Only My Love (16 page)

He finally fell asleep thinking about Drew Beaumont and the kick that had sent the reporter over the side of the mountain. Had he survived? And if he did, did he have enough sense to take Ethan's warnings seriously? A story about Michael Dennehy and her real connection to Drew and the
Chronicle
would surely be a death sentence. This time for him as well as her.

* * *

It was the weight on her chest that woke her, the suffocating weight that seemed to compress her lungs and wouldn't let her draw a breath. Michael clawed at the weight. She twisted and struggled, pushing upward with her arms and outward with her legs.

"Stop it, Michael!" The husky whisper was also urgent. "Damn you, woman, stop struggling and I'll let you up! I'm not going to hurt you." Ethan was sitting on the edge of the bed, half turned toward Michael but leaning over her. One forearm rested heavily on her breastbone while his hand clamped her mouth closed. The other arm batted her flailing hands away, protecting himself. "Would you please wake up?" he demanded impatiently.

She
was
awake. Not that she could tell him. She was desperate to suck in air, faint with the lack of it now that he had pinched off her nose. Her teeth managed to grasp the fleshy part of his palm. She bit down hard.

Ethan swore. He stopped pinching her nose, jammed the side of his forefinger under the soft part of it and pushed. Michael's mouth opened almost instantly and Ethan freed his hand. He raised his hand to his mouth, sucking on the wound, tasting to see if she had drawn blood, while Michael gulped for air.

"I said I wasn't going to hurt you!" he told her.

"You were doing a credible job of it."

His voice lowered and became even more severe as he explained. "You were screaming at the top of your lungs! Another few seconds and you would have had every boarder in here."

He had barely completed his sentence when there was a knock at the door. Ethan was without patience. "What the hell is it?"

Happy pushed open the door far enough to stick in his head. The meager light from the stove gave an orange cast to his scruffy features. He grinned widely. "You mind pleasurin' your woman a little less loudly, Ethan? Some of us folks done already called it a night."

Michael pushed herself away from Ethan and sat up. "He was
not
pleasuring me," she said between clenched teeth.

Happy's eyes wandered from Ethan to Michael and back to Ethan again. "Well, then, iffen you're gonna beat her, gag her first. No sense keepin' the rest of us up." He nodded once as if to emphasize the point and ducked back into the hallway.

Working herself up to a scream that would shatter Happy's eardrums, Michael threw her pillow at the door. "Why that son of a—"

Ethan's hand found its mark. "You cuss like a man, too. Now, shut up." He waited. "Done?"

She nodded, staring at him wide-eyed above the hand that covered her mouth.

"Good, 'cause I've had about as much as I'm taking from you tonight. There's a few hours left till morning." He lifted his hand cautiously. "Go back to sleep now." Yawning, Ethan slid off the bed and onto the floor. His brief taste of the bed made the floor seem harder than before. He punched his pillow and gave it a sour look when it didn't conform to the shape he wanted. He turned from side to side several times before he found a position that was vaguely comfortable. His satisfaction was punctuated with a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a sigh.

The silence was blessed... for as long as it lasted.

Michael scooted to the edge of the bed and looked over. She could make out Ethan's lumpy form beneath his blankets. It was more difficult to tell whether she was talking to his face or his feet. "Was I really screaming?" she asked.

Every part of the sound he made now was a groan. "Ever heard a rebel yell?"

She hadn't, but she got the point. She was relieved to find out she was speaking to the talking end of him. "I'm sorry about waking you. I must have been dreaming."

"Hell of a dream."

She nodded. "It was hell. I mean, that was the dream. At least I think it was. It's difficult to remember now." Shutting her eyes, she could recall a black slippery void that surrounded her, pulsing as if it were a living thing. At times it was as insubstantial as midnight, as smooth as polished onyx, as cold as well water. Then it would become oppressive, thick and heavy, bearing down on her and squeezing her from all sides. There was no escape and the only direction she felt herself go was not up or down, but deeper. Remembering forced a shiver to the surface of her skin. She burrowed under the covers. "It was emptiness," she told him. "I think that's what I was dreaming about."

