Nan Ryan (14 page)

She bitterly complained to Helen that her visit in New Orleans had worked no magic on her big, stubborn, redheaded sweetheart. Coop swore he had missed her terribly, but he obviously hadn’t missed her enough to propose, as she had hoped.

She admitted she’d been foolish to suppose such a miracle would occur. After all, the big brave man she loved had been away from her throughout the interminably long war, seeing her only a twice in those four lonely years. Yet when the conflict had finally ended and he’d come back home for good, he hadn’t asked her to marry him.

Em talked of her boring stay in the Crescent City with a house full of obnoxious cousins. She admitted that when finally she got back home, she had shoved Coop inside the carriage and kissed him over and over, doing her darnedest to make him surrender. Said she blew in his ear and whispered that if they paid a quick visit to the justice of the peace, they could spend the rest of their day at the Conde Hotel doing more than just kissing.

“Em Ellicott, you didn’t actually say that, did you?” Helen said.

“Sure as heck did,” stated Em emphatically. “It almost worked too. I could tell by the pulse hammering on Coop’s forehead. But alas, my big straitlaced, duty-first darling said he had to get back to Spanish Fort by noon to transport the jail’s one and only occupant over to Mobile for trial.” She laughed good-naturedly and added, “Can you believe it? I get beat out by a common thief!”

In time Em began to wind down, after filling Helen in on practically every moment of every day she had been away. Helen was sitting on the bed, her back against the tall mahogany headboard, arms wrapped around her raised knees. And she was laughing. Em always made her stories colorful and amusing, and just listening to her chatter made Helen feel good.

When finally Em’s narrative on Coop and New Orleans was concluded, she said, “So now I’ll shut my big mouth and you tell me what’s been going on here. Tell me about your Yankee and—”

Helen abruptly stopped laughing.

“Em Ellicott, I told you, he is not
my
Yankee.”

“Oh, you know what I mean. How did it come about? Jolly sent him out here, I’ll bet? I understand the Yankee’s got a young son. What’s the little boy like? What’s the Yankee like? Tell, tell, tell! Start at the very beginning.” Em fell over onto her back, threw her arms above her head, and waited.

“You don’t blame me, do you?”

“For what?” Em’s head lifted from the mattress and she looked at Helen. “For hiring a strong-backed man to help you work this farm?” She laid back down. “I should hope not.”

“I knew you’d say that,” mused Helen gratefully.

She told her best friend about Kurt and Charlie Northway. About how Kurt was a hard worker and Charlie was the cutest little boy imaginable. Said the child had lost his mother and grandparents and he was so withdrawn, she’d been afraid he would never be normal, but that Jolly had taken Charlie under his wing and the two were the greatest of friends. Said they were down at the bay fishing together this very moment.

Helen talked at length about Charlie, said very little about Charlie’s father. In midsentence, she interrupted herself, sighed, and said, “Oh, Em, you understand why I would hire a Yankee to help out. I had no choice. Why can’t the others see it?”

“The others can’t see beyond the ends of their long noses,” Em snorted. “What do you care what they say or think, so long as you get to keep your farm?”

“I suppose I shouldn’t.”

“No, you shouldn’t. I don’t! Why, I’m certain the whole blessed town gossips constantly about me chasing after Coop. But so what? Think I give a tinkers damn?” Em laughed to show that she didn’t. But abruptly she stopped laughing and levered herself back up into a sitting position. Swinging around to face Helen, she asked, “Have the busybodies been ugly to you?”

Helen shook her head. “No. Not really.”

“You’re lying to me, Helen Burke Courtney! Tell me the truth or I’ll pinch you like I used to when we were kids.”

Helen sighed. “I went into Spanish Fort last Saturday for supplies just like I always do. It was awful. Really awful.” She closed her eyes for a second, opened them. “Jake didn’t want me in his store. The Livingston sisters … they crossed the street to keep from speaking.”

Her face as dark as a thundercloud, Em reached for Helen’s hand and held it firmly in both of her own. “I’m so sorry. I wish I’d been here. I wish I had been with you. I’d have told them all—the whole town—to go straight to blazes! I’d have had Coop arrest the entire lot of them and throw them in the pokey! I’d have made them sorry their mamas ever gave birth! I’d have seen to it that—”

“Lord, I’m glad you’re home,” Helen happily interrupted, smiling sunnily again.

