The True Love Wedding Dress (32 page)

Angling sideways to get through the gate, Patrick carried his burden toward the house, the child wailing at his heels. Once inside, he hurried up the hallway that bisected the first floor, his goal the kitchen at the rear.

Once there, he rested the woman’s rump on the edge of the table and cleared the surface behind her with a sweep of one arm, sending his breakfast plate and coffee mug clattering to the bare planked floor.

“Quiet!” he barked at the child, his voice much harsher than he intended. He tipped the mother over onto her back and winced when her head struck the wood with a loud
thunk
. “She’s going to be fine, sweetheart. She just fainted, is all.”

“Maman never faints.”

“It’s a long way from town in the heat of the afternoon,” he mused aloud. He’d seen strong men pass out in the fields when they worked too long under the hot summer sun. “We’ll get some water down her. That’ll probably bring her around.”

“She’s hungry, too,” the little girl revealed brokenly. “She’s been giving all the garbage she finds to me.”

Patrick’s heart caught. He gave the child a horrified look, hoping to God he’d misunderstood her. “Garbage, did you say?”

The child nodded, her dark curls bobbing. “Someone stole all our money while we were sleeping at a stage station. All Maman has left is a penny they missed at the bottom of her reticule. She’s been trying to find a position of gainful employment ever since we arrived in No Name, but there are no jobs.”

The child used words twice as big as she was, her eastern twang sounding strange to Patrick’s ears. “Where on earth have you been staying?”

The little girl blinked her huge brown eyes and swallowed convulsively. “We’ve been sneaking into the livery stable to sleep in the hay. Maman hid our satchels under an overturned trough out back.”

Patrick almost let fly with another “Jesus H. Christ.” He managed to hold his tongue and said instead, “You’ll find some corn bread in the warmer and some milk in the icebox, honey. Get yourself something to eat while I tend to your ma.”

The child cast an anxious glance at her mother.

“She’s going to be fine,” Patrick assured her with far more confidence than he felt. “Before you’ve finished eating, she’ll be awake and right as rain, I’ll wager.”

“Are you quite certain?” the child asked in a quivering voice.

The woman’s pallor concerned Patrick, and her pulse felt weak and irregular. “I’m pretty certain. Mind what I say, now. You need to get some food in your belly. I can only care for one fainting lady at a time.”

The child licked her lips and glanced hungrily around the kitchen. “Where’s the warmer?”

The question brought Patrick’s head up. Had she never seen a kitchen? “The top shelf of the stove.”

She turned to stare at the old cooking range.

“There’s a stool in the corner,” Patrick told her as he unfastened the woman’s collar. “You can use it to climb up. And mind you, don’t go spilling the milk. You’ll find a clean glass there in the cupboard to the right of the sink.”

The little girl made short work of dragging the stool across the floor. While she fetched the corn bread, Patrick unfastened the woman’s threadbare gown to mid-chest, trying his best to ignore the swell of her breasts above the lacy chemise and the flawless ivory of her skin. No luck. It wasn’t every day that he found himself partly disrobing an unconscious female, after all. Suddenly all thumbs, he placed a cool, damp cloth at the base of her slender throat and pumped a glass of water to moisten her parched lips.

Her cheeks bulging with bread, the child asked, “And where, pray tell, is your icebox, sir?”

A recent addition to the outdated kitchen, the icebox sat in plain sight at the end of the counter. Patrick gave the little girl another wondering look. The drab and worn condition of her clothing indicated to Patrick that she and her mother were poor, not members of the pampered upper class who supped at fine tables on food prepared by servants.

After directing the child to the icebox, Patrick returned his attention to his patient. Her pallor alarmed him, and he wished now that he’d thought to ask her name. If the worst happened, he would have to contact her relatives back east and arrange for someone to come fetch the child.

“What’s your name, honey?” he asked the little girl.

Her rosebud mouth ringed with milk, she stared at him with wary eyes. “Charity,” she finally revealed.

Patrick offered her a smile. “My name is Patrick, Paddy to my friends. My last name is O’Shannessy.” He let that hang there for a moment. Then he asked, “What’s yours?”

