Delilah's Flame (43 page)

“Lilah says you can come up now.”

Tabor’s head snapped forward; he hadn’t noticed Sarah at the threshold. “How is she?”

“She’s fine. The girl’s got spunk. I told you that. It would take more than a run-in with a polecat to get her down.”

Tabor finished his whiskey, knowing that if Sarah had been counting she would say he’d had one glass too many. He thought it would take a few more to make him happy with what he’d decided to do. Lilah was here only because he had forced her to be here. From the day he’d seen her on the stairs at Damon House she had wanted nothing to do with him. She had tried everything in her power to keep away from him, and failed. Granted, he had known that all along, but in his bullheaded way had refused to yield to her wants and insisted on satisfying his own.

The least he could do now was let her go without any trouble. A man who let the woman he loved be hurt the way Lilah had been hurt didn’t deserve to have her. She had a life without him, a good man waiting to become her husband. It was what she wanted, and he never should have stepped in and tried to change it. He would go to her now and tell her she was free to go home and that she never need fear anything from him.

Sarah left him, understanding he had things to sort out with himself. A few minutes later she heard him climbing the stairs. Sarah headed for the kitchen. The last loaf of bread in the house was almost gone and she had always found bread-making an activity good for calming the nerves. Whatever those two had to say to each other needed no interference from her.

“Lilah...” Tabor knocked lightly.

“Come in,” she said, shutting the door of the empty wardrobe. Her trunk, which had been stored in a corner of the bedroom, sat open. All around it were her personal articles and clothing.

Her heart cried out when she saw him. She wanted to fly to his arms and tell him all the things she felt. But when he stopped and stood stiffly in the doorway, her confidence wavered. She gave a faltering smile and tried to cover her disappointment by busily dropping things in her trunk.

Torn, Tabor searched for a smile. “You must be feeling better to be getting about like that.”

She glanced at him without stopping her work. “Sarah says the sooner I get back to normal, the sooner I’ll get over what happened.”

“Sarah’s usually right.” He stepped on into the room and closed the door behind him. “I’m sure you’re anxious to get home.” Sorrow settled like a deadweight in his chest. She was still pale, and in spite of what Sarah said, he had his doubts she ought to be out of bed.

“I think I ought to.” Forgetting she had a nightdress draped over her arm, Lilah stopped packing and stood staring at him a moment, then painfully went on. “My debt to you will have to be settled in another way.”

He felt as if he’d been struck with a whip. “Forget about the debt. I never should have held you to it to begin with. You offered me fair payment. A gentleman would have taken that.”

If a lady had offered it. She silently finished the statement for him. But when the offer came from a notorious woman, a man didn’t feel obligated to do the chivalrous thing.

“I’ll still pay you what the horse is worth.”

“No,” Tabor insisted. “The horse is yours, free and clear. You don’t owe me anything.” He hesitated a few seconds, then went ahead and mentioned what was bothering him. “There is one thing I’d like to know. Whether or not you tell me is up to you. I won’t insist.”

“Go on,” she said.

“When Delilah spoke to me in that bar in Yuba City, she already knew who I was and had a reason for searching me out. I want to know what that reason was.”

“I didn’t...” She grabbed for a lie, but when his eyes locked with hers, they sent shivers through her and she couldn’t go on.

“Tell me the truth, Lilah,” Tabor pleaded. “I need to know. When you invited me to spend the evening with you, I took it for granted it was because you wanted a man in your bed. Evidently that was the farthest thing from your mind that night. Tell me why you wanted me alone that evening, and, I guess, why you took those other men to your rooms.”

Lilah’s pale cheeks flamed red. These were the answers she had hoped he wouldn’t demand of her. She could easily make up a story that would satisfy him. But the burden of all the lies she had told pressed on her like the weight of the world. She wanted to tell Tabor the truth. Could she do it without revealing the treachery of his father?

“I’ve tried to explain,” she said as steadily as she could. “I mistook you for another man, one who had wronged me. I wanted to get even.”

Tabor looked at her incredulously. “By having me—him—jailed on concocted charges.”

