Wanton Angel (7 page)

Bonnie stood on the far side of a worktable, trembling with cold and fear and fury, trying to think. If she could just reach the newspaper office and Webb Hutcheson, she would be assured of safety.

“If Forbes or—or anyone else comes in here,” Bonnie whispered, through chattering teeth, “you haven’t seen me. Do you understand that? You haven’t seen me!”

With that, spurred by a clatter in the fancy dining room beyond, Bonnie dashed out the rear door and cautiously rounded the building. Menelda and her battalion of do-gooders were gone; there was only the usual late afternoon traffic in the streets.

Huddled near a corner of the Brass Eagle Saloon, Bonnie drew a deep breath and scurried down the street toward the humble offices of the
Northridge News.

“I hope you know,” Seth Callahan blustered coldly, “that you have made a complete fool of yourself.”

“I’ll drink to that,” chimed Genoa, lifting her wineglass in the air and her wry eyes to Eli’s face.

Eli looked around the once-familiar parlor, feeling crowded by the army of Dresden figurines, the false mantels, the portieres and plants, the displays of wax fruit and the tasseled curtains. He suppressed an awesome urge to spread his arms in an attempt to clear some space and give himself room to breathe. “Why didn’t you tell me that Bonnie was—dancing—at the Brass Eagle?”

Obviously delighted by the whole situation, Genoa took a leisurely sip of her wine and savored it properly before answering. “You didn’t ask.”

Eli’s hand tightened around a snifter of brandy, all but crushing the delicate crystal to shards. “As my sister, it was your duty—”

Genoa shot out of her Morris chair, her pale blue eyes flashing, her narrow face red with incensed conviction. “Don’t you dare to talk to me about duty, Eli McKutchen. You suffered a tragedy when you lost Kiley, but your actions after the fact were hardly admirable, were they? You shut Bonnie away when you might have given her comfort, as was your
duty,
and then you went off to a silly war, where you had no business being! And if that wasn’t enough, you proceeded to carouse through Europe, like the prodigal son, completely ignoring your responsibilities not only to Bonnie, but to our grandfather’s company!”

“Here, here,” muttered Seth, hefting his glass, apparently emboldened by its contents. His eyes glittered with admiration as he watched Genoa.

Eli was taken aback—much of what Genoa said was true, though he wasn’t willing to admit that yet—and by the time he’d thought of a response, the petulant wail of a child filled the cluttered parlor.

The prettiest nanny Eli had ever seen stood in the tasseled and beaded doorway, a squalling toddler riding on one hip,
addressing Genoa: “Pardon, Miss McKutchen, but little Rose Marie is some fretful and I wondered if she shouldn’t start her nap early, even though the schedule says—”

Eli stared at the child, setting his glass down among a half dozen china shepherdesses, and she stared back with eyes exactly the same color as his own, falling silent in mid-wail. Her hair, like his, like Genoa’s, was wheat-brown with a mingling of gold, and her identity fell on his spirit with the weight of a house. “My God—Bonnie’s child?”

Out of the corner of one eye, Eli saw his sister nod. “Yes.”

“I’d forgotten—” His voice fell away. It was a lie; he’d never forgotten, not for a moment. He’d been torn apart by the knowledge that Bonnie had borne another man’s child, and he’d never dared hope—

“A startling resemblance,” observed Seth. “Uncanny, isn’t it, Miss McKutchen?”

“Absolutely striking,” agreed Genoa, in tones of saucy gentleness, before speaking crisply to the nanny. “You may give Rose Marie her nap now, Katie, but let’s not let Mrs. McKutchen find out. You know how she is about the schedule.”

Katie, a lovely, dark-haired imp with a look of dignity about her that ran completely counter to her station in life, nodded and smiled, then turned to go.

Both Eli and the child protested at the same moment, the child with a cry, Eli with a quick “Wait—”

Genoa touched his arm. “Later, Eli,” she said softly. “There will be plenty of time for you and Rose to get to know each other.”

Reeling with a curious mixture of wrath and pure delight, Eli relented and sank into an overstuffed chair, reaching blindly for his brandy snifter. Seth had to find it and put it in his hand, and, after a good look at his employer’s face, he refilled it in the bargain.

Webb was away from the newspaper office, as luck would have it, and Bonnie couldn’t wait for him. She finally waylaid a goggle-eyed messenger boy passing on the street and sent him to the Brass Eagle, with a hastily scrawled note for Forbes.

