Free Willow: A Novel (No Series) by Linda Lael Miller

dirt-smudged cheeks crimson. To think she’d let that man take such unconscionable liberties with her person, to bare her breasts, to know her in ways only a husband should. Probably her surrender, such as it was, was just another joke to him.
    Like their “wedding” two years before, in California.
    Quickly, her father was there, drawing her into his strong arms, holding her. “I’ll have this farce of a marriage annulled, Willow,” he promised earnestly, “if you can just tell me that-that you and Gideon haven’t . . .”
    Willow wept harder, overcome by this second betrayal of Gideon’s, and her father took this for an admission that the marriage had been consummated.
    Still, he was patient. “There’s no annulment, then,” Devlin said bleakly. “I’ll make up the papers and we’ll go to the territorial legislature—”
    Willow broke away from her father, ran sobbing into the house, and locked herself in her bedroom. She wanted more than anything in the world to be free of Gideon Marshall, but she also wanted to be his wife. God help her, she wanted more—much more—of the heated ecstasy that she had known with him that morning. Instinctively, she knew that she would never, in all her life, love another man as she loved Gideon, never feelsuch brutal, sweeping satisfaction unless it was he who gave it.
    The knowledge filled Willow Gallagher with despair.
    *   *   *
    Gideon had lain on his lumpy hotel room bed all day long, staring up at the ceiling and wishing that he’d never been born. Though he considered it time and time again, he could not bring himself to find a whore and end the torture.
    Finally, though, as the sun began to set, he rose from the bed, washed, and brushed his hair. There was still time to send the wire the board of directors was waiting for, and then he’d go to one of Virginia City’s dozen saloons and get blind drunk.
    Five minutes later, he entered the Western Union office and, feeling like Judas reincarnated, dictated the message that had to be sent:
    HAVE FOUND THE MEANS TO LOCATE GALLAGHER. G.M.
    It was that means, that whiskey-eyed, passionate means, that haunted Gideon as he left Western Union and entered the noisy, well-lighted saloon directly across the street. Gideon Marshall hadn’t cried since he was four years old; now, at thirty-one, it was all he could do to keep from it.
    *   *   *
    Wielding her sponge, Maria scrubbed Willow’s back with a ferocity born of love.
    Willow, her single braid wound into a coronet on top of her aching head, sat stolidly in the ornate tub in the special bathing chamber just off the kitchen, enduring. “I want to die,” she said distractedly.
    Maria spared her the lecture such a remark invited. “Pooh,” she said, scrubbing harder. “You will live to be a hundred.”
    And every minute of it loving a man who would sell out my brother , mourned Willow in silence.
    Finished scouring Willow’s back, Maria deftly undid the thick golden braid and began the process of shampooing by reaching for an enamel pitcher and dunking it into the tub. “You must look especially pretty tonight,” she said brightly.
    Willow groaned. “Why? I’m staying in my room from now until three years after the Second Coming.”
    Maria shook her head, overlooking the irreverent remark, for reasons of her own. “Sí,” she agreed. “The señorita would expect a Third Coming, just for her.”
    Willow was silent until after she had left the bathtub, long minutes and much scrubbing and rinsing later. She dried herself with a thick towel and took modest refuge in a flannel wrapper. “Why did you say I would have to look pretty tonight, Maria?”
    “You are not the only one who suffers. Your father, he is wearing his heart in his eyes. He, too, is afraid and worried. If you do not go down to dinner and behave like a lady, he will have only the señora to talk to. Would you wish this on a man who has been so good to you?”
    Willow sighed. “I wouldn’t