Fair Is the Rose (25 page)

"Who are you?" he whispered, unable to close his eyes to the sorrow fleeting across her features. She was
afraid,
she was running from something that frightened her. She was alone.

But he was the one who was helpless. What could he do for her?
Nothing—another facet to the fear.
He wasn't even sure he knew her real name. He wasn't even sure she was a widow. There was a toughness about her that unsettled him. She'd seen more of the world than she wanted to. She kissed him.

Her lips took his like a flower, petals opened wide, beckoning. Her softness had the opposite effect on him. He wanted to control it, but he couldn't. She made him do, and think, and feel, even when he didn't want to.

Another facet of the fear.

Her mouth moved lower.
To his neck.
Her tongue licked his scar. Her teeth pulled and sucked on his skin. She liked what she was doing to him, she liked the power. Women always did. But she was different. The sadness never left her eyes.

"Who are you?" he choked out as she kissed his flat, small nipple. Her mouth trailed down his chest to his navel. She didn't answer. He wrapped his hands in her hair.
Gold silk.
He wanted to see her face.
Her expression.
Anything but that small, pink, wet tongue that heated his skin.

"Tell me who you are. Let me help you. I'm the law . . . I'm the law . . ."

She moved lower.

"Christ, who are you?"
 
he
demanded between gnashed teeth. Groaning, he fell back against the cot. She couldn't answer.

"Tell me . . ." he whispered, his words becoming uneven, his sight losing focus. Excitement pumped through him as acute as the fear he felt for her. She was in trouble. He knew it. But he could help her. He was no poor Southern boy looking for a handout. He was the law now. Things were finally under his control and he could help her.
If she would just trust him.
Trust him.

"Who are you?" he whispered, forcing an answer with every quick breath he took. "Who are you?" he demanded, caressing and stroking her hair.
Until words became too difficult.

Cain's eyes shot open. He was sweating, though the room was so cold there was a transparent layer of ice in the washbowl. Disoriented, he looked around, not sure of his surroundings. Then he looked down at his pants.
Christ.

He stumbled to his feet, his limbs leaden, his head pounding like the entire Maine 34th was thundering over it. With a shaking hand, he slicked back his hair.

He had to see her.

He grabbed for his bandanna to clean himself, but the bandanna was gone from the peg. His money was gone too. The coins he vaguely remembered throwing on the table had been picked up. The only evidence they'd been there at all was one forgotten copper penny wedged between the cracks in the floorboards.

Gritting his teeth, he broke the ice in the bowl and washed himself. He didn't know why he rushed. He knew what he'd find. That terrible feeling he'd had in the last years of the war came back to him. The Cause was hopeless. Some things just couldn't be saved, no matter how a man tried.

Dressed at last, he slammed into the room next to his. She wasn't there. He could look in the mess hall, but it was no use. In his gut, he knew she was gone. Escaped like a criminal on the run.

"Who are you?" he whispered to the empty room, wishing there was something of her left behind that he could touch, smell. He remembered something and dug inside the pocket of his vest. Seven gold pieces flashed in his palm. He couldn't understand it. In her hurry to flee, she'd taken pennies when she could have had a fortune.

His cold gray eyes sparked with anger. As if he was making a silent vow, he clutched the coins in his fist. He would understand why she fled someday.

And he would see to it that
she
personally was the one to explain.

I gave this Miss a parting kiss,

Mark well what I do say!

I gave this Miss a parting kiss,

When I got on board, my money I missed.

I'll go no more a-rovin' with you, fair maid.

November 1875

"Obsession has many symptoms. He has all of them, I fear." Rollins shifted in the oxblood leather chair, uneasy in the presence of the gentleman standing across the desk. The man looked pensively out the window. A snowstorm had hit the city. Carriages had replaced their wheels with
runners,
sleighs now outnumbered hacks on the avenue. Willard's City Hotel was unusually quiet in the inclement weather. The hotel's windows, which had for years stared dispassionately at the churnings of power, corruption, and—rarely—heroism, were now sheeted in falling white. In the blizzard the building looked like a squat, vacant-eyed ghost.

"I thought Cain was going to quit all that hard riding."

Rollins's answer was a chuckle.

The man caught the joke. "A woman, then, is it? God save us all. Is that what made him turn down the offer?"