Instead of sending a reply, Forbes came in person, his
brazen brown eyes humorously sympathetic as they took in Bonnie’s ruined clothes, smudged face and tangled hair. “Oh, Angel, you’ve got us all into a mess this time, haven’t you?”

Bonnie swallowed, cold and miserable and deeply shamed. Forbes’s opinion didn’t matter but, if she were to be honest with herself, she had to admit that Eli’s did. “I suppose I’m fired,” she said.

Forbes paused long enough to draw a cheroot from the inside pocket of his coat and, leaning against the jamb of Webb’s open door, he struck a wooden match against the sole of his boot. “Eli McKutchen is the one man I can’t afford to tangle with,” he said, with uncommon forthrightness. “On the other hand, nobody draws business into the Brass Eagle the way you do. And you’re not legally his wife, are you?”

Bonnie had divorced Eli rather impulsively, angry because he’d gone off to war and because her father’s store had fallen into such ruin. She shook off the regret that possessed her whenever she thought of her action and, lifting her smudged and rouge-stained chin, announced, “Eli McKutchen has no legal hold over me, Forbes. None whatsoever.”

“He has a few over me, Angel,” Forbes reflected, his eyes in the far distance now. “He has a few over me.”

“He isn’t going to approve of your management of the smelter,” Bonnie agreed. “It seems to me that since we’re both in trouble, we might as well stand our ground.”

Forbes chuckled. He was a rounder and every other sort of scoundrel, but Bonnie had to admire his spirit. “So you admit that you’re in trouble, too, do you?”

Bonnie lowered her head for a moment, and then nodded. She thought of her daughter and her store and her position as mayor, joke that it was, and felt a new determination surge through her. “I’m not going to let Eli bully me, Forbes. I have reasons to fight and, by God, fight I will!”

As if in wonder, Forbes shook his head. “Are you forgetting how powerful Eli is, Bonnie? We’re not dealing with a spurned pot-tender or a lumberjack, you know—your ex-husband is a man the likes of Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Astor.”

“I’ve met them all,” Bonnie sniffed and in that moment, if she was forgetting anything, it was the ridiculous state of her appearance, “and they’re only men.”

Forbes’s perfect teeth were bared in an insufferable grin. “Well, Angel, if you’re game, so am I. We’ll beard the lion and all that.”

Despite everything, Bonnie laughed. With the demeanor of a queen, she swept past Forbes and started walking down the street toward the Brass Eagle Saloon and Ballroom. “Why didn’t you tell me you had a bathtub like that?” she demanded. “My word, it’s so luxurious as to be sinful, Forbes Durrant!”

Forbes looked unaccountably happy as he strode along beside her. “That’s the way I like my sin, Bonnie-my-sweet. Luxurious.”

A shiver crept up Bonnie’s spine, a shiver that had no connection whatsoever to her wet clothing. It was all very well to whistle in the dark, but the truth was just as Forbes had pointed out—Eli
was
one of the most powerful men in America. If his temper didn’t cool and his natural good nature failed to come to the fore, he might well crush not only Forbes, but Bonnie herself.

Dottie Thurston assessed Bonnie’s fresh dress and neat, if somewhat dewy, coiffure with slightly envious eyes. “Forbes never lets nobody else use his bathtub,” she complained in an undertone, as the ballroom began to fill with token-bearing miners, smelter workers and sheep farmers. Soon the orchestra would play, the dancing would begin, and Bonnie found herself dreading the evening as never before.

“It was something of an emergency, you know,” Bonnie whispered back, her eyes anxiously scanning the rough crowd of men awaiting the first strains of music and the feminine contact the dancing would allow them.

“Don’t know why you’d want to leave a man like that anyhow,” Dottie fussed, her hands on her round hips now, her eyes, like Bonnie’s, moving over the night’s crop of dancing partners. “Eli McKutchen’s good-lookin’ enough to stop a girl’s heart, and he’s got all that money, besides.”

Blessedly the music began before Bonnie had to give a reply. She danced first with Till Reemer, who worked as a
foreman at the smelter, and then with Jim Sneeder, Menelda’s husband. Jim had a habit of wrenching his partner a little too close during a waltz—and all the dances were waltzes—so Bonnie kept her arms stiff to hold him at his distance.

“Heard Menelda got a little out of hand today,” he commented, trying all the while to draw his dancing partner nearer.

