Connie Brockway

by Anything For Love

  “If we ain’t got no spur line, we ain’t got no way to get stuff up here and that means we ain’t got nothin’ fer no one to buy.”

  “Yup.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  Harry didn’t have an answer. He rolled onto his stomach, scratched his rump, and peered out the window again. Noble was gone.

  “We’ll end up going back to Dubuque!” Anton bellowed tragically.

  Harry’s eyes glazed over. Dubuque. No liquor on Sundays, women holding their noses if you didn’t wash every month, little kids throwing spitballs at you. Dubuque meant giving up every wondrous aspect of the marvelous life Harry and Anton lived.

  Had lived for seven years, ever since Uncle Zeb keeled over dead, right here on the front step of the Grundy Mercantile. Big, ugly old Uncle Zeb.

  Harry could almost see the dear old fart lying there. He’d been stiff as a board by noon, a funny look cemented on his ancient face for all eternity. It was like he’d been hanging on for years, just waiting on Anton and him to appear in order to die blissfullike

  Old, dead Zeb. Old . . . dead . . . man.

  Whooping with joy, Harry Grundy sprang from his bed and tore back the blanket. He wasn’t going to give up Salvage and the mercantile and whores in velvet and all this other heaven-bestowed munificence. Not without a fight!

  “Ain’t you got no privacy at all ‘round here?” Fifi LaPalma grumbled from the other side of Anton’s massive bulk.

  Harry ignored her. “I got it, Anton. I know’d what to do!”

  Chapter 14

  “Didn’t anyone else think to bring an additional deck of cards?” Cassius demanded.

  “No.” Venice sighed. They’d been traveling for three days now, and each one had seemed longer than the last. Because of her companion, Cassius Reed.

  “This will never do, never,” he fumed.

  Venice closed her eyes and counted to ten. If she had to put up with too many more of Cassius’s petty complaints, she would end up killing him. Maybe she should just drown him in that vat of macassar oil he’d insisted on bringing for his hair.

  “If you hadn’t left the cards outside your tent last night, the wind wouldn’t have blown them away,” she said reasonably. “If you’d like, I can make—”

  “First no proper bed linen, now this!” Cassius broke in, rifling through a mule’s pack. “How, might I ask, are we to entertain ourselves in this dreary place?”

  “Dreary?” Venice asked incredulously. “It’s magical! Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”

  “Beautiful? A dripping forest and a bunch of mountains?” He sniffed. “If I want to ponder the panoramic splendor of a mountainscape, I’d much rather do it from the comfort of a nice club chair in front of a painting than from a mule’s back in a rainstorm.”

  “But you wouldn’t be part of the magnificence then. You’d just be a . . . a spectator.”

  “Thank God,” Cassius replied irritably, going on to the next mule’s pack. “I’d go mindless with boredom were I forced to be part of this ‘magnificence’ for any length of time. And speaking of boredom, how are we supposed to occupy ourselves for the rest of the day?”

  “If you are looking for something to do, you might help set up camp,” Venice suggested.

  “Set up camp?” Cassius echoed in disbelief. “That’s what these bounders are being paid to do.” He flincked his hand toward Tree-Too-High and Crooked Hand.

  “They’re busy trying to get a fire going.”

  “And not a moment too soon. I declare, I am quite chilled. No fire, bloody drippy forests all around, and no decent food.” He snapped the flap down on the pack without bothering to reorganize the mess he’d made. “And nothing of value in here either. Nothing at all but some books.”

  He said the word as though it were a disease. “And this excavating equipment. I can’t believe a man as wealthy as your uncle would not include some civilized accouterments amongst his supply list.”

  Venice started refolding the pack, still bemused that Cassius thought all this splendor “boring.”

  “Hmm,” Cassius was murmuring as he sauntered toward Noble’s crate. “I wonder what McCaneaghy has in here?”

  “He said it’s some fossilized shells for my uncle,” Venice replied.

  Cassius rapped his knuckles against the wood. The crate sounded hollow.

  “I’ll wager there’s something other than rocks in here.”

  “Mr. McCaneaghy said he promised my uncle he would send up any fossils he couldn’t identify I’m sure that’s all it is.”

