His Perfect Bride. Judy Christenberry

hand.

      Galloway held it just out of the smaller man’s reach. “My goods, if you please, b’hoy,” he said.

      The pickpocket glanced quickly around the grocer’s to see if they were being observed. “All right,” he snarled, “but in private. Not out here where a copper might see.”

      Wooton pushed the curtain aside. Deegan gestured for him to enter first, using the wallet to give the direction. Once the curtain had swished back in place behind them, Wooton began emptying his pockets on the top of a rickety-looking table. Soon he had created a pile of wallets and watches.

      “Help yourself,” he urged as he slumped sullenly in a straight-backed chair.

      Deegan tossed him the hefty wallet and reclaimed his own possessions from the horde. “You know, if you’d look a mark in the face occasionally you wouldn’t make the mistake of lifting from an old friend.”

      Wooton shook his head. “Hell, you know that makes ’em too aware of you, Dig. Trusty and me taught you that when you were nothin’ but a slick fingered kid. Damned if I would have recognized you with those side-whiskers if you hadn’t said something to me.”

      It was a lie, but one Deegan was willing to overlook. Even with his lush, tawny sideburns and luxuriant mustache serving as camouflage, he was little changed from the boy he’d been. Taller and more hardened, but still cursed with features that were far too memorable for a man following Wooton’s profession. Which was part of the reason Deegan had given up lifting wallets for a living. At least it was the reason he’d given his old associates.

      And speaking of old associates…

      “Have you seen Hannah lately?” Deegan asked.

      Busy emptying the contents of the various wallets into his own pockets, Wooton didn’t look up. “Not in a while. Did you know she got out of the mattress trade? Claims she managed to save up enough to retire, but there ain’t a whore alive can manage that unless it’s one of the madams. I think Hannah’s found some mark to keep her. But she ain’t moved outta the Coast.”

      Which she could with the money he’d sent her, Deegan knew.

      “Maybe old Trusty left her something,” Wooton said. “He was always sweet on her.”

      Deegan’s jaw stiffened. Trusty O’Rourke, the man who had been his mentor, the man who had passed as his “da.” Deegan remembered only too well that Trusty had drunk away every dollar either Hannah or he had managed to make.

      Wooton clicked open one particularly ornate pocket watch and grinned. “Would you look at this,” he said with appreciation. “You never know what kind of trinkets you’ll cull in a proper, God-fearing crowd.” He reset the timepiece so that the tiny tin cutout couple went into randy mechanical action.

      As Wooton gloated over the erotic toy, Deegan strolled over to the grimy window and flicked the faded gingham curtain aside to peer out, before glancing back at the pickpocket. “Is she still in the same rooms?” he asked.

      “Who? Oh, Hannah? Sure.” His peep show over, Wooton snapped the watch closed and slipped the timepiece into his vest pocket, obviously intending to keep this bit of booty for himself rather than turn it over to his fence. “Not many of the old gang around anymore,” Wooton mused. “Those a bullet or the coppers ain’t got, the crimpers swept up. Did a hitch to Honolulu meself when things got hot after Trusty kicked it. You weren’t around then, were you, Dig?”

      Deegan turned back to the window. “No.” Although Wooton’s tone clearly indicated he was curious about the intervening years, Deegan wasn’t about to satisfy that curiosity.

      “Hannah’d like to see you, I’ll bet,” Wooton said. “Looks like you did all right for yourself. She’d be proud.”

      Would she be? Deegan wondered. More likely she’d be angry with him for disappearing, for sending her money when he had it but never letting her know how he was or where he was. She’d be particularly furious to learn he had spent considerable time in San Francisco over the past year without bothering to contact her.

      He doubted Hannah would understand just how much he wished to forget his early years and everyone connected with them. Everyone, that is, except her.

      Perhaps running into Wooton when he was feeling particularly restless was fortuitous. “You still prop up the bar at the Albatross, Charlie?”

      Wooton patted down his pockets, insuring that there were no telltale bulges, then resettled his bowler at a cockier angle. “Not since the proprietor slipped me one of his special cocktails and sold me to that skipper. Why? Thinkin’ of visiting your old friends?”

      “Perhaps,” Deegan murmured noncommittally. Since Wooton had seen him in his Nob Hill finery, it wouldn’t do to give prior notice of his return to the Barbary Coast. Although Charlie tried to hide it, there had been a gleam of avarice in the man’s eye as he took in the elegant top hat, starched collar, silk cravat, tailor-made, dove-gray university jacket and charcoal trousers that proclaimed Deegan Galloway a gentleman rather than the rogue he knew himself still to be.

      Rather than leave the grocer’s first, Deegan delayed, pretending to linger over the rolling of a cigarette. Wooton was barely out the door when he tossed the smoke away and trailed after the pickpocket, making sure that his former associate didn’t follow him to either his seldom-visited office or his posh bachelor’s quarters at the Palace Hotel. The fewer people who could connect Digger O’Rourke, boy songsmith and pickpocket, to Deegan Galloway, well-to-do society dandy, the better.

      Seeing Wooton brought back memories of the old days. In particular, memories of Hannah McMillan and all Deegan owed her.

      He would be risking his recently acquired respectability in visiting her; taking a chance that his former felonious associates would recognize him, or worse, that the more reckless of his newfound friends on the Hill would hail him as Galloway while looking for a dose of sin in the Coast. Digger O’Rourke might have been game for any adventure, but the Deegan Galloway he had become was a far steadier fellow.

      Or so he hoped.

      And yet an hour later Deegan stood in the heart of the Barbary Coast, admittedly prowling for trouble, the itch to encounter and best danger again too strong for him to ignore. He paused at the junction of Sansome and Jackson Streets to stare down the narrow gap between soot-stained buildings to the ill-kept house where Trusty O’Rourke, Hannah and he had kept rooms two decades earlier. The building where Hannah still lived.

      Restlessness had brought him back to his roots, but now unease over how Hannah would greet him kept him cooling his heels in the street, leery of taking the steps needed to enter the building and climb the stairs to Hannah’s place. He had left without saying goodbye, simply stealing away one night, taking with him what cash Trusty hadn’t drunk or gambled away. A week later, Deegan was still considering where to go when he heard Trusty had taken a knife in the ribs, his sudden death leaving Hannah alone and unprotected. Deegan had pinched a banker’s weighty wallet and sent Hannah the funds the lift had provided. Then, rather than return to the Coast, he’d shaken the dust of San Francisco’s streets from his clothes. He’d provided more than enough money for her to follow his example fifteen years ago and leave, but Hannah had remained.

      How would she look? As beautifully shaped and cheerful as he remembered her? Or worn and haggard like so many of the women who had been forced to sell their bodies to live? At least he’d given her the chance at a different kind of life, even if she hadn’t taken it.

      Still hesitating, Deegan rocked back on his heels and nearly lost his balance as a whirlwind in brown wool rounded the corner and plowed into him.

      The woman cast a frantic glance back over her shoulder, then turned, clutching at his forearm with one hand, her nails driving deep into the thick fabric of his sleeve. “Help me,” she gasped. “A man…”

      His arm closed naturally around her small waist, steadying her as he looked down into a pair of eyes as luminous and bright as moon-washed waves. They