Of the four of them, Angel was the one who’d most easily adapted to the cataclysmic changes in her life. Gavin still regarded both his father and Lila with the wariness of a young wolf, but Angel simply accepted them both with the same ease with which she seemed to accept everything else in her life. Lila envied the little girl her equanimity.
Still, a few weeks after her arrival in Paris, Lila was surprised to realize that she was not unhappy. She liked Colorado, liked the raw newness of it, the feeling that something startling might happen at any moment. While she still didn’t see the dangers that Bishop insisted lurked behind every corner, she had to concede that it was nothing like the sleepy town where she’d grown up.
In Beaton, saloons did not jostle elbow to elbow with more respectable businesses. Bearded miners did not swagger down the street, shouting that they’d hit the mother lode and offering to buy drinks for anyone who cared to join them. Bishop told her that the mother lode generally turned out to be nothing more than a tiny pocket of gold and the miner would spend a winter’s earnings within his first forty-eight hours in town and then spend a night or two in jail sobering up from the celebration.
In Beaton, ladies of dubious character did not boldly enter a store and shop next to more respectable citizens as if they’d every right to do so. Nor did those same ladies lounge on the balcony of their house of ill repute, dressed in scandalously cut garments and calling out invitations to men passing by on the street below.
Naturally, Lila deplored such behavior but she had to admit, even if only to herself, that after a few weeks in Colorado, Pennsylvania was starting to seem quite dull.
Certainly that term did not apply to her life these days. Turning over in bed, she stared up at the ceiling. She was restless. It was late and she should have been asleep hours ago. The mantel clock in the parlor chimed midnight, its soft tones adding to her restlessness. Spring fever, her mother would probably have called it, Lila thought as she sat up and swung her legs out of bed. Perhaps it was the warming weather and the increasing hours of daylight that had inspired this sudden attack of restlessness. Or maybe it was the fact that Bishop had not yet come to bed.
Though she certainly didn’t welcome his presence in her bed, she’d grown accustomed to it. She might fall asleep alone, but when she woke in the middle of the night, he was always there. Though she was loath to admit it, there was something comforting about having his large frame lying next to hers. It gave her a sense of safety, of being protected. Tonight, when she woke and found him gone, his pillow untouched, she hadn’t been able to go back to sleep.
She pulled on her wrapper, smoothing one hand absently over the slight swell of her belly. It wasn’t that she was worried, she told herself. Bishop was certainly well able to take care of himself. And it certainly wasn’t the fact that, in thinking about those bawdy ladies and their softly voiced invitations, it had suddenly occurred to her that Bishop might be tempted. An argument could even be made that, if he were tempted, she’d have no one to blame but herself. But there was no reason to think that he’d succumb to their charms only after midnight. As he’d so vividly demonstrated a few weeks ago, lovemaking was not an activity limited to the hours of darkness.
Lila slid her feet into a pair of soft slippers. No, she wasn’t worried about him and she wasn’t concerned that he might be, at this very moment, breaking his marriage vows. She was just thirsty. That was why she was having trouble sleeping. A sip of water and she’d be able to go right back to sleep.
Moving quietly so as not to wake the children, Lila left the bedroom. After tiptoeing down the hall, she came to an abrupt halt when she saw the flicker of lamplight coming from the direction of the kitchen. So Bishop was home after all. Relief washed over her, leaving her almost weak in its passing. It was frightening to realize how much she’d come to depend on him.
She started to turn and go back to bed, her thirst forgotten, but something made her hesitate—a scrape of sound, a hiss of indrawn breath. Her slippers silent on the polished wooden floor, she crept toward the kitchen.
Bishop stood near the dry sink, naked to the waist. Lamplight flickered on the taut muscles of his back and shoulders, creating rippling highlights that, at another time, might have put her in mind of statues carved in ancient times. But at the moment, her eyes were riveted to the wad of bloody cloth he had pressed to his side. On the floor at his feet was a lump of bloodstained white cloth that she guessed must be the remains of the shirt he’d been wearing. For an instant only, shock held her frozen in the doorway, and then she was hurrying toward him.