  Cassius’s gaze slid toward the other men. “Your uncle probably requested a . . . libation.” He mouthed the word, again jerking his head toward the Indians. “That has to be it.”

  “I don’t think so. Mr. McCaneaghy said—”

  “ ‘McCaneaghy said’!” Cassius sputtered in exasperation. “My dear woman, you must learn that you can’t trust the likes of him. He’s little better than a savage himself, living outdoors like he does.”

  “Then I must have ‘savage’ tendencies myself. I like it here.”

  “Yes. Yes. Very nice for a holiday,” Cassius said dismissively. “But that’s not what I meant. I meant that McCaneaghy is not our sort.”

  “Our sort?”

  “Noble McCaneaghy is nothing but an Irish thug from the New York slums.”

  She’d had enough. “And just what would you know about Mr. McCaneaghy, Mr. Reed?”

  Cassius’s face took on a smug mien. “I know all about him. He was at Yale the same time I was.”

  “He was?”

  “For a while, yes,” Cassius said haughtily. He sneered. “I know what you’re thinking. What would an Irish immigrant be doing at Yale? It makes a rather droll story.”

  He leaned forward. A gossipy note underlined his usual smooth tones. His eyes gleamed with the special, distinct delight of someone about to share a hurtful secret. Venice recoiled. His avidity was repulsive.

  “Noble McCaneaghy was a charity case. Some rich man’s social experiment. I would have guessed he was probably the man’s by-blow but from the atrocious accent he had when he first came to college, it was only too obvious he was right off the boat.”

  Is this the bigotry that Noble had had to endure at college? she wondered. Is this why he had left New York?

  “This man paid McCaneaghy’s way—his clothes, his apartment, his vices . . . everything! The tuition was the least of the expenditures!” Cassius leaned further forward. “Wait. It gets better.”

  “I don’t want to hear anymore,” she said severely.

  He went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “When McCaneaghy didn’t live up to expectation, his mentor had him drafted into the army.”

  “Drafted?” Venice asked. Her breath caught in her throat. “No!”

  “Yes. What else do you do with something that becomes a potential political liability?”

  “You don’t know any of this,” she said urgently, not wanting to believe it was true, already knowing that it was.

  Cassius finally realized his words were not having their desired effect. He sniffed as though offended by her disbelief. “I heard it firsthand from a clerk in the college assessor’s office. No one was supposed to know, not even McCaneaghy . . . but McCaneaghy’s unknown benefactor cut him off without a dime. He had McCaneaghy’s name sent to the conscription officers.”

  The blood rushed from Venice’s cheeks. Her father couldn’t have been capable of a betrayal of this magnitude, could he? “A lie!”

  “No.” Cassius pronounced the word with savage satisfaction. “True. Verifiable. His benefactor did cut him off and gave his name to the draft.”

  His face took on a sly, suggestive expression. “Fairly excessive measures to get rid of a failed experiment, weren’t they? I have often asked myself why would he do something so extreme, unless he arid McCaneaghy had an ‘extreme’ relationship?” Venice gasped.

  “Oh, come now,” Cassius said blandly. “It was j
ust a thought. You’re a worldly woman, Venice. You haven’t been raised in a convent.”

  “You don’t know anything!” Venice’s hands clenched and unclenched at her side. “You and your friends! Vicious-minded little boys huddling in your rooms, giggling over your sordid suppositions! Haven’t you a single shred of decency?”

  Realizing he had gone too far, Cassius stepped back before Venice’s verbal onslaught and blinked in rapid succession.

  “I am sorry to have burnt your tender ears,” he muttered.

  “You haven’t burnt my ears, you pompous ass!” Venice spat. “I am merely disgusted with myself for not realizing just how vile you are. I should have begged Noble to guide me before agreeing to your company!”

  “Begged Noble?” Cassius sputtered. “I see you were more impressed with his manly attributes than I’d thought! How long has this been going on?”

  Venice glared at him. “Fourteen years!”

  “What?”

  “Next time you spread filthy rumors, Mr. Reed, you’d best be sure of all the facts. Noble McCaneaghy lived with us when he was a boy. My father was his unknown benefactor.”

