“Jonas,” Griffin whispered, flinching as Molly untied his hand and positioned herself under his right arm.
Because of Griffin’s size, Molly, even with the help of her son, could bring him no farther than the study. At Field’s insistence, the room was still a fine mess of overturned furniture and scattered draperies.
While Molly trembled under the leaden weight of Griffin Fletcher’s inert frame, Billy put the sofa right. Then, together, they dragged their burden toward it.
After depositing him there and covering him with the first thing that came to hand—a drapery—Molly took firm command. “Run and fetch Field Hollister, Billy. Don’t stop looking until you find him.”
Tearfully, Billy ambled off to obey, casting an occasional wounded glance backward, at the still form stretched out on the leather sofa.
Molly went to the cupboard where supplies and instruments were kept. It had been untouched by the doctor’s rampage, and not by accident, she thought.
From its shelves, Molly took a bottle of alcohol, clean cloths, tape, and a roll of gauze. These supplies secured, she placed them carefully on a corner of Griffin’s upended desk and hurried into the kitchen for hot water.
It was only after she’d tended Dr. Fletcher’s wounds that Molly Brady permitted herself to cry.
• • •
Rachel began her first day of work in a bustle of brave enthusiasm, even though she felt foolish and inept and, somehow, imposed upon Mr. Turnbull like a troublesome relation.
By noon, she had sold only a length of satin ribbon and a card of pearl buttons. No matter how friendly she was, her feminine customers seemed affronted by her presence, asking petulantly after someone named Poor Marie.
More than once, during the morning, Rachel had raised her eyes to the grim, rainy bay and regretted her hasty flight from Providence. The dream of turning the saloon her mother had left her into a respectable boardinghouse still ached in a corner of her heart.
For a few minutes, as she drank her solitary noon-time tea in the cluttered storeroom behind the dry goods counter, Rachel dared to imagine herself buying passage on the steamboat, Statehood, and returning to the small town on Hood Canal.
Of course, she couldn’t—not for the time being, at least. She needed time to heal, and to reassemble her broken pride. Until she had done these things, she could not reasonably expect to encounter Griffin Fletcher time and time again, as she undoubtedly would, and still retain her dignity.
Suddenly, as she munched dispiritedly on a lettuce sandwich snatched from Miss Cunningham’s kitchen that morning, Jonas Wilkes loomed in her mind. Rachel again felt tremendous guilt for the way she’d left him behind at the picnic. How on earth would she apologize, when and if she ever saw him again?
I’m so sorry, she imagined herself saying. I didn’t mean to abandon you like that, but I had to go up onto the mountain and lose my virginity, you see.
Rachel meant to laugh, but hot tears came to her eyes instead.
She turned her mind to memories of the night before. The trip to Skid Road had been fruitless, and dangerous in the bargain. There had been footsteps echoing behind her as she hurried along the waterfront, and she’d been mute with terror when a sleek carriage had rattled to a stop beside her and disgorged a lividly angry Captain Douglas Frazier.
He had shouted at her in the street, shouted at her in the carriage, shouted at her in Miss Cunningham’s dooryard. And he’d still been angry at breakfast.
This is not my decade, Rachel thought.
• • •
Jonas Wilkes felt a disturbing sense of disquiet as he rode onto his own property, his men straggling, single file, behind him, their horses nickering in the rain.
Griffin Fletcher’s words echoed in his mind. “You’re too late. You’re too damned late.”
Suppose it was true? Suppose Rachel had not remained in Seattle, after taking the hasty steamboat ride Fawn had finally recounted to him this morning? If she had boarded another ship, she would be lost to him, perhaps forever.
Jonas stiffened in the saddle, his muscles still aching with the satisfaction and release of bringing Griffin to his knees.
Dismounting at the door of his barn, Jonas considered the element of time with cold logic. Today—he would begin the search today.
Striding toward the house, Jonas allowed his thoughts to shift to Griffin. He was badly hurt, Griffin was, but he wouldn’t be laid up long. Two days—maybe three—and he would be as formidable as ever. That was all the more reason, as far as Jonas was concerned, to act with haste.
