James didn’t argue. “What do I tell them?”
Will gave him a blank look.
“What do I tell my wife and girls? Elizabeth and the Treasures are very fond of you, Will. They’re bound to notice the empty chair at the breakfast table and wonder where you’ve gone and when you’re coming back.”
“Tell them I love them and that I’ve gone home to visit my father,” he said.
“Hong Kong? You can’t be serious.” The thought of returning to Hong Kong for any reason—even to visit his mother and father, was anathema to James.
“I am,” Will admitted. “My sisters have married and moved on. They have husbands and children. My father’s been alone since Mother died, and he isn’t getting any younger or stronger. It’s time I played the prodigal son and returned to the fold to help him.”
“You’re no more suited to the life of a missionary than I am.”
“Maybe not,” Will agreed, “but it’s a life I know and a place where I can be of service and where I can start over.”
“I can’t see you following in your father’s footsteps. I don’t mean this as an insult, but ministering to the poor and spreading the gospel is a waste of your education and your talents.”
“I don’t need to minister to the poor or preach the gospel to be of service. The missions need money, and I’m quite good at making it and raising it.”
“Yes, you are, and that’s why you’re vital to Craig Capital.”
“Jamie, my mind’s made up.”
“What about our ventures? With you gone, who is going to take over the special project we’ve worked so hard to put together?” James glared at him across the oak desk. “Or are you prepared to walk away and abandon that as well?”
“No.” Will bit out the admission. “I’m not prepared to abandon our special project.” Their project was something he and Jamie had dreamed up together. It had nothing to do with Craig Capital, but would be funded by the two of them. Will had agreed to fund the San Francisco part of the operation, while James and Elizabeth handled the Coryville and northern California operation. “But neither am I prepared to stay here and rain havoc on our friendship.” He glared back at James. “I recommend Jack O’Brien take over the project. He’s my assistant. He knows the plan. That will clear the way for Peter Malcolm to assume the role of head of operations in the San Francisco office. Jack is more than able to take over the special project in my absence. He’s the one I had in mind and the man best suited for the job.”
James snorted in disgust.
“What have you got against Jack O’Brien?”
“I don’t have anything against Jack. I like Jack, but he’s not the man best suited for the job. You are.” James held up a hand to forestall him when Will would have protested. “Hear me out. I need a man I can trust implicitly.”
It was Will’s turn to snort in disgust. “You trust the man who just admitted he’s afraid of falling in love with your wife?”
“Yeah, Will, I do,” James told him. “I trust you implicitly. I trusted you with my first wife and I trust you even more with my second one.”
“Then you’re a better man than I am, because I don’t trust myself.”
“You should,” James said. “Because you’re as trustworthy and honorable as the day is long. So you loved my wife. I was away on business half our married life. Did you act on those feelings? Did you seduce her? Or allow her to seduce you?” He stared at Will. “Did you take her into your bed, Will?”
“No. Of course not!”
“Why didn’t you?” James asked. “You loved her. You wanted her, and you had every opportunity.”
“Because she was your wife, Jamie. And I may make a habit of falling in love with them, but I don’t make a habit of seducing other men’s wives. Especially when the woman I love happens to be in love with my closest friend.”
“Then what the devil has changed?” James was practically shouting, his blue eyes shooting sparks at him. “So you’re afraid of falling in love with Elizabeth. . . . I was scared spitless at the idea of falling in love with her—of falling in love with anyone again—and I did it anyway.”
“Dammit, Jamie, you don’t understand!”
“What? That it hurts? That it hurts for you to be around us? I understand pain, Will. I watched you struggle with your feelings for Mei Ling for years. Did you think I was blind to the pain you were feeling? Did you think I didn’t feel guilty because she was sent to me instead of to you? Did you think I enjoyed seeing you want what I had, then struggle with guilt for being human and feeling a bit of envy from time to time? Did you think I enjoyed seeing the pain in your eyes when I couldn’t bring myself to look at her or forgive her when I knew she needed it so desperately? When I knew it was killing her? Killing you? Killing all of us?” James sucked in a ragged breath. “Open your eyes, Will, because what you’re feeling is double-edged. It cuts both ways. I understand your need to get away. I understand your need to do penance, but you don’t need to sail halfway around the world again for that,” James told him. “If it’s distance you need from me and Elizabeth, why not work from the city instead of Coryville? Use the San Francisco office. Put whoever you want in charge of day-to-day operations and oversee him along with our new enterprise. I can’t do it. I’ve got my hands full here and have no desire to travel back and forth to the city to check on Jack or Pete Malcolm or anyone else.”
“All right.” Will’s sudden capitulation came as a shock—to him and to Jamie.
“All right?” James required confirmation.
“All right, Jamie.” Will couldn’t keep a note of self-disgust out of his voice. The truth was that he didn’t want to abandon their venture to go to Hong Kong. That city held as many painful memories for Will as it did for James, and although he loved his father, ministering to the man’s flock held no particular appeal for him either. “I’ll go to San Francisco. I’ll assume responsibility for the special project we’re about to launch and the Craig Capital office. And I’ll run it as I see fit, with no argument or interference from you.”
