Книга - The Drifter

The Drifter
Susan Wiggs


Comes a drifter to a windswept island…He wanted to tell her everything. About the lost years that had changed him from a desperate young boy into a man hardened by life. About the night he’d sold his soul for a woman who wasn’t worth the price… But Jackson Underhill said nothing. After all, he was an outlaw, clearly on the run – reason enough for silence.The truth was Dr. Leah Mundy scared him. She made him want to trust again, to share his burden. She made him want a home, a family. And it was dangerous to want such things.Because the past would find him if he stayed – and there could be no future with a woman who would not leave.









Praise for the novels of

SUSAN WIGGS


“Wiggs has a knack for creating engaging characters, and her energetic prose shines through the pages.”

—Publishers Weekly on Enchanted Afternoon

Enchanted Afternoon is “a bold, humorous and poignant romance that fulfills every woman’s dreams.”

—New York Times bestselling author Christina Dodd

“With its lively prose, well-developed conflict and passionate characters, this enjoyable, poignant tale is certain to enchant.”

—Publishers Weekly on Halfway to Heaven (starred review)

“Wiggs’ writing shimmers…. Her flair for crafting intelligent characters and the sheer joy of the verbal sparring between them makes for a delightful story you’ll want to devour at once.”

—BookPage on Halfway to Heaven

“With this final installment of Wiggs’s Chicago Fire trilogy, she has created a quiet page-turner that will hold readers spellbound….”

—Publishers Weekly on The Firebrand

“Once more, Ms. Wiggs demonstrates her ability to bring readers a story to savor that has them impatiently awaiting each new novel.”

—Romantic Times on The Hostage

“In poetic prose, Wiggs evocatively captures the Old South and creates an intense, believable relationship between the lovers.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Horsemaster’s Daughter

“The Charm School draws readers in with delightful characters, engaging dialogue, humor, emotion and sizzling sensuality.”

—Costa Mesa Sunday Times




Susan Wiggs

The Drifter








To the crew of the Sea Fox/La Tache armada:

Jay, Elizabeth, Jamie, Tucker, Ben and Kristin.




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


Special thanks to Tom McEvoy and his Jet Ski—the Neptune of mobile marine mechanics. Also to Alistair Cross for advice on the proper way to sabotage a schooner.

Heartfelt thanks to landlubbers: Joyce Bell, Christina Dodd, Betty Gyenes, Debbie Macomber and Barbara Dawson Smith.

Thanks to Laura Shin, whose superb editorial skills brought out the very best in the manuscript.

And finally a big thank-you to Carol and Don Audleman for the most convivial tavolo comune.


“Wherever you are

it is your own friends who make your world.”

—William James, American psychologist




Contents


Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen




One


Whidbey Island, Washington

1894

“Don’t scream, or I’ll shoot,” warned a low-pitched voice.

Leah Mundy jerked awake and found herself looking down the barrel of a gun.

Sheer panic jolted her to full alert.

“I’m not going to scream,” she said, dry-mouthed. In her line of work she had learned to control fear. Lightning flickered, glancing off the dull blue finish of a Colt barrel. “Please don’t hurt me.” Her voice broke but didn’t waver.

“Lady, that’s up to you. Just do as you’re told, and nobody’ll get hurt.”

Do as you’re told. Leah Mundy certainly had practice at that. “Who are you,” she asked, “and what do you want?”

“Who I am is the man holding this gun. What I want is Dr. Mundy. Sign outside says he lives here.”

Thunder pulsed in the distance, echoing the thud of her heart. She forced herself to keep the waves of terror at bay as she blurted, “Dr. Mundy does live here.”

“Well, go get him.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

She swallowed, trying to collect her wits, failing miserably. “He’s dead. He died three months ago.”

“Sign says Dr. Mundy lives here.” Fury roughened the insistent voice.

“The sign’s right.” Rain lashed the windowpanes. She squinted into the gloom. Beyond the gun, she couldn’t make out anything but the intruder’s dark shape. A loud snore drifted down the hall, and she glanced toward the noise. Think, think, think. Maybe she could alert one of the boarders.

The gun barrel jabbed at her shoulder. “For chrissakes, woman, I don’t have time for guessing games—”

“I’m Dr. Mundy.”

“What?”

“Dr. Leah Mundy. My father was also a doctor. We were in practice together. But now there’s just me.”

“Just you.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re a doctor.”

“I am.”

The large shape shifted impatiently. She caught the scents of rain and brine on him. Rain and brine from the sea and something else…desperation.

“You’ll have to do, then. Get your things, woman. You’re coming with me.”

She jerked the covers up under her chin. “I beg your pardon.”

“You’ll be begging for your sorry life if you don’t get a move on.”

The threat in his voice struck like a whip. She didn’t argue. Spending three years with her father back in Deadwood, South Dakota, had taught her to respect a threat issued by a man holding a gun.

But she’d never learned to respect the man himself.

“Turn your back while I get dressed,” she said.

“That’s pretty lame, even for a lady doctor,” he muttered. “I’m not fool enough to turn my back.”

“Any man who bullies unarmed people is a fool,” she snapped.

“Funny thing about bullies,” he said calmly, using the nose of the Colt to ease the quilt down her body. “They pretty much always manage to get what they want. Now, move.”

She yanked off the covers and shoved her feet into the sturdy boots she wore when making her calls. Island weather was wet in the springtime, and she’d never been one to stand on high fashion. She wrapped herself in a robe, tugging the tie snugly around her waist.

She tried to pretend this was an ordinary call on an ordinary night. Tried not to think about the fact that she had been yanked out of a sound sleep by a man with a gun. Damn him. How dare he?

“Are you ill?” she asked the gunman.

“Hell, no, I’m not sick,” he said. “It’s…someone else.”

For some reason, his hesitation took the edge off her anger. Another thing she’d learned about bullies—they almost always acted out of fear.

“I’ll need to stop in the surgery, get some things.”

“Where’s the surgery?”

“Downstairs, adjacent to the kitchen.” She pushed open the door, daring to flash one look down the hall. Mr. Battle Douglas was a light sleeper, but despite his name, he wouldn’t know the first thing to do about an armed intruder. Adam Armstrong, the newcomer, probably would, but for all she knew, the handsome timber merchant could be in league with the gunman. Aunt Leafy would only dissolve into hysterics, and Perpetua had her young son to consider. As for old Zeke Pomfrit, he’d likely grab his ancient rifle and join her abductor.

The gunman jabbed the Colt into her ribs. “Lady, don’t go doing anything foolish.”

Leah surrendered the urge to rouse the household. She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t put any of them at risk.

“You may call me Dr. Mundy,” she said over her shoulder. Her hand slipped down the banister as she made her way to the foyer. The man wore a long, cloaked duster that billowed out as he descended, sprinkling rainwater on the carpet runner.

“You’re not a lady?” he whispered, his mouth far too close to her ear. His voice had a curious raw edge to it.

“Not to you.”

She led the way along a hall to the darkened surgery. In the immaculate suite that occupied the south wing of the house, she lit a lamp. Her hands shook as she fumbled with a match, and her anger renewed itself. As the blue-white flame hissed to life, she turned to study her captor. She noted a fringe of wet hair the color of straw, lean cheeks chapped by the wind and stubbled by a few days’ growth of beard. An old scar on the ridge of his cheekbone. He pulled down his dripping hat brim before she could see his eyes.

“What sort of ailment will I be treating?” she asked.

“Hell, I don’t know. You claim you’re the doctor.”

Leah told herself she should be hardened to doubt and derision by now. But some things she never got used to. Like someone—even a dangerous man hiding behind a gun—thinking gender had anything at all to do with the ability to heal people.

“What are the symptoms?” She lifted the flap of her brown leather medical bag, checking the contents. Capped vials of feverfew, quinine, digitalis, carbolic acid disinfectant. Morphine crystals and chloroform. Instruments for extracting teeth and suppurating wounds. A stethoscope and clinical thermometer sterilized in bichloride of mercury, and a hypodermic syringe for injecting medicines into the bloodstream.

“The symptoms?” she prompted.

“I guess…fever. Stomach cramps. Babbling and such. Wheezing and coughing, too.”

“Coughing blood?” Leah asked sharply.

“Nope. No blood.”

It could be any number of things, including the dreaded scourge, diphtheria. She tucked in some vials of muriate of ammonia, then took her oiled canvas slicker from a hook on the back of the door. “I’m ready,” she said. “And I might add that forcing me at gunpoint isn’t necessary. It’s my calling to heal people. If you want to put that away, I’ll still come.”

He didn’t put the gun away. Instead, he pushed the flap of his duster back to reveal a second gun. The holster—darkened with grease for quicker drawing—was strapped to a lean, denim-clad hip. The gun belt, slung low around a narrow waist, bore a supply of spare cartridges in the belt’s loops. Clearly, he was a man unused to being given what he asked for. He jerked the barrel toward the back door, motioning her ahead of him.

They passed through the waiting room of the surgery and stepped out into the night. She could feel him behind her, his height and breadth intimidating, uncompromising.

“Is it far?” she asked, indicating the coach house, a black hulk in the sudden gloom. “Will we need the buggy?”

“No,” he said. “We’re going to the harbor.”

A seafaring man, then. A pirate? Whidbey Island saw its share of smugglers plying the waters of Puget Sound and up into Canada. But this man, with an arsenal of weapons concealed under his long, caped coat, had the look of an outlaw, not a pirate.

As frightening as he was, he needed her. That’s what was important. The oath she had taken compelled her to go. What a peculiar life she led. In the back of her mind, her father’s voice taunted her: Leah Jane Mundy, when are you going to settle down and get married like a normal woman?

The rain drummed relentlessly on her hood. Her booted foot splashed into a puddle and stuck briefly in the sucking mud. She looked back at the boardinghouse. The tradesman’s shingle hanging above the front porch flapped in the wind. In the misty glow of the gaslight Leah always kept burning, the white lettering was barely legible, but the stranger had found it: Dr. Mundy, Physician. Rooms To Let.

“Get a move on, woman,” the gunman ordered.

The light in the surgery window wavered. There was nothing beyond the lamp glow but blackness. No one in sight but the stranger holding the gun on her, pushing it into her back to make her hurry.

Just who the devil was this man?

Rising Star, Texas

1894

“He called himself Jack Tower,” the sheriff said, taking off a pair of ill-fitting spectacles. “Course, there’s a good possibility it’s an alias.”

“Uh-huh.” Joel Santana stroked his hand down his cheek, the skin like shoe leather beneath his callused palm. Damn. He’d been looking forward to hanging up his gun belt and spurs, and now this. Many was the evening he’d spent thinking about a parcel of green land, maybe a flock of sheep, and a good woman with broad hips and a broader smile….

He crossed one aching leg over the other and absently whirled a spur with his finger. “And you say the fugitive took off six weeks ago?”

Sheriff Reams laid his spectacles atop the hand-drawn map on the desk. “Six weeks Saturday.”

“Why’d you wait to call me in?” Joel held up a hand. “Never mind, I know the answer. You and your deputies had the situation under control. This is the first time your posse ever let one get away, am I right?”

“As a matter of fact, Marshal, it’s true.”

“Uh-huh.” It always was. These greenhorns always waited until a criminal had hightailed it across state lines and the trail had grown cold; then they called in a U.S. Marshal. “I guess we’d better get down to it, then. You say this man—this Jack Tower—murdered the mayor of Rising Star?”

Reams narrowed his eyes. “Damn right he did. Probably wasn’t the first. He had a hard look about him. A mean look, like he didn’t have a friend in the world and didn’t care to make any.”

“Who witnessed the murder?” asked Joel.

Reams hesitated just long enough to rouse his suspicions. “No one’s come forward. You need to bring that desperado back and hang him high.”

“Hanging folks is not my job, Sheriff.” Joel lumbered to his feet, fancying he could hear his joints creak in protest. Too many years on horseback had ruined his knees.

“What in blazes do you mean?”

Joel pressed his palms flat on the desk and glared at the map. The shape of Texas formed amutated star, its pan-handle borders so artificial—yet so critical when it came to enforcing the law. “I bring in fugitives, and I’ll bring in this Tower fellow. But his guilt or innocence isn’t up to us. That’s for a judge and jury to decide. Don’t you forget it.”

“I won’t.”

But he would have, Santana knew. Likely if Jack Tower hadn’t fled, he’d have been strung up on a high limb and left for the buzzards to pick over.

“So what’ve you got?”

The sheriff lifted the map, revealing an ink-drawn illustration of a man with cropped, spiky hair, a beard and mustache. A small scar marked one cheekbone. The drawing had indeed captured the mean look.

“This here’s your man. He didn’t leave much behind. Just a tin of Underhill Fancy Shred Tobacco and half of a broken shirt button.” Reams handed them over.

“Oh—” he laid a tintype photograph in front of Joel “—and this here’s the woman he fled with. Her name’s Caroline. Caroline Willis.”



“She’s my…wife.”

Leah heard a heartbeat of hesitation in her abductor’s grainy voice before the word “wife.”

It wasn’t her place to question, but to heal. Still, she couldn’t help wondering why the simple statement hadn’t come easily to the stranger’s lips. It had been her unfortunate lot to attend the deaths of more than a few women while the husband stood nearby, wringing his hands. There weren’t many things more wrenching than the sight of a man who knew he was about to lose his wife. He always looked baffled, numb, helpless.

She glanced over her shoulder at the gunman. Even in the uncertain light of the ship’s binnacle lamp, he didn’t appear helpless. Not in the least. At the harbor, he’d forced her into a small dinghy. With the gun in his lap and his fists curled around the oars, he had rowed like a madman. It took him only moments to bring her out to a long schooner anchored offshore.

The twin masts had creaked in the whipping wind. She’d shivered and climbed down an accommodation ladder into the belly of the boat. The smell of damp rope, mildewed sailcloth and rotting timber pervaded the air of the once-grand aft stateroom.

An inspection hatch on the aft bulkhead flapped open and shut in the driving wind. Someone—the outlaw, she guessed—had been working on the steering quadrant or perhaps the rudder. Several bolts and cap nuts rolled along the planks. A fraying rope led out through the hatch as if he’d repaired it in haste—or in ignorance of Puget Sound gale winds.

