Gabriel's Lady
Ana Seymour
Things Were Different In The Wild WestAmelia Prescott just couldn't believe it when she woke up to find her legs entwined with those of the roguish Gabriel Hatch. But she had no time to reform the handsome reprobate, even if he did have more charm than could possibly be legal. Miss Amelia Prescott sure was something, Gabe decided.The Eastern do-gooder who'd braved the frontier to rescue her wayward brother had blossomed beneath the wide Western skies - and miraculously made his own jaded heart begin to thaw.
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ud5f57eb7-3b2a-57e3-8939-caa54a53ff18)
Praise (#u6325825e-39f6-53e0-a31c-609037ca31d3)
Excerpt (#u6da74c2a-50da-5c76-9d92-0d8205ad570f)
Dear Reader (#u3bc634cb-293e-5a57-aa3b-a5d535cb695f)
Title Page (#u17c3fa9a-e1fe-5285-a72e-986f5b1de45a)
About the Author (#u8b3ff263-bbd7-55fc-8891-24f7d15dcbe5)
Dedication (#u32b36d28-c1bc-5867-aba0-eddb63740649)
Chapter One (#uf50ae080-e25b-534d-ab6a-ea5484a9b94e)
Chapter Two (#u62d3a19c-2e12-522e-925e-f755e986f81f)
Chapter Three (#u22c05f45-6901-559c-a99c-7c20c7270e72)
Chapter Four (#u8e8b5739-8000-5b19-b5bb-54be2d872a4f)
Chapter Five (#u6487f8ef-ca98-5ce8-aab0-f2dda232c463)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Author Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Critical acclaim for Ana Seymour
Moonrise
“Fast-paced adventure and sensuous romance…impossible to put down.”
—Affaire de Coeur
“…memorable lovers…secondary characters who add humor and excitement.”
—Romantic Times
Brides for Sale
“…fast-paced romance…titillating right up to its fantastic finale.”
—Affaire de Coeur
Angel of the Lake
“…a love that stands the test of tragic circumstances.”
—Romantic Times
The Bandit’s Bride
“…a beautiful love story…”
—Rendezvous
“Do you know how to fire a gun?” Gabe asked.
“I’ve never even touched a gun,” Amelia replied. “Much less fired one. And I haven’t the slightest desire to do so.”
His fingers slid down her cheek to trace the fine line of her jaw. “You’re in the Wild West now, Amelia. Things out here aren’t resolved at tea parties.”
She drew in a breath and waited for his fingers to leave her skin so that she could swallow the liquid that had pooled in her mouth.
He dropped his hand. The sun glinted highlights in his hair and mustache. Amelia tried to concentrate on what she was saying. “I…don’t think I could fire a gun.”
“Then I’ll teach you,” he said. His deep voice had taken on that husky tone again. Something was definitely happening between them, and Amelia had absolutely no idea what to do about it!
Dear Reader,
Ana Seymour has set her sixth book for Harlequin Historicals in a gold-mining town in the Dakota Territory. Gabriel’s Lady is the story of an eastern dogooder who heads west to rescue her wayward brother and finds herself falling in love with his disreputable mining partner. This delightful Western is the first of two connected stories, so keep an eye out for the brother’s story, Lucky Bride, coming in January.
For those of you whose tastes run to medieval novels, Knight’s Ransom is the next book in Suzanne Barclay’s dramatic ongoing series, The Sommerville Brothers. This story of a French knight who captures the daughter of his enemy to avenge the murder of his family marks the author’s exciting return to the series that won her several awards and terrific reviews.
RITA Award finalist Laurel Ames is back with Tempted, her new novel that Affaire de Coeur calls an “exciting, unusual, and delightfully quirky Regency.” And Emily French rounds out the month with her emotional tale, The Wedding Bargain, about a Puritan woman who defies her community to marry a bondsman with a tortured past.
We hope you’ll keep a lookout for all four titles wherever Harlequin Historicals are sold.
Sincerely,
Tracy Farrell
Senior Editor
Please address questions and book requests to:
Harlequin Reader Service
U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3
Gabriel’s Lady
Ana Seymour
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ANA SEYMOUR
has been a Western fan since her childhood—the days of the shoot-’em-up movie matinees and television programs. She has followed the course of the Western myth in books and films ever since, and says she was delighted when cowboys started going off into the sunset with their ladies rather than their horses. Ms. Seymour lives with her two daughters near one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes.
To Midwest Fiction Writers “veterans”: Kathleen Eagle, Tami Hoag, Betina Krahn, Pam Muelhbauer
I was so lucky to have you as mentors… and I am now even luckier to have you as friends.
Chapter One (#ulink_ba144caa-fae8-5d12-a823-972a69d57a58)
Amelia Jenks Prescott sat up straight in her seat and gave a deliberately loud sigh. If the disreputable-looking fellow sitting across from her had any trace of the gentleman, he would wake up and move his long legs aside to give her cramped body a bit of room.
It seemed weeks since she had left the relative comfort of the train back in eastern Dakota Territory to climb into the tiny confines of a traveling coach. At first it had been just Morgan and herself, which had been tolerable, but in Rapid City a man and a woman had joined them. The woman had introduced herself rather vaguely as a Mrs. Smith. The man had not said so much as a hello. Then both had gone to sleep, a feat Amelia had found utterly impossible during the long, jarring ride.
She moved one foot to the other side of the man’s boot and tried to stretch out her legs. At least they would arrive in Deadwood that night. She could find Parker, rest up a couple of days and, with any luck at all, be back in New York within a fortnight.
She nudged the man’s leg with her knee. Through the thin muslin of her dress the muscles of his thigh felt rock hard. To her surprise, her cheeks grew warm. She wasn’t accustomed to blushes. But then, neither was she accustomed to having her legs entwined with those of a strange man—a very masculine-looking man. And handsome. With carelessly curly, long blond hair, sideburns and an unruly mustache. Blue eyes. She’d seen just a glimpse of them before he dozed off, his head cocked to one side on the horsehair seat. Amelia had had plenty of time to study him and to come to the conclusion that he was a lout. Though his clothes were of good quality, they were disheveled. His white shirt was open at the neck with no sign of a tie. It had been a good three days since his face had seen the edge of a blade.
Her nudge had produced no effect. She cleared the dust from her dry throat and said, “Sir, might I request you to sit up in the seat?”
The blue eyes opened. “I beg your pardon?” the man asked sleepily.
Amelia pointed to their nearly joined legs. “I don’t believe these coaches were designed to provide their passengers with beds,” she said frostily. “I need a bit more room.”
Gabe Hatch ran a hand across his whiskery chin. Slowly he pushed himself backward against the straight seat. The hours of sleep had not gotten rid of the hammers pounding inside his head. He had an acid taste at the back of his throat. When had he eaten last? Certainly not since he’d started in on the Mad Mule Saloon’s finest rotgut.
When he had climbed into the coach that morning his head had been clear enough to take notice of his traveling companions, especially the slender beauty seated across from him. From the fancy cut of her blue taffeta dress, her fashionable feathered bonnet and the haughty way her pretty nose had turned up when he and Mattie had climbed on board, he’d decided that she was probably a Southern belle. But now, taking a better look, Gabe reckoned he’d have to reconsider. A Southern belle would endure excruciating pain before she would press her legs against his as if they were at the Saturday-night wrestling competition at Chauncey’s. And no Southern belle would stab him with such a direct gaze. The stabbing eyes were brown, he noted idly—dark, velvety brown.
“I didn’t mean to wake you, but I’ve been quite cramped most of the day, Mr., er…?”
Gabe shifted once more to allow the woman more space. There was a wave of pain behind his eyes and he felt sick to his stomach. “Gabriel Hatch, ma’am—or should I say miss?”
Amelia moved her knees to take advantage of the additional room and answered in a less hostile tone. “Miss Amelia Jenks Prescott.”
His eyes widened in surprise. For a moment he looked as if he were going to say something, but finally he simply nodded his head and murmured, “How d’ye do.” Then he smiled at her.
Amelia felt the breath catch at the back of her throat. Mr. Gabriel Hatch was not at all the kind of gentleman she was used to associating with, but she imagined that even back in the finest parlors in New York City that smile would cause a stir. Cynthia Wellington, for one, would have set her cap for him in the blink of an eye.
She gave a tentative answering smile. “I’m sorry I had to awaken you,” she said again.
Gabe leaned forward until his face was just inches from hers and said softly, “You can awaken me any time you like, Miss Prescott.”
