Naughty Marietta

by Nan Ryan

  At Marietta’s gentle touch, Cole felt a quick rush of sexual excitement. He brushed her hand away and turned his back on her.

  “Sing some more, Marietta,” he said, knowing that her singing would quickly dampen his desire. “I do so like to hear you sing.”

  “Really?” she asked, eyes shining.

  “You have no idea,” he said as he picked up his chambray shirt.

  Marietta was thrilled. Her singing had had the desired effect. She would use it as her chief tool to tempt him. And once she had seduced him, had given herself to him, he would surely fall in love with her. So much in love he would not force her to go to Galveston to her grandfather. He would take her wherever she wanted to go. And she wanted to go back to Central City and the opera!

  Marietta inwardly shuddered at the prospect of allowing Cole to actually make love to her. She didn’t really know what to expect. Wasn’t sure she would know what she was supposed to do when the time came.

  She was worried. But she had no other choice. If she was ever to be free of him, then she would have to let Cole make love to her. It would, she knew, be quite a sacrifice on her part.

  But it would be worth it.

  Also by Nan Ryan

  THE SCANDALOUS MISS HOWARD

  THE SEDUCTION OF ELLEN

  THE COUNTESS MISBEHAVES

  WANTING YOU

  CHIEFTAIN

  NAUGHTY MARIETTA

  NAN RYAN

  For seven of my favorite writers

  who are also valued friends

  Marsha Canham

  Lori Copeland

  Heather Graham

  Virginia Henley

  Kat Martin

  Meryl Sawyer

  Christina Skye

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  One

  June 1872

  Midnight in Galveston, Texas, a Southern coastal city still under the occupation of federal reconstruction troops seven long years after the end of the War Between the States.

  A man who had given the ultimate for the Confederacy’s cause—his only son’s life—sat alone in the paneled library of his spacious seaside mansion. He was grimacing in agony, his teeth were clenched, his eyes closed.

  Seventy-eight-year-old, wheelchair-bound, Maxwell Lacey—crippled in a fall from a horse years ago—was suffering. The increased dosage of laudanum failed to kill the pain. The disease that was slowly ravaging his frail body was incurable; he would not recover. Nor, he realized, would his passing be an easy, peaceful one.

  The pain refused to go away. It was unbearable. He could stand it no longer. He would stand it no longer.

  Maxwell Lacey opened his eyes, gripped the arms of his chair and anxiously wheeled himself across the room and around behind his massive mahogany desk. Grimacing in misery, he opened the bottom desk drawer and took out the old Colt revolver he had carried as a young man. Perspiration dotting his pale, drawn face, he calmly loaded the weapon, raised it and placed the cold steel barrel directly against his right temple.

  His finger on the trigger, he glanced across the room. His watery eyes fell on the poster advertising Marietta’s starring role in her most recent opera. Maxwell Lacey swallowed hard and blinked to clear his vision. Focusing on the diva, he gritted his teeth against the worsening pain and slowly lowered the revolver.

  Shaking his gray head, he laid the weapon atop his desk. He folded his age-spotted hands together, placed them beneath his quivering chin and sat quietly for a long moment, staring fixedly at the poster. Lost in the mists of memory, he was tormented with anguish and regret.

  He thought back over the years to when he was young and the mansion was filled with children’s sweet voices and his wife’s throaty laughter. Now the big house was silent and lonely, had been for a long, long time. All were dead: his son, Jacob, his daughter, Charlotte, his devoted wife, Annabelle.

  Maxwell stared at the poster as tears rolled down his wrinkled cheeks. And he came to a decision. He would attempt to right some of the terrible wrong he had done.

  Suddenly, for the first time in days, the pain eased.

  Maxwell Lacey sat in the shadowy library of his opulent home all night, patiently waiting for the summer dawn. Come morning, he sent a servant to summon his attorney to the mansion.

  Upon his arrival, Marcus Weathers was immediately shown into the library. Puzzled, the attorney stepped inside and greeted his client.

  Turning his wheelchair around and without so much as a “good morning,” Maxwell instructed Weathers, “Draw up my last will and testament!”

  The lawyer frowned, his eyebrows knitting. “You already have a will, Maxwell. Don’t you recall, you made it several years ago.”

  “I’m changing it, so get out your pen and start writing,” Maxwell bellowed.

  “Why the urgency?” asked Weathers as he took a seat facing Maxwell’s desk. “Has something happened? Are you…?”

  “Yes,” Maxwell Lacey interrupted. “Doc LeDette was here last evening. The prognosis is not good. I haven’t long to live and I want to…I have decided that I am going to…. Damnation! What is that infernal hammering?”

  The steady, rhythmic hammering just outside the steel-barred window elicited no curiosity from the darkly bearded prisoner whose cold blue eyes stared unblinkingly at the ceiling.

  In the shadowy cell at the rear of the Galveston city jail, Confederate war veteran and condemned prisoner Cole Heflin lay on his bunk with his hands folded beneath his dark head and his long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles.