The stranger’s wife lay in an alcove bunk on freshly laundered muslin sheets, her head centered on a plump pillow, her eyes closed and her face pale. Suddenly, Leah no longer saw the run-down boat or the faded opulence of the stateroom. All her fear and anger fled. She focused her attention on the patient. Without looking at the man, she motioned for him to bring a lamp. She heard the rasp of a lucifer and a sibilant hiss as he lit one and brought the lamp forward.

“Hold it steady,” she commanded. “What’s her name?”

Another hesitation. Then, “Carrie,” came the gruff reply.

Observation. It was the most basic tenet of healing. First, do no harm. Generations of doctors had violated that rule, poking and leeching and bleeding and cupping until a patient either died or got better out of sheer exasperation. Thank heaven it was more common practice these days for well-trained doctors to stand back, to observe and ask questions.

And so she observed. The woman called Carrie appeared almost childlike in repose. The dainty bones of her face and hands pushed starkly against translucent flesh. Nordic blond hair formed a halo around her small face. Her dry lips were tucked together in a thin line. Frail, defenseless and startlingly beautiful, she slept without seeming even to breathe.

And she looked as if she was on the verge of dying.

Leah unbuckled her slicker, shrugged it off, and held it out behind her. When the stranger didn’t take it immediately, she gave the garment an impatient shake. It was plucked from her hand—grudgingly, she thought. She refused to let her attention stray from the patient.

“Carrie?” she said. “My name is Dr. Mundy. I’ve come to help you.”

No response.

Leah pressed the back of her hand to Carrie’s cheek. Fever, but not enough of a temperature to raise a flush on the too-pale skin. She would have no need for the clinical thermometer.

Gently, Leah lifted one eyelid. The iris glinted a lovely shade of blue, vivid as painted china. The pupil contracted properly when the lamplight struck it.

“Carrie?” Leah said her name again while stroking a thin hand. “Can you hear me?”

Again, no response. The skin felt dry, lacking resilience. A sign of dehydration.

“When was she last awake?” Leah asked the man.

“Not sure. Maybe this afternoon. She was out of her head, though. Didn’t make a lick of sense.” The shadows shifted as he leaned closer. “What is it? Will she be all right?” Tension thrummed in his voice.

“I’ll do my best to figure out what’s wrong with her. When did she last have something to eat or drink?”

“Gave her some tea with honey this morning. She heaved it up, wouldn’t take anything else. Except—” He broke off, drew in a breath.

“Except what?”

“She asked for her tonic. She needs her tonic.”

Leah groped in her bag for the stethoscope. “What sort of tonic would that be?”

“Some elixir in a bottle.”

Elixir. Snake oil, most likely, or maybe a purgative like calomel, Leah guessed. It had been her father’s stock-in-trade for years. She herself was not that sort of doctor. She found her stethoscope. “I’ll want to analyze that tonic.”

She adjusted the ear tips and looped the binaurals around her neck. Working quickly, she parted Carrie’s nightgown at the neckline. Again, she was struck by the freshly laundered cleanliness of the garment and bedclothes. It seemed incongruous for an outlaw’s lady. A gunman who did laundry?

Pressing the flat of the diaphragm to Carrie’s chest, Leah held her breath and listened. The heart rate was elevated. The lungs sounded only slightly congested. Leah moved the chest piece here and there, listening intently to each quadrant. It was difficult to hear. Storm-driven waves slapped the ship’s hull, and a constant flow of water trickled somewhere below.

She palpated the areas around the neck and armpits, seeking signs of infection. Then she moved her hands down the abdomen, stopping when she felt a small, telltale hardness.

“Well?” the stranger said. “What’s wrong?”

Leah removed the ear tips of the stethoscope, letting the instrument drape like a necklace. “When were you planning to tell me?”

“Tell you what?” He spread his arms, looking genuinely baffled. It was probably all an act, though, she thought.

“That your wife is pregnant.”

His jaw dropped. He seemed to deflate a little, sagging against the wall of the hull. “Pregnant.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Surely you knew.”

“I…” He drew his hand down his face. “Nope. Didn’t know.”

“I estimate that she’s a good three months along.”

“Three months.”

Ordinarily, Leah loved to be the bearer of this sort of news. She always got a vicarious thrill from the joy and wonder in a young husband’s eyes. Such moments made her own life seem less sterile and lonely—if only for a while.

She stared at the stranger and saw no joy or wonder in him. His face had turned stony and grim. He certainly didn’t act like a man who had just learned he was going to be a father.

“So that’s the only thing wrong with her,” he said at last.

“It’s not ‘wrong’ for your wife to be pregnant.”

For a moment, he looked as if he might contradict her. “I meant, so that’s the only thing ailing her.”

“Hardly.”

“What?” he asked harshly. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong? To begin with, your boat is on the verge of sinking.” She glanced pointedly at the aft hatch. The rudder seemed to be hanging by a thread—or by a waterlogged rope, to be more precise. Worm-eaten wooden bolts lolled uselessly along the deck. Big gaps separated the caulking of the hull. The line holding the post in place strained with a whining sound.

“This is no place for a patient in her condition. We’ve got to move her.” Leah coiled the stethoscope and tucked it back into her bag. “As soon as it stops raining, bring her to the house, and we’ll put her to bed—”

“I guess you didn’t understand,” the man said in an infuriating drawl.

She scowled at him. “Understand what?”

He stuck his thumb in his gun belt and drummed his fingers on the row of cartridges stuck in the leather loops. “You’re coming with us.”

A chill seized her, though she took care to hide her alarm. So that was why he’d abducted her at gunpoint. This outlaw meant to pluck her right out of her own life and thrust her into his. “Just like that,” she said coldly, “without even a by-your-leave?”

“I never ask leave to do anything. Remember that.”

By the time Leah had finished neatening her bag, she had worked herself into a fine fury.

With a quick movement that had him going for his gun, she shot to her feet. The old boat creaked ominously.

“No, you don’t understand, sir,” Leah said. “I have no intention of going anywhere with you, especially in this leaky hulk. I’ll treat your wife after you bring her to the boardinghouse where she can enjoy a proper recovery.”

Leah tried not to flinch as he trained the gun on her.

“She’ll recover just fine right here with you tending her,” he said.

Leah glared at the too-familiar blued barrel, the callused finger curling intimately around the trigger. “Don’t think for a minute that you can intimidate me. I won’t allow it. I absolutely won’t. Is that clear?”

His lazy gaze strayed over her and focused on her hands, clutching the bag in white-knuckled terror. “Clear as a day in Denver, ma’am.”

She hated the mocking edge to his voice. “Sir, if you hope to give your wife a decent chance to recover, you’ll let me go, and after the rain you’ll bring her to the house where I can treat her.”

“You call yourself a doctor. So how come you can only doctor people in your fancy house?”

Fancy? She almost laughed bitterly at that. Where had he been living that he’d consider the boardinghouse fancy?

“I refuse to debate this with you,” she informed him.

“Fine. I’m not fond of debating, either.”

“Good. Then—”

“Just get busy with Carrie, and I’ll be in the cockpit, making ready to weigh anchor.”

Red fury swam before her eyes, obliterating everything, even the hated gun barrel. “You will not,” she said. Her voice was low, controlled, yet he seemed to respond to her quiet rage. He frowned slightly, his hand relaxed on the gun, and he regarded her with mild surprise.

“Lady, for someone at the wrong end of a gun, you sure have a mouth on you.”

“Sir,” she went on, “you cannot simply pluck me from my home and sweep me away with you.”

She gestured again to indicate all the damage. Her gaze followed the fraying rope across the heading of the room; the line exited through a scuttle and was tied somewhere above.

“Sugar, it’s not that I want to sweep you away,” he said insolently. “It’s just that I need a doctor for Carrie.”

He stepped forward, and for the first time, she got a good look at his eyes. They were a cold blue-gray, the color of his gun barrel, and his gaze was piercing, as if he saw more of her than she cared for him to see. Leah experienced an odd sensation—as if the tide were tugging her along, drawing her toward a place she didn’t want to go and couldn’t avoid.

No. She would not surrender to this man.

“You cannot force me to come with you.” She looked pointedly at the flapping hatch. The wind made a sullen roar, twanging the shrouds against the mast abovedecks. “This ship is unseaworthy. Honestly, what sort of sailor are you, to be out in this tub of—”

“Shut up.” In one long-legged stride, he came to her and pressed the chilly round eye of the gun to her temple. “Just…shut up. Look, after Carrie’s better, we’ll put you on a ship back to the island.” He added under his breath, “And good riddance.”

The touch of the gun horrified her, but she refused to show it. “I will not go with you,” she stated. Clearly, this man had no appreciation for how determined she could be. He’d never outlast her. “I have too many responsibilities in Coupeville. Two of my patients are expecting babies any day. I’m treating a boy who was kicked in the head by a horse. I can’t possibly come along on a whim as your wife’s private physician.”

“Right.” He removed the barrel from her temple.

Relieved, she brightened and took a step toward the door. “I’m glad you decided to see reas—”

“Yeah. Reason. I know.” He gave her shoulder a shove, thrusting her back into the room. “Now get busy, woman, or I’ll make sure you don’t ever see your patients again.”

He stepped out into the companionway. Leah heard a bolt being thrust home as he locked her in the stateroom with his wife.



Standing in the bow of the creaking schooner, Jackson T. Underhill looked up at the sky. A white gash of lightning cleaved the darkness into eerie shards. The thunder roaring in its wake shouted a warning from the very throat of heaven. The storm came from the sea, blowing toward the shore. It was crazy to be out in this weather, crazy to sail in night so deep he could barely get a heading.

But Jackson had never been much for heeding warnings, heavenly or otherwise. He jammed his gun back into its felted holster, fastened the clips of his duster, and scowled when the wind tore at the backside of the coat, separating the flaps. The garment was made for riding astride a horse, not sailing a ship. But everything had happened in such a hurry, everything had changed so quickly, that the last thing on his mind had been fashion.

Bracing himself against the wind, he hoisted the sails. They went up squealing in protest, the mildewed canvas luffing. He hoped like hell the ship would hold together just long enough to make it to Canada. He’d been working on the rudder when Carrie had gotten sick, and had only managed to keep it from falling off with a hasty rig of lines connecting it to the helm. A sailor’s worst nightmare was being swept onto a lee shore in a storm with no steering. The vessel would round up into the wind and start going backward, then go to the opposite tack as the sails backwinded. It would seesaw its way toward shore with sails flapping and no control.

Jackson set his jaw and told himself the steering would hold. Once they were out of the country, there would be time to fix the schooner up right.

Over the quickening breeze, he heard indignant thumps and muffled shouts from the stateroom below. Add kidnapping to his list of crimes. That, at least, was a first for him.

Yet when a healthy puff of wind filled the sails, he felt a measure of relief. The unplanned stop at Whidbey Island hadn’t been so costly after all. He had a doctor for Carrie, and no one was the wiser. The doctor wasn’t at all what he’d expected, but he’d have to put up with her.

A lady doctor. Who would have thought it? He’d never even known such a thing could be possible.

Leah Mundy was a prickly female, all pinch-faced and lemon-lipped with disapproval, and there wasn’t a thing to like about her.

But Jackson did like her. He’d never admit it, of course, and would never find occasion to, but he admired her spirit. Instead of getting all womanish and hysterical when he’d come for her, she’d taken it like a man—better than most men he knew.

He felt a small twinge when he thought of the patients she wouldn’t see tomorrow, or the next day, perhaps even the day after that. But he needed her. God, Carrie needed her.

Pregnant. Carrie was pregnant. The thought seethed inside Jackson, too enormous for him to confront right now, so he thrust it aside, tried to forget.

Dr. Mundy would help Carrie. She would heal Carrie. She had to.

Jackson pictured her bending over to examine her patient. That’s when the doctor had changed, shed her ornery mantle. He’d seen something special in her manner—a sort of gentle competence that inspired unexpected faith in him.

It had been a long time since Jackson T. Underhill had put his faith in anyone. Yet Dr. Leah Mundy inspired it. Did she know that? Did she know he was already thinking of her as an angel of mercy?

He figured he’d thank her, maybe even apologize as soon as they got under way. It was the least he could do for a woman he’d ripped from a warm, dry bed and dragged along on an adventure not of her choosing. The least he could do for a woman he intended to take to Canada, then abandon.

He’d cranked in the anchor and moved to the helm when he heard a strange thunk, then an ominous grinding noise. The whine of a rope through a wooden pulley seared his ears. With a sick lurch of his gut, he looked behind him. The line he’d used as a temporary fastening for the rudder was slithering away.

He let go of the wheel and dove for the rope. A split second before he reached it, the rope disappeared, snakelike, through a scuttle in the hull.

“Shit!” Jackson said, then held his breath. Maybe the rudder would stay put. Maybe—

A terrible wrenching sound shattered the night. Then a quiet hiss slid through the noise of the storm. Jackson hurled himself at the aft rail and looked over.

His curses roared with the thunder. Dr. Leah Mundy, his angel of mercy, his divine savior, had just wrecked his ship.




Two


17 April 1894

My dear Penelope,

I debated quite a bit with myself about whether or not I should relate what happened to me in the wee hours of the morning. The temptation is great to stay silent.

But since you are determined to become my partner in the practice when you complete your medical studies, I feel I owe you an unvarnished picture of what a physician’s life is truly like.

Sometimes we are called upon to treat cases against our will. Such was the circumstance around three o’clock this morning when a man abducted me at gunpoint.

Somehow I managed to keep my wits about me. The scoundrel forced me aboard his ship to treat his ailing wife, who is with child. His intention was to sail away with me aboard so that I could tend to the unfortunate woman.

Naturally, such a criminal had no care whatever for my other patients and would not listen to reason, so I took matters into my own hands. When he locked me in a stateroom with his wife, I used a scalpel to slice through a rope, thus disabling the steering and stopping our departure. After the mishap, my abductor burst into the stateroom, roaring with fury and actually threatening to use me as an anchor.

He is an uncommonly large man, broad of shoulder, with a lean and dangerous face and terrible eyes, but I refused to flinch. In my travels through the untamed West, I learned early to hide my fear. Thanks to my late father and his constant schemes and intrigues, I am no stranger to gunfighters and bullies. In my heart I knew my abductor would not harm me because I have something he needs—my skills as a physician. It is a great virtue to be needed. Greater, even, than being liked. For of course, the outlaw does not like me at all. But he needs me. And this prevented him from shooting me on the spot.

