Wanton Angel (32 page)

The stars twinkled in the black sky and Bonnie watched them as she nourished Eli, her hand moving gently at the back of his head. When it was time, she urged him to her other breast, her fingers still entwined in his hair.

She felt her skirts rising and welcomed the plundering of Eli’s fingers as he prepared her for a thorough taking. When he lowered her onto himself, she trembled, and all the stars in the sky melted together into one great, shining silver light.

E
LI CAST A
long look back at the overturned wagon that had served as a shelter, a wry grin lifting one corner of his mouth. “I’m going to miss this place,” he said.

Bonnie, tired and dirty and vastly hungry, tried to free her hand from his. He held on and continued up the steep hill overlooking the place where they had camped, and Bonnie had no choice but to follow him.

She was consumed with guilt. Rose was probably calling for her. Genoa and Katie were no doubt making funeral arrangements at this very moment. Webb was lying on his bed of pain or, worse yet, he had already died of his injuries.

And what had Bonnie been doing while all this was going on? Making a spectacle of herself with a man she’d sworn she would never give in to again, that was what. She felt her face grow hot with self-recrimination as she navigated the rocky incline, trying to keep up with Eli.

Finally they reached the top of the hill, and Bonnie went goggle-eyed at what she saw before her. There was a small farmhouse within a stone’s throw of where they stood, an occupied farmhouse with chickens scratching in the yard and laundry drying on the clothesline.

Bonnie seethed as one realization after another dawned on her. Eli had known about this farmhouse almost from
the first. He’d gotten the chicken they’d eaten for supper the night before and probably the matches for the fire from these people, pretending all the while that he and Bonnie were stranded. “You wretch!” she hissed, in a scathing whisper, as a sturdy-looking middle-aged man hailed them from the barn.

“Mornin’!” shouted the farmer, approaching, and Bonnie saw a slender woman with gray hair come out of the house to stand on the step. “Come on in and have some breakfast!”

The missus didn’t look too thrilled with the idea of having two strangers at her table, but she said nothing.

Bonnie tried to pull her hand from Eli’s and found it stuck fast. She considered kicking him to free herself and decided against it. It wouldn’t do to create a scene in front of the farmer and his wife.

Minutes later they had washed up and seated themselves at the table inside Mr. and Mrs. Ezra Kinder’s modest house. Bonnie was ravenous, and she consumed ham, eggs and fried potatoes accordingly.

Mrs. Kinder, a plain, angular woman with lashless eyes and thin lips, kept one hand on a battered Bible throughout the meal, as if to guard herself from the insidious spread of evil.

“Last I heard, the Northridge depot was under fifteen feet of water,” Ezra Kinder imparted, through a mouthful of food.

Eli didn’t seem the least bit self-conscious, even though his hair was mussed and he was wearing stiff, wrinkled clothes that he’d been swept downriver in. He might have been clad in a fine suit and dining at Delmonico’s, the way he acted. “How far away is Colville? We could probably get some horses there.”

Bonnie felt real despair at the thought of riding some forty miles on horseback. Dear Lord, wasn’t it enough that she’d been washed away in a flood, made to sleep on the ground and seduced in the bargain? Did she have to ride all the way to Northridge on the back of some horse as well?

“Colville ain’t but three miles from here. I’d borrow you a wagon, you understand,” Ezra said, speaking around the biscuit he had just shoved whole into his mouth, “but I
can’t spare the one I’ve got.” He sighed to show a measure of sympathy. “I figure things must be pretty bad up Northridge way.”

“They were worse than bad when we left,” Eli answered.

Bonnie thought his description of their departure rather colorless at best, but she said nothing to embellish it. She was too worried about Rose Marie and Webb, Genoa and Katie, to make a place for herself in the lackluster conversation.

“Water’s been going down steadylike, from what I’ve heard,” Ezra said. “Still, them tracks will need lots of fixin’ and I reckon half the town’s gone.”

“What about the telegraph lines?” Bonnie asked, finished with her breakfast and eager to let Genoa and the others know that she and Eli were alive. Western Union was housed in the Northridge post office, which was on high ground.

Ezra looked at her with such curiosity that she was suspicious. Bonnie’s gaze turned to Eli, who was studiously looking the other way.

