Scoundrel for Hire (Velvet Lies, Book 1) (32 page)

But Aaron had survived, and other than the scar he hid so artfully beneath his dashing new hair style, he'd remained unscathed, while she...

She gulped a shaky breath.

She relived the nightmare every time a man dared to touch her. She wanted so desperately to be held, to feel safe, to be loved. She wanted with every fiber of her being to be free of Aaron's ghost. A thousand Naheles couldn't haunt her half as cruelly.

She wondered if it was possible to make Rafe understand.

She stirred, gathering her nerve. "Rafe, I..."

"Shh." His melodious baritone, now hoarse with feeling, crackled beneath her ear. "You have my word. It won't happen again."

Not ever?

Tongue-tied and frustrated, anxious that she might have lost her one chance with the man who had somehow come to mean more to her than any suitor she'd ever known, she withdrew, intending to explain. Somehow, she had to convince him she wasn't a tease, or a prude, or worse, disinterested in the kisses that made her head float and her senses spin with giddy longing.

But when his mist-colored eyes touched hers, the shock of his misery was visceral. It poured into her so fast and deep that her heart wrenched, overwhelmed by its sheer oppressiveness. He was drowning in a whirlpool of despair, and for the life of her, she didn't know what to say or do to pull him from the undertow.

A smile so melancholy that it made her eyes sting curved the sensuous lips that only moments ago had ignited her soul. With a whisper-soft caress, his thumb brushed the tear that dribbled past her lashes.

"I hope you can forgive me, Silver."

She nodded hurriedly, his tawny visage swimming before her. He sighed, kissing her forehead.

"I don't deserve it," he whispered, "but thank you."

He raised her hand, pressing his lips to her knuckles. Another fleeting smile, this one just as mirthless, touched his mouth. "I trust we'll both feel better tomorrow."

She blinked, uncertain what he meant. For a precious moment longer, his fingers twined through hers. She could feel the pulse of him, the life of him that beat so forcefully beneath the onerous burden he'd shouldered since his birth. She knew he was wrong to call himself a failure. She
knew
he was more than he imagined himself to be.

But before she could say as much, his palm softly rasped from her hand.

And he walked down the stairs in the dark.

Chapter 12

If Rafe had believed in heaven as much as he did in hell, he would have blamed divine intervention for keeping him in Aspen. Only minutes after he'd vowed, for Silver's own good, to flee like a cur in the night, Max burst through the front door, all but singing with excitement.

"Chumley, my boy," the millionaire boomed, stopping just short of bowling Rafe into Aphrodite, "I've found it! The perfect wedding gift for Cellie! I'm gonna build her the biggest brand-spanking new theater this state has ever seen. And I'm going to do it before that nuisance, Horace Tabor, beats me to it!"

Max chuckled, rubbing his chubby hands together. "Yep, she'll be able to enjoy her circus acts, Silver can watch her operas, and I'll get to hear a rousing Anvil Chorus every now and then. It's perfect!" Beaming, he linked his arm through Rafe's. "C'mon, son. I need your help. Do you know this Shakespeare fella the Trevelyans think is such a ripsnorter?"

To his bemusement, Rafe spent the better part of four hours holed up in Max's study, smoking cigars, sketching plans, and trying not to seem
too
knowledgeable about the life he'd led since the age of fourteen.

But that had only been the beginning. At the stroke of midnight, when he'd finally earned his reprieve from the exuberant theater builder, Rafe had stumbled across Jimmy's prone form, snoring outside his bedroom door.

"Oh, yer worship sir!" Jimmy lamented, looking more distressed than rested after his snooze. "She's gone and done it again. I searched full-chisel through every inch of this house. Honest! But I couldn't find her anywhere. Miss Tavy's plumb absquatulated!"