The words carried a suggestive undertone that left Amelia speechless. And it wasn’t only the words that shocked. When Gabriel Hatch moved close, she could smell the distinct odor of liquor. Dear Lord, the man was a drunk! The hands that had been folded demurely in her lap tightened. She leaned back as far as she could and closed her eyes. This was exactly the type of character she had anticipated meeting when she had started out on this onerous journey. She would simply ignore the comment…and the man himself.
“Are you feeling all right, Missy?” Morgan’s resonant voice had an edge of concern.
Amelia debated the wisdom of opening her eyes. She did not want any further exchanges with the inebriate Mr. Hatch. “I’m fine, Morgan,” she said finally, opening her eyes but keeping her head turned toward the side to look directly at the big man who had been her family’s retainer for as long as she could remember.
She reached out to give his hand a squeeze. “I think we must be almost there, don’t you?”
Morgan shook his head doubtfully. “It doesn’t seem to me that this trip’s ever going to end.”
She gave him a look of sympathy. Morgan didn’t like to travel. He always said that his six-week passage across the Atlantic in the hold of an immigrant steamer had been all the traveling one man needed for a lifetime. It was only his loyalty to Caroline Prescott that had made him agree to accompany Amelia halfway across the country into the savage West. On a temperance crusade back in ‘58 Amelia’s mother had plucked Morgan from the gutters of New York City and had convinced him to start a new life as a sober man. He’d been employed by the Prescotts ever since.
“The driver said we’d be pulling in by suppertime,” Amelia reassured him.
The talking had now awakened their other traveling companion. Morgan’s long legs allowed her little more room than Gabriel Hatch’s slouching posture had allowed Amelia, but the gray-haired woman was so small that the two appeared to fit comfortably. “I wouldn’t put too much faith in anything Charlie tells you, my dear,” she said, sitting up and adjusting her tucked silk bonnet. “Back in Tennessee we would say that Charlie’s one of those fellows who’s mostly all vine and no taters.”
Amelia laughed, even though the woman’s words were not reassuring. “Are you just arriving from Tennessee?” she asked.
The woman shook her head. “Lordy, no. I haven’t been back home in years. I live in Deadwood now…before that Colorado and before that Californy. I’m Mattie Smith.” She gave a little nod. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Amelia felt herself relaxing. It was comforting to meet another woman in this godforsaken territory. Perhaps she and Mattie Smith could be friends during her short stay in the Black Hills. “The pleasure is mutual, Mrs. Smith. I’m Amelia Jenks Prescott. Is your husband a miner?”
Gabriel Hatch gave a half cough, which drew a sharp look from the woman sitting beside him. “Watch yourself, Gabe,” she said crisply. “If you can’t see that Miss Prescott here’s a lady, then you ain’t got the brains God gave a squirrel. Besides, I did have a husband once—Ezekiel Smith, God rest him. He said he was going to make a Christian out of me, but never got very far. The apoplexy took him one day when he had just started in on the Corinthians.”
Amelia’s eyes went to Gabe, who shrugged. “I didn’t say a word.”
“Mind that you don’t,” Mattie Smith said. She turned back to Amelia. “Don’t let him bother you none, Miss Prescott. Gabe’s usually not a bad sort, but today he’s got a head on him, as you can see.”
Gabe glowered. “Which is why I should be back sleeping peacefully in my hotel room, where I would be, Mattie, if you hadn’t insisted on hauling me out of there…”
Amelia blinked in confusion. Mrs. Smith gave every appearance of being a proper, decent woman. She rather reminded Amelia of her aunt Sophie, the one who brought her sweetmeats every Christmas. But the description of her marriage was certainly odd. And for the life of her, Amelia couldn’t determine what could be the relationship between Mrs. Smith and the dissolute Mr. Hatch.
“Go back to sleep, Gabe, and let me talk with Miss Prescott in peace,” Mrs. Smith interrupted him good-naturedly.
It looked as if Gabe was about to protest when the coach suddenly gave a lurch to the right, then bolted forward, throwing Amelia into his lap. His hands closed firmly around her arms and kept her from being thrown against the side of the coach. The cab gave four bounces, each slower than the last, and finally came to a stop, tilted crazily toward front right.
Amelia looked up at Gabe Hatch. His expression was one of annoyance, not alarm. His hands loosened their grip on her arms and slipped behind her back to pull her more securely on to his leg. Her left breast was pressed tightly up against his paisley silk vest. The smell of whiskey was overpowering.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She twisted her body, her rear end sliding intimately along the smooth serge of his trousers. Finally with a shove against his chest, she pushed herself back to her own seat. “Let go of me!” she said belatedly.
Gabe held up his empty hands and gave her an amused smile.
“Is it a broken wheel?” Mrs. Smith asked without concern.
Gabe leaned his head out the tiny coach window. “Looks like we’ve gone off the road into a coulee.” He pushed the coach door open with one booted foot, then, hanging on to the listing doorframe, swung himself to the ground. “You’ll have to get out,” he said to Amelia.
Amelia looked over the edge of the doorsill. The drop to the floor of the dry creek bed was a good four feet. There was no way Morgan could maneuver over her to get out first and give her a hand, and she would rather fall flat on her face than touch Hatch again. Carefully she gathered her skirts in one hand, then held on to the coach with the other and gingerly lowered herself. Gabe stood watching, arms folded.
Morgan followed Amelia, his legs reaching the ground with hardly a stretch. Mrs. Smith slid along the seat toward the door and reached toward Morgan with one tiny hand. He leaned into the coach and plucked her off the seat, then set her safely down on her feet outside.
“Oh, my,” Mrs. Smith said with a little intake of breath. Her eyes went to the bulges underneath the sleeves of Morgan’s linen shirt.
The driver, the man Mrs. Smith had called Charlie, had climbed down from his seat and was flat on his back looking at the underside of the carriage. “Don’t look good,” he said.
With a sigh of exasperation, Gabe dropped to the ground and pulled himself under the coach. Heedless of the smears of dust on his black suit, he slid back out again and sat up with a look of disgust. “The axle’s cracked. This rig’s not going anywhere.”
Amelia’s mouth dropped open. “What do you mean, ‘not going anywhere’?”
Gabe stood and brushed off his hands. “I mean, Miss Prescott, that you might as well go and sit yourself down over in that soft buffalo grass, because we’re going to be here a spell.”
She looked around at the barren terrain in disbelief. “Can’t you fix it?” she asked the driver, who was sitting on his haunches and shaking his head at the disabled coach. His greasy gray hair brushed the shoulders of his buckskin jacket.
“No, ma’am,” he said mournfully without looking up.
“Well…” Amelia turned around in her tracks as if searching the horizon for a rescue party. “Someone will have to ride for help,” she said finally, looking doubtfully at the four swaybacked horses hitched to the coach.
Gabe reached up to the luggage rack and pulled down a bedroll. “Feel free to give it a try, Miss Prescott. Through Candle Rock Canyon without a saddle or bridle—that would be some mighty fine riding.”
“I didn’t mean that I should go,” she said to his back as he sauntered across the dry creek and climbed up the other side to a grassy bank.
Mattie Smith leaned over and patted her on the arm. “Don’t worry, dear. Someone will come along before too long. In the meantime, we’ll just make ourselves up a comfortable little campsite.”
“Campsite!”
“It would be silly for us to keep sitting in that stuffy old cab.”
“But…” Amelia’s voice faltered. “How long will we be out here?”
Charlie stood and gave a frustrated kick to the broken vehicle. “The mail stage should be coming through about this time tomorrow,” he said, punctuating the remark with a stream of brown tobacco juice that landed precariously close to Amelia’s skirt.
“Tomorrow…” she repeated, her voice dazed.
Gabe forced himself to take another hot swallow of Charlie Wilson’s coffee. He needed an antidote for his hangover. The sleep and fresh air had not been enough. He swatted idly at the insects that swarmed around his head. Pesky little creatures, but not vicious. Not like the blackflies farther out on the prairie that could engulf an animal in minutes and suck it dry. Kind of like some women he could name.
He looked across the campfire toward Amelia Prescott. She was a dyed-in-the wool New Yorker, not at all like her brother, who had taken to the West like a duck to water. When he’d tried to strike up a conversation with her, she’d backed away from him like a pup facing a rattler. It was just as well. He was in no mood for females, particularly not prickly Easterners with high-falutin ways. Even if this one did have hair the color of polished mahogany and a tantalizing figure that, under normal circumstances, would have caused more than his brain to come to attention.