“Thought you knew the lines were all right,” the farmer answered. “Mr. McKutchen had me send off a message to his sister yesterday. Got one back right away, too.” Ezra looked questioningly around the tidy kitchen. “Where’s that there telegram we got back, Amanda?”

Forgetting that she’d sworn off violence, Bonnie kicked Eli beneath the table. He flinched but did not look at her, choosing to lift his coffee mug to his mouth instead.

Amanda—a pretty name, Bonnie thought, for such a dour and severe-looking woman—took a folded piece of yellow paper from beneath the cover of her Bible and tossed it toward Eli. He made to ignore the message, so Bonnie snatched it up and read it.

THANK HEAVEN,
it read.
ROSE AND KATIE BOTH SAFE WITH ME. WEBB BEING LOOKED AFTER. HURRY HOME. GENOA.

“It would have relieved my mind to know about this message!” Bonnie said, not caring that the Kinders were staring at her and taking in every word she said. “Eli McKutchen, how could you?”

Amanda opened her Bible and began to read silently, her thin lips moving.

Eli only shrugged, and that made Bonnie so mad that she wanted to slap him right across the face. Since she’d resolved not to do that, however, she had to be content with bounding out of her chair and stomping toward the door, calling an ungracious “Thank you for the food” to the Kinders as she went.

Bonnie expected Eli to follow after her in high dudgeon, but she strode almost a mile in the direction she hoped would bring her to Colville before he fell into step beside her.

“Ezra would have taken us to town in his wagon,” he said, as if he hadn’t taken advantage of her, as if he hadn’t lied about the chicken he’d roasted and about the fire and the farmhouse as well.

Bonnie walked on, her shoes cramping her feet. “Rubbing two sticks together indeed!” she spat.

Eli laughed. “Would you really have preferred to sleep in the Kinders’ barn, Bonnie? They wouldn’t have put us up in the house, you know. Mrs. Kinder knows we aren’t married and she considers us sinners.”

“We are sinners!” Bonnie shouted, walking faster and still refusing to so much as glance in Eli’s direction. “We’ll both burn in hell!”

“I don’t believe in hell,” Eli replied reasonably, “and I don’t think you do, either.”

Bonnie stopped in the middle of the cowpath that served as a road, her arms folded across her bosom, her eyes snapping. She knew that her hair was matted from the dousing in the Columbia River and probably full of leaves and twigs as well. Her face was no doubt as dirty as it felt, and her clothes—a perfectly good skirt and shirtwaist—were ruined. Her best cloak had been lost and her shoes didn’t even bear thinking about. “How do you know what I believe in, Eli McKutchen? You’ve never once in your life bothered to ask!”

His clothes looked terrible. Who would believe their fantastic story when and if they ever found their way into Colville? “All right, Bonnie,” he sighed. “What do you believe?”

Bonnie was furious. Now that he’d finally asked her, she didn’t know, damn it. She whirled and stomped on
toward Colville, her arms swinging at her sides like a soldier’s.

Once again Eli walked beside her. Rows of new corn stood along both sides of the narrow road and the smell of recent rain was pungent. A mud puddle loomed ahead, and Bonnie went right through it, while Eli skirted the small lake and joined her on the far shore.

“You found the Kinders’ farm while I was sleeping yesterday!” she accused, eyes straight ahead. “You knew that farmhouse was there all the time!”

“Yes.”

“I hate you, Eli McKutchen!”

“1 don’t believe you.”

“You don’t believe in hell, either. Everybody believes in hell. What do you know?”

Eli laughed. “I know that you need me as much as I need you.”

“I do not!”

“Your body gives the lie to that every time I touch you, Bonnie.” Eli stopped her then, made her face him. He gave a long sigh. “We have to go back.”

Bonnie felt unaccountable tears stinging behind her eyes and forced them into retreat. “Why?”

“Because Colville is over there,” he answered, gesturing in the opposite direction.

Again Bonnie wanted to kick him. “You might have mentioned that before I walked this far in these damnable shoes!” she yelled.

He frowned. “Do your feet hurt?”

“Yes!”

Eli bent slightly and, grasping Bonnie by the waist, flung her up onto his shoulder. After her initial shock had subsided, she doubled up her fists and hammered at his broad back.

“Put me down!”

Eli sighed and set her on her feet. “I was only trying to help,” he said in a martyrly tone.