James laughed. “I can’t promise not to argue,” he admitted. “But I’ll draw up papers transferring the ownership of the San Francisco operation to you. You’ll get no interference from me.” He reached out and offered Will his hand. “Fair enough?”
Will shook the hand Jamie offered. “Fair enough.”
Chapter Two
“A good cause makes a stout heart and a strong arm.”
—PROVERB
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
FEBRUARY 6, 1875
Will Keegan opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling of his bedroom in the Silken Angel Saloon. His head ached from the pall of bluish smoke that lingered in the saloon, produced by the hundreds of cigars and cigarettes his customers smoked each night. The half bottle of brandy and the pot of coffee he’d drunk, the loud conversation, and the music from the slightly out-of-tune piano also contributed to the pounding behind his eyes.
He’d dreamed the dream again. Dreamed that he was back in Hong Kong with Mei Ling, whose features blurred, merging once again with Elizabeth’s. Will groaned.
The tinny drone of a piano, the beat of the drums, and the cacophony of dozens of voices speaking different dialects of Chinese, including the only two he could understand—Cantonese and Mandarin—drifted up from the first floor of the saloon and through the open window from Dupont Street. The Silken Angel occupied a large lot at the corner of Washington and Dupont. It was the last saloon in the Occidental section of town between Jackson Square and the entrance to Chinatown.
He had chosen the lot and built the building for just that reason. A saloon was the perfect front for the special project. The construction of any other sort of building might have raised suspicions and alerted the tongs, but no one gave another San Francisco drinking establishment a second thought.
Will squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth against the splintering pain in his brain. It was early. The soft l
ight of the Saturday morning barely penetrated the heavy fog, but the clouds of moisture hanging over the city did little to muffle the noise. He had lived here for nearly four months and worked longer, later hours than he’d ever worked in his life, but he couldn’t seem to get used to the constant din. Coryville and the chaos that was breakfast with James and Elizabeth and the Treasures was an oasis of blessed silence compared to this. The mining camps in the High Sierras were quieter than this. And it would only get worse.
Today marked the beginning of the Chinese lunar year. In a few hours Dupont Street and the streets along the waterfront would be filled with more discordant sounds—parades, fireworks, bells and horns, bamboo flutes, cymbals, drums, including the hundreds of toy bolang gu, the pellet or rattle drums sold by street vendors, as well as the squeals of live pigs that would be paraded through the narrow city streets as the residents of Chinatown welcomed another Year of the Pig.
As a boy in Hong Kong, he had loved the pageantry of the dragon parades and the noise of Chinese New Year, but as a man suffering from a painful head and too little sleep, he found it another challenge to overcome. But it was early yet, and Will hoped that a mug of the strong, scorching-hot brew that passed for coffee and a heaping spoonful of willow bark elixir would ease his head enough to allow him to grab another hour or two of sleep despite the drum banging and the cymbal crashing and the amazingly clear mezzo-soprano voice growing closer and louder by the minute.
“‘Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness. Sowing in the noontime and the dewy eve . . .’”
Recognizing the anthem, Will rolled to his side, reached over, grasped the window sash, and shoved the window down to block the sound of the Salvationist crusading for women’s suffrage or temperance or some other cause. He’d heard hundreds, perhaps thousands of hymns, and had heard the psalms quoted and preached an equal number of times over the course of his life. Some hymns he liked, some he didn’t, but Will had never heard this one until he’d come to live in the city. He hadn’t known anyone had put the psalm to music. Now he knew every word and note of the song, the anthem of every Salvationist in San Francisco. It grated on his nerves like no other.
Closing the window silenced the tinny piano, but not the singing.
It kept coming . . . growing closer and louder. . . .
“Not again.” Will sat up, raked his fingers through his hair, grabbed the silk dressing gown at the foot of his bed, flipped the bedcovers aside, and stepped into his boots.
She was inside the building. Inside his saloon . . .
Will didn’t know who had let the crusader slip through the doors of the Silken Angel, but there would be hell to pay when he identified the culprit.
He didn’t mind religious fervor. He’d grown up with missionaries and had been surrounded by it. His father was minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Hong Kong, his mother had preached the gospel according to John Knox on her deathbed, but a little religious fervor went a long way, and Will was rapidly reaching the end of his patience.
The construction of the Silken Angel Saloon had become a clarion call for every follower of William Booth’s philosophy in San Francisco—and their numbers seemed to be multiplying daily. A year ago, you could count the San Francisco Salvationists on one hand, but the past few months had brought boatloads—all looking to save the city—particularly the Barbary Coast—from itself and eternal damnation.
Will didn’t object to the goal, but he certainly objected to the methods. Between visits from the Salvationists and the Women’s Suffrage and Temperance League, he’d had to replace three bar mirrors, two plate-glass storefronts, a case of whiskey, two tables, and half a dozen chairs. All of that in addition to the breakage caused by the usual assortment of rowdy customers.
He’d nearly reached the bottom of the stairs and was in the midst of shoving his arms into the sleeves of his dressing gown when the soprano reached the refrain.
