Corbin's Fancy (16 page)

“One question at a time, sugarplum. He’s resting comfortably now in the back of his wagon, but I think we should get him to Spokane, where he can rest. He has a sister there.”

“W–What about his wagon—his balloon and everything?”

Jeff looked away momentarily, then met Fancy’s eyes again. “I bought the balloon.”

“You what?!”

“I bought it.” He was defensive now. “Any objections?”

“As long as you don’t expect me to fly in it, none at all!”

“Good. Then can we get back to the subject of Phineas’s health, please?”

Fancy was properly shamed. “Do you know what’s wrong with him?”

“I’m no doctor, but I’d say it’s his heart. I’ve seen some of my brother’s patients with similar symptoms.”

“We should leave right away!”

“Wrong,” Jeff immediately replied. “He needs to rest first. Spokane is several days’ journey from here and it will be hard in a wagon.”

“Couldn’t we send him ahead on the train?”

“I suggested that, but Phineas wanted no part of the idea.”

“What are we going to do, then?”

Jeff smiled over the rim of his coffee cup. “Finish our supper, go back to the roominghouse, and make love. I’ve never had you in a real bed, you know, and I do find the prospect intriguing.”

“How can you even think of something like that when Phineas is so gravely ill?”

“Bemoaning our friend’s condition won’t change anything. Besides, life is a fleeting thing, Fancy, and it can be gone”—he snapped his fingers—“like that. In my opinion, we should take advantage of every opportunity to enjoy the pleasures at hand.”

Fancy blushed. “And in my opinion, you are positively shameless. In fact, you’re a libertine!”

Jeff lifted his coffee cup in a mocking toast. “Get used to it,” he said.

“I will not!” hissed Fancy, leaning across the sugar bowl to make her point. “I didn’t bargain for this!”

“All the same,” he answered smoothly, “you did bargain. You sold yourself to me, Fancy, and—”

“I know, I know. You intend to get your money’s worth!”

“And more,” crooned Jeff. Then he rose from his chair and solicitously helped Fancy out of hers. After he’d paid their check, he escorted her out onto the narrow board sidewalk.

Fancy tried to pull her hand from the crook of his elbow, where he had firmly placed it, and found that it was stuck there. “Let go of me!”

“Not on your life, dear.”

“You have no right to treat me like this—as though—as though I were a slave! I don’t have to follow your orders, Jeff Corbin!”

“Of course not, my dear. For that matter, you needn’t sing, you needn’t dance—” He paused, sighed philosophically, and kissed the tip of her nose. “Just do magic.”

Chapter Nine

T
HE SOUND OF A TRAIN WHISTLE DREW
J
EFF UP FROM THE
depths of a drugged sleep. A train. There was somewhere he should be going, something he should be doing.

It was cool in the small room due to a soft breeze wafting in through the window. Fancy lay across his chest, her hair tickling his chin. He smiled and entangled one hand in the honey-colored tresses, careful not to awaken her.

She made a kittenlike sound in her throat and stirred. Their flesh was bonded together by the fever of the night, it seemed to Jeff, and he wished that they could remain this way forever.

Again, the train whistle sounded, nearer this time, intrusive. Jeff closed his eyes and held onto the moment, knowing that the sweet peace of it would soon be gone, driven away by the din from the nearby railroad
tracks and by facts that would demand to be faced.

Fancy wriggled and then stretched, and Jeff ached with love for her. He should tell her how he felt, he knew that, but the act required more courage than he’d been able to muster up. Another announcement like the one she’d made yesterday would devastate him.

The arrival of the eastbound Pacific Central shook the roominghouse and the flimsy cot. Fancy lifted her head, looked at Jeff with befuddled violet eyes, and murmured, “Good heavens, what’s that noise?”

Jeff smiled sleepily. “Noise?” he asked with feigned surprise as the cot began to dance and jiggle beneath them. The keening shriek of a steam whistle muffled her reply.

He slid his hands down her satin back to her bottom, nipping at her earlobe.

She squirmed against him, igniting fires that burned away his doubts. He turned her, placed her beneath him. “I love you,” he said at her breast.

Fancy could not hear him, he knew. But her body arched toward his in heated welcome and, minutes later, when their frenzied need was satisfied, their cries of despairing triumph went unheard for the clanging of the conductor’s bell.

