Midnight Lover (2 page)

From the first, Jesse had known they shared a certain outlaw mentality and reputation to match. They both knew what they wanted and weren't ashamed to take it. Jade was the only woman in Silver Spur who didn't ask more of Jesse than he was willing to give. The Golden Dragon was a means to an end for Jade. One day she would gather up her money and go back to Hong Kong or whatever exotic place it was she whispered about when the lights were low and the nights were long. She didn't want anything from Jesse and that was the way he liked it best.

She patted the empty spot next to her on the big brass bed. Her dark almond eyes held both fire and promise and for a moment he was tempted, but Bennett's face, lost and terrified, still haunted him. There'd be no rest for him until he went back to the Crazy Arrow and packed up all of the Easterner's things so they could be shipped back to Boston along with his body.

He yanked on his white shirt and held out his wrists so Jade could fasten the cuffs. "Got some things to do."

She tossed her sleek black hair over one bare shoulder and kissed the inside of his wrist. "At midnight, Jesse? Should I be jealous?"

He laughed at the thought. Jade was a businesswoman, pure and simple. That was one of the things he liked best about her.

"You, jealous? You got more men panting after you than a bitch in heat. I'd be surprised if you noticed I was gone."

"I notice, Jesse," she said as he headed for the door. "I always notice."

It was an odd thing for Jade to say, but he forgot her words by the time he hit the street. Music floated up from the King of hearts at the other end of town and he wished he were sitting in his office in the back room, counting up his receipts. The town was changing quicker than he could keep up with. Pretty soon frilly white curtains would be hanging from every window and the sounds of children playing in the dirt road would replace the tinkle of Black Jack at the piano as he played The Blue Juniata.

It wasn't that long ago that traveling theatre troupes made Silver Spur their first stop on their western tours. The Streets of New York, Under the Gaslight—actors with slicked-back hair and actresses with painted faces and feather boas tossed over creamy shoulders were showered with gold and silver coins tossed by miners with money to burn.

But now most of the bonanza kings had headed up to San Francisco and the pleasures of the Barbary Coast while Jesse had stayed behind in the town he'd strangely grown to love.

The Crazy Arrow was still and empty when Jesse unlocked the front door and stepped inside. The gas globes and chandeliers had been extinguished but even without their bright yellow glow, the brass fixtures and bright red flocked wallpaper leaped out at him.

Bennett might have been a citified dandy but he damned sure knew how to furnish a first-rate saloon. Why, even the spittoons were all polished and shiny, no matter if half the cowboys and gamblers at the gaming tables missed them by a mile.

What the man had needed was a good partner, someone used to Silver Spur and the way things were done here. The Crazy Arrow could've made Bennett a fortune, if only he'd been smart enough to know his limitations. A Boston snob couldn't walk into a town like Silver Spur and expect the men to start dancing to his tune. Things just didn't work that way.

If Bennett had been smart, he would've unsnapped that stiff white collar of his and gotten down to the business at hand: gaining the acceptance of the townspeople. Too bad Bennett had to run roughshod over everyone, talking that Eastern talk, waving his credentials under everyone's noses until not one of his employees had seen fit to yell "Duck!" when the bullet meant for Jesse came whizzing through the back room.

Face up to it, Reardon
, his conscience screamed.
You're glad Bennett's bound for Cemetery Hill.
He was the first competition to appear since the big fire of '72 that marked the end of Silver Spur's glory days.

None of that made any difference now. Bennett was dead as yesterday and now it was up to Jesse to collect all the papers and paraphernalia stashed in the big roll
-top desk and make sure they got shipped off to Bennett's kin.

Everything, that was, except the deed to the Crazy Arrow and the old Rayburn mine. Not that he'd send them on to Bennett's daughter even if he had been able to find them. The saloon and the mine were his, thanks to a handful of ladies, and no piece of paper could tell him otherwise.

