Rebecca Hagan Lee (22 page)

Julie winced, but didn’t cry out as he manipulated the swollen joint.

“Bearable?” Dr. Stone asked. “Or unbearable?”

“Bearable,” she answered.

He nodded. “Still using the laudanum I left for you in order to ease the pain and sleep at night?”

Julie shook her head. “No. Not since the first night. I don’t care for laudanum.”

Dr. Stone raised an eyebrow in query before glancing over at Will for confirmation.

Will nodded. “She doesn’t,” he added. “She expelled it when I gave it to her. After that, we gave up and settled for coffee and brandy.”

Julie glared at Will. “You put brandy in my coffee without my knowledge?”

“Don’t get your dander up with him, young lady,” Dr. Stone interrupted. “He gave you brandy on my orders, in case you displayed an adverse reaction to the laudanum. Some folks do. And you appear to be one of them.”

“Are you still putting brandy in my beverages?” Julie asked.

“I’m the doctor,” Dr. Stone reminded her. “I’ll ask the questions.” He stared at Will. “Well? Are you?”

“Not unless she wants it,” Will replied. “And she hasn’t complained of pain since yesterday morning.” He turned his attention to Julie. “Jack made a pot of tea for you this morning. So no. We haven’t added brandy to your coffee since yesterday morning, when you said your shoulder hurt.”

“Good,” she told him.

“Very good,” the doctor pronounced. “From now on, I recommend a hot soak in the bath to ease the aches and pains, and brandy if she asks for it.” He smiled at her. “But I would rather you try to do without it.”

Dr. Stone concluded his examination with a check of her stitches. He looked at the cut above her eye and the two stitches in her lip. “Well, young lady, you are well enough to get up and walk around. In fact, I encourage you to do so in order to keep the threat of pneumonia at bay, but not anywhere unsafe. But these”—he indicated her stitches—“must stay a few more days.”

Julie groaned. The stitches were beginning to itch, especially those in her bottom lip, and she wanted nothing more than to be rid of them.

“I’ll be back Saturday morning to take them out.”

“I’ll be counting the days,” she promised.

Dr. Stone laughed.

Will didn’t say a word aloud, but when his gaze met Julie’s, the look in his eyes said he was anticipating the removal of her stitches as much as she was.

Before he left, Dr. Stone reminded Julie to get up and walk around. Unfortunately, there was nowhere for her to go that was safe, so Julie was confined to the upstairs and her own company for a while longer.

Chapter Twenty-five

“A cat pent up becomes a lion.”

—ITALIAN PROVERB

B
y Friday, two days after the doctor’s visit, Julie thought she would go mad from boredom. Always an early riser, she paced the floor of her room like a lioness in a cage at the zoo, expanding her territory on the second day to include the second-floor hallway. She paced as Will slept. And her boredom grew. She’d finished reading
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Will had started reading to her while she was unconscious, and had read Mrs. Shelley’s novel as well, but the cache of books in Will’s room was limited, and as far as she knew, there was no library or gentleman’s smoking parlor in the saloon where she might find something else to read, and the downstairs was off-limits to her in any case.

The Silken Angel Saloon was open for business twenty hours of the day. It opened at eight o’clock in the morning for breakfast and locked the doors every morning at four. Will and Jack slept during the hours between four and eight, as did everyone else except the Pinkerton detectives, who stood guard over the grand parlor downstairs.

Bringing her breakfast tray the morning after the doctor’s visit, Will had encouraged her to do the same. “I know that this will seem queer to you, but we function in a world very different from that of the mission or of most legitimate businesses to which you are accustomed.” He’d poured her a mug of tea, added a lump of sugar and a splash of cream, then settled down in a chair beside the bed with his mug of coffee. “We work at night and sleep a few hours before daylight. That is quite against normal instincts and every early morning axiom you’ve ever had drilled into your head. But it is the nature of the beast. Saloons provide evening entertainment for men who work during the day.”

