Betina Krahn Read online

  “There is an explanation.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  She took a deep breath. “I’ve known each of them for years … since I was a little girl.” She lowered her gaze. “When I came out in society, suitors began to show up everywhere. I couldn’t go to the bank or into the city shopping, or to a party without being set upon—sometimes physically. Then Morgan stepped in. He was so—”

  “Eager to help?” he supplied.

  She didn’t contradict him.

  “He began to escort me and that meant the others had to keep a distance. It was such a relief that I … well … when he began to talk about the future … I—”

  “Couldn’t say no.”

  “I am perfectly capable of finishing my own sentences.” Her head came up with defiance, but after a look at his face, she paused and once again lowered her eyes to her clasped hands. “Then Morgan began to talk more and more about making money. He became obsessed with rescuing his stables and restoring Kensington to its former glory. He was so single-minded and driven that I began to spend time with Paine Webster.

  “Paine was a great relief. Despite his failings, he is really a very dear man … gentle and witty and compassionate. He’s been pursued by females since he was in short pants, so he understood exactly what was happening to me. Then, when his family saw that we were keeping company, they began to pressure him to propose. I believe they hoped I would rescue him from the clutches of debauchery. Dutifully, he began to talk about the future, and I—”

  “Couldn’t say no.” It was becoming an intolerable refrain. “And Louis the Missionary … what’s your excuse for the ‘righteous’ Brother Pierpont?”

  “I’ll have you know, Louis is not self-righteous. He has a strong and high-minded set of convictions and a noble soul. He understood my need to give money away and my desire to make the world a better place. More importantly, he understood the dangers the world can pose for a person left with too much of a good thing. He too was the heir to a sizable fortune.”

  “Who is now living above a soup kitchen,” Bear said testily.

  “By his own choice,” she said, looking away. “And while it may be true that he’s gone a bit beyond the pale with his hatred of money and—”

  “You think he hates money?” He gave a sardonic smile. “He likes it well enough when he’s milking it out of little old widow ladies.” She stiffened, but the uneasiness in her face said that she wasn’t entirely comfortable with Louis’s behavior in that regard, either.

  “Louis spent a great deal of time with me, advising me,” she continued. “He helped me find places where my money would do some good. He’s devoted to protecting me from the onslaughts of the world. So, when he began to mention marriage and all the ‘good works’ we could do together, I—”

  “Couldn’t say no.”

  He studied her face, seeing more of her point of view than was probably prudent. Rich girl. Young. Alone. Besieged on every side. She had three fiancés because she had needed them … each in his own way and time. Heaven help him, he could almost understand how it could have happened. He felt a tightness settling over his chest and had to battle it in order to hold on to his anger with her.

  “So now you have to decide, is that it?”

  “I’ve already decided,” she answered.

  “You have?” He felt his skin contract. “Which one is the lucky man?”

  Diamond looked up and found his eyes glowing with that molten-copper heat that always seemed to dissolve the strength in her knees. It was a good thing she was supported by the wall at her—

  Looking about, she realized she had been slowly backed against the wall and corralled between Bear McQuaid’s arms, which were braced on each side of her head. His long, muscular frame was bent over her and their faces were barely an inch apart. She could barely breathe, much less think. Only the most basic of survival instincts provided her the strength to give him a push and step away.

  Even then, her senses were still captive. She couldn’t look away, couldn’t hear anything but the ragged sound of his breathing, couldn’t feel anything but the warmth he had radiated into her body. The way he was looking at her—from beneath the brim of his big Western hat, a chaotic mix of discernment, accusation, and desire in his eyes—sent her defenses into chaos.

  “Well,” he prompted, “what did you decide?”

  “I’m not marrying any of them,” she said. “I’m not going to marry at all.”

  He blinked, stared at her for a minute, then erupted.

  “Those three have been planning their futures and fortunes around you!” He stabbed the air furiously with a finger. “What the hell makes you think they’ll just turn tail and slink away when you tell them you don’t want to be bothered with a husband?”

