My Heart's Desire (18 page)

He came to his feet, glanced around her bedchamber, and shook his head in disgust. "It's a sty, Rennie." For once she didn't try staring him down. It would have been a pathetic gesture given the fact she was crying. She turned away and stared out the French doors as she had on so many other occasions recently. Her vision was too blurred to see anything on the street below or Jarret's reflection in the glass in front of her. She gave a little start as his arms circled her, but she didn't try to move away.

His chin rested in the crown of her hair. It was silky against his skin, fragrant with the lingering scent of lavender soap. "Nothing's been going your way since you met me."

She closed her eyes, trying to stem the flow of tears, and shook her head slowly in agreement.

"I don't expect that's going to change any time soon," he said.

Rennie brushed impatiently at her eyes as she was turned in his arms. The afghan slipped to the floor. She thought he might kiss her, but it was only his breath that stirred the hair at the temples, not his mouth. He held her in just that manner for a long time, absorbing her shudders, stilling her trembling, and when she was quiet he put her to bed and sat with her until she fell asleep. She never missed the photograph he took on his way out.

* * *

Four days later Nathaniel Houston was dead, killed not by Ethan or Jarret, but by Rennie's twin.

Chapter 5

Rennie sat with Ethan in the parlor of Michael's suite of rooms at the St. Mark. Their attempts at conversation were awkward. The only thing they had in common was their concern for the woman giving birth in the adjoining room.

Rennie's eyes periodically strayed to the bloodstains on the carpet. Three hours ago Nate Houston had been killed in the chair where she was sitting now. A porter from the hotel had delivered Ethan's hastily scrawled, nearly illegible, message to Jarret and Rennie. For once Rennie was glad for Jarret's terse commands and unflappable nature. Her own thoughts were like a shower of shooting stars, coming to her so fast and furious that grasping a coherent one was beyond her. She depended on Jarret's cool control for direction.

But that was then. Her head had been clear since Jarret had removed Houston's body from the suite and gone after Dee Kelly. That had left Rennie to see to her sister and Ethan. Dr. Turner was with Michael now; that left her with the marshal. She would have rather been with Michael.

"It's too early for the baby," Ethan said. His voice was drawn, haunted.

Rennie wanted to accuse, not comfort, but she also needed to reassure herself. "She was only a few days shy of carrying eight months," she said. "I know a number of women who have given birth at eight months, even seven months. Everything was fine for them and the baby."

Ethan wasn't convinced. Too many times a full-term child was delivered seven months after the wedding. By that same reckoning Michael was giving birth to a child she had only carried two weeks.

Rennie read the drift of his thoughts. "All right," she said. "Some of the women were altering dates to avoid moral judgments, but that wasn't always the case." Rennie turned white then as Michael screamed. She saw that Ethan's hands were shaking. She served him a whiskey from the sideboard and took a sherry for herself.

"Why did you have to leave her alone?" she blurted out. "Mr. Sullivan wouldn't let me out of the house, sometimes not out of my room, for the last two weeks. And
you
just go off by yourself, leave Michael here, even after you knew the danger was imminent."

The pads of Ethan's fingers turned white against his tumbler. His head was bent as he studied the bloodstained carpet at his feet.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly, sighing. "I promised myself I wouldn't do that."

"It's all right." He glanced up and gave her a jerky little self-mocking grin as he raised his glass. "You're not asking me anything I haven't asked myself."

"I don't think I was asking anything," she said. "Not really. I was blaming."

He took a large swallow of his drink and felt it burn the whole way down. "So was I."

Rennie sat down again, this time next to Ethan on the loveseat. "Michael will be so disappointed in us," she said. "She loves us both, and she won't find any pleasure in us not being friends. I know that whatever you did tonight, you had your reasons. You relied on your best judgment."

"You know that?" he asked bitterly. "You can't know that. You don't know me at all. I almost got Michael killed tonight. She begged to come with me, but I thought it was too dangerous. I should have listened to her."

Rennie recognized that Ethan Stone was a man who needed to talk, to purge himself of the events of the evening. In the next room Michael's moan rose to an anguished wail. Rennie could hear Dr. Turner's steady, comforting encouragement, the words indistinguishable from one another, but reassuring in their tone and cadence. "I really don't know what happened this evening," she said. "Mr. Sullivan wasn't very forthcoming."

Ethan was able to shrug off a little tension at Rennie's remark. He permitted himself a small, genuine smile. "Jarret rarely is."

"Well, I don't want to talk about him."

Ethan flinched as Michael's keening cry drifted in from the other room. He began speaking in part because it would cover the sound of his wife's pain, and in part because he needed Rennie to understand. "I decided I was recovered enough to follow Dee this evening when she left work. The Turners had identified her working in the dining room a few days ago."

Rennie nodded. "Jarret told me that was the plan."

"I needed to see where Dee was going to determine if she was working alone or with Houston. There wasn't enough time to send anyone from the hotel to get Jarret, so I decided to do it myself. It never entered my mind that Houston might come here without Detra. I would have never left Michael alone if I'd thought that."

"I believe you," Rennie said. And she did. She wasn't merely mouthing the words because they sounded right or because she thought Ethan needed to hear them. In the end it only mattered what Ethan believed himself.

