Her Wyoming Man (17 page)

“But not our lovely Gabrielle. Oh no, not our rose among the thorns. Not our musically gifted
lady,
the one reserved for only the richest client. No, not our beautiful French
whore.”

The word left stunned silence in its wake.

Lena laughed then. An odious sound that made the bystanders visibly uncomfortable. “You’re all so easily duped.” She raked a glance from one shocked face to the next. “You brought a wagonload of whores into your uppity little town! All the way from Dodge City, Kansas, yes-sir-ee, where the cowpokes never stop piling in on Saturday night and the wind never stops blowing up dust, brought them directly to your doorstep. And you married us!” she added gleefully, then laughed again.

She rounded on Nathan and looked him in the eye. “You, Mr. Big Shot Councilman, married yourself a whore.”

Her words sank into Nathan’s mind, swimming about in confusion, seeking verification…while Rita and Celeste glared at Lena…and a buzz moved through the crowd. He sought Ella and found she’d moved closer, but still stood a dozen yards away, frozen to the spot, staring at him with a look of dread that drove shards of unease into his heart.

A hundred little pieces of a bigger puzzle swirled into place and snagged his awareness. Ella had no skills in cooking or sewing or other domestic chores. She had no experience in anything a young woman is normally taught. She could play the piano like an angel and speak fluent French, over which he’d always marveled. She’d never been timid, never shied away from him…in fact she’d initiated and sought physical encounters.

She’d been a warm and enthusiastic bed partner.

No wonder she’d been so willing. No wonder she lacked restraint if she was no stranger to intimacies between men and women. He’d been so foolishly naive and blindly enamored that he’d imagined her desires were all because of her feelings for him.

Rita finally caught Lena by the arm and led her aside, where another woman joined them.

Paul went to Celeste, wrapping his arm around her supportively, and the two of them studied Nathan’s reaction.

People on all sides spoke in hushed tones as he strode toward where Ella stood, her blue eyes wide and full of fear. He stared into those eyes and everything else faded into the background. He wanted her to tell him it wasn’t so. He wanted it more than he wanted his next breath.

He couldn’t bear for everything he believed about her to be a lie. Fixing her with a harsh stare, he demanded to know, “Is it true?”

Chapter Twenty

E
lla stood trembling, but faced him. “Yes,” she answered. “I was going to tell you.”

He stared at her, his world collapsing inward. “What were you going to tell me?”

“The truth,” she said. “All of it.”

“And exactly what is the truth?” he asked.

The crowd had dispersed, many of them gathering their children and their belongings and heading for home. The musicians packed their instruments. Nathan and Ella were soon left standing alone.

“I was going to tell you that there never was a Miss Haversham’s Academy for Young Women,” she said. “We made that up after we saw the newspaper and decided to make a run for it. Celeste had already answered the ad. The rest of us joined up with her.”

“And you weren’t from Illinois.”

She shook her head. “I grew up in Dodge City. In a parlor house run by Madame Fairchild.”

“The first time we were together, you weren’t a virgin.”

She locked her gaze with his, and a heart-stopping moment passed before she said, “No.”

The night air threatened to suffocate him. His chest hurt. Nathan turned toward the tent where his children were, vaguely aware of her behind him. He woke them, picking up Robby and taking Grace by the hand and setting off toward their street.

Christopher mumbled sleepy questions behind him, but Nathan didn’t really hear them. Ella must have been back there, too, but he only turned once to make sure his son was keeping up.

A hundred confusing thoughts tumbled through his head, and Lena’s words kept coming back to him. Accusations he’d expected his wife to deny. Expected someone to deny. Accusations he needed someone to deny.

She hadn’t.

She’d looked at him like someone who’d had all their dirty laundry spilled out in public and who wanted to run the other way. She’d looked guilty.

He shifted Robby on his shoulder.

Mrs. Shippen heard them arrive and helped lead the children up the stairs. “Will you see them to bed?” he asked her.

“Yes, of course.”

Without another word or acknowledging that Ella had accompanied him home, he loped down the stairs and headed out the door, snapping it shut behind him.

Ella stared after Nathan. Her chest ached so badly, she couldn’t draw a breath.

What had she done to him? It was bad enough she’d lied and hurt him, but she’d just destroyed his standing in the community and his political aspirations.

She stepped out onto the porch and stared into the darkness, wondering where he’d gone. He would come back. This was his home. His children were here. His life was here.

She was the one who would have to leave.

She stumbled to the top porch stair and lowered herself to a sitting position before she collapsed. She’d never wanted anything before. She’d never dared to hope for a future or a home or a family. Hope wasn’t for women like her.