This news was made even more aggravating for its sheer inconvenience: rather than smuggling Tavy and all his other belongings out the back door before dawn, Rafe had been forced to enlist the aid of Max, Jimmy, and, eventually, an appealingly rumpled, sleepy-eyed Silver. They'd crawled under furniture, rummaged through drawers, and pulled books off shelves until three in the morning. Empty-handed and dejected, they'd finally huddled en masse around the scarred kitchen table and a steaming pot of coffee. Silver and Jimmy had each taken turns blaming themselves for Tavy's escape while a cigar-puffing Max had griped between yawns, "If Cellie were here, her spirits would tell her where to look."

It had been clear to Rafe at that point he wasn't going anywhere.
At least, not until I find Tavy,
a petulant voice inside him whispered as he lay lonely and restless, watching dawn creep through the slats of his shutters. He hadn't thought it would be so hard, sleeping through a whole night without Tavy's wet little nose tucked under his chin.

And he hadn't thought he'd grow so glum at the prospect of leaving behind easygoing, wily old Max.

Then there was Cellie, spooky but kind-to-a-fault Cellie. Rafe had never dreamed he'd find a maternal confidante in the woman he'd set out to seduce. How could he leave Cellie to fend for herself, knowing that he was the only person who could persuade Silver to end her desperate scheme?

But most of all, how could he walk out on Silver when she was quite possibly the woman he was falling in love with?

He squeezed his eyes closed, groaning at the insidious suspicion that had been plaguing him for days.
You're a sap, Jones. Look what love did to Romeo and Juliet.

Then again, look what it did to Max and Cellie. What if Silver were his one chance for salvation on his otherwise bleak road to hell?

He smiled with self-ridicule. He'd played one too many balcony scenes. Silver had never purported to be his divine deliverance; in fact, it had been her sheer humanness that had drawn him to her. She'd been an honest-to-goodness spade among all the conniving queens of hearts.

He'd been intrigued that she'd allowed him to see her flaws from the first, and that those flaws—overprotectiveness, blind loyalty, and single-minded determination—had proven to be some of her most endearing characteristics. Silver put her whole heart and soul into love; if her relationship with her father was any indication, she would stand by her husband even if their whole world was going up in flames.

Still, it was scary to love, he realized uncomfortably. It was scarier than standing nauseous and tongue-tied in the footlights, especially for a man with his prospects. After all, he was a lawless, penniless bastard. That was the truth, not the fantasy, of Raphael Jones. So why would he dare to believe a woman like Silver might let her feelings for him go beyond infatuation? Was it because he wanted her to love him? Because she'd held him when he'd cried?

Rafe didn't have the answers to his questions. But he'd spent a lifetime as a professional scam artist. He knew how to calculate odds, and he figured they weren't stacked against him as high as the night he'd met Silver.

That's why he decided to stay in Aspen. He had a séance to watch, a woman to woo, and an otter to scare up.

That night, at the appointed hour for Cellie's extravaganza, Max greeted him in the dining room amidst a throng of skeptics and crucifix-clutching believers. Robustly red in his starched linen and swallow tails, the millionaire looked like a stuffed penguin who was in serious danger of coming unstuffed.

"Evenin', Chumley," Max called jovially, his ever-present fog of smoke wreathing him from head to chest. "I hardly recognized you. No puce velvet and lace cuffs tonight, eh? Why, you're looking as drab as any regular old colonial, son. Silver must be rubbing off on you."

Rafe inclined his head, his demeanor not quite as Chumleyfied as usual. His black-and-white formal attire was all part of his new plan to develop some sophistication in Chumley. He figured in one month's time, the ducal idiot that the
Aspen Times
so loved to lampoon would be gone forever, and he could start behaving in public like the kind of man Silver might want to marry. He'd even gone as far as dreaming up a new identity—Raphael Jones, undercover detective—who'd come to Aspen to investigate allegations of claims-jumping among the miners and had decided to wed and raise a family instead.

He only hoped Silver would agree to the idea, especially the family part.

