The Confidential Life of Eugenia Cooper Part 28

"You look lovely." Charlotte settled on the seat beside Gennie at the vanity.

"Thank you. Would you like your hair done up like mine?"

"Yes, please," the girl said. Half an hour later, Charlotte Beck looked ready to go to the ball as well.

"Your ball gown for the night is a nightgown," Gennie told her, "and you'll only be dreaming of dances with handsome princes. Someday, however, you will be the belle of the ball."

"Promise?"

"I do."

When Gennie swept down the stairs, she found Daniel gawking. "So Tova's repairs meet your approval?"

It seemed he could only nod as he handed her into their carriage, and they headed out into the night.

As yet another attempt to fuse the futures of Anna Finch and Daniel Beck failed, she wondered whether it was at all possible. Every time Anna drew near, he seemed to suddenly feel the urge to dance with Gennie.

How could he resist escorting Gennie around the dance floor when she was easily the loveliest woman in the room? Along with her beauty, she had tamed his daughter and gone far toward preparing her to meet the earl.

If only he were as prepared.

But that was a thought for another day. Tonight he held Gennie Cooper in his arms, and all of Denver society was reduced to merely watching.

He had not kissed her since their near-picnic, and keeping that record was an ongoing exercise in restraint. While he could not say he loved her, Daniel was painfully aware of just how very much he was smitten.

As he handed her into the buggy for the trip home, he made the mistake of looking into her eyes. For a moment, he recalled the day they met in Fisher's Dry Goods Store. "You never did wear that buckskin jacket," he said as he took his place beside her.

She gave him a sideways look, then giggled. "I don't suppose the mayor and his wife would have understood if I'd worn it tonight."

"Perhaps not," Daniel said, "but I would have."

"Oh?"

He leaned in, powerless to stop what he'd ignored for far too long. "Gennie, I promised you a Wild West adventure, and I fear I've let you down."

Her laughter held more than a little nervousness. "Didn't Miss Finch look lovely tonight?"

"She always does," he said. "But then, her father sees to that." He paused to gather his wits only to realize he'd lost them altogether. "Gennie, I don't want to talk about Anna Finch tonight."

"But she's ever so clever, and-"

He placed a finger over her lips. "Shh," he said. "Don't talk."

There was nothing left to do but kiss her.

"I'll be leaving soon," she said a moment later.

Daniel sat back and shook his head. "I've kissed my share of women, but this is the first time one of them said that afterward."

Gennie looked away. "Two weeks and a day. That's when my train leaves for New York."

"I see."

Her fingers captured his. "I'll never forget you, Daniel."

"No," he said, "it is I who will not forget you."

"I need to tell you who I am."

Daniel gestured for her to wait. They were only minutes from home.

Home. The big house had come to feel that way since Gennie Cooper arrived, and not just because she'd done what he'd been unable to: get rid of that awful jeweled bird Tova loved so much.

"Leave us, Isak," he said when the buggy halted in the drive. When the boy had gone into the carriage house, Daniel turned to Gennie. "All right. Go ahead."

She leaned back against the cus.h.i.+ons and looked up into the night sky. "It's a long story."

"And one you do not have to tell." He sat back too and stared up at G.o.d's creation overhead. "I'm content with today. We don't need anything else, do we?"

"I suppose not." The evening breeze carried her soft comment along with the fresh scent of impending rain.

He looked over at her. "That's not exactly a ringing endors.e.m.e.nt."

Gennie s.h.i.+fted to look at him. "I've been thinking, Daniel. Denver, Leadville, it's all been something special. Charlotte has come to be like my own, and I'm not sure how that happened. It seems like just yesterday she was robbing me at the train station."

Daniel sat bolt upright. "She robbed you at the train station? Why am I just now hearing of this?"

She waved away the question. "She was a motherless girl seeking attention."

He took immediate exception to the statement. "What does that mean? She had me. Are you saying I was somehow deficient as a parent?" He remembered her letter. "Indeed, that is exactly what you told me, isn't it?"

"Daniel." Her fingers found his shoulder and then, by degrees, his jaw line. "A father is a precious part of a little girl's world, and I was wrong to insinuate you had failed in that area. But a girl needs a woman's influence." She sat back and let her hand fall into her lap. "Now Miss Finch, she would be-"

"Enough. Why do you insist on trying to throw me together with Anna Finch?" He swiveled to face her. "Can't you see it's you I've wanted since the first time I saw you at the dry goods store?"

His admission stunned them both. Daniel sat back and found Orion again, looking into the celestial heavens rather than at the heavenly creature beside him. He'd just bared his heart to a woman who not only had a train ticket to New York in two weeks, but also was practically betrothed to another.

What sort of idiot had he become since he'd fallen for the woman in boots and buckskins?

"Kiss me again, Daniel, so I'll have this memory to take back to New York."

He tore his attention from the sky. Kiss her? He could do that all night and die a happy man.

Throwing care to the summer breeze, Daniel pulled her onto his lap, then leaned away so he could look at her. She was stunning. No more beautiful woman took a breath. Thick lashes swept high cheekbones that, in the moonlight, seemed dusted with silver. Even his Georgiana paled in comparison, though to be fair, hers was a much-faded memory.

And Charlotte loved them both.

Had he every ounce of the silver that could be hauled up from beneath the Leadville mountains, he'd not come close to the value of this woman. Or of his daughter and his good friends.