Maybe, he thought, if he didn't say anything she might go back to sleep now.

"And I couldn't get away from it."

Ethan turned away from her.

"I wonder what it—"

He sat up abruptly. Now his head was almost level with her face. "Lady, listen to me. I don't know about your dream. I don't
want
to know about your dream. Find a fortune teller if you have to know what it means. All I know is you were screaming like it was the end of the world. Now, go back to sleep or, so help me God, you'll wish it
were
the apocalypse." He lay down again, this time on his stomach with one arm propped under the pillow and his head.

Michael bit her lower lip to squelch her giddy laughter.

She would have liked to have fallen back to sleep but the room was cold. Lying there, she could hear the bitterly icy wind whistling past the window. She glanced at the stove and saw by the dying glow of coals that there was little warmth coming from that quarter.

Waiting until she thought Ethan's steady breathing indicated sleep, Michael pushed back the covers and slipped quietly out of bed. She stepped over Ethan, careful not to touch him. The towel that had been lying at the base of her bed was still damp. She draped it over the back of a ladder-back chair then knelt in front of the stove to lay a new fire.

She was shivering rather violently when she felt the press of hands on her shoulder.

"Go back to bed," Ethan said. His voice was husky with weariness. "I'll do that."

"Are you sure? I didn't mean—"

"To wake me," he said, finishing her sentence. "I know. Go on."

Michael came to her feet slowly, aware of Ethan's hands still on her shoulders. When she turned toward him he lifted them only fractionally, then rested them again, this time so that his thumbs lay along the line of her collarbone. A different kind of shiver caused her body to tremble. She looked up at him and felt the hot impact of his eyes on her mouth.

He raised his hand. She thought he was going to touch her mouth with the pad of his thumb. She almost closed her eyes in anticipation of the contact. Instead of tracing the line of her lips, Ethan turned her and gave her a gentle push toward the bed.

"Go," he said. "While you still can."

Ethan took care of the stove quickly and returned to his place on the floor. The ache in his groin was a poor sleeping companion. It was small comfort to listen to Michael toss and turn and know she was wrestling with the same demons.

* * *

Kitty was a dervish of activity as she entered the room. "Time to rise, Michael. Ethan said I was not to let you sleep past nine. And Dee, well, I can tell you Dee thought you should have been up long before that." Kitty laid a plain hunter green gown, similar in cut and style to the sky blue one she was wearing, over the back of the armchair. "That's for day wear. Dee found it at the back of her wardrobe and I let out the hem. It should be a fine fit." She held up another gown in front of her, sashaying around the room to show it off, clearly oblivious to Michael's sleepy inattention. The gown was pink taffeta, trimmed in white at the bodice and along the hem. It was inches shorter than any decent street dress, coming to the middle of Kitty's calves as she pretended to model it. The bodice was low, off the shoulder, and the short sleeves were rather dramatically puffed. The waist was so tiny the wearer would have no choice but to be tightly cinched in a stiff corset.

"This was Dee's too," she said, putting it with the other one. "A little too small for her now, which is why I think she's letting you have it. You'll have to try it on so I can fit it proper. Ethan says you don't sew. I don't mind helpin' out until you learn. It's a shame about your trunks and such. They're probably on their way to San Francisco by now. I bet you had some pretty things. It always seems to me that Eastern ladies have the prettiest things." Her voice was a shade wistful, her light blue eyes dreamy. The far away look only lasted seconds then she was all brisk business again, clapping her hands once to slough off the fantasy.

