Rexanne Becnel (43 page)

Abby was already a trifle dizzy from the champagne. Being hemmed in by the brazen Mrs. Gadsdon on one side and the matchmaking Mrs. Hamilton on the other was enough to make her head spin. It occurred to her that her mother would not approve of the tart words that bubbled to her lips. But it was quite beyond her to prevent them from spilling forth.

“Mr. McKnight is quite the most capable bodyguard,” she began, her eyes glittering with the light of battle. “He’s saved my life on two separate occasions. Once from a bed of poisonous snakes.” She heard the women’s gasps of surprise, but her eyes remained locked on Mrs. Gadsdon. “The second time from two despicable creatures, who had more than merely murder on their minds.

“He dispatched them both rather handily. And without even the faintest show of emotion. He is quite the hardest and coldest man I’ve ever met,” she finished. At least in some ways, she thought, her heart aching.

But if Abby had thought to frighten off the lush Mrs. Gadsdon, she realized at once that she’d seriously misjudged the older woman. While Mrs. Hamilton and the other women clucked in appropriate tones of both fascination and repulsion, Rita Gadsdon only smiled.

“A hard man, you say. He sounds more and more interesting all the time.”

“Now, Rita, stop that,” Mrs. Hamilton interrupted. “You are going to give our dear Abigail quite the worst impression of your character with our teasing. Come, dear.” She directed this last to Abby, at the same time steering her to sit upon a delicate settee covered in blue damask. “We want to cast our society in a good light this evening and perhaps interest you in some of the charitable works we engage in.”

When they rejoined the men later in the parlor, there was music, coffee, and more wine, and an endless, circuitous shifting of people from one intimate group to another. She met everyone; her grandfather saw to that. If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Hamilton’s automatic pairing of her with Patrick, she would have been relieved when he stole her from her grandfather’s side. But instead of easing her tension, Patrick’s constant hovering only added to it. It was enough to drive her quite mad and she was able to be little more than civil to several of the more admiring men she met.

To make it worse, Tanner was nowhere to be seen, and she thought at one point that she would actually be sick. Her grandfather would blame the champagne, no doubt. Mrs. Hamilton would probably harangue her cook. But Abby knew it was jealousy—jealousy of the gut-deep, stomach-churning variety—that made her insides roll and her head throb so unmercifully.

When they finally took their leave, she was inordinately thankful that Patrick had come in his own vehicle. At least she would not have to suffer his presence on the ride home. In the foyer she searched again for a glimpse of Tanner, and when she did not see him, tall and forbidding as usual, she almost panicked. But he was outside on the front landing, she realized a moment later, searching the shadows in the elaborate shrubbery that set off the front entrance of the mansion. Her panic swiftly gave way to relief and then to the more comfortable emotion of anger. Should that shameless woman offer him her favors, no doubt he’d welcome the chance.

“Did you check the coach?”

Tanner nodded in answer to Willard’s question. “Keep the shades down, though.”

Tanner didn’t so much as glance at Rita Gadsdon, who stood on the lowest step, awaiting her own carriage and not hiding in the least the seductive glances she sent his way. Abby enjoyed a smug feeling of triumph over the lovely Mrs. Gadsdon. But it was a short-lived pleasure, for Tanner ignored her almost as thoroughly as he did the other woman. Had he absolutely no feelings whatsoever? she fumed.

Her grandfather handed her up into his elaborate coach, then followed her in. Once the coach lurched to a start, he leaned back and patted his generous girth in a satisfied manner. “Well, Abigail. What do you think of Chicago society?”

With no outlet for her inner turmoil but her grandfather, she succumbed to her need to express her frustration, or else explode.

“It’s very like society everywhere, and at every level,” she began, though her stomach churned and her head had begun to pound once more. “It has far too many vain peacocks and posturing fools for comfort.”

He turned to face her, straightening in his seat. “Vain peacocks? Posturing fools? I’ll have you know—”

“Oh, and I left out overdressed strumpets.”

At that he began to laugh, much to her self-righteous surprise. “I had hoped you would have inherited less of your father’s humorless disposition and more of your mother’s tractability.”

