My Darling Melissa (28 page)

Melissa happened to think that he needed distracting, so she began unbuttoning his shirt. He groaned when she slid the fabric aside and started teasing and caressing him in much the same way he liked to do with her.

“Melissa ...” He ground out the name.

She bent to touch one taut masculine nipple with the tip of her tongue. “Hmmmm?”

Quinn moaned, and Melissa could see the muscles standing out in his neck as he tilted his head back. She continued to devil him, very sure of herself, until he suddenly grasped her by the waist and thrust her away with such force that she nearly landed on the floor.

He shot out of his chair and began pacing, and he fastened the buttons of his shirt as he moved. “My God, Melissa, give me room to breathe, will you?”

He might as well have slapped her as said that. Melissa retreated a step, smarting as though he had. “I-I’m sorry.”

Quinn stopped in his tracks.
“What?”
he demanded. “What did you say?”

“I said I was sorry,” Melissa answered miserably.

“Well, don’t be!” came the furious retort. “I’m the one who’s in the wrong here, and don’t forget it!”

“Oh,” said Melissa, her eyes going wide as Quinn began to pace again. The realization came to her that he was in a great deal of emotional pain, but she had no idea what was causing it or how to help. She longed to put her arms around him but was afraid of being rejected again, so she just stood there wringing her hands.

Presently Quinn stopped and faced her again. “I never meant to hurt you,” he said, and then he started toward the door.

Melissa beat him to it, pressing herself to the paneling as she had done once before downstairs. “You’re not leaving without me,” she told him firmly. “I won’t be left to agonize over where you are and what you’re doing!”

A muscle bunched in his jawline, and the audacious eyes snapped with annoyance. “There is a simple solution to your dilemma, my darling,” he said. “Don’t think about me at all.”

“I can’t help thinking about you, and you know it!” Melissa cried, beyond patience. “Damn it, Quinn, if you leave this house tonight, I won’t be here when you get back!”

He paused. “You’re worried that I’m planning to spend the night with Gillian, aren’t you?” he accused. His tone made Melissa out to be a poor sport.

“Yes,” she answered, calmer now.

Quinn was reaching for the doorknob. “Then I guess it’s about time you learned to trust me,” he said, and then he stepped past Melissa and walked out into the hallway. When she heard the front door close loudly in the distance she stuffed some of her things into a valise and fled the house.

The idea of making a tumultuous entrance at a hotel with just her valise was more than Melissa could tolerate. She made her way to the train yard, where Quinn’s railroad car sat sidetracked on a spur, and let herself in.

After lighting a lamp and building a fire in the stove Melissa willed herself to cry—the pressure building up inside her was nearly intolerable—but she found that she couldn’t. She’d exhausted her store of tears since meeting Quinn, and now there were no more to shed.

Knowing that she wouldn’t be able to sleep, she got out pen and ink and sat down at the desk to work on her story. She wrote feverishly, pouring all her emotions into the book, until well after midnight. Only when she was too spent to think at all did she crawl into the decadent bed with its covering of chinchilla and sleep.

Quinn watched the light fade from the windows of the car and longed to be inside it, and inside Melissa, with such savage intensity that he didn’t trust himself to approach her. To make matters worse, he was roaring drunk, and he made it a point never to touch a woman when he’d had too much whiskey. Doing that would have reduced him to the same level as his father.

He was about to walk away when it occurred to him that Melissa was vulnerable, alone in that railroad car. There were men in town who wouldn’t be above taking advantage of her.

Frustration seized Quinn, and the sheer force of the emotion sobered him somewhat. He was about to go into the car and insist that Melissa come home with him when,
out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a familiar form leaning against a lamppost.

“Looks like you’re havin’ trouble keepin’ the two of ’em under your wing,” Eustice observed, and then he laughed.

Quinn wheeled on his father, sick with hatred. The old man was haunting him like a ghost, and he’d go right on doing it until he’d gotten what he wanted. Quinn’s bearing must have conveyed some of what he felt, for Eustice immediately backed up a step.

“Now, I didn’t mean no harm, boy,” he hastened to say. “I was just funnin’.”

Quinn cursed under his breath, willing his brain to clear. “What do you want?” he asked. “What will it take to get rid of you once and for all?”