  Cole Heflin knew what the hammering meant. A gallows was being constructed. A hanging was to take place at noon. And he, Cole Heflin, was the man who would be hanged. He had been charged with burning Hadleyville—a Northern munitions-supply station—during the war. The Northern press had dubbed him “the man who burned Hadleyville.” Secretary of War Stanton had declared the act a crime against the Union. A crime for which he would hang.

  Cole did not fear death. He had faced it many times in the bloody four-year struggle in which most of his friends had perished.

  Reflecting on his thirty-four years on earth as he calmly awaited the fast-approaching hour of his death, Cole realized with little regret that he would be leaving no one behind to mourn his passing. His mother and father had long since gone to their final reward and the pretty young woman who had promised to be his faithful sweetheart and wait for him until he came home from the war hadn’t. She had waited only a few short months before running away with a wealthy New Orleans cotton b
roker.

  There would be no tears shed over his passing, including his own. But he did have regrets and remorse that he had not kept his pledge to Keller Longley.

  Cole’s eyes clouded as his thoughts turned back to that hot summer day in 1864 when his best friend, Keller Longley, died in his arms on the battlefield atop Lookout Mountain.

  When the war began, Cole and Keller—friends since their Texas childhood—made a solemn vow. Should one survive and the other die, the survivor would take care of his deceased comrade’s family.

  Cole swallowed hard as he recalled that terrible moment just before Keller died. “You’ll look after Ma and little Leslie, won’t you, Cole?” Keller had managed to say weakly, clutching Cole’s shirtfront as his lifeblood flowed out of him.

  “You know I will,” Cole assured him as he cradled Keller in his arms and cried like a baby.

  Now Cole ground his teeth in frustration. He hadn’t kept his promise to Keller. He had failed his friend, hadn’t been able to look after Keller’s widowed mother and baby sister. Cole closed his eyes and grimaced, a muscle clenching in his lean jaw.

  Before the war Cole had been a young, struggling attorney. But he couldn’t practice law when the war ended. A fugitive with a price on his head, he’d had to lie low. Had to constantly keep on the move in an effort to elude the occupation troops and avoid being caught and hanged for burning Hadleyville.

  Finally, in desperation, he had attempted a bank robbery to get money to help Keller’s mother and sister. He had been caught. An alert captain on the provost marshall’s staff had matched the captured felon’s face to the old federal death warrant.

  What would have been five years in Huntsville State Prison for the failed bank robbery became a federal death sentence. He would hang for the burning of Hadleyville and the destitute Longley women would be left to struggle on alone.

  The hammer of the ancient clock in the town square struck the hour. The jailer’s booming voice drew the reclining prisoner from his painful reverie.

  “It’s time, Heflin,” the jailer said as the heavy cell door swung open and he held out a pair of silver handcuffs.

  Cole slowly turned his head, nodded and agilely rolled up and off his bunk. Rising to his full, imposing height of six foot two inches, he extended his wrists and said, “Crowd forming?”

  “A big one,” said the burly jailer with a broad smile.

  “Well, let’s go give them what they came here for,” said Cole calmly.

  Flanked by two armed federal marshals, Cole Heflin walked out of the Galveston City Jail and into the sun-splashed square where the newly built gallows dominated the cloudless blue skyline.

  “Here he comes!” The excited declaration swiftly swept through the gathering as the throng parted to let the prisoner through.

  “The bastard’s getting what he deserves!” exclaimed a well-dressed, transplanted Easterner who spat contemptuously at him as Cole passed.

  The expression on Cole’s face never changed.

  “I don’t care what he’s done, he’s too handsome to die!” shouted a brazen young woman and, elbowing her way through the crowd, she stepped right up to Cole and threw her arms around his neck, kissing him soundly.

  A mixture of whistles and boos rose from the shocked spectators. Other less forward young ladies threw bouquets at the tall, dark Southerner, while a majority of the men, Confederate veterans who considered Cole a hero, shouted admiringly, “Hurrah for the brave Johnny Reb! The man who burned Hadleyville!”

  Cole climbed the gallows’ steps to the wooden platform where a new rope hung down in an ominous loop from the sturdy overhead beam. There stood an old robed padre and the hangman, dressed all in black.

  The jailer cautiously uncuffed Cole. Cole gave him no trouble. Instead, he stepped into place directly below the looped lariat and atop the trapdoor.

  The rope was lowered, the loop slipped down around Cole’s neck. The hangman produced a black hood. Cole declined.

  The hangman asked, “Any last words, Heflin?”

  “No,” said Cole as the priest stepped closer and began to read passages of scripture.

  The hangman was tightening the noose around Cole’s neck when an out-of-breath gentleman, soon identified as Marcus Weathers, forced his way through the crowd, shouting, “Stop! Don’t do it! I have signed orders from Colonel Patten of the Federal Occupation Forces for you to cease and desist!”

  The shout drew everyone’s attention to the well-known attorney. In his raised hand was a blue legal document. Marcus Weathers rushed up onto the platform and handed the papers to the executioner. The document was read and then, frowning, the executioner announced, “Take the rope from the prisoner’s neck. The hanging’s off!”