"A good woman has that effect on a man, old chap," Rafe quipped, winking at his matchmaking cohort.

Max chuckled, winking back. "Reckon you're right. Cellie badgered me for months to lose a couple pounds so she could get her arms 'round this ol' gut. Giving up Boston cream pie for four weeks liked to have killed me, but I did it. I wouldn't shave off my whiskers even for Cellie, though, son. A man's got to draw the line somewhere."

Rafe couldn't help but laugh. "Oh, quite."

Max beamed, linking his arm through Rafe's. "Say, have you met everyone here yet? This being a private séance, I only invited the bare minimum: Union leaders, our chief investors, Brady, the Trevelyans—oh. And Judge Gates. But he got detained in Leadville, so I reckon we won't see him 'til the wedding."

"The, uh, wedding?" Rafe almost choked to hear there was an officer of the court,
the federal
court yet, coming to Max's wedding. "You know the good judge well enough for him to preside at your nuptials?"

"Shoot, no," Max said, elbowing a path through the buzzing speculators. "Cellie invited him. Said they're long-lost cousins of some sort. But she invited him a week early, which befuddles the bejabbers out of me. I reckon she got her dates mixed up. Anyway, it turns out he likes spooks. Guess it runs in the family, eh?"

Rafe nodded weakly. Of all the rotten luck, he groaned. Why had he fallen in love with a woman whose in-laws would soon number a
federal judge!

Well, there was no helping it, he told himself darkly. He'd never met Gates, and hopefully Gates had never met his wanted posters. Besides, he couldn't very well walk out of Silver's—or Cellie's—life now.

He let Max drag him around the room. Most of the men seemed to be huddled around the elegant hors d'oeuvres buffet, stuffing their mouths until their chins dripped with foie gras, caviar canapés, cucumbers polonaise, and crab puffs—to name a few. Rafe barely had enough time to squint through the tobacco cloud at the ice-sculpted goose and the basket of "golden" deviled eggs dominating the sideboard before Max whisked him into another haze, this one enveloping the potted palms that shrouded the window seat.

"There's a fellow over here I'd like you to meet," Max said exuberantly. "Hails from England, just like you. Got himself in a bit of a pickle a few days back, but he's a good enough sport. Meeting him was the damnedest thing, though. There I was, thinking to surprise Cellie by hiring a New York impresario to recruit acts for her wedding gift, a gift she doesn't even
know
about yet, mind you, when she pipes up out of the blue, 'Max, dear, the spirits tell me what you're looking for isn't in New York but in Aspen.' Then she drags me off to Marshal Hawthorne's jail, and who should be twiddling his thumbs on a bunk but—"

"Frederick Fairgate, Esquire," boomed an all-too-familiar voice. "Thespian, playwright, and impresario."

The palms parted on cue, and Rafe's hackles rose as Fred made his grand entrance. Fred was attired in bootblacked swallow tails to hide their shabby elbows.

"Good evening, Your Grace," Fred said, never missing a beat. He swept a formal bow, one of Max's cigars spewing between his fingers. "Seems like merry old England again, what with the Cornishman and the Irish Catholic itching for a fight, eh?"

He jerked his head toward the Union leaders, who stood glaring at one another from opposite ends of the hors d'oeuvres table. "Why, the Missus and me were talking only yesterday about how you used to pay us poor sots a call when you had a mind to go slumming. It's been too long, Your Grace."

Not long enough.
Rafe clenched his teeth, biting back the uncharitable retort. The most civil response he could muster was a daggerlike glare.

Max, meanwhile, was heartily thumping Fred on the back. In spite of the twelve years he had over his host, Fred's tall, muscular build, honed through boxing and stage carpentry, wasn't showing the same decline that Boston cream pie had wreaked on Max's squat frame. However, Max did have the advantage in hair, since Fred was balder than a cue ball above his drooping mustache and caterpillar eyebrows.