patient. It never came. Puzzled, trembling, she tried to read it more carefully, but tears kept blinding her to the words.
He was leaving her. He had already left. He was on the seven o'clock train to Cincinnati. He would write whenever he got wherever he was going. He would keep in touch. If there was a child, he wanted to know about it, because he wouldn't let any child of his go without a father. But he wanted her to have her house and her freedom and her life back just the way it had been before he had come into it. He wanted her to be happy, and he would only cause her grief and trouble.
It was just like Daniel. She could hear him speak every word. He was very eloquent, astonishingly sincere, and heartbreakingly honest. He was also the biggest damned cad she'd ever had the misfortune to run into, and she would make him pay for this.
Georgina didn't even bother looking for the mortgage he had assured her was in her desk drawer. Damn the mortgage. Damn the house. Damn all damned Mulloneys. He wasn't doing to this to her. He had played the hero for the very last time. This time, she was going to shoot him down.
Raging inwardly, Georgina leapt from the bed and began jerking on whatever clothing came to hand. It was the middle of the night. The last train had left with Daniel on it. But she knew how to find him. She had one ace up her sleeve that he obviously didn't believe she would play. He was about to learn differently.
She would telegraph Tyler and Evie.
* * *
Daniel watched the brief show of lights as some unnamed town flashed by. He had passed the last stop between Cutlerville and Cincinnati. There would be no turning back.
He tried to look ahead, to plan a future that seemed suddenly empty. He didn't think he would go back to Natchez right away. Tyler and Evie would be full of questions, and they wouldn't be pleasant ones. Perhaps he would go to the Despatch in St. Louis. Pulitzer had been a good teacher.
Or he could go to Texas and find a town that didn't have a paper. He wouldn't get rich, but he could make a comfortable living. He'd find some pleasant little girl who would make a good wife and wouldn't require rescuing and they could settle down and have twins or something. He'd like to have roses in the front yard and a picket fence. His needs really were very few. Surely he could acquire these basic desires.
Or he could risk it all and have Georgina.
The train slowed to make a long curve. To his surprise, Daniel found himself putting on his hat and picking up his bag. Without a thought to what he was doing, he meandered down the aisle past the sleeping passengers, walking faster the closer the train came into the curve. He vas practically running before the train could pick up speed on the other side.
Dashing out the car door, Daniel grabbed the pole on the outside, threw his bag into a corn field, and leapt into the dark of night.
A man in a stained and crumpled Stetson watched him go, then pulled his hat farther over his eyes and smiled as he settled more comfortably into his seat. The boy had gumption, he'd say that much for him.
Chapter 35
The pounding on the front door echoed the pounding behind her eyes as Georgina jerked her hair tightly into a knot and stabbed another pin into it. She had just spent the most wretched night of her life, and she didn't need this infernal pounding. Maybe she ought to find one of her mother's bottles of laudanum.
She couldn't expect Evie and Tyler to respond to a telegram sent in the middle of the night. She should have waited until morning. But she couldn't just sit here and do nothing. If she had any idea at all which train Daniel had taken after he reached Cincinnati, she would be on the next train out. But she didn't, so she couldn't. Not until she'd heard from the Monteignes.
A servant discreetly tapped on her door. "Mr. Peter Mulloney to see you, ma'am."
Peter? At this hour? Georgina glanced at the mantel clock. She didn't think Peter even knew what the sun looked like at this hour.
She nodded her head in dismissal. "I'll be down in a minute."
It would only take a minute to