by Rose Lerner
“Helen,” he said. “It’s not that hard. We’re friends, after all.”
Friends. After all.
It had been years since she’d had a friend.
“Stay,” she said. “I…would like your help.”
“All right,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”
She pointed at the carpetbag. “You can start there. It’s mostly business papers.”
* * *
James picked up the carpetbag that had tipped over. Papers had slid out all over, and he gathered those up too.
He glanced at them, trying to find some order, and inadvertently read what a few of the papers contained.
“He really was married to your mother,” he whispered, and showed her the marriage license. At the bottom was a wobbly signature. Ann-Marie Rivers.
“Burn it.”
He smiled at her ferocity, but there were real ramifications to her having all this paperwork.
“You are his heir.”
“He has a will?”
“Seems so.” He held out more of the documents.
“If he still owns land out East, this proves it’s yours.”
“He sold it.” She glanced up from Charles’s shaving case with wide eyes. “Or that’s what he told me. Do you think…?”
“He might still own his own land and yours? I don’t know. You need a lawyer.”
“Then I better hope those paste gems are worth a lot of money.”
James flipped through the papers. He found no bill of sale for the house, or deed for the land, but he found a bank statement.
A couple of them, from banks in St. Louis and Chicago.
And the balances were not small. Not at all.
He handed them over to Helen.
“I don’t think you need to worry about money,” he said. “Only tickets to Chicago and St. Louis.”
She looked at him with wide eyes and took the papers.
“My lord,” she breathed. “Oh my lord. I’m…”
“Rich.”
There was more: contracts and investment agreements for silver mines in Arizona, water rights in Texas. He’d been in contact with someone in Pennsylvania regarding rock oil.
“You are…very rich,” he said.
She abandoned the clothing and took a sheaf of papers from his hand, fanning them out on the floor.
Even if he were to go back to his father and beg for forgiveness and—miracle of miracles—have it granted, he would not have as much money as she did.
“It’s a great deal of correspondence with saloons and whorehouses,” she said. “I was to go to San Francisco next. Apparently, to secure me as entertainment it cost upwards of five hundred dollars. He was making a fortune off me.”
James had the primal wish that he’d been the one to put that man in his grave.
“But I don’t understand.” She looked up at him with a wrinkled brow. “If he had so much money, why were we traveling like this? Why were we living in whorehouses? He had money and land and a house…” She shook her head. “Was his need to punish me so great?”
“Perhaps,” he whispered. “Perhaps the war did its damage to him.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t feel sympathy for him.”
“I’m not asking you to,” he said. “Trust me. I wish he was alive so I could kill him myself. But no one survived the war undamaged.”
They found more bank statements, including one from the First National Bank of Denver.
That one alone held a thousand dollars.
He did not want to feel this way, as if she were slipping away from him with every dollar they found. He did not want to begrudge her her good fortune—because she more than deserved it. And he did not want to begrudge her her independence, because she deserved that too.
Finally, from the bottom of the satchel she pulled out bank notes. And a small bag of coin.
“Good God, Helen. You might be richer than Steven.”
She smiled tentatively, and then with wider glee. And then she began to laugh. She nearly toppled over she laughed so hard.
He laughed as well, so glad for her. But the thought came winding in with its dark poison nonetheless.
She will leave you now. She has more choices now than you could ever give her.
This …this is how you’ll lose her.
* * *
That night, after Steven had taken Helen to the bank and they’d signed papers and dealt with important financial things, Annie and Elizabeth made a special meal and Steven opened a bottle of champagne. Helen made a toast. The evening had felt like a party.
A bon voyage party.
And now, hours later, James could not sleep. He could barely sit still.
For the first time in a long time, the desire for chloroform was almost more than he could bear. For the first time in a long time, he wasn’t sure he was strong enough to resist it.
He tried not to think of the locked cabinet in the surgery full of all those sweet oblivions. The green bottles and the brown bottles.
He tried not to think of Helen.
He wondered if she was suffering tonight, feeling uncertain on this swell of good fortune. If she longed for the morphine the way he longed for chloroform.
He wondered if she was thinking about him. At all.
You are better than this, he thought, trying to shame himself into compliance. But he wasn’t sure he was better than this.
Just the fact that she was here, a few feet above him, pushed him to the very edge of himself. He felt shaky and raw.
Miserable with everything he wanted and couldn’t have.
With his elbows braced against his knees he stared into the fire and wondered with sudden fierce clarity—why?
Why was everything to be resisted? Until he was bone and sinew and boredom?
Endless goddamn boredom.
“Jesus,” he breathed, coming to his feet in one big swell, pushed by a wave of such anger and… “Fuck.”
A walk. He needed a walk.
The hallway was deep with shadows and sharp with cold. He stomped toward the door and ran right into a shadow made real. Warm. Dense.
Breathing.
It was Helen.