  Her face and conscience both burned. The moment she had dreaded was here. She had to face up to the mess she had made and declare her course in resolving it. But, somehow, the worst thing about it was that it was upright, forthright, indomitable Bear McQuaid who had discovered her shameful secret and confronted her with it.

  “They’ll accept my decision … because … I’ll make it worth their while.”

  “Make it worth their—” He gave a short, hard laugh. “What could you possibly offer them that would make them forget a breach of promise by the richest, most eligible woman in the city?”

  “I should think that would be obvious,” she said, tucking her arms and paring her answer to its core. “Money.”

  When he stared disbelievingly at her, she defended her strategy. “If you give people enough money, they’ll go away. They always have.”

  “You just hand over cash and they bow out of your life? Very tidy, Miss Wingate.” But her statement continued to unfold in his mind, and every perceptive instinct he possessed came alert and focused on her. “What do you mean, ‘they always have’?”

  The containment in her expression and posture heightened.

  “I’ve had a lifetime of experience at giving money to people,” she said tautly. “Charitable people, stingy people, brilliant people, simple people, honest people, conniving people … it doesn’t matter who or what they are. If you give them enough, they’ll go away.”

  He probed her gaze, seeing deeper into her than either of them wished … far enough to glimpse the surprisingly steely assumptions about human nature that had framed a well-disguised set of defenses in her.

  Everyone wanted money.

  Everyone wanted her money.

  When she gave money to people, they went away.

  That was it? That was why she gave away money by buckets and barrels? So people would leave her alone?

  “And just how much of your fortune do you think those three will require as compensation for losing the richest woman in Baltimore?” he continued, still grappling with that unsettling insight. “Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? A million?”

  “It will undoubtedly be expensive.” Her chin set with defiance. “But money has never held the fascination for me that it seems to inspire in others. Money is a means, a tool. It’s a means to an end, a way of making things happen. Over the years, I’ve learned to make its power and potential work for me as well as against me.”

  The nuances packed into her statement and determined expression caught him flatfooted. Meanings nested inside meanings. A damned pile of layers. This was why he never did well with women. There was always more to what they said and did than met the eye, and he hated the feeling that half of what transpired between him and females generally slipped through his fingers.

  “So, whether you want to admit it or not, you’ve made money your answer to everything,” he charged, distilling her words and scrambling to hang on to insights that were sliding unexplored over the edge of his awareness. “If your cousin gets into trouble, you just buy his victim a new suit. If you need a dancing partner to get you out of an awkward situation, or a fourth for riding, or a shill in your romantic intrigues, you just make it worth someone’s
while. You’re used to buying your way through life.”

  Her eyes became the color of polished steel.

  “One has to make do with what one has, Mr. McQuaid.”

  That glint of steel was visible in more than just her eyes, he realized. Everyone in Baltimore thought she was a soft touch because she gave away heaps of money. No one ventured close enough or lingered long enough to see what—or who—existed behind those piles of ready cash.

  As he stood turning that chilly deduction over in his mind, trying to square it with the warmth of the woman who had responded so generously to his kisses, she turned to her cousin’s door and flung it back with a bang.

  “Well, my troublesome little patient … look who’s come to see you!”

  • • •

  She had honestly meant it when she said she didn’t intend to marry.

  It sounded right in her head. It had always sounded right in her innermost thoughts. But as she stood by the door of Robbie’s room, stopped in mid-escape by the stories Bear was spinning about life out West, she found her determined words produced a hollow echo inside her … one that had nothing to do with a longing for children and a sense of family. She had a child now, or a reasonable approximation of one. She could always find another child to take in—a whole house full of children if she wanted them. It definitely was not a “motherly” lack she was feeling.