Instead, cursing so profusely I swear the air turned blue, he anchored his broken ship and together we bundled his wife into a dinghy. By sunup, we had her in a proper bed here at the boardinghouse in the main overnight guest room. Though her condition is still grave, I know she has a better chance to recover here. As for the husband, I can only wonder what sort of life it took to mold a man into such a hard-edged desperado.

Hoping I’ve not frightened you away from joining me upon completion of your ward studies, I remain as always,

Leah Jane Mundy, M.D.

Leah rolled a velvet-wrapped blotter over the page to soak up the excess ink. The heavy-barreled roller with its engraved pewter handle reminded her of earlier times.

She would have sold the ink blotter along with everything else if she could have gotten a decent price for it. But it was old and battered, and the initials stamped into the handle had meaning only to her.

G.M.M.

Graciela Maria Mundy. The mother Leah had never known.

A wave of sentiment washed over her as it often did when she was fatigued. She had no memory of her mother, but she felt a tearing loss all the same. Or more accurately, an emptiness. The absence of something vital.

Although it seemed nonsensical, she had an uncanny feeling that if only her mother had lived through childbirth, she would have taught Leah the things textbooks couldn’t explain—how to open her heart to other people, how to live life in the middle of things rather than outside looking in, how to love.

She stared at her face in the barrel of the blotter. Her features had the potential to look exotic, owing to her mother’s Latino heritage. But Leah worked hard to appear ordinary, choosing the plainest of clothing and scraping her hair well out of the way into a bun or single braid. She could do nothing to change her eyes, though. They were large and haunted, the eyes of a woman who knew someone had taken a piece of her away, and she’d never gotten it back.

Regaining a firm grip on her emotions, she thrust the blotter into a drawer, folded the letter precisely into thirds, and sealed it with a blob of red wax. “Work hard, Penny,” she murmured under her breath. “I shall be glad to have your company soon.”

She and Penelope Lake had never met face-to-face. Leah had contacted Johns Hopkins Medical College, newly founded the year before. The college had opened its doors to women from the very start, so Leah had asked to sponsor a promising young female medical student. Her father had sworn he wouldn’t tolerate yet another woman in the practice.

In a rare act of defiance, Leah had persisted. She’d been put in touch with Miss Penelope Lake of Baltimore, who showed signs of becoming a gifted physician and who was interested in moving west. Away, as she hinted in her letters, from the cramped confines of settled society.

The correspondence grew surprisingly warm and intimate. Leah could well imagine Penny’s world because long ago Leah had once been a part of it—cavernous homes like mausoleums, grim social visits, mannered conversations that went nowhere. And always, always, the unspoken expectation that any woman of worth would concern herself with home and family, not a profession.

Leah and Penelope Lake seemed to be kindred spirits. Why was it so easy to write openly to Penny, Leah wondered, when she was so guarded with the people she saw every day? She lived in a busy boardinghouse filled with interesting people, yet she could find no true friend among them. Even Sophie, her assistant, maintained a cordial distance. Leah wondered if it was simply her destiny to be alone in a crowd; never to know the easy familiarity of a close friendship or the quiet comfort of a family.

Even less likely was the possibility of intimacy with a man. Her father, always formal, demanding and distant, had made such a thing seem impossible. That was his legacy. With his pride, his expectations and his tragic shortcomings, he had left her as a creature half-formed. He had taught her that appearances were everything. He’d never shown her how to dive beneath the surface to create a rich inner life. Some parents crippled their children by beating and berating them. Edward Mundy was far more subtle, molding Leah’s character with undermining phrases that slipped in unnoticed, then festered into wounds that would never heal. He sabotaged her self-confidence and he limited her dreams.

“What a charming frock,” he used to say to her when she was small. “Now, do you suppose Mrs. Trotter would fix that unruly hair in order to do the dress justice?”

And later, when she was a schoolgirl: “There are a hundred ways to be mistaken, but only one way to be right. You have your mother’s looks and—alas—her contempt for conventional wisdom.”

When she became a young lady and a social failure, he had said, “If you cannot attract a decent husband, I shall permit you to assist me in my practice.”

By the time she recognized the harm he’d done her, it was too late to repair the damage. But he was gone now, and maybe she could find a way to move out from under his shadow. Maybe the world would open up for her.

“It’s not fair for me to pin so much hope on you, Penny,” Leah said, shaking off her thoughts.

She placed the letter to Penelope Anne Lake on a wooden desk tray, then checked her register. Mrs. Petty-grove had sent her houseboy with a list of the usual complaints, all of them imaginary, all treatable with a cup of Sophie’s mild herb tea and a bit of conversation. The Ebey lad, the one who had been kicked by a horse, had passed a quiet night.

Unlike Leah. Her own head throbbed—not from an iron-shod hoof, but from a man with an iron will.

And the most frightening eyes she had ever seen.

Just the thought of those hard gray eyes brought her to her feet. Restlessly, she paced the surgery, scanning the bookshelves and the framed certificates hanging on the walls, trying to construct her day in some sort of orderly fashion. But the extraordinary night she’d passed destroyed her concentration.

Memories of the man’s bleak gaze troubled her as she stopped at the coat tree behind the door and put on a white muslin smock. The garment had been laundered and starched and fiercely pressed by Iona, the deaf-mute girl abandoned by her parents three years earlier.

Over her father’s protests, Leah had taken in the girl. Other women marry and have children of their own. But you have to adopt someone else’s damaged goods.

Leah wished she could forget her father’s bitter words. But she remembered everything. Her blade-sharp memory was both a gift and a curse. In medical school, she’d been renowned for her ability to commit the most minute detail to memory. Yet the curse of it was, she also recalled every slight, every slur, and they hurt as fresh as yesterday. Leah Mundy, too busy doing a man’s job to remember she’s a woman… Her childhood friends had gone to parties while Leah had stayed home, memorizing formulae and anatomy. Her classmates had married and become mothers while Leah doctored people and delivered other women’s babies.

Resolutely, she filled a small earthenware churn with vinegar heated at the kitchen stove. She added sassafras and mint, then a pinch of ground cloves, and put the container on a tray to take upstairs.

As she passed through the hallway, she heard the sounds of clinking dishes and silver from the dining room, the clack of the coffee grinder in the kitchen. Smells of sizzling bacon and baking biscuits wafted through the house. Eight o’clock, and Perpetua Dawson would be serving breakfast.

Leah rarely took the time to sit down for a meal with the boarders. When she did, she felt awkward and intrusive anyway. She had never learned to be comfortable in company, even among people she encountered every day. For most of her life, she’d been regarded as an oddity, an aberration, sometimes an absurdity: a woman with a mind of her own and the ill manners to show it.

She paused in the grand foyer. Perhaps this was the area that had deluded the outlaw into thinking the house fancy. High above the front door was a wheeled window of leaded glass depicting a ship at sea. The colored panes with their fanciful design served as a reminder of bygone days when the owner of the house had been a prosperous sea captain. A railed bridge, reminiscent of a ship’s deck, spanned the vestibule from above, connecting the two upper wings of the house.

By the time Leah’s father had bought the place, it had been an abandoned wreck for many years. He’d gone deep into debt restoring it, but impossible debt was nothing new for Edward Mundy.

She went up the main staircase, noting with satisfaction the sheen of verbena wax on the banisters. Iona kept the house immaculate.

Leah stopped outside the first door on the right. She tapped her foot lightly against the door. “Carrie? Are you awake?”

No sound. Leah shouldered open the door, the tray balanced carefully in both hands. Silence. Heavy drapes blocked out the morning light. She stood still for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness. The room had a fine rosewood bedstead and, when the curtains were parted, a commanding view of Penn Cove.

Carrie lay unmoving in the tall four-poster bed. Alone. Good God, had the husband abandoned her?

Leah turned to set the tray on a side table—and nearly dropped it.

The gunman.

He dozed sitting up in a chintz-covered chair, his long legs and broad shoulders an ungainly contrast to the dainty piece of furniture. He still wore his denims and duster, his hat pulled down over the top half of his face.

Held loosely in his hand was the Colt revolver.

Leah gasped when she saw it. “Sir!” she said sharply.

He came instantly alert, the hat brim and the gun barrel both lifting in warning. When he recognized Leah, he stood and approached her, raising one side of his mouth in a parody of a grin.

“Morning, Doc,” he said in his gravelly voice. “You look mighty crisp and clean this morning.” Insolently, he ran his long, callused finger down her arm. The forbidden touch shocked Leah. She flinched, glaring at him. Before she could move away, he cornered her. “Uh-oh, Doc.”

“What’s the matter?” She forced herself to appear calm.

“You missed one.” Before she could stop him, he reached around and fastened the top button of her shirtwaist.

A man should not be so familiar with a woman he didn’t know. Particularly a married man. “Sir—”

“Do you always look so stiff and starched after wrecking a man’s boat?”

Ignoring his sarcasm, she moved past him. “Excuse me. I need to check on my patient.” She deposited the tray on the table. “Did you find a bottle of your wife’s tonic? I need to know what she’s been taking.”

“All our things are on the boat.”

“I wish you’d remembered the tonic.”

“We had to abandon ship pretty fast. It was all I could do to keep myself from choking you to death.”

“That wouldn’t do Carrie much good, would it?”

“Damn it, woman, you could have killed us all.”

“Perhaps you’ll consider that the next time you try to kidnap me.” She took the lid off the medicine crock.

He crossed the room, boots treading softly on the threadbare carpet. “What’s that?”

“An inhalant to clear the lungs.”

“So what’s wrong with her?” he asked, and she heard the anxiety in his voice. “Besides…you know.”

“Yes, I do know.”

“She’s got the croup or something?”

“Or something.” Leah folded her arms. “I’ll need to do a more thorough examination. Her lungs sounded congested last night. She’s in danger of developing lobar pneumonia.”

His ice gray eyes narrowed. “Is that bad?”

“It can be, yes, particularly for a woman in her condition. That’s why we’d best do everything we can to prevent it from happening.”

“What’s everything?”

“The inhalant. Complete bed rest. Plenty of clear liquids and as much food as we can get her to eat. She must regain her strength. Pregnancy and childbirth are arduous chores, and they take their toll on frail women.”

He glanced at the sleeping form in the bed. So far, Leah had not seen him touch her, and she thought that was strange. None of her affair, she told herself.

“Carrie doesn’t eat much,” he said.

“We have to try. Since she seems to be resting comfortably, don’t disturb her. When she wakes on her own, help her sit up. Have her inhale the steam and try to get her to take some broth and bread. Mrs. Dawson will have it ready in the kitchen.” Leah turned to go. He stepped in front of the door, blocking her exit. He was one of the tallest men she had ever seen—and one of the meanest-looking. She folded her arms. “If you dare to threaten me again, I’ll go straight to Sheriff St. Croix.”

Her warning made no impression on him—or did it? Perhaps his eyes got a little narrower, his mouth a little tighter. “Lady, if you know what’s good for you, then you won’t breathe a word to the sheriff.”

She hitched up her chin. “And if I do?”

“Don’t take that risk with me.”

The icy promise in his voice chilled her blood. “I don’t want any trouble,” she stated.

“Neither do I. So I’ll be spending the day working on the boat you wrecked last night.”

“That boat was a wreck long before I disabled the rudder.”

“At least I could steer it.” He hissed out a long breath, clearly trying to gather patience. Then he dug into the pocket of his jeans and took out a thick roll of bills. “What’s your fee?”

She swallowed. “Five dollars, but—”

He peeled off a twenty-dollar note. “That should take care of the fee, plus room and board. I ought to be able to get the steering fixed today, and then we’ll be off.”

She stared at the paper money but made no attempt to take it. “I’m afraid you didn’t understand. You have to stay here and take care of your wife. Not just for today, but until she gets better. You can’t just go sailing off into the sunset.”

“But you said—”

“I said she needs complete bed rest and plenty of food and care. She won’t get that on your ship. She won’t get that without you. You’re staying here, Mr….” She floundered, realizing he’d never told her his name.

“Underhill. Jackson T. Underhill. And I’m not staying.”

“What’s your hurry, Mr. Underhill?” Leah demanded. As if she didn’t know. He was a man on the run. A fugitive. From what, she didn’t care to speculate. None of her affair. Her gaze flicked to the twenty dollars in his hand. Was it stolen?

“I don’t have time to lollygag on some island.”

She felt a niggling fear that he’d go off and leave Carrie. “You cannot abandon your duties,” she stated. “I simply will not allow it.”

“I’ve got business to take care of.”

“You’ve got a wife to take care of.”

He waved the money at her. “That’s what I’m hiring you to do.”

“I’m a doctor, not a nursemaid.” Leah planted her hands on her hips and wished she were taller so she could face him down, eye to eye, nose to nose. “Good day, Mr. Underhill. I’ll look in on your wife this evening. If you need anything before then, tell Mrs. Dawson. She’ll instruct Mr. Douglas to fetch me.”

She reached past him for the doorknob. He seized her wrist.

Something happened; she wasn’t sure what, but his touch sparked a hot and alien sensation within her. His grip was strong, though it didn’t hurt. His gaze was brutal and uncompromising. And in spite of it all, she felt a curious breathlessness, a quickening in her chest.

“If I need anything?” he repeated. “Lady, there are a lot of things I need.”

She snatched her hand away, mortified by the forbidden sensations his touch had caused. “I wasn’t speaking of your needs, but Carrie’s. I’ll treat your wife to the best of my abilities.” She hoped he didn’t hear the slight tremor in her voice. “Beyond that, I can promise you nothing.”

Face flaming, she pushed past him and left the room.



The Mundy place had a real honest-to-God bathhouse, Jackson was pleased to discover. Apparently, this had been a fine estate at one time, and the previous owner had spared no expense in endowing it with luxuries. Perpetua Dawson, the small, busy woman who ran the kitchen, had shown him to the bathhouse, pointing out the deep zinc tubs and the furnace-heated water supply.

After laboring to bring the crippled boat into harbor, Jackson had looked in on Carrie, finding her listless and vague. Trying to calm the panic beating in his chest, he went to the baths to enjoy the first good soak he’d had since…Santa Fe, was it? No, there was that night in San Francisco not so long ago. A frizzy-haired whore, wet-brained from too much beer, had careered right into Jackson and landed in his lap. Laughing, Carrie had struck up a conversation with her and blurted out that they’d bought passage to Seattle. He’d thought the whore was too far gone to hear. He hoped he was right.