He could tell in the dark, by her scent. By the alarm in his body. By the sudden quiet in his head.
It was Helen two inches from him. Helen’s shoulders under his hands. Helen’s breath against his face.
“James?” she whispered. “Did I wake you?”
“No. Not at all. What are you doing?”
“I was going for a walk.”
“It’s midnight. And freezing.”
“What were you doing?” she asked in a tone that indicated she knew all too well what he was doing.
Right.
She wore a coat, one of Annie’s. And a hat. Steven’s long muffler. And the night was heavy on her. Her eyes were wide. Her hands fidgeting. She was buzzing, too.
“I’ll come with you,” he said, reaching past her to get his coat. They should not be standing so close in the entryway. It was midnight and they were alone.
Don’t think that way. Better to not think that way. Or they wouldn’t make it outside.
“I know this is ridiculous. It’s so cold out. And midnight. But I couldn’t sleep. Not tonight. I feel my skin…” She sucked in a breath. “…Shrinking.”
“I understand.”
“This is why you walked, isn’t it? At the whorehouse.”
He nodded. “It will help.”
“I know what else will help,” she whispered. Her eyes fell to his lips and he felt her gaze like a touch.
“Helen,” he said in his best doctor’s voice. “You are responding to the excitement of the day combined with the intensity of the craving-”
“Do not,” she whispered, “try to tell me what I am thinking. Or how I am feeling. I lived in danger every moment of every day for years. I told a thousand lies. Lies upon lies. I lived them and breathed them and I still knew what was real and what was somethi
ng manufactured by adrenaline and fear. I know my own mind.”
Her strength was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.
“The question is, do you know yours?” She tilted her head and took a tiny step toward him. He was frozen in place, his throat full of words.
“How disappointing,” she said into his cowardly silence, and turned for the door. “I will walk on my own.”
Chapter 17
* * *
He heard the knob turn, felt the cold air come through the crack as she opened the door, and perhaps the cold air snapped him out of his frozen state. Snapped him out of his fear.
He reached out just past her head and shut the door with his palm.
She gasped. Maybe he did, too, he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure about anything.
She turned and he felt her hands against his face, the warm skin of her fingers at his jawline. Against his lips.
His eyes met hers in the murky dark and he was lost. Gone.
“I very much want to kiss you,” she whispered. “It’s all I think about when you’re around. And it’s all I think about when you’re not around. My life has been turned upside down and instead of thinking about that, I’m thinking about your wrists.”
“My wrists?”
“They tease me.”
“I had no idea.”
It was too much, to hear these words and put his hands around her shoulders, across her back. Too rough maybe. No finesse, certainly. But desperate and mad. And the way her fingers slid roughly into the hair at his neck told the same story of desperation.
He didn’t know if she leaned forward or if he did. Or if they met there, hungry and nearly wild.
Her lips were soft, so soft, and he had barely a fleeting sense of them before she’d opened them, letting him deeper into her mouth. It was not an innocent kiss. But that was fitting, perhaps, as both of them lacked innocence. He stepped forward and she stepped back and they fell against the door. His hand cupped the back of her neck, holding her still for the long, slow lick of his tongue. He felt the vibrations of her moan in his fingers and against his chest.
She tasted like lemon candy and sweet tea and it was delicious. He wanted to eat her.
Her teeth grazed his lip, the tip of his tongue, and his blood pounded in his erection. She tilted her head, taking over the direction of the kiss, holding his face in her hands so he wouldn’t move. Her tongue slipped into his mouth and he’d never been kissed like this.
Everything felt…matched. Equal.
“You’re perfect,” he breathed against her mouth when they pulled back to get air. Their chests heaved against each other. His hands were clutched in the wool of her cloak and he could feel hers, tangled in the lapel of his.
“We both know that’s not true,” she whispered, licking the corner of his lips, arching her hips into his. “Take me to your room.”
“Helen,” he sighed. The pressure of her hips, even between their coats and clothing, made him see stars. Made him mad for her.
“Make me stop thinking. Make me stop…craving.” She rained kisses along his neck until she found a place she liked and sucked the skin into her mouth. He groaned and pushed harder into her, flattening her against the wall. “And I will do the same for you. For just a little while.”
She’d already done that. He was already outside of his head, and the only thing he craved now was her.
Yes, he thought. He would take her to his room and they would fall on each other, claw away the excess until all that was left was the truth of themselves.
The rightness of it fell into place with an audible snap. Like the world around him was sharper. Clearer.
Made crystal clear sense.
Everything beat harder in his body. His blood burned through his veins.
He took her hand and pulled her down the hall into his room. The fire made the shadows darker and tossed flickering, shifting light across her face. He shut the door behind him and she was back in his arms.
Their coats fell to the floor. He unwound her muffler, pulled off her hat, found all the pins holding her hair in place and he took them out, one by one, dropping them on the floor until he held that raven-wing hair in his hands.
