Because he and Jack both knew it was going to hurt like hell if the doctor had to set it.
Will turned to Jack. “I’m going to need your help. Is there anybody else we can send for Dr. Stone? Luis? Ben?”
Jack shook his head. “Nobody here except the poker players. It will have to be one of us.”
“I’m not leaving her.” Will was firm.
“Then it will have to be me,” Jack said. “How are we going to explain a young lady being here in your room? Besides the obvious?”
“I don’t want the obvious,” Will said. “We have her reputation to consider.” He gave the question a moment’s consideration. “Any suggestions?”
“Nobody has to know who she is or that she came to the Silken Angel dressed like that,” Jack said. “If we get her out of her Chinese garb we can say we found her and create a fiction to support it.”
“We could leave her in her Chinese garb and say we found her,” Will pointed out. “Without the fiction.”
“A white girl dressed like a Chinese peasant? With a British accent to boot? Care to explain that one?”
“No.” Will was adamant. “Either way, the doctor is sure to think she’s a saloon girl. Especially with the beating she’s taken. I just hope he doesn’t think I’m capable of this. It would make our continued association difficult.”
“He knows better,” Jack replied. “And the fiction is better than him knowing who she really is.”
Will turned to Julie. “Agreed?”
He didn’t think she would answer, but she finally did. “Agreed.”
“All right, Jack, let’s finish converting this Chinese peasant into British aristocracy.” He looked at her.
“I’m sure that is going to be more like trying to turn Quasimodo into Esmeralda,” Julie murmured sotto voce.
“What’s that?” Will smiled, the single dimple in his cheek finally making a return appearance.
“You heard me.”
“So I did,” Will agreed. “Brace yourself; I’m afraid this is going to hurt. . . .”
“Everything hurts.”
“I’ll do what I can to minimize the pain.”
Julie bit her already bitten lip.
Jack passed Will the folded flannel face cloth.
Will placed it against Julie’s lips. “Bite on this,” he urged as he carefully worked her tunic over her head and down her arms, taking special care not to touch her shoulder or jostle her injured wrist. “I’m going to have to cut this off,” he told her, staring down at her very pretty corset embroidered with tiny rosebuds. And stained with blood splotches.
“You wear a corset under your peasant garb?”
Julie closed her eyes. “Of course not. I wore binding because Chinese peasant girls don’t wear corsets.”
“You’re dressed as a Chinese peasant girl and you’re wearing a corset.”
“For the same reason you’re cutting it off. I was wearing my undergarments when I was attacked. The wound in my shoulder prevented me from unlacing,” she explained. “I used my binding to stanch the blood. . . . And I wore my corset because I couldn’t go without anything. . . . But corsets p—” Realizing she was having a conversation about her intimate apparel with a man, she abruptly broke it off.
But she’d provoked Will’s curiosity. “Corsets what?”
She heaved a weary sigh. “Push up and display. I needed the opposite in my peasant costume in order to make me look like a boy.”
Will stared down at her, and Julie swore the temperature in the room rose a few degrees. “I hate to be the one to disappoint you, Julia Jane,” he told her, “but nothing is ever going to make you look like a boy.”
She tried to frown and failed. “It does when I bind them—when I pull the binding tight enough. But I couldn’t do it by myself with my wound—” She broke off again.
“Or Quasimodo,” he added, in a husky voice.
Heat flared between them as Julie stared up at him.
“Turn your back, Jack,” Will ordered.
Jack let out a good-natured groan, but he turned his back without argument or further protest.
“Close your eyes,” Julie demanded, her whisper a bit louder.
“I can’t close my eyes,” Will protested. “If I’m going to cut your corset off and check your wound, I need to see what I’m doing.”
“You promised,” she reminded him.
Jack snorted. “Nice try. But she’s got you there, boyo.”