Jesse was thinking about how shit-scared Bennett had looked when he drew that last ace—and how some men should never play poker—when he came upon the picture tucked in with some of Aaron's records.

Miss Caroline Louisa Bennett, pretty and blonde-haired and all of six years old, smiled up at him from the scratched Daguerrotype and for a split second Jesse was sorry Aaron had taken the bullet meant for him.

He hadn't won his reputation as a hard-dealing, dangerous man by giving way to bouts of sentimentality, but there was something about that little girl that reached way back into his memory and made him understand what had been pushing Aaron Bennett.

From the moment he'd been turned out to grass, a scared kid with a gold piece pinned to the inside of his shirt and the words, "Sorry, son," a burning stone inside Jesse's heart, he'd known how it would be for him. Loneliness had been carved into his soul from the first breath he drew at the breast of his angry mother and nothing had been able to change the inevitable.

He grew fast and he grew tough and when the Civil War broke out, he joined the Union Army and fought side by side with boys from the Pennsylvania town he'd left far behind.

After the War ended, Jesse started riding for the Pony Express and met up with one of his cousins who told him that Jesse's mother and stepfather had been killed right after Appomattox, leaving behind an eight year old half-brother he'd never known existed. Jesse was already on his way to earning his fortune. He wanted to toss the cousin a twenty-dollar gold piece and push the boy from his mind but, unfortunately, Jesse's heart was the last part of him to grow tough.

"Son of a bitch." Jesse reached for the brandy on the shelf next to Bennett's desk and poured himself a slug.

If there was one thing he hated, it was looking back. Looking back only brought up feelings that clawed at his chest like a wild animal fighting to break free, reminding him that he was one step away from nowhere, the same lonely kid who learned to use a gun while other kids were learning their ABCs.

Looking back only reminded him that not even his money had been enough to help Andrew when he needed help the most and now his brother lay under the Pennsylvania earth, his promise as dead as Jesse's dreams of glory.

But still he couldn't shake the feeling of kinship with the hapless Bennett's orphan and because he was tired of thinking about things he couldn't change, he pulled out a sheet of foolscap and dipped the pen into the inkwell and slowly, carefully, told Miss Caroline Louisa Bennett that her daddy had seen fit to leave two hundred dollars in gold for her welfare.

He'd send it out on the stage with the rest of Bennett's belongings and then he'd do his damnedest to forget Aaron Bennett and his blonde-haired daughter ever existed.

Ch
apter 2

Boston
- April 1876

Caroline Louisa Bennett took a deep breath, counted to ten, then turned to face the overwhelming concern of Emily Addison and her dutiful son, Thomas Wentworth Addison II.

"I'm sorry, Emily," Caroline said, crossing the drawing room and sitting down on the edge of a spindly-legged Louis XIV chair. "I've been woolgathering again."

"Thinking of your dear father, I'm sure." Emily sniffed loudly into her glass of Madeira, her tiny brown eyes soft with tears. "Terrible business, this. Simply terrible."

Thomas patted his mother's hand. "Let me pour you some more sherry, Mother," he said, waiting while Emily drained her glass. "It's been a difficult day."

"Oh, it has been that, Thomas. When dear Aaron's trunk arrived this morning—" Emily paused to dab at her eyes with a lace-trimmed handkerchief "—well, I thought my poor heart would break."

Oh yes, thought Caroline, Emily's tears had been prodigious that morning. No sooner had the trunk been deposited in Caroline's third floor room before Emily was regaling everyone with her dreams of what might have been. Caroline removed a bottle of bay rum from his trunk and Emily moaned aloud. She fished out a watch fob and Emily clutched her bosom in anguish. When Caroline found a wrinkled cambric shirt with Aaron's initials embroidered on the breast pocket, Thomas had to fetch both Emily's smelling salts and a servant to see her back to the drawing room.