He clenched his fists and she gasped.
“Sorry,” he breathed, realizing he must have pulled her hair. He let go and she put a hand against his wrist.
“I liked it.”
He stared into her eyes and slowly made fists in her hair again. The tension of the silken strands against his fingers pulled taut and she moaned again, her eyes revealing her desire.
She did like it.
“I told you,” she whispered. “I know my own mind.”
Barely in control, he bent to her mouth.
He walked her backward as her fingers made short work of his vest. His shirt was open in heartbeats.
With a joking flourish, he held out his wrists, twisting them in the firelight.
“Devil,” she gasped and he laughed. Gently, he turned her against the edge of his desk and undid the laces at the back of her dress.
The serviceable gray wool slipped off her body, revealing a corset and the bare skin of her arms, and the wafer-thin fabric of her chemise and pantaloons.
In the firelight it was see-through, and bent as she was over his desk, he saw the dark lines of her thighs and hips. He could not resist tracing her flesh, warm and lush under the fabric.
“James,” she moaned, her head falling forward, and he liked the look of her like this. Her surrender to the pleasure. To him.
He reached around her stomach and untied the lace of her drawers and he slipped them down over her strong legs.
“Step out of them,” he whispered, his voice a thick garble. Her boots had a small heel and her stockings were black. He could see everything through her chemise.
“You are so beautiful.”
Her breath shuddered.
One hand he kept there, where her shoulder met her neck. He could feel her breathing, the pound of her heart.
She dropped her head again, gorgeous in her acquiescence.
His other hand slipped over the boning of her corset, the fine, fragile fabric of her chemise, under which he felt the warm tremble of her skin.
He stepped closer, blanketing her with his body, so she could not move without feeling him behind her. She could not breathe without knowing he was there.
Up over the edge of her corset his hand found the full swells of her breasts. Carefully, slowly, he eased down the edge of her chemise, slipping a hand into the warm gap between her body and the top of her corset.
She groaned and pushed her hips back against him, a sweet torture against his erection.
He eased her breast from the confines of her corset, found the nipple, hard and hot. He stroked it, ran his palm over it, caught it between his knuckles and pulled. Squeezed.
The sound she made was a soft, shaking cry of pleasure.
He bent his head, resting it against the skin of her back.
Perfectly, her hips cradled his, and she continued to push against him, to arch and writhe against his body, and he bit his lip against the need to push back into her.
For her, he reminded himself. For her.
He let go of her breast and slipped his hand back over the confining strength of her corset, and then down slowly over the soft swell of her belly. He felt her still. Tense.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“God no,” she whispered. “I want you to hurry.”
Against her spine he smiled and pressed kisses, adoring her with his touch and swallowing all the words he wasn’t quite ready to confess.
Inch by inch he pulled up her chemise until his fingers felt the warm skin of her thigh. He shifted away from her so that the fabric could be pulled up in back, and the sight of her hips, the round curve of her ass, the black stocking tied just above her knee - it very nearly brought him to his own knees.
It very nearly had him coming in his pants like a schoolboy.
She tilted her head back, until she touched the top of his head. “Please,” she whispered.
Right. Yes. The woman knew what she wanted.
As he traced the seam between the fat lips of her sex, she shifted with the motion. He brushed the hard knot of her clitoris, the fleshy hood that covered it, and she jerked.
“Yes!” she cried.
“Shhhhh,” he whispered into her ear, kissing the delicate whorls of it, sucking the fleshy part into his mouth and biting, just a little. Just enough.
She was shaking.
“You need to be quiet. Can you be quiet?”
“Yes.” The word came out with barely a sound.
“Good.” He traced circles through her sex and she shifted her legs wider, eased her hips down searching for a harder touch. “You feel so good, Helen,” he breathed. “So strong and so fierce and so soft at the same time. You’re wet. Can you feel that?”
“Yes.”
“Very wet. I want to put my fingers inside you. I want to put my tongue inside you.”
She whimpered, her head bowed again and he could not resist, he put his teeth against her neck and bit her, just a little.
“Fuck,” she groaned, and the language and the way her hand grabbed his, pushing him harder against her sex, made him wild. Crazy.
Her hand dropped his, but reached between them to find the hard rod of his cock. She pushed her hand against it, fumbling slightly for a way to grip him.
He pushed her away. “For you, Helen. This is for you.”
The rhythm he created caught fire and she stood nearly on her tiptoes, breathy gasps sawing out of her throat.
“Shhhh,” he whispered again, but she was too far gone and he slipped a hand over her mouth.
Her body was strung so tight between him and the edge of the desk and she somehow just kept reaching, kept pulling herself tighter and tighter.
“Come on, Helen,” he breathed, kissing her ear. Her neck. “Let go.”
She shook her head, her eyes squeezed shut, and on instinct he lowered his mouth again and sucked that sensitive skin at the bottom of her neck.