They lay still in the aftermath, clinging together, struggling for each breath as though they were one entity. Desire, now sated, ebbed and flowed over them in warm waves.

Jeff closed his eyes and shuddered, certain that should he ever care more deeply for Fancy than he did at that moment, he would not be able to bear it. The feeling coursing through him now was startling in its intensity.

“Jeff?” She spoke his name softly; it was only then that he realized that the whistling clatter of the train had died away.

He could not speak; if he did he would do something stupid and unmanly. He would cry.

Fancy tangled a finger in the hair at the nape of his neck. “Darling, what is it?” she pressed.

Jeff clenched his teeth together, the flesh on his face seemed to stretch taut over his cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. She married you for money, not love, he reminded himself savagely. If you forget that for one minute, you’re a fool. “Fancy,” he said despairingly, his voice muffled by the pillow.

“We’d better get back to Phineas, don’t you think?”

The cool practicality of that remark sobered Jeff, allowing him to lift his head without fear of disgrace. “Yes,” he croaked out, careful not to look directly into those lethal violet eyes. “You’re right—”

She cupped her hands on the sides of his face and made him look at her. “Jeff,” she insisted softly. “What’s the matter? D–Didn’t I please you?”

With a strangled exclamation, Jeff thrust himself out of her arms, off the cot. He wanted to batter the wall with his fists, wanted to shout and rail. Instead, he let his forehead rest against the cracked plaster and struggled for some semblance of control. His shoulders heaved with the effort.

He heard quiet desolation in her voice. “I’m s–sorry,” she said.

Jeff whirled, unconcerned now with the tears that were glittering in his own eyes, blurring his vision. “Sorry?!” he rasped. “God in heaven, Fancy,
for what?”

She was crouched in the middle of that miserable, rumpled, sagging excuse for a bed, her fingers knotted in her lap, her face wan. “I—It would seem that I’ve upset you—disappointed you—”

Heedless of his nakedness, Jeff stared at her in frank amazement. “Disappointed me?” he echoed.

Fancy bit her lower lip and nodded. A tear streaked down her face and fell away into the twisted sheets.

“No,” he protested hoarsely. “No.”

She drew a deep, quivering breath. He knew that she was attempting to be brave for some reason, and it wounded him that she felt the need. “Yesterday, when I said I only married you for your money, I was lying,” she announced, in a tremulous voice. “I l–love you, Jeff.”

Jeff felt as though he’d just had a bucket of ice-cold water poured over his head. God, if he could only believe her! He reached for his trousers and wrenched them on. Believe her? Why should he, when she’d been nothing but trouble from the first? She had left him twice. She had accused him of betrayal and even of falsifying his own wedding. Furthermore, she had associated with Temple Royce.

“Right,” he rasped, pulling on his shirt, averting his eyes. “Get dressed.”

“Don’t you believe me?” Fancy persisted with dignity as she climbed off the bed.

“I believe you,” he lied. “I just don’t care, that’s all. This is a business arrangement. Let’s keep that in mind, shall we?”

She was crying; Jeff knew that but he steeled himself against it. Another trick, another tactic. Petunias would bloom in hell before he fell for that again.

“So far,” she began, her voice quivering with rage and hurt, “the advantages of this ‘arrangement’ have all been on your side! When do I benefit?”

When he could bear to, Jeff met her gaze. “Get dressed,” he ordered with a coldness completely unrelated to what he was feeling. “We’ll talk about your ‘benefit’ when we get to Spokane.”

Fancy stepped back from him as though he’d slapped her. He almost relented, almost made an ass of himself and told her that he loved her, wanted her, needed her. Had it not been for the crisp knock at the door, he would have.

“Don’t you dare open that door!” Fancy hissed, lunging for her clothes.

“Just a minute!” Jeff snarled.

“I’ve got all day,” sang Jewel Stroble, from the hallway.

*   *   *

Fancy knelt beside Phineas’s pallet in the wagon, forgetting her own concerns as she noted the deep blue smudges of pain beneath his eyes, the pallor of his skin. “Do you want me to get a doctor?” she whispered.

“No,” replied Phineas with surprising briskness. “I most certainly do not. Did you and that husband of yours manage to talk to each other, Fancy?”

Fancy swallowed hard. For a time, it had seemed that she and Jeff might be able to converse sensibly. Lord knew, their bodies had been in accord. But when Fancy had worked up her courage and declared her love, Jeff had flung it back in her face, just as she had feared he would. “Oh, Phineas,” she whispered, “it was a disaster.”

