Lily Read online

  Lily

  Leigh Greenwood

  Copyright 2011 by Leigh Greenwood

  Smashwords Edition

  San Francisco, 1885

  Chapter One

  Lily Sterling paused to offer a silent prayer to the angel responsible for waifs and homeless children. She knew she didn't qualify for either category, but if he'd just watch over her for the next few minutes, she'd never so much as whisper his name again.

  Nothing in her nineteen years had prepared her for San Francisco and Pacific Street at 6:37 p.m.. The street teamed with men. All kinds of men. All in a hurry. Many wearing guns. Some of them drunk. All of them strangers.

  With them were women unlike any Lily had ever seen. Most wore brightly colored dresses cut to reveal so much of their bodies it made Lily blush. Their hair and skin had been dyed and painted until they looked more like masks than human faces. They were nearly as loud and as drunk as the men. Lily had never seen a drunk female before. She didn't know it was allowed.

  The boardwalk was crowded with buildings of every description, spilling bright light, music, and the noise of human revelry into the night. Lily had never heard such a racket, not even at last summer's campground revival attended by more than two thousand people.

  She stared up at the facade of the Little Corner of Heaven Saloon. It looked more like the Devil's front door. The building had been built of brick, but everything was red and gold, even the curtains at the windows.

  Lily couldn't see through the etched glass panes in the doors, but ever so often someone would leave or enter, offering a brief glimpse inside. Tobacco smoke hung over the room like fog in a valley on a crisp fall morning. The smell of whiskey was so strong she could almost taste it. She felt the heat from the press of so many bodies, heard the music, women singing and dancing, felt the energy of the life that throbbed so vibrantly inside the saloon.

  Nearly every evil her father had warned her about since she was a little girl had come together in this place. Yet she was fascinated by the flashes of bright color, the brash energy of the music, glimpsed smiles, voices raised in laughter, the sheer energy that flowed from that room. For the first time in her life, she was seeing sin and temptation up close, and it didn't seem half bad.

  She shivered even though it was July. The wind off the bay chilled her to the bone. She took a deep breath to calm her nerves, but it didn't help. What would Zac Randolph say when she walked in and announced she had come to live with him? He had invited her, but she was certain he had never expected her to take his invitation seriously. She took another deep breath, but her heart still pounded like the hooves of a team of horses trying to outrun a stagecoach going downhill.

  She unclenched her hands, automatically smoothed her dress. There was one good thing about wearing black. It might show dust and lint, but it didn't show soot. After a week on a train, plenty of that had settled on her. She just hoped there wasn't any on her face.

  She pulled her veil down, but it fluttered so much in the wind she put it back up. She'd never been in a place as windy as San Francisco, not even her mountain valley home in southwestern Virginia. She knew she must look untidy, but she had too little money to rent a room for the sole purpose of making herself more presentable. If Zac couldn't take her in -- if he wouldn't take her in -- she'd need every penny to keep body and soul together until she found a job.

  That was another thing that concerned her. From birth she had been destined to be the wife of a preacher. Aside from being able to run a household, quote the Bible, and smile comfortingly, she couldn't do much. From what she has seen so far, she doubted her smile or her Biblical quotes would be much in demand in San Francisco.

  It was too late to start thinking about that now. The die was cast. It was time to face Zac.

  But her feet wouldn't move.

  Lily told herself she was merely postponing the inevitable. Her father had often told her that only made things worse. It was time to face the issue squarely and be ready to deal with the outcome.

  But that was more easily said than done.

  Zac had to take her in. She couldn't go back home, not even if she had the money, which she didn't. Her father would kill her. There wasn't any doubt in her mind. He'd simply wring her neck and throw her body down the mountainside.

  Lily nervously plucked at her veil. In her mind's eye, she saw herself, a thin female clad in black from head to foot. She must look like she was dressed for a funeral. Those brightly colored females inside would laugh themselves silly.

  With sudden decision, she untied the bonnet strings and pulled the hat and veil from her head, removed the pins that held her hair in place, and dropped them into her purse. She shook her head to loosen the hair she had so carefully hidden under her hat early that morning. A mantle of white-blond hair tumbled down her back, around her shoulders, and over her breasts.

  Lily became aware that the steady flow of men all around her had slowed. Looking up she saw men staring at her from all sides.

  "Jesus, Joseph, and Mary!" one man, unsteady on his feet, exclaimed to his companion. "It must be the angels come for me."

  "Ain't no angel stupid enough to set foot in San Francisco," his slightly more sober friend said. "It must be the whiskey."

  The first man drew closer until he could reach out and touch Lily. "She's real!"

  "That's it," his companion said. "No more whiskey for you. From now on we stick to opium."

  Petrified she should attract even more unwanted attention, Lily gave her hair a final smoothing, took a deep breath, picked up her suitcase, and stepped inside the Little Corner of Heaven.

  * * * * *

  Zac felt Dodie Mitchell's grip on his shoulder tighten. She was standing behind his chair as she often did. He flexed his muscles as a warning. He had been a gambler too long, had played too many games with thousands of dollars at stake, had bluffed too many times when holding nothing more than two pair, to let his own excitement betray him. He'd be damned if he'd let Dodie's do it.