Rooting through the pile of clothing items she had placed on the table, she held up a pair of white tights and white kid boots. "These go with the pink gown. We do a very nice number with parasols that I'll teach you after breakfast. I'll have to find you a parasol, to be sure. I think Carmen might have one you can use. Ethan says he intends to get you to the dressmaker some time today. You'll need day dresses and gowns for evening work." She sighed. "You were lucky to find Ethan. He sure seems to have taken a shine to you. I can't recollect him ever takin' so much interest in a single woman before. He put me in mind of a hummin'bird, goin' from flower to flower."

A hummingbird was the last thing that came to Michael's mind when she thought of Ethan Stone. Yawning and stretching and keeping her thoughts to herself, Michael sat up. Kitty was still sifting through the pile of clothing she brought in, holding things up for Michael's inspection. There were more stockings and tights, two pairs of serviceable shoes, cotton and silk drawers, lacy petticoats, corsets, hair ribbons, hair pins, and hair feathers. It was an impressive array of items that Detra had donated. Michael imagined that Houston had had to use some persuasion. She preferred not to dwell on the form that persuasion may have taken.

The bilious and bawdy pink gown had been Detra's way of exacting revenge. Michael was fairly sure of that. If the dress didn't fit Dee any longer, Michael had little hope it would fit her. Detra had offered it as nothing less than an insult.

"Ethan said he wasn't sure he was going to let me dance," she told Kitty. "You may not need to find that parasol at all."

"Oh, pish," Kitty said, waving her hand dismissingly. "Dee hired you, didn't she?"

"Yes." She offered the answer reluctantly, wondering if Kitty were laying a trap. Had Obie told her the truth as he knew it, or did she still believe the story that Ethan wanted almost everyone to believe? Michael saw the ease with which she could be caught in a lie. "Yes," she repeated. "Dee hired me."

"Well, then. There's nothing more to be said. Ethan might keep you here all night but before then you're one of Detra's girls. That's what she told me to tell you. She says she hired you to work and you'd better do it." One pale eyebrow was raised consideringly. "Unless you decide to quit, that is. Can't think it's a good idea though. Ethan may lose interest in you and then where will you be? Sure, you may be able to save a little money after giving Dee her forty percent, but it will be a while before you can get train fare out of these parts again, and you might as well know that if you quit now Dee would as soon see you in the streets as hire you back."

Only one thing made an impact on Michael. "What forty percent?"

Kitty tossed a blood red robe at the bed. "Dee's cut," she said with untroubled frankness.

"I'm not sure I understand," Michael said. "You mean she pays me a wage for dancing and I give her back forty percent?"

That interpretation brought a frown to Kitty's full mouth. Her rounded features screwed up comically as she looked at Michael as though she suddenly saw a third eye. "Now that would serve no purpose," she said. "The forty percent is what you owe her for sleepin' with Ethan."

"But-"

"You aren't just givin' it to that man, are you? You can't be that love struck." Her eyes narrowed as she studied Michael more closely. "Where'd you work before you answered Dee's advertisement?"

Michael's mind went blank. There were probably a thousand dancehalls, brothels, and bars in New York City and she couldn't think of the name of one. She thought her hesitation would be her undoing, instead Kitty put another explanation to it.

"My God, you're new to this, aren't you? You just answered that ad to get out here. I'll wager you don't have no more sense than a gaggle of geese headin' for the choppin' block about what's in store for you."

"That's a good assessment of the situation."

"Hell, you don't even talk normal." Kitty shook her head as if she could barely take in this turn of events. "You better stay close to me else you're in for a passel of trouble. What Dee didn't know won't hurt her much. You
can
dance, can't you? You weren't so foolish to answer her ad without at least knowin' that."

"I can dance."

"Kick?"

How hard could kicking be? "I can kick."

"Line dancing?"

"I know the Virginia Reel," she said, thinking of the two lines that were formed for that dance.

Kitty rolled her eyes, threw up her hands, and sank into the wing chair. Her curly flaxen hair bobbed with the force of her drop. "Lord, this is going to be harder than I thought. I wish I hadn't taken a likin' to you. Don't even know why I should when you lassoed the man I've had my eye on for five months now."