She would see her uncle, come to an agreement about the value of her father’s share of their joint holdings, get her money, and leave. She would go back to Boston to continue her studies—in a civilized city where people appreciated the finer things in life and didn’t glorify the questionable virtues of train robbers and murderers.
Chapter Three
“Hey, Ward!” Doug Paggett said, nudging Ward in the ribs. “Whooee! Would you look at that little beauty. That is some high-tone fluff if I ever seen it!”
Ward heard his good friend but chose to ignore him. Instead he smiled down upon the petite Mexican girl clinging so worshipfully to his arm. Little Maria. Her skin was a soft golden brown that looked ripe to bursting. She wore a loose camisa, gathered at the sleeves and around the neck, and nothing, not even a shift, under it. Her dark brown nipples pressed like tiny buds against the soft cotton. She snuggled close against him, looking as eager as he to leave this fiesta crowd and find a quiet place where they could get to know each other better.
“Tell me you wouldn’t like to get next to that little beauty.” Doug persisted, jabbing him again with his sharp elbow. “I bet she smells like lilacs and rosewater, all powdery and perfumy. Makes my body ache just thinking about it.” he whispered.
“Well, go get her.” Ward chuckled, not taking his eyes off Maria, whose firm flesh was practically simmering against his hand.
“You’re going to be so sorry…” Doug warned, shaking his head.
Ward laughed, but there was something in Doug’s voice akin to awe that finally motivated him to look up and search out the “little beauty” Doug was raving about.
“There!” Doug hissed, pointing.
Ward followed his friend’s finger. A woman in a white gown and hat was stepping out of a carriage about half a block away. In profile all he could see was that she was beautifully gowned, no doubt the height of fashion, with her skirt pulled tight over her hips, outlining a flawlessly slender figure. A bustle of ruffles and flounces cascaded behind her as she was lifted down by the man helping her disembark from the fancy phaeton. It was no wonder that Doug had noticed her. She was as out of place in the fiesta crowd as a pile of gold coins in a pigsty.
He’d always thought bustles ridiculous, but on this woman, offset by a tantalizing glimpse of a dainty ankle, it made for a very charming picture. Instead of standing her in the dusty street her escort changed his mind in mid-swing, gathered her into his arms, and carried her to the rough plank sidewalk, where he gallantly deposited her.
“Isn’t that romantic?” a woman beside Ward whispered to her companion.
“Pure de ole foolish, if you ask me,” the man grumped. “No one but a fool would tote a perfectly healthy woman around in this heat.”
“Well, I think it’s romantic,” she said, irritated.
“A woman who cain’t walk to the sidewalk by herself shouldn’t be allowed to come to town,” the man persisted.
“I don’t know why I bother to talk to you,” she said, dismissing her husband and turning to a female companion. “Aren’t they a handsome couple?”
“I purely love the way he dotes on her,” the friend whispered. “D’you s’pose he could still love her as much as he seems to? Don’t rightly seem possible, does it?”
“I wouldn’t give a flip one way or the other. He treats her like he worships the ground she walks on…That would be good enough for me.”
Obviously disgusted, their male companion turned away and spat a stream of tobacco into the dust at their feet.
Ward was typically unimpressed by fancy gowns, but there was something about this woman that held his interest even though Maria was squirming impatiently against him, pressing her warm breast to his arm, demanding his attention. Absently, he found her hand and caressed it while he squinted at the other woman, trying to see beneath the rakishly angled Rembrandt-style hat that covered part of her face and most of her hair.
She lifted her skirts and started to walk toward where Ward, Maria, and Doug were standing in the shade in front of the saloon. And while she was completely circumspect, there was no way she could hide the vibrant energy that radiated from her movements. Ward smiled to himself. Only a dancer could look so graceful and so leashed at the same time, as if she were only momentarily contained—as though any second she would throw off her restraint and leap into dance.
Now he urgently wanted to pierce the anonymity of her fancy gear, but something deep inside resisted. And as if he had no control over it, he felt his attention shift. He turned away and scanned the holiday crowd.
