by Lisa Plumley
His husky laughter brought a smile to her face as well. He seemed a different man when he smiled, a gentler man.
“Then I’m hopelessly outmoded,” Gabriel said. “I never leave home without mine.”
Wonderful, a part of her jibed. He’d be forever ready to lock up her father in irons and take him away.
“I’d say a man so well-fortified has no reason to fear holding my poor tired hand.” Megan waggled her fingers in blatant appeal. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
He stared as though she’d lost her mind, to be baiting him so. Maybe she had. But once committed to a course of action, she decided she could hardly turn back.
If a simple human touch couldn’t reach him, then perhaps social logic could.
“You’re making a public spectacle of me, I’ll have you know.” It was only as she said it that she realized how prophetic her words might be, and her heart sank at the thought. Nevertheless, she plunged onward: “By morning, the gossips will be all aflutter with tales of how poor Megan Kearney threw herself at a man’s head, and was so cruelly rebuffed in the end.”
“Megan….”
Why did he hesitate? At this rate, she’d sooner charm herself than coax Gabriel to take her hand.
“What?” she asked, rather reasonably, she thought.
“I’m not one of your damned beaus,” he finally blurted, “to be charmed and petted and coaxed into doing what you want.”
As if she’d had beaus to begin with. Why did he persist in speaking as though she had—and dozens of them, at that? Aloud, Megan said, “I don’t see why not.”
He scowled harder. “I do. And the fact that you don’t is all the more reason why I ought to.”
“You’re talking in riddles.”
It wasn’t like she meant to make some sort of untoward advance to him. This had nothing to do with wanting to feel his fingers brush against her skin. Nothing to do with wanting the thrilling contact of his hand clasping hers. Nothing whatsoever to do with needing to return some of the battling spirit to his soul or adding that aggravating cockiness back to his smile.
No, indeed.
This had to do with forcing a little humanity into that mean-spirited Pinkerton armor he shielded himself with, and making sure he’d recognize the truth about her father’s innocence when she showed it to him later.
Gabriel reached for his flat-brimmed black hat and held it at his chest, ready to put it on. “I’m not holding your hand any more than I’m going to jump onto this table and sing ‘Yankee Doodle.’ Show me what you brought me here to see. Or we’re leaving.”
“Take my hand. Or I won’t show you,” Megan countered.
“You’re being unreasonable.”
“So are you.”
He rubbed his fingers against his hat brim. Thinking, she guessed. Then Gabriel said, “This isn’t worth arguing over.”
“Then do it.” She nodded toward her outstretched hand. “If it’s as meaningless as you say, it shouldn’t bother you to touch me.”
His answering stare would have sent a lesser woman under the table to hide. Luckily, Megan counted herself well-fortified against it, so she stared right back and waited for his reply.
“It doesn’t bother me to touch you,” he said bluntly.
Was that disappointment she felt? Surely not.
Until he pounded his opinion home by adding, “I could touch you all day. All night.” Gabriel lowered his voice and slowly, in a tone fraught with meaning, murmured, “All over.”
Obviously she’d misread him, if he could taunt her with his indifference to her this way. “Fine, fine!” Megan burst out, not needing any more reminders of all the ways a man might find her lacking. “I understand.”
Before she could surrender to common sense and take her arm from the table, Gabriel’s large, warm hand slid over hers. With an assurance born of having her all but beg him to hold her, he threaded their fingers together and glared up at her.
“Happy?” he asked.
Slightly bedazzled by the sight of their joined hands, Megan looked up, too. She’d bested him! At least in this small way. As long as she could pile up victories, hope still remained of helping her father.
“Because you look downright smug,” Gabriel went on, his features hardening into what she took for suspicion…and a goodly amount of poor sportsmanship, in Megan’s opinion.
She shook her head, hoping to rattle her good sense back in place. “Happy? Almost. Move your chair a little closer.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Are you always this demanding?”
