Banner O'Brien (26 page)

“Get out!”

The woman stood, studiously arranged her gaudy, fur-trimmed cloak. “I could tell you how to please your man,” she said, in a singsong voice that made Banner’s blood pressure shoot heavenward.

“Thank you very much, but I think I know how to do that. Will you please leave?”

Bessie swayed and swung to the door. “You won’t have to ask me again, sweetness—I got manners. Just remember to look in that coat pocket.”

When the door had closed and she was alone with yet another grief, Banner lowered her head. Now she knew why Adam had not come to the guest room the night before, in one of his fine and typical rages. He hadn’t been at home.

Perhaps he hadn’t even known about his wife’s grand gesture of defiance, or cared.

Banner took a few minutes to compose herself and then marched past a smirking Francelle to take up the book she’d been reading. She wouldn’t enter Adam’s bedroom again—she wouldn’t. Not until he’d apologized and stopped seeing Lulani once and for all.

But the coat was there—she knew it was—and it pulled at her like a magnet at shavings.

Finally, because she knew she would have no peace if she didn’t, Banner left the office, climbed the stairs, and opened Adam’s door.

The coat in question was easy to find; it had been flung down on the foot of the bed, which was neatly made.

Even as she determined not to, Banner went to the coat and reached into the inside pocket. There was a card there, like the one she’d found in another coat, on a day when she’d been sure she would die, alone on a snowy mountain trail.

She read it with tear-blurred eyes: “Bessie Ingram. Room 8
Silver Shadow.
Discretion assured.”

When she could move again, Banner let both the card and the coat fall to the floor. Then, with dignity and dispatch, she moved the rest of her things out of Adam’s room and into her own.

*  *  *

Adam knew what had happened before he lifted the coat from the floor or read the half-crumpled card that lay beside it. Despair ground in his stomach and clawed at the back of his throat.

He was damned now, he thought, as he sank to the edge of the bed and braced his head in his hands. If O’Brien didn’t believe that Lulani wasn’t his woman, she wasn’t going to believe that he hadn’t slept with Bessie Ingram, either.

Adam swore hoarsely and rubbed the nape of his neck with one hand; there was a fierce headache spawning there.

After a time, he rose to his feet again, went to the wardrobe. It was as he had suspected; Shamrock’s things were gone.

He sighed. He could go to her, drag her out of the guest room and back here, where she belonged, but what good would that do, really? He could not force her to love him, and that was what he wanted from Banner above all else.

The house was dark when Adam went back downstairs, an hour later, to take refuge in his office. If he couldn’t sleep, he could at least read. Failing that—it would be hard to concentrate on the printed word, he knew—he could, in that quiet setting, sort out his tangled thoughts and emotions and come to some workable decision about O’Brien.

In his small study, Adam lit a lamp, fell into the wooden desk chair, and assessed the books lining the shelves with disinterest. Banner’s name pulsed around him like the beat of a giant heart; he loved her, he wanted her, she was upstairs now, in a cold bed. A bed from which he had been summarily barred.

Infuriated, he plundered the deep bottom drawer of his desk for a bottle and found one. Adam kicked his feet up, unscrewed the lid of the high-proof whiskey, and drank.

With each swallow, his thoughts became more muddled. Adam began to consider what a truly unfortunate bastard he really was, with his stupid secret and his love for a woman who would spit stew all over him and fling the romantic skill of her former husband into his face at the slightest provocation.

He lifted the bottle again; the firewater scorched his throat and roiled in his troubled stomach.

“Adam.”

He lowered the bottle and studied O’Brien, wondering if she was really there or if he had conjured her somehow. “Umm?”

“What are you doing?”

She was real, all right. And on the warpath, judging by the scornful and wifely looks she was hurling his way. “Drinking,” he said, and the word was oddly difficult to form.

“I can see that. You should be in bed.”

Adam arched an eyebrow and grinned. “I should indeed, madame. However, I’m not.”

“Obviously.”

He laughed. “I’ll go if you will, O’Brien.”

Banner folded her arms across the bodice of her blue flannel wrapper, tossed her head toward the bottle, which had drifted wide of his body, though he was still holding it in one hand.

“Why don’t you just put a nipple on that and take
it
to bed?”