Phoenix had changed in the six years since he had first visited the town. There had been no Paris bonnets then. In 1882 it had been a pleasant little farming town, surrounded by cotton plantations, acres of wild alfalfa, peaches, beans, and corn, all because an enterprising man by the name of Swilling had seen the ancient irrigation canals abandoned by the Indians who used to farm the Salt River Valley and had formed his own irrigation company. Swilling had cleaned out the silt and sand and made the canals functional again. His friend who had the forage contract with the army joined him, and they began raising alfalfa instead of just hacking down what they could find along the river banks. Their farms supplied hay to Fort McDowell and fruit brandies to neighboring towns. There had been cattle then too, but for the most part the ranchers respected the farmers. The cattle roamed the brakes where farming was impossible or where the irrigation canals did not reach. Few cowboys bothered the residents. Phoenix had been a sleepy little town of two thousand, half white, half Mexican, with the Mexicans living south of town in adobe huts, tents, and squalid shacks.
Now Kincaid’s railroad had changed all that. Phoenix had become a magnet for cattle drovers from the north who wanted to ship their cattle back east for the big prices the Texans had been getting for years by driving up the trail to Dodge City.
The population had doubled since the arrival of the steel tracks and the soot-spewing locomotives. Now there was a fancy hotel—the Bricewood West. Thinking of the name brought a rush of bitterness. Kincaid’s Bricewood West—an expensive and authentic copy of a French Second Empire palazzo set in the middle of the Arizona desert. Leave it to a bastard like Kincaid to pull a stunt like that, Ward thought bitterly.
Doug nudged him again, and he forced his angry thoughts back to the female he was supposed to be admiring—probably one of Kincaid’s imported females. Kincaid was notorious for hiring any local who wanted a job and was still attracting easterners by the thousands to swell the towns along the path of the railroad—sort of like building a railroad to nowhere and bringing in the people to use it. But Ward had to admit that, as much as he hated the man, Kincaid did have a few good ideas. Women had a civilizing influence. They insisted upon all the trappings of civilization—no matter where they had to live. Put a woman down in the middle of the Sahara or the Arizona desert and pretty soon a French dress shop would spring up across the street from her. Without turning his head he could see La Roche Fashions only two doors from where the elegantly groomed couple had paused. A banner over the door announced the latest in Paris originals.
The woman in white turned toward Ward, not seeing him, searching the fiesta crowd, and he saw her face for the first time. A pale, perfect oval of creamy skin, wide dark eyes, a lush curve of wide lips…Ward felt an involuntary pang of recognition—like a fist in the stomach—and wondered why he hadn’t recognized her escort…
Jenn!
Jenn…
A pulse began to pound in his temples. The part of him that had loved her was jumping up and down inside, wanting to cry out to her, “Jenn, Jenn, I’m here! I’m here!” He could imagine her joy at seeing him, but the part that remembered the way she had abandoned him in favor of Kincaid throttled his momentary joy, and he stood there with his breath turning to pain in his lungs and throat, like a solid column of ice, all the way down to his belly, a long, slow ache he could not control…
His emotions in a turmoil of confusion, he
continued to watch her walking with that brisk, leashed elegance through the festive, noisy crowd. The man at her side, Chantry Kincaid III, was as solid and sturdy as Jenn was luminous and ethereal. Eight years had changed him very little—still lean, still as smooth and handsome as he had been when they’d met him. “He reminds me of a barbarian,” Jenn had remarked after she saw him for the first time. “Attila the Hun in a green velvet Prince Albert coat—wicked good looks and all the assurance in the world.” They had laughed about it then, until Jenn had succumbed to those wicked good looks and the challenge promised in Kincaid’s deceptively warm green eyes.
No doubt Kincaid still moved in the hard, realistic world of business where he took what he wanted with diabolic ease, whether it be a railroad, a string of warehouses that just happened to belong to someone else, or a woman. Jenn had been quite a feather in Kincaid’s cap. At twenty-three, when they had first met, she was already a legend—the daughter of one of New York’s most respectable old families and a sensation on the stage—unheard of in polite society, but Jenn had carried it off with her customary verve and elan.