A gusty sigh escaped her. “Are you always this molasses slow? At this pace, I’m surprised your suspects don’t pass on from old age before you ever catch up with them.”
Stone-faced, Gabriel inched his chair closer. She supposed that counted as cooperation when dealing with someone like him.
Turning her wrist so her hand lay on top, she drew a deep breath. She looked at the angular lines of his profile, sent up a quick wish that she was doing the right thing in confiding in him, and then began.
“When you were a little boy,” Megan said, “did you ever go someplace special with your folks? Someplace you could never have got to alone, where things were different than anywhere you’d ever been?”
She stopped to look at him, awaiting his answer. While she’d been talking, Megan saw, he’d turned their hands so his lay on top. Wanting the upper hand, of course—even literally. How typically Pinkerton of him.
Now, he shrugged.
Undaunted, she went on. “Well, I did. And Hop Kee’s was the place I’d go to. Every year, when it was time to pay taxes on the stage station, my father would bring me to town with him.” A faint smile crossed her face at the memory. “My mother used to say it was the only time things at the station were really clean, when my papa and me were both gone.”
Gabriel smiled, too. He stroked his thumb over the back of her hand. “She sounds like my mother.”
“I doubt it,” Megan said flatly. Her mother had been unlike anyone she’d ever heard of—at least, so far as she knew. And what recollections she had of Emmaline Kearney’s playful nature had turned bitter long ago, with the remembrance of what had followed them.
“Anyway,” she went on, “one year things were especially hard. Nothing was…nothing was going right at the station, and I couldn’t wait to get to the presidio and forget those troubles for a while.”
It was the year her mama had left, but the last thing Megan intended was to tell him that.
“And you came here?” he asked.
Blessedly, she felt her smile return. She nodded. “Yes. The Celestial Kitchen was new then, and Mr. Kee had just come to Tucson. I’d never met a Chinaman before. When I saw the paper lanterns and the statues and the gilded mirrors from outside, I begged my papa to bring me in.”
Gabriel’s hand squeezed hers, offering more comfort than she would have expected. “I’ll bet he couldn’t refuse you much, either.” His grin widened, as though his compliment held a keen-edged finish. “You probably jawed at him until he agreed. Poor man.”
Megan narrowed her eyes at him. “I have half a mind to poke you in the ribs for that remark, agent Winter. Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to listen to a story?”
“No. I never cared much for fairy tales.”
“Not even as a boy?” She paused, thought over what she knew of him so far, and said, “Never mind. I don’t think I need to know anything quite that sad in the middle of a perfectly nice evening.”
“Ignoring the truth doesn’t make it any less real.”
He took his hand away, leaving her missing the soothing rasp of his thumb on the back of her hand. Sharply aware of how much she’d enjoyed having him touch her, Megan folded her hands in her lap and did her best to forget the sensation.
What else could she do? It was beyond foolish to want closeness this much, especially with a man like Gabriel. Beyond reason, when she knew perfectly well no one could be relied upon to keep that c
loseness alive.
After a moment, he propped his elbow on the table, put his head in his hand, and asked, “Did your father bring you here, like you asked?”
His interested gaze invited her to go on with her story. Somehow, the hardness that had appeared in his expression over the notion of sharing fairy tales had disappeared, too. An interrogation technique, probably. Honed at the side of Allan Pinkerton himself. She ought to be wary, Megan knew. But looking at the man across the table from her, she found it hard to muster the defenses she needed.
It was funny how the tension between them could rise and fall like this. Sparring with Gabriel Winter was like trying to swim upstream in an arroyo. However much you thought you were getting where you wanted to go, however hard you kicked and fought and swam, you still wound up at the same bend in the stream you’d started from.
Why hadn’t the Pinkerton agency sent her a man as placid as the waters of Silver Lake to deal with? Instead, she had this man who seemed peaceful on the outside…but on the inside, had all the tranquility of river water over rocks.
