Read Online Wanton Angel by Linda Lael Miller - Free Book Online

herself dreading the evening as never before.
    “It was something of an emergency, you know,” Bonnie whispered back, her eyes anxiously scanning the rough crowd of men awaiting the first strains of music and the feminine contact the dancing would allow them.
    “Don’t know why you’d want to leave a man like that anyhow,” Dottie fussed, her hands on her round hips now, her eyes, like Bonnie’s, moving over the night’s crop of dancing partners. “Eli McKutchen’s good-lookin’ enough to stop a girl’s heart, and he’s got all that money, besides.”
    Blessedly the music began before Bonnie had to give a reply. She danced first with Till Reemer, who worked as aforeman at the smelter, and then with Jim Sneeder, Menelda’s husband. Jim had a habit of wrenching his partner a little too close during a waltz—and all the dances were waltzes—so Bonnie kept her arms stiff to hold him at his distance.
    “Heard Menelda got a little out of hand today,” he commented, trying all the while to draw his dancing partner nearer.
    “Yes,” answered Bonnie, remembering the upraised hatchet and the hatred—perhaps not entirely unjustified—flashing in Menelda’s eyes. “We did have words.”
    “I keep tellin’ that woman to stay home and mind her knittin’, but she don’t listen.”
    “Indeed,” Bonnie agreed, absentmindedly, her eyes sweeping the room over Jim Sneeder’s shoulder.
    At last the music stopped and Bonnie turned gratefully away, only to come face to shirtfront with Eli McKutchen. Her gaze slipped from the tasteful diamond stud on his tie to his squared, almost imperceptibly cleft chin, to his golden eyes.
    Taking one of her hands firmly in his own, he turned it palm up, then dropped so many tokens into the hollow that the small brass chips overflowed, falling to the floor in a tinkling cascade.
    Bonnie looked up into Eli’s impassive face and was possessed of the unnerving realization that she was in even more trouble than she had admitted to Forbes earlier, on the way back from the newspaper office. She was still in love, and with a man who could easily destroy her.
    The music began to play and Bonnie, heedless of the tokens scattered over the ballroom floor, allowed herself to be taken into Eli’s arms. As they danced, she watched his face for any expression that might indicate his mood, but his features were unreadable, neither stony nor tender.
    For the rest of the evening, Bonnie’s every dance was Eli’s, and no one dared to complain.
    At midnight the music stopped and the magic ended. Eli draped Bonnie’s wrap over her shoulders—a light blue capeleft over from more prosperous days in New York—and ushered her most forcefully down the front steps of the Brass Eagle Saloon and Ballroom and into a carriage waiting in the road.
    “You,” he said, as the elegant vehicle lurched away into the night, “have some explaining to do.”

CHAPTER 6
     
    B ONNIE M C K UTCHEN WASN’T about to explain anything. She sat stiffly in a corner of the lushly upholstered carriage seat, her wrap drawn close against the chill of an April evening. Whatever spell Eli had woven earlier, inside the Ballroom, had evaporated.
    With a raspy sigh of irritation, Eli sat back in his own seat, facing Bonnie’s, and folded his arms across his chest. His face, turned toward the window, was draped in shadow, but Bonnie could make out the tense line of his jaw. “My daughter,” he said, after several moments had passed. “Rose Marie is my daughter.”
    Bonnie remembered her humiliation in the street that day, her ignoble bath in Forbes’s suite, her sodden flight to Webb Hutcheson’s newspaper office. And beneath these remembrances were others, those of the hurt she’d suffered in New York when Eli had blamed her for Kiley’s death. He had betrayed her, scorned her, in fact, and ultimately deserted her. “If you say so, darling,” she said sweetly.
    She felt Eli’s glare, rather than saw it, and a dangerous