Carrie had cajoled him into spending his winnings on a room at the Lombard Hotel. She had exclaimed gleefully over the luxurious velvet draperies, the champagne and oysters, the tray of chocolate truffles….

But then she’d looked at the fancy grille on the window and shivered. “This is a prison, Jackson. They’ll never let me out of here. I’ll never be safe. Never.”

“Hush now, Carrie,” he’d said, repeating an age-old pledge. “I’ll keep you safe.”

“Build up the fire,” she had begged. “It’s too cold in here.”

The thought ignited an old, old memory that raised a bittersweet ache in his chest. The years peeled away and he was a boy again, sitting on the wet brick pavement in the moldering courtyard of the St. Ignatius Orphan Asylum of Chicago. Through a grille-covered window he could hear a little girl sobbing, sobbing.

Carrie. With shaking hands, Jackson had held the bundle of sweets he’d stolen from the pantry of the refectory. The sweets were never given to the children, of course. Brother Anthony and Brother Brandon saved them for themselves.

Holding a little cloth bag of gumdrops, Jackson started to climb. His feet, in worn and ill-fitting shoes, wedged into the gaps left by crumbling mortar. His wiry arms trembled as he pulled himself up. A sliver from the windowsill stabbed into his hand. He ignored the pain. At St. I’s, kids knew better than to cry over a sliver.

“Carrie,” he said, finding a toehold on the rain gutter. “Carrie, it’s me, Jackson.”

Her sobbing hiccuped into silence. Then she spoke, her little-girl’s voice clear as a crystal bell. “They locked me in. Oh, save me, Jackson. I’m so cold. I’ll die in here.”

“I couldn’t pick the lock,” he said apologetically. “I tried and tried.” He pushed the bag of sweets between the rusty bars of the window. “Gumdrops, Carrie!”

“Red ones?”

The silence spun out. A distant horn blew, signaling the end of the shift for Chicago’s dockworkers at Quimper Shipyards. The swampy smell of Lake Michigan blew in on a cold wind through the courtyard. “Carrie?” Jackson strained to see inside the locked room, but spied only shadows. “You all right?”

“No,” she said, the word muffled by a mouthful of candy. “What’s this, Jackson?”

“Something I made for you. Carved it out of firewood.”

“It’s a bird.”

“Uh-huh.” He imagined her turning it over in her small hands. He was proud of his work, his attention to detail. It was a dove; he’d copied the stained glass Holy Ghost in St. Mary’s Church. At Christmas and Easter, the brothers scrubbed the orphans up and paraded them to church, and Jackson had always spent the hour staring at the jewel-colored windows.

“Oh, Jackson.” Her voice came through the barred window. “I’ll keep it with me always.”

“I put a hole in the back so you can wear it on a string around your neck.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said, and he had the eerie impression she wasn’t speaking to him. “I just wanted to hold the baby, just wanted to be warm by the fire, but they blamed it all on me, put me here in the cold. I’m scared, Jackson.”

His legs began to tremble from the effort of holding himself up. “Carrie—”

“You there,” barked a deep, familiar voice. “Get down from there, boy!”

Jackson didn’t have to look back to know Brother Anthony stood below, flexing a knotted belt while his eyes gleamed with hell’s fury and his costly ring of office flashed in the light.

“Are you deaf, boy, or just stupid? I said get down.”

He tilted his head up. Just a short reach away loomed a drainpipe. If he could grab onto that, he’d climb up to the roof, maybe find a way down the other side. He leaned toward the rusty pipe, closed his eyes, and leaped. The ancient iron groaned under his weight, but it held. He began to climb, up and up, ignoring the wrathful commands of Brother Anthony. Jackson kept climbing toward the pigeon-infested ledge above him. How he wished he were a bird. He’d fly away free, soaring…

“If you won’t come down, I’ll give your punishment to that little devil-spawn girl you like so much,” Brother Anthony promised.

Jackson stopped climbing. His brief fantasy of freedom flickered and died. He blew out a long, weary breath. He slid down the drainpipe and dropped to the cracked brick yard, stumbling a little as he turned to face Brother Anthony.

The portly warden backhanded him across the face. Jackson’s head snapped to one side; he saw a spray of blood fly out. Brother Anthony’s ruby ring had cut him above the cheekbone.

He knew from years of observation that the warden would go easier on him if he cried and begged for mercy. But he’d never been able to plead. Instead, he wiped his bleeding cheek with his sleeve, then clawed off his shirt even before Brother Anthony commanded it. With a cold gleam of defiance in his eyes, Jackson turned, braced his hands against the wall, and waited for the first blow to land.

In the detention room, Carrie was strangely silent.

In the bathhouse, many miles and many years away from that moment, Jackson plunged his head into the lukewarm water and scrubbed hard, wishing he could wash clean the past. But he couldn’t, of course. The past would always be with him, just as the scar from Brother Anthony’s ring would always be with him. Just as Carrie would always be with him.

Pregnant. God Almighty, Carrie was pregnant.

She had awakened briefly this morning. Like a petulant child, she had turned up her nose and complained about the sour smell of the vinegar and herbs, but she seemed to breathe easier after the treatment. He had managed to get her to eat a bit of bread sopped in warm milk and flavored with cinnamon and sugar.

“You’re good to me,” she had murmured. “You’re always good to me.” And she’d reached her hand out for the bottle of tonic she needed.

“I left it on the boat, honey.”

He’d taken her hand in his. Her fingers tightened into a fist, and she knocked his arm away. “I need it, Jackson. I need my medicine now.”

Resigned, he’d rowed out to the schooner. He planned to bring her in to dock anyway. He’d paid the harbormaster, then returned to Carrie. He should have talked to her about the pregnancy, talked about what it would mean to bring a baby into the world. Their world. Instead, he watched her grab the bottle, watched her drink greedily until her eyes grew dazed with a sated look.

“Save a little of that,” he said. “The doctor wants to know what’s in your medicine.”

“I need it,” she mumbled, visibly calmer. “I always do.”

He’d sat with her and held her hand until she slept again. All in all, it had been an easy day with Carrie. Not every day was like that. Her moods had always been unpredictable, but lately her spirits had spiraled downward at an accelerated rate. He supposed the pregnancy explained that, but what the hell did he know of female things?

For that matter, what did he know of anything the future held for him and Carrie? He knew better than to expect love and security, a settled life, a home. That was something that didn’t happen to people like them. They were too desperate, too damaged. He would simply drift along with Carrie, taking each day as it came.

He’d never done a lot of planning for the future. He’d always lived for the moment. Decisions that had altered his life had turned on a single moment. A three-year stint on a whaling ship? He’d gone simply because his bed in the flophouse where he was staying had been lumpy. Ownership of a broken-down seagoing schooner? He’d won it with a single hand of cards.

Good or bad, it was the way he had lived. If you don’t expect anything out of life, he reasoned, then life won’t have a chance to disappoint you.

It was enough to simply stay ahead of the law. Drifting along had never bothered him in the past, though today it preyed upon his mind. There was something about that lady doctor that made him wish he could be something more than a wanderer. Made him weary of always being on the wrong side of the law—even when he was trying to do right. If he could get Carrie away to a safe place, maybe they could start over again, settle down, get a house and some land like regular folks.

He dried himself with a clean towel and wrapped it around his waist. The timid deaf girl called Iona had set out some shaving things for him. Peering into a small, oval mirror, he lathered up. He’d gotten careless the past few days with Carrie being so sick. He had to stay clean-shaven because the Wanted poster showed him with a beard.

His mood rose a couple of notches. The likeness and its screaming headline hadn’t been posted in Seattle, so he guessed the search wouldn’t reach this far north. Not anytime soon, he figured.

By the time they traced him here, he’d be long gone, thanks to a lucky hand of cards dealt at a tavern on Yesler Way in Seattle. A timely quartet of queens had won him the schooner.

The thought of the boat almost brought a smile to Jackson’s face. He’d always dreamed of having a boat. When he was a boy, he’d stolen a copy of Treasure Island—everything worth having was stolen. Late at night, burning a contraband candle in the boys’ dormitory at St. I’s, he had devoured the adventure story with his eyes, his mind, his heart. Against all odds, he had learned how to dream. Ever since reading that book, he’d wanted to sail away, wanted the freedom, wanted the sense that he was in control of a world of his choosing.

Jackson T. Underhill had never found that. Not yet. He was still looking.

The whaling ship had not been the answer. He’d hated the tedium, the rigid pecking order among the crew, the sick cruelty of the second mate, the grim violence of the hunt. As in all the things Jackson had done in his life, he’d gleaned important skills from the experience; then he’d moved on.

The schooner was a new—if leaky—start. But it had problems. The damage done by the lady doctor was only the beginning. Once he’d docked the boat, the harbormaster’s assistant had given him a depressing litany of repairs to be made before she was seaworthy again.

If he could just get her running well enough to make it to Canada, he’d take his time, maybe make a plan. He had only the vaguest idea where he would go; all he knew was that he needed to find a place where Carrie would feel safe, where his face wasn’t known, where a man could be judged by the hard work he did, not by a past he couldn’t change.

He cleaned off the razor, wiped his chin, and turned to reach for the pile of freshly laundered clothes in the dressing room.

Instead of the clothes, he saw a woman’s backside.

Dr. Leah Mundy was coming into the bathhouse, shuffling backward, bent over and talking softly to someone in a rolling wood-and-wicker chair. “Just a few steps more. There we are,” she said.

Her voice was incredibly sweet and coaxing, devoid of the acid, scolding tone she used with Jackson.

“You’ll feel like a new person when you’re in the bath,” Leah Mundy said. She brought the rolling chair fully into the room and swiveled it around.

“Dr. Mundy, who’s that man?” asked a child’s voice.

She glanced up, and her eyes grew wide and panicked, the eyes of a doe caught in a hunter’s sight. “Mr. Underhill!”

He bowed from the waist where the towel was knotted precariously. “Ma’am.”

He was impressed by the way she regained control without even moving a muscle. The panic in her gaze subsided to a detached authority. In her profession, she probably saw male bodies all the time. Half naked or not, he was no more than an anatomy specimen to her. She straightened her shoulders, folded her lips into a humorless line, and cleared her throat.

“I didn’t expect to find anyone here,” she said. Jackson could tell she was trying not to look at his tattoo. “I was bringing Bowie for his therapeutic bath. He’s Mrs. Dawson’s boy.” Her voice softened a little as she glanced down. “Bowie, this is Mr. Underhill. He was just leaving.”

The child in the chair smiled shyly. Jackson felt his heart squeeze with an odd feeling of longing and loss. Bowie had fair hair and pale skin, and a face stamped by an invalid’s patient resignation. He was painfully thin, with a blanket draped over sticklike legs.

Jackson managed a friendly grin. “How do, youngster. Pleased to meet you.”

He glared at Leah, his gaze never leaving hers as he gathered up his things and stepped behind a trifold screen. He whistled as he dressed, savoring the feel of clean clothes against clean skin. He noticed that his shirt button, which had been broken for weeks, had been replaced. Leah Mundy might not be all that friendly, but she employed good help.

Every so often, it was possible to feel respectable, just for a minute or two.

As he was leaving the bathhouse, he happened to glance into the bathing chamber. Leah had managed to get the boy out of his clothes except for a pair of drawers for modesty.

“Sophie’s away, so it’s just the two of us,” she was saying. “Can you hang on to my neck?” She burrowed her arms around and under him.

Bowie complied, linking his bony wrists behind her neck. “Where’s Sophie?”

“She took the side-wheeler to Port Townsend.” Leah lurched as she stood up with the boy in her arms.

“Here, let me help,” Jackson said gruffly, striding toward them.

A flash of surprise lit her face. She gave the briefest of nods. “Just take Bowie’s legs and we’ll ease him into the bath.”

The legs were even paler than the rest of him, flaccid from lack of use. Jackson took careful hold and slowly bent, easing Bowie into the water.

“Too hot for you, son?” Jackson asked.

“No. Just right…sir.”

“You don’t have to call me sir. Call me Jackson.” It just slipped out. Here he was, running from the law, and he was supposed to be keeping a low profile. Being friendly only brought a man trouble. The lesson had been beaten into him by all the hard years on the road.

The boy seemed happier once he was in the bath. He rested his head against the edge of the basin and waved his arms slowly back and forth.

“You like the water?” Jackson asked, hunkering down, ignoring Leah as she seemed to be ignoring him.

“Yup. I keep telling Mama I want to swim in the Sound, but she says it’s too dangerous.”

Leah scooped something minty-smelling out of a ceramic jar and started rubbing it onto Bowie’s legs. “It is too danger—”

“Just make sure you’re swimming with someone real strong,” Jackson cut in.

“Don’t put ideas into the boy’s head,” Leah snapped.

“If a boy doesn’t have ideas,” Jackson said, “what the hell is he going to think about all day?”

“And don’t swear,” she retorted.

Hell’s bells, she was a bossy stick of a woman. “Did I swear?” Jackson asked. “Damn, I never even noticed.”

He found a sea sponge and playfully tossed it to Bowie. The boy looked baffled for a moment, then tossed it back.

“Anyway, son,” Jackson continued, “when I was your age, I was full of ideas.”

“What sort of ideas?”

Like how to escape the orphanage. How to forget the things fat Ralphie made him do in the middle of the night. How to turn a deaf ear to the cries of the younger boys…

Jackson thrust away the memories, hid them behind a broad grin. “Ideas about sailing off to paradise. I had me a favorite book called Treasure Island. It was by a man called Robert—”

“—Louis Stevenson!” Bowie finished for him. “I know that book. He wrote Kidnapped, too. Did you read that one, Jackson? I have heaps of books. Dr. Leah always gives me books, don’t you, Dr. Leah?”

“You’re never alone when you’re reading a book,” she murmured, and Jackson looked at her in surprise.

For the remainder of the bath, he and Bowie discussed all sorts of things from storybooks to boyish dreams. Jackson couldn’t believe he’d actually found something in common with a little crippled boy who spoke properly and owned a roomful of books. And all the while, Leah Mundy looked on, her expression inscrutable.

She probably disapproved. He didn’t blame her. She didn’t know him, and what she’d seen of him did not inspire trust. He’d taken her away at gunpoint, would have kidnapped her.

In a way, he was glad it hadn’t come to that. The idea of spending days with her cooped up aboard the schooner gave him the willies. Still, a sense of urgency plucked at him. The past was nipping at his heels.

