Walking on Air (8 page)

Time to back off
, he silently conveyed to Gabriel.
From this point forward, you have to leave me alone and let me handle this my way.

The angel laughed softly, causing a waft of air to tickle Gabe’s ear.
The instant I leave you to your own devices, you’ll be calling upon me for advice.

Gabe couldn’t deny the possibility. He’d only ever dealt with eager, willing females, and he knew he was totally out of his depth with Nan. Even so, the angel needed to scat.
I can’t say I deserve my privacy
,
Gabe replied in his mind,
but Nan has never deliberately harmed anyone, and she does deserve hers. What happens between us from this moment forward needs to be between her and me and nobody else, not even an angel. You can’t hover invisibly in the air, watching us and listening to every word we say. It wouldn’t be right or fair to her.

Gabe heard the angel sigh.
All right, my friend, I’ll leave you to proceed without my inestimable wisdom to help you along. Before I leave, however, I’d like to give you a few last words of advice. When you have no idea what to do or say next, take a moment to listen to your heart.

Gabe wasn’t sure his heart did much talking.

“Would you like to see my shop and the upstairs?”

Nan’s question jerked him back to the moment. Her nervousness and the anxiety in her expression told him she’d issued the invitation with great reluctance. “I’d love to see everything.”

She gave him a quick tour of the downstairs. He found her curtained-off workroom far more interesting than the storage closet and display areas, because it reflected more of her character. The right and left walls sported shelves and cubbyholes that held yardage, trims, and other sewing sundries, all tidily arranged. A new-looking Singer sewing machine held court at the back of the room, its gleaming walnut stand draped with what appeared to be a woman’s dress in progress. A roomy square table took center stage. Scissors, a neatly wound measuring tape, a sketch tablet, and a wine-red pincushion adorned its smooth surface.

She rested her slender fingers on the black scissor handles, making Gabe wonder if she planned to stab him. With a quick search of her expression, he chased away the thought. Nan didn’t have it in her to deliberately harm anyone, not even a man who had forced her into matrimony.

“This is where I work,” she said shakily. “I also consult with my customers in here.”

“That is a beautiful sewing machine. It must have cost a small fortune.”

Pink slashed her pale cheeks. “A necessary purchase. I’ve doubled my sales since buying it.”

She brushed by him to exit the room and turned toward the door that led to the upstairs living area. Gabe stopped her short. “Shouldn’t we lock up? Even with the closed sign showing, curiosity seekers are liable to walk right in.”

Nan glanced down at the key he still held in one hand. “Laney will be home soon, and her only way in is through the shop.” She held out a slender hand for the key. After taking it from Gabe, exercising care as she did to avoid a touch of their fingertips, she slipped the instrument into her skirt pocket. “As for the gossipmongers, as sharp as their tongues can be, most of them are honest to a fault. I doubt any of my customers would steal.”

Gabe didn’t share her faith in the goodness of most people, but then, when he thought about it, he decided that his opinion of others might be more than a little biased. He’d spent much of his life seeing the dark side of human nature, and as a kid, he’d suffered cruelties that not even Nan, emotionally injured by her father though she had been, could probably imagine. Maybe his perspective had come to him through a narrow lens, focused on the gutter scum, while Nan had seen the world through a multifaceted prism, allowing her to glimpse more brightness and hope.

Remaining two steps behind her, Gabe followed her up a steep, narrow staircase, the kind he called a neck breaker. One misstep could cause a person to take a very nasty fall, and if that occurred on one of the top risers, a somersault to death could easily result.

“You need some nice, sturdy handrails,” he observed.

“I know,” she admitted as she paused to push open the door to the apartment. “Hiring a carpenter is expensive, though. I recently enlarged the shop and our quarters after buying the place next door. The renovations, simple though they were, cost me dearly. I also paid a lot extra to put in a kitchen water pump and some drainpipes. Handrails in this stairwell must wait until next year.”

Gabe made a mental note to visit the lumberyard and the hardware section at the general store. He didn’t want Nan or Laney to take a tumble.