Julie looked at him. “I’ve read everything you have to read in this room, and if there’s a library on the premises, it’s not on this floor. I’ve checked.”

Will bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. “You’re right. There is no library. Saloons aren’t generally equipped with them.”

“The theory being that a man may read and drink at home, but must frequent a saloon in order to be thoroughly entertained,” she snapped.

“Ouch! My, aren’t we being a bit waspish this morning?” He set the tray down on the table.

“That’s generally the outcome when one’s sleep is constantly interrupted by the pall of cigar smoke filling the atmosphere, and the sound of men’s laughter and loud voices, the clink of glasses, the infernal sound of that wheel going ’round and ’round, and billiard balls bouncing against one another and the rails of the table,” she grumbled.

“The same could be said of the sound of windows opening to air out the cigar smoke and letting in the noise of the streets of Chinatown coming to life every morning, as well as the infernal pacing up and down the hall and around this room,” he shot back before downing a mouthful of hot coffee to clear the early morning cobwebs from his brain so he’d be better able to spar with her at the ungodly hour of eight fifteen.

“You can hear me pacing downstairs?” Julie was ashamed to admit to herself that she hadn’t thought to ask where Will slept now that she had taken over his bedroom. She knew Jack kept an apartment downstairs next to the kitchen and assumed Will was sharing it with him.

“You’ll have to ask Jack about that,” he told her. “I sleep up here.”

“Up here where?”

“Earlier in the week, I slept in that chair beside the bed if I slept at all. For the past two nights, I’ve been sleeping in the room next door.” A wedge of her delicate lawn nightgown was visible through the opening in her dressing gown, and Will found himself watching the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the thin, almost transparent fabric.

Recalling the single iron bedstead in the room she’d occupied while the seven Chinese girls were here, Julie suddenly wondered how he managed to fold his six-foot-three-inch frame onto the mattress of those small beds. “How on earth do you manage that? Don’t parts of you hang off the bed?”

Will waggled his eyebrows at her and gave her a wolfish grin. “Not the essential parts.”

Julie frowned. “Maybe we should switch rooms.”

“We can’t,” he reminded her. “Because the room I’m sleeping in and the others like it were designed to look like sporting rooms open to the male public. There are no locks on the doors. So it wouldn’t do to have a customer make his way up here by mistake or by design and find you in one of those rooms. My suite of rooms—the rooms you’re currently occupying—are private and have locks on the doors to prove it.”

“But I’m short and you’re . . .” she protested.

Aroused.
“Fine where I am.”

“You couldn’t possibly be,” she insisted.

“You’re right, Julia Jane, I’d be more comfortable in my own bed, but it’s occupied.” He gave her a meaningful smile.

She blushed.

“And now my unguarded tongue has made you uncomfortable,” Will said by way of apology.

“It’s only fair. The beds in those rooms are much too small for you. I would know,” Julie said, recalling the night of the auction.

He nodded. “Last Friday night, when the other girls were here.”

“I was planning to convince them to follow me out of the saloon to freedom,” Julie admitted.

“Imagine that,” Will said with a touch of irony, “Julia Jane Parham leading a freedom crusade. Now eat your breakfast before it gets cold.” He pulled out the chair for her and motioned for her to sit down on it.

“What about you?” she asked, a lifetime of proper table manners and mealtime etiquette burned into her.

“I’ve already eaten.”

“Oh.”
Julie took a couple of bites of her scrambled eggs, then put her fork down.

“I thought you knew my morning routine by now. Breakfast with Jack first thing.”

“I do,” she said. “It’s just that . . .”

Will read the disappointment on her face and realized that she was lonely and bored. Her world had narrowed to the second floor of the Silken Angel Saloon, her contact with the outside world limited to four people—him, Jack, Zhing Wu, and Dr. Stone. “I breakfast with Jack so we can discuss business matters. But I wouldn’t object to having my morning coffee with you like this every day.”

“That would be nice.” Julie’s voice cracked, her eyes sparkling with unshed tears.