“Ever been sailing?” he heard himself asking.

“No, sir.”

“It’s a fine thing, Bowie. A damned fine thing.” Jackson shot a glance at Leah. “Of course, you have to make sure you don’t have a mutineer aboard who’d sabotage the steering.”

“Who’d do a thing like that?” Bowie asked. “Pirates?”

“A crazy woman,” Jackson said casually.

Bowie laughed, thinking it a great joke. Leah ducked her head, but Jackson noticed the hot color in her cheeks. She didn’t look half so harsh when she was blushing.

“One time,” Bowie said, “Mama was going to take me on the steamer to Seattle, but she changed her mind. Said it was too far from home.”

“Maybe your daddy—”

“His father’s been dead for years,” Dr. Mundy said. She spoke with a peculiar icy calm that sat ill with Jackson.

He kept his eyes on Bowie. “Sorry to hear that. But be glad you have a place to call home. Maybe you’ll go swimming in the Sound one of these days.”

“Maybe,” Bowie said, slapping his palms on the soapy surface of the water.

“I’d better go.” Jackson lifted him out of the bath, and Dr. Mundy wrapped him in a towel. “You keep reading those books, you hear, youngster?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dr. Mundy.”

“Good day, Mr. Underhill,” she said stiffly.

He left the bathhouse, shaking his head. What the hell was it with her? She’d gotten her way, forced him to stay here on this remote green island, yet she refused to drop her mantle of self-righteousness. Something about her taunted him, challenged him, made him want to peel away that mantle and see what was underneath. He told himself he shouldn’t want to know her. He wondered why her opinion of him mattered.

Damn. He’d met scorpions and prickly pears that were friendlier than Dr. Leah Mundy.



By sunset, Leah had finished with Bowie, lanced a boil for the revenue inspector, visited elderly Ada Blowers to check on her cough, and set a broken arm for a drunken lumberjack who swore at her and refused to pay a “lady sawbones” for doing a man’s job.

But Leah’s long day wouldn’t end until she paid a visit to her newest patient. She stood for a moment at the bottom of the wide hardwood staircase, resting her hand on the carved newel post and listening to the sounds of the old house at evening.

Perpetua hummed as she worked in the kitchen, a little worker bee at the heart of the house. In the parlor, the boarders sat after supper, the men smoking pipes and the women knitting while they spoke in muted voices.

This was Leah’s world, the place where she would spend the rest of her life. The light from the lowering sun filtered through the circular window high above the foyer, and to Leah it was a lonely sight, the symbol of another day gone by.

She didn’t know how to talk to these people who lived under her roof, didn’t know what dreams they dreamed, didn’t know how to open her heart to them. And so she lived apart, working hard, keeping to herself, an outsider in her own house.

She smoothed her hands down the front of her white smock. The starch had wilted somewhat during the day, and she knew the ribbons straggled down her back.

Have a care for your appearance, girl. No wonder you haven’t found a man yet.

Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut up. She wished she could close out the memory of her father’s voice. She had loved him with all that was in her, but it was never enough. Even at the end, when he’d lain helpless and needy on his deathbed, her love hadn’t been enough. She couldn’t save him, couldn’t make him say the words she’d waited a lifetime to hear: I love you, daughter.

Pressing her mouth into a determined line, she climbed the stairs, her skirts swishing on the polished wood. She tapped lightly at the door.

“Mrs. Underhill? Are you awake?”

The sound of a male voice—his voice—answered her, but she couldn’t make out the words.

“May I come in?”

The door opened. Jackson T. Underhill stood there hatless, his blond hair mussed as if he’d run his fingers through it. “She’s awake, Doc,” he said.

No one had ever called her Doc. She realized that she rather liked the homey, trusting sound of it. She found herself remembering the incident in the bathhouse. What a shock it had been to see him standing there, naked except for a towel around his middle. Even without the gun belt slung low on his hips, there was something dangerous and predatory about him. Something she shouldn’t let herself think about. She forced her attention back to where it belonged—her patient.

Evening light spilled through the dimity curtains framing the bay window. The glow lay like a veil of amber upon the reposing figure on the bed. Carrie Underhill wore the shroud of gold like a mythic figure. How lovely she was, the fine bones of her face sharpened by light and shadow, her milk-pale skin and fair hair absorbing the pinkening rays of the sunset.

She turned her head on the pillow and blinked slowly at Leah.

“Mrs. Underhill, I’m glad you’re awake.” Leah took the slim hand in her own. Immediately, the pathologist in her took over. The first thing she noticed was how cold the hand was. Too cold. “How are you feeling?”

Carrie pulled her hand away with a weak motion. Her eyes, blue as a delft dessert plate, were wide and wounded. “I feel awful, just awful.” Her gaze sought Jackson, and she seemed to calm a little when she spied him. “Is this a safe place, Jackson? You said we were going to a safe place.”

“You’re safe here, sugar,” he said. His voice was so gentle that Leah almost didn’t recognize it.

“Hurts,” she said with a whimper, and her perfect face pinched into a wince of pain. “Hurts so bad.”

A chill rose up and spread through Leah. Her suspicions, the ones she had been beating down since first laying eyes on Carrie Underhill, came back stronger. She moved the coverlet aside.

Carrie clutched at the quilt. “Jackson!”

“She doesn’t like being uncovered,” he said. “Likes being wrapped up tight.”

“I need to examine her,” Leah snapped. Then, collecting herself, she turned back to Carrie. “I’ll be quick,” she promised. As gently as she could, she palpated Carrie’s abdomen through the fabric of a clean flannel nightgown.

An outlaw who did laundry…

What was a ruthless man like Jackson T. Underhill doing with this fey and delicate creature?

The scent of laundry mingled with something sharper, an odor that was rusty and unmistakable.

She looks to be about three months along…

Leah’s hand touched the abdomen low. Carrie screamed. Her legs came up to reveal an angry smear of fresh blood on the sheets.

“Jesus!” Jackson grabbed Leah’s arm and yanked her back. “You’re hurting her.”

Leah drew him away from the bed and into the recess of a dormer window. Lowering her voice so Carrie wouldn’t hear, Leah leaned toward Jackson. “When did the bleeding start?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“I didn’t know she was bleeding.” Fear edged his words. “I thought she was doing better, just sleeping.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“No. She—I don’t think she knew, either.”

“I’m afraid she’s miscarrying,” Leah said.

“What’s that mean?” he demanded, clutching her arm, holding tight.

Leah wrenched her arm away. “She’s losing the baby.”

“So fix it.”

The chill inside Leah froze into a ball of fear. “It’s all I can do to save the mother.”

“So save her. Do it now,” he said, raising his voice above Carrie’s high, thin keening.

“I don’t think you understand, Mr. Underhill. It’s not that simple. She might need surgery.”

“Surgery. You mean an operation.”

“I have to stop the bleeding.”

His face paled. “Surgery,” he repeated.

“Yes, if the bleeding doesn’t stop.”

“No.”

She could see the shape of his mouth, but she made him say it again. “I didn’t hear you, Mr. Underhill.”

“No. You aren’t going to hurt her anymore.”

Furious, she tugged on his hand, leading him out into the corridor.

“You aren’t operating on Carrie,” he repeated, his voice low and threatening. “She’s not some critter for you to experiment on.”

“How dare you,” she shot back. “I’m a healer, Mr. Underhill. Not a butcher. Believe me, I would give anything not to have to do anything invasive to your wife, and I will try to stanch the flow as best I can. But if we ignore the problem, the bleeding will continue. Toxins will spread through her body, and she’ll die. A slow, painful death.”

He pressed himself against the wall of the corridor, leaning his head back and closing his eyes. “Damn it. God damn it all to hell.”

“Mr. Underhill, this isn’t helping your wife. You have to make the decision.” A thin wail of pain drifted from inside the room. “You have to make it now.”

He moved so fast that Leah didn’t even realize it until he was clutching her by the shoulders, shoving her up against the wall. The desperate strength in his fingers bit into her upper arms. He put his face very close to hers. She caught his scent of bay rum and leather.

“Look, lady doctor. You’re telling me she could bleed to death?”

“That’s correct.” She tried to glare him into releasing her, but he only held her tighter. She moistened her lips, trying not to let the fatigue of a long day bother her. “An infection could take hold, and she’s too weak to battle an infection.”

“Then you fix her.” He spoke in a low, icy undertone. “You do it now. You stop the bleeding and you make her well. Or I swear to God I’ll kill you.”



Leah and her father had argued long and loud about outfitting an operating theater in the surgery. Edward Mundy claimed to scorn the fancy, big-city ways of modern medicine. In truth, what he scorned was spending money on anything but himself. Leah rarely won an argument with her father, but when it came to her profession, she found strength in her passion for healing.

In the end, she had prevailed and was rewarded with a tiny but innovative theater adjacent to the main suite. It was nothing so grand as the busy hospital theaters where she had learned her brutal craft in Denver and Omaha, but it was an impressive facility for a small island town.

She religiously followed the antiseptic methods of Dr. Lister of Great Britain. Lister had proven beyond a doubt that sterilizing the operating theater reduced the risk of infection. Penny Lake had written to say that all the surgeons of Johns Hopkins were using rubber gloves during surgery. Leah willingly embraced the technique.

Her assistant, Sophie Whitebear, had returned from Port Townsend. With quiet competence, she sprayed the chamber with carbolic acid solution until a fine mist hung in the air. Everything—their gowns, their hair, their sleeping patient, the instruments, the walls and the floors—grew damp and acrid-smelling.

When all was in readiness—the light in place, the patient draped, the dressings and instruments at hand—Leah closed her eyes and said a quick prayer. She had done this many times, had probed dozens of bodies in search of bullets or gallstones or bleeding tumors, but each time, she was overwhelmed with the enormity of invading the sanctity of the human body.

Dear God, please guide my hand in this. Please….

Holding her breath and her nerves perfectly steady, she began.




Three


There wasn’t a goddamned thing he could do.

Like a caged beast, Jackson prowled the surgery. His gaze kept cutting to the enameled white door. Beyond that door, in a room lit so brightly his eyes hurt, Carrie lay bleeding. He might have looked his last at her as they brought her into the strange, foul-smelling chamber. She might never awaken again. He might never again see the color of her eyes, hear the sound of her voice, feel her hand grasping his.

Bitter guilt seared his throat. From the time they were children in the orphanage, he had promised Carrie he’d look out for her. But the deadly bleeding was a shadow enemy. He couldn’t beat it in a fistfight or run away from it. He had to put all his faith in an ill-tempered lady doctor who clearly had no respect for him and not a whole lot of compassion for Carrie.

Fear had become a familiar companion to Jackson. His life had been, for the most part, a series of horrifying incidents, from the moment his mother had abandoned him on a stoop in Chicago to the moment he’d fled Texas with a man’s blood on his hands. But this fear was sharper and colder than anything he’d ever felt.

He hated being in this position. Helpless. Without choices. Powerless to do anything. God, how long was this thing going to take? he wondered.

Grim silence shrouded the surgery. The lady doctor and her assistant weren’t saying a word. Carrie was under ether, blessedly senseless, thank God. The only sound came from a wood-cased mantel clock. The incessant ticking pounded out a hammer rhythm to Jackson’s anxiety, seized his mind and wouldn’t let go.

Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to stop pacing. The outer office was snug and painfully neat with apothecary jars lining one wall and shelf after shelf of textbooks. Above a woodstove hung a picture of a misty green-and-gold island with palm trees nodding over a calm bay. For a moment, Jackson stared at it.

Paradise. He could almost smell the perfume of exotic flowers, hear the call of colorful birds. He wondered if such a place actually existed.

Hungry for a distraction, he moved into the tiny inner office. Ah. Here, at least, was a bit of evidence that Dr. Leah Mundy actually had a life. That she was not some clockwork female sawbones who snapped out orders and intimidated people into getting better. Several diplomas lined one wall. Jackson had never actually seen one up close before, and he was fascinated by the scrolling script that spelled out high honors and important degrees.

She had attended institutions that sounded both imposing and exotic—Great Western, Beauchamps Elysées, Loxtercamp Hospital. She had read books such as Delafield & Pudden’s Pathology and Osteology of the Mammalia. Tucked between the medical tomes was one slim volume. He had to tilt his head to read the title: Ships that Pass in the Night: A Tragic Love Story by Beatrice Harraden.

An educated woman. Jackson was fairly certain he had never met one before.

He picked up a framed tintype of Leah and a bewhiskered gentleman. Jackson squinted at the image. A father. He had no idea what it felt like to have one; he’d been told he was sired by a Nordic lumberjack at a Chicago brothel.

He’d never allowed himself to care about not having a father. But he could tell from the expression on Leah Mundy’s face in the picture that she cared very much. Her hand gripped his arm. Her other hand held a rolled certificate—one of the diplomas on the wall? The bearded man exuded a chilly hauteur while Leah beamed with the eagerness of a pup.

Something had happened since then to beat her down. She was smart as a seasoned cardsharp. When she did her doctoring, she exuded competence and control. But she’d lost that bright sparkle in her eye. What happened to you, Leah Mundy? he wondered.

Was it the death of her father, or had something else soured her spirits? Whatever it was, it had turned her from a smiling, eager young woman into a somber, authoritative physician whose only pleasure seemed to be in work.

Was that what made Leah Mundy unique? What made her seem so very sharp, so special, so competent?

Or was it that she held Carrie’s life in her hands?

With a muttered oath, he started pacing again. Carrie. For years she had been his quest, his purpose; sometimes she was his only reason for getting up in the morning.

She had been no more than nine years old when he’d first laid eyes on her. He recalled the moment vividly, because it was the first time in his life that he’d dared to believe angels were real. Even standing in the dingy foyer of the Chicago orphan asylum, Carrie seemed to transcend the squalor, her eyes fixed on some point far beyond the busy roomful of orphans and wardens.

She reminded Jackson of a painting he’d once seen in church—a pilgrim filled with the quiet ecstasy of her first sight of God. The other children whispered that Carrie—as beautiful and delicate as a moth—was strangely empty, that she had no soul.

He knew he was the only one who could protect her. He had endured hell in her defense: bloodied nose, broken finger, twisted arm. The rewards were sparing, but he cherished them all the more for their scarcity. She’d smile or squeeze his hand or whisper that she loved him—just often enough to make him believe her. And with just enough sincerity to make him believe she knew how to love.

