Rexanne Becnel (39 page)

One time he’d made slow, almost reverent love to her. He’d worshiped her with his hand and his mouth. With words and with tender caresses.

But that other time … She’d held tight to the bed, though she’d arched and bucked beneath his rough lovemaking. His words still rang in her ears. “You’re mine, Abby. Mine to do with as I please. And I plan to do everything—”

He’d teased her unmercifully, torturing her almost to the point of tears. He’d brought her so near, over and over again. And every time she’d released the bed frame to touch him, he’d punished her as only he could do.

“You’ll pay a dear price for that, sweetheart,” he’d whispered once, turning her onto her stomach and clasping her fingers around the ironwork headboard.

Once more she shuddered, remembering the heated stroke of his tongue down her spine, reliving the sensuous assault of his hands on her derriere. He’d raised her up on her knees then and entered that way, like a stallion mounting a mare, and she had nearly swooned. Even now her heart raced to remember it.

He’d stroked deeper and harder, more fiercely than ever, until she’d erupted in violent shudders. But he hadn’t stopped even then. He’d pushed her farther, drawing out the heart-stopping spasms until she was utterly spent. Only when her legs were collapsing beneath her did he turn her over.

For one long, timeless moment their eyes had held. It had been dark, with neither candle nor lamp to cast a light on his features. But she’d seen something in his eyes. The light of love, she’d thought then, though now she was not so sure. He’d kissed her deep and long, possessing her mouth with an urgency that stirred her now just to recall it. Then he’d entered her once more and swiftly found his own peak.

She remembered him hoarsely calling her name, but beyond that nothing. She’d plummeted like one felled by a blow into the oblivion of sleep.

Abby blinked hard and reached for the handkerchief in her reticule. That had been her fatal mistake, she realized. At the moment when he’d been the most susceptible to an emotional confrontation, she’d gone to sleep. Sweet Jerusalem, but she was an utter fool.

She rode a long time staring beyond the glass window to the Illinois countryside. It grew warm, but she didn’t slide the window up. She wondered where Tanner might have disappeared to, but she knew better than to seek him out. One by one she’d lost everything she’d ever loved: her mother, her home. Her father.

She sighed and closed her eyes. Her corset chafed the skin under her right arm. A bead of sweat trickled down the valley between her breasts. But she hardly noticed those discomforts, for her thoughts sank her into the dark morass of dejection. She’d lost her old life through no cause of her own, though that fact did nothing to assuage the pain of those losses. But Tanner … Tanner she’d managed to lose quite on her own.

When the conductor announced Galesburg, Abby forced herself to straighten in her seat. From Galesburg they would go to Mendota and Aurora and eventually Chicago. At what point in their all-day journey would Tanner seek her out? At what point would they say their final good-bye?

Abby didn’t see him until she was hurrying back from a trip to the Galesburg station’s private facilities. Tanner was pacing back and forth along the short raised walkway beside the passenger car. When he spied her, he halted, then flung the remnants of his cheroot between the twin rails of the track.

“Where the hell have you been?”

Abby sent him an incredulous look Where the hell had
he
been? was more appropriate. She jerked at the gray striped peplum of her traveling costume and drew herself up. “I doubt you actually wish to hear all the details. Suffice it to say, I was attending to a private matter.”

She would have marched past him and mounted the step to the train car. The conductor was there waiting to help her up, and even as she started forward, the whistle sounded, loud and impatient. But Tanner caught her arm when she would have stormed past him. “Don’t go anywhere again without telling me first.”

She glared at him, not believing what she was hearing. “I had no idea you cared so much,” she snapped sarcastically. It was enough to give him pause, and she took advantage of it. She hurriedly mounted the nearest steps in a flurry of skirts and petticoats, relieved to be away from him. Who did he think he was, ordering her about? And after abandoning her these past two hours!

Yet even in her anger Abby recognized the fact that her fury was just a shield she hid behind. Easier to be angry at his unreasonable attitude and high-handedness than to face the fact of his rejection.

Unfortunately in her haste to flee him Abby had entered the wrong passenger car, and by the time she realized it, the train had resumed its lumbering progress. She had no choice but to make her way, muttering in annoyance now, to the door at the far end of the car. To her dismay, however, Tanner waited for her on the small swaying platform outside.