All the same she’d wanted to start fresh here.

She’d spent her youth and her young adulthood carefully guarding her mind and her heart from feeling anything…simply single-mindedly surviving the best she knew how. When Ansel had handed her that bankbook, she’d glimpsed a whole new world…and dared. Dared to leave Dodge behind and make a new life for herself.

She’d made friends. She’d discovered the joy of a family. She’d tasted freedom. She’d walked the streets of this town without ridicule or persecution.

She’d fallen in love.

She’d been utterly foolish.

Freedom and safety had been an illusion. Her weeks here had been merely a life based on deception. What had she imagined would happen? Had she thought no one would ever be the wiser?

Perhaps if she’d just smartened up and told Nathan sooner. Told him herself. Maybe he could have accepted the truth if it hadn’t been thrown in his face in front of all of his friends and all the voters.

Ella’s stomach lurched. She stood, ran down the stairs and around the side of the house and vomited behind the rosebushes. The looks on the people’s faces earlier that evening swam before her eyes. Shock. Revulsion. Betrayal.

She had betrayed every person she’d met in Sweetwater, every person who’d shown kindness and extended friendship. She remembered the women talking about Bess Duncan in the mercantile and how they’d considered her unworthy of shopping in their stores.

When her stomach had settled and her knees were able to carry her back up the porch stairs, she entered the house. In the kitchen, she poured cool water into a pitcher and carried it upstairs. She’d been sleeping in Nathan’s bed, but most of her things were still back in the space she now used mostly for a dressing room, so she closed herself into the first room she’d occupied upon her arrival. She removed her dress and washed up before donning a silk dressing gown and perching on the edge of the bed.

Wrapping her arms around herself, she considered how many people were affected by what Lena had done tonight. What were Rita and her liveryman husband doing at this moment? The other women and their situations crossed her mind.

The only relationship not in turmoil was Celeste and Paul’s…because she’d told him the truth. Celeste wouldn’t be welcomed back to the choir, however.

Ella thought of Betsy and Mildred and the other friends she’d made. She wouldn’t be welcomed back to the choir, either. Or to church. Or the shops. She wouldn’t be welcome period.

But what about Nathan? Would the citizens turn on him? Or would they understand he’d been as fooled as the rest of them?

Her chest hurt and her eyes burned. Wanting to disappear and escape this night, she curled up on the bed. She had nowhere to go.

Ella balled her fists, channeling her despair into anger directed at Lena for her hatefulness. Ella had never done anything to encourage the woman’s loathing or jealousy, and such spitefulness was beyond her comprehension.

Her head ached. Regret and heartache consumed her. Her foolish hopes mocked her now. She wasn’t worthy of Nathan. She would never be an asset to him or be held in esteem. Because of her past, she held no value whatsoever.

A hundred images and sounds flitted through her memory, snippets of days they’d spent together, things the children had said, moments she’d held so precious and dear…all part of the grand illusion—the world she’d fabricated out of lies and deception. None of it had actually been hers. None of it had been real.

She must have fallen asleep, because a soft knock at her door startled her. With a quick intake of breath, she sat up. “Come in.”

Nathan entered, closing the door behind him and moving to stand at the foot of the bed.

Chapter Twenty-One

H
er head still ached, and she worked to orient herself. The events of the evening came rushing back over Ella like a frigid tidal wave. She was thankful for the darkness that hid her shame, because she couldn’t bear for him to look on her and she couldn’t face the hurt in his eyes.

He wrapped a hand around the bedpost.

Her heart hammered.

“Is anyone looking for you?” he asked.

She rolled the question around in her head for a few seconds. “What do you mean?”

“Earlier you said that you and the other women decided to make a run for it. Meaning someone wanted to keep you in Dodge City? Meaning someone might not have been happy that you left?”

Ella held her gown tightly wrapped around her to calm her nerves. She knew how to tamp down emotion. Distancing herself was how she’d survived for as long as she could remember. It had only been here—with this man, with his children—that she’d allowed herself to experience feelings, and now her lapse in judgment had come back to bite her. Hard.

“Madame Fairchild kept us in seclusion,” she answered. “If we had any shopping to do, we were escorted.”

She would tell him what she needed to say, and she would do so without a humiliating display. She took a deep breath. “We were told that the bars on the windows were for our protection, but we didn’t have the option of leaving. We were Madame Fairchild’s livelihood—and a pretty good one. We didn’t see the money, of course. She handled all that and deducted our expenses.”