  It was the prospect of spending the rest of her life as the spinsterly heiress, the doting elder cousin, and Baltimore’s resident “soft touch” that produced this gnawing sense of emptiness inside her. Combined with the memory of Bear McQuaid’s kisses and of recent nights spent tossing and burning in her solitary bed, that potential future sounded every bit as bad as being stripped of power and personhood by some high-handed, money-hungry man. And she knew exactly where to lay the blame for this disturbance in her once serene view of her future.

  She turned back, still gripping the door handle, to watch Bear demonstrating throwing a rope around a calf’s neck.

  Hardwell was right. Bear McQuaid did look like the veriest cowboy she could imagine. Straight out of Dodge or Carson City or Tombstone. Tautly sculptured face … whipcord-lean body … movements like a lithe, powerful mountain cat. The very terms in which she described him revealed how much her susceptibility to him was influenced by an unhealthy indulgence in dime novels. He was trouble on the hoof … danger in a black Stetson hat … an emotional stampede just waiting to run her down. And no matter what lurid Western metaphor she chose, the final chapter seemed to be that he was under her skin and headed straight for her heart.

  No. Her eyes widened as she felt a breathtaking warmth spreading through her chest. He wasn’t just headed for her heart; he was already there.

  Drawing a sharp breath, she turned the handle and fled into the hall.

  “Jeffreys …” She caught the butler on his way upstairs with Robbie’s afternoon snack. “Have Ned bring the coach around and wait until Mr. McQuaid is ready to leave.”

  “Yes, miss.” Jeffreys nodded. “And you, miss?”

  “I’ll be in the library. Working.” She turned toward the stairs, avoiding the little butler’s gaze. “And I needn’t be disturbed.”

  It was approaching dusk when Bear had Diamond’s driver drop him off in front of Vassar’s bank, reasoning that there were at least two respectable hotels within walking distance and he could say he needed a stretch of the legs.

  What he really needed, he knew, was time to prepare to face Halt. In their six-year association, Bear and Halt had kept little from each other. A wealth of shared experience had bred both truth and trust between them, and Bear had violated both from the first moment he set eyes on Diamond Wingate.

  He slouched his shoulders and tilted his hat over his eyes as he set off for the waterfront, hoping to make himself less recognizable and possibly less of a target. Remembering the last time he had walked to the tavern, he took care to check alleys and fences and the corners of buildings for lumps and shadows.

  As he continued on, undisturbed, his thoughts again turned to his partner and his predicament. He dreaded facing Halt with his failures with Diamond Wingate. Infernal female. Every time he left her, he vowed not to go near her again except to ask for a straightforward business loan. And every time he approached her, with nothing but businesslike intentions, he got dragged into her personal problems again.

  He thought of the pride and desperation burning in her as she whirled away from him in the hall. There was a woman, he mumbled to himself, who had far too much of everything. Too much money, too much pride … independence, generosity, wit. If only she were a mousy little thing with protruding teeth and beady eyes. If she only had a few hundred instead of a few million. If only she weren’t quite so bright and feisty and desirable and enjoyable and …

  And if only he weren’t a bigger fraud than all three of her panting, sticky-fingered fiancés combined.

  When he turned the corner beside the Cork & Bottle, he spotted a carriage in front of it … a fine black carriage with white wheels drawn by a set of matched grays. It gave him a bad feeling. He thought of Beecher and considered avoiding the tavern in favor of the back stairs. But, on second thought, he concluded that if Beecher had found them and was waiting, it wouldn’t do any good to put off the confrontation. Sooner or later, they would come face to face.

  Steeling himself, he ducked inside the main door.

  Halt was sitting near the dingy main window with his feet propped up on a table and his arms folded over his barrel of a chest. “An’ just where ’ave you been?” he demanded, lowering his feet and lurching to the edge of his chair.

  “She asked me to come visit the boy. In fact, she insisted.” Taking a page from Halt’s book, he quickly changed the subject. “Who belongs to that carriage outside?” He looked around the busy tavern, trying to spot its owner.

  “It’s ours, lad,” Halt said with a fierce little smile. “Yours an’ mine.”