“Yes,” answered Bonnie, remembering the upraised hatchet and the hatred—perhaps not entirely unjustified—flashing in Menelda’s eyes. “We did have words.”

“I keep tellin’ that woman to stay home and mind her knittin’, but she don’t listen.”

“Indeed,” Bonnie agreed, absentmindedly, her eyes sweeping the room over Jim Sneeder’s shoulder.

At last the music stopped and Bonnie turned gratefully away, only to come face to shirtfront with Eli McKutchen. Her gaze slipped from the tasteful diamond stud on his tie to his squared, almost imperceptibly cleft chin, to his golden eyes.

Taking one of her hands firmly in his own, he turned it palm up, then dropped so many tokens into the hollow that the small brass chips overflowed, falling to the floor in a tinkling cascade.

Bonnie looked up into Eli’s impassive face and was possessed of the unnerving realization that she was in even more trouble than she had admitted to Forbes earlier, on the way back from the newspaper office. She was still in love, and with a man who could easily destroy her.

The music began to play and Bonnie, heedless of the tokens scattered over the ballroom floor, allowed herself to be taken into Eli’s arms. As they danced, she watched his face for any expression that might indicate his mood, but his features were unreadable, neither stony nor tender.

For the rest of the evening, Bonnie’s every dance was Eli’s, and no one dared to complain.

At midnight the music stopped and the magic ended. Eli draped Bonnie’s wrap over her shoulders—a light blue cape
left over from more prosperous days in New York—and ushered her most forcefully down the front steps of the Brass Eagle Saloon and Ballroom and into a carriage waiting in the road.

“You,” he said, as the elegant vehicle lurched away into the night, “have some explaining to do.”

B
ONNIE
M
C
K
UTCHEN WASN’T
about to explain anything. She sat stiffly in a corner of the lushly upholstered carriage seat, her wrap drawn close against the chill of an April evening. Whatever spell Eli had woven earlier, inside the Ballroom, had evaporated.

With a raspy sigh of irritation, Eli sat back in his own seat, facing Bonnie’s, and folded his arms across his chest. His face, turned toward the window, was draped in shadow, but Bonnie could make out the tense line of his jaw. “My daughter,” he said, after several moments had passed. “Rose Marie is my daughter.”

Bonnie remembered her humiliation in the street that day, her ignoble bath in Forbes’s suite, her sodden flight to Webb Hutcheson’s newspaper office. And beneath these remembrances were others, those of the hurt she’d suffered in New York when Eli had blamed her for Kiley’s death. He had betrayed her, scorned her, in fact, and ultimately deserted her. “If you say so, darling,” she said sweetly.

She felt Eli’s glare, rather than saw it, and a dangerous silence fell between them. The carriage groped and slid over a road made muddy by yesterday’s rain.

Bonnie broke the impasse by tartly demanding, “Where are we going?”

Eli took his time in answering; it was his nature to be downright cussed when he chose. Finally, after stretching vastly and making a startling sound similar to a yawn to accompany the motion, he replied, “Why, to your store, of course. It is true, is it not, that you and my daughter live in the apartment upstairs?”

Bonnie was simmering at the emphasis he’d put on the phrase “my daughter”—of course Rose Marie was Eli’s child as much as her own! How galling that he had so obviously expected circumstances to be otherwise. “Rose and I do indeed live above the store,” she said with quiet dignity. “Do you plan to try and steal it again?”

“From what information I’ve been able to gather, the place isn’t worth stealing,” came the immediate response, carrying a soft and wounding bite.

Bonnie felt the attack sorely, though she did her best not to give any outer indication of that. Had the mercantile flourished as she had hoped, what a sweet triumph it would have been, but in truth the enterprise was a dismal failure, just as Forbes and even Genoa had predicted it would be. Only sheer stubbornness made Bonnie open the doors for business each morning, and it was with the deepest regret that she closed them each afternoon in order to spend the evening dancing at the Brass Eagle Ballroom. Too proud to accept help from Genoa or demand it from Eli, Bonnie needed the money she earned by dancing to survive. “I had no idea,” she countered coldly, “that thieves were so choosy.”

The carriage was moving up the steep incline leading to the main part of town. “I didn’t steal your store, Bonnie.”

Bonnie felt color rise into her cheeks. “Perhaps not personally,” she said and, though she spoke quietly, there was a challenge in her words.

“Not personally, not impersonally. In fact, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!”