“What happened?”
At the sound of her voice, Bishop spun toward her. The sudden move pulled on his wound and jerked an oath from him. The color drained from his face, leaving him ashen, the thick blackness of his mustache standing out in vivid contrast. He swayed and Lila was beside him in an instant. She started to slide her arm around his waist but he warned her off with a single word.
“Don’t!” He braced one hand against the edge of the sink and she saw immediately why he’d warned her away. His right side was covered in blood from the middle of his rib cage to the waist of his trousers.
“Oh, God.” The whispered words were a prayer as Lila fell back away from him, the room tilting around her. It was like seeing an old, old nightmare come to life. How many times had she dreamed of Billy’s death, seen the hot rush of his blood as he died?
“If you faint, I’m not going to catch you.”
The harsh rasp of Bishop’s voice shook Lila out of the grip of memory. She shook her head to clear it and drew a deep, calming breath. “I’m not going to faint. But you may if you don’t sit down.”
“I’m all right,” he said.
She pulled a chair away from the table, spinning it with a twist of her wrist and settling it behind him. “Sit.”
He obeyed, sinking carefully into the chair. Droplets of blood fell from his side to spatter against the polished planks of the floor. He cursed under his breath, cupping his hand over the injury. “I’m bleeding all over the floor. I’m sorry.”
Lila gave him an incredulous look. “You’re sitting there bleeding to death and you’re worrying about the floor?”
“The floor was clean,” he said as if that explained his concern. “And I’m not bleeding to death.”
“The floor will wash and, if you’re not bleeding to death, you’re doing a damned fine imitation of it,” she said sharply. “What happened?”
“I’m shocked by your language,” Bishop said, raising one brow in mocking disapproval. Given his pallor, the effect was not what it might have been.
“I doubt that.” Lila set a bowl of clean water and a towel on the floor and knelt down beside him. “What happened?”
“I didn’t move fast enough.” He leaned back in the chair and let her pull his hand away from the injury. “It’s a knife wound. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“It couldn’t be, or you’d be dead by now,” she said bluntly. After moistening the towel, she began to wash the blood away so that she could get a look at the injury.
Bishop felt almost removed from what was happening. The pain in his side seemed a distant thing, a minor annoyance. He recognized the feeling as a symptom of mild shock and loss of blood. He’d underestimated how badly he was bleeding and had delayed returning home until he’d dealt with the aftermath of the barroom brawl he’d been trying to stop when he was wounded. While it was true that he was in no danger of bleeding to death, he’d lost more blood than he cared to think about.
Ordinarily he would have insisted on taking care of the injury himself. He’d handled worse, including once removing a bullet from his own leg. He’d never liked other people near him when he was hurt. Like a wild animal, he preferred to crawl away to lick his wounds and live or die on his own. He didn’t know if it was the blood he’d lost or if he was getting soft in his old age, but, for the moment, he was content to watch Lila work.
Her hair fell in a thick
braid down her back, gleaming like a banked fire where the lamplight caught it. He thought lazily of wrapping that braid around his hand, using it to pull her close. The towel dabbed gently against the slash across his ribs and he sucked in a quick pained breath, jerked out of his hazy state. Fantasies of that sort were going to have to wait for another time.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she pronounced once the worst of the gore had been cleaned away.
“I told you it wasn’t.” Tilting his head, Bishop studied the long, shallow wound that started in the middle of his rib cage and cut down and in until stopped by his belt. He’d bled like a stuck pig but it wasn’t a life-threatening injury.
“What happened?” Assured that he really wasn’t going to bleed to death, Lila sat back on her heels and looked up at him, her green eyes wide and dark with concern. “And don’t tell me that you didn’t move fast enough.”
