Walking on Air (21 page)

Laney planted a good-night kiss on Nan’s cheek. Then she glanced hesitantly at Gabriel before suddenly circling Nan’s chair to throw her thin arms around his neck. “I love you, too, Gabe. I really do.”

Nan saw Gabriel squeeze his eyes closed as he hugged the girl against him. “I know you do, honey. But thanks for telling me so.”

A few minutes later, when Gabriel joined Nan in bed, she rolled onto her side to face him. In the darkness, he was limned by soft moonlight coming through the window. Nan’s throat felt tight. He truly did love her little sister in an avuncular way, deeply enough to lay down his life to protect her. Nan had seen the truth of that in his eyes when he’d said the words.

It was a wonderful thing to know that Laney now had a strong male protector. Nan wouldn’t have changed that for the world. All the same, she felt sad. She wasn’t certain why, but there was no denying the ache at the base of her throat. Perhaps, she decided, it was merely that she felt set aside. Laney had never loved anyone else but Nan.

Yes, that was it. Nan clung to the explanation like a drowning woman might a log. But even as she did, a little voice in the back of her mind taunted her.
You want him to say those words to you! That’s the truth of it. It’s not sadness that you feel; you’re green with jealousy. And of your own little sister, no less. What kind of person are you?

Nan flipped onto her back to glare at a ceiling she couldn’t even see. She felt Gabriel stir beside her. “You okay over there?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Nan said, almost too quickly. She’d never been a good liar. Thank goodness he couldn’t see her nose.

The truthful answer would have been that she wasn’t okay and wasn’t sure she’d ever be truly okay again. She’d gone and let herself make one of the stupidest mistakes of her life: She was falling head over heels in love with Gabriel Valance.

E
ver aware that his days were numbered and his fate might be less than pleasant if he didn’t accomplish all the tasks assigned to him, Gabe had, from the start, been keeping a mental checklist. He’d been told to hire a Pinkerton agent.
Done.
He’d been told to make Nan the sole beneficiary of his will.
Done.
He’d been told to make her trust him.
Almost there.
By never touching her intimately in bed without an invitation—which, damn it to hell, he hadn’t yet received—he’d succeeded in convincing her that she needn’t anticipate a physical attack every time the lamp went out. His second great move had been forcing her to be present while he had Hamm draw up his will. Immediately afterward, Gabe had regretted doing that, but in retrospect, he knew that visit to the attorney’s office had erased all fear in Nan’s mind that Gabe was after her money. Also, by signing documents that protected her assets and then transferring ten thousand dollars into her bank account, he’d given her financial independence
and
the ability to flee if she chose. Those three actions had gone a long way toward convincing Nan that not all men wanted or needed to be in complete control of a woman. Though Gabe couldn’t yet say Nan trusted him completely, he believed she was coming close.

Two things remained on his to-do list: making Nan fall in love with him and then seducing her. Even in the shack, when Gabe had first heard those conditions, he’d had some serious reservations. What kind of man deliberately wooed a woman, tricked her into loving him, and made use of her body when he knew from the start that he couldn’t stay with her? And how was it right to
pretend
he loved a woman with the sole aim of getting between her legs? The angels had strongly disapproved of Gabe’s former practice of paying women to satisfy his male urges, but to Gabe’s way of thinking, that had been an honest exchange, money in return for service. And he’d always been generous, leaving more than was asked. It had been his way of paying tribute to his mother.

Not that he wasn’t coming to care for Nan. The more relaxed she became around him, the more she tugged on his heartstrings. The fact that she didn’t know she was doing it made it all the more poignant. There was no artifice about her. She was real. If he’d known he could spend a lifetime with her—loving her, protecting her, and providing for her—he would have gladly let go and moved beyond mere affection to a deep and abiding devotion. What man in his right mind wouldn’t? But the remainder of Gabe’s life was numbered in days, not years.

The big question that troubled him was, just how far was he willing to go in order to save his own ass? He’d done plenty in his life that didn’t make him proud, but deliberately setting somebody else up for a world of hurt wasn’t one of them. He yearned to tell Nan that her knitting needle hadn’t killed Barclay, to hell with waiting for the damned Pinkerton report. But if he did that, he would lose the only leverage he had to make her remain in the marriage. He liked to think that she’d come to care enough for him that she wouldn’t kick him out, but what if she hadn’t? The moment he told her she had no murder charge hanging over her head, she might get an annulment and send him packing. He couldn’t take that chance.