Time and the reality of Phoenix suddenly vanished in a flood of memory. Eight years of Ward’s life peeled back as though it had never existed.
He was back in the house on Fifty-seventh Street, in New York City, across from the park. The moon glistened on the icy trees and streets. From his upstairs bedroom window, the pond in the middle of the park looked like a large oblong silver serving platter left outside by accident. His name was Peter then. Peter Van Vleet. If he looked north out that window, up the wide expanse of Fifth Avenue, he could see a row of houses like the one he and his sister lived in. Fifty-seventh Street was an avenue of millionaires’ mansions—a long tree-shaded avenue lined by looming chateaus, cavernous castles, villas, neo-Renaissance palazzos, and in the middle of all that opulence, the Van Vleet townhouse, bought at a time when the Van Vleets had more wealth than those social upstarts, the Astors.
A woman named Bettina had shared his bed and snuggled warmly against him. He didn’t know what had brought her there that night. He hadn’t asked. He hadn’t seen anyone associated with Kincaid since the night Kincaid’s men had beaten him senseless. He hadn’t wanted to see anyone. Except Bettina had come to him, after he thought Simone had betrayed him to Kincaid’s men, and he couldn’t think of any reason to send her away. Except that Jennie had never liked her. He was just beginning to feel like he might live, and the first thing that came back was his need for a woman. So Bettina had stayed. He reached over and slapped her smooth, white, thrusting buttocks.
“Go get us some food.”
“What do you want?”
“Bring everything. I can’t keep this up without food.”
Bettina scampered cheerfully off the bed, grabbed his robe off the floor, and did as she was told. They ate in the center of the bed, and then in the middle of a sentence, with her mouth full of apple, she started talking about Jenn.
“Did you know your sister came back today?”
Peter refused to let Bettina know he had been agonizing in a sickbed, wondering why his sister hadn’t even bothered to see if he had lived or died.
“From where?”
“Don’t you know? Her honeymoon! What kind of brother are you anyway?” She giggled mischievously, took another bite of the apple, and continued. “Mr. Kincaid came back ages ago—she just showed up this morning. What a row that was!”
He could feel the blood draining out of his head to be replaced by a giant heartbeat. Married to Kincaid? His sister? The last time he had seen Jenn was the night he had been beaten so brutally that he could barely breathe through the mess they had made of his nose and mouth. That night, three weeks ago, Jenn had been horrified and repulsed at what Kincaid’s hired thugs had done to him. How could she now have married the man responsible for his beating and left on her honeymoon? He had the sudden urge to throttle Bettina, to choke the truth out of her.
Rage burned in him like a fever. Jenn couldn’t have married Kincaid. She knew Kincaid had tricked their mother out of her proxies, then had used them to bankrupt the Van Vleet warehouses. She knew Kincaid’s interference had driven their father to kill their mother and then himself. Jenn knew! That’s why she had finally agreed to help him expose Kincaid for what he was. He felt like throwing back his head and howling in his pain and disbelief.
“Peter, you’re not listening to me,” Bettina protested.
So he arranged his face into a listening mask, trying to ignore the hard ache in his chest. He felt as if part of his insides had been ripped out. Any second his remaining blood and organs would stop working.
Bettina squirmed her round little bottom into the bed. She loved to gossip, so Peter knew he would hear every detail no matter what he did. Bettina worked for Kincaid as a chorus girl in the same theater where Jenn was the headliner—the New York Bricewood’s Grand Salon. The Bricewood East was the ne plus ultra of the hotel and gambling circuit and Kincaid’s pet project. It was the headquarters for all Kincaid’s other enterprises as well.
“Your sister came back like one of the furies,” Bettina said. “She fired Edgar, that tight-assed little know-it-all who used to run the lift, and…” She paused, eyeing him to see the impact of her words. “And Simone.”
That jarred him only slightly. “Why?”