“Are you feeling any better, Gabe?” Mattie’s mellow, sympathetic voice broke into his reverie. She stood next to him, only a head taller than he was, sitting.
Gabe gave up on the coffee and poured the remainder into the ground at his side. “I’m all right,” he said with a frown.
“You ought to be thanking me, you know.”
“Is that right?”
“That trollop was after your money. I saw her watching you all night at the tables. And when you started in drinking like a damned fool, she went over to have a cozy little chat with the bartender. They might even have slipped something in your drink.”
“Trollop?” Gabe asked with a lazy smile.
“Darn right. I saved your purse, dragging you out of there. Your worthless hide, too, likely. And I ask myself, why did I even bother?”
“’Cause I’m the only tinhorn in Deadwood you can trust, Mattie, m’love. And without me you’d never be able to get your accounts straight.”
Mattie sighed and dropped to sit beside him. “What were you trying to do, anyway, Gabe? I never saw you drink like that in Deadwood.”
“If you must know, you interrupted my anniversary celebration.”
“Anniversary of what?”
“What else? Of my wedding.”
Mattie’s jaw dropped. “You’re married?”
“I was. My wife’s dead.”
Mattie shook her head. “Who’d have figured? I always took you for the confirmed-bachelor type.”
“Yeah, well, we all make mistakes.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Gabe flopped back on the grass and looked up at the stars that were growing brighter in the night sky. “No. But that probably won’t stop your asking. Let’s just say that once a year I make it a habit to get stinking drunk in tender memory of the idealistic fool I once was. If there’s a friendly…‘trollop’ available, I might invite her to share my celebration. And that’s the end of it. The other 364 days of the year I try to live a moral and upstanding life relieving cowboys and miners of their excess cash, which, if left in their hands, would in all probability lead them down the path of degradation and sin.”
Mattie grinned. “I hadn’t realized that your motives were so lofty, Gabe.”
“Just shows how little you know of me, Mattie. I’m a prince of a fellow.”
“I never said otherwise. But as to your marriage…”
Gabe rolled up to his feet. “What is it about women that makes them ask so gol-danged many questions?” he asked her, softening the query with one of his dazzling smiles.
Without another word he walked away into the dark.
Amelia dug in her carpetbag and pulled out the silk shawl her mother had given her on her twenty-first birthday. It had been the only bright moment in an otherwise miserable day. They had all known it was going to be hard getting through the celebration without Parker. Amelia and her brother were exactly one year and one week apart in age, and up to this year they had always celebrated their birthdays together. Now Parker had taken off with only a note to explain that he had joined the latest group of gold-crazed prospectors rushing to stake out new claims in the Black Hills. Amelia could hardly believe it, and her father had been so distraught that the strain on his fragile heart had sent him to bed for two days.
It had been on the very day of her birthday that the doctor had told them sternly that her father was simply in no condition to continue to work full-time at the bank he had founded and controlled like a fiefdom for the past twenty years.
Amelia ran the fine silk through her fingers, remembering. Then she twisted the shawl around her head, letting it drape over her shoulders. She might look odd, but the insects around her ears were making her crazy. If the shawl didn’t work to keep them away, she intended to climb back into the listing coach and make her bed there.
“Is that the latest New York fashion?”
Amelia jumped at the sound of Gabe Hatch’s voice coming out of the darkness behind her. She had managed to avoid talking to him most of the evening. She cranked her head to watch him emerging from the darkness. “How did you guess that I was from New York?”
He shrugged and crouched down next to her. “You have the stamp.”
She turned back toward the fire. “I’m trying to get away from these miserable bugs. If I were in New York, I’d be wearing this shawl to the opera.”
“They won’t hurt you—the bugs, I mean. I’m not too sure about the opera.”
Amelia ignored his gibe. “There must be millions of them. Is it always like this on the prairie?”
“Yup. This time of year.” He leaned close to her head and sniffed. “Part of the problem is you smell too pretty.”
Amelia pulled away. “I beg your pardon?”
Gabe went from his crouch to a sitting position and leaned back on his hands, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “Your hair. You’ve used some kind of fancy soap and the bugs like it. Not that I blame them,” he added with a grin.
For the second time that day Amelia felt her cheeks growing warm with a blush. Not even her father had ever commented on anything so personal as the soap she used. All at once she remembered that Mr. Gabe Hatch was a reprobate. She should refuse to talk with him. But she found herself answering tartly, “I suppose they like it better than the odor of liquor.”
Gabe’s grin stretched wider under his golden mustache. “Now, that would make an interesting experiment, Miss Prescott. And I just happen to have some whiskey in my bags. Shall we try it out—for the sake of science?”
If it weren’t for the man’s remarkable smile, she would just refuse to speak to him entirely. But there was something so engaging…
“Shall I get us a bottle?” he asked again.
Amelia took a deep breath. “Mr. Hatch,” she said primly. “Obviously you are one of the unfortunate souls who…imbibe. I feel it my duty to tell you, sir, that this practice is one which can only lead to a most dire fate.”
“Ah.” Gabe’s expression became sober, but his blue eyes mocked her. “A temperance crusader. Is that why you’ve come to the Black Hills, Miss Prescott? You’ll have plenty of fodder for your campaign here, I wager.”
“I’m no crusader, Mr. Hatch. I was merely giving you some friendly advice. I was not named after Amelia Jenks Bloomer for nothing.”
Amelia bit her lip. Her mother, Caroline, had been a friend of the noted crusader for temperance and women’s suffrage when Amelia had been born, but in recent years Amelia had become a bit embarrassed at the name, particularly now that people had taken to applying it to a type of women’s underclothes. Nevertheless, something in Mr. Gabe Hatch seemed to bring out the reformer in her.
“I suppose your brother is named John Brown,” Gabe said with a look of amusement.
The remark took Amelia by surprise. Her brother had, in fact, been named after an abolitionist. Not the misguided firebrand John Brown, but the abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker, one of her father’s idols. “How do you know I have a brother?”
Gabe reached to throw a small log into the campfire. “I’m just teasing you.” His eyes came back to her. “Are you against teasing, too?”
Amelia shifted uncomfortably. The shawl had fallen to her shoulders. She had quite forgotten about the insects. “I’m not against teasing, Mr. Hatch, but you’ll forgive me if I do not find it appropriate under the circumstances in which we find ourselves.”
Gabe leaned back again and looked up at the sky. “Nothing wrong with the circumstances as far as I’m concerned. It’s a beautiful night.” He waved a hand upward. “Tell me if you’ve ever seen a sky like that back East.”
Amelia tilted her head. The sky had turned black. As she continued to stare, more and more stars appeared, until the points of light seemed to be swirling around them. “No, I’ve never seen anything like this,” she answered him finally.
Gabe nodded. “That’s the West for you. We may be lacking some of the comforts you have back home, but there are sights here that will make your heart want to leap right out of your body.”
His voice had softened. Amelia continued to stare at the spinning, star-spangled sky. A log fell in the campfire, sending up a shower of sparks that joined in the display. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…” she murmured sleepily.
“Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” Gabe finished quietly.
Amelia sat up straight. “You know Shakespeare, Mr. Hatch?”
Gabe grinned. “You’re surprised that a lost soul such as I can appreciate the Bard?”
Amelia nodded slowly. His eyes in the firelight were really the most extraordinary blue.
“I find it useful,” Gabe continued, moving closer to her. “I haven’t found a woman yet who can resist a sonnet.” He reached out and took her hand in his. “’Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,’ Miss Prescott?”
She pulled her hand out of his grasp and leaned back on it. For the third time that day her cheeks began to burn. Perhaps she was coming down with some kind of prairie fever. She closed her eyes and pictured herself arriving in Deadwood just in time to expire in Parker’s arms. It would, she thought, serve her foolish, bullheaded brother right.
Chapter Two (#ulink_a7fa4ab3-1dc5-55c0-9171-c4a5faeb0504)
Tin-roofed shacks, brush houses, tents and wagons made into temporary sleeping quarters dotted the steep, wooded sides of Deadwood Gulch like debris scattered after a storm. It was only on the floor of the gulch, the single main street of Deadwood proper, that the structures became real buildings. Amelia stepped down from the lumbering mail coach and looked up and down the block in amazement. It was solid saloons.
“How many drinking establishments does this town have?” she asked Mattie Smith.
Mattie smiled. “Twenty-seven, at last count. You temperance workers have your work cut out for you here.”
Amelia shook her head. “I told you—I’m not a temperance worker. I’m just here to find my brother.”
“So how come you went off to sleep in that broken-down coach last night the minute Gabe took out his bottle?”