She gazed up at him, determined not to betray her struggles. “No, he didn’t bring me here that day. There was a load of lumber to be brought to the station, or wagon wheels, or something—I’m not quite sure. Whatever it was, we had to head straight back home without stopping.”
Megan remembered jouncing over the miles of road between Tucson and Kearney station, bawling so hard she’d nearly gotten her seven-year-old self tumbled out of their buckboard wagon in her inattention. Her father had snatched her back by the ruffle on her best Sunday dress, and set her beside him again without a word of rebuke. He’d given her his handkerchief to wipe her tears with instead—and looked as though he’d wanted to use it himself.
She hadn’t understood the reasons for his sadness then. Now she did, and felt all the sorrier for it.
“You must have been disappointed,” Gabriel remarked.
Megan glanced away from his sympathetic expression. Her tale had turned hard enough to tell, without his pity to cope with, too. “I was fit to be tied. For weeks I needled him, trying to make papa go back into town and visit the Celestial Kitchen. I wanted to see it on the inside, and I wasn’t going to quit until I did.”
“Imagine that. You not quitting.”
Sitting a little straighter, she fluttered her fan toward him. “Laugh all you want. It worked. My father brought me here only a few weeks later, and we’ve been coming here every year on tax day ever since.”
His expression turned contemplative, as though he’d guessed there was more to the story—but wasn’t sure what it was. After a few minutes, Gabriel asked, “Were you satisfied, once you got inside?”
“No.”
He laughed. “No? All that caterwauling for nothing?”
“Not exactly.” Mimicking him, Megan propped her elbow on the table, then leaned her head against the palm of her hand. “You see, one of the station hands had a book. The Celestial Atlas, it was called, and it had the most wondrous pictures of constellations in it.” She paused, remembering the striking images of the Gemini twins, the crab, Cassiopeia, and all the others, drawn in bold white against a night-sky black paper background. “I must have looked at that book for hours. I would have slept with it beneath my pillow, if I could have, but Addie wouldn’t let me.”
“Your station’s cook.”
It wasn’t a question. Chilled to recall the many things Gabriel most likely knew about her family, Megan raised her head and got on with finishing her story. Either this would work, or it wouldn’t. Either this would remind him of the goodness in the world, or not. She had to try.
“Yes. Anyway, after so long looking at that Celestial Atlas book, I was plumb certain there would be stars in here—” Feeling wistful, she waved her hands in the air to illustrate. “—everywhere. Just like magic.”
“No. Just like the book.”
Giving him a sharp-eyed look, Megan nodded. “Just like the book,” she agreed. What had made her hope he would understand the magic, the whimsy, she’d once dreamed of finding? “I was too young to know that sometimes ‘celestial’ meant a particular thing had come from China—”
“—and not necessarily the heavens.”
“Yes.”
He sat back in his chair. “Too bad you got the Chinaman’s version of heaven, instead of a little girl’s.”
“That was exactly what I thought, at the time.” With a start, Megan realized he did comprehend part of what she’d been hoping for, after all. Surprise uncurled inside her, taking shape someplace beside those shivery feelings his kiss had caused before. “But I was wrong.”
Gabriel quirked his eyebrow, then absently leaned forward and picked up one of the empty porcelain rice bowls from their table’s center. He turned it in his hands, staring down at it while he listened to her speak.
“Wrong in what way?” he asked.
“Wrong in not believing the Celestial Kitchen could be what I wanted. Wrong in not believing that someone loved me well enough to make it come true, somehow.”
He didn’t understand. She could see it in the lazy progress the delicate bowl still made from hand to hand, in the casual bend of his head as he watched it move. Maybe no one had ever tried stealing the heavens for Gabriel, and that was what lent that wintery cast to his heart.
She went on: “But my father did love me well enough. On the second time I came here, he and Hop Kee explained to me that we had dined at the wrong table the time before—and they brought me right here to this table instead.”
Thumping her palms atop the smooth linen tablecloth between them, Megan issued him her most challenging look.