Chapter Seventeen
Griffin made a strangled, soblike sound, deep in his throat, as Field grasped him beneath the arms and lifted him into a nearly upright position.
“Hold him there, then,” breathed Molly, as she cut away the muddy suit coat and blood-soaked shirt. Then, tossing the garments aside, she gently washed Griffin’s swollen, horribly bruised ribs and began binding them tightly with strips of cloth torn from a bedsheet.
Field watched her swift, capable hands with distraught admiration. She’d learned much, it was clear, helping Griffin with the patients who were so often brought, virtually in pieces, to his door. “Molly, you are a fine nurse,” he remarked wearily, as she finished her task and nodded to Field to lay his friend down again.
Molly didn’t answer; her eyes swept Griffin’s face with a gentle, wounded look, and she brushed the dampened, blood-crusted hair back from his forehead. Her lips formed the plea soundlessly. Don’t die.
“He won’t, Molly,” Field said, out loud.
On the sofa, Griffin writhed in an anguish that was shattering to see. Molly reached out to touch his face and, when she did, his twisting frame grew still beneath her hand. Her eyes were like polished emeralds, gleaming in the sun, when she raised them to Field’s face. “This is the work of Jonas Wilkes.”
Field put his hands into his trouser pockets and sighed. “I’d guessed that,” he said. He did not add that, while it was vicious, the attack had not been entirely unprovoked. When would it stop, this ceaseless, mindless violence?
There was a long, terrible silence, broken only by the grating rasp of Griffin’s breathing.
Finally, her eyes dark with misery, Molly drew herself up, squared her small, straight shoulders, and lifted her chin. “This will be a long night, I’m thinking. You’d best build a fire, Field Hollister, while I’m making tea.”
Glad of something practical to do, Field crossed the room and placed crumpled newspaper inside the fireplace. Then, kneeling, he took splintery sticks of kindling from the brass bin beside him and stacked them, teepee fashion, around the paper. Into this structure, he tossed a lighted match.
As the flames crackled and popped in response, Field laid a pine log in their midst, closed his eyes, and prayed devoutly that Griffin would not die.
Behind him, Griffin moaned in delirium and cried out. Thunder, relatively rare on Puget Sound, rumbled in the night skies overhead, and Field looked heavenward as he turned from the newly laid fire.
“I hope you’re not saying no,” he muttered.
Presently, Molly came in carrying a tray. Field righted a small table and two chairs, and they sat down, facing each other.
Molly’s eyes were oddly distant as she poured tea for Field, and then for herself. When her hands were free again, she brought a pale blue envelope from her apron pocket and laid it on the table. “I’ve gotten a letter from Rachel herself,” she said, in a tone that suggested awe.
“What did she say?” Field asked evenly, not really caring.
Molly shook her head, and the firelight danced, crimson, on the strong planes of her face. “I’ve had no chance to read it; all I know is that someone gave it to Billy while he was looking for you.”
Field averted his eyes from the neat, childish, and somehow hopeful handwriting on the face of the blue envelope. “She’s gone, Molly—she’s gone, and still it isn’t over.”
Again Molly’s gaze was fi
xed on something far, far away, and her head was inclined to one side, as though she might be listening to a sound only her Celtic ears could hear. “No,” she agreed, at last. “No, Field, it isn’t over.”
Restless, Field gulped the bracing tea Molly had given him and surveyed the colorful shambles that was Griffin’s study. What a ridiculous sight we must be, he thought. Two sentinels drinking tea in the rubble. And the war is just beginning.
High overhead, two massive air fronts collided with a reverberating crash. Field listened soberly, his eyes on the shadowed ceiling. Complete with cannon fire, he remarked to himself.
• • •
As far as Rachel was concerned, the afternoon was no better than the morning had been; indeed, it was worse. The store’s front windows were sheeted with rain, and the atmosphere inside was dreary.
Shortly before it was time to close the store, Mrs. Turnbull bustled in, her face a study in petulant rebellion, her voluminous poplin skirts drenched with rain and muddy at the hem. Her small eyes were like black beads, gleaming in the pasty corpulence of her face, as she hurled a suspicious glance in Rachel’s direction and then flounced into the back room, where her husband was totaling receipts.