He glanced again at the surgery door. He tried to think of Carrie having a kid, but his imagination wouldn’t cooperate. She wouldn’t know the first thing about babies. Ever since that accident back at St. I’s when an infant in Carrie’s ward had died and she’d been sent in disgrace to the isolation room, she’d never spoken of babies, never looked at one, never held one.

Then one day, Carrie had disappeared from the orphanage. He remembered waiting for her outside the girls’ ward as he always did, the corridor stinking of piss and borax. But she hadn’t come out. Brother Anthony had informed Jackson—cuffing him on the ear for the impertinence of asking—that Carrie had been adopted.

He’d felt something implode inside him. Not from the blow; he was used to beatings. But from the news Brother Anthony had delivered. Jackson knew what it meant when a girl like Carrie was “adopted.” Pimps were always on the lookout for new, pretty girls. Brother Anthony and Brother Brandon were always on the lookout for ways to line their pockets.

What happened next came back in broken images, shattered by the violence that followed. Sharp fragments of remembrance stabbed at the back of his mind.

He had lunged at Brother Anthony, seized the portly man, shoved him against the seeping wall of the corridor. “Where is she, you son of a bitch? Who took her?” Jackson’s fierce, boyish voice echoed through the cavernous hallway of the tenement.

“Long…gone, damn you to the eternal fires,” Brother Anthony choked out, his eyes bulging as Jackson’s thumbs pressed on his windpipe. Jackson was a strapping boy despite the poor diet and poorer treatment he’d suffered over the years.

“Where?” he persisted, feeling an ugly pressure behind his eyes. Rage swept over him like a forest fire, burning out of control. The fury was a powerful thing, and his young mind absorbed its force. This, he knew then, was what drove men to murder. “Where?” he asked again. “Where? Where?”

“Already heading…down the Big Muddy—” Brother Anthony stopped abruptly. Strong arms grabbed Jackson from behind. Fists clad in brass knuckles beat him senseless. He’d awakened hours or days later—he couldn’t tell which—in a windowless cell in the basement. One eye swollen shut, a constant ringing in his ears, broken rib stabbing at his midsection. It had taken him days to recover from the beating, and still longer to ambush the luckless boy who brought him his daily meal. Then Jackson had burst out into the street—to freedom, to danger, to the desperation of an outlaw on the run.

He drifted from town to town, from logging camps in the northern woods to army forts and outposts in the West, from little farming villages where people pretended not to see him to big dirty cities where everyone, it seemed, was part of a confidence game. Jackson had mastered the trade of a cardsharp and gunfighter. He crewed on Lake Michigan yachts in the summers, learning the way of life that had captured his imagination. He was like a leech, finding a host, sucking him dry, moving on.

A six-day card game had taken place on an eastbound train, and without planning to, Jackson had found himself in New York City. He had no liking for the city, but a force he didn’t understand and didn’t bother to fight had drawn him inexorably eastward along the low, sloping brow of Long Island.

He’d gotten his first glimpse of the sea on a Wednesday, and he’d stood staring at it as if he beheld the very face of God. The following Monday, he signed on a whaler as a common seaman. The next three years consisted of equal parts of glory and hell. When he returned, he knew two things for certain—he hated whaling beyond all imagining. And he loved the sea with a passion that bordered on worship.

But the unfinished quest for Carrie held him captive. Eventually, he had traced her. In New Orleans, while celebrating a tidy sweep at the poker table, he’d found himself a whore for the night, oddly comforted by the mindless, mechanical way the services were rendered and received. But in the morning, he’d opened his eyes to a shock as disturbing as a bucket of ice water.

“What the hell’s this?” he’d demanded, yanking at the silk ribbon around the whore’s neck. “Where’d you get it?”

The whore had clutched the object defensively. “Lady Caroline left it behind, said it was a good-luck charm so I took to wearing it.”

He grabbed the charm, stared at it for a long time. It was the dove he’d carved for Carrie so long ago. “Lady Caroline,” he said, hope burgeoning in his chest. “So where is she now?”

“Gone to Texas, last I heard, with Hale Devlin’s gang.”

Texas. And that had only been the beginning.

The shattering of glass jarred Jackson out of his reverie. With a curse, he looked at the framed tintype he’d been holding and saw that he’d broken it. An ice-clear web of cracks radiated from the center, distorting the picture of Leah and her father. Her smiling mouth was severed as if by violence; the father’s hand on her shoulder had been detached.

Painstakingly, Jackson removed the broken glass. The picture went back to normal—Leah, smiling, aglow with pride. Her father cold, distant. The scroll of a paper diploma clutched in her hand.

An educated woman. But could she save Carrie?

He shuddered from the memory of what he had found in Texas.

Could anyone?



Bone weary, bloodied to the elbows and filled with self-doubt, Leah peeled off her patent rubber gloves. She pressed her forehead against the damp wall of the surgery and closed her eyes.

Nearby, she could hear Sophie’s movements as she placed soiled sheeting and gowns into a pail of carbolic solution, then emptied a large porcelain container into a waste pail.

“You did your best. I watched you like a hawk on the hunt,” Sophie said. “Those fancy city doctors in Seattle couldn’t have done better.”

“Try telling that to Mr. Underhill,” Leah whispered. “Oh, God, God.” She forced her eyes open, made herself look at Sophie.

Her assistant was broad of face; she had wise dark eyes and an air of serenity that governed every move she made, every word she spoke. Half Skagit Indian and half French-Canadian, Sophie had been educated in boarding schools that taught her just enough to convince her that she belonged neither to the white nor the native world, but stood precariously between the two. It was an uncomfortable spot, but Leah, a misfit herself, felt sometimes that they were kindred spirits.

“It is the great curse of doctors,” Leah said, “that while most people have to die only once, a doctor dies many times over, each time she loses a patient.”

Sophie pressed her lips into a line, then spoke softly. “But it is the great reward of healers that each time you save a life, you yourself are reborn.” She looked down at the unmoving, pale face of Carrie Underhill. “Yes, you lost the baby. But you also saved Mrs. Underhill from bleeding to death. She’ll live to thank you. Perhaps to bear other children.”

Leah swallowed the lump in her throat. She knew some babies were never meant to be, especially when the mother suffered such precarious health. There was something puzzling about Carrie Underhill’s condition, something besides the pregnancy. A chronic complaint, perhaps. But what?

Did she drink calomel? Leah wondered. The purgative was still a popular folk remedy; it had been her father’s favorite prescription. This was the sort of thing he caused, she thought resentfully. She intended to keep Carrie under close observation.

The task at hand was more pressing, though. She had to face this woman’s husband. The baby’s father.

With a leaden heart, she helped Sophie finish clearing up. After Carrie was clad in a clean gown and lying on clean draperies, Leah went to the door and opened it. “Mr. Underhill?”

His head snapped around as if someone had punched him in the jaw. Weariness deepened the fan lines around his eyes and mouth, yet a beard stubble softened the effect; he appeared deceptively vulnerable. “Is she all right?”

Leah nodded. “She’s sleeping, but will probably awaken within the next hour.”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Good,” he said between his teeth. “Damn, that’s…good.” He opened his eyes. “Jesus. I feel like I just got dealt four aces.”

Leah cleared her throat. “She might suffer a headache, possibly vomiting, from the ether. You must watch her closely in case the bleeding starts again, but I don’t think it will.” She forced an encouraging smile. Something tender and desperate lived in Jackson Underhill’s haggard face. She wished she knew him well enough to take his hand, to hold it tight for a moment. Instead, she said, “I believe your wife will be fine. She needs plenty of bed rest and good food, and we’ll see to that.”

“Yes. All right.” His eyes closed again briefly. His knees wobbled.

“Sit down, Mr. Underhill. I can’t handle two patients tonight.”

He lowered himself to the wing chair and cradled his head in his hands, fingers splaying into his thick golden hair. “Didn’t know I was wound up so tight.” He glanced up at her. She felt an inner twist of compassion at the turbulence in his eyes. Those gunslinger eyes. The first time she had looked into them, she had nearly fainted from fright. Now she felt a chilly reluctance to tell him the rest.

“Thanks, Doc,” he said to her.

She nodded, holding the edge of the door, waiting. Waiting. Waiting for him to ask about the baby. He didn’t. He didn’t even seem to acknowledge its existence. She swallowed hard. “Mr. Underhill?”

“Yeah?”

She took a deep breath, sensing the harshness of carbolic and ammonia in her lungs. “I’m afraid I couldn’t save the baby.”

“The baby.” His soft voice held no expression, no hint of what he was feeling.

“I’m sorry. So terribly, terribly sorry.”

He stared at her for a long time, so long she wasn’t certain he’d heard and understood. Then at last he spoke. “You did your best, I reckon.”

In her travels with her father, she’d met her share of gamblers and gunslingers. They were men without souls, men who killed in the blink of an eye. Jackson T. Underhill was one of them. Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how badly she’d wanted him to be different—better, more worthy, more compassionate. But his attitude about the baby proved her wrong.

“I did my best, yes,” she said. “But like every physician, I have my limits. Some things just weren’t meant to be.” She decided not to tell him her concerns about Carrie. Not now, at least.

“I see.” He steepled the tips of his fingers together.

Mr. Underhill, you lost a child today. She didn’t say the words, but she wondered why he didn’t react more strongly. Perhaps his way of coping was to deny the baby had ever existed. After all, he’d only known about it for a day.

“What about the tonic your wife’s been taking?” Leah asked. “I really must know its contents.”

“Yeah, I’ll give you the bottle. It’s some patented medicine. Helps her relax. She’s always been…a nervous sort.”

“I’ll write off to the manufacturer and inquire about the contents.” Based on the substances she’d seen her father dispense, she was not optimistic. A lot of the patented remedies contained calomel purgatives and worse. She tried to smile encouragingly. “After the recovery, there’s no reason you and your wife can’t have more children.”

“There won’t be more children.” He slashed the air with his hand and lurched to his feet, the motion at once violent and desperate. “She almost died this time.”

Leah had heard the same words from other frightened husbands. The vow rarely lasted, though. Once the woman was up and about again, their husbands generally forgot the terror of the miscarriage. Still, she smiled gently and said, “Make no decisions now, Mr. Underhill. Everyone’s tired, and your wife has a long recovery ahead of her. You have plenty of time to think of the future.”

His eyes narrowed. “What’s that mean? A long recovery.”

“Weeks, at the very least. She’s lost a lot of blood, and she was underweight and anemic to begin with.”

“I can’t wait that long.”

Anger hardened inside Leah. “Then you’re taking a terrible risk with your wife’s health, sir,” she snapped. “Now, can you help bring her to her bed?”

“Doc.” His voice was flat, neutral. “Dr. Mundy.”

“Yes?”

“I wish you’d quit looking at me like that.”

“How am I looking at you, sir?”

“Like I was a snake under a rock.”

“If you see things from the perspective of a snake, that is your fault, not mine.”

He muttered beneath his breath, something she didn’t even want to hear, but he cooperated, helping her with Carrie.

“Will you stay, then?” Leah asked as they carefully tucked Carrie into bed. “No matter how long her recuperation takes?”

Jackson T. Underhill dragged his hand down his face in a gesture she was coming to recognize as his response to frustration. “Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, I’ll stay.”



Like a morning mist, a rare, dreamy wistfulness enveloped Leah as she made her way back from the Winfield place. She had driven herself in the buggy since the weather was fine and the vehicle unlikely to get mired. Ordinarily, Mr. Douglas from the boardinghouse did the driving. But he was getting on in years, and she tried not to drag him out of bed too early.

Her father had insisted on a driver, claiming it bolstered his image of importance. The thought of her father took Leah back in time. She was nine years old again, done up in ribbons and bows, seated stiffly in the parlor of their Philadelphia house while he drilled her on her sums. Even now, she could recall the scent of wood polish, could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. Could see the chilly glare of her father growing colder when she stumbled over a number.

“I’m sorry, Father,” she’d said, her voice meek. “I’ll study harder. I’ll do better next time.”

And she did do better the next time. She perfected everything he demanded of her, but it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. Edward Mundy had done a splendid job of convincing his daughter that no matter how hard she studied, no matter how hard she tried, she would never please him.

He’d wanted her to be a doctor, yes, because he had no son to carry on in the profession. But he’d also expected her to marry, and marry well. There had been an endless parade of suitors arranged by her father, but they never stayed. The men she met had no idea what to do with a woman like her. They wanted someone who laughed and danced and gossiped, not someone who studied anatomy and voiced opinions that raised eyebrows.

Lulled by the creaking rhythm of the buggy wheels, Leah thrust aside the dark memories. Her father was gone. The past was gone. It was up to her to keep it at bay.

She watched the roadway unfold between the horse’s brown ears and thought about the Winfields. The birth had been an easy one; the baby had emerged healthy and whole into her eager, waiting hands. She would never tire of the warm, slippery feel of newborn flesh. The look of wonder from the father, the triumphant tears of the mother. But most of all, she loved the first gasp of breath as the baby inhaled, the lusty cry that said, “Here I am, world, alive and hale,” followed by the glorious rush of crimson as the child took on the flush of life.

Each time you save a life, Sophie had told her, you yourself are reborn.

On spring mornings like this, a week after Mrs. Underhill’s miscarriage, Leah could believe it. She had been called from her bed at five to attend Mrs. Winfield. Just two hours later, the baby had made his appearance, and Mr. Winfield, overjoyed, had paid Leah—immediately and well, a rare surprise since most of her patients tended to procrastinate when it came to settling fees.

So with pride in delivering Coupeville’s newest citizen and carrying a gold double eagle in the pocket of her smock, Leah was in excellent spirits.

She practiced the most glorious profession of all, that of healing, saving lives, relieving suffering. She had been an exemplary student, studying harder than her male counterparts, performing better than her father’s expectations for her, and in the end knowing the triumph of succeeding against all odds.

Yet inevitably as always, a shadow crept in on her, dimming her elation. Because even as she stood holding a newborn, the time always came for her to surrender the child to its mother. To watch the father gather them both in his arms while a glow of radiance surrounded them.

Some might claim the notion pure fancy, but Leah had seen that glow again and again. She wondered if she was the only one who recognized the magic, who realized what love and family could do. They could transform a plain woman into a vision of loveliness, could light the dark corners of the meanest lean-to hovel.

