had been laced with poison.

“Aye and have a wet for your whistle, then!” enjoined the friendly peddler, as two enormous mugs of foaming beer were set on the bar.

Gideon looked at the Scot and thought that his mustache
was just a bit off center. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said, befuddled, his words a bit slurred.

He took a sip from the mug allotted to him and the taste of it was so bad that he spat the stuff unceremoniously onto the sawdust floor.

“We call it panther piss,” explained the barkeeper.

The peddler laughed richly. “It’s an acquired taste, Mr. . .?”

“Marshall,” frowned Gideon. “Gideon Marshall.”

“’Tis a troubled man you are, Gideon Marshall,” guessed the Scot. Did he straighten his mustache? No, it wasn’t possible to do that; Gideon had merely imagined the gesture.

At the back of the saloon, someone pounded a tinny piano and a woman began to sing a bawdy barroom song, the lyrics of which Gideon would normally have appreciated. Everyone except the bartender, the drummer, and Gideon himself drifted toward the music, singing along.

The peddler drained his mug and ordered another. He seemed as steady on his feet as before, a remarkable thing, considering. “You’re a wee bit into your cups, Mr. Marshall,” he observed, and it seemed to Gideon that his burr was slipping, just as his mustache had seemed to, moments before. “Might be good if you went back to your house, then. There are those who’ll set upon a man and take his valuables, in an evil and wayward town such as this one.”

“Evil?” muttered Gideon, drunker than he’d ever been in his life. Virginia City was a wild place, especially when compared to the comforts of San Francisco, but he wouldn’t have gone so far as to say it was evil.

“’Tis a sin to sell spirits of a Sunday,” announced the peddler, in a jovial tone of confession, raising his glass and looking at it appreciatively before taking a deep draft.

Gideon sighed inwardly. The world was full of hypocrites and he himself was among the greatest of those. “What’d you say your name was?” he asked the peddler.

“I didn’t say,” came the reply, with no accent at all, and then the stranger was calmly ushering Gideon out of the bar and onto the almost deserted street.

There, he suddenly thrust Gideon up against the weathered outside wall of the saloon and landed a very respectable punch in his middle.