“If you’ll excuse me,” she said in a polite tone calculated to freeze him out.

“Just a minute, Abby. I think we’d better talk.”

She tilted her chin up to a pugnacious angle. “Do you, now?”

“Yes, I do.” Beneath the shaded brim of his hat his brows met in a frown. “I have good reason for keeping an eye on you.”

“Oh, yes. Your reward. How
could
I forget?”

His jaw tensed at her flippant reply. “Have you also forgotten our two nighttime visitors back in the Nebraska Territory?”

Abby couldn’t help flinching at his harsh reminder. Those awful men. Still, they were dead now. He’d seen to that most efficiently.

“I haven’t forgotten anything,” she conceded. “But since they’re not likely to follow us from the Great Beyond—”

“They were sent by someone else. They were paid to find you.”

“So were you!”

“But they were willing to bring you back dead.”

Abby turned and gripped the iron rail of the swaying platform with both hands. She shook her head, trying to deny his words, trying to make sense of too many conflicting facts. “But that would gain them nothing.”

“Obviously it would gain somebody something,” he stated in a tone gone so cold, she peered over her shoulder at him. He removed his hat and raked his long fingers through his hair, all the while staring intently at her. “The way I see it, someone doesn’t want Willard Hogan’s granddaughter showing up after all these years.”

It was ludicrous. Yet even as Abby dismissed his conjecture as the product of a too-suspicious nature, she nevertheless could not ignore the basic logic of his argument. Those men, whom she’d initially thought meant to rescue her, had made no secret about their true intentions. One had even ordered Tanner to give up his “prize.” At the time she’d taken it to be a general sort of reference to her. But could the man have known all about the reward Tanner would receive from her grandfather? Could they have been pursuing a reward of their own, though with a completely opposite outcome, at least for her?

If Tanner was right …

The acrid scent from the locomotive’s wood-burning engine filled the air, and a shiver snaked its way down her spine. “You’re just trying to frighten me,” she accused, desperately wanting it to be just that.

Tanner jammed his hat back on his head. “Just stay close to me and you won’t have anything to worry about.”

The irony of that statement almost made her laugh. “You left
me
this morning. Remember? And anyway once we reach Chicago, you’ll be rid of me and any responsibility for my well-being.”

She was giving away too much with her eyes, she knew. Though her words were meant to be matter-of-fact and completely uncaring, she feared they fell far short of the mark. As if in confirmation, Tanner stepped nearer. She was neatly sandwiched between the unyielding iron railing and his towering form, with the world flashing past at a dizzying rate. Abby was suddenly gripped by an insane urge to make everything stop. Their conversation. The train. The world even.

He caught the ribbon of her bonnet as it fluttered in the breeze created by the train’s headlong pace. “I’ll keep you safe for as long as necessary.”

Abby swallowed the lump that formed in her throat. Dare she read anything into his quiet avowal? She leaned toward him—blame it on the train’s movement, she thought, though she knew that wasn’t the case. She leaned toward him, and when he caught her shoulders in his hands, she let out a slow, involuntary sigh. Why did this feel so right?

But before their bodies could come together—before they could meet in the embrace she needed so badly—his fingers tightened and his arms grew tense. “I’m staying for one reason only, Abby. So don’t get the wrong idea.” He thrust himself away, then let out a string of oaths that should have left her ears burning.

But she was too stung by his abrupt rejection to care about his language. “Why do you do that? Why do you act as if you care, then push me away?”

Embarrassing tears burned behind her eyes, but she didn’t care about them either. “How can you make love to me one night and then have it mean nothing the very next day?”

“No. No, Abby, you’ve got it all wrong,” he began. “I don’t want you to think it meant nothing—”

“But it didn’t, did it?” she interrupted him raggedly. “It meant nothing to you. I mean nothing to you.”

She wanted him to deny it. Sweet God in heaven, but she needed him to say it wasn’t true. None of it.

But he didn’t.