  Cassius stared, his mouth dropping open. Venice didn’t wait for a reply. She swung around and stalked away.

  “You’re sure this is an accurate map?” Cassius whispered, squinting at the crude drawing by the glow of the dying campfire.

  The Indian nodded. “Mil-Ton’s camp is half day on this trail.”

  “And it’s easy to follow? This trail, I mean?”

  The Indians exchanged dubious glances. Damn their insolence! They stood there with water dripping down their oily locks, staining their filthy buckskin shirts, and had the temerity to judge him. Him!

  “If you cannot follow this, it is better that we stay,” the short Indian said. “The white woman is Mil-Ton’s family and—”

  “You will not stay!” Cassius nearly shouted. A twig snapped behind him and he jerked around, searching the rain-veiled shadows on the edge of the firelight. Nothing. His gaze darted to Venice’s tent. No movement. She was still asleep.

  “You will not stay!” he repeated in a furious whisper. “I paid you twenty-five American dollars! Ten for this pitiful excuse of a map and fifteen to leave with Milton’s junk before morning. And you’re going to keep to your part of the bargain!”

  The tall, wooden-faced bastard just stood, gazing off into the rain. It was the short, thick-set Indian that was vacillating.

  “The woman. She is yours?” he asked.

  Who’d have thought that he, Cassius Thornton Reed, should ever stoop to persuading an Indian to do anything? Cassius bit at his nail and thought. Extreme circumstances called for extreme measures.

  “Look, she’s a wealthy society woman. My society. She wants to be alone with me. She is just too shy to tell you herself.”

  The short Indian didn’t look convinced. “Why, if she is yours, does she watch McCaneaghy with such hot eyes?”

  Cassius swore under his breath. He should have known. Any fool—even these savages—could see the way Venice panted after that Irish bastard like a bitch in heat. He struggled to control his temper.

  “Believe me, what Venice wanted from McCaneaghy she could get in five minutes. But when everything’s said and done, I’m the one she’ll end up marrying. Listen, this is no concern of yours. You don’t want any trouble. Don’t get involved. Just take the money and leave.”

  The short Indian exchanged doubtful looks with the taller one. The taller one shrugged. “It is as McCaneaghy says. The woman is not of McCaneaghy’s people. We’ll go to Mil-Ton’s camp and bring him his stuff. We will tell him where his brother’s child is.”

  “You do that.” By then, Cassius thought, it will be too late for old Milton to do anything to save his niece’s already far-from-spotless reputation.

  Without another word the Indians disappeared into the surrounding forest, as silently as the rain falling from the sky, leaving Cassius bent over, studying the map.

  It looked as if there was a stream a quarter mile from here. If he led Venice there, they could get “lost” for a couple of days and he’d still have a good idea where they were. She didn’t ever need to know that they were never farther than five miles from Milton’s camp.

  By then he was sure to have recovered her good opinion of him. He scowled. How was he to have known Leiland had been McCaneaghy’s anonymous benefactor?

  As for her father throwing McCaneaghy to the draft office, that much was true. Venice had looked laughably shocked by that bit of information. Cassius smiled bitterly. It was amazing Venice didn’t realize what her father was capable of.

  He shuddered at the thought. The consequences should Trevor Leiland ever hear that Cassius had hinted about his having an unnatural relationship with McCaneaghy made Cassius’s stomach churn. Leiland would crush him.

  He had to make sure Leiland never heard. By getting rid of these savages, he had two days in which to play the hero for Venice. He could do it. After all, just three days ago she’d called him “Cassius.”

  And if she didn’t come around by the time their “honeymoon” ended? Why then, he’d have no choice but to explain to her father the circumstances of their unchaperoned trip, intimating, of course, that the newspapers might be made privy to the unfortunate story.

  Trevor was singularly ambitious. Considering the upcoming elections, he would make sure that Venice accepted Cassius’s marriage proposal. All of New York society knew that Venice Leiland would do anything for her father’s approval.

  A gust of wind rippled the map in his hand and spat sleet into his face. Folding the map, he tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket and headed back for his tent. This just might work out better than he’d hoped.