“My mother’s tractability!” she exclaimed, rounding on him. She’d been spoiling for a fight ever since Rita Gadsdon’s little display and suppressing her anger at her grandfather ever since she’d met him. But it seemed she could suppress nothing tonight.

“My mother was sweet as could be, but she had a core of steel,” Abby snapped. “She softened my father and brought out his good humor. And it’s clear she stood up to you. After all, she left here, didn’t she?”

She’d succeeded in silencing him with that. But she’d hurt him, too, she realized. Even in the dark of the well-sprung coach she saw his expression change. His head drew down between his hunched-over shoulders.

“She didn’t have to run off that way. It was that damned Bliss who lured her away.”

“He told me once that he wasn’t even interested in her at first. That she pursued him,” Abby persisted, knowing that every word twisted a knife into the old man’s heart. “She preferred his ‘humorless disposition,’ as you put it, to your … to your …”

She trailed off, unable in the face of his sudden vulnerability to add to his misery. The coach rolled along, swaying, rumbling. But inside, the silence was deafening.

Abby closed her eyes and for a moment she thought she would be ill. Her mother would never approve of such a display of cruelty. Her father, yes, for he believed in a God of anger and wrath and punishment. But her mother had believed in love and forgiveness. And so, Abby had always thought, did she. Hot shame filled her, and she tore back the shade and pushed her face near the window to breathe deeply of the cool night air. Unfortunately Tanner rode astride a tall gray gelding just beyond the coach. When he turned toward her, she forgot to feel ill any longer. For one long second she saw concern in his expression, and all the other feelings he usually kept so well hidden. Then a shadow fell over his face and he was once more his normal, somber self.

The last remnants of her anger fled, replaced by the heavy press of sorrow. She let the curtain fall and leaned back into the plush upholstered seat, taking slow, deep breaths.

“I’m sorry.”

“What?” Willard Hogan shifted on the leather seat across from her.

“I’m sorry. For being so ugly and ill mannered. My mother didn’t raise me to behave so.”

He shrugged and sat up a little straighter. “No, you’re right. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, as they say. And that’s what I am—and Hamilton too. And all the rest of us vain peacocks and overdressed strumpets. Just upstarts. We’ve got shitloads of money—Ah, damn. There it is. That rough side of me sticking out again.”

Abby shook her head. “If you’re a sow’s ear, well, so am I.”

To Abby’s complete surprise Willard leaned forward and reached out to take her hand. “We
are
family,” he stated. “The only family either of us has got.”

Despite all the unsettled matters that lay between them, Abby could not deny that truth. She returned his grasp. “The thing is, I don’t understand what happened between you and Mama. How could the two of you turn your backs on each other so completely?”

“Ah, Abby girl. It all seems so foolish now.”

Abby smiled into the darkness. “My father used to call me that. Abby girl.”

“Did he, now? Well, I suppose there must have been some warmth inside him after all. For you. For my Margaret. But back then … All I could see was a fire-and-damnation would-be preacherman. He saw my money as the devil’s pay and my ambition as some sort of sin that damned me to hell. And he turned my little girl against me.

“Mama did love him,” Abby countered, though gently, for she sensed the pain beneath his gruff words. “I just don’t understand why she had to choose between you both.” Yet even as she said the words, a flash of insight came to her. Her father had been a rigid and unyielding man. So, obviously, was her grandfather. Her mother had chosen to love a man very like her own father, though neither of the men could ever have recognized that fact. Perhaps Margaret hadn’t realized it either. But Abby did, and she couldn’t help wondering now if she had done the very same thing with Tanner. He was rigid and unyielding, too, fixed in his ideas and resistant to letting a woman disrupt the life he’d chosen for himself. Her mother had been forced to choose between her father and her husband. Would she, too, be forced to make the same sort of choice, Abby wondered. Would she even be given the chance to make the choice?

The sharp report of a gun split into her thoughts, like lightning from a clear night sky, and at once chaos broke out. The coach lurched. From somewhere outside she heard Tanner bark out an angry order. Another shot. Then two more.

What was happening? Was Tanner in danger?

Her grandfather jerked her away from the window and pushed her roughly to the floor.

“Get down, dammit!”