The revelation stunned him, and his hands began to shake.

"Daniel? Is something wrong?"

When he did not answer, she started to sit up.

"No," he said through the lump in his throat. "Please stay there. The moonlight. You."

She reached for him, placing both hands behind his neck and pulling him to her. "There are memories to be made, Daniel," she said. "I'm not ready to leave you tonight."

Nor was he ready to leave her. If ever he wished that marriage license had been real, the vows they made true, now was the time. He could have happily lived out the Song of Solomon right here under G.o.d's stars.

But she'd told Tova and Elias that someone else held her heart. Another man would soon claim her.

All of her.

Daniel shuddered and nearly dropped her. Carefully, as if handling a precious and fragile thing, he settled her on the buggy cus.h.i.+on. Again those impossibly long lashes swept cheekbones sculpted by G.o.d.

He touched them, then cupped her cheeks, traced her jaw, found a tender spot on the back of her neck. "I could love you, Eugenia Flora Cooper."

Gennie's eyes flew open. "How do you know my full name?"

"I know more than you think," he said, "and I could still love you."

Her surprise gave way to impudence. "Well, I don't know a thing about you, Daniel Beck, except perhaps that you're a very secretive man."

"I am? I hadn't realized." He paused to draw in a deep breath of her rose-scented skin. "I am entranced, Gennie," he said softly. "Ask me anything."

She touched the tip of his nose. "Anything?"

"Anything."

"How did you come to live in Denver?" she asked. "Were you longing for a Wild West adventure too?"

He chuckled. "Hardly. Though I certainly found it. To tell this story, I must go to its beginning in England. The family lands in the shadow of Scafell Pike, to be exact." He paused to rest on his elbow. "We'd profited from the deposits beneath the mountains for generations, but until I took the company and made it something, we'd barely gotten by. Two years, Gennie, and I had the Beck name where it should have been two generations ago."

She said nothing, though he knew she listened intently.

"The Beck inheritance had finally come to mean something, though I cared less for it than I did the challenge of besting the land and bringing out what was hidden beneath it." He closed his eyes and saw it all. "I had everything, all before I turned five and twenty."

"It sounds wonderful," she said.

"Oh, it was. She was."

"Charlotte's mother?"

Daniel opened his eyes. "Yes."

To her credit, she said nothing, even though she surely wanted to know more. For a time, they remained in silence, with only the whisper of the wind through the aspens and junipers for company.

"Elias will tell you I saved his life," Daniel said, "and I warrant I've plucked the old coot from more than one sc.r.a.pe over the years. But it is he whom I credit for the life I now live."

Gennie smiled, and he longed to fit his lips to hers. But he'd embarked on this road, and stopping was not an option he'd take, lest he not return to it.

"I lost it all." He shook his head. "No, that's not right. I gave it all away. Willingly. Only Georgiana had value to me. The mines were not yet mine, nor yet my brother's, so my father was within his rights to deliver the ultimatum. What he did not expect was that I would choose Georgiana over him and his company. He thought her beneath me." Daniel sat back, unable to believe he'd said these things. And yet there was so much more to tell. He skipped ahead, unwilling to stop, yet unable to give a full accounting of things he'd not contemplated in a decade.

"Elias was a man without a country. His Confederacy had fallen and his s.h.i.+p, the Bernadette Bernadette, which had sought refuge in British waters, was taken. I too had lost everything. He found a vessel, signed us on as crew, and we sailed from England, never to return."

"What happened next?"

Daniel shrugged. "A man with soldiering skills can always get by. The South was defeated, but not without need of men who could use their weapons. The West too."

"What happened to Georgiana? Did she come with you?"

"Georgiana." Funny how he remembered her as he last saw her on the doorstep of his father's home and not as she was when she returned to him five years later. "No," he said slowly, "she chose another."

"But Charlotte, your marriage."

He nodded, caught in the web of a memory he longed to forget. "I did marry her, though it proved my downfall. My father thought her common, and he was right, though only by birth and certainly not by character." Or so he thought.

"I won't ask anything further," she whispered. "Some things are private between a husband and wife."

Daniel smiled despite himself. "There are a substantial number of persons in Leadville who would argue that we are husband and wife."

"Ah," she said, "but what does G.o.d say? Is it not He who decides these things?"

Daniel remembered a mountain stream. A woman whose swollen belly would bear his brother's child. A wedding that cost him everything except his pride. That, he had already given away.

There was so much more to the story. A brother's betrayal. Two signatures on a doc.u.ment giving an innocent child both halves of an inheritance that would mean full control of the mines Daniel had returned to their glory. And a heart scarred by time and a woman, but healed by a Savior.

"Daniel?"

He looked down to see Gennie staring at him, felt her insistent tug on his neck. He knew she wanted a kiss, as did he. What he didn't know-couldn't be sure of-is whether this time the kiss would become more.

He gave in to the urge to kiss her but held at bay his want of more with her. "I fear we've come to the end of us, Gennie," he said. " To claim you as mine, I would have to steal you from another. This I now realize I cannot do."

Mae found only pieces of rope and an open window in her bas.e.m.e.nt.

"Time to ride again," she said as she gladly retrieved her hidden buckskins and prepared to return to the trail that was her true home.

Turning the key in the lock, she left behind what would be the dream of most women, and disappeared into the sagebrush.

She didn't get a full mile from home before she realized she'd been followed.