Where were the boundaries? Or were there any? Gabe found himself wavering back and forth on that question. So for a few days, he cogitated on it. One minute, he told himself that making love to Nan would be for her own good. Enjoying sex—and Gabe was pretty damned sure he could make her enjoy it—would show her that the physical intimacies between a man and a woman could be not only beautiful but also fabulously pleasurable. Where was the harm in that? After he died again and she got over feeling sad, she’d see men in a whole new light and would no longer cringe at the thought of marriage. That would be good not only for Nan but also for Laney. Gabe sure didn’t want that cute little girl to reach womanhood with a deeply ingrained disgust for the opposite sex.

Oh, how easy it was for Gabe to justify his reasoning and embrace the thought of seducing Nan. She was beautiful. At night, lying beside her in bed, he sometimes wanted her so badly that he ached. He knew she was ready for some gentle persuasion, and physically, he was
more
than ready. And, he assured himself, it would be for a good cause.

Only, would it really be in Nan’s best interest? Just when Gabe got himself convinced that the answer was an unequivocal yes, a bothersome little voice whispered inside his head that pushing Nan to be physically intimate was
wrong
. In all his life, Gabe had never worried much about being a gentleman. All those highfalutin manners and social mores were for other fellows, not him. So it was unsettling to discover that he had countless scruples that were now suddenly rearing their ugly heads to torment him with indecision. Right now, it was also a damn nuisance. His conscience may have been late in making an appearance, but it sure was making up for lost time.

He began to feel that his brain was a seesaw, up with positive thoughts one second, and down with negative ones the next. In the end, Gabe decided to concede to his scruples, the bothersome little buggers.
Let it be Nan’s choice
,
he decided. If she made a romantic overture, he’d make love to her so fast that her head would swim. But if she didn’t—well, he’d have to live with the consequences, he guessed. When he tried to imagine eternity, he felt overwhelmed—and, okay, a little afraid. A
lot
afraid, if he was honest with himself. But waiting Nan out was the only decision he could live with.

So instead of trying to woo Nan, Gabe found himself fashioning sturdy rails for the dangerously steep staircase that led upstairs, rebuilding some of her downstairs shelving, which had gone a little rickety with age, and then fixing her shop flooring, the planks of which had worked loose in spots to create trip hazards. On Christmas morning, when he had to take that inevitable predawn walk from the saloon toward her shop, he would take his last breaths knowing that he’d made some improvements, and maybe, if the angels didn’t wipe Nan’s memory clean because he’d failed in his mission, she would think of him with a smile after he was gone.

In the meanwhile, Gabe could congratulate himself on accomplishing a few things that the angels hadn’t specified. He had Nan laughing now. Granted, she was still the most prissy-mannered woman he’d ever run across, but she was developing a sense of humor about that and was even starting to alter her thinking about some things. Laney was now allowed to be in the upstairs living area in her long flannel nightgown, sans wrapper. The girl was covered from head to toe, after all, and Nan had finally accepted that unless Laney needed extra layers to keep warm, it was silly to make her wear them. Nan had also stopped sitting rigidly straight during meals, and sometimes she even let go enough to rest an elbow on the table while she ate. Her appetite had improved by leaps and bounds, and Gabe was more than pleased to note that she no longer avoided sleep by working long into the night. The dreams that had interrupted her rest for so many years seemed to have stopped. She’d also become a participant in the evening games, and slowly but surely, her poker-playing skills had improved. Gabe was pleased when she learned to read his expressions well enough to know when he truly held a winning hand and when he was bluffing. As silly as it sounded spoken aloud, life was one big poker game, at least in Gabe’s estimation, and a woman who knew when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em wasn’t as likely to be bamboozled by shysters.

Gabe even started accompanying his ladies to church on Sunday morning. It made him uneasy, having to hang his guns on a wall hook at the front door, but he did it, not because he was filled with a sudden rush of good feelings or even liked being inside the church, but because his presence there seemed to make Nan and Laney happy.

Gabe tried to find religion in that place; he truly did. Hell, he knew better than anyone that something more waited on the other side of this life. So why was it so difficult to sing the songs and rejoice in the Lord? Gabe worried on it and decided in the end that though he believed in the basic principles of Christianity and that Christ had died for everyone’s sins, he didn’t agree with the way these people were working their way toward salvation. Believing wasn’t some exclusive club, dammit, shutting out others who didn’t think exactly the same way. There were people out there who’d never stepped foot inside a building crowned by a steeple and cross, and though they had faith in other things, or possibly a divinity of another name, that didn’t mean they’d be banned from heaven.