It was no secret Emily Addison had had her middle-aged widow's heart set on Aaron Bennett, nor was it any secret that Aaron had liked his women considerably younger in years and freer with their charms. Emily Addison had served Aaron's purpose, a purpose Caroline had been all too aware of these past sixteen months. What harm was there in wooing the mother when it was the mother's son who figured in Aaron's future? His Western adventure was less likely to be interrupted by the appearance of his twenty-three year old unmarried daughter if she were safely betrothed to stable, churchgoing, rich Thomas Wentworth Addison II.

Caroline had understood nothing if not how her father's mind worked. Good looks and charm only got a man so far and Aaron was beginning to run short on both commodities. Each time he would try to settle down and make a home for Caroline and a career for himself, a pretty redhead or a winsome brunette would sashay onto the scene and Caroline's chances for a normal life would disappear the second he said "I do."

He was forty-two years old and running out of options. Marrying his daughter into a wealthy and well-connected family was his way of insuring her future—and his own, as well.

"Thomas will make you a fine husband, sweetheart," Aaron had said the night before he took the train to St. Louis to make the stage connection west. "You have nothing to worry about."

"You've made a fine husband, too, Father," she had pointed out. "Six times over."

Her father's marital history was as checkered as the dresses she had worn as a little girl. Alone, Aaron Bennett lacked direction; married, he followed the direction of his wife—usually straight to the poorhouse. Aaron's death at the hands of an unknown gunman didn't surprise Caroline half as much as the fact that her father had died unwed.

Aaron had the last laugh, hadn't he? Dead and gone, leaving her once more at the mercy of old friends the way she'd been left a thousand times in the past. In his last few letters he'd mentioned owning a saloon, but that was obviously an invention meant to soothe his daughter's mounting suspicions. As it was, the only things she could call her own were her sterling silver brush and comb, her collection of china plates, and that blasted trunk upstairs filled with the pathetic accumulation of her father's forty-two years on this earth.

Caroline sighed, her nostrils quivering at the scent of generations of Wentworth dust that rose from the Turkey rug at her feet. Emily Addison continued to run on about Aaron's grace and consummate style; Thomas's murmurs of assent echoed throughout the drawing room like a Greek chorus of one.

This is it, Caroline thought wildly. Her future stretched before her, an endless string of days and nights in this polite and boring drawing room as Emily Addison drank her way through countless bottles of Madeira provided by her doting, thoughtful son.

Caroline stood up and smoothed the skirt of her black mourning dress and tried to control the panic building inside her. Through the years she'd learned the importance of keeping one's emotions private; things like softness and sentimentality and fear could always be used against you. "If you'll excuse me, perhaps I'll go upstairs and finish going through Father's things."

Emily took another medicinal sip of Madeira and dabbed at her eyes with her limp handkerchief. "Oh, my dear, do you think you should? So much heartache for one day, so much—" Her words drifted off into another ladylike series of sobs.

This time to Caroline's surprise, Thomas ignored his mother and walked Caroline into the center hallway. "I apologize for Mother. Crying is one of the things she does best."

"Let her cry,' Caroline said. "Someone should cry for him." God knew his daughter was finding it hard.

He reached for her hand. "I'm here for you, Caro. If you should find yourself needing a shoulder to cry upon, I can provide one."

For the first time since she'd learned of her father's death, Caroline's eyes filled with tears. "Thank you, Thomas," she said, her voice low. "I'll remember that."

One thing Caroline Bennett never did was cry and she struggled to hide this unexpected rush of emotion from Thomas. He was a good man; it wasn't his fault if his fawning deference toward women reminded her sharply of her father.

Thomas apparently took her silence as encouragement and he went to put his arm about her shoulder, but she moved just beyond reach.

"I'm tired," she said. "If you'll excuse me..."

She climbed the first step but still he held onto her hand.

"I know this has been an exhausting day for you, Caro, but there's something I'd like to talk about." He rested one foot on the bottom step and moved closer until she could clearly see the flecks of gold in his dark brown eyes. "We've had an understanding, you and I, an unspoken understanding, I'll grant you, that—"