“‘Bringing in the sheaves. Bringing in the sheaves. We shall come rejoicing, bring—’”
He hurried down the remainder of the stairs and collided with the figure standing at the foot of them. The girl looked up, widening her eyes in surprise at the force of the impact. He recognized the look of astonishment and fear as her ugly black boots lost purchase on the polished oak floor and she wobbled backward.
Reacting instinctively, he reached out, grabbed the girl around the waist, and hauled her against his chest. The air left her lungs in a whoosh of warm breath.
“Oh!” came her muffled exclamation. Her hat had been knocked askew and her face was buried in the hair on his chest, revealed by his open robe.
Will held her fast until he was certain she was in no danger of falling, then set her down on the floor and released his hold.
She sucked in a breath.
“Please . . .” Will held up his hand. “Don’t sing anymore.”
A startled look crossed her face. “I wasn’t going to sing.”
“Thank God,” he murmured beneath his breath.
“I was going to scream.” She didn’t look up, but continued to stare at his bare chest as if mesmerized by the sight.
Staring down at the top of her head, Will pulled the silk edges of his robe together and knotted the belt. “Don’t do that either.”
“I most certainly will!” she warned, still staring at the bit of flesh left exposed by the wide lapels of his dressing gown, a frown marring the area between her eyebrows. “If the situation warrants it.”
“It won’t,” he muttered. “As long as you don’t sing.”
She looked up at him then, her gaze narrowing in a warning that matched her frown. “What’s wrong with my singing voice? I’m told it’s quite pleasant. And how dare you manhandle me this way?”
Her eyes were blue. Cornflower blue fringed by thick dark lashes and framed by eyebrows that were a dark reddish brown. A tiny sprinkling of lighter reddish-gold freckles dotted her nose. Her hair, beneath her awful military-gray bonnet, matched her eyebrows. “Would you rather I allowed you to tumble to the floor?”
“No. Of course not,” she replied. “I thank you for saving me from that, but if you hadn’t come charging half-clothed down the staircase as if the building were on fire, I wouldn’t have been taken unawares or thrown off balance in the first place.”
“You’re blaming me?” Will was taken aback by her audacity. He stood nearly three inches over six feet tall in his bare feet and was solidly built, while the top of her head barely reached his chest despite the two-inch heels on her boots. She was a tiny, auburn-haired spitfire of a girl standing toe-to-toe with a man practically twice her size.
A man whose hands, he recalled, were large enough to span her waist.
Yet she refused to be intimidated.
“Who else is there to blame?” she countered, glaring up at him. “You charged into me.”
“That’s because I didn’t expect to find you standing at the bottom of my stairs,” he told her. “I thought you’d be wreaking havoc in the saloon.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what all you Salvationists and Women’s Suffrage and Temperance women do.” He looked down at her, searching for an umbrella or parasol—the weapon of choice of nearly all the female crusaders. “You wreak havoc on private property. You sing at the top of your lungs while you smash bottles of liquor and mirrors and plate-glass windows.”
“I’ve never smashed anything in my life!” She was indignant at the very idea.
He gave her a wry look. “You must be new to the soul-saving business.”
“I’ve been a member of the Salvationists for nearly three months.”
“I don’t recall seeing you before. Who sent you to the Silken Angel?”
“No one sent me,” she told him. “I came on my own.”
Will snorted in derision. “How long have you been in San Francisco?”
“Two days.”
He snorted again. “In town two days and you manage to find your
way from Mission Street to my establishment.” He looked down at her. “I don’t believe it.”
“It isn’t that difficult,” she told him. “The Salvationists warned us about Sydney Town and the Barbary Coast on the journey and explained that most of San Francisco’s disreputable establishments are located near the waterfront. I came by ship. I disembarked along the waterfront. Returning to it was simply a matter of going back the way I came.”
She was fairly boasting of her ability to navigate a strange and often dangerous city on her own, and Will was impressed in spite of himself. “Who the devil are you?”
She stiffened her spine and drew herself up to her full height. “I’m Julia Jane Parham. Who the dev—” She caught herself before she uttered the oath, took a deep breath, and regrouped. “Who are you?”
Will bit the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning from ear to ear as the little spitfire’s temper got the best of her. “William Burke Keegan,” he answered, offering her his hand to shake. “My friends call me Will.”
Julie slipped her gloved hand into his much larger one. The fabric of her glove did nothing to dampen the jolt of electricity that sparked when she touched him. Lifting her chin a notch higher, she spoke in her best proper governess voice. “Mr. Keegan.”
He gave a wry shake of his head. “So that’s how it’s going to be.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she replied in the same tone of voice.
“You know exactly what I mean, Miss Parham.” Will was astonished at his uncharacteristic rudeness. He had been brought up to be a gentleman and had always exhibited gentlemanly behavior and extended ladies every courtesy, but something about Miss Julia Jane Parham and her ugly gray Salvationist uniform and equally atrocious black boots set his teeth on edge.
“I most certainly do not!”
“I meant that we both know where we stand.” Will bent at the waist and retrieved her tambourine.