Her mouth was dry, and she swallowed with difficulty. “But there’s no way for her to learn where we are. Celeste got the train tickets secretively. Rita dosed the woman with laudanum, got the keys, and we sneaked out in the middle of the night. By the time she would have wakened the next day, we were long gone. Trains come and go from Dodge all the time, and we divided up so we wouldn’t be noticed.”

He stood without moving. Without speaking.

She thought back to his question. “So, no. No one is looking for us. For me. If I believed there was any possibility of drawing danger to your home or your children, I wouldn’t be here.”

“You deny nothing that Lena said this evening?”

Of course he wanted her to deny it. He didn’t want to believe he’d married a woman from a parlor house and brought her into his home. “I was going to tell you,” she told him again. “I’d been thinking about it, but today I decided for certain. I just needed the opportunity.”

“You decided today? Why was that?”

“Well…Celeste shared that she had told Paul. At first I was mortified, but then I realized that basing our marriage on lies was dishonorable, and you are an honorable man. You deserved the truth.”

“And that never occurred to you
before
we were married? You never considered how that one detail might damage anything we could ever hope to build together?”

She deserved his anger. He was hurt. She’d done something inexcusable. “No.”

“No?” he asked. “Just like that. No?”

“Would you have married me if you’d known?”

She couldn’t make out his expression in the semidarkness, but he stood erect, still grasping the bedpost.

Nathan thought back to the night he’d met her. His fascination with and attraction to her had been overwhelming—and decidedly out of character. The council had encouraged him to take a wife to improve his chances of election, not destroy them. “No,” he replied. “I wouldn’t have.”

“Well, there you have it,” she said. “The whole point of pretending to have come from a young women’s academy was to increase our chances for making marriages. It seemed like a good plan at the time. The only solution really.”

He wanted to believe she’d been about to tell him the truth. But she hadn’t been forthcoming. Now, after the fact, it was difficult to believe anything she said. Their marriage had been a lie. An act.

He was consumed with thoughts of her with other men. Countless other men, no doubt. She obviously took him for a complete fool, a besotted sop blinded by her beauty and charm and oblivious to all the signs that he should have been able to read. Shouldn’t he?

“You must have had a good laugh at my expense.” At last some of the anger seeped into his words. “When I think of the way I’ve behaved around you, it makes me sick. My concern over your sensibilities. My reluctance to take you to my bed too soon for fear of souring you on the physical aspect of marriage. And you let me carry on. While all along you’d slept with a hundred men.”

“It wasn’t like that,” she said. “And there were never a hundred men.”

“I doubt you kept track.”

“A tally wasn’t necessary,” she told him.

He would never sleep. How had she been able to fall into mindless slumber so easily? The fact that she had angered him further. He was too angry to hold a civil conversation. And he didn’t want to wake the children.

“We’ll talk tomorrow. Later today, rather.” It was Sunday morning already. He wouldn’t be going to church this day. The thought sickened him even more. He didn’t want to face the reactions of his peers or the townspeople after last night’s humiliating escapade.

“I’ll leave,” she told him. “Just give me time to pack my things, and I’ll be out of here.”

The thought was enough to send him into a panic, though for the life of him he didn’t know why. “Where would you go?”

“I don’t know, but I have funds. I can stay at the hotel. I’ll buy a train ticket and be gone.”

“To do what with yourself? Go back to Dodge City?”

“No. Never.”

“Another city then. What kind of work could you find? Or would you be looking for another husband to take care of you?”

Her catch of breath was audible in the stillness of the shadowed room. He’d wounded her, but it didn’t feel good. He didn’t want to lash out. That’s why he wanted to postpone conversation until he’d more tightly wrapped his anger.

“You have nowhere else to go. You will stay here while we work this out.”

Work it out? Surely she was wondering what that meant, because he didn’t have the faintest idea.

She said nothing. What could she say? He was right. He was the wronged party in this situation, and he darned well meant to have the final say in everything that happened from here on out. He was finished with being her play toy.

“I will ask Mrs. Shippen to take the children with her for the morning. You and I will talk then.”

“Yes, of course,” she answered meekly.

He turned and left her room then, pulling the door soundly shut. Silently, he entered the nursery and observed the children as they slept, oblivious to the unpleasantness that had entered their household and now threatened to shake things even more.

Tucking the sheet around Grace’s shoulders, he pictured the way she looked at Ella. He remembered the excitement in his wife’s voice when she spoke of Grace’s conversations with the dolls. She might be a liar and a—he paused at even the thought of the word—prostitute, but she had made a difference in the lives of his children.

Anger welled anew, this time over the fact that she’d allowed his vulnerable offspring to grow attached to her. They’d experienced enough loss in their young lives without her thoughtless antics.