Perhaps it was her fate to be an observer, but dear God, there were times when she yearned to experience that joy for herself. Love and family. At quiet moments like this, with the clopping of hooves punctuating the silence, she could feel the fear growing inside her. It was like a fistula, a cancer. It was the horror that she would never know that kind of love. That she would grow old alone and lonely.

She released a pent-up sigh and turned the buggy down Main Street, clucking to the horse. The mare picked up her pace, but with a reluctant blowing of her lips.

Lined with shops and churches, the gravel road cleaved the hilly town in two and descended to the waterfront. Across the Sound, the rising sun burst with a dazzle over the jagged white teeth of the distant Cascade mountain range.

Some activity at the harbor caught her eye, mercifully distracting her from her thoughts. Peering through the light layers of mist, she saw Davy Morgan, the harbormaster’s apprentice, come out of the small, low office at the head of Ebey’s Landing. The youth stretched as he yawned to greet the day. The first rays of sunshine shot through his vivid red hair.

Davy shaded his eyes in the direction of the dock where Jackson Underhill’s schooner bobbed at its moorage. The disabled rudder hung askew like a broken arm.

An unpleasant wave of guilt swept through Leah. The steerage was damaged because of her, and apparently repairing it was quite a task. Though it was none of her business, she knew Mr. Underhill had been sleeping on the boat rather than at the boardinghouse with Carrie. Perhaps he’d taken his vow to avoid having more children very seriously.

Seized by a perverse curiosity, she went to check out the boat, pulling up the buggy at the end of the dock.

“Morning, Miss Mundy.” Davy Morgan bobbed his bright red head in greeting.

She nodded back. Like most people, Davy neglected to address her by the title “Doctor,” but in his case, there was no malice intended. Yet when his employer, Bob Rapsilver, stepped out of the office, Leah’s defenses shot up like a shield.

The harbormaster made no secret of his dislike for her, ever since she’d advised him that the liver ailment he was always complaining about would abate once he gave up his daily pint of whiskey. Instead of giving up drink, however, he’d turned on her, openly questioning her morals, her intentions and her skill to anyone who would listen.

“Mr. Rapsilver,” she said with cool politeness.

“Miss Mundy.” He lifted a battered sailor’s cap. “You’re out and about bright and early today.”

“The Winfields had a fine, healthy son this morning.”

“Ah. Midwifing is a proper business.” He checked his pocket watch with a bored air. “Good to hear you weren’t out trying to do a man’s job.”

“I never try to do a man’s job,” she countered. “I do better.”

Davy snickered. Rapsilver pointed with a meaty hand. “Boy, weren’t you supposed to be testing the steam engine on Armstrong’s La Tache?”

“Already done, sir,” Davy said. “And it’s not safe. Almost burned my hand off trying to shut it down.”

“Are you all right?” Leah asked, concerned.

Davy nodded. “Yes, thank you, ma’am. But Mr. Armstrong’s not going to be too happy about his engine.”

“Be careful, then.” She jumped down, buggy springs squawking, and wound the reins around a cleat on the dock. She frowned at the rusty noise of the decrepit buggy. Another task to see to. Another problem to solve. Some days she felt like Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again before reaching the summit.

Not today, she thought determinedly. She had brought a new life into the world and there were no other calls to make. She wouldn’t let worries drag her spirits down.

Lifting the hem of her skirts away from the damp planks, she walked to the end of the dock and peered at the schooner. It looked to be perhaps sixty feet in length. Its once-sleek hull had dulled, the paint peeling. Jackson had told her the boat was called the Teatime. Some long-ago optimist had painted the name on a fancy scrollwork escutcheon affixed to the stern. Now all that remained were the letters eat me.

Leah walked down the length of the boat. Even in its state of disrepair, the schooner had the classic stately lines of a swift blue-water vessel. Seeing it all broken and peeling made her a little sad, reminding her of a favored patient succumbing to the rigors of old age.

She wondered who had commissioned the ship. Had it called at exotic ports in distant lands? And how had it wound up in the possession of Jackson T. Underhill? What sort of man was he anyway? Where were he and his strange, beautiful wife going in such a hurry? North to Canada, she guessed, maybe to lose themselves in the wilderness.

The fact was, they were already lost. She could see that clearly. She wondered if they knew.

She hesitated on the dock. She did need to speak with Mr. Underhill. Her patient was agitated. She knew no easy way to tell him what Carrie said during her lucid moments. Perhaps she could ease into it.

There was a danger, too, of being alone with him. He was, after all, a man who had tried to abduct her. The harbormaster would be of little help if Jackson attacked her. But why would he? He needed her. From the first moment, even holding a gun to her head, he’d needed her.

Steadying herself by grasping a ratline, she stepped onto the boat. A gentle listing motion welcomed her. Moving across the cockpit, she went up a small ladder to the midships. The deck glittered with glass prisms set into the planks to provide daylight for the rooms below. In the middle of the deck was a skylight hatch angled open to the morning.

Bending, she leaned down to see inside.

“G’damned chafer,” said a furious male voice. “Chicken-bred bastard from hell—”

She clapped her hands over her ears. “Mr. Underhill!”

The hatch swung open and his head popped up. His face was flushed a dark red, brow and temples damp with sweat. “Hey, Doc.”

She cleared her throat. “I’m sure whoever you’re speaking to below would prefer that you keep a civil tongue in your head.”

To her surprise, he gave her a crooked grin. “I’m alone, Doc. Just having a little argument with this repair.”

To her further surprise, she felt her mouth quirk in amusement. “And is it working?”

“What?”

“Cursing. Is it helping to fix the boat?”

“No, but I feel better.”

She eyed a part of the rudder lying across the main deck. Ropes and pulleys lay scattered about. She had never done a destructive thing in her life until she’d sabotaged his boat, and despite the circumstances, she felt guilty.

“I’ll help you.” Without further ado, she clambered down the hatch. The heel of her boot caught the bottom rung of the ladder, and she lurched forward.

“Careful there.” Strong hands gripped her waist, thumbs catching just below her breasts.

He held her only a second, but it seemed like forever. Leah stopped breathing. It had been so long since anyone had touched her. His handling was impersonal, yet she couldn’t help acknowledging that no one had ever held her this way before.

She saw his eyes widen.

“No corset, Doc?” he observed. His frankness embarrassed her.

“Binding is terrible for one’s health.”

He lifted his hands, palm out, in a conciliatory gesture. “You won’t hear me objecting to a ban on ladies’ corsets.”

Self-consciously, she straightened her shirtwaist.

“Watch your step.” He indicated a tub of pitch and masses of coiled rope on the floor. He moved back and regarded her. His attention had an odd effect on her composure. Her face grew warm, her pulse quickened, and she felt completely foolish.

“So,” he said, his grin slightly off center. “You’ve come to help.”

“You look as if you could use it.”

“You’re not too busy?”

“I’ve already made one call today. If no emergency comes up, I’m free for the time being.”

“Well, thanks. That’s real nice of you, Doc.”

She shrugged. “I thought it was the least I could do, since…” She let her voice trail off.

“Since you’re the one who broke the steering,” he finished for her.

“You’re the one who tried to kidnap me,” she shot back.

He nodded. “You’re not one to own up to things, are you?” He handed her a wood spanner.

She snatched the tool from him. “And you’re not one to apologize for your actions.”

“Here, hold this steady. Yeah. Just like that.” He put a peg into a freshly drilled hole and tamped it tight with a mallet. “Some landlubber used iron bolts on this mast stepping and they rusted. I have to replace them with wood fastenings or the aft mast could come down.” He repeated the procedure several more times, but each time he tamped down a peg, the opposite one came up. He cursed fluently and unsparingly through gritted teeth.

She watched him for a while, holding the pegs and holding her tongue until she could stand it no more.

“May I make a suggestion?”

The mallet came down squarely on his thumb. He shut his eyes, jaw bulging as he clenched it. “Shoot.”

“Why don’t you cut the pegs a longer length, then after they’re all in, trim the wood flush with the deck?”

He stared at her for a long moment. She thought he was going to argue with her or ridicule her. That was what men always did when a woman dared to comment on their work. Instead, he said, “Good idea. We’ll do it your way.”

She still had to hold the pegs for him, and he had to lie on his side to reach all the fittings, but his mood lightened as the work progressed. He had a long frame, lean and sinewed, and appeared to be remarkably healthy. The human body was her calling, her obsession, and it pleased her to watch him.

More than it should have.

“So,” he said at length, and she started guiltily, certain he knew she’d been studying him. “How is it you came to be a female doctor?”

She let out a relieved breath. “How I came to be a female is by accident of birth.”

He laughed. “I guess I deserved that.”

“How I came to be a doctor is by reading, hard work, a rigorous apprenticeship, and ward study in a hospital.” And how did you become an outlaw? she wanted to ask—but she didn’t dare.

His eyes narrowed as he sealed one of the pegs with glue. “You sure talk a lot and say nothing.”

His observation startled her. “I suppose you’re right.”

“So what’s the real story?” He stood and brushed off his leather carpenter’s apron. She liked it better than the gun belt.

“Why do you want to know?” Why on earth would it matter to you? she wondered.

“Just curious, I guess. Is it some big secret?”

“No. I’m just not used to being asked.”

He swept a mocking bow, the tools in his apron clanking with the movement. “So I’m asking.”

She caught herself smiling at him.

“You ought to do that more often,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Smile. Makes you look downright pretty.”

“Looking pretty is not important to me.”

“That’s a new one on me. You didn’t have the usual kind of mama, I guess.”

“Actually, I was raised by my father. Since he had no son, I suppose you could say he pinned his aspirations on me.” She paused, gazing out a portal as she collected her thoughts. In the faraway past, she heard a voice calling, “Dr. Mundy, can you come?”

Leah, no more than ten at the time, went along with her father, holding the lamp in the buggy and then squashing herself into a corner of the sickroom at the patient’s house.

She could not bring herself to admit to this stranger, this friendly man with secrets of his own in his blue-gray eyes, that her father had been the worst sort of doctor, a quack, a purveyor of questionable potions that often did more harm than good.

“I learned much from being in practice with him,” she said. It was not quite a lie. She’d learned there was nothing more precious than human life. That people needed to look to a physician for hope. That a good doctor could do much to ease suffering while a bad one got rich from it. Her father had given her one gift. He had made her determined to succeed where he had failed.

She made herself remember the pain and the horror and the fact that even as he was dying, Edward Mundy had withheld his love. She swallowed hard. “He died of complications from an old gunshot wound.”

He gazed at her thoughtfully. “I take it that’s why you’re not real fond of guns.”

“A gun is the tool of a coward,” she snapped. “A tool of destruction. I’ve seen too often what a bullet can do.”

“Touché, Doc, as the Three Musketeers would say.” He changed tools, selecting an awl. “So you became a doctor just like your papa.”

“Not like my father.” She flushed and looked away. “We disagreed often about courses of treatment.” For no reason she could fathom, she added, “We disagreed about everything, it seemed.”

“Such as?”

The proper way for Leah to dress. And talk. And behave.

The way to snare a wealthy husband.

Where they would flee to each time one of his patients expired due to his incompetence.

“Well?” Jackson prompted.

She already regretted the turn the conversation had taken. Yet it was surprisingly easy to talk to him. Probably because she knew that he was only here for a short time; then she’d never see him again. He couldn’t use the things she told him to hurt her.

“He never quite understood my insistence on practicing medicine for the good of humankind rather than to make money. He thought I should spend my leisure time pursuing drawing-room etiquette. He was disappointed when I failed to marry well.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean—marry well?”

“My father thought it meant marrying a man who’d settle his bad debts for him.”

“And you? What do you think it means?”

“Finding a man who will l—” she didn’t dare say it “—esteem me.”

“So why haven’t you done it yet?”

“Because such a man doesn’t exist.” The old ache of loneliness throbbed inside her. “I’ve yet to meet a man who would give me the freedom to practice medicine. Men seem to want their wives to stay at home, keeping the hearth fire stoked and darning socks instead of healing the sick.”

“It all sounds like a damned bore to me.”

“Healing the sick?”

“No. Stoking the hearth and darning socks.”

She laughed. “Did your mother never teach you a woman’s place is in the home?”

All trace of pleasantry left his face. “My mother never taught me a goddamned thing.”

His tone of voice warned her not to probe an old wound. We both have our scars, she thought. We work so very hard to hide them.

“So who taught you about the Three Musketeers?”

“Taught myself.” His voice had gone flat, uninviting. Then he brightened, reaching up to lean the heel of his hand on a cross beam. Light from the deck prisms fell across him, striking glints of gold in his hair. “Now that I’ve got the Teatime, I can go anywhere.”

“Where do you plan to go?”

“Wherever the wind takes me.”

“It sounds rather…capricious. Do you never think of staying somewhere, settling down?”

He got back to work, swirling his brush in a bucket of glue. “I never think of much at all.”

Letting the wood glue set around a loose bolt, Leah fell silent for a time, thinking. She wanted to ask him so many things: what he had left behind in his past, why he never spoke of the baby Carrie had lost, what he expected of the future. But she held her tongue. At an early age, she had learned caution. Watch what you say to another person. Watch what you learn about him. Watch what you feel for him.

Once in her life, she had given her whole heart and soul to a man, and he had crushed her flat. That man had been her father. He was a charlatan, but he was all she knew, all she had, and she’d given him enormous influence over her choices. Now she had nothing but broken, bitter memories.

Wishing she could forget the past, she worked in silence alongside Jackson Underhill, studying him furtively. In her profession she had seen men from all angles, yet she regarded Jackson as uniquely—and discomfitingly—interesting.

Despite a demeanor she found more charming than she should, he seemed to be a man who expected—and usually got—the worst life had to offer. Yet he still clung to hope in a way that was alien and intriguing to Leah.

“I’m curious, Mr. Underhill,” she said, unable to stop her incautious questions in spite of herself. “How is it that you came to be in possession of this boat?”

“What makes you think I didn’t commission her?”

“Somehow I can’t picture you christening a boat Teatime.”

“It said ‘eat me’ last time I looked.”

“Then at least fix the lettering on the stern,” she advised. “If you didn’t name her, who did?”

He thought for a moment, no doubt weighing what it was safe to tell her. “Some English guy I met in Seattle. I won her in a card game. Her owner was down on his luck, but I’m told in her day, she sailed the Far East, plying the waters around the island groves, looking for rare teas. I mean to go there someday,” he said, almost to himself.