Lilah sighed, seeing he wouldn’t be satisfied until he learned more. “Being falsely jailed isn’t nearly as serious as what prompted me to seek revenge.”

Tabor swiftly crossed the room. “The other men you entertained, were you getting even with them too?”

“Some of them,” she answered, closing the trunk lid and seating herself on the ribbed back of it. “Others were more or less decoys. I really do enjoy a game of poker.”

“An honest one?” He quirked a brow at her, remembering her skill at cheating.

A slight smile appeared on her lips. “Those aren’t nearly as much fun.”

“I take it poker is all you played with those other men.”

Now Lilah’s entire face reddened. “Why, no,” she said in haste, suddenly finding herself back on the same old track and dependent on a lie to save her. “Some of them were my lovers.”

“I see.” Tabor shuffled away a few feet, his back to Lilah. He had asked for the truth and hoped she would give it. But for some reason, she still didn’t think she could trust him with it. That fact was one that told him what was in her heart. If Lilah cared about him, she would tell him the truth. Hiding his disappointment, Tabor turned to face her.

“I’m sure you understand,” she went on.

Tabor nodded. “So the truth is, you play at being Delilah because it gives you a chance to pick and choose your lovers.”

“No!” Appalled at the way it sounded when he said it, Lilah answered too quickly. “I became Delilah only to get even with the men who wronged me.”

“Couldn’t the law do that for you?”

“No. There was never any proof of what they had done. I couldn’t have proved their crime in a court. But they were guilty. I was there and I know.”

Again he raised a dark brow. “I’m not the one to say there aren’t times a person has to be judge and jury. Out here that may be the only law there is. I’m not sure I would have let Chapman live if he hadn’t gone for his gun. No man has a right to do that to a woman.”

“I’ll never forget what you did for me,” Lilah whispered as her conscience gnawed at her. This man had saved her life. Twice. Maybe he didn’t love her but he had saved her from Chapman. In her heart she knew he would have done the same for Sarah or Millie Franklin or any other person who needed him. Knowing that only made deceiving him seem worse.

Tabor shook his head slowly. “What I can’t understand about what you’re telling me is why Clement Damon wouldn’t have found a way to punish men who had wronged his daughter.”

Lilah looked him straight in the eye. This time she had to abandon her path of lies. “He would have,” she said. “But the men I wanted punished harmed my father, not me.” Her voice quivered. “Because my father dared to work Chinese laborers and pay them fairly, those men drove a herd of horses through his mining camp. Many of his men were killed. Papa was trampled. I saw it happen.”

Tabor couldn’t speak for a few seconds. So that was it. That was what had happened that hurt her so much. “I’m sorry, Lilah. I didn’t know. I didn’t know you had seen what happened to your father.” His heart wept for her. At last he understood. She must have been a mere child then, and all the years since, she had been haunted by what she had seen. He thought of the pain building inside her all that time. Poor, sweet Lilah.

“There were six of them,” Lilah said. “And it was planned. Maybe they didn’t know my father would try to outrun the horses to save me, but they were glad about what happened to him. Afterward he was too ill to do anything about it. He had to send Dinah and me to Aunt Emily in London. He was afraid for us to stay in California. You know how mining towns were. They had their own law and it was mostly that whoever survived was right. Papa never tried to get even. He put all of himself into building the Damon enterprises and believed a higher law would take care of those six who almost killed him.”

“And you decided to be that higher law.”

“Yes,” Lilah said. “I never forgot what those men did and what they said or what they took away from him. I swore they would pay for killing our friends and for maiming Papa. I became Delilah to do it.

Tabor remembered the ruckus down the hall the time he had taken the room next to Delilah’s in Crescent City. He remembered the newspaper account of what had happened there. “You were responsible for Newell going to jail. He was one of them, wasn’t he?”

“Newell was one of them,” Lilah confirmed. “He was behind the attack.”

“Did you get them all?”

Lilah hesitated. “Most of them. There are two more, brothers. I’ll do one more tour as Delilah and the Penns will wind up where they belong.”