  But he understood. For the first time in his twenty-six years, he held a spade flush, ace high. With no cards wild, no matter what they threw on the table, he could take it. It wasn't the money or the game. It was the hand, and he'd drawn it. He didn't need to discard. It was perfect. Most gamblers went through their entire life without seeing one.

  He glanced up at the other men at the table. They all had good hands. He could tell.

  Bob Wilkerson thought his demeanor was impenetrable, but his left eyebrow bunched ever so slightly. Asa White's eyes glazed over. Eric Olsen tapped his boot against the table leg. Heinrich Beiderbecker had no control at all. He grinned like a bear in the middle of a trout stream during a spawning run. When he had a good hand, everybody knew it.

  Only Chet Lee could match Zac's poker face. But then Chet always had a good hand. Zac was certain he cheated, but he'd never been able to catch him. Tonight it didn't matter.

  Zac settled back and the betting began. It wasn't until the pot topped twenty thousand dollars that he became aware of a ripple in the noise that surrounded him. He ignored it.

  He enjoyed gambling even more than his customers. His employees were under strict orders not to bother him unless it was a life-threatening emergency. But there was something different about this sound.

  In a city of more than two hundred and fifty thousand people, all of them seemingly addicted to gambling, even the biggest gambling saloons were always crowded and noisy. That's what was wrong. The noise was dying down. That never happened. If the mix of men, whiskey, gambling, and women could guarantee anything, it was noise. It needled at Zac's mind until he looked up.

  At first, he saw nothing to account for the change. Everybody around him was concentrating on their games, shouting their pleasure or bellowing their fur
y. He started to turn back to his game.

  Then he saw her.

  She was dressed in black from head to toe. As she crossed the brilliantly lighted room, she stilled all sound and motion. Like the hand of an angry creator quelling an annoying din, she left the men and women dressed in gaudy colors staring after her in bemused, immobile silence.

  She seemed to float, the only evidence of physical movement the gentle sway of the stiff material of her skirt. The warm creamy softness of her skin, the moist vermilion of her lips, the robin's-egg blue of her eyes stood out in stark contrast to her black dress and gloves. But even they paled in comparison to the shimmering halo of white-blond hair that fell across her shoulders and over her breasts. She looked like a figure from a Botticelli painting.

  Zac watched as she threaded her way across the room until she came to a stop before his table.

  "Hello," she said.

  Her voice was soft and clear. There was only a trace of the drawl that betrayed she had lived in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.

  "Hi," Zac replied, having no idea what he was supposed to do for this woman. She looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn't remember having met a female all decked out in black since meeting all those Civil War widows when he visited his brother in Virginia. Not one of them was under the age of forty. This woman was hardly out of her teens.

  "Who are you?" Dodie demanded.

  Dodie sounded possessive, and that irritated Zac. He liked Dodie as much as he liked any woman. She took good care of his girls and kept the saloon running smoothly, but he didn't want anybody thinking Dodie had a claim on him, not even this stray from a Salvation Army mission.

  "What do you want?" Zac asked.

  The quiet serenity of the young woman's face relaxed into a smile that caused the men near her to forget there was anyone else in the room. If ever there was an angel come down to earth, it was this woman.

  Zac had a sudden apprehension that his time was up, that she'd been sent to fetch him to some eternal reckoning for a life thoroughly enjoyed but badly misspent. It wasn't fair. His brothers had all had time to grow older and repent of their earlier indiscretions. He had a long list of indiscretions still waiting to be committed.

  "Don't you recognize me?" the vision asked. "I'm your cousin, albeit a distant one. I've come to stay with you. You invited me," she added when Zac seemed unable to answer.

  The denizens of the Little Corner of Heaven were not yet aware that a dividing mark in the annals of their lives had just occurred, but they observed its coming with an appropriate hush.

  "I wrote," the vision explained, "but I got no reply. I thought you were still in Virginia City. But when I got there, a very nice young man told me you'd moved to San Francisco. He found my letter slipped down in a crack."

  "You can't be any relation of Zac's," Dodie said, her red-blond hair quivering from agitation, her voice harsh and urgent. "He's as dark as you are fair."

  "It's not very close. My grandmother was a Randolph."

  "Where is your family?" Zac asked, ignoring Dodie.

  "They're still in Virginia." She laughed softly. "Papa doesn't approve of you. Neither does Mama."

  Zac could tell the laugh was forced. She was scared stiff.

  "You'd better sit down so these fellas can breathe," he said. "What are you doing here in San Francisco?"

  She remained standing, a look of anxiety flaring in her eyes. "I just told you. You said if I ever got tired of Salem to come see you, so here I am."

  "I don't remember inviting you," Zac said, cudgeling his brain for a reason as to how he could have forgotten such a stunning young woman.

  "You invited me four years ago when you were visiting your brother in Virginia," she said shyly. "I guess I've changed some since then."

  It was the first time his entire family had been together in twenty years. They had come from Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, and California to gather at the home they'd been driven from in 1860. For George and Jeff, it was a vindication. To Zac it was too many people in one house.

