Diana Palmer - The Savage Heart

Tess caught sight of a store window where little electric trains ran against a backdrop of mountain scenery that had actual tunnels running through. “Oh, Matt, look. Isn’t it darling?”

“Do you really want me to tell you how I feel about iron horses?”

“Never mind, spoilsport.” She fell into step beside him once more. “Christmas isn’t so very far away. Does your landlady decorate and put up a tree in the parlor?”

“Yes.”

“How lovely! I can crochet snowflakes to go on it.”

“You’re assuming that she can find room for you.”

She gnawed at her lower lip. She’d come here on impulse, and now for the first time, she was uncertain. She stopped walking and looked up. “What if she can’t?” she asked.

Even through the veil, Matt could see plainly the expression of fear on Tess’s face. He was touched in a dozen ways, none wanted. “She will,” he said firmly. “I won’t have you very far from me. There are wicked elements in this city. Until you find your feet, you need a safe harbor.”

She smiled. “I’m a lot of trouble, I guess. I’ve always been impulsive. Am I trading too much on our shared past, Matt? If I’m in your way, just tell me, and I’ll go back home.”

“Home to the persistent lieutenant? Over my dead body. Come on.”

He took her arm and guided her around a hole in the boardwalk that looked as if a rifle had made it. Matt recalled reading about a fight between a city policeman and a bank robber recently. The bank was close by.

“Mrs. Blake told me that Chicago is very civilized,” Tess said. “Is it?”

“Occasionally.”

She looked over at him. “Now that you have your own detective business, what sort of cases do you take?”

“Mostly I track down criminals,” he replied. “Once or twice I’ve done other sorts of work. I’ve taken on a couple of divorce cases, getting evidence to prove cruelty on the part of the men.” He glanced at her. “I suppose you have no qualms about divorce, being modern.”

“I have a few,” she confessed. “I think people should try to make a marriage work. But if a man is abusive or cheats or gambles, I think a woman is more than entitled to be rid of him.”

“I think she’s entitled to shoot him,” he murmured, remembering vividly a recent case, where a drunken husband had left vicious bruises on a small child and her mother. Matt had knocked the man down and taken him to the police himself.

“Good for you!” Tess peered up at him through her veil. “You’re still wickedly handsome.”

He gave her a mocking smile. “You’re my cousin,” he reminded her. “We’re relatives in Chicago. You can’t leer at me, regardless of how modern you feel.”

She made a face at him. “You’ve become absolutely staid!”

“I work in a staid profession.”

“I’ll bet you’re good at it, too.” She eyed his waistcoat. “Do you still carry that enormous bowie knife around with you?”

“Who told you about that?”

“It was in a dime novel I read about you.”

“What?”

She bumped into him because he stopped so abruptly. “Don’t do that!” She straightened her hat. “There was a dime novel about you, didn’t you know? It came out close to a year ago, just after that case where you caught the ringleader of some bank robbery gang and shot him. They called you Magnificent Matt Davis!”

“I’m going to be sick,” he said, and looked as if he meant it.

“Now, now, it can’t be so bad to be a hero. Just think, one day you can show a copy of that novel to your children and be a hero to them, too.”

“I won’t have children,” he said shortly, staring straight ahead.

“Why not?” she asked. “Don’t you like them?”

He looked down at her evenly. “Probably as much as you do. Isn’t twenty-six about the right age to be called a spinster?”

She flushed. “I don’t have to get married to have a child,” she informed him haughtily. “Or a lover!”

He gave her a speaking look.

Odd, she thought, how that look made her feel. She swallowed hard. It sounded good at suffragist meetings to say such things, but when she looked at Matt, she thought of how it would be to have him as a lover, and her knees went wobbly. She actually knew very little about such things, except that one of her suffragist friends had said that it hurt a lot and it wasn’t fun at all.

“Your father would beat you with a buggy whip if he heard you talk like that!”

“Well, who else can I say such things to?” she demanded, glaring at him. “I don’t know any other men!”

“Not even the persistent soldier?” he asked venomously.

She shifted. “He never bathes. And there were crumbs in his mustache.”

He burst out laughing.

“Never mind,” she grumbled, and started walking again. “I’ll just keep my scandalous thoughts to myself until I can find a group of suffragists to join.” She looked at him from the corner of her eyes. “Do you know where they meet?”

“I never attend suffragist meetings myself. I’m much too busy with my knitting.”

She punched his arm playfully.

“I’m sure you’ll find them,” he said quickly.

“I expect they have a low tolerance for liquor, as well,” she mused aloud. “Do you have a hatchet?”

“Only Indians carry hatchets,” he informed her. “I’m a detective. I carry a .32 caliber Smith & Wesson double-action revolver.”

“You never taught me to shoot a pistol.”

“And I never will,” he said. He gave her a wry glance. “One day, the temptation might be too much for you. It wouldn’t look good on my record if you shot me. We’re here.”

Matt took her elbow and guided her up the steps of a brownstone house with long windows and a huge door with a lion’s head knocker. He escorted her inside, then paused outside a closed door and knocked.

“Just a minute,” a musical voice called. “I’m coming.”

The door opened and a tiny woman with gray-streaked blond hair in a bun looked way up at Matt and then at his companion.

“Why, Mr. Davis, have you found a wife at last?”

Tess flushed scarlet and Matt cleared his throat.

“This is my cousin, Tess Meredith, Mrs. Mulhaney. Her father has died, and she has no relatives except me. Is that room on the third floor still vacant?”

“Yes, it is, and I’d be delighted to rent it to Miss Meredith.” She smiled at Tess, a thousand unspoken questions in her blue eyes.

Tess smiled back. “I’d be very grateful to have a place to stay near Matt.” She looked up at him with sickening adoration. “Isn’t he just the sweetest man?”

“Sweet” wasn’t an appellation that had ever connected itself with the enigmatic Mr. Davis in Mrs. Mulhaney’s mind, but she supposed to a kinswoman he might be.

“He is a kindhearted soul,” she agreed. “Now, Miss Meredith, you can have meals with us. Mr. Davis will tell you the times, and there’s a laundry just three doors down run by Mr. Lo.”

Matt stifled a chuckle. “I’ll show her where it is,” he promised.

“Let me get the key and I’ll take you to your room, Miss Meredith. It has a very nice view of the city.”

She went off, mumbling to herself, and Tess lifted both brows as she looked up at Matt. “And what was so amusing about the laundry?”

“Don’t you remember? Whites used to call us Mr. Lo.”

She frowned.

He made an exasperated sound. “Lo, the poor Indian…?”

She laughed. “Oh, good heavens. I’d forgotten our jokes about that.”

“I haven’t,” he murmured. “You and I joked. Everywhere else being called Mr. Lo or ‘John’ most of my life was not funny.”

“Well, you’re anything but a poor Indian now,” she said pointedly, her gaze going over his rich paisley vest in shades of magenta and the dark gray suit and white shirt he was wearing with it. Even his shoes were expensive, handmade. For feet that size, she thought wickedly, they’d have to be handmade! She searched his dark eyes with a smile in her own. “You look filthy rich to me!” she whispered.