She pursed her lips. “I’m not allowed to say, sir.”

“Not allowed to tell me your last name?” He gave a low laugh. “Why not?”

“Because we’ve run away.”

“Run away?” The phrase filled his mind with memories that he had tried very hard to forget. “Who are you running away from?”

“My grandfathers. My papa passed away two years ago, and they are trying to make Maman get married again to a perfectly awful man. He has a nasty disposition, and he quite dislikes me. When Maman discovered that he had enrolled me in a boarding school far away from Brooklyn and planned to keep me there all year long, she decided we had to leave.” The child shrugged and nibbled her lower lip, the glass of milk clutched to her narrow chest. “One night when everyone was asleep, she sneaked me out of the house, and we embarked on our journey here.”

“In servants’ clothing,” he guessed aloud.

Charity nodded. “It’s not as if she
stole
the clothing. She replaced everything she took with garments of ours, which were much finer. I’m sure the upstairs maid and her little girl were delighted when they awakened the next morning.”

“I imagine they were.”

The picture forming in Patrick’s mind wasn’t pretty. In Colorado, a young woman was still occasionally coerced into marrying a man not of her choosing, but for the most part, such archaic marital arrangements were a thing of the past.

Charity dimpled her cheek in a mischievous grin. “I doubt that Grandfather Maxwell, Maman’s papa, was very pleased, though. Maman emptied all his household coffers before we left.”

Patrick chuckled, then returned his attention to his patient. When he trickled some water into her mouth, she choked and moaned.

“How on earth did you end up here?” he asked.

“We hoped to reach a place called San Francisco, but when our money was stolen, we couldn’t go on.”

San Francisco was the devil’s lair for impoverished young women, especially beautiful ones. In Patrick’s estimation, it was probably a blessing in disguise that they had been robbed and ended up stranded in No Name.

“Now,” the little girl added forlornly, “we are without resources and have nowhere to go.”

Patrick didn’t consider himself to be an overly charitable man, but he wasn’t so coldhearted that he could turn away an impoverished young mother and child. Tomorrow he’d go into No Name to retrieve their satchels. While he was there, he would visit the community church. Surely there was a respectable family in town that needed a housekeeper.

F
aith drifted slowly awake to the morning sunlight.

After blinking her surroundings into focus, she was startled to discover that she was abed in a strange room. There were feminine touches—lace curtains at the windows, an ornate hurricane lamp on the bedside table, and tatted lace doilies on the battered surfaces of the dresser. An old, scarred armoire loomed like a dark specter in one corner of the room.

Faith pushed slowly to a sitting position. Her head spun sickeningly, and she pressed a trembling hand to her throat. Where was she? More important, where was her daughter?

Memory of the previous day came rushing back to her.
Patrick O’Shannessy.
She recalled his saying that she wouldn’t suit for the housekeeping position. After that, she had no memory at all.

She trailed a hand from her throat to her upper chest and gasped in dismay. She wore only her chemise. Her gown, pantalets, and corset had vanished. Appalled, she pulled the faded coverlet taut over her bare legs and cast a frantic look around the room in search of her clothing.

The faint sound of a child’s laughter drifted to her ears. She swung out of bed, pushed to her feet, and promptly almost fell on her face. Putting a hand on the wall to keep her balance, she went to the armoire, where she found her missing garments hanging inside on the rod. The ruined wedding gown was nowhere in sight, but Faith had more pressing concerns at the moment, namely getting some clothes on.

Making her precarious way back to the bed, she grasped the bedpost for support while she dressed. Then she sat on the edge of the mattress to lace her kid boots, which proved to be more of a challenge. She was so light-headed that every time she leaned over she almost pitched to the floor.

“What in God’s name are you doing?”

Faith glanced up. Patrick O’Shannessy loomed in the open doorway. This morning he wore a fresh pair of faded denim trousers topped by a green work shirt. The neck of the shirt hung open, revealing burnished chest hair and more muscle than a woman cared to see when at the mercy of a stranger.

“I am
en dishabille,
sir,” she said with as much hauteur as she could manage. “A gentleman would refrain from entering my bedchamber uninvited.”