Even from her ignominious position on the floor, surrounded as she was by foams of taffeta and lawn and Belgian lace, Abby could nonetheless see the gun her grandfather had drawn. It was a small, gleaming weapon, nothing like Tanner’s heavy sidearm. But it looked every bit as lethal.

What in the name of heaven was going on?

Like a stampeding herd of buffalo the coach careened through the suddenly threatening Chicago night. The vehicle might have been a living creature, panicked and in full flight. Abby only knew that she was hurled from side to side, bruised and scraped as she sought to keep herself upright. But none of that mattered in the least to her. Where was Tanner? Was he all right?

The rumbling of the coach precluded her hearing any other sounds. It wasn’t until they swerved wildly to the left, then came to a bone-jarring halt that she heard the nervous dancing of a horse outside the coach.

Tanner!

“Get her into the house! I’m going after them!”

“No!”

But Abby’s fearful cry was lost as her grandfather scrambled to his feet. Before she could right herself, Tanner was off in a thunder of hoofbeats. She was hustled into the house and the door was barred, and all the while her grandfather bellowed at the top of his lungs.

“Get up! Man the doors and windows! Send around for the law! And get Abigail into the vault!”

In the vault, sitting with Mrs. Strickland, Abby’s heart slowly eased from its frantic pulse. But as she waited in the small room, deaf to all the outside sounds, she nevertheless could not completely relax. If Tanner were hurt …

She threw off her cream-colored lace shawl and elbow-length gloves as she paced, and removed the diamond earbobs her grandfather had given her.

“Be still, child. Mr. Hogan will see to everything.”

Abby glanced at Mrs. Strickland, who sat on a wooden crate. Filled with money? she wondered half hysterically. “Yes, he’s good at that, isn’t he? Seeing to everything.”

The woman’s eyebrows only raised a very little despite Abby’s sarcastic tone. “Why, yes, you might say he is. It’s how he’s come to rise so far from his humble beginnings.”

There was no real reproof in Mrs. Strickland’s tone, but her words nonetheless hit their mark. Abby slumped back against the heavy door, facing her grandfather’s housekeeper. “I sound ungrateful, I know. But if it weren’t for his wealth, no one would give a fig about me. No one would be chasing me. Hunting me down.”

“Mr. McKnight was only doing his job.”

Abby threw her hands up in utter frustration. “I didn’t mean
him.
I meant …” Her voice fell. “I meant whoever shot at us tonight. Whoever tried to kill us back in Nebraska.” Despite her wish to remain strong and calm, a faint tremor crept into her voice. “Why is all of this happening?”

“Now, child. It will all come to rights. You’ll see. Mr. Hogan, why, he’ll fix things.”

But it wasn’t Mr. Hogan Abby was worried about. Her grandfather wasn’t the one taking his chances against the desperadoes out there. It was his hired men. It was Tanner.

By the time the two women were allowed to vacate the vault, the house had filled with people. The sheriff trailed a half-dozen deputies. All the house servants, the gardening staff, and the stable workers milled around as well. A man from the newspaper took notes while her grandfather’s bellows rang out over all the other excited murmurs.

But she didn’t see Tanner anywhere.

Abby hurried through the huge foyer, dodging people in her panic-driven need to find Tanner. The reporter dashed after her.

“Miss Hogan, Miss Hogan,” he called, confusing her name with that of her grandfather. One of the liveried servants caught the man by the arm when he would have followed her into her grandfather’s private office.

It was there she found Tanner. His coat was flung over a chair. His shirt lay abandoned on the floor, stained with scarlet blotches. But Abby only had eyes for him—for the broad expanse of his bare shoulders and the stark white bandage that bound his left arm above the elbow.

“Dear God in heaven!”

Tanner’s head jerked around at her horrified whisper, and the sight of his frowning face worked perversely like a balm to her fears. He was all right. If he could frown at her in so frustrated a fashion, he must be all right.

She drew in a sharp breath. “What happened?” she said, managing somehow to keep her voice calm.

“More nocturnal visitors,” he answered. But his sarcasm did not make it all the way to his eyes. What she saw there for the brief moment he held her gaze was a depth of caring she’d only dreamed about. He would protect her with his very life if circumstances demanded it. She knew that, for he’d repeatedly shown her so. But it was more than just for the money. It had to be.