“Go ahead,” he said, and gave her a few coins, then watched as she followed an apron-clad merchant into the fish shop. From the moment they’d sold the horses, she’d insisted he carry what money they had and dole it out to her as need arose.
While he waited for her to come out again, Will scanned the ships at anchor in the shallow bay. Coastal steamers, clippers, more brigs and barges than he could count, and riverboats like the one they’d taken out of Sacramento City.
Shading his eyes against the water’s glare, Will read the names off their hulls, his gaze narrowing as he recognized the steamer depicted in the letter sheet Mustart had given him.
Orion, sailing for Sitka in two days’ time.
He stared at the fit-looking ship and ground his teeth. It was what he wanted, wasn’t it? Why he’d married Kate in the first place. To get enough money to get the hell out of here, to start a new life somewhere else.
Why, then, wasn’t he more enthused?
He sucked in the salt air and let his gaze drift along the line of ships. A clipper, newly arrived, stood fifty yards out unloading passengers into rowboats that brought them ashore. He watched as immigrants took their first steps on the rocky beach, their eyes shining with equal parts of hope and fear.
One family, in particular, caught his eye as they tromped past him in their ragged clothes, mouths agape. The young man and his doe-eyed wife paused for a moment, waiting for three freckle-faced boys—one a gangly youth, and a younger set of twins—to catch up with them. They were all talking at once, in rich Irish brogues that caused the edges of Will’s mouth to curl in a smile. He watched them as they moved down the wharf and disappeared into the crowd.
“I’ve got it. We can go now.”
Kate’s voice snapped him back to the moment. He turned to see her standing there holding a string of dried herring aloft for his inspection. Her cheeks were flushed from the icy air, her eyes bright and trained expectantly on him. Hell, she was beautiful.
He hardened his heart and let his short-lived smile fade. “That clipper out there,” he said, nodding toward the ship offshore. “It’s from Ireland.”
“Is it?” She gazed at it, her soft brow creasing, her bright eyes growing dull.
“Most likely it’ll be headed back, and soon. Tomorrow morning I’ll see about getting you a place on it, or one like it.”
“But what about the—?”
“I told you I’d take care of it.”
She pulled him off to the side, behind a pallet of waiting cargo, where they could talk without being jostled by the crowd. Her hand felt good on his arm—warm, strong. It was the first time she’d touched him in days.
“How, Will? You’ll never be able to raise that kind of money in so short a time. Besides,” she said, “it’s not your problem, it’s mine.”
“It is my problem. You’re my wife, aren’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
“Come on. I’m taking you back to the room. I’ve got something to do this afternoon, and you’ll only slow me down.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward one of the muddy streets dead-ending into the harbor.
Pushing through the rowdy throng of immigrants and street merchants, Will pulled her along behind him as he marched down Clay Street toward the boardinghouse where he’d already paid three nights’ lodging in advance.
At the corner, Kate jerked unexpectedly out of his grasp. He turned and caught the fire in her eyes. It was a look he hadn’t seen from her in days. He’d forgotten how much he missed it.
She pursed her lips and drew herself up as if she could match his height, though she still had to look up at him to meet his gaze.
For a moment she didn’t say anything, then the fire inside her cooled, the color fled her cheeks, and she seemed to grow smaller before his eyes. “I…wanted to ask you something.”
“Well?” he said. “Ask it.”
“You loved her very much, didn’t you?”
“Who?”
“Sherrilyn. Your…wife.”
It was the last thing in the world he expected her to say, and he had every intention of ignoring the question. He stood there, teeth gnashing, then heard his whispered words as if someone else were speaking. “I thought I did—once.”
Her eyes widened with shock, confusion, maybe both. He knew she tried to hide it, but it was too late.
“That was before,” he said.
“Before…what?”
“You really want to know?”
She nodded.
Fine. He’d tell her then. “Before I found out her true reason for marrying me.”
“True reason?”
“Money. Social standing. I’m a rich man’s son. I thought you’d figured that out by now.”
“I did suspect it.”
“Sherrilyn knew it. Oh, she was very good at making me believe she wanted me—before the wedding, that is. Afterward, once she and my father both got what they wanted, her affections for me changed.”
“I—I had no idea, Will. I’m so sorry.”
He snorted. “Save your pity. Besides, it’s history now.” He turned into the crowd, then paused when he felt Kate’s hand grip his forearm.
“I don’t understand. What had your father to do with it? Surely he—”
“He arranged it all. Our first meeting, chance encounters in the park, parties and weekends. No expense was spared. He needed the union between us to cinch a business deal with Sherrilyn’s father, another up-and-comer he feared would one day cross him when he grew rich enough.”
Will stopped himself, just short of telling her the rest. They stood there in the crowd, Kate looking up at him intently, hanging on every word, and him looking away just as intently.
“There’s more,” she said, as if reading his mind. “Tell me.”
When he finally met her gaze, he could see that she’d already guessed the rest. “That’s right,” he said. “The child she carried…I can’t say if it was mine or not.”
Kate said nothing, merely nodded, as if it all made perfect sense. He wished to God it didn’t.