“Go where?”

“I’m not sure. Someplace far. Exotic. Maybe I’ll just follow the sunset until I find what I’m looking for.”

The gruffness in his voice caught at her. “And what’s that, Mr. Underhill?”

“Paradise. Like that picture in your office.” His ears reddened after he spoke. “I guess. Just something I’ve always wanted to do.” He shrugged dismissively. “Pass me that mallet, will you?”

She handed it to him, frowning a little.

“What’s the matter, Doc?”

“I find you quite hard to understand,” she admitted. “My profession is the motivating factor of my life. It’s what gives me direction and purpose. Yet you have no plan for your life beyond sailing to the next port. You’re like this ship, Mr. Underhill. You’ve got no fixed rudder. No fixed course. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“I’m a dreamer. You’re a planner. Who the hell are you to say your way’s better?”

She felt a flush rise in her cheeks. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I apologize.”

“You don’t need to.” He picked up a sanding block and got to work.

“How long will these repairs take?” she asked, eager to leave the topic of planning and dreaming.

He blew out his breath. “Weeks, according to Davy Morgan who claims to know such things. He was amazed I was able to get here from Seattle. He gave me a list of repairs a mile long. I can do the work myself, but I’ll have to go back to the city to earn enough money to pay for supplies.”

“How will you earn the money?”

He winked. “I’m a gambling man.”

“Is that why you’re on the run?” she asked.

“Who said I was on the run?”

“You didn’t have to.” She pressed her mouth into a wry smile. “I guessed it as soon as you tried to abduct me. You confirmed it when you warned me not to alert the sheriff.”

He squinted menacingly at her. “And did you?”

She forced herself to hold his gaze. “No. But if you give me a reason to, I shall.”

“I’m not looking for trouble.”

“I know.” And she did. She’d briefly considered a visit to Sheriff Lemuel St. Croix, but she hadn’t actually done it. St. Croix was a tough, humorless man who seemed out of place in Coupeville. A bachelor of middle years, he had a taste for fine things; even on his modest lawman’s salary he’d managed to acquire a Panhard horseless gasoline carriage. Keeping law and order in the town did not seem to concern him overly much. This was not a problem since crimes in the area tended to be petty and few.

Lost in thought, she watched Jackson work. When he spoke of the sea, a dreamer took the place of the gunfighter. There was something compelling in his intent manner. Passion burned brightly in his gaze; she was caught by it. She couldn’t remember the last time such a powerful desire had burned inside her. The rigors of everyday life had dulled her heart to dreaming, it seemed.

When had it happened? she wondered. When had all her dreams died? And why hadn’t she felt the loss until now, until she looked into the eyes of a stranger and saw the lure of possibility?

She shouldn’t probe into the life of this drifter. He was clearly on the wrong side of the law, clearly had much to hide in his past. The less she knew about him, the better. It was time to tell him what she’d come to say in the first place. “Your wife seemed troubled when I checked on her yesterday evening.”

“She lost a baby. I guess that might trouble a woman some.”

And you? she wanted to ask. Does it trouble you?

“Of course,” she said carefully. “But I fear it is more than that. She said—” Leah broke off. Were they a husband and wife who shared everything, or did they keep secrets from one another? “She seems agitated.”

“Yeah, well, she gets that way.”

“She’s been having some rather terrible attacks of panic, almost like waking nightmares. She speaks of blood and fire—a stain on the floor, a burning house. And she seems to have a horror of being closed in. Mr. Underhill, your wife suffers from a fear that someone or something is after her. Someone is hunting her down.”

She wanted him to laugh it off, to joke it away as he did so many things.

Instead, his eyes took on the metallic sheen they’d had the first time she’d beheld him. The dull gleam of gunmetal. Danger emanated from him, causing her to take a step back toward the skylight hatch.

“It’s all just her talk,” Jackson said. “And none of your goddamned business.”

“Anything that affects the condition of my patient is my business,” she retorted.

He squeezed his jaw, clearly fighting his own temper. She wondered what made him so angry, what he was hiding. She wished it could be as he said—none of her business. Unfortunately, it was.

“Carrie’s had a rough life,” he said grudgingly. “We were raised in an orphanage, and if she seems scared sometimes, it’s because her whole life’s been scary.”

She felt an unexpected thickness in her throat. Life had clearly been brutal to Carrie. “I see. I’m sure the orphanage was awful for you both.”

“Awful,” he echoed, putting a wry twist on the word. “I guess you could say that. All right, Doc. You ready to help with the mast?”

Surprised, she followed him up on deck. He’d put his outburst behind him. It was, she realized, the boat that seemed to save him. He forgot everything else when he worked on it.

“Here.” He tossed her a line. “Grab onto that. If I did this right, the top section should drop into place.” He struggled for several moments with his end, breaking out in a sweat and cursing. He paused to peel off his plaid shirt and fling it aside. Leah stared, caught herself doing so, then forced her attention to the task at hand.

As the tall fir topmast responded to the ropes and pulleys, she caught her breath. Jackson experimented with hoisting the sails, and with an unexpected thrill, she took heady satisfaction in the majestic loft of the canvas. She felt a curious tightening inside her, a sort of breath-held anticipation. Then, when the sail unfurled against the sky, the sensation uncoiled with a sudden warmth that made her part her lips to utter an involuntary sound of pleasure. How had she missed the excitement of seafaring when she lived right at the edge of it?

Shading her eyes, she admitted the answer. She missed everything important because she was an outsider. It took a stranger on the run to show her the wonders right under her nose.

She lowered her hand to find him eyeing her curiously. The sun glinted off the sheen of sweat on his shoulders.

“Is something wrong, Mr. Underhill?”

“You liked that, didn’t you?”

“Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I did find it…diverting.”

“I mean you really liked that.”

“Indeed. But how can you tell?”

He briefly touched the back of his hand to her cheek. “You look like a woman who just made love.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” She turned her back on him. She shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be doing this, feeling this.

Yet her fascination with him grew each moment, became harder to cope with each day. Jackson T. Underhill was at once mysterious and seductive, shadowed by the weary indifference of a rootless drifter. She should keep a cool distance from him. Should keep her mind on his wife. Instead, she caught herself thinking forbidden thoughts, remembering dreams she had abandoned years ago, then despising herself for doing so.



“You say you did business with this Jack Tower?” Joel Santana spread the Wanted poster on the shop counter. With quick, furtive movements, the chemist swept the poster out of sight, glancing around to be sure the other customers hadn’t seen it.

Ratlike, his nose twitched. “I never said that, Marshal.”

Joel rested his elbow on the counter as a great wave of weariness overcame him. He’d tracked Tower across Texas and into New Mexico where the Santa Fe wind blasted a man’s face with red dust during the day and chilled him to the marrow at night. “Look, mister, if I say you said it, than you damned sure did say it.”

“But—”

“I don’t like your kind.” He glanced over his shoulder at the Indian sleeping on the boardwalk outside. “I don’t like the stuff you sell.”

The rat nose narrowed haughtily. “I assure you, my medicines are all of the highest—”

“Horseshit. I’m not real fond of selling folks stuff that makes them stupid, keeps them coming back for more.” Squinting, Santana scanned the shelves behind the counter. Peyote, powdered psilocybe, laudanum, morphine crystals and Lord knew what else. Jail cells without bars, as far as Santana was concerned. They robbed a person of freedom, dignity and eventually life.

Reaching past the chemist’s shoulder, he knocked over a stoppered bottle. The glass shattered, and a pungent herbal smell tainted the air. “Oops,” he said. “I’m just a bull in a lady’s parlor.”

“Hey, what the—”

“Just trying to read this here label.” Joel’s hand shoved another bottle off the shelf. “Damn! I don’t know what’s got me so clumsy all of a sudden.”

A matron who had been perusing an array of sleeping powders scuttled out the door.

“Now, how about this one?” Joel stretched his arm toward the shelf.

The chemist stepped back, spreading his arms, trying to protect his wares. “All right,” he snapped. “I sold him something!”

Santana lowered his arm. His shoulder burned, the bursitis kicking in. Too damned many cold nights under the stars, he thought. The quicker he found Jack Tower, the sooner he could retire. A place where the weather was mild, the scenery pretty. Find a woman who’d put up with an old saddle bum’s foibles…. Before his mind wandered too far, he stuck his thumb into his gun belt and regarded the chemist, waiting.

“He got me up in the middle of the night,” the man said. “Woke me right out of a sound sleep.”

Joel clucked in mock sympathy. “So what’d he want?”

“I couldn’t even hear him at first. The woman he was with—his wife or whatever—was screaming hysterically.”

Joel’s blood chilled. Even though he already knew the answer, he took out the photograph the sheriff of Rising Star had given him. “This woman?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s her.”

“And what’d you sell them?”

“A tin of tobacco, Underhill Fancy Shred, I think…and a whole case of this.” The chemist brought down a box of patented medicine called A Pennysworth of Peace. The label made outlandish claims of its restorative powers. The user could count on everything from a good night’s sleep and regular bowel movements to perfect spiritual contentment. Joel cracked open the blue bottle and sniffed. A mixture of low-grade corn whiskey, molasses and opium, he judged.

The chill in his blood moved into his heart. Jack Tower didn’t know about Caroline Willis. Didn’t know what she’d done in the past, what she was capable of.

But Joel Santana knew.

He had first heard of Caroline a few years earlier in the aftermath of a fatal fire in New Orleans. One of the more notorious French Quarter cribs had burned to the ground. The victim had been a local preacher who, it turned out, had a taste for dangerous games. At the time of the fire, he’d been dressed in leather chaps and nothing else. He’d been spread-eagled and bound to the bed with leg irons. And there, on a sweltering July night, he’d come to understand the true meaning of burning in hell.

The preacher had been Caroline’s client.

“Where’d they go after they left your shop?” Joel asked the chemist.

“Took the train straight out of town, swear to God. That’s all I can tell you,” the chemist said, clearly ready for the interview to be over. “Honest to Pete, that’s all.”

Joel lifted his hand to the brim of his hat. The chemist cringed, probably anticipating more breakage. “Mister, you’re a pretty nervous fellow,” Santana said. Spurs clinking, he walked to the door and cast an eye at the rows of potions. “You ought to take something for it.”



Troubled and restless, Jackson sat on the front porch of the big house and stared up at the night sky. He’d been studying the stars because a good skipper used them to navigate by. He took out a tin of tobacco, rolled a smoke, and lit up, watching the lazy strands of gray mist weave in and out of the moonlight. He’d tried to interest Carrie in astronomy, showing her the drawings in the tattered book he’d found on board, but Carrie wasn’t interested in much lately.

A small, forbidden whisper passed through his mind. Leah Mundy would be interested.

He shouldn’t be thinking about her, not in that way, yet he felt his gaze stray to the wing of the house where her surgery was.

A light burned in the window.

He gripped the arms of the rocking chair, willing himself to stay put. But part of him wanted to go, wanted to see her, to find out why she was sleepless, too. He moved quietly across the lawn, craning his neck to see into the lighted window. What the devil was she doing up so late?



Leah held a slim glass tube up to the gaslight. Crystals formed high on the tube; lower down she discerned a layer of inert substances. Her titration had worked this time even though it was a tricky business. She was lucky she’d gotten some results at last, for the bottle of Carrie’s tonic was almost empty.

Using a sterile rod, she extracted some of the crystalline substance. Now she knew for certain, but the knowledge didn’t ease her mind. She had to figure out a way to tell Jackson what she’d discovered.




Four


“Mr. Underhill, if you hold that cup any tighter, you’ll break it,” Leah Mundy said.

Jackson glanced down at his hand, saw that the knuckles had gone white. He stood in the doorway of the parlor, watching Carrie, and he hadn’t heard Leah approach him. He forced his grip to relax and turned his attention back to the parlor.

Two weeks after Carrie’s illness—he’d trained himself not to think of it as a miscarriage—she appeared to be recovered. Surely she was feeling much better, for she had taken to holding court each afternoon in the parlor of the boardinghouse.

Holding court was about the only way he could describe it. She liked to put on her prettiest dresses—she had a lot of them and wanted a lot more—and sit by the window on an old-fashioned fringed chaise and talk with the people who lived at the boardinghouse.

Jackson didn’t know the folks too well, but they all took a shine to Carrie. People generally did. She was as pretty as the springtime, and when she was in a talkative state, people found her entertaining. Her rapt audience consisted of Aunt Leafy, who was no one’s aunt, but an avid student of everyone’s private affairs; Battle Douglas, a shrinking man terrified of his own shadow; Zeke Pomfrit, the aging vigilante and miner who made Jackson nervous; and Adam Armstrong, a timber baron who was said to be fabulously wealthy. He was a guest while his steam-powered yacht, La Tache, was being refitted at the harbor.

Unlike Jackson, Armstrong didn’t trouble himself to do the work, but had hired a local shipwright to tinker with the engine and the wood-and-steel hull. Meanwhile, Adam spent his days wrestling with the unreliable telegraph at the post office, playing cards with the other boarders, or flirting with the girls at Nellie Morse’s dress shop in town.

Jackson knew the type—fat on family money and not real interested in breaking a sweat over anything. He had the polished smoothness that seemed to be bred in the bones of men born to wealth and privilege. It was as if his family money and power had been applied to him like the clear oil varnish applied to a ship’s woodwork. Armstrong’s hair, lacquered by bay rum, tumbled down over his forehead in an apparently casual way, but he’d probably spent an hour getting it that way.

Jackson shifted his gaze away from Adam Armstrong. The man didn’t interest him. There was nothing wrong with the fellow—except his unrelenting charm.

At the center of them all, wearing an organdy gown she’d begged Jackson to buy in San Francisco, Carrie sat like a queen amid her subjects. Her eyes shone, her cheeks were flushed, and her voice had a piping, animated quality as she chattered of everything and of nothing at all.

“…I had the most beautiful gown—it was tea rose moiré silk. And there was a woman who brought her little dog right into Antoine’s.”

“Imagine that,” Armstrong murmured politely with a smile Jackson wanted to pound off his face.

“I believe it was in New Orleans that I first heard ‘The Streets of Cairo,”’ Carrie went on. “Yes, as a matter of fact, it was New Orleans, at the Wildcat Club. The Cairo dance was so scandalous, but it couldn’t have been too evil, because my partner that night was a preacher. They had the most marvelous oysters there….”





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