Will kept his eyes open while he sliced her corset off, but closed them and worked by feel, to pull it away from her flesh. He immediately discovered that was an erotic torture of its own. His eyes were closed and he couldn’t see the flesh he was uncovering, but his brain supplied an assortment of images of breasts—stark white or cream-colored or slightly darker hued and showered with freckles like gold dust, and crowned with strawberry-colored or pink-tipped or dusky rose areolas and nipples. He did his best to control it, but each brush of his fingers against her warm, soft skin brought a fresh image. Will clenched his jaw against the almost overwhelming urge to press his palms against her breasts as he ran the flannel over her, bathing her, washing the blood away from her wound. He ached to feel the weight of her breasts and run the pads of his thumbs across the sensitive tips. He smelled the scent of her peach soap. It clung to her skin and the muslin of her corset, and his body, guided by his heightened sense of smell and feel and his too-vivid imagination, reacted in the predictable manner. Will sucked a breath in between clenched teeth, suffering the tortures of the damned playing blindman’s buff with Julia Jane Parham’s delectable flesh. He ached to taste her. All of her. Every part of her.
Will heard rustling sounds and tiny whimpers, felt the mattress give slightly, and although he knew the whimpers indicated pain, his imagination painted other images.
“You can open your eyes now,” she said.
Will opened them to find Julie primly clutching her discarded tunic against her chest, covering the interesting bits. She was sitting where he’d propped her, against his pillows and on top of the quilted coverlet and sheets on his bed. He could see the beginnings of a large bruise forming on her left shoulder where the edges of her tunic failed to cover everything. Leaning closer, Will reached under the ends of her shirt and carefully traced the contours of the large mark where her blood was seeping into the tissue.
Julie cried out at his touch.
Recognizing her distress call, Jack turned around to see what was wrong and watched as Will spied the contusion forming on her right shoulder. She flinched when he touched that one, but she didn’t cry out. He turned his attention back to her left side. “What happened here?”
“I was trying to get away,” she said “He grabbed me and threw me against the bed.”
Will’s eyebrows knitted together and his face seemed to darken with fury. “Your ribs are bruised, but I don’t think he cracked any,” he told her. “Did you get a look at him at all?”
Julie shook her head, She was weary. The rush of terror that had kept her pain at bay was gone, and her strength had all but disappeared. “No.”
“Any impressions?” Jack asked.
“Big. Strong. Tall,” she remembered. “Not as tall as Will or you, but tall. He wore white gloves. And something on his coat cut me. A button, maybe. His breathing was labored. I hit him with the tin of chocolates and kicked him in the knee. I think he was limping when he left the hotel.”
“Policemen wear white gloves,” Jack commented.
“And sharp-edged badges,” Will added.
“Badges that might produce a cut like that one above her eye,” Jack continued, “if she was struggling and he held her against it.”
“That narrows the list of suspects,” Will remarked wryly as he untied the laces of her ugly missionary boots and pulled them off her feet, along with her plain white stockings and beautifully embroidered garters. He dropped her shoes and stockings on the floor beside his bed and turned his attention to the draw
string of her trousers. “Just how many bribable policemen are there in San Francisco?”
“I’ve no idea, but we know Madam Harpy paid one,” Jack reminded him. “One. Singular.”
“We know she said she paid a policeman,” Will corrected. “She could have paid a dozen. All we need to do is find one with a bruised face, wearing white gloves and walking with a limp.” Will couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice. He undid the knot at her waist, and gestured for Jack to lift her up. “Close your eyes, Jack.”
“After you, my friend,” Jack retorted, lifting her hips off the bed high enough to allow Will to take off her trousers with a minimum risk of exposure.
“Jack.” Will bit out his friend’s name, carefully enunciating it.
Jack obeyed.
“You, too,” Julie demanded. He did as she bade and squeezed his eyes shut, but not before he caught sight of the fact that there was nothing beneath her trousers except Julie.
Clutching her tunic to her chest with her bad arm, Julie did her best to cover the thatch of copper-colored curls decorating the vee at the juncture of her thighs by gripping the opposite edge of the quilt in her other hand, and tugging it over her womanly parts.