Rachel sighed. The woman hadn’t looked any happier than she had an hour earlier, when she had come into the store for the express purpose of being introduced to “the new clerk who was taking Poor Marie’s place.”
In the back room, the Turnbulls’ voices rose and fell in a spate of polite bickering, and only the occasional phrase was distinct enough to understand. “I don’t care what the Captain said—you’ve always had an eye for the pretty ones—what could she know about business?”
What indeed? Rachel closed her eyes and gripped the edge of the ribbon counter.
It was no surprise when Mr. Turnbull came out, mumbled that he was sorry she couldn’t work for him anymore, and paid her the day’s pay she’d earned.
Outside, the rainy wind bit into Rachel’s flesh with icy teeth, even through her navy woolen cloak. Her despair ached in her throat, and stung behind her eyes. She would not have noticed the carriage at all if Captain Frazier hadn’t gotten out of it and caught her arm as she passed.
“The life of a shop girl is not what you thought it was?” he asked, in a surprisingly gentle voice, as seconds later, Rachel sank into the carriage seat across from his.
Rachel did not dare to speak; if she did, she would burst into tears. She fixed her eyes on the tufted leather ceiling of the carriage instead and wished that she had never left Providence.
Unruffled, Douglas Frazier pressed a clean linen handkerchief into her hands. “There’s no shame in crying, Rachel. It cleanses the soul, they say.”
Still, she did not speak. Words could not possibly contain all the misery she felt; once freed by even the simplest utterance, it would come in torrents.
Gracefully Douglas shifted his sizable frame from his side of the carriage to hers. His arm slid around her shoulders in a brotherly fashion, and his voice was warm, almost tender. “Rachel, Rachel,” he muttered. “Poor, brave little Rachel. When will you see that you can have everything—everything— if you’ll only reach out for it!”
Everything. But not Griffin Fletcher, who personified that sweeping term. “How wrong you are,” she whispered. And then, as she had feared, her composure was shattered. She allowed Douglas Frazier to press her head to his shoulder and hold her close as she wept.
She was a mystery, this one. Douglas Frazier felt both rage and tenderness as she huddled against him, broken by the loss of a paltry, wretched position in a common shop.
Rachel dressed like a lady, and she certainly spoke like one. And yet she wandered in places like the Skid Road—after dark, no less—without an escort.
Was she, after all, nothing more than a trollop?
Douglas pried his handkerchief from her clenched hands and used it to dab at the ceaseless tears streaking down her face. If she was a tart, she was a devastatingly lovely one, even when she cried.
Yes, Douglas assured himself, Ramirez would want her—volatile nature, scandalous tendencies, and all. Her amethyst eyes and the sweet invitation of her body would bind the bargain.
The wheels of the carriage clattered on the plank street beneath them, and Rachel’s sobs subsided a little, leaving sniffles in their wake. Was she a virgin, he wondered? Surely, she was.
Ramirez definitely wanted a virgin.
• • •
Inwardly Jonas cursed the rain as he strode, hatless, along the waterfront, flanked by McKay and one of the other men. Ahead were the shacks and sheds and tents of Skid Road.
Jonas did not expect to find Rachel here, not for a moment. But little transpired in Seattle that wasn’t common knowledge in these disreputable environs; vital information could often be had for the price of a drink.
Instinctively Jonas selected the saloon where he’d met and hired McKinnon, just over a week before—though it seemed like a century—as the starting point of his search. He knew, when he saw the slut McKinnon had been drinking with that first night, that the capricious element of luck was with him.
It was so easy that Jonas was almost disappointed; while he was desperate to find Rachel, he enjoyed a challenge, too. And he wasn’t exactly pleased to hear that a violet-eyed young woman claiming to be McKinnon’s daughter had come into the saloon alone, only the night before, asking questions.
“I know where she lives, too,” volunteered the whore, with a smug grin.
Jonas was annoyed, relieved, and stricken to know that Rachel hoped to find her father. “Where?” he snapped.