“I didn’t stay in Philadelphia long enough after that to ever find out who the man was. Or men. Sherrilyn had several lovers, it seemed.”
“Yet, when you went west you took her with you.”
“I had to,” he said. “She was my wife.”
“Your…obligation.”
“That’s right.”
Kate looked away, her pale lips tight, her expression as hard as he’d ever seen it. Very like the moment he first saw her in Dennington’s Dry Goods when she first learned her father was dead. Her eyes darted to shop signs, faces in the crowd, everywhere but at him.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ve got business to do. Let’s get you back to the room.”
A few minutes later he left her sitting on the narrow bed in the boardinghouse. As he turned to leave she said, “That’s why you hated me so much in the beginning.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I reminded you of her, didn’t I? Because of the money. Our bargain.”
He didn’t deny it. He couldn’t. Though he knew now Kate was nothing like his first mercenary bride.
“Landerfelt, too. His greed and deceit. You were obsessed with defeating him simply because he reminded you of your father.”
Will’s lips thinned in a hard line. He stood there in the open doorway of their tiny room, looking down at her, gripping the doorknob so fiercely he thought he might pull it clean off.
“Tell me, Will. Where are you getting the money?”
Kate sat there on the shabby bed after Will left and watched the light fade in the room as the late autumn sun dipped into the sea.
All of it made sense to her now.
He made sense.
At first she’d thought he’d married her only for the money. He had, in part. He’d needed it for his passage to Sitka. Later she thought he’d done it for her. Well, if not for her, at least as a favor to her father, who
m she was certain he’d befriended. Now she realized his motivation was likely something else altogether. He couldn’t stand to see Eldridge Landerfelt win.
Perhaps he’d married her for all those reasons. Taken together they were compelling, but knowing what she now knew about his history, she marveled that he’d done it at all.
No wonder he hated himself. And her.
She glanced at the open bedroll laid out on the floor where Will intended to sleep—alone. His fur hat lay beside it, forgotten in his rush to leave her, to take care of the business he’d alluded to in the street.
She knew what he intended, and the thought of it made her stomach twist into knots so tight she could hardly breathe. A second later she was out the door, fumbling to lock it behind her and to button her cloak all at the same time.
It only took her ten minutes to find the right bank.
She remembered what Mrs. Vickery had told them at dinner that night about the wealthy Philadelphia businessman newly arrived in San Francisco, in Montgomery Street.
Kate gazed upward at the finely crafted sign. Crockett was the only word she recognized. That, and the quality of the masonry compared to the slapped-together construction of the buildings surrounding it, told her she’d found the right place.
What now, Kate?
She stood there in the street as sunset colors washed across the blur of faces pushing past her in the crowd, weighing all that Will had told her, and what he hadn’t.
Unsure of what to do next, she stepped off the muddy street onto the wooden planking edging the bank and peered into the barred window. Will wasn’t there.
Three clerks in fine attire serviced customers who waited patiently in line to complete their transactions. Kate stepped closer, narrowing her gaze. Behind the clerks were desks, and behind those another room.
Her heart beat erratically as she crept around the side of the building, moving slowly toward the window she hoped would afford her a view of the bank’s back room.
Lamplight spilled from the window, splashing across the creaky planking. She inched closer, holding her breath. And then she saw them.
Will stood rigid in front of a huge mahogany desk, alternately fisting his hands at his sides and relaxing them. Behind the desk in an overstuffed leather chair sat a man who looked remarkably like him save for his graying hair. The same dark eyes and square jaw, the same heavy build underneath his fine clothes. Kate knew at once he was Will’s father.
There were characteristics, however, that the elder Crockett did not share with his son—the bitterness reflected in Will’s eyes and the stone-cold hardness of his expression as his father rose and turned to the safe behind him.
Kate felt a sting of tears as Will’s father pushed a canvas bag across the desk toward his son. Coolly Will counted out seven hundred dollars in twenty-dollar coins, rare double eagles so shiny they must have been newly minted in the East.
With a shock she realized the sum wasn’t nearly enough for them both. Her passage to Ireland alone would cost better than six hundred dollars.
His father said something, then pushed the canvas bag still stuffed with coins toward his son. Shaking his head, Will slipped the golden eagles he’d counted out into the leather pouch that had been her father’s, then pocketed it.
She knew what it cost him to beg the money. His pride, his convictions, all that he was. The least she could do for him, the only thing she could do, was to take it and go home.
Set him free.
He didn’t want her. It was as simple as that.
Coldwell Crockett briefly turned his back on his son to close the safe, and for one startling moment Kate read the pain in Will’s face.
She swiped at her eyes and watched as the banker held out a manicured hand to him. After a long moment Will took it, shaking it briefly before muttering something Kate suspected was his promise to repay every cent.
The last thing she saw, before her tears blinded her and she had the presence of mind to race back to the boardinghouse before Will’s return, was the anguish in Cold-well Crockett’s eyes as his son turned away from him, stone-faced, and quit the room.