He, being a Pinkerton man—and too mule-headed for his own good—only frowned. “So?”
“So this is where the heavens and China come together. And seeing it was what made me decide to always believe first—no matter how wrong everything might seem to be. Look.”
She reached to touch his shoulder, gesturing with her other hand toward the ceiling. Postponing the revelation for herself, she watched Gabriel closely as he turned his face upward.
The reflection of the stars cast a glow on his image. Only cut-tin, and hand-fashioned at that, they sparkled from the ceiling directly above their table and no other. They gleamed in quantities too numerous for a little girl to count, and brought the celestial wonder she’d yearned for straight to a bachelor Chinaman’s restaurant in the heart of the Tucson presidio.
“My papa cut out every one of them himself,” Megan told Gabriel, “and he and Mr. Kee nailed them up just in time for my second visit here. They brought the heavens down to meet me.”
Memories of the awe she’d felt on that long-ago day returned, and Megan made no attempt to hold them back. The tears they brought to her eyes were needful ones, no matter how bittersweet they felt today.
Across the table, Gabriel’s watery image only looked upward, filled with a stillness she hadn’t glimpsed before. It was impossible to tell if he felt the same magic she had.
“There are eighty-nine of them.” Surreptitiously, she dabbed the tears from her eyes and sniffed. “I learned to count right in this chair, squinting up at my stars until I’d summed up every one.”
Her papa had sworn she’d turn herself stone-blind before learning to tally such high numbers all by herself. But Megan had known better. And just as long as Joseph Kearney had stayed across from her at the table, with his pipe and his cherry tobacco and his copy of the Weekly Arizonan, she’d had the courage to keep trying. And she’d succeeded in the end.
Just as she intended to triumph over Gabriel Winter.
Surely he couldn’t remain unmoved in the face of all this. Smiling to herself, Megan transferred her gaze from the tin stars overhead to Gabriel.
“So you see? All I needed was a little faith, all along.” She laid aside her fan, wishing he would say something, anything, that would reveal how her China heavens had affected him. “And now I have it. Whenever I start to
feel my faith in life waver, I come here to Hop Kee’s. Somehow just seeing all those stars again sets everything a little bit straighter.”
She cleared her throat against the tears threatening to choke off her voice, and added, as fiercely as she could, “So what do you have to say to that, agent Winter?”
In response, Gabriel reached across the table. He slipped his hand inside his suit coat—the same suit coat still wrapped warmly around her shoulders—and wormed his fingers around the inside pocket sewn within. Megan went dead-still, partly fearing the brush of his fingers against her, and partly anticipating it. A moment later, he took out a men’s linen handkerchief.
He gave it to her, then stood. “I’d say it’s too bad I didn’t come here on tax day.” He watched her from his position beside the table, looking darker than ever before—and twice as immovable. “I’d have found your father already, and not wasted all this time talking.”
Shock made her fingers clench on the handkerchief he’d offered. “What?”
“You heard me.” Hard as carved marble, he put on his hat and held out his hand to help her from her chair. “Dry your eyes. We’re leaving. I have a job to do.”
Megan stared at his outstretched hand, feeling like slapping it away. Always gentlemanly, Gabriel Winter was—even while twisting the knife into her heart. Battered with sudden despair, she closed her eyes at the realization of what his behavior meant.
Her ploy hadn’t worked. Hadn’t softened him, hadn’t taken an ounce from the freight-wagon’s weight of cynicism he carried, hadn’t furthered her cause in the least. She’d revealed one of her most cherished memories to him…and somehow, had hardened the Pinkerton man against her still further. What was she supposed to do now?
Gabriel wasn’t waiting for her to decide. With an impatient exhalation of breath, he tugged her to her feet.
“Take heart, sugar,” he said, oblivious to the twisted handkerchief Megan hurled at his chest. “When your papa gets there, maybe you can paste up stars in the jailhouse for him.”