After passing through the doorway to enter the room beyond, Nan stood in its center with her hands clasped at her waist, the fingers of her right hand twisting the wedding band around and around as if the circle of gold seared her flesh. She waited for him to join her. He noticed that her pointy little knuckles were white, a telltale sign that she still expected him to jump her at any second. Recalling the scenes of her life that he’d been shown by the angels, most particularly the obscenely fat Horace Barclay’s sexual assault upon her person, he felt a little sick to his stomach. Nobody who’d seen all that could blame this woman for fearing men.

Most nauseating of all to Gabe was the inescapable fact that Martin Sullivan had been in his upstairs study during the attack upon his daughter, well aware of what was occurring down in the sitting room, because he and Barclay had discussed the situation and agreed it needed to happen. Nan’s premature deflowering would have ensured that she offered no last-minute objections on the day of the fast-approaching nuptials. Grinning like a cat lapping cream, Sullivan had reclined on a velvet chair in front of the fire, enjoying an expensive cigar while wreathing his head with aromatic smoke. So far as he was concerned, nothing could be allowed to prevent the wedding. Nan’s feelings about it were inconsequential. The union of the Sullivan and Barclay families would create a formidable financial alliance that would greatly benefit both men. Nan would settle down quickly enough once Barclay got her pregnant. She’d forget about her silly, girlish revulsion at marrying a much older man and focus on raising a family, just as countless other women of her station had done for centuries. Martin wasn’t about to let his daughter’s foolish notions about becoming a spinster get in the way. What a bunch of poppycock. Females had been created for one reason, and one reason only: to provide men with progeny.

Fortunately, at least to Gabe’s way of thinking, Sullivan hadn’t counted on Nan’s knitting needle coming into play, and he’d seriously underestimated his elder daughter’s intelligence, courage, and ingenuity. While Martin Sullivan had sipped fine brandy and lit a second cigar, Nan, in shock and quivering with terror, had been emptying his study safe, stuffing possessions into pillowcases, and spiriting her little sister from the huge house through the servants’ quarters.

Gabe wasn’t sure how Nan had found her way to Random. The angels hadn’t shown him that part of her life. He had glimpsed scenes of her early years here in a much smaller shop, and had seen the meager existence she’d led in order to get her ledgers in the black. He also knew that she’d done without many necessities in order to give Laney everything she’d felt a little girl should have.

In short, though Gabe knew he had only a short time to enjoy it, he was proud to be Nan’s husband. She was, in his estimation, one hell of a lady. A little too prim for his taste, perhaps, and she definitely needed to learn how to laugh. But over the next month, he’d work on that.

•   •   •

During the renovations, Nan had enlarged the kitchen, turning the previously tiny nook into a spacious room reminiscent of the few farmhouse kitchens around Random that she’d seen. There was a wide window above the new sink, which was actually plumbed, and the counter space was ample, providing plenty of room for rolling out dough and cooling baked goods. She’d even gotten a long table, large enough to seat six, because it felt homier, as if a real family lived here.

Gabriel Valance made the area seem smallish and cramped. Nan wasn’t sure how that could be. Though he was a tall and well-muscled man, he wasn’t
that
big. Yet he seemed to dominate the room, towering over her and robbing her lungs of breath.

“This is nice,” he said, drawing his gaze from the frilly lace curtains above the sink to scan the adornments she’d hung on the yellow walls and set on the waxed wood counters. He smiled slightly. “Your decorating talent extends to more than just hats, I see.”

Nan felt an odd warmth spread up her spine. She loved what she’d done with the kitchen, and of course Laney had given it high marks, but no one else, except the workmen, had seen the finished product. Having a stranger praise the room’s appearance felt . . . nice.

She nearly smiled, but squelched the urge. Gabriel Valance wasn’t just any stranger. He was her husband, and he might give her compliments merely to butter her up. Everything she’d heard about this man and from him made it clear that he took what he wanted. And she wasn’t at all sure she believed his avowals that he had no intention of consummating the marriage unless she was willing. “Flattery will get you nowhere, Mr. Valance.”

