Midnight Lover Read Free

his brother lay under the Pennsylvania earth, his promise as dead as Jesse's dreams of glory.
    But still he couldn't shake the feeling of kinship with the hapless Bennett's orphan and because he was tired of thinking about things he couldn't change, he pulled out a sheet of foolscap and dipped the pen into the inkwell and slowly, carefully, told Miss Caroline Louisa Bennett that her daddy had seen fit to leave two hundred dollars in gold for her welfare.
    He'd send it out on the stage with the rest of Bennett's belongings and then he'd do his damnedest to forget Aaron Bennett and his blonde-haired daughter ever existed.
     

 
    Ch apter 2
     
     
    Boston - April 1876
     
    Caroline Louisa Bennett took a deep breath, counted to ten, then turned to face the overwhelming concern of Emily Addison and her dutiful son, Thomas Wentworth Addison II.
    "I'm sorry, Emily," Caroline said, crossing the drawing room and sitting down on the edge of a spindly-legged Louis XIV chair. "I've been woolgathering again."
    "Thinking of your dear father, I'm sure." Emily sniffed loudly into her glass of Madeira, her tiny brown eyes soft with tears. "Terrible business, this. Simply terrible."
    Thomas patted his mother's hand. "Let me pour you some more sherry, Mother," he said, waiting while Emily drained her glass. "It's been a difficult day."
    "Oh, it has been that, Thomas. When dear Aaron's trunk arrived this morning—" Emily paused to dab at her eyes with a lace-trimmed handkerchief "—well, I thought my poor heart would break."
    Oh yes, thought Caroline, Emily's tears had been prodigious that morning. No sooner had the trunk been deposited in Caroline's third floor room before Emily was regaling everyone with her dreams of what might have been. Caroline removed a bottle of bay rum from his trunk and Emily moaned aloud. She fished out a watch fob and Emily clutched her bosom in anguish. When Caroline found a wrinkled cambric shirt with Aaron's initials embroidered on the breast pocket, Thomas had to fetch both Emily's smelling salts and a servant to see her back to the drawing room.
    It was no secret Emily Addison had had her middle-aged widow's heart set on Aaron Bennett, nor was it any secret that Aaron had liked his women considerably younger in years and freer with their charms. Emily Addison had served Aaron's purpose, a purpose Caroline had been all too aware of these past sixteen months. What harm was there in wooing the mother when it was the mother's son who figured in Aaron's future? His Western adventure was less likely to be interrupted by the appearance of his twenty-three year old unmarried daughter if she were safely betrothed to stable, churchgoing, rich Thomas Wentworth Addison II.
    Caroline had understood nothing if not how her father's mind worked. Good looks and charm only got a man so far and Aaron was beginning to run short on both commodities. Each time he would try to settle down and make a home for Caroline and a career for himself, a pretty redhead or a winsome brunette would sashay onto the scene and Caroline's chances for a normal life would disappear the second he said "I do."
    He was forty-two years old and running out of options. Marrying his daughter into a wealthy and well-connected family was his way of insuring her future—and his own, as well.
    "Thomas will make you a fine husband, sweetheart," Aaron had said the night before he took the train to St. Louis to make the stage connection west. "You have nothing to worry about."
    "You've made a fine husband, too, Father," she had pointed out. "Six times over."
    Her father's marital history was as checkered as the dresses she had worn as a little girl. Alone, Aaron Bennett lacked direction; married, he followed the direction of his wife—usually straight to the poorhouse. Aaron's death at the hands of an unknown gunman didn't surprise Caroline half as much as the fact that her father had died unwed.
    Aaron had the last laugh, hadn't he? Dead and gone, leaving her