Ethan shook his head slightly, clearing it. He drained his tumbler but held on to it. "I wasn't gone long at all. I followed Detra into the Bowery, saw the clapboarded dwelling where she was living, and stayed long enough to ask a few questions of the neighbors. They were suspicious, but I was able to learn that she was living with someone... a man. One drunk let slip that the man had some kind of leg injury. As soon as I heard that, I knew I had Houston, too. I left immediately and came back here."

He stood, went to the sideboard, and splashed his tumbler with whiskey. "Michael was ten minutes into her labor, and Houston dead just as long."

Rennie hugged herself. It was chilling to imagine her sister alone with Nate Houston, but impossible to imagine that Michael had killed the outlaw.

"He came here to confront Michael," Ethan continued. "He meant to kill her and her child if she refused to leave with him."

"He wanted her?" Rennie asked. The thought raised more gooseflesh. "But what about Detra?"

"Houston always wanted your sister. He was fascinated by her, repelled and attracted. He couldn't help himself from coming here." Ethan sipped his drink. "Because of his injured leg Houston was using a walking stick. It had a spring-action knife concealed in the tip, just the sort of thing Houston would have prized. Michael didn't know it was there; he hadn't threatened her with it."

"Then how...?"

"He riled her," Ethan said as if he still couldn't believe it. "Do you and your sister share the same temper?"

"Actually, we each have one of our own," Rennie said, straight-faced.

Ethan found his first reason to laugh. He looked at Rennie appreciatively. "Then, you know how it could have happened," he said. "She got so damned mad at Houston's demands and the threat to her baby that she picked up his walking stick and poked him with it to emphasize her angry speech. Her action released the dagger. She didn't even know she'd wounded him until she saw the blood. Her first stab was the fatal one."

Rennie's anxiety finally had an outlet in laughter. She imagined Houston's surprise at being hoist by his own petard, and suddenly it was very, very funny. She raised her hand to her mouth, trying to smother her laughter. Tears sprang to her eyes as her dark humor would not be suppressed. "I'm sorry," she said, shaking her head. "I don't know what's wrong with me. There's nothing at all fun—" she swallowed some sherry and tried not to choke on it—"funny about it. Oh, God, that Michael could have... He must have been so... so
shocked..."
Rennie gasped a little as laughter caught in her throat and became a wrenching sob. Suddenly she was weeping.

Ethan put down his drink and became the comforter. His arms circled her, and he let her lean against him. She was the same size and shape as Michael; yet there were differences, and he felt them deeply, felt the need strongly to be holding Michael in just the same manner.

"Don't you have the wrong sister?" Jarret asked, stepping into the suite. He raised the brim of his hat with his forefinger and regarded the entwined couple with lazy interest.

"Don't you ever knock?" Ethan asked.

Rennie stepped back and dried her eyes with the handkerchief Ethan slipped her. She sniffed. "He thinks he can come and go as he pleases."

Jarret grinned. He shut the door behind him and tossed his coat and hat in a chair by the entrance. He winced as he heard Michael's cry from the bedroom. "She hasn't delivered yet?" he asked.

Ethan shook his head. "Dr. Turner says it could take most of the night."

"She's doing all right, though?"

"The last word was that she's doing fine."

Jarret's eyes darted between Ethan and Rennie. "Then why the long faces? Houston's dead. Dee's safely in jail. And in a few hours one of you is going to be a father and the other an aunt. I take it you do know who is who."

Ethan got a drink for his deputy. "Here. I think you'd better have this. You're wound too tight. What happened when you got to Dee's?"

Rennie watched Jarret take the drink but observed that he had too much energy to sit. She had never seen him like this. He was always so controlled, so contained, that she often felt as if she were running in place beside him. Now he paced the floor, methodically to be sure, but it was Rennie's first indication that he was still operating in the aftermath of an adrenaline rush. Ethan, she noticed, was regarding Jarret with friendly sympathy, proving he understood perfectly what his deputy was going through.

"She didn't hear me," Jarret was saying, "until I was in her bedroom. She was sitting with her back to me, and she called Houston's name, assuming he was the one coming in. She was furious with him for leaving the flat. You know Dee. Her voice was as arched as her back."

"She probably wished it were Houston when she saw you," said Ethan.

Jarret nodded, raising his glass in a gesture of agreement. "I didn't think she could get angrier. I was wrong. She came after me with a pair of scissors. I'm lucky to still have both ears."

Rennie's eyes widened. She noticed for the first time the scratch extending below Jarret's hairline and into his shirt collar. "What did you do?"

"When I couldn't restrain her I didn't have any choice. I knocked her out."

"I thought you didn't strike women," Rennie said sweetly.

"I've always reserved the right to make an exception," he returned dryly, giving her a significant look.

Ethan got his friend's attention. "Did you have any trouble taking her in?"

"None, except I couldn't find any beat cops patrolling the area."

"They don't like to go into the Bowery at night," said Rennie. "It's dangerous."

Jarret raised his eyebrows. "And you've led me to believe the city's so civilized." He looked at Ethan. "Dee woke up at the station. She managed to get a gun from the desk sergeant and used it to keep everyone at bay. I didn't think we were going to get it off of her. There were some moments when I wasn't sure if she was going to use it on herself or us. It wasn't until I convinced her that Houston was really dead that she gave up... just sort of caved in." He finished his drink. "I stayed while all the papers were being completed and did my best to make certain they understood how dangerous Detra is."