It was late morning when they reached Colville, a bustling town situated, like Northridge, on the banks of the Columbia River. The town had been spared the flood but the populace was not without sympathy for their neighbors, for
there were signs everywhere urging people to donate food and money for the benefit of the victims.

Eli approached the railroad depot and climbed the steps to the ticket agent’s window. Bonnie waited some distance away, praying that Ezra Kinder had been wrong, that the train would be traveling to Northridge on schedule so that she wouldn’t have to travel forty miles on a horse or jostling about on the hard seat of a wagon.

Prayers are sometimes answered. When Eli turned away from the window, he was grinning and there were two tickets in his hand.

“Remind me to thank Genoa,” he said. “She wired money for our fare back to Northridge.”

Bonnie’s relief was so great that she forgot her irritation for a moment. “Bless her,” she said. But then she frowned. “Didn’t Mr. Kinder say that the tracks were washed out?”

Eli shrugged. “The trains are running, so the damage couldn’t have been too bad. We have a couple of hours. Do you want to check into that hotel over there and have a bath?”

“Genoa arranged for that, too?”

“My sister is a practical woman. She probably assumes that we’re somewhat the worse for wear, having been washed away in a flood.”

Bonnie tried not to smile, but she couldn’t help it. This would certainly be a story to tell to her grandchildren, though she would leave out the part about making love in the sun, of course. Her smile faded. “Would we have separate rooms?”

Eli took her arm and ushered her toward the hotel, which was grander than the one in Northridge but not so grand as the one they’d stayed in in Spokane. “Feeling virtuous, my dear?”

Bonnie stuck out her chin. “Yes.”

“Fine.” They were passing a sizable mercantile, and Eli stopped abruptly on the board sidewalk. “Let’s get ourselves a change of clothes.”

“Without money?” Bonnie asked, longing to be clean from the skin out. It would be terrible to take a nice, hot bath and then have to put those same bedraggled garments back on.

Eli grinned. “The McKutchen name is magical,” he said and, of course, he was right. The proprietor was only too happy to grant him a line of credit.

While he was selecting new trousers, a cambric shirt, stockings and boots, Bonnie outfitted herself with a simple calico dress, drawers and a camisole, shoes and stockings. She also purchased a brush and hairpins, along with a toothbrush and polish.

At the hotel, she was given a room of her own, and it came equipped with a bathtub, a sink and a commode.

Bonnie ran a hot bath for herself and sank into it, sighing contentedly as the warm water soothed her aching muscles and soaked away the worst of the grime from her adventure in and beside the river.

The tender flesh on the inside of her arms stung when the water touched it and, for the first time, Bonnie examined herself for injuries. There was a large bruise on her right hip bone and her forearms were scratched from grasping and clinging to that log. Gingerly, Bonnie lowered them into the water.

She almost fell asleep in that tub, it was so comfortable, but at the last minute she roused herself and lathered her hair with the new cake of soap provided by the hotel. Again and again she washed and rinsed, washed and rinsed, and finally she felt clean.

Bonnie got out of the tub reluctantly, drying her body and her hair with towels, and put on her new drawers and camisole. Suddenly exhausted, she collapsed crosswise on the bed and sank into an immediate, fathomless sleep.

A gentle hand on her shoulder awakened her. “It’s time to board the train, Bonnie,” a familiar voice said.

Bonnie sat up, blinking. Eli was standing over her in his fresh clothes, a gentle look in his eyes.

Remembering what usually happened when she found herself alone with this man, Bonnie snatched up her new calico dress and shimmied into it, permitting Eli to touch her only to do up the buttons at the back of her gown. What had possessed her to buy a dress that buttoned up the back?

“Hurry,” Eli said when he’d finished. “We only have about fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes!” Bonnie gasped, brushing her tangled hair furiously. “I’ll never be ready—”

Eli’s reflection smiled at her from the mirror over the bureau as she hastily did up her hair. “I wouldn’t mind if we missed the train,” he said.

“Well, I would!” Bonnie cried. “Rose must be scared to death and Webb—”

The name fell between them like a boulder. Eli sighed. “Yes,” he said. “There’s always Webb.”

Bonnie’s hands shook as she pinned her hair into place. “He’s a fine man, Eli.”