Adam frowned at the whiskey. “I think she’s making inferences about my emotional maturity,” he confided to the amber liquid.

“And you call yourself a doctor!” harped O’Brien, her voice piercing the lining of Adam’s brain. “What if someone fell ill? Some help
you
would be!”

Adam knitted his eyebrows together and studied O’Brien’s outraged and fuzzy countenance solemnly. “I’d send you,” he said.

“Go to bed, Adam.”

“Oh, no. Too cold. Too lonely.”

“No doubt. Lulani is too far away to warm you, but you could always go to Bessie. After all, discretion is assured!”

Adam laughed, which was odd, because he felt so broken and so miserable.

“What kind of name is Lulani for an Indian, anyway?” fussed O’Brien, looking flushed and rumpled and damned appealing.

“Lulani is not an Indian,” Adam muttered. “She is Hawaiian.”

Now what the hell had made him say that? He brought the whiskey to his mouth and drank, to keep himself from telling the rest.

“Are you going to stop visiting her?”

Adam set the bottle down with a thump, lowered his feet to the floor, rubbed throbbing eyes with the fingers of one hand. “No.”

O’Brien whirled and stormed away, and it was all he
could do not to call her back and tell her everything.

*  *  *

One week passed, and then another. Adam did not come to the guest room even once, nor did he try to lure Banner back to his bed.

On the twenty-second of February, he went off to the mountain once more. This time, however, Banner made no attempt to follow.

“Why do you stay with him?” asked Melissa softly, her round, crystal-blue eyes trained on her sister-in-law.

Banner ignored the question, at least momentarily. How could she answer, when she didn’t know herself? “Are you feeling better?” she hedged, tucking Melissa’s covers and refilling her teacup. “It’s a pity your visit had to be spoiled.”

“I’ll be better tomorrow,” Melissa said with a brave lift of her chin. “That’s the only good thing about cramps. They do go away.”

Banner flinched. Cramps. When was the last time she had had cramps, or even a flux for that matter?

Melissa frowned. “Banner? What’s wrong?”

“Oh,
no!”
whispered Banner, pacing now, wringing her hands. “No, no—”

“Banner!”

She stopped, faced her sister-in-law. December. Banner had not bled since December, the week before she had come to Port Hastings from Oregon!

“I’m all right,” she lied, to still the alarm in Melissa’s eyes.

“You are not all right,” insisted the girl, setting aside her cup with a rattle. “Banner Corbin, you tell me what is the matter, right now!”

Banner fell to a seat on the foot of Melissa’s bed. She was estranged from her husband, a husband she had been making halting, painful plans to leave. There was
gossip about her and about Sean—who might return at any time. And now there was a very good chance that she was pregnant!

“I think I’m going to have a baby!” Banner wept, covering her face with both hands.

Melissa was there promptly, offering a hug and a tearful, “Oh, but that’s wonderful, Banner! Everything will be all right now—”

Banner howled. All right? How could everything be all right when Adam was probably making love to Lulani at that very moment and Sean wanted to kill her?

And it had been hard enough supporting herself, given the attitude most people took toward a woman doctor. What would it be like trying to earn a living for a baby and take proper care of it in the bargain?

“Banner, don’t cry,” Melissa pleaded, holding her, rocking her like a child. “If Adam won’t care for you, Mama and Jeff and Keith and I will. We’re your family now.”

“You’re
Adam’s
family.”

“Well, we’ll side with you anyway!”

Banner was not comforted. All the love in the world would not sustain her, if none of it came from Adam.

*  *  *

Determined to spare O’Brien and the rest of his family his black mood for once, Adam bypassed the house when he came down from the mountain and went to the
Silver Shadow
instead.

A few drinks, a good steak—he’d feel better soon.

Striding up the boarding ramp, Adam considered Bessie and the singular relief she offered. God knew, with O’Brien sleeping in another bedroom and making it clear that she’d sooner couple with a gorilla than him, he could use some female consolation.

The saloon was brightly lit and a little too loud for Adam’s tastes, but he went to the bar, thinking how
damnably
married
he was. Had it really only been two months since he’d been able to come into Temple Royce’s establishment and take his pleasures in good conscience?