  “Come again?” Bear stared out the door at the glowing carriage lamps.

  “Yer friendly banker sent it for us.” Halt stood and rolled his shoulders. “It seems we’re invited to be his house guests, you an’ me. Startin’ tonight.”

  “Both of us?” Bear stared at him.

  “Mr. McQuaid and Mr. Finnegan.” Halt reached for his hat with a wicked look. “High time I sampled a bit o’ the sweet life ye been enjoyin’ of late.” When Bear scowled and started upstairs, Halt grabbed his arm. “I already got yer gear, lad. An’ I found a bloke over at the mission—down on ‘is luck and needin’ a place to sleep—t’ hold our place upstairs.”

  Halt turned to the next table where a man in a rumpled gray suit lay face down beside a half empty tankard of ale. “Come on, Ellsworth, hie yerself upstairs. A cot will feel a sight better than that table.” He jerked his head in the fellow’s direction and explained: “Ain’t much of a drinkin’ man. A half-pint ‘o grog an’ he’s out like a light.”

  Halt gave him a nudge and the fellow raised a long face and unfocused gaze to Bear, who started with recognition.

  “I know him—he’s that crazed inventor—” Bear said, scowling.

  “What inventor?” Halt demanded.

  “The one I rescued Diamond Wingate from at Vassar’s party,” Bear said, watching the fellow fumbling to right his spectacles on his face and feeling a resurrected pang of guilt that annoyed him. “He’s a raving lunatic.”

  The fellow squinted at Bear and raised a wobbly finger of exception.

  “An en-gin-nnneeeer … ak-tually.”

  Halt stuck his thumbs in his belt and regarded Bear soberly. “He’s got nowhere else t’ go, lad.”

  The gaunt face, the impossibly smudged spectacles, the soiled gray suit that looked as if it had come through the battle of Vicksburg … everything about the poor wretch spoke of hitting rock bottom … of the death of a cherished dream. When the fellow looked up, over his spectacles, with the tatters of a dream in his eyes, Bear couldn’t help
feeling somehow responsible. The poor wretch needed help. And Bear just couldn’t bring himself to say no.

  “How much trouble could a lunatic get into on a cot?” Bear reached for one of the fellow’s arms.

  As they dragged him toward the stairs at the rear, Ellsworth raised that precise finger yet again: “En-gin-nnneeeer … ack-tually …”

  A short while later they were in Vassar’s coach and underway. Bear could feel Halt’s stare.

  “Well?” the Irishman demanded and Bear knew exactly what he wanted.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I got time, lad.” Halt settled back in the plush upholstered seat with a grandiose sigh. “Now that I’m a man o’ leisure. Like you.”

  Bear saw no reason to confess that he had first met and angered Diamond in the tailor shop, and so began his story with his arrival at Vassar’s party and his fortuitous intervention with the crazed inventor who was now occupying their sleeping quarters. He proceeded to their dinner conversation, to Vassar’s description of her, their dance, and her timely swoon.

  “All truly fascinatin’ stuff, lad,” Halt said dryly, sitting forward. “But what I want to know is why ye didn’t tell me what was goin’ on. Why didn’ ye just say ye wrapped yer tongue ’round yer tonsils every time ye laid eyes on ’er? I’d ’ave understood right enough. She’s a beauty, she is.”

  “It had nothing to do with her being a beauty,” Bear said, with more heat than was prudent. “Nor with my tongue wrapping around— Where the hell do you get these damnable sayings of yours?” His voice rose. “What I told you is Gods honest truth. She’s one tough nut.”

  His insight from earlier that afternoon swept unexpectedly through his mind, insinuating itself into yet another level of his awareness. He had had no idea of how fitting a description that was until a few hours ago.

  “Ask Vassar, if you don’t believe me,” he declared. “She knows a damn sight more than she ought to about the railroad business and—”

  “An’ ye go all tiddly in th’ knees whenever she turns them big blue eyes on ye.”