Free Fletcher's Woman by Linda Lael Miller Page B

forward the proceeds to you.”
    Rachel was at once appalled and touched. “I couldn’t,” she whispered.
    â€œBut you will,” insisted her mother. “Rachel, you are a woman now, not a little girl. It is time you lived a decent, settled life.”
    Rachel could not absorb the things she was hearing. “You’re dying, aren’t you?” she asked at last.
    Rebecca seemed fitful now; she was beginning to writhe from the pain she had tried so hard to hide. “That’s what Griffin tells me, and it can’t happen too soon, as far as I’m concerned.”
    Tears slipped, unnoticed, down Rachel’s cheeks. She forgot her resentment and pain, forgot that this woman ran a notorious brothel. Rebecca was her mother, and she loved her.
    â€œCome here, Child,” Rebecca said, reaching out for one of Rachel’s hands, drawing her into an embrace.
    Rachel allowed herself to be held, and when the spate of weeping had passed, she dried her face, straightened her impossible dress, and went downstairs in search of Dr. Fletcher.
    Rebecca had weakened significantly during Rachel’s brief absence, and she seemed almost to welcome the decline. Her eyes strayed from Rachel’s face only once, when she heard the doctor opening his medical bag.
    She shook her head as he drew out a vial and a syringe. “No, Griffin. I want every moment—every moment.”
    Griffin dropped the items back into his bag without speaking and went to stand at a far window, looking out.
    A last burst of fiery light came into Rebecca’s hollow eyes as she clutched both Rachel’s hands in her own. “You must go—promise me you’ll go. There’s a man, a terrible man—”
    Rachel nodded, unable to speak.
    Just minutes later, Rebecca McKinnon died.

Chapter Six
    Rachel was devastated. She stood, trembling, in a shadowed comer of her mother’s room as Dr. Fletcher closed Rebecca’s staring eyes and covered her face with the bedsheet.
    A peculiar silence filled the room for a long time; muted sunshine crept across the bare floor, only to be blotted out again by some dark, distant cloud.
    â€œI’m sorry,” the doctor muttered, as Rachel dried her eyes and raised her quivering chin.
    But Rachel was hearing another voice, her mother’s. “There’s a man, a terrible man—”
    She remembered the angry, almost hateful way Rebecca had greeted Dr. Fletcher, the mean things he’d said and done from the first moment she’d met him. Perhaps the man of her mother’s warnings was this one.
    But Rachel couldn’t be certain; in spite of outward appearance, she had sensed a sort of gruff, irreverent affection between the two of them. And there was, at the moment, no room inside her for any emotion other than the boundless, tearing grief she was feeling. I lost you twice, she raged inwardly, gazing at the thin form lying so still beneath the bedclothes.
    Rachel grappled with the knowledge that there was no shining hope to cling to now, no chance that Rebecca would reappear in her life, repentant and prepared to be her mother again. Somehow, she felt even more bereft than she had at seven years of age, and more alone, too.
    Griffin knew that Becky’s death was a mercy, but still, he mourned her. He would miss her boundless friendship, her blunt honesty, her magnificent wit.
    Yet he would have laughed aloud, had it not been for the shattered girl huddling in a corner. Damn it, Becky, he thought. You managed it after all, didn’t you? You’re gone and Ezra is on the mountain and I’m stuck with the kid!
    Griffin allowed himself a heavy, audible sigh. He reviewed the facts in his mind and came up with the same disturbing result every time: he could not leave Rachel there, at the brothel; places like that had a way of absorbing the bewildered and making them their own. Of course, she couldn’t be dropped off at Tent Town and