“You’re on dissa what?”

“En dishabille,”
she repeated. “In an improper state of dress.”

“Ah.” The corner of his firm mouth twitched. He ran an unsettling blue gaze over her as he rested a brawny shoulder against the doorjamb. “One thing I’ve never claimed to be is a gentleman.”

Faith had determined that for herself the previous afternoon.

“And, beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but this bedchamber happens to be mine, not yours. If I want to enter uninvited, I reckon I can.”

Faith had no ready comeback for that, either. The bedchamber did indeed belong to him. It was she who was the interloper. “That being the case, I shall collect my daughter and relieve you of our presence, Mr. O’-Shannessy.” She ran trembling fingers up the front of her bodice to be sure it was properly fastened, the thought not far from her mind that it had undoubtedly been his strong fingers that had last touched the buttons. “I appreciate your generous hospitality and apologize for the imposition.” She pushed weakly to her feet. “I must have swooned from the heat.”

“I’m glad to see that you found your things.” He pointed to a trunk at the foot of the bed. “I stowed the wedding gown in there.” His gaze moved slowly over her. “It’s a real pretty dress. You plannin’ on using it anytime soon?”

“Using it?”

“Yeah, you know, to get hitched.”

Hitched?
She could only surmise that he referred to the institution of marriage. “Most assuredly not.” She recalled the dirt stains all over the skirt. “And even if I were, the dress is ruined.”

He frowned slightly. “It looked fine to me.”

Faith seriously doubted that the dress would ever look fine again, but she chose to let the comment pass and concentrate on more imminent concerns, namely getting out of there. Despite her announcement that she intended to leave, he remained in the doorway, much like a huge tree that had put down roots.

“Do you always talk like that?” he asked.

“Like what?”

“Like you’ve got a bad case of the highfalutins.”

Faith swayed and grabbed the bedpost. O’Shannessy was across the room in a beat. Instead of grasping her elbow as a gentleman might, he cinched a strong arm around her waist, his big hand splayed familiarly over her side, his thumb resting in unacceptably close proximity to the underside of her breast.

“Please, Mr. O’Shannessy, unhand me.”

“Damned if I will. You’re so weak you can barely stand.” If anything, he tightened his hold. “Let me help you downstairs. You’ll feel better with some food in your belly.”

“I must collect my daughter and go. It’s no short distance back to town.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” he informed her as he half carried her toward the door. “The way Charity tells it, you have no place to go and no money to get there. I’ll check around in town today to see if I can come up with a more suitable arrangement. If not, there’s no denying that I need a housekeeper, and you clearly need a job. We’ll have to iron out the wrinkles somehow.”

Wrinkles? His thumb had found a resting place in the hollow just under her breast, the touch seeming to burn through all three layers of her clothing.

“I fear that I cannot work for you after all, Mr. O’Shannessy. You’ve no wife. I’m a widow. Gossip about such an arrangement would abound.”

At the top of the stairs, he pulled her closer to his side. “Watch your step, darlin’. It’s a long way to the bottom.”

Try as she might, Faith couldn’t bring the treads into clear focus. Terrified of falling, she knotted her right fist on the front of his shirt.

“I’ve got you,” he assured her huskily.

He had her, all right. A hysterical giggle bubbled at the back of Faith’s throat. “I truly can’t stay here,” she told him again.

“If no one else in town needs a housekeeper, what’re your options? There are very few jobs for decent young women in No Name.”

“I shall manage, Mr. O’Shannessy.”

“Right. You’ll end up working on your back to keep food in your daughter’s mouth. Somehow I don’t think you’re cut out for that particular profession.”

“On my back?” They reached the bottom of the stairs, at which point Faith hoped he might release her. Only, of course, he didn’t. “I’m sorry. To what sort of work are you referring?”

“You know damned well what I mean,” he said huskily. “You didn’t find that child under a cabbage plant.”

Scalding heat rushed to Faith’s cheeks. For a moment she yearned to kick him, and then in the next she wanted to kick herself for asking such a stupid question. She was no innocent, fresh from the school-room. She was simply too addlepated at the moment to make sense of what he was saying.