He chuckled. The deep timbre of his laughter was a pleasant sound, but Nan knew from hard experience that the kindliest, most pleasant of men could turn into heartless monsters in the blink of an eye. She’d seen her father charm his houseguests, then whisper a scathing remark to her mother that had shattered what little self-esteem Helena Sullivan still possessed. By the time Nan was thirteen, her mother had been slowly killing herself for years by trying, over and over again, to give her husband a son. Between miscarriages, Helena would barely give her body time to heal before she tried to get pregnant again, and her successes at that had always ended with hemorrhaging, loss of the baby, and Martin raging at her for failing yet again.

Nan’s memories of her mother’s last miscarriage, which had occurred right before Helena became pregnant with Laney, would haunt her for the rest of her life. Nan had just finished with her lessons for the day and had run upstairs to dress for their formal dinner, a daily ritual her father insisted on each evening, as befitted a man of his social status.

Nan had rounded a corner in the long hallway to find her mother lying on the marble floor in a spreading pool of blood just outside the master suite. Martin Sullivan had stood over his wife, white-faced with anger, his hands knotted into fists.

“You stupid, skinny little cow!” he’d yelled. “The midwife says it was a boy. A
son
, Helena,
finally
a son. I swear to God, you can do
nothing
right.”

“I stayed in bed just as the doctor advised,” Helena cried, her voice weak from blood loss and exhaustion. “It wasn’t my fault, Martin. It just happened.”

“That’s your song, and you sing it so well!” Martin toed his wife’s hip, not putting enough force behind the kick to actually do her physical harm, but jostling her body nevertheless. “Get out of my sight, you useless bitch.”

Nan could still remember how she’d stared down in horror at the spreading pool of her mother’s blood. Yet Helena had struggled to gain her feet, sobbing and begging for her husband’s forgiveness even as she slipped and fell again. Nine months later, Helena had gone into early labor and died giving birth to Laney, another female for Martin Sullivan to despise.

Jerking her thoughts back to the present, Nan gave Gabriel Valance a long, deliberate study. His eyes twinkled in the afternoon light that shone through the window. Try though she might, she could find no glint of cruelty in their dark depths. Even so, she knew only a ruthless man could kill as many times as he had and still feel lighthearted enough to laugh.

With a deliberately cool edge to her voice, Nan said, “I did the kitchen to please myself. Your opinion really doesn’t matter to me.”

He shrugged, still smiling. “Fair enough.” Glancing toward the archway, he asked, “And where does that lead?”

“The sitting room.” Nan moved toward the opening, determined to give him a tour and be done with it. “Expanding into the shop next door provided us with a lot more space upstairs as well. This used to be a tiny sitting area and bedroom, which Laney and I shared, and that was the entirety of our quarters. During the remodel, I focused mainly on our living area, so down that short hallway we now have two bedrooms, a water closet, and another room where I work at night. Laney often has nightmares, so I don’t go back downstairs to my shop after she’s asleep.”

She saw him give the horsehair settee a measuring glance and followed his gaze. He was far too tall to stretch out on it, she realized, and knew he was thinking the same thing.

“What does she have nightmares about?”

Worrying about the coming night’s sleeping arrangements, Nan took a moment to assimilate the question. “Why do you ask?”

“Just curious. With you to mother her and a home as fine as this, I’d think she would be a happy, carefree girl.” He stepped over to the fireplace, glanced at the burgundy parlor chairs at each hearth corner, and then flicked a look at the empty leather sling that she used to bring up wood from the backyard pile each evening. Fingering the gray mortar between two red bricks, he asked, “Does this put out enough heat to keep you cozy on a cold winter night?”

“I keep the fire going in the cookstove most evenings as well. We stay warm enough.”

“It must be an ongoing chore to carry enough loads of wood up that staircase to keep two fires going.”

“Laney helps. Between the two of us, we manage fine.”

He turned from examining the brick to face her again. Her nervous gaze became fixed on the breadth of his shoulders. A suffocating sensation filled her throat. “In other words,” he said with a touch of amusement, “you have absolutely no need of a man in the house.”

Nan supposed she had been a trifle transparent in their exchanges thus far, but if her honesty made him feel unwelcome, that was his burden to bear. She had not entered into this marriage willingly, and she would not pretend she had.