Fatherly concern shimmered in his eyes. “Why?” he wanted to know.

“It–told Jeff yesterday that I married him for money. I didn’t really do that—I was just speaking in anger—but he’s convinced that I meant what I said.”

“Oh,” said Phineas, and the expression on his face urged her to go on.

“I told him that I loved him and he—he said he didn’t care, that all w–we had was a business arrangement.”

“A business arrangement, is it?” chortled Phineas. “That kind of arrangement makes babies, if memory serves me correctly.”

Fancy blushed and looked away. “Yes,” she choked out.

“Are you in the family way, Fancy?”

The question was put so kindly that Fancy couldn’t be offended. “I don’t know. It’s too soon.”

Phineas groped for one of Fancy’s hands and held it tightly in his own. “Jeff loves you, Fancy. You remember that. You stay by his side, no matter what, and you go on loving him. The day will come when he’ll be able to get past all the barriers he’s set up to protect himself.”

“Protect himself? From me?” Fancy was truly startled. “I couldn’t hurt him!”

“You’ve done that already, Fancy—twice that I know of. I’d say Mr. Corbin is afraid to love you the way he’d like to. That would put a terrible weapon in your hands and men are shy of such things.”

Fancy bristled. “Well, he certainly isn’t shy of Jewel Stroble!” she argued, forgetting Phineas’s illness for a moment. “That woman had the audacity to knock on our door and ask Jeff to have supper with her tonight!”

Unbelievably, Phineas chuckled. “She’s a brassy piece, that one. And did she invite you, too?”

“Of course not! The bold thing—it didn’t even matter to her that I was standing right there!”

“And what did Jeff say to her?”

Fancy couldn’t help smiling. At least, out of all her defeats, there had been that one minor triumph. “He told her to stop behaving like a trollop and leave us alone.”

“There, you see?”

Fancy’s glory was short-lived. She colored at the memory of what had happened next. “He swatted her on the bottom!” she marveled angrily.

“Jewel’s got that sort of bottom,” observed Phineas.

“Phineas Pryor!”

“Well, she does. Not being a man, you wouldn’t understand.”

Fancy understood, all right. One woman wasn’t enough for Jeff Corbin. Even though he’d spurned Jewel’s attentions, he hadn’t been able to keep his hands off her. Drat it all, she’d seen the glimmer in his eyes as he assessed the bottom in question. “Is there anything I can do for you, Phineas?” she asked stiffly, tucking the blankets more closely around him and touching his forehead to check for fever.

“You can find that man of yours and you can tell him you love him. Tell him until he listens, Fancy.”

Fancy nodded distractedly, but she had no intention of laying herself open for another brutal rejection. If Jeff wanted to believe that she’d married him to assure her own comfort, then let him.

*   *   *

Smiling at her own cleverness, Jewel bent over as far as she could to place that hussy’s rabbit, cage and all, in the gondola of the balloon. Then she stepped aside, folded her arms, and waited. Jeff Corbin would come to
her house for supper that night, all right. And for a lot more, if Jewel had her way.

Soon enough, Jewel saw Fancy approaching, her purple eyes flashing fire just the way her fingertips did when she was performing magic tricks. If it hadn’t been for that Jeff Corbin-sized ache inside her, Jewel might even have liked Fancy. As it was, she couldn’t afford to do that.

“Afternoon, Mrs. Corbin,” she sang out.

“Eudora said you took my rabbit!” accused Fancy, ignoring the neighborly greeting. “Where is he?”

Jewel thought she’d burst with glee, but she managed to point to the gondola and say, “In there.”

Fancy gave her a scathing look, then sprang quite deftly over the side of the big wicker basket. Jewel immediately released the ropes that kept the balloon on the ground, and it began to rise.

Mrs. Jeff Corbin clutched the gondola sides with white-knuckled hands and peered down in terror. She could have jumped, but she seemed too shocked to try it.

Jewel was already beginning to doubt the wisdom of what she’d done, when Jeff came bolting through the crowd and sprang into the air, just managing to catch hold of the gondola’s jutting brim before the vessel rose in earnest. It was about ten feet in the air, Jewel supposed, when Jeff managed to scramble over the side and join his petrified wife.