What, exactly,
was
heaven, anyway? The way Gabe saw it, heaven existed mainly in people’s hearts, not really as a place with streets paved in gold, but a peaceful state of being in the presence of divine goodness, attained by believing in something and living your life on earth by those tenets. Was a Cheyenne Indian less likely to find that because he worshiped Mother Earth, the four directions, the sun, and the moon? The people in this building seemed convinced that
they
had it right, and everyone else had it wrong.

Gabe didn’t buy that. He’d run into a lot of Indians out on the trail who’d shared their food with him because he had none and had left him with his scalp because he meant them no harm. They had been good men, and back in their villages, they’d had wives and children whom they loved just as much as any white man did his.

Judging by what Gabe had thus far heard, Jesus had been all about love, and that had been at the core of every word he said.
Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.
Well, Gabe knew for a fact that none of these men and women in their Sunday best was living by that edict. Not a single one of them had helped that boy under the staircase, and though most of them ate fairly often at Lizzy’s, not a scrap of the food left on their plates had ever found its way to that poor dog in the lean-to.

Jesus would have given his whole supper to the boy, and then he would have pitched a holy fit inside the café, berating everyone there for ignoring the plight of a helpless critter outside.

That was it for Gabe in a nutshell: He couldn’t believe that it was the holy songs people sang or the devout prayers they could recite by memory that earned them a ticket to their idea of heaven. It was one’s actions toward others, human or animal, that saved one’s soul.
I’m here every week
, these people seemed to be saying.
I’m holier than others who don’t come.
Yet some of the men snored through the preacher’s long sermons, and a lot of the women seemed more concerned with how they looked than with why they were there.

All his life, Gabe had felt set apart from religious people, never quite understanding what they found so special about the inside of a building, and more than once as a kid, he’d envied other children who regularly attended church with their parents. Now he no longer felt left out or even slightly jealous. If he wanted to feel close to his Creator, he’d go outside, away from all this sanctimony, and appreciate creation—the power of a high wind, the miraculous formation of an icicle, the incredible blue of a summer sky, or the beauty of a dog that never lost faith and continued to wait for a handout that none of these people was ever likely to offer him.

Nan seemed to sense that Gabe didn’t like going to church, but when she asked him about it, he skirted the question. It wasn’t right to make light of another person’s beliefs or to criticize the rituals she held dear. Nan was sincere in her worship. She hung on every word the preacher uttered and said every prayer with reverence. Her face fairly glowed as she sang the hymns. For Nan, going to church meant everything, and Gabe respected that. It truly was
Nan’s
way, and Gabe had no doubt that God looked into her heart and saw that.

It just wasn’t for Gabe.

He did like the Lord’s Prayer, which he’d never before heard in its entirety. He sorely wished he could memorize the words without studying on them, because, in his opinion, Jesus had laid out a set of rules in that prayer for every decent human being to follow, regardless of what name they gave their god.

When Gabe had completed all the needed repairs in the shop, he tried to make himself scarce during the day so Nan could do business. Most of the ladies had overcome their fear of him after seeing him in the shop a few times, but it didn’t escape him that there were some purchasing needs that they would never mention to Nan when a man was present. Mrs. Tandy, a stout matron with black hair, entered the shop one afternoon, glanced from the corset case to Gabe, and then turned as red as a ripe tomato. She left without buying anything. Mrs. Hamm, who walked a lot like her chickens, bobbing her head with every step, whispered behind a cupped hand of her more personal needs and then went into the work area, where Nan could show her merchandise behind the curtain. Patience Cole, a hunched and frail widow woman with bad hearing, stopped in every day to browse and visit, and announced each time she left that men had no business in a ladies’ apparel shop. Each day, a number of ladies came into the shop, but few of them bought anything. Gabe couldn’t help but wonder if he was causing a drop in sales.

Staying upstairs too long made Gabe feel caged. Of a morning, he’d go across the street to get a newspaper or periodical, which entertained him for a couple of hours while he finished off the morning pot of coffee. Then he cleaned the apartment, a task he considered to be obligatory, since he lived in the place and helped create the messes.

By noon, though, he ran out of things to do. He spent the lunch hour with Nan, sharing a meal with her that he usually prepared, mostly sandwiches, since he wasn’t an accomplished cook, and then helping her in the shop with little chores she couldn’t do while waiting on customers.

When one o’clock rolled around, Gabe developed the habit of hitting the boardwalks to get some fresh air and exercise. He always went to the livery first to visit Brownie. Giving the horse a good rubdown and some treats took only a few minutes, but Gabe stretched his time there into an hour by exercising the gelding in the corral out back. Once he’d left the stable, Gabe walked the streets of Random. He strolled up one and down another; then he retraced his steps, not caring if anyone noticed that he passed the same buildings again and again. If they thought he was casing a joint, so be it.