"If Cain survives this one, he'll be more than ready to

work
for you, sir. Give him a year and he'll be scratching at the door of the Treasury to get in."

"Why is he deciding this now? I thought when he came here to Washington he was going to be ours."

Rollins shook his head. "He was going to forget about her, sir, but that's how it goes. Trying to forget an obsession only makes it grow bigger."

"We need Cain here. I've been impressed with him ever since I faced him at Shiloh. His work for the marshals has been unparalleled. He's the right man for the job."

"The Secret Service will still be here in a year. And when Cain comes back, I assure you, Mr. President, he'll be able to give it his full attention." Rollins gave a wry smile.
"Unlike now."

Grant finally turned from the window. Rollins remembered him as impressive. The last time he'd seen him was in the Wilderness. Grant rode among the troops, his blue lieutenant general's uniform as soiled as the rest of them, but even with the lieutenant general's gold braid ripped and dulled by mud, there had been no one more dignified, no one possessing more valor and honor than Grant.
Except maybe Lee.

Now Grant was much heavier. And he looked weary. Corruption, Rollins assumed, made a tiring bedfellow.

"So where's that Reb off to? I think I have a right to know if I've got to wait a year for him. That's a long time." Grant raised one eyebrow. "I needn't remind you —this
is
my second term."

Rollins released an exasperated sigh. Cain was behaving like a madman. Ever since that woman had disappeared from Camp Brown last August, Cain just couldn't get her off his mind. Sure, he'd vowed to. When she had trotted off, Rollins swore he'd never seen Cain so angry, so quiet. Rollins and some of the other men had offered to go after her, but Cain wouldn't budge. There was betrayal on his face when he'd said there wasn't a woman alive worth chasing all across hell and damnation.

But there was something else on his face too. And the emotion had grown every day since the girl had left him. Rollins wasn't sure he could explain to the President what Cain was about; he wasn't sure he understood it himself. All he knew was that Cain couldn't stand it anymore. The girl had a pull on him that he was finally giving in to. Cain was leaving for Wyoming Territory in the morning. Spurred on by the fixation of
his own
imagination.

"So tell me about her. Tell me about this woman who has captured Macaulay Cain."

"She's in trouble. I know that for sure." Rollins cast his eyes downward. "I keep telling Cain she might be more trouble than she's worth. You should have seen her face when she found out Cain was no outlaw but a marshal. I thought she might faint right there in the middle of the prairie. The girl was more terrified of him then, than she was of the entire damned Kineson gang."

"You think she's hiding out west, running from Confederate crimes?"

"Couldn't be.
Too young.
Besides, she's a Northern girl. I'd stake my life on it. Something about the way she walks.
Very upper class.
She made me think of the women you see in Newport or Saratoga Springs. Rich. When you see her, you think rich."

"Was she rich?"

"I doubt anymore. Would she have been on that coach if she was? Besides she was wearing widow's weeds. Her husband probably left her poor."

"So maybe the family's running after her."

"We thought of that, me and Cain. But if she was some merry widow who'd up and killed her husband, why would she be mourning him in weeds? And even more important, why wouldn't she have some money?"

"The woman's an enigma, I'll hand you that. Where is she now?"

"Cain tracked her down to some dead, nowhere mining town in Wyoming. I told him to just go there and get the woman out of his system, but he's convinced that approach won't work. He's terrified of frightening her off. She could run so far he'd never find her. She's working in a saloon there in Noble—that's the name of the town—and I think she's selling more than . . . well, I hate to be indelicate . . ."

Grant came right out with it. "You mean he thinks she's a hooker?"

Rollins coughed. He would never get used to that word. "Yeah, I think so. And it's tearing him up. So what he did was, he wrote to the mayor of Noble and offered himself up as sheriff—hiding most of his over-qualifications, of course. Well, they haven't had a sheriff in Noble for five years and they were pretty damn glad to get one. The council just voted him in. He's at the Willard packing right now."

"All this for a woman . . . it's hard to believe . . ."

"She was a fine-looking woman, sir.
Beautiful, actually."
Rollins stroked his mustache, a habit when he was pensive.

"Beauty is fleeting. Doesn't Cain know that?"

"Yes, he knows it. If there ever was a man who's never lacked the company of beautiful women, Cain is it. But this one's different, sir. It almost worries me. He might be headed for trouble."