Tabor’s brows flickered. He didn’t think Lilah realized she had mentioned the name of the brothers. He tucked the information away. “I guess I can understand your reasons. A woman couldn’t very well call out the men responsible. In your place I might have done the same thing.”

“I’m glad you understand,” she said softly.

“I understand your reasons. I understand why you needed another identity to carry out your plans. What I don’t understand is why you got me confused with one of those six men.”

Lilah choked back the lump in her throat. “One of the men was named Stanton. I’d hired a detective to investigate but I didn’t give him time to verify that you were the right man. I
thought
I had the right person, I got in a hurry to be done with one more of the six. I’m sorry about the mistake,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t realize the full scope of it. “There must be many men in California named Stanton.”

“Not so many,” he said as a sense of dread filled him. Things were coming together in his head that he hadn’t connected before. He had been in Yuba City that day by chance. Lilah’s detective couldn’t have known he would be there at that time. The Stanton Lilah expected to find there was another man. He was a worn-out prospector, an old drunk who lived up in the hills, a man who had abandoned what humanity had to offer, a man whose dying thought was the debt he owed Clement Damon.

Tabor Randall Stanton.
His father
.

Torn with conflicting emotions, Tabor could only stare silently at the lovely but sad-faced woman before him. Once again he had discovered another dimension of Lilah Damon. He held one more piece of the puzzle. The picture was quite different from that of a flame-haired temptress in a Yuba City hotel room. That night and that woman seemed a lifetime away.

Lilah. Delilah. His mind sped through his numerous perceptions of her. Onstage she was half-devil, half-angel, striking fire in a man’s loins and devotion in his heart. Across the table from her in a poker game he had decided Delilah was a stylish seductress who got a thrill out of beating a man at cards before she bedded him. When he’d realized she never intended sleeping with him, he had figured her for a man-hater.

Later, at Damon House, she was someone else entirely, a rich young woman bored with her tame society life. It was that Lilah Damon he had thought needed a lesson about trifling in a world where she didn’t belong. Only Lilah wasn’t that shallow girl any more than she was the torchy Delilah. She was a little girl who had witnessed a terrible deed done to her father and as a woman had been unable to live with the injustice of what she had seen.

To right that wrong, Lilah had gambled, losing both her pristine reputation and her life of ease. He had to admire that deep courage even if he didn’t like her taking such boundless chances. His mind leapt to the brave girl whose spirit never broke under Chapman’s torture. She was made of strong stuff, as Sarah said. Now he understood why she was so adamant about keeping her actions secret from her father. With Clement’s health as bad as Lilah reported, knowing she had confronted those dangerous men might cause him a heart attack. And yet Tabor understood that for her ever to lay that matter to rest, all six of those men had to pay for their crime against her father.

How could she even stand to look at him? One of those men had been his father, and all this time she hadn’t told him.

“Tabor...” Worried because he had been silent so long, Lilah called his name softly. He knew. She could look at his face and tell that he knew. “I’m very sorry you had to find out about your father. Perhaps it will help a little if I tell you he wasn’t the worst of them. He wanted to help Papa and me that night. The others wouldn’t let him.”

The shock of what she was saying hit Tabor like an earthquake. His father, a good man who for a long unexplained reason had turned his back on everyone and everything he loved. Now he knew that reason. He recalled the things Clement had said about his father and the things Sarah had said about both men. It all added up. His father had participated in running down innocent men because of someone’s hatred for another color of skin. Afterward the guilt had torn him apart. Maybe Stan had thought he was unworthy of the ones he loved. Tabor guessed he would never know just what had happened to his father after that night.

He looked at Lilah with baleful eyes. “You knew when I came to Damon House that I was the wrong man. That’s why you fainted when you saw me.”

“No,” Lilah confessed. “When I saw you in the hall with Papa, I still thought you were the right Stanton. Only after I talked to Papa did I learn you were actually...”

“His son.”

“Yes.” Lilah sighed softly. “I was quite upset at what I had done. I planned on finding a way to repay you for your losses—short of returning the Admiral. I was selfish about that. The stallion made Papa happy, and for that reason I wanted to keep him.”