“Me too. I just wish to high heaven Coop was as glad.”

“You know Coop’s happy to have you back.”

“Mmmmm. Not quite happy enough to marry me.”

Em dropped Helen’s hand, clasped both of hers beneath her chin as if in prayer, closed her eyes, and murmured, “You hear me up there, Lord? I need some help down here getting a reluctant redheaded sheriff down the aisle. Think you can do something about it, please? And make it snappy.” She opened her eyes, dropped her hands to her knees, and winked at Helen.

Grinning, she said, “You don’t think the Almighty will strike me dead for being such a self-centered woman, do you?”

“Not if he hasn’t already.”

Both women dissolved into spasms of girlish laughter.

Chapter Fifteen

K
urt was still seated in the chair, the white cloth draped around his shoulders, when Skeeter and his helper returned an hour later. The two barbers were not alone.

A half dozen townsmen escorted the pair into their shop. All the men wore identical antagonistic expressions. All were armed. All were purposely exposing their weapons.

The short, pudgy Skeeter elbowed his way through the cluster of taller men, stepped up directly before Kurt, and said, “I ain’t going to cut your hair.”

“You’re not?” Kurt replied evenly.

“No, I’m not!” Skeeter announced loudly, puffing out his chest and looking around at his audience of backup toughs. Chuckling, he bravely added, “You won’t get a haircut in this town as long as I’m the barber.”

“That a fact?”

“Yes, that’s a fact.” Skeeter took a menacing step closer. “So just what do you aim to do about it, Yankee?”

Kurt maintained his cool, casual manner. He lifted his hands up behind his head, untied the draped cloth, and pulled it away from his body. When he stood up, the blustering Skeeter took a defensive step backward. Kurt smiled. Then, taking his time, he folded the large cloth neatly and handed it to the barber.

He started to move toward the door. Six armed men stood in his way.

“Excuse me,” he said, and pushed resolutely through the crowd. Grumbling and issuing threats, they allowed him to pass.

“Answer me, Yankee!” Skeeter wouldn’t let it go. “What are you going to do about it?”

Kurt had reached the door. He paused, turned back, and acted as if he were thinking it over. Then he ran a hand through his unshorn locks and grinned.

“Not a thing.” He exited the barbershop, unfazed by the shouted insults to his manhood and the loud derisive laughter which followed him.

As Kurt stood on the sunny sidewalk outside Skeeter’s Barbershop, Niles Loveless, behind the locked door of his closed office half a block away, was scolding the forward Yasmine Parnell for taking such unnecessary risks.

“You’re never to come here again,” he said, buttoning his shirt. “I’ve told you before!”

“Never’s such a long time, darling,” said Yasmine, resting a bare foot atop his mahogany desk and seductively pulling a sheer silk stocking up her bare shapely leg. “Besides, you enjoy the added danger, just as I do.” She slowly molded the transparent stocking up over her pale thigh and smiled accusingly at him. “Don’t you?”

He couldn’t deny it.

The beautiful Yasmine had been in his office for hours. She had breezed in at midmorning, looking incredibly desirable in a figure-hugging gown of lavender silk and matching bonnet, locked the door behind herself, and challenged, “Niles Loveless, if you’re half the man I think you are, you’ll make love to me this minute!”

She hadn’t waited for a reply. She’d begun stripping immediately while he’d watched and begged her to stop and hoped she would and hoped she wouldn’t. She hadn’t. Wearing only her fashionable lavender bonnet, the rest of her clothes scattered about on the plush carpet, she crossed to him, swept his massive desk clean of all papers, pens, and framed photographs, climbed atop it, stretched out like a lazy cat, and purred, “I’m not leaving here until I have what I want.”

Niles gave it to her.

Hands trembling, heart thudding with a mixture of hot desire and nervous trepidation, he took off his clothes and joined her atop the shiny desk. The door had remained locked all morning and on through the noon hour.

Now, at shortly after one o’clock, Niles was rushing her to get dressed, reminding her he had a business engagement at one-thirty and if she didn’t hurry, they would get caught.

Yasmine wasn’t worried.

She lowered her stockinged leg to the floor, slipped her foot into her kid-leather slipper, and dropped the billowing skirts of her silk lavender gown. Exhaling deeply, causing her ample bosom to swell against the low-cut bodice of her tight gown, she shook her bonneted head and laughed.