“That’s not all she did. She threw Latitia Laurey’s clothes and all her things out of Mr. Kincaid’s suite. And Latitia! I didn’t see it, but I would have given anything to have been there. Your sister may look like such a lady that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but she can sure fight for what she wants. Can you imagine that? She came home from her honeymoon, and he had already moved another woman into what was supposed to be their love-nest!”
Bettina wiggled in anticipation, watching him with her enormous baby-doll eyes as if he would be able to explain his sister’s actions. He shrugged and plumped the pillow at his back, pretending that his sister was no concern of his. To distract her, he reached over and caressed the firm underswell of her breast and saw the nipple blossom and harden.
“Peter, stop that. I won’t be able to concentrate.” She settled herself like a chicken making a nest. “Your sister came back again in the evening, in the middle of a big, ritzy dinner party that Kincaid and Latitia were giving. This part is absolutely delicious! One of the serving girls told me about it. Well—not exactly—she heard it from one of the girls who was there, though. Anyway, your sister threw Latitia Laurey, Miss High-and-Mighty herself, out of that party bodily. Can you imagine? In front of all Latitia’s hoity-toity friends! She even had enough spunk to dump a bowl of some gooey salad down the front of Latitia’s dress. She ran out of there screaming like a banshee. I bet that was a real cat fight,” she said with satisfaction.
Peter closed his eyes, trying not to see it. The thought of his sister lowering herself to the level of a street-fighting, hair-pulling harridan for a man like Kincaid nauseated him.
The next morning Peter rang the Bricewood East and asked for Mrs. Kincaid. When he heard his sister’s voice on the line, he quietly broke the connection forever…That afternoon he joined the cavalry and gave notice at the brokerage firm where he had worked since leaving Harvard.
Three nights later, when Simone came, he was packing to leave for the Dakota badlands. He had gotten the assignment he had asked for. And the promise of a commission in six months.
Simone. She reminded him of a wounded doe, a wary forest creature, with her brown eyes full of stars. A strange mixture of goodness, need, and weakness.
When he closed the doors to the study, she rose from where she had been huddled beside the fire, looking very small and vulnerable. Was this the same woman who had spent two loving hours in his bed so he would be sure to be home when Kincaid’s men came for him?
She moved toward him, but something stopped her—perhaps the look in his eyes. “Oh, Peter, chéri,” she whispered, biting her lush bottom lip. “I didn’t kno
w you had been hurt until tonight…I came as soon as I found out. Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“I waited for you. I hoped you would come to see me…”
She looked so defenseless that he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her. Maybe she had been taken in and used by Kincaid, too. Why should he expect Simone to be any smarter than he or his sister?
“I’ve been busy. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Oh! Oh, I’m sorry,” she said brokenly. “You’re going away for good!”
“I joined the cavalry.”
“Oh, Peter, chéri…” She started to cry. Tears came up in her brown eyes, turning them into oceans of pain. She’d never gotten anything she wanted, she’d confided. Sometimes she got close, but someone or something always snatched it away.
Still crying, she reached up gently and touched his face where the greenish tinge of a bruise still showed. His aristocratic nose looked broader, with a hump that probably wouldn’t ever go away.
“Oh, your poor face, your poor broken face…It was so beautiful,” she said mournfully.
Peter grimaced. Beautiful? Maybe Kincaid had done him a favor. He liked this one better. It looked lived in.
Her lips started to tremble and tears streamed down her pale cheeks in a solid sheet. “Those men who did this came after I left, didn’t they? Oh, Peter, I swear to you that I didn’t know…”
He shrugged. “It’s all right. It doesn’t matter…”
Simone turned away, sobbing brokenly, and he moved to hold her almost by instinct.
“Oh, Peter, chéri, I didn’t know. I didn’t know…”
He stroked her slender back, sighing. “It’s all right.”
“No, it isn’t. It never will be. I love you. More than anything. More than life…I will die if you leave me.”
“Hush. People don’t die of love,” he said gently.
No, they died of much worse things—especially Simone. Things that left a man’s gut twisted with hate. But he hadn’t known that when he had decided to bring Simone with him.
The Lady and the Outlaw Page 3