  “Don’t despair, dear Venice, I shall deliver you from this wilderness!” Cassius said, throwing his arm out in a grand, sweeping arc. He had been making such ridiculous, theatrical gestures and issuing inflated assurances all morning.

  Venice’s eyes narrowed. He was altogether too happy at having been deserted by their guides.

  “You’re sure you haven’t any idea why Trees-Too-High and Crooked Hand left?”

  Cassius turned in the saddle, a puzzled frown on his face. “Trees-Too—? Oh! The savages. Who can say, m’dear? Most likely,” he continued in that infuriatingly artful tone, “having absconded with their ill-gotten gain they are even now riding into yet another of these mountain’s festering toss pots, seeking to barter your uncle’s equipment for ‘firewater,’ as I believe it is colloquially known.”

  Venice didn’t bother hiding her disgust.

  Cassius blinked in offense. “Primitives like those are ruled by their impulses, dear lady. They are not like us. Certainly not to be trusted.”

  “I trusted them.”

  “I know,” Cassius returned sadly. “And look what it got you. I shudder—absolutely shudder—to think what horrors might have befallen you were I not here to ensure your welfare.”

  Nothing, Venice was quite sure, nearly as horrible as having to endure another hour of Cassius’s company.

  She tugged the brim of her hat lower over her ears and squinted up at the sky. Icy droplets stung her face. Clouds the color of new bruises churned on a lead-colored canvas. Just last night, Crooked Hand had said a bad storm was brewing in the west and had warned her that they should not travel today.

  For Trees-Too-High and Crooked Hand to just up and leave in the middle of a rainstorm in the dead of night didn’t make sense. And yet, that’s exactly what had happened.

  She’d stalked to the sputtering campfire this morning, determined to ignore Cassius. But he had greeted her with a grave demeanor and the unfathomable information that their guides—and their pack mules—had disappeared while they slept.

  Misreading her bewilderment, Cassius had haughtily assured her that they were well rid of the “bounders.” He was adept at reading the landscape. They need only ride south to find a stream that they could fo
llow.

  He hadn’t listened to her ensuing protest. Instead, he’d pulled down the tents, cramming all their equipment into two enormous canvas bags and throwing them onto his long-suffering mule. Then, he’d trotted off, heading into the woods.

  With all of her belongings on Cassius’s mule, Venice had had no choice but to follow—which she had been doing for hours.

  “See?” Cassius called, pointing ahead. Venice squinted through the rain.

  He had halted his mule at the head of a clearly defined trail. It plummeted to the floor of a narrow valley, to a rushing stream sixty feet below them. From her vantage, she could see that the stream entered the valley through a rift in the canyon wall a mile upstream. A quarter-mile downstream it disappeared around the bend of the deepening gorge.

  “I told you not to worry, m’dear. I am here. I will protect you.” Cassius touched his index finger to his nose. “How fortunate for you that you have a capable man on whom to rely. A woman needs a man to support her, don’t you think? A captain to guide her through life’s little squalls. A patient teacher willing to instruct her. A noble mentor whom she can revere . . .” His voiced lowered suggestively. “A lover?”

  She made a choking sound.

  “Don’t worry. I am a sophisticated man. I am able to overlook your little infatuation with that Irish upstart. I am certain that having indulged your—sense of adventure shall we say?—you will be more appreciative of a man of your own class.”

  He didn’t wait to hear the growl erupting deep from Venice’s throat. He flipped back around and swatted his mule on the rump, sending the unbalanced creature staggering down the incline.

  Venice didn’t follow him. She couldn’t. Her rage upon hearing of her father’s treatment of Noble had become numbing anguish.

  No wonder Noble had never come back to the Park Avenue address. Now his attitude, the hot and cold, the pull and push, made sense. Trevor had betrayed him, and now Noble found himself attracted to his betrayer’s daughter.

  Trevor Leiland, knight-errant of the lower classes, Venice thought bitterly. She wouldn’t have blamed Noble if he hated all the Leilands! And she could certainly understand this distrust of them. He would be a fool not to be suspicious of her.