“I don’t approve of spirits, Mrs. Smith. But I’m not a crusader.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that, Miss Prescott, because you’ll find Deadwood a sight easier to take if you don’t start in preaching. The truth is that most of these boys come here thinking they’ll be rich in weeks. Instead they end up broke and homesick. I figure they deserve what little comfort they can get.”
Amelia looked down at her pleasantly rounded companion. “You’re a compassionate person, Mrs. Smith, I can see that. I promise you that I don’t intend to set about reforming disappointed miners. I just want to find Parker.”
Amelia felt a sinking sensation as she realized that the task might prove more difficult than she had anticipated. It might even mean going into some of these…drinking establishments. She sighed. Perhaps Morgan would know what to do. He and Mr. Hatch had both left the coach at the edge of town in front of a tall, thin building with narrow letters that spelled out Telegraph squeezed across the front. Morgan was always proud when an occasion arose to show that he had book learning, a skill he had never had a chance to acquire during his childhood in the mines in Wales. He still worked with her father three nights a week after supper, though Morgan had mastered the basics years ago and their lessons had evolved into spirited discussions of various books they read together.
Mattie cocked her head to one side. “Parker Prescott. Now, that name sounds familiar.”
Two cowboys with wide leather chaps over their dirty denims came crashing out of a swinging door just a few feet from where the women were standing. Mattie gave them a brief glance, then continued speaking. “Why, that’s Claire’s young man. Of course…Parker.”
One of the cowboys was holding up a hand of cards. His face was a mottled red, and he was sputtering like a crusted-up teakettle. The other man reached down into his pants and pulled out a revolver. Amelia felt a quick rush through her midsection. “Mrs. Smith, that man has a gun!”
Mattie Smith took Amelia’s arm and drew her around the back of the stagecoach. “We’ll just stay out of the way back here,” she said as calmly as if she were discussing dress patterns.
Amelia leaned against a thick leather luggage rack. “That man pulled a gun,” she repeated in a shaky voice.
“Lordy, child. You’re pea green. We’ve got to toughen you up, I reckon. Everyone’s got guns in Deadwood. But they don’t do much harm. Most of these boys can’t hit the side of a barn with their eyes open.”
“Shouldn’t we call the police?”
“We don’t have any police. No sheriff, either. Why do you think Deadwood’s so popular with every no-account west of the Mississippi?”
Amelia gripped the edge of the stagecoach and peered cautiously around the corner. The cowboy who had pulled the gun was sprawled on the ground. The other man, cards still clutched in one hand, was sitting on top of him with his free hand pressed down on his opponent’s neck. Several feet away, the revolver lay discarded in the dusty street, sun glinting off its steely barrel.
“Come on,” Mattie urged. “Let’s get out of here. Charlie will take care of your bag until you come back for it.”
Amelia let herself be led down the street. “There’s no law in Deadwood?” she asked, her head turned back to the scene behind them. A burly redhead was trying to separate the two combatants as the sidewalk filled up with onlookers.
“There’s all kinds of law—the law of the gun, the law of the best hand, the law of the almighty dollar,” Mattie continued. “But if you mean real law…nope. Not in Deadwood.”
“I was hoping to ask the police to help me find Parker.”
Mattie gave a snort. “That’s what I was trying to tell you, child. I can take you to your brother. Come on with me to my place.”
Amelia’s eyes followed Mattie Smith’s hand as she pointed across the street and down a short distance. Nestled between two rough board saloons was a neatly painted clapboard house, looking for all the world like a little piece of New England. A trimmed row of bushes dotted with pink primroses edged the railing of a small front porch. Pink curtains showed at each of the six real glass windows.
“You live right here in the middle of town?”
Mattie didn’t answer. She waited until a buckboard had rattled past them, then took Amelia’s hand and led her across the street.
Amelia followed along, asking in some confusion, “How do you know my brother, Mrs. Smith?”
It wasn’t until they stood directly in front of the tidy yellow house that Amelia saw the discreet sign. Female Companions. Cleanliness Guaranteed. Mattie Smith, Proprietor.
Amelia pulled back with a kind of horror as Mrs. Smith said cheerfully, “Here we are.”
“I can’t go in there,” Amelia said stiffly.
A gleam of sympathy appeared in Mattie Smith’s soft gray eyes. “I don’t mean to go against your sensibilities, Miss Prescott, but you did say you wanted to locate your brother, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then you’d better follow me. Because the odds are ten to one that this is where you’ll find him.”
Amelia settled into the feathery softness of the rose damask sofa and closed her eyes. In her wildest dreams she would never have imagined that she would find herself in such a place. Although, except for a cloying scent that was fast bringing on a megrim, the little parlor of Mattie Smith’s…house…was not really much different than the sitting rooms back home where she and her mother would take tea with the other ladies of middle-echelon New York society. But when she had entered the front door she had had a direct view up the stairs to a room bathed in red light. Glowing red. She didn’t even dare think about the type of activity that might take place in such a room.
“Hey, sis.” The soft voice coming from the doorway popped her eyes open.
In an instant she had jumped to her feet and was caught up in her brother’s arms. “I could kill you,” she said, laughing and hugging him as great tears rolled down her cheeks.
Parker lifted her off her feet and spun her around. “I’d deserve it,” he said, giving her a sound kiss.
Amelia put her hands on her brother’s shoulders and pushed herself out of his grasp. “I mean it,” she said through subsiding sniffles.
Parker’s grin faded. “I do, too. I deserve anything you want to do to me, my darling little sister. But it’s damn good to see you.”
Amelia’s outburst of tears ended with a final jerky breath. “Don’t swear,” she said. The admonition was automatic. Though she was a year younger than her brother, she’d been giving him orders her whole life. Their parents had so often been away from home, involved in their own special causes, that Amelia and Parker sometimes felt that they had raised each other. Amelia mothered Parker, injecting some caution into his wild schemes, and Parker provided Amelia with a father’s strength and protection. At least, he had until he had taken off without a word.
“It’s very good to see you, sis,” Parker amended, tenderly pinching her cheek with a callused hand that Amelia did not recognize as belonging to her brother. His appearance was different, too. His dark brown hair was longer and had reddened in the sun. His skin was tanned and leathery, making him look years older. “But what in blazes are you doing here?” he asked. “Surely you didn’t come all this way by yourself?”
“Morgan’s with me. He’s down at the telegraph office sending a wire to Mother and Father.”
“How are they? And Matilda? I bet she misses having her pies stolen right off the cooling rack now that I’m gone. And Chops?”
Amelia smiled and motioned to Parker to slow down his questions. “Matilda says she always knew you were a scoundrel, and when you come home she’s going to give you a piece of her mind, if not a licking with her wooden spoon. And Chops wouldn’t eat for a week after you left until we finally took to mixing his food with liver paste. So now we call him Golden Chops. As to Mother and Father…” She bit her lip. “They were terribly hurt, Parker.”
Parker looked down at Mattie’s rose-patterned carpet. “I know. It was the one bad thing about this whole plan. I never wanted to hurt them.” He blinked and swallowed hard. “Or you, either, sis.”
Amelia let out a deep breath and asked the question that she had been waiting to ask for the past six months. “How could you do it, Parker? How could you leave us that way?”
Their identical brown eyes met, hers accusing, his guilty. “It seems a lifetime ago, you know. At the time I thought I was leaving because I was sick of Father trying to badger me into working at his precious bank. And I was miffed when Cindy Wellington threw me over for Jack Hastings…”
Amelia gave an incredulous huff. “Cynthia Wellington goes through men faster than she does hankies. She’s had at least a half a dozen since Jack Hastings, and besides—”
Parker stopped her with a wave of his hand. “Come on and sit down. Just listen to me for a minute,” he said, leading her to the rose sofa. “I said I thought I was leaving for those reasons. But as soon as I hit the prairie west of St. Paul, I knew that none of those things were important.”
“Then what—”
Parker put a finger on her lips. “If you can keep still long enough, I’ll try to explain, though it’s all beyond words, really.”
He shifted his gaze from her to look out beyond the pink curtains to the view of the canyon rising above the buildings across the street. “I’ve never seen anything like the West, sis,” he continued in an almost reverent tone. “It’s fresh and majestic, wild and exciting. It…” He turned back to her as he searched for the words. “It fills me up. I don’t know any other way to say it. It fills all those places in me that were so empty back in New York.”