Eustice sighed. “Thanks to that money you gave me this morning, I ain’t in no particular hurry to move on. I reckon I’ll hang around Port Riley for a time, and see what comes of this—marriage of yours.”

Shoving a hand through his hair, Quinn sucked in a deep breath. It steadied him, driving more of the whiskey fog from his mind. “That wasn’t the deal, old man. I paid you to leave.”

Eustice pretended that he hadn’t heard Quinn’s words. “From what I hear, she’s got rich folks, that wife of yours. You ain’t good enough for her any more than you was for Miss Gillian Aires.”

The streets were dark, and they were empty, and for one insane moment Quinn considered getting rid of his father for good. In the end, however, despite all he’d suffered from the man, he found it strangely difficult to lift his hand against him. “Where would I be, Pa,” he drawled, “if I hadn’t had you to encourage me all this time?”

The old man gave a hoot of disgusted amusement. “You’re lucky I didn’t just hand you back to that whore and spit on her as she walked away.”

“What are you talking about?” Quinn demanded, striding over and grasping his father by his fetid lapels.

Eustice’s aplomb had deserted him. “I didn’t mean nothin’, boy,” he whined. “Let me go!”

Quinn’s fingers tightened on Eustice’s flannel shirt. “Tell me!”

“I didn’t get you off your ma!” Eustice spat out. “Damn you, you’re the son of a whore, and I wish she’d drowned you afore she brought you to me!”

Not knowing whether to believe his father or not, Quinn released him, more in shock than mercy, and rasped out, “You’d better tell me the rest, old man—right now.”

“There ain’t much to tell.” Eustice was blustering, straightening his clothes with the affronted ceremony of an accosted gentleman. “Your ma—my wife, I mean—she never could carry a brat long enough to get it strong, and she’d just lost another one, so she wanted you. She said she’d run off if I didn’t let you stay, and I gave in. A man needs a woman handy.”

Quinn’s stomach was roiling, but he wasn’t about to let on that he was shaken. “What was her name? Where is she now?”

Eustice gave a guffaw of amusement. “Don’t rightly remember her name, boy. As for where she is—how the hell could I know that? Tell you one thing, though—if I was you. I’d be careful who I laid down with.”

At that Quinn’s reason snapped. He lunged for his father’s throat, closing his hands around it. He’d surely have killed the old man if Melissa hadn’t come flying across the street in a flowing flannel nightgown, screaming, “Quinn! No!” Her small fingers pried at his hands, strong and frantic. “No!”

Slowly, reluctantly, Quinn gave in to her pleas and released his grasp on Eustice’s neck. The old man turned and fled down the sidewalk, and Quinn stared after him. aching to finish what he’d started.

“Quinn?” Melissa grasped at his arm, and when that failed to draw his attention from the figure retreating into the darkness she came around and cupped his face in her hands. “Quinn!”

He dared not speak, so he simply stood there, regarding his wife with hot, angry eyes and needing her more than he had ever needed any woman.

Melissa’s eyes were glistening with tears as she looked up
at Quinn, seemingly unaware that she was standing on the street in a nightgown. “That man—he was your father?”

Quinn was still seething, and he had to drag in three or four breaths before he could answer. “Yes, God help me. Yes.”

She took his arm and led him toward the railroad car. “What was he saying to you that made you go crazy like that?”

Quinn knew a sensation of sweeping relief. Melissa hadn’t heard; she didn’t know that the one claim to goodness and decency he’d ever had—his gentle mother—had been stripped away. He didn’t answer because he couldn’t speak.

When they were inside the car Quinn staggered to the bench where Melissa had sat not so long ago in her sodden wedding dress and collapsed.

“How did you know he was my father?” he asked when several minutes had passed.

Melissa was reheating coffee, and it smelled stout enough to strip paint. Her slender shoulders moved in a shrug. “I don’t know—I guess it was just something about him.”

“Probably the horns sprouting out of his head,” Quinn muttered.

Melissa poured some of that turpentine she’d brewed into a mug and brought it to Quinn. She sat beside him on the bench. “You really hate him, don’t you?” she said, marveling.

“Yes,” Quinn breathed after taking a sobering sip of the coffee. “Oh, God, yes.”