“Then we have a date,” Will promised. Reaching over, he picked up her fork and handed it to her. “Jack would be dismayed to learn you didn’t like his breakfast.” He smiled at her. “It may not be haute cuisine, but his breakfast is considerably better than Mr. Ming’s. Take another bite.”

She did as he asked, swallowing forkfuls of fluffy eggs and bites of ham until she cleaned her plate and finished her mug of tea.

Will whisked her plate away and put it on the tray and turned toward the door. “I’ll see what I can find for you to read.”

“Thank you.”

“And Zhing will deliver the laundry later this afternoon.”

Julie nodded.

He paused in the doorway as another thought occurred to him, something that might help her pass the time. “Do you play cards?”

“I played in whist drives back home.”

Will frowned. Whist was a trick-taking game for four people. He and Julie equaled two. “Do you play any other card games?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Any games at all?”

“Chess,” she admitted reluctantly.

Will’s eyes lit up.

And Julie groaned.

“You don’t play well?” he guessed.

She looked down at her hands neatly folded in her lap. “It isn’t that.” In fact, she played an excellent game of chess. She and her father had played for as long as she could remember, but it wasn’t a game she particularly enjoyed. It was something she shared with her father when he was home, and she treasured their matches for that reason, but the commodore had insisted she memorize chess moves the way she memorized multiplication tables and sheet music. Her father was proud of the way she played chess.
I taught her to play the way I intended to teach my son
, was his oft-repeated boast. Julie withered a little inside every time she heard it.

Will studied her. “You don’t like chess.”

She glanced up. “I
loathe
chess.”

He knew from her expression and the way she said it that there was a story there. But he wasn’t going to push her to reveal it. Not today. “Then I’ll save the chess for Jack,” he said with complete equanimity. “Tell me, is there anything you enjoy playing in your spare time—when you aren’t psalm singing and smashing glass? Tennis, perhaps?”

She cracked a smile.

“Cricket? Badminton? Golf? Croquet? You swung your parasol as if you’d had a great deal of practice.”

“No tennis,” she said. “No cricket. No badminton. No golf.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s just as well.” He sighed. “With your injured shoulder and sprained wrist, you’d be no match at all.” He snapped his fingers. “How about croquet?”

“I adore it.” She gave him a mischievous look. “I especially adore smacking the ball with the mallet.”

“Too bad it’s played out of doors,” he recalled. “You aren’t allowed out of doors. . . .”

“Yes, too bad,” she agreed. “I’m in the mood to smack something.”

This time Will let a smile slip out. “We can’t have that.” He thought about the options available indoors and within his reach, searching his brain for a game similar to croquet. “Do you by any chance play billiards?”

“Billiards?”
Billiards was a man’s game—played almost exclusively by men in their gentlemen’s clubs and saloons, or the upper stories of their houses where women were not allowed, or were not able to navigate the narrow stairs in skirts and bustles. Julie had never seen the game played or known a woman to play billiards. The idea that a
lady
might do so was scandalous. And Julie was instantly enamored of the idea.

“Yes, billiards,” Will confirmed. “Pocket billiards, to be exact. It’s an indoor game where one smacks a little ball with a stick.” He flashed his most gorgeous smile—the one where his dimple showed. “Similar to lawn croquet. I thought you might enjoy it.”

“It sounds delightful.”

His smile broadened. Life with Julia Jane was anything but boring. “Is there anything else you’d like to play? Other than tambourine?”

“Piano,” she said softly. “I play piano.”

“You are in luck, Miss Parham,” Will said. “I happen to own a piano and a billiard table.” He winked. “Now, I have work to do and more errands to run. If you’re a good little missionary and agree to wear your black wig and not to smash anything, I’ll pick you up tonight. After hours.”

“I’ll be the best little missionary you’ve ever seen, as long as you let me go downstairs. . . .”

She was already the best little missionary he’d ever seen
.
“You’ve got a deal.”