For once Amelia had no reply. It was as if her brother, the person she had always known better than anyone else in the world, had passed a boundary into a place she couldn’t follow. She had been prepared to demand that they return to New York immediately. Their father needed them, needed Parker. But as she watched this totally unfamiliar expression on her brother’s dear, familiar face, the words wouldn’t come out.
“Listen,” Parker said in a brisk tone designed to squelch the emotion that had crept into his voice, “I can show you what I mean better than telling you. Let me take you out to my place to see the mine.”
Amelia looked around once again at Mattie Smith’s parlor. “Well, at least let’s get out of here.”
Parker followed her gaze with amusement. “What do you suppose Mother would say if she knew we were sitting in a bawdy house parlor?”
The notion did not seem so shocking to Amelia now that Parker was beside her. In fact, nothing did. Not the broken-down stagecoach nor the fight out on the street. Parker would take care of her now. And she would take care of him. She gave a happy giggle. “She’d haul us up in front of one of her crusading friends—The New York Ladies’ League for the Rehabilitation of Fallen Doves, or some such.”
Parker stood with a grin and reached for Amelia’s hands. “Mother and her colleagues would have a field day in this town.”
Amelia had to admit that the scenery as Parker led them up the trail toward his mine was breathtaking. When they had left Mattie Smith’s parlor, the little proprietor had been nowhere in sight, so without taking their leave they had made their way back to the stagecoach to find Morgan and retrieve their bags. Then they had gone to the livery where Amelia and Morgan had rented horses over Morgan’s protest that there wasn’t anywhere he couldn’t go on the two good feet that God had given him.
Amelia’s mount was a trim brown mare that had taken to her new rider immediately. The stableboy had said her name was Whiskey, which had caused Amelia and Parker to burst into one of the laughs they had shared so often through the years.
“I’ve been in Deadwood less than a day and I’ve already visited a brothel and acquired a horse named Whiskey,” Amelia said, choked with mirth. It was remarkable how just a short time in her brother’s company had restored her good humor.
“You shouldn’t have gone into that place, Missy,” Morgan called from behind them. “Your mama’s going to say I didn’t take proper care of you.”
Amelia turned around in her saddle. “I suspect there are a few things about this trip that Mother will never know, Morgan.”
Parker threw back his head and laughed as he spurred his horse up a sudden incline in the trail. “It’s called independence, Morgan. Isn’t that what you left the coal mines of Wales to find?”
Morgan shook his head. “Independence is not about doing things your mama and papa wouldn’t approve of.”
Parker’s smile stayed in place. “I know. Maybe after a few days in the West you’ll start to understand the kind of independence I’m talking about.”
Amelia looked affectionately from her brother to Morgan, who appeared gangly and uncomfortable on the small gelding they’d rented. “You need a bigger horse, Morgan,” she shouted back.
“This one’s plenty far off the ground for me, Missy. I don’t need to go breaking any bones in my old age.”
Morgan still had the strength of men half his age, and there was not a gray strand in his thick black hair, but once he’d passed what he had figured was his fiftieth birthday last year, he’d started talking about being old.
Amelia smiled and turned to the front again. The trail had leveled off and they emerged from the piney woods into a small valley. She’d seen such a vista once on the stereopticon at a party at the Hastings’, but it couldn’t prepare her for the real thing. Long grasses swayed green and golden in the sunlight, sloping down to a sparkling blue-gray stream where a group of deer drank and grazed. On every side pine-covered hills formed a dark majestic backdrop against the bluest sky she’d ever seen.
“Here we are,” Parker said, stopping his horse and throwing his arms wide like a circus ringmaster. “Pronghorn Valley.”
“Look at the deer!” Amelia said with a little squeal of delight.
“They’re not deer. They’re pronghorn antelope—the sweetest critters you’d ever want to meet.”
“It’s a beautiful place, Parker,” she said, her voice dropping.
Her brother nodded. “The mine’s right across the valley, upriver. Come on. I’ll race you.”
His horse took off gracefully in response to his signal. Amelia spurred hers to follow him, shouting back to a frowning Morgan, “We’ll wait for you.”
They raced along through the grasses, sending the herd of antelope bounding away into the trees. Fox hunting had been one of the few activities the brother and sister had shared with their busy parents, and they’d been well schooled in equestrian arts. Neither Amelia nor Parker had ever cared much for the actual kill, but both had enjoyed riding and the freedom of being out in the countryside, away from the cluttered streets and foul air of the city.
Parker slowed as they approached the end of the open grass. Amelia was by his side almost instantly. “Not fair,” she said, out of breath. “I’ve a new mount and don’t know the way yet.”
“You always did manage to find some excuse for losing,” he taunted.
Amelia pulled herself up in the saddle and adjusted the flat silk hat that had tilted crazily along with the chignon it was perched upon. “Mercy, that felt good,” she said with a grin.
Parker beamed at her as they took a minute to enjoy being together again. Morgan and his horse were still halfway across the meadow, heading toward them at a sedate walk. From this vantage point Amelia could look up the end of the valley and see a series of odd-looking wooden contraptions built next to and partly in the river. A rough bridge crossed the water and led to a small house built from unfinished pine logs.
They walked their horses up the hill toward the structures. “Home sweet home,” Parker said.
Amelia’s gaze had fixed on a tall blond man emerging from the door of the cabin.
“Oh, good,” Parker said. “You can meet my new partner.”
The smile faded from Amelia’s face as she let her horse take its lead from Parker’s. They picked their way through scattered mining equipment and what looked like mazes built of wood. When they reached their end of the little bridge Parker stopped and waved to the man across the river. “Gabe,” he yelled. “Come meet my sister.”
Gabriel Hatch sauntered across the log bridge. He’d bathed and shaved and changed his clothes. His dark suit was impeccable. His shirt was snowy white punctuated with a dark purple waistcoat and matching silk tie. He could have passed for one of the dandies from London who visited their father now and then on transatlantic business.
“We’ve met,” he said, approaching their horses. He turned to Amelia. She could see the sunlight actually glinting off his long blond eyelashes as he winked at her and drawled, “I had the honor of spending the night with your sister, Parker.”
Parker’s eyes widened. He snapped his head around toward Amelia.
She unconsciously tightened her fingers around the pommel of her saddle as her knees suddenly refused to hold her on the horse.
Gabe took a step forward and offered his hand. “May I assist you?” The formal politeness of his tone was contradicted by a smug smile.
Amelia ignored his proffered hand and slid off her mount as gracefully as her weakened legs would allow.
“It’s nice to see you again, Miss Prescott,” he persisted.
“The feeling is not mutual, Mr. Hatch,” she said stiffly. Then she grasped her horse’s reins and pushed her way past Gabe on to the wooden bridge, leaving Parker staring after her in amazement.
Chapter Three (#ulink_af98e1cc-bdda-5d2e-95be-c9ea7ebfe4a5)
Amelia couldn’t remember when she had been so tired. She had hardly slept the previous night after she had chosen to spend it in the broken-down stagecoach. Every time she had dozed off she would start to slide down the seat cushion until she ended up crumpled against one wall. She had finally turned around and ended up sleeping with her head downward and her feet stretched above her, a position that had left her ankles quite numb.
Tonight might not prove to be much better, she thought, looking over at the one wooden cot in Parker’s tiny cabin. There were two blankets folded on it haphazardly, but no sign of either a mattress or sheets. Tears of exhaustion burned in her eyes.
The final frustration was that “partner” Gabe Hatch had stayed the entire evening, preventing her from having the serious conversation with Parker that she had rehearsed through all those long miles of weary travel between New York and Deadwood. Couldn’t the man tell when he wasn’t wanted? Evidently not.
Of course, Parker and Morgan had provided an appreciative audience for his stories about his gambling adventures on the great steamers that plied the waters up from New Orleans. And his tour of the Colorado camps, where he had spent several weeks as an escort to the famous actress, Lotta Crabtree.
The whole display had given Amelia the headache that had threatened since she had awakened in the stagecoach that morning. Most of the questions she had for Parker had remained unanswered. She still did not know how he had ended up with Gabriel Hatch as a partner. And she had not been able to pin him down about returning home with her.
She stood up from the cane rocker that was the only civilized piece of furniture in the room. “It’s getting late, gentlemen,” she said.
Morgan, Parker and Gabe turned their heads toward her in unison. Parker jumped up and went to put his arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Amelia. I should have realized you’d be tired after your long trip. Gabe and Morgan and I can go on down into town, unless…” He looked suddenly uncertain. “You’re not afraid to be out here by yourself, are you, sis?”
Morgan uncrossed his long legs and stood with a stretch. “I’m not leaving Missy up here by herself. No way. You and Mr. Hatch go on ahead if you like.”