He shoved his fists into his pockets then stepped back the meager width of the passenger car’s rear platform. “It was fun while it lasted,” he said slowly, distinctly. “But that’s all.” He paused. “You’d better get inside now, before your new clothes get covered with soot.”

After a long, disbelieving moment Abby did as he suggested. She stepped over to the next car’s platform, then opened the narrow doorway and entered. She closed the portal behind her and sought out her seat. Once there, she removed her hat and peeled off her gloves.

But though she performed those tasks with the outward semblance of normalcy, inside something had died. Her heart bled. Her soul grieved. Her last hope had been dashed. All that was left was the unknown that was Chicago, and the endless, empty years that stretched out beyond then.

Endless, empty years.
Tanner’s grim thoughts echoed Abby’s as he watched her retreat. With every fiber of his being he wanted to call her back, to tell her how he really felt. She made him want things he’d never thought he’d want: a family, the love of one good woman … But the fact was he could not escape his past any more than she could escape the future that awaited her.

No doubt her grandfather would find the right sort of man for her to marry. And maybe he’d find the right sort of woman, too, once he forgot about her.

But somehow he didn’t think so.

W
ILLARD HOGAN WAS PRECISELY
what she should have expected. After all, the coach he’d sent for her and Tanner was the most brilliant shade of maroon, trimmed in black with gold braid and tassels in every imaginable spot. The vehicle was pulled not by two but by four high-stepping horses, perfectly matched white steeds with braided manes and tails.

Then there was the house.

After winding down a driveway of crushed gravel, bordered by one landscaping vignette after another—a Japanese garden with a pagoda, a miniature castle complete with a moat, a tropical village beside an actual waterfall—they had just pulled up before a structure Abby could only describe as astounding. If a house could be considered both sprawling and towering, this one most certainly was. The rusticated granite facade rose three stories, with wall dormers above, almost like the crenellations of a medieval castle. The front doors soared the height of at least two men, she estimated as she stared out the coach window. Had it not been for the absolute profusion of flowering plants that surrounded the harsh stone edifice, she would have thought it more likely a government building—a prison even—than a home. But it was a home. Hers now. And the flamboyantly dressed man standing alone before a bevy of other onlookers must be her grandfather.

The coach door opened, and the step was folded down by a man in royal-blue livery. A red carpet lay waiting just beneath the step, and Abby had everything she could do to stifle the hysterical need to laugh. Tanner had not exaggerated. The man must be as rich as King Midas. But if he meant to impress her with this gaudy show of his wealth, he was falling far short of the mark.

Gathering her skirts as well as her scattered wits, she took the hand of the waiting servant and stepped down. She didn’t look for Tanner. He’d ridden with the driver and no doubt stood somewhere behind her, watching the cozy little reunion he’d arranged. Instead she focused on the balding man with the huge muttonchop whiskers who bore down on her now, like a peacock in full regalia.

To her enormous relief, he stopped short an arm’s length from her. She wasn’t in the mood for pretending an affection she did not feel. But it was equally hard to withstand his undisguised scrutiny.

“I expected a younger girl.”

“Then perhaps your bounty hunter should take me back and find you one,” she snapped before she could stop herself.

As one, the collected servants and other onlookers seemed to catch their breath at her tart reply. Hogan, too, drew back, his thick, graying brows arched in shock

Then he surprised her, and everyone else, it was clear, by breaking into booming peals of laughter. “Aye, she must be the right one, for she’s got her mother’s lovely coloring, her father’s stiff neck, and my own quick wit and glib tongue.” Before Abby could stop him, he enfolded her in a crushing embrace of welcome.

In the complete chaos that followed, she had only one enduring impression. She met myriad servants, was shown through innumerable rooms, and was given a rundown on the activities planned for the coming week. But it all faded into a muddy babble she couldn’t quite sort out except for one thing: he smelled of tobacco and peppermint.

She could have remained aloof and separate from all the frantic activity but for that. Her mother had loved peppermint above all flavors. Perhaps a carryover from her own father? And Abby’s father had smoked a pipe. The two scents combined together in this man—this stranger—managed to affect her as nothing else could have. She didn’t care a fig for his grand house and endless wealth. But he was a connection to her parents. He was the last of her family.