“That pretty much sums it up,” he said. “There was a fight at the Lucky Dragon. One of the participants objected to me breaking it up. It was nothing personal.”
“Nothing personal?” Lila’s brows rose. She turned the towel to a clean corner, then washed a little more of the blood away. The wound was still bleeding but not nearly as much as it had been just minutes before. “It looks pretty personal to me. If this was much deeper, you wouldn’t be sitting here.”
“Considering the fact that he was trying to gut me like a Christmas goose, I think I got off pretty lightly.” He saw her blanch and immediately regretted his casual description. Reaching out, he touched his fingertips lightly against her cheek. “It’s not that bad.”
“It’s bad enough,” she said huskily. “You should have seen a doctor right away.”
“I told you before, we don’t have a doctor in Paris.”
“You said the barber was also a doctor.”
“I said he was the closest thing we had to a doctor,” he corrected her, trying not to wince as she cleaned the wound.
“Then why didn’t you go see him?” she snapped, her voice quivering on the edge of angry tears.
“Zeke was in the saloon when it happened—passed out in the corner.” His mouth twisted in a rueful smile. “I suppose I could have had someone throw him in a horse trough to wake him up, but I’m not sure his medical skills would have been up to their usual high standards.”
“It’s not funny,” she snapped, tilting her head back to glare at him. “You could have been killed.”
“I could have been but I wasn’t.” He could have asked her why it mattered to her, but he wasn’t sure he’d like the answer.
“So you just decided to come home and bleed all over my clean kitchen?” Her hands were a gentle contrast to the snap in her voice.
“I thought you didn’t care about the blood on the floor.”
“That was before I realized that this was all a joke to you. Why didn’t you wake me?”
“I thought I could take care of it myself.”
“Then you’re not only slow, you’re slow-witted. Any idiot can see that you couldn’t possibly clean and bandage a wound like this yourself. You should have woke me up immediately. Even Gavin would know that much. And he’s only twelve. It isn’t a deep cut but it certainly needs to be taken care of. How did you think you were going to put a bandage on it?”
“I hadn’t thought that far.” It had been a long time since anyone had scolded him, but there was no mistaking the tone.
“Even if you could have cleaned it, you’d probably have made it worse by trying to twist around to get a bandage on it. You should have awakened me right away. I’m your wife.”
“Sometimes that’s hard to remember,” he said softly.
Lila’s head jerked up and her eyes met his. He saw the color come up in her face and knew she was thinking of the bed they slept in without touching, of the intimacies they weren’t sharing. Seeing her discomfort, Bishop regretted his words. He’d agreed to their bargain. It wasn’t fair to reproach her for it now. Especially not when she was still pale with fear. Fear she’d felt for him.
He had no right to expect her to be afraid for him, he thought as she bent her head to her task again. He’d torn her life apart and had done little enough to put it back together again. He was lucky she didn’t take a kitchen knife and finish what Jack Michaelson had started.
Lila forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand. All that mattered now was taking care of his injury. She could think about everything else later. The kitchen was quiet as she finished cleaning the cut. Awareness crept into the silence, as soft and subtle as a morning mist. She was suddenly conscious of the solid male muscle beneath her hands. With every breath she took, she drew in the faint, musky scent of him. A mixture of sweat and blood and an underlying odor that she could only identify as Man.
“I have to get something to use as a bandage,” she said. She rose and dropped the bloodstained towel into the bowl of water. “Stay here and don’t do anything to open that cut up again.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he promised with a meekness she didn’t trust for a minute. But she could hardly tie him to the chair in her absence. She’d just have to trust that he had the sense to stay where he was.
It was a misplaced trust. When she returned a few minutes later, Bishop was kneeling on the floor, dabbing at the spots of blood that marred the polished pine. He looked up when he heard her enter and, for an instant, he looked as guilty and almost as young as Gavin did when caught in mischief.
“You haven’t the sense the good Lord gave a turnip,” Lila said, setting her hands on her hips and glaring at him.