Picking up her reticule, she said, “Niles, darling, you worry too much. I made it a point to tell anyone who would listen that I had a scheduled meeting here in your office this morning. One which might prove quite lengthy.”

“Good God, you didn’t,” said Niles, horrified. “And just exactly what was this so-called meeting to be about?”

“Why, the intricate, time-consuming handling of my assets,” Yasmine teased, coming to him, straightening his cravat, pressing her assets against him. “Relax, my love. Everyone knows you promised dear Walter you’d take care of all my affairs.”

“Yes, I did.” Niles grinned then. “I’ve taken care of a bit more than old Walter had in mind.” His hands slid down from her narrow waist and over the swell of her hips to possessively cup the rounded cheeks of her bottom through her rustling dress. Squeezing gently, he teased, “Do you suppose old Walter would approve of the way I’m ‘handling your assets’?”

At times Niles felt almost guilty about their blazing affair. Walter W. Parnell had been an old and dear friend of the Loveless family, had grown up with Niles’s father, Bennett Loveless. The two older men were partners in many business ventures, including banks throughout the South and a string of fine-blooded racehorses. With Bennett’s untimely death when Niles was barely twenty, Walter Parnell became a father figure and mentor to Niles.

Niles remembered well the summer the widowed, forty-five-year-old Walter married the eighteen-year-old Yasmine, a milky-skinned Creole belle from New Orleans. That had been fifteen years ago. At the time, Niles had just turned twenty-two and had been married himself for less than a year to the pretty nineteen-year-old Patsy McClelland.

The moment he’d laid eyes on Yasmine, Niles had wanted her. But old Walter Parnell was nobody’s fool. He’d locked the delectable Yasmine up in his pillared mansion, giving her no opportunity to dilly-dally. She had gained the respect and admiration of the citizenry, who’d been skeptical when first Walter had brought home his beautiful young bride.

She had carefully maintained that respect when Walter Parnell rode proudly off to war at age fifty-six, leaving his trusted twenty-nine-year-old wife behind, making her promise she would call on Niles Loveless should she need anything.

Niles smiled now as he thought back on it.

Yasmine had needed something, all right. And he’d been just the man to give it to her.

The dust had hardly settled behind the departing Walter Parnell before Yasmine had summoned Niles to the big Parnell estate. In the soft feather bed she had shared with her husband, they made wildly physical love for the entirety of that cool April day. A violent meeting of bare burning bodies. An explosive coupling of hungry beasts, starving for the feasts of forbidden flesh.

The clever, provocative Yasmine had kept him wanting her with a white-hot passion ever since. A cruel creature, she loved showing up unannounced at his home on the pretense of visiting his unsuspecting wife, Patsy. She took a perverse pleasure from seeing him squirm as he played his role of faithful husband and contented family man while she lounged seductively in his drawing room, looking so lovely and sensual it was all he could do to keep his hands off her.

“Come by the house later this afternoon when you’re finished here,” said Yasmine, bringing Niles back to the present.

“Fine, fine. But now you really must go.”

He opened the door, handed her out, and said loudly enough for any passersby to hear, “Don’t mention it, Mrs. Parnell. Always glad to be of service.”

“Good day to you, Niles. Give my best to Patsy.”

She smiled, turned, lifted her skirts, and stopped short when her flashing eyes caught sight of a jet-haired man moving lithely toward a tethered sorrel stallion.

She heard Niles exclaim from behind, “Will you look at that magnificent beast!”

“Yes, isn’t he,” murmured Yasmine. She wasn’t referring to the equine creature, but Niles was far too preoccupied to catch her meaning.

“I’ve got to own that thoroughbred!” Niles said, then stepped around Yasmine and hurried down the sidewalk toward Kurt Northway.

“Niles Loveless,” he said, and put out his hand. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Before Kurt had a chance to respond, Yasmine Parnell stepped eagerly in front of Niles, offered her own small gloved hand, and said, “I’m the widowed Mrs. Walter Parnell. You must be Helen’s Yankee.”

“I’m Kurt Northway, Mrs. Parnell,” Kurt said, unsmiling, as he gently shook her hand and released it. “My son and I hired out to do some seasonal labor at Mrs. Courtney’s farm.”

“So it’s true,” said Yasmine. “You’re living with Helen.”

She saw a muscle jump in his jaw, knew he was gritting his teeth. He said, “Mrs. Courtney has been kind enough to provide temporary quarters down at the barn.”