“No lamp?” Will said, as he entered the tiny, dark room of the boardinghouse where he’d left Kate nearly two hours ago. The sun had long since set.
“No.” Kate pulled her feet under her on the narrow bed to allow him more space. “Not even a candle.”
“Thirty dollars doesn’t buy what it used to here.” He shucked his jacket and retrieved the money pouch from his shirt pocket. Matter-of-factly he set it on the table flanking the bed, along with the passenger ticket he’d bought for her trip home.
Kate stared at the ticket.
“She sails tomorrow on the evening tide. I’ve spoken to the captain. You can board in the morning. Everything’s arranged.”
To his surprise she didn’t ask him how he’d come by the ticket or the coin. She said nothing, in fact.
He should have felt calm, in control of his emotions, now that he’d finally done what he’d had to do. But he didn’t. “Did you eat?” He poked at the string of dried herring draped across the table, shimmering in the occasional flickering light shining in from the street through the undraped window.
“I’m not hungry.”
He wasn’t, either. “We’d better get some rest, then.” Will pulled off his boots and stretched out on the thin bedroll he’d placed on the floor beside the bed where Kate would sleep.
When he heard the rustling of her clothes he politely rolled onto his side, away from her, to afford her some privacy to undress. It had been three nights since she’d slept in a bed. The last time he’d slept with her, sheltering her body with his, drifting off, sated from their lovemaking, the scent of her drugging him to sleep.
He drifted now, remembering her kisses, the softness of her skin, the passion in her eyes when she’d cried his name. Hours later he thought he was dreaming when he rolled over and caught her looking down at him, her face bathed in moonlight, nestled just above him on a pillow at the edge of the bed.
No, he wasn’t dreaming.
The floor underneath him was hard and cold, the look in her eyes warm, almost pleading. Without a word she opened the covers to him.
It was all the encouragement he needed.
Chapter Twenty
He knew it was wrong, that he shouldn’t take advantage of her vulnerability.
She’d weathered more in the past week than most women would in a lifetime. As he slid into the narrow bed beside her, Will told himself she needed comfort, not sex.
But there was more than a need for comfort in the way she kissed him, the way her arms snaked around his waist, pulling him close, the way her legs tangled with his in the cool sheets.
She sighed as he cautiously kissed her back, his tongue mating with hers, slowly this time, deliberately, not at all like their first frantic coupling.
She was warm and yielding and soft, and he was far past wanting. He looked at her in the moonlight and knew if he made love to her now he’d never be able to put her on that ship tomorrow.
“Kate,” he whispered against her lips.
“No more words,” she breathed. “Not tonight.” She closed her eyes and kissed him with a raw tenderness that was his undoing.
He willed himself to stop, but he couldn’t. He told himself it didn’t matter, that in the morning he would be the same man he always was, and she the same woman, and that he was right to send her home where she belonged.
A minute’s work on both their parts and he was freed of all his clothes. He moved under her, naked, and pulled her gently on top of him, her loose hair silking across his skin. Through the fine-weight cotton of her shift her taut nipples grazed his chest and caused the breath to rush from his lungs.
When her legs spread around him and he felt her heat, he knew he was lost. She wrestled with the ties of her shift. No pantalets tonight, he realized with a heady shock, as the pearly light of a full November moon spilt across her body.
She was so lovely he could barely breathe.
Desperate to crush the torrent of untried emotion welling inside him, he fought to stay focused on the physical: working his hands down her narrow back, circling her waist, molding the curves of her buttocks and hips.
At last she settled atop him, naked. The slick velvet between her legs grazed his manhood, and he cried out.
“Aye,” she breathed, and rolled her hips against him in a fluid motion that seemed not of this world.
His hands moved to her breasts, shaping and cradling, delivering each in turn to his greedy mouth. When he began to suckle she gasped, her hips grinding into him hard, her nails piercing his shoulders so deeply he was sure she drew blood.
He encouraged her, while deep inside himself he battled an overpowering yearning to tell her what he felt, what he longed for and feared.
He thrust upward again and unexpectedly slid inside her. They both cried out as he filled her, her eyes widening with the shock. She was small and tight, and he feared—as he had their first time together—that he would hurt her.
“Slow,” he whispered, but she ignored his instruction. Rising up, she rode him, her hands braced against his biceps, her thighs gripping his hips.
They moved together, and he knew from the sweet tension building in her face, from the tightening of her sheath around him, that already she was as close to the edge as he.
He didn’t want it to be as good as it was between them. He pretended that it wasn’t. It was dangerous to need her, impossible to want her as much as he knew he did.
All the same, when she at last reached her peak he let himself go with her, giving in to feelings he knew he could not fight.
When it was light enough to see, Kate rose and quietly dressed, careful not to wake him. Will hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night in days, not since the last time they’d lain together. She knew, because neither had she.
She gathered up her few things and stuffed them into her satchel: her old dress, so tattered now it wasn’t much more than a rag, Mrs. Vickery’s evening gown, which she planned to sell before she sailed, her father’s pistol and a few keepsakes Mei Li had given her to remind her of her time in Tinderbox.
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