Gabe was the last to his feet. “Gabe,” he said to Morgan. “It’s just plain Gabe.”
Morgan nodded and repeated to Parker. “You and Gabe can go to town if you like.”
Parker’s tanned forehead furrowed with lines Amelia had never seen. “I…I guess I shouldn’t be leaving you by yourself,” he said slowly.
Amelia had the impression that her brother was seeing the independence he had found so intoxicating being abruptly curtailed, an assessment she felt was unfair. She hadn’t come to Deadwood to become his warden. But in spite of herself, she asked, “Where do you go in town?”
Parker flushed. “The Lucky Horseshoe usually…if I’m thirsty.”
“And the Lucky Horseshoe is…”
Parker dropped his arm from her shoulders and stepped back. “Well, it’s…a saloon. Ah, shucks, sis. There aren’t any other places in Deadwood to go.”
“Except for Mrs. Smith’s?”
The flush deepened. “You looked just like Mother when you said that. And you don’t really know what you’re talking about. The girls at Mattie’s are…Well, let me put it this way. I’ve learned a thing or two about the wicked ways of the world that Mother preached about. And not everything is the way she painted it.”
Amelia felt the pressure of her headache behind her eyes. She did not want to argue with Parker tonight, but she felt compelled to ask, “So after a few months in the West you now think it’s perfectly all right to drink spirits and consort with loose women?”
Gabe was watching the exchange without amusement. He could see the hurt in Amelia’s eyes. But he could also understand Parker’s chafing under her scrutiny. A young man who had just discovered the wide world did not want to be cross-examined like an errant schoolboy.
“Your sister’s right, Parker. It’s too late for more socializing. I’ve overstayed my welcome. How about if I invite you all to supper tomorrow?” He gave a little bow in Amelia’s direction. “At the Willard Hotel, not the Lucky Horseshoe.”
But Parker’s attention stayed focused on his sister. “If you’ve come out here to light into me like one of Mother’s holier-than-thou reformer friends, you might as well just get right back on the stagecoach east.”
Drums sounded in the back of Amelia’s ears. “Parker Prescott! How can you say such a thing after I’ve come all this way—”
“I didn’t ask you to come—”
“With our father practically at death’s door all for worry over you?”
“Since when has Father worried over me?”
“He worries about both of us. He loves us…”
“Father never worries about anything but his noble causes and his beloved bank!”
“Stop it!” Morgan’s deep voice interrupted. Amelia and Parker stopped talking, but continued to glare at one another.
Morgan walked slowly across the room. As he had done all their lives when he wanted to make a point, he spoke very slowly and his Welsh inflection became more noticeable. “I’m too old to be a referee to fighting children. And these old bones are too weary to stand here and listen to you two caterwauling all night long.”
Parker’s expression remained hard, but Amelia looked contrite. “You probably didn’t get any more sleep than I did last night, Morgan,” she said. “Let’s call it a day and see what kind of sleeping arrangements we can figure out.”
Parker’s lips were set in that way Amelia knew so well. He said stiffly, “You’ll take the bed in here, Amelia. Morgan can sleep out in the lean-to. I’ll join him there when I get back.”
“Back from where?”
“Back from Mattie’s!” he shouted. He turned sharply on his boot heel and stalked out the door, ripping his hat from the peg along the way.
Amelia watched him go in disbelief. She had known that there would be unpleasant moments as she persuaded Parker that he had to return with her to New York, but she hadn’t imagined a raw shouting match their first evening together. Her head throbbed and she felt a little sick to her stomach. She turned her anger on their guest. “I suppose he’s trying to live up to you, Mr. Hatch. All those exploits you make sound so attractive.”
Gabe gave her a sympathetic smile. “How old’s your brother, Miss Prescott?”
Amelia rubbed her sore eyes. “Twenty-two.”
“Well, there you have it. Any lad worth his salt is going to be out trying to get a taste of life at twenty-two.”
Amelia sighed and stretched her neck. Morgan bent over her. “You got one of your headaches, Missy? You need to get to bed.”
Amelia nodded tiredly as Gabe said, “You need fresh air more than you do sleep.”
Amelia looked puzzled. “Believe me,” Gabe continued. “There was a period in my life when I became an expert on headaches—both causin’ them and curin’ them. You need to clear all this smoke out of your head before you settle down to sleep.” He gestured toward the fire, which they’d kept burning all night in deference to the approach of autumn chill.
Gabe reached carefully around Morgan’s big shoulder and took Amelia’s arm. “Come on. Just walk outside a few minutes.”
Too tired to protest, she let him lead her out the door as Morgan watched with a doubtful expression.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were my brother’s partner?” she asked as he slowly led the way down to the log bridge.
“I thought it was Parker’s place to explain the situation to you.”
“Well, it would have been more…gentlemanly to tell me that you knew who I was.”
“Yes, ma’am. It would.”
“So you owe me an apology.”
They reached the bridge. “The problem is that being a gentleman doesn’t happen to be one of my favorite occupations.”
“Favorite occupations such as drinking?”
Gabe leaned his arms on the log railing. “Well, no. You’ve been misled on that account, Miss Prescott. Drinking’s not exactly a favorite, either.”
The cool air, just barely scented with pine, did feel good inside her nostrils. Amelia took a deep breath. Beneath them the rush of water sounded comforting, like an odd lullaby. Gradually other night sounds seeped into her consciousness. The insects that had bothered her so out on the trail were nowhere around, though she heard their rhythmic chirping out in the woods. And from just across the river there was an eerie hooting sound.
“Is that a real owl?” she asked in amazement. Owls had always been something out of a children’s storybook. She’d never seen one or even heard one back in New York.
Gabe laughed. “That’s a real one, all right. A lusty hoot owl, calling out for a mate. Not too much different from your brother.”
They had reached the middle of the bridge, and Amelia looked down at the water. She had the feeling that Gabriel Hatch was flirting with her by making such improper comments, but it was not a kind of flirting with which she was familiar.
“Back home Parker would never have dreamed of going to a place like Mrs. Smith’s.”
“Oh, he dreamed it, all right. All young men do. It just wasn’t the kind of dream you share with your family.”
Amelia shook her head. The water underneath her danced along in a moonlit ballet. “I’m starting to feel that New York is very, very far away,” she said softly.
Gabe fought back an impulse to put an arm around her. In fact, he realized with surprise, he wanted to do more than that. Last night at the campsite he had been ready to dismiss her as a snobbish Eastern prude who was not worth more of his attention. But once he’d left her at the stagecoach this morning, he’d been unable to get her out of his mind. Instead of heading for the game at the Lucky Horseshoe, he’d found himself riding out to Parker’s place. And staying all evening. And now he was standing with her in the cool night air, thinking about young men’s fancies and hoot owls and imagining how it would feel to wrap her up in his arms.
Amelia had been at first anxious, then furious when she awoke the next morning to hear from Morgan that Parker had not returned home. Morgan tried to tell her, as Gabe had the night before, that it was not such a strange thing for a young man to spend the night away from his home. “Like some sort of tomcat, you mean,” Amelia had snapped. And Morgan had looked embarrassed and headed down to the river to fetch water.
Parker had shown up midmorning, whistling and ready to charm his sister into forgetting their quarrel. He apologized profusely for leaving her on her first night and called himself a scalawag and several other creative names that had Amelia laughing in spite of herself.
By lunchtime they were friends again. They sat on the banks of the little Pronghorn River and ate cold boiled potatoes and hard rolls. “I must say I’m not much impressed with the cuisine here in your fabulous West,” Amelia said.
Parker reached for the jug of cider to wash down his dry lunch. “I just haven’t had much time for figuring out things like cooking.”
“You don’t even have a stove.”
“Every ounce of dust I find goes right back into the mine.” He indicated all the mysterious equipment that surrounded them. “I’ve bought all this just from working the river with my own two hands and a washpan. Now with a sluice and a Long Tom and a cradle, pretty soon I’ll be taking out twenty-five dollars a day or more. And if I find a vein in those cliffs over there, why, the sky’s the limit. Twenty-five dollars will be my tip to the shoeshine boys back on Park Avenue.”
A glow came into his eyes when he started to talk about his mine. It made Amelia uncomfortable. It was going to be harder to talk Parker into returning home than she had anticipated.
“Couldn’t you come home for a couple of years, just to help Father get used to the idea that he can’t run everything at the bank anymore? Then you could come back out here.”