“What’s it worth?” countered the prostitute.
Bitch, Jonas thought, but he drew out his wallet and produced an impressive bill. “Tell me.”
She snatched the money from his fingers with an eagerness that, coupled with the stench of her, sickened Jonas on some primary, half-discerned level of awareness. “She’s stayin’ at Cunningham’s, on Cedar Street.”
Jonas turned abruptly, almost colliding with McKay and the other man who stood gaping just inside the saloon doors. “Get me a buggy,” he ordered, in a tone that tightened their slack jaws and sent them scrambling to obey.
Stubby, eager fingers came to rest on Jonas’s sleeve. “I could offer some entertainment while you wait,” drawled the prostitute he’d just paid.
Wrenching his arm free, Jonas inspected the fabric of his suit coat with revulsion. “I would rather eat slug stew,” he said. And then he strode outside, to wait in the misty drizzle.
The slattern howled an obscene word after him and followed that up with a shrill invective concerning fancy gents who don’t know a real woman when they see one.
Jonas bore the tirade with uncharacteristic patience. There was only one woman he wanted; and she was “real,” all right—real as the rain that beaded in his hair and crept down his neck to saturate his collar.
McKay and his sidekick returned with a hired horse and buggy in record time and were plainly delighted when Jonas freed them to spend the evening as they saw fit. They half-killed each other in their eagerness to get inside that stinking saloon.
As Jonas got into the buggy and took up the reins, he smiled. Perhaps the prostitute would ply her trade this evening after all.
Cedar Street was easy to find, and so was the Cunningham house. It was marked by a prominent sign, dangling from one limb of a blossoming cherry tree.
Jonas drew the buggy to a halt behind a carriage as impressive as the one he’d left behind in Providence. The presence of such a vehicle disturbed him, though he couldn’t have said why; but the sensation was only momentary, and he had forgotten it by the time he’d abandoned his horse and buggy and sprinted up the pine-board walk.
He turned the bell knob briskly, and clasped his hands behind his back, wondering how he would bear even the briefest delay.
But the luck of the day was holding. When the door opened, Rachel herself was standing there, staring at him with
puffy, red-rimmed eyes.
Jonas’s hands ached for the feel of her, but he knew better than to betray the true depths of his passion before the time came. His voice was deceptively light and more than a little mischievous. “Hello, Urchin. The picnic was marvelous; you should have stayed.”
Rachel’s throat worked for a moment, and beguiling shame darkened her lavender eyes, deepening the worrisome shadows beneath them. Then, unbelievably, she cried out softly and flung her arms around Jonas’s neck.
If there had ever been any doubt that she held him captive, it was dispelled in that instant. Jonas’s emotions churned within him as he drew her close and held her.
Presently, she fell away and drew Jonas into the house with both hands. Her splendid chin quivered in the half-light of the hallway. “Oh, Jonas,” she whispered, “Will you forgive me for abandoning you like that? It was thoughtless… .”
Jonas cupped her chin in a hand he hoped was more steady than his voice. “Forgiven. And why have you been crying?”
The answer came in a surprising rush of soft words and sniffles. She had found a job, only to lose it again the same day. She despaired of ever finding her father, and she wasn’t sure she should have come to Seattle at all.
Jonas listened, his eyes gentle on her wan face, but something inside him seethed all the while. At the core of her misery was Griffin Fletcher; she bore the mark of him on her face and along every enchanting curve of her body.
If Griffin hadn’t possessed her, it wasn’t because she hadn’t wanted him.
Purposely, Jonas sustained the light, undemanding tone he sensed was vital. “Wash your face, Urchin, and change your dress. We’ll have supper at the Seattle Hotel and make plans for tomorrow.”
The uncertainty in her face was maddening. “Hotel?”
Deliberately, Jonas smiled. “In the restaurant, Urchin—not the bridal suite.”
A smile flashed in her eyes and brought the faintest color to her too-pale cheeks. “I’ll be ready in a few minutes. In the meantime, please come in and meet Miss Cunningham and Captain Frazier.”
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