Will bit back a groan. As if having images of her naked breasts in his mind weren’t enough, he now had a vivid mental picture of the enticing red curls hiding the entrance to paradise. He wanted to cover her hand with his and guide her fingers to the secret place within. He wanted to watch her pleasure herself, to teach her the motion if she didn’t know how, and then he wanted to pleasure her with his hand and his mouth and tongue before burying himself to the hilt inside her warm, welcoming sheath and making hot, slow, tender love with her.
Tamping down the raging libido, Will forced himself to remember that his needs were secondary to hers, and that his erotic fantasy was a private flight of the imagination of which she was entirely unaware. And she was no doubt innocent of the sexual congress that took place between men and women. Although how she could remain innocent of the intimacies in which men and women indulged while navigating the dark underbelly of Chinatown was a mystery worth investigating. But she’d blushed as she pulled at the quilt, and in his experience that was a sure sign the young lady lacked practical knowledge of the ways of the sexes.
And no matter how Julia Jane felt about engaging in a little sexual exploration with him, she was in no condition to do so. Right now, she needed the attentions of a qualified physician more than she needed the burden of a fully aroused saloon owner sniffing at her skirts.
Will dropped her trousers on her lap, then pulled the covers from beneath her. Julie held on to her corner of the quilt and her modesty.
“You can put her down, Jack.”
Jack placed Julie on the bottom sheet, and Will quickly flipped the bedclothes over her bare legs.
She settled back against the pillows with a heavy sigh.
Will opened his eyes. Julie was still clutching her tunic to her chest. “Have you any idea where we can get a ladies’ nightgown?” he asked Jack.
Jack opened his eyes and lifted an eyebrow in query. “At a dressmaker’s,” he answered. “But they won’t open until ten.”
“We can’t wait that long,” Will said. “You’ve got to summon the doctor before the shops open. She’s in pain.”
“Then we’ll have to improvise,” Jack replied. “Have you a nightshirt?”
Will snorted in disgust. “Do I look like the sort of man who wears a nightshirt to bed?”
“No,” Jack conceded. “And neither do I.”
“I do wear dress shirts every night in the saloon,” Will remembered. “Silk dress shirts long enough to cover the essentials and preserve her modesty.” Walking over to his armoire, Will opened a drawer and took out a silk shirt, then returned to the bed, unbuttoned the top two buttons, and dropped it over Julie’s head. He straightened it as best he could without jostling her and gently turned the cuffs and rolled up the sleeves.
Julie sagged against the pillows, the last of her energy spent.
“She’s ready,” Will pronounced before turning to Jack. “Go get the doctor.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Wisdom, compassion, and courage are the three universally recognized moral qualities of men.”
—CONFUCIUS, 551–479 B.C.
Dr. Galen Stone, a rather spare, stoop-shouldered man, world-weary and older than his years, confirmed much of Will’s layman diagnosis as he examined the girl Will Keegan told him he and Jack O’Brien had found beaten and half-conscious on the boardwalk outside the Silken Angel Saloon when they were locking up.
She had a badly bruised throat and neck, a sprained wrist, a bruised rib or two, and a nasty little stab wound. The stab wound, high on her shoulder, wasn’t life threatening by itself, but the puncture could spawn infection or fever or both. In addition to her other injuries, her face was a mass of lacerations and bruises.
There was no mistaking the fact that someone had tried his damnedest to kill her. Documenting the damage done to her, Dr. Stone thought it was a miracle that the person hadn’t, and that she hadn’t suffered more serious injuries.
Shortly after arriving, he’d sent Jack downstairs to boil water and tear strips of linens for bandages. Will stayed with the doctor, not because he was necessarily better suited for the job of doctor’s assistant, but because he refused to leave the girl’s side.
The laceration above her right eye required five stitches. The cut on her bottom lip took two. Because the young woman was in considerable pain from the beating she had taken, Dr. Stone had opted for a dose of chloroform to induce sleep during the suturing, instead of using a local anesthetic to numb her lip and browbone.