Parker looked at her as if she were crazy. “A couple of years? This could be gone by then. Look at California—the richest strike in history, they called it, and now it’s mostly played out. I’m just damn lucky I was able to stake claim to this place. There aren’t too many more prime spots left. Before long they’ll all be taken.”
Amelia decided to ignore the strong language. In view of the obvious nature of Parker’s disappearance last night, she decided that swearing was the least deleterious of Parker’s new activities.
“He could die, Parker. That bank is his life, and he’s simply not willing to turn over the reins to anyone else but you.”
“He’s not willing to turn them over to me, either, sis.”
“At least you could try.”
Parker tore at a tuft of grass and threw it violently into the river. “We’ve been warned about Father’s heart condition for years now, Amelia. How come it suddenly gets so especially grave just when I’m trying to make a new life for myself?”
Amelia put her hand on her brother’s knee. “We owe them, Parker. They’re our parents, and they’ve always taken care of us.”
Parker was silent, continuing to pull up blades of grass. Finally Amelia said, “Couldn’t your partner run the mine for a while? What’s his stake in this, anyway? You say you bought this equipment yourself. What has he put into it?”
Parker flopped backward on the grass and closed his eyes. “It was sort of a…mistake.”
“What does that mean?”
He winced and peered up at her through one half-open eye. “You’ll find out sometime, I guess. I lost half the mine to Gabe in a poker game.”
“A poker game!”
“When I first came out I didn’t know what the heck I was doing, and I was hardly panning out enough to eat on, so I thought I’d try my luck with the cards. It worked out pretty well—for a while.”
Amelia turned around and sat back on her knees facing him. “I knew that that Gabriel Hatch was the one who had gotten you into trouble.”
Parker opened his eyes. “It was my decision. Gabe had nothing to do with it. Besides, the pot I lost was worth more than my entire mine, but he refused to take more than half.”
“How generous of him! He refuses to steal more than half the property of an innocent boy who doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“I knew perfectly well what I was doing, sis. In fact, you might be surprised to know that I was getting pretty good at the tables.”
“Good enough to lose half your mine.”
“Just forget it, all right? It’s my business, not yours.” He rolled to his feet. “I have to get to work.”
Amelia watched as he crossed the bridge over to the long wooden trough that ran along the gravel bank of the river. He set his wide-brimmed hat back on his head and bent over to pick up a shovel.
So they had quarreled once again. Parker had changed in the few months they had been separated, and Amelia felt a stab of grief. She wanted her brother back. She wanted her family living all together harmoniously in their comfortable house in New York. But she had the sick feeling that those days were gone forever.
She stood and walked slowly up to the cabin. She felt the need to blame someone for the change in Parker, and the likely candidate was Gabriel Hatch. But when she tried to generate some anger against the attractive gambler, she found herself remembering how he’d helped cure her headache last night, how he’d tried to console her about Parker. Most of all she found herself remembering that when she’d stood next to him on the bridge in the moonlight, her heart had inexplicably started beating as wildly as the wings of a trapped bird.
Amelia knelt on the stone hearth of Parker’s big fireplace and stirred a pot of stew that Morgan had helped her fashion from a squirrel he had caught that afternoon. The concoction smelled gamey to her, but she was hungry enough to be willing to give it a try.
She had utterly refused to consider going to town to dine with Gabriel Hatch at the Willard Hotel. Morgan had reminded her of the invitation just after Parker had confessed the manner in which Hatch had obtained half the mine. Though Morgan felt it would be rude to turn the man down, Amelia had decided that, considering the strange feelings the gambler had engendered in her, the less she had to do with him, the better.
The door opened and Parker’s lanky frame filled the doorway. They hadn’t spoken since their quarrel at lunch. “I have a proposition,” he said.
His voice sounded hesitant, but hopeful. She looked up.
“I know I can make the mine work, Amelia. And I’ve just got to be able to give it a try.”
It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Her shoulders sagged, and she went back to stirring the stew.
“Don’t turn away, sis. Listen to me. As I said, I’ve a proposition. If I had Morgan to help me, I could really get this thing going. Give me six weeks—six weeks—to make the mine profitable. At the end of six weeks if I haven’t either found my lode or built up our panning to at least twenty-five dollars a day, I’ll go back home with you.”
His face had that expression of satisfaction he’d always shown when he’d beaten her at a game of chess or two-handed whist. “And what if you do strike it rich, as you say, by the end of six weeks?” she asked.
He hunched down next to her, his eyes gleaming. “Then you and Morgan go on back to New York by yourselves. I’ll send Mother and Father my love, and before long I’ll send them enough money for that tour of Europe they’ve put off their entire lives. Father can’t very well work at the bank if he’s on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.”
Amelia considered her brother’s words. She didn’t believe there was any way he would be able to make the mine work in just six weeks, even with Morgan’s help. It would mean a delay in their return, but perhaps this bargain would be a way to accomplish her mission without more fighting. “You’d need to ask Morgan if he’d be willing,” she said.
Parker grinned. “I already did. He says he’ll go along with whatever you decide.”
Amelia gripped the handle of the stew pot with the makeshift apron she had fashioned that morning from one of her petticoats. “This is ready to eat,” she said, standing.
Parker pulled out the flap of his shirt and used it to take the pot from her and carry it to the table he had built from two flour barrels and some planking. “So what do you say?” he persisted.
Six weeks. Six weeks of a wooden bed and squirrel stew and…
“I’d want you to stay away from that Mr. Hatch,” she said. “I still think that he’s responsible for getting you into trouble.”
Parker seemed to sense her capitulation. He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I haven’t gotten into any trouble. At least, not any I can’t handle. But as to Gabe, he has as much right to be around here as I do. He owns half the place.”
Amelia felt the strange flutter in her chest again. She looked up at her brother. “So Gabriel Hatch is part of the deal?”
Parker gave a firm nod. “He’s part of the deal.”
Chapter Four (#ulink_ab3948b3-e287-5f3e-ac7b-0d842078c341)
It had been a discouraging day. The stew of the previous evening had not set well with her, and Amelia’s stomach had rolled all morning. She had gotten on Parker’s nerves again with her hovering presence. All she had wanted was to understand the workings of the mysterious equipment he had installed at his mine, but he had grown defensive at her questioning. By midafternoon he was fully out of sorts and had taken off again for an unspecified destination “in town.”
Amelia sat on the hard cot and looked disconsolately around at the single room that would be her home for the next six weeks. There were two windows chopped in the logs, but they were covered by oil paper, so it was impossible to see outside. Besides the cot, the crude table and four barrel chairs, there was the cane rocker, a set of cupboards built up the wall and a large wood bin. That was the extent of the furniture. Amelia closed her eyes and pictured the elegant Prescott parlor back home with her mother’s prize Biedermeier furniture. Independence certainly had its price, she thought wryly. But when tears began to prickle behind her eyelids, she gave herself a shake and stood. One of Caroline Prescott’s favorite phrases was, “Never underestimate the power of the human spirit.” Surely her mother’s daughter could not let herself be daunted by an unasked-for stint of pioneering.
She brushed her hands together resolutely. The room was sparse and crude, but it didn’t have to be dirty. Her first order of business would be to give this place a good, thorough cleaning. She marched across the room and flung open the door to call to Morgan, who was at the river’s edge sifting a cradleful of sludge.
“Does my brother have any cleaning supplies in the lean-to?” she called.
Morgan laughed. “Cleaning supplies?”
“Brushes, brooms, buckets, soap.”
With no apparent effort, the Welshman pulled on a thick rope and hoisted the heavy cradle into an idle position. Then he came over to her. “I don’t think so, Missy. What do you want those things for?”
“To clean, of course. If this is to be our home for the next few weeks, the least I can do is try to make things a little more livable.”
Morgan peered into the tiny cabin with a doubtful expression. “It would be quite a task, if you ask me.”
“Well, it would give me something to do. Obviously Parker doesn’t want me hanging over him while he’s mining. So I’ve decided that I’ll just take over the housework and the cooking.”
“The cooking?” While money was not abundant in the Prescott household with all that was spent on their parents’ respective crusades, the family had never been without a cook and a maid.
Amelia nodded firmly. “I don’t know why not. I have two good hands and a brain in my head. It can’t be that hard to learn. We’ll start by going into town and picking up some supplies.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Morgan said, shaking his head.