What was he thinking—that Ella would indeed leave? The prospect made his chest ache with dread. What if there was no other solution? Right now he couldn’t think of one.

Nathan smoothed Christopher’s hair, pressed his nose to Robby’s cheek and kissed his forehead before leaving the nursery. In his room, he lit a lamp, removed his boots and shirt and washed in the tepid water left from earlier that evening.

Even after lying down, his brain wouldn’t shut off. He thought of how Ella disliked being called beautiful. The fact that she found compliments offensive took on new meaning, and he tried to grasp the reasons behind her aversion. No doubt plenty of men had praised her beauty.

He remembered the jewelry she’d worn to dinner parties and while hosting their own gathering. It hadn’t made sense that someone from a girl’s academy possessed such lovely gems, but it made perfect sense for a high-class working woman to own them. The necklaces and earbobs might have been part of her wardrobe or she may have received them from her admirers.

He visualized the other women: Celeste, Rita, Lena…. While they were attractive, none were stunning beauties like Ella.

Gabrielle,
he corrected himself. He’d heard that name several times now.

She must have been the most desirable woman in that parlor house. In that whole town for that matter.

The lamp was still burning, and Nathan studied the ceiling. He worked to picture Deborah, but his faded memories brought up the image in their photograph. She’d been pretty enough, with lustrous shining hair and a nice smile. His recollections brought to mind innocence and purity. Sometimes he’d felt as though his desire for her was a shameful thing. She’d never enjoyed intimacies, and had refused to discuss lovemaking or her aversion.

Ella, on the other hand, had been a willing and enthusiastic partner, showing preferences and inquiring of his. What man wouldn’t have been delighted to have married a woman—not only exquisitely beautiful—but an unabashedly eager bed partner?

How many men had enjoyed those same delights?

Somehow he dozed for minutes or an hour and woke with thoughts of Paul Adams foremost in his aching head. Celeste had told the man and he’d carried on with being married to her—and obviously quite happily.

He dozed again and woke before dawn to dress and slip down the hallway. The door to the room where Mrs. Shippen slept when she stayed the night was already open, the bed neatly made, so he stole down the stairs.

He found the woman in the kitchen, drinking a cup of tea.

“I have a favor to ask of you this morning,” he said, and then explained that he and Mrs. Lantry—his tongue tripped over the name—wouldn’t be attending church. He would be grateful if she could take the children with her for the morning.

The woman was happy to oblige, and together they woke and dressed the three of them. Nathan hurried out to secure them a buggy before hugging and kissing each child and waving a goodbye.

Ella had heard the sounds of movement, signaling her that morning had arrived. A knock sounded at her door, and when she opened it, she found only a pitcher of warm water.

She washed and dressed in a green pinstriped skirt and a high-necked white blouse, shirred and edged with eyelet. She tied her hair back with a pair of trailing ribbons and added dainty earbobs.

Her eyes in the mirror lacked any sparkle, and her skin seemed paler than normal, with a dark moon under each eye. She used rice powder in hopes of disguising her lack of sleep, but the result wasn’t as effective as she’d hoped. What did it matter anyway? Her days here were numbered and her appearance made little difference.

At a rap on the door, she jumped and realized she’d been staring blindly into the mirror. She pressed her palms against her skirt and managed, “Come in.”

The door opened and Nathan’s broad form appeared from behind it. Her heart skittered nervously at the sight of him.

“The children are gone for the morning. Come have something to eat, and then we’ll talk. You’ll want a hat.”

Where was he taking her? She hadn’t packed. He’d told her she was staying here for now. Ella noticed the crystal atomizer in her hand and set it on the bureau. She joined Nathan where he waited in the hall, and at his gesture, led the way down the stairs and to the kitchen. Surely they weren’t going to church.

Someone had prepared oatmeal, and he gestured for her to take a seat where a bowl sat.

He poured them both coffee and seated himself adjacent to her.

Ella picked up the spoon with fingers that trembled and took a bite of the warm cereal. There was nothing wrong with it, but she could barely swallow. She took another bite and forced it down. When she’d consumed half the bowlful, she set down the utensil, dabbed her lips with a napkin and reached for the coffee.

It was hot and strong, and he had sweetened hers the way she preferred it. She wondered if he could hear her heart beating as loudly as she could.

She dared look at him. He studied her with furrowed brows, just as she’d sensed. She’d felt his sharp gaze on her. His expression wasn’t angry or even repulsed as she’d expected. Instead, when their eyes met, she recognized the hurt of betrayal.

Apologies stuck in her throat. Nothing she could say would make a difference now.