“Why?” Her small hand was making slow, comforting circles on his back, and her voice was gentle. Everything about her invited confidence, and Quinn needed desperately to talk to someone.

“Every memory I have of that man is brutal.” He grated out the words. “He was always drunk, and always abusive, and my—my mother got the worst of it. He kept her pregnant from the day they were married until the day she died. She was—fragile. Pa made her life so miserable that she couldn’t carry a child full-term, then he cursed her for failing him.”

“Oh, Quinn,” Melissa whispered, her hand resting on the taut nape of his neck. “I’m so sorry.” She stood, lithe in her nightgown. “Come to bed,” she said, taking his hand. “Let me comfort you.”

Quinn shook his head. The stench of whiskey, and of Eustice Rafferty, was all over him. To touch Melissa would be to foul her. “Not like this,” he said brokenly. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m drunk.”

She smiled, though her eyes still sparkled with sympathetic tears. “I’m your wife, Quinn. I promised to love you no matter what.”

Quinn had to avert his eyes for a moment.

When he looked back Melissa was at the stove. She ladled water into a basin and set it on to heat, moving the coffee pot aside.

“So you really left me,” Quinn observed, to make conversation.

She laughed. “I didn’t go far, did I?” she confessed. “But I’d said I wouldn’t be there when you got home, so I had to keep my word.”

Quinn thought of what he might have done if Melissa hadn’t been on hand to stop him, and how that act would have separated him from her forever, and said, “I’m glad you were around when I needed you.”

Melissa came to him, drew him to his feet, and stripped him of the coat and then the shirt beneath it. Quinn was powerless to stop her until she began working at his belt buckle; he grasped her hands then and held them still.

“I meant what I said, Melissa. I won’t make love to you.”

Her eyes were round and full of innocence when she looked up at him. There were so many things she didn’t know, things she’d been shielded from by her friends and family. Quinn wanted to be part of that conspiracy and keep Melissa the way she was forever, even though he knew the task was futile.

“I don’t think you understand,” she said reasonably. Heat was surging through the basin on the stove, and she went to set it aside, using handfuls of her nightgown as pot holders.

She went into the water closet and came out with a washcloth, which she dipped in the basin. Her blue eyes warmed Quinn’s bare chest and shoulders long before she began bathing him.

The sensation was one of such profound solace that Quinn could not bring himself to protest. He closed his eyes and allowed his wife to wash his back, his middle, his arms.

He had no memory of moving to the bed or taking off his trousers. He was just there all of the sudden, beneath the sheet and the chinchilla spread. Melissa’s caresses warmed him long after the water in the basin had turned cool; when she’d prepared him, she drove him into a place of light and thunder and made him cry out in rapturous grief.

He slept deeply, and without dreams.

Melissa was up long before Quinn awakened; in fact, she’d written half a chapter before he even opened his eyes. When he stumbled into the water closet, grumbling under his breath, she smiled and put the lid back on her ink bottle.

Quinn came out presently, smelling of peppermint tooth powder and looking rumpled. He squinted at the neat pile of papers on the desk as he got into the clothes Melissa had laid out for him on the bench. “The book?” he asked in an ominous tone.

Melissa sat up very straight. “Yes,” she answered firmly.

Quinn shook his head and busied himself with the pulling on of his boots, which seemed to be a major undertaking. All the while a mischievous grin lurked at the corner of his mouth.

Melissa pushed back her chair. “Don’t you dare patronize me, Mr. Rafferty,” she warned. “It’s not easy making all those imaginary characters do what they’re supposed to!”

Quinn laughed. “I don’t imagine it is. Let’s go have some breakfast, Calico. I’m starving.”

“Breakfast?” Melissa retorted. “It’s nearly time for lunch.”

Quinn muttered a curse. “Why didn’t you wake me?” Melissa went back to her desk and opened her ink bottle
again, struck by fresh inspiration. “It’s not my job to open your eyes for you,” she said. “If you’re going to drink yourself into a stupor, you’re on your own.”

He chuckled at that—he was good-natured for a man with a hangover, to Melissa’s way of thinking—and finished dressing. In the middle of a paragraph she felt his hand under her chin as he lifted her mouth for his kiss.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?” she asked, dazed as always by his touch.

“For last night,” he answered, nibbling at her lips once more before withdrawing.