  He remembered the shy, elfin creature who'd followed him everywhere, asking endless questions about the places he'd been and the things he'd done, until her father dragged her off with a particularly offensive warning to beware of lechers parading as gentlemen.

  "I'm Lily," she told him. "Lily Sterling."

  Lily! Hell and damnation! All six of his brothers had been corralled by women with flower names, and here he was sitting at his ease, staring at her like she was a sweet, innocent country cousin come to visit when she was more dangerous than a Black Widow spider.

  His mind went blank, his muscles went slack, and his cards spilled onto the table.

  "Holy shit!" Asa White cried. "Do you see what he's holding?" He threw his cards on the table. "Nobody can beat that."

  One by one the players abandoned a game they couldn't win.

  Zac leapt to his feet, his brain and limbs finally released from immobility. Though the men in the room had resumed their normal breathing, no one spoke except a brightly painted girl in purple net who asked in a voice perilously close to a squeal, "Who'd a thought Zac could be related to anybody like her? If I didn't know better, I'd swear I was back home in Massachusetts."

  As though released from a spell, they all started talking at once.

  "Introduce us, Zac," Eric Olsen said, the card game forgotten.

  "You got no call to be getting familiar with a gal like her," Dodie said, jealousy clearly present in her tone. "What are you gonna do with her?"

  "You just introduce me. I'll figure something out." Eric was young, beardless, and thin to the point of gauntness, but there was strength in his gaze and confidence in his voice.

  Chet Lee and Heinrich Beiderbecker stood up. That seemed to bring Zac out of his trance. "Where are you going?" he demanded. "The game's not over."

  "It sure as hell is!" Chet said pointing to Zac's hand laid out in front of him.

  Zac looked at all his lovely spades laying face up on the table, his wonderful secret exposed, and he felt furious enough to strangle someone.

  "Who turned them over?" he demanded. It was unspoken rule of the game that no man touched another player's cards for any reason.

  "You did," Chet said.

  "P-probably when you g-got a good l-look at your c-c-cousin," Heinrich Beiderbecker stammered around his thick German accent.

  Zac looked at his cards, then at Lily, then back at his cards. He should have expected it. Women named after flowers had spelled disaster for each of his brothers. What had he been thinking of when he invited Lily out West? She might have been a young girl at the time, but surely he knew she would grow up and become a potential hazard. She had calamity written all over her.

  Just look at the men, staring at her like they'd never seen a woman. Not a one of them gambling or drinking, just staring at her like Dodie and the other girls weren't females, too. She was big trouble he needed to head off before he found himself surrounded.

  He rose to his feet and with his customary calm said, "Gentlemen, this young lady is my cousin, Miss Lily Sterling. She will be staying at Bella Holt's tonight and leaving on the first train headed east in the morning. She regrets she doesn't have time to get to know you, but it's late and she has to go to bed." Zac walked around the table and took Lily firmly by the elbow. "Say good night, Lily."

  "Good night," Lily said with an entrancing smile that encompassed the whole room. "I hope to see you again soon."

  "She wishes she could, but she can't," Zac corrected. Keeping a firm grip on her elbow with one hand and picking up her suitcase with the other, he escorted her from the saloon, refusing to acknowledge the chorus of groans and complaints about his selfishness. He had no idea how heated he had become until he stepped outside. The cold that raced through him when the fog-dampened air came into contact with the thin film of moisture covering his body caught him by surprise.

  Just his luck to catch a chill and come down with pneumonia all because some blo
nd enchantress didn't have enough sense to stay in Virginia and limit herself to driving farm boys and any married man this side of death out of their minds.

  "Does your father know where you are?" Zac demanded as he propelled Lily along the boardwalk, away from at least a dozen saloons and gambling parlors. He could imagine all too vividly the fire-breathing Reverend Isaac Sterling coming after him with a Bible in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

  "Not exactly," Lily answered.

  A past master at manipulating the truth, Zac knew what not exactly meant.

  "In other words, you didn't say a word to the old devil."

  "He's not a devil," Lily said, "but he wouldn't understand."

  "I guess not," Zac said, "especially if you don't explain anything to him."

  "I tried. He doesn't want to understand."

  "I don't know why I should expect him to. I don't understand myself."

  "Of course you do," Lily said, trying to twist around so she could see his face. "You're the black sheep of your family. You told me so yourself. You have defied tradition, tossed your brothers' advice in their faces, and gone into the world to do what you pleased."

  "Sounds like I really shot my mouth off," Zac said. "I can't think what got into me."

  "It was after lunch. Jeff had been lecturing you about your responsibilities to the family. You came storming out into the garden and told me no matter what I did with my life, I wasn't to waste one minute of it trying to satisfy a bunch of relatives. Far better, you said, to dash out into the night and howl at the moon."

  "I never was very good with children," Zac observed in a tone that implied it wasn't a problem likely to keep him awake nights. "Never did know what to say to them."

  "I wasn't a child," Lily declared. "I was fifteen."

  "If you paid attention to anything I said after being lectured by Jeff, you were thinking like a child. Everybody knows he can make perfectly saintly people start searching for a really hot place to shove him."