“I haven’t opened it up again,” he said, sounding so defensive that, despite herself, she felt her lips twitch.
“No thanks to your common sense,” she snapped, refusing to soften her expression. “Get up from there and let me put a bandage on that cut before you do yourself some further damage.”
After crossing the room, she bent to put her hand under his elbow, offering what support she could as he rose to his feet. Straightening, he caught his breath in a quick gasp of pain.
“Serves you right,” she said heartlessly. She bent to examine the wound. “What made you think you were up to mopping the floor, anyway?”
“I wasn’t mopping it. I just thought I’d get some of the bloodstains up.”
“Why are you so caught up in worrying about the floor?” she asked, her tone not quite so sharp when she saw that he hadn’t done any fresh damage. “Lift your arms a bit.”
“I don’t want the children to see the mess,” he said as he obeyed her order and lifted his arms away from his body. “I may not be much of a father but I’m the only one they have. They’ve known more than their fair share of loss. I don’t want to scare them.”
Lila didn’t say anything for a moment. She couldn’t. Just when he’d annoyed her beyond all bearing, he had to go and say something like that. She cleared her throat.
“I’ll clean it up,” she told him, her voice a little huskier than usual. “You just do as you’re told. If you open up this wound and start bleeding again, you’ll wind up flat on your back in bed, and that’s not going to do you or the children any good. Now, hold still.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
There was no bite behind the soft mockery of his acquiescence. Lila gave him a halfhearted look of disapproval. She put one end of the soft cotton against the small of his back. Holding it in place with the flat of her hand, she leaned forward so that she could wind it around his uninjured side. Because of the position and length of the cut, the only way to bandage it was to wind the bandage around his lower torso.
Standing so close and all but embracing him, Lila’s senses were filled with him. Her vision was filled with the solid wall of his chest. Every breath she drew filled her head with the scent of him. She reached around him and, for a moment, her face was practically pressed against his skin. She could hear the steady beat of his heart—a solid, reassuring sound. When she drew back, winding the bandage as
she went, her breathing was not quite steady.
“What are you using for a bandage?” he asked.
“I tore up one of my petticoats.”
Out the corner of her eye, she saw his eyebrows go up. Though she knew it was a mistake, she looked at him. “First you use strong language, then you mention an article of intimate apparel. Next thing I know, you’ll be chewing tobacco and carrying a gun.”
The laughter in his eyes was irresistible, particularly since she could see the pain that lay under it. She sniffed and gave him a haughty look. “It’s a good thing for you that I don’t have a gun. Your life might have been in danger a time or two.”
His laugh ended on a soft huff of pain as she snugged the bandage tight to hold the edges of the wound together.
“Sorry.” Lila’s teeth worried her lower lip. She hated knowing that she was hurting him.
“I’ll live,” Bishop told her. “Next time, I’ll move faster.”
“I think that would be a good idea.”
As she leaned forward to circle the bandage around his waist, her braid tumbled over her shoulder, falling in the way of her hands. Before she could toss it back, Bishop’s fingers closed over it. Lila froze in place, her arms half around him. She could see his hand wrapped around the thick length of her braided hair. There was something strangely erotic about the sight of his tanned fingers against her hair. His hand shifted and the heavy braid curved across around his wrist in a thick auburn bracelet.
Lila was chained to him, her own hair the shackle that bound her. Hardly breathing, she lifted her eyes to his. His eyes were a pure, clear blue, heavy-lidded and hungry, stealing what little breath she had left. She felt an echo of that hunger deep inside her, a pulsing heat low in her belly. His thumb stroked across the braid he held, and Lila seemed to feel the caress as if it were against her skin.
For the space of several heartbeats, they stood together, their eyes locked, their hearts beating in rhythm. Lila felt spellbound, aware of nothing but Bishop and the sharp hunger in his eyes.
Schulze, Dallas Page 23