The
Shadow
was crowded that night; there was music and a blond wisp of a girl with dark, empty eyes was singing on the stage. Adam bought a drink and moved closer, trying to hear her.

Instead, he heard Cam Peters, the marshal, who was sitting at a nearby table, a drink in his hand, the center of attention.

“I knew one man wouldn’t be enough for that one first time I laid eyes on her,” Peters boomed. “No sir. Nobody needed to tell
me
there was fire enough in that redhead to scar a man for life!”

Adam’s hand tightened around his glass; he read the worn signboard beneath the stage methodically, in an attempt to settle his mind: Fancy Jordan. She Sings. She Dances. She Does Magic.

“I shouldn’t look the other way, I guess,” Peters prattled on, blithely unaware of the man standing just behind him. “It’s agin the law for a lady to have two husbands, even if one of ‘em
is a
Corbin.”

Stewart Henderson was at the table, too, and he lifted a glass in a gesture of agreement, spoke clearly without the wires that had held his jaw in place. “Mr. Royce wanted to bed her, but she was already—”

Cam Peters broke in with a lewd chuckle. “Two husbands!” he marveled. “I reckon there’ll be more’n one man in line if she decides she needs a third!”

Adam closed his eyes. “Stop,” he said, in a low, rumbling tone that somehow managed to still Fancy Jordan’s tremulous little voice and every other sound in the saloon in the bargain.

Peters whirled in his chair and fear worked in his grizzled, ordinary face. “Adam! Jesus, I didn’t know you were—”

Adam set down his drink, grappling with the murderous rage inside him. “That was obvious,” he said.

And his body seemed to be acting independently of his reason; he approached Peters, clasped his lapels in aching fists, wrenched the man to his feet. “Go on, Cam,” he said, in a deadly undertone. “Tell us all about my wife and her two husbands.”

“Christ, Adam—”

“Talk. You know so much about the subject.”

“I ain’t got nothin’ to say!”

Some measure of sanity returned. Adam released the marshal, watched as he sank back into his chair with all the decorum of a jellyfish.

The girl on the stage began to sing again.

Adam went back to the bar and his drink, which held no appeal for him now. He didn’t want a steak, he didn’t want a woman.

He most certainly didn’t want to hear Fancy Jordan sing.

Wishing to God that he’d never met Banner O’Brien, let alone married her, he gathered the last of his strength and went home.

*  *  *

The marshal shifted from one foot to the other, looking both reluctant and angry in the thin morning light. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come down to the jail with me, Mrs. Corbin,” he said.

Banner reeled, cast one look at Francelle, who was suddenly very busy at her typewriting machine. “Jail?” she echoed, certain that she couldn’t have heard correctly.

“It’s agin the law to have more than one husband,” pontificated the marshal.

Banner felt color rise in her cheeks. “I don’t think you understand, Marshal. Sean Malloy and I were divorced—I have the papers to prove it.”

“I’d like to see them,” retorted the lawman.

“I-I’ll just get my bag.”

“Fine, Mrs. Corbin. That’s fine.”

Banner hurried into the office, pushed aside papers and books and a yellow envelope that rested on the desk. For such a brilliant man, Adam was certainly slovenly, she thought. And where was he now, when she needed him to tell the marshal that she was his wife and no one else’s?

She found her bag and wrenched it open, reaching into the side pocket where she kept not only her divorce decree but the papers proving that she was a doctor and the certificates from both her marriages.

The diploma from the New York Infirmary was there, as was the certificate binding her to Adam Corbin. But her divorce decree and the license bearing Sean’s name were gone.

Banner shivered. The papers couldn’t be gone—she never took them out of this bag. Never.

“Doctor?” prodded Marshal Peters, from the office doorway. “You find them documents?”

Slowly, resigned to a dismal fate, Banner shook her head. “They were here—you must believe me—”

“I’m sorry.”

Banner closed her eyes briefly, drew a deep breath, and turned to face the constable. “S-Someone has taken my papers.” Adam, perhaps? Had he been that desperate to be free of her, now that she refused him his marital rights?

“Sure they have,” said Marshal Peters. “Now, if you’ll just come along with me.”

Banner swallowed a sob of terror and frustration. Then she lifted her chin, collected her cloak, and walked out of the office with dignity.