Will Keegan had hovered at his shoulder like a mother hen with one chick while he administered the chloroform. And once the patient had fallen asleep, Keegan had watched him sew up the cuts, insisting that he use the tiniest stitches his aging fingers could manage, insisting that the scars the cuts would leave be all but invisible.
“I suture cuts, Will,” Dr. Stone snapped while sewing the delicate skin of her bottom lip. “I don’t do ladies’ fine embroidery.”
“Maybe you should. We don’t want her looking like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster,” Will snapped back, referencing Mary Shelley’s novel.
Dr. Stone was no fool. He knew there was more to the story than Keegan and O’Brien had told him, but he also knew that they were completely honorable men. Dr. Stone suspected Keegan might be on pins and needles because he worried that the doctor might not believe the story he and O’Brien had told him—might believe Will was capable of brutalizing the girl in his bed. Stone knew that was nonsense. Will Keegan had never hit a woman in his life. He’d sent for him to care for the sick and injured Chinese girls who stayed at the Silken Angel Saloon on two previous occasions. Keegan and O’Brien trusted him and had complete faith in his discretion. Dr. Stone respected that, and believed that any information they withheld from him made no difference in the young woman’s care and was most likely concerned with the protection of her identity and reputation.
The way Keegan was hovering over her, Dr. Stone surmised that she might be one of Will’s lady friends or one of his stray lambs. Dr. Stone knew Will’s compassion wasn’t limited to the Chinese, but extended to abused women of all races and backgrounds.
Dr. Stone sympathized.
By the time he’d met James Cameron Craig and William Burke Keegan, nearly five years ago, Galen Stone’s promising career as a surgeon had been in shambles. James Craig had financed his move to San Francisco, and Will Keegan had given him the opportunity to help the unfortunate women who found themselves caught in the harsh, ugly world of prostitution. His introduction to Jack O’Brien had come later, after Will hired Jack as his assistant at Craig Capital, Ltd. Jack had helped Stone create a new identity and set up his current very prestigious and very profitable practice among the most affluent of the city’s citizens.
Very few people knew th
at Dr. Galen Stone had once been known as Dr. Grandon Stonemeyer, whose career had been anything but prestigious or profitable. After earning a reputation as a fine surgeon, he’d been recruited into the Army of Northern Virginia and attached to Lee’s command. He’d been performing desperate surgery behind enemy lines when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, and Stonemeyer had spent several months in prison as a guest of the Unites States government. By the time the Union army discovered that he was a noncombatant physician instead of a rebel traitor, his reputation was in tatters and his career as a surgeon was over. His prison sentence had cost him everything—his wife, his unborn child, his home, his practice, his reputation. He drank to numb the pain of the deaths of his wife and unborn son and ended up in Chicago, where he’d set up a women’s clinic. And where he’d twice been jailed for distributing contraceptive devices and providing information on birth control. He’d also performed surgery and treated venereal diseases, and cared for victims of botched abortions in the heart of Chicago’s Tenderloin district.
James Cameron Craig had advertised for a doctor interested in relocating to California to start a medical practice in the newly established town of Coryville. William Burke Keegan had accompanied Craig on the journey to Chicago to interview him.
Dr. Stonemeyer hadn’t been Craig’s first choice, but Craig had watched him perform an emergency cesarean procedure on one of his clinic patients when his assistant had interrupted the job interview and dinner at Craig’s hotel to summon the doctor back to his clinic. He had saved Mrs. Jorgensen and her son and been offered a position with the company on the condition that he change his name and give up the drink. Coryville was a new California town populated by veterans of both sides of the War Between the States, as well as Chinese and European immigrants, and miners and lumberjacks and laborers from all over the globe. It was the height of Reconstruction, and Coryville couldn’t run the risk of polarizing its population for one side or the other by hiring a rebel doctor who had served time in a federal prison. And the town couldn’t afford to hire a doctor whose usefulness would be limited, if not ruined, by alcohol or the delirium tremens caused by the heavy use of it.