Free Memory's Embrace by Linda Lael Miller Page A

was rubbing her upper arms with both hands in an attempt to keep warm. “She was an actress, in St. Louis. She was also the mistress of a man named Asa Thatcher, a lawyer. Very successful.” She stopped and her face hardened; Keith saw, even in the relative darkness, a flash of rancor in her wonderful green-brown eyes. “One day, Mr. Thatcher—yes, if you’re wondering, he was my father—decided that he didn’t want to keep Mother and me anymore. He sent people to evict us from our house, and we came out here because we didn’t have anywhere else to go.
    “Mama was young and pretty, and she could have gone on being an actress, found a husband or at least another lover, but she didn’t. She just faded and fadeduntil one day Aunt Derora and I had to take her to P-Portland and put her in a hospital.”
    Keith ached, thinking of his own bright, beautiful mother, with her wicked wit and her outrageous political and moral opinions. He tried to imagine Katherine Corbin in an asylum and failed completely. “She’s there still?” he asked, in a raspy whisper.
    Tess swallowed visibly and nodded. She was shivering now, and Keith went to the rear of the wagon, got out a suit coat for her to wear. The way she looked with that oversized and obviously masculine garment draped over her shoulders made him ache inside.
    She didn’t say that she had risked her mother’s welfare to help him, but, then, she didn’t have to. Again he considered driving Tess to the telegraph office himself and then just sitting back and waiting for one or both of his older brothers to show up. And when they did—
    But he didn’t take to the idea; it was like a chess game, this situation. And if he let Adam and Jeff find him, he would be moving his king into check, so to speak. Letting them win. The fact that it had cost them five thousand dollars to do it would be of no comfort at all; that was pocket money to them. And even if he smashed their arrogant, aristocratic Corbin noses—a prospect he relished—they would still have found their little lost brother. It was that which rankled, when all was said and done.
    And there was this moon-nymph. She had sacrificed practically all there was to sacrifice, in an effort to help him. How could he send her back to face her aunt’s wrath and still live with his conscience?
    Besides, if he were to be honest with himself—and he tried to be—Keith had to admit that he found the prospect of traveling with Tess more than appealing. Since leaving the boardinghouse, in fact, he’d done little but brood about her. And want her.
    Did she know what would happen if they were alone together, on the road? Did she sense how badly he wanted her?
    “Will you take me with you or not?” she demanded, her chin still up, her voice shaky.
    Keith reminded himself that Tess believed in free love, that she even purported to practice it. She had given herself to men before him, and she would give herself to men after him, no doubt. So why shouldn’t he avail himself to the pleasures her lush body promised?
    Mingled with the desire that raged within him like an inferno was a cold, bitter anger stemming from the knowledge that he would be neither the first nor the last man to possess her.
    “I’ll take you to Portland,” he found himself saying. “I’ve got to go there for supplies anyway.”
    Color pooled in her cheeks and then drained away, and her eyes widened. “My camera!” she breathed. “I left my camera in my room—”
    “We’ll go back for it, then,” Keith offered, to his own amazement, and then he was putting that ridiculous bicycle of hers into the back of the wagon, lifting her into the seat.
    “But my aunt—”
    “It’s late. She’s probably asleep. You can get yourcamera and whatever else you want and then we’ll leave.”
    Portland. Was he crazy? Why had he offered to take her to Portland, of all places? Showing himself there was almost as foolhardy as turning up in Seattle or Port