  Two

  A low moan went through the crowd.

  Amid rising jeers and cheers, Cole stood stunned and totally still as the jailer roughly removed the noose from around his neck.

  “You’re free to go, Heflin,” the big lawman said, clearly disappointed.

  Marcus Weathers stepped forward, smiled at Cole and said, “Come with me, Mr. Heflin. The carriage is waiting.”

  “Where are we going?” Cole asked.

  “You’ll see,” replied Weathers as he took Cole’s arm and slowly guided him down the gallows steps, through the buzzing mob and toward the black carriage.

  Cole was driven a short distance to the city’s waterfront. The carriage soon turned into a long palm-bordered avenue that led to an opulent seaside mansion. The white two-story building was located at the center of a great expanse of well-manicured acreage. It gleamed in the late-morning sun and Cole quickly realized its inhabitants were afforded an unobstructed view of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Cole was ushered into the imposing mansion and immediately directed to a large, darkly paneled library where an old man sat in a wheelchair.

  Maxwell Lacey smiled when Cole entered the room and said, “Welcome to my humble abode, Mr. Heflin. Won’t you have a seat.”

  Cole continued to stand. “I’m afraid you have the advantage, sir.”

  “I usually do. Or, at least, I try to,” Maxwell Lacey said with a chuckle.

  Cole didn’t share his amusement. “Who are you? What’s this all about?”

  “You’ll know soon enough what it’s about, Mr. Heflin. But allow me to introduce myself. I’m Maxwell Lacey. You may have heard of me.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “No matter. Would you like a drink?”

  Cole accepted. An unobtrusive servant immediately handed him a bourbon. Cole turned the heavy shot glass up to his lips and drank thirstily.

  Maxwell Lacey dismissed the servant with a wave of his hand and said, “Please, sit down, Mr. Heflin. Let’s have a little talk.”

  Cole drained the glass, set it aside and folded his long body down onto a comfortable sofa. Lacey wheeled his chair out from behind his desk and moved closer. He continued to smile as he sized up the lean, darkly bearded man.

  The man he had chosen to do his bidding.

  Maxwell laced his fingers together in his robe covered lap, leaned forward and said, “I know all about you, Heflin. You’re the man who singlehandedly burned Hadleyville during the war and—”

  “Ancient history,” Cole interrupted with a dismissive shake of his head.

  “Not ancient history to the occupying federal forces,” Maxwell Lacey reminded him. His eyes flashed when he added, “You were tried and convicted in absentia years ago and sentenced to hang! Took them seven years to catch you.”

  Cole shrugged his wide shoulders. “What’s that got to do with you?”

  “Everything, Heflin. I saved your life. Had the federal commander order you taken down from the gallows. I am a very powerful man in Galveston. And a rich one. I greased the necessary palms, pulled the necessary strings to have your life spared.”

  Cole raised one well-arched eyebrow, looked Maxwell Lacey in the eye and said, “My sincere thanks. But again, why?”

&
nbsp; With an ominous laugh, the old man ignored Cole’s question and stated, “I expect to be repaid for your deliverance. You will do exactly as I ask, Mr. Heflin.”

  “And why would I ever do that?”

  A sharp pain pressed Maxwell’s spine. He paled, but continued as though Cole had not spoken. “There is a special young woman, a Miss Marietta Stone, an opera singer in Central City, Colorado.” He pointed across the room to the poster featuring Marietta. “She is my granddaughter and my only living relative.” He paused.

  “Go on,” Cole said.

  “I am dying—I have only a matter of months, perhaps weeks, to live. My granddaughter must be brought to Galveston before I pass away.”

  “And you’ve chosen me to go get her, bring her here.”

  “Exactly.”

  Cole looked thoughtful, as if he was considering the proposition. But when finally he spoke, he said, “No, I don’t think so. Find somebody else.”

  Maxwell’s wrinkled face instantly turned scarlet with anger. He thundered, “Damnation! If just anyone could bring her back from Central City, you’d be swinging from the gallows this very minute! I saved your life. You owe me, young man!”

  “True,” Cole admitted, pausing briefly. “I’ll go,” he finally answered. “But here are my terms. Before I leave for Colorado, you’ll pay me ten thousand dollars cash.”

  “Ten thousand dollars! Why, this grand house didn’t cost much more than that. You’re out of your mind if you think I’ll give you that kind of money.”

  Cole sat calmly, said nothing.

  “That’s highway robbery! You’re in no position to demand anything,” barked Maxwell Lacey. “Let me remind you again, I saved your life. You will go after my granddaughter or you’ll go right back to the gallows and be hanged.”

  Still, Cole didn’t budge. “Ten thousand or your precious granddaughter stays in Central City.”

  Maxwell Lacey was not a man used to being bested. His first inclination was to order this arrogant upstart out of his house. Send him back to the gallows. Let the ungrateful bastard swing. But time was short. Running out. His days were numbered.