There seemed to be no way to lock up the cabin, so they merely shut the door, saddled up their horses and rode away, leaving everything unprotected, as appeared to be the custom in this strange land. They headed back across the beautiful meadow, then followed the twisting path into town. Amelia’s spirits rose as they went. It felt good to be doing something, to have a purpose. Parker would feel better, too, she decided, when she told him that she was going to leave him alone to his mining operations and that she would take care of having a clean house and a nice hot meal ready for him each day. Perhaps if she made him happy enough, he would agree to give up his trips to town.
When they reached the main street, she told Morgan, “I’m going to send a wire to Mother and Father letting them know that we’ll be heading back in six weeks. I don’t know exactly how I’ll explain the delay, but I’ll think of something. In the meantime, I’d like you to look for Parker.”
Morgan frowned as he tied their mounts to the rail in front of the telegraph office. “I don’t like leaving you alone, Missy. And, anyway, where am I supposed to find that wild brother of yours?”
Amelia shrugged. “I believe he mentioned an establishment called the Lucky Horseshoe.”
Morgan’s frown deepened. “Now, Missy, you know very well that I haven’t been inside a saloon these past twenty years.”
Amelia bit her lip. “I didn’t say you had to drink anything, Morgan. Just fetch him out of there. Tell him I want to talk with him.”
“I don’t know…”
Amelia gave him a gentle shove. “Go on with you. I’ll send my wire and then meet the two of you at the general store.”
His big boots shuffling against the fine dust of the street, Morgan headed down the row of saloons toward a large building at one end that sported an awning and a shellacked sign painted with an upside-down horseshoe.
Tinny piano music drifted out through the saloon’s wide-open door. Morgan took a deep breath, set his shoulders and walked in.
Gambling tables covered with green felt filled over half of the large, smoky room. Clustered next to the bar were a few smaller tables just for drinking. Most were empty. A busty woman with bright yellow hair sat on a stool next to the bar, her crossed legs revealing the grimy ruffles of at least three petticoats.
Morgan paused at the door and squinted through the smoke at the gambling tables.
“Hey, big fella,” the woman at the bar called to him. “Wanna buy me a drink?”
He walked slowly toward her, politely removing his hat as he went. “I’m just here looking for a friend, ma’am.”
“I can be right friendly when I want to be, Samson.” Her eyelashes were crusted with kohl. Close up she looked much older than she had from the door. There was no welcome in her eyes to match her words.
“Ah…the name’s Morgan, ma’am. Morgan Jones. But I really just came to find a fellow name of Parker Prescott. Would you know him, by any chance?”
She smiled. “Parker’s a regular. And a right pretty boy he is, too.” The thickened lashes fluttered up and down. “But I prefer the strong silent type, don’t ya know. So how’s about that drink?”
Morgan shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Ah…have you seen Parker around here this afternoon?”
The woman leaned back against the bar and turned her head to call to the bartender at the far end. “Roscoe, this fellow here doesn’t want to have a drink with me.”
The words were slurred, and as she swung around she teetered for a moment at the edge of the stool. Morgan put out a hand to steady her.
“No sampling of the merchandise,” said a voice behind him. “If you want Stella’s company, you’d better buy a drink.”
Morgan turned around. The man in back of him was a middle-aged man, elegantly dressed with a bright silk vest that stretched over a banker’s paunch. His cheeks were slightly flabby and his hands looked soft. He had thinning hair that he’d greased and pulled over to one side. Normally Morgan would have brushed off such a man like a bread crumb on a tablecloth, but there was something in the fellow’s expression that gave him pause. The man smiled and stood politely awaiting Morgan’s answer. His steel-colored eyes held a deadly expression that matched the deadliness of the longbarreled Colt Special tucked into his belt.
“I don’t drink, sir,” Morgan said softly.
The man’s smile grew broader. “Well, now. That’s a strange thing to say for a man standing in the middle of a saloon. Or did you think this was the Ladies’ Aid Society?”
Morgan held his temper. “I’m just looking for Parker Prescott.”
The man hesitated for a minute, then seemed to make a decision. He clapped Morgan on the back and said heartily, “Any friend of Parker’s is welcome here, my good fellow. I take it you’re new in town.”
Reluctantly Morgan introduced himself.
“I’m Jim Driscoll. Big Jim, most folks call me.” He patted a hand on his stomach and laughed. He pushed the woman roughly off the stool. “Go on upstairs and get some coffee to sober up, Stella,” he told her. “How’re you supposed to last out the night when you’re sotted before sunset?”
She stumbled away from the bar and headed toward the stairs at the end of the room. Driscoll indicated the seat she had vacated. “Sit down, Jones. The first one’s on the house for a new customer.”
Morgan didn’t move. “Thank you for the offer, Mr. Driscoll, but as I said before, I don’t drink. If Parker’s not here, I’ll just be moving along.”
“Something wrong with our liquor, man?” Two cowboys, one with two Smith & Wessons holstered in a double gunbelt and one with a Colt Peacemaker stuffed into his pants, had quietly come up along either side of Driscoll. Morgan took a step backward but found himself up against the long bar. “I’m not here for trouble,” he said, holding out his empty hands.
“It looks like Mr. Jones’s backbone doesn’t quite match up to the rest of his size,” Driscoll said with a sneer.
Morgan dropped his hands and tried to move around the three men. Before he could take a second step, the man with the gunbelt had cleared leather. Slowly he pulled back the hammer of the big gun, cocked it and pointed it at Morgan’s chest.
Morgan froze in place. A rivulet of sweat made its way along his temple. Driscoll was still smiling. Chairs scraped and the piano music across the room slowed, then stopped altogether.
A man at one of the gaming tables rose to his feet and sauntered toward the group at the bar. “What seems to be the problem here, Driscoll?” Gabe Hatch asked in an even voice.
The smile dropped off Driscoll’s face as he turned toward the newcomer. “Go on back to your game, Hatch. This is a private matter.”
Gabe ignored him and kept on coming, stopping just behind the cowboy with the drawn gun. His hands were at his sides, fingers slightly spread.
“Mr. Jones is a friend of mine, gentlemen,” Gabe said. “And he’s new in town. I wouldn’t want to see him get into any kind of trouble.”
The man with the Peacemaker still tucked in his belt said, “Your friend thinks he’s too good to have a drink with Big Jim here.”
“I told you to stay out of it, Hatch,” Driscoll said, turning around to face Gabe.
“And I told you that Morgan’s a friend of mine.” He had no visible weapon, but he flexed his fingers and had the look of a man ready to take action.
He and Driscoll locked gazes for a tense moment. Finally the saloon owner shrugged and said, “Tell your friend he’d better be more sociable the next time he comes around here.” He gave a curt nod to the man holding the gun, who immediately uncocked it and slipped it back into its holster. Then he pushed past Gabe and walked away.
Gabe gripped Morgan’s shoulder. The big man was shaken by the encounter, and Gabe didn’t blame him. Deuce Connors had gotten his nickname from those two sidearms of his, and he handled them as slickly as anyone in Deadwood. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Parker’s not around. He must be over at Mattie’s.”
Connors and the other gunman kept their eyes on them as they walked toward the door. “Friendly town,” Morgan said dryly when they were out on the street.
“Yeah, well, most of the people are all right. Driscoll’s just gotten too swelled for his britches. He’s got the biggest saloon in town and owns most of those rentals up there.” He pointed up the canyon wall to a section of tin-roofed shacks built practically on top of each other. “Charges sky-high rents for miserable huts that a pig would think twice about sleeping in. But there are so many danged fools arriving every day determined to strike it rich that he can set any price he wants.”
Morgan spat into the dust as if trying to rid himself of the taste of Big Jim Driscoll. “He won’t have my patronage again, that’s for darn sure.”
Gabe started down the street. “I’ll walk with you to Mattie’s,” he said. “I wouldn’t choose the Lucky Horseshoe myself except that it has the richest games in town. If you want to talk real money, you’ve got to be a customer of Big Jim.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes. Then Gabe asked, “Why are you looking for Parker?”
“His sister wants him. It seems she’s determined to make a happy home for him up there at the mine. She’s over at the store right now buying soap and brooms and what all. Says she’s going to clean things up.”
Gabe chuckled. “Well, now, that should be interesting.”
* * *
By the time an evasive Parker and an even more evasive Morgan had joined Amelia at the general store, she had finished making her purchases. She stood impatiently, surrounded by bundles and feeling a little self-conscious. The storekeeper didn’t seem to mind having a strange woman planted in the middle of his store, tapping her foot and looking around restlessly.
Parker had refused to offer much in the way of an explanation for the delay, though he claimed to be pleased that she had found a project with which to occupy herself and agreed to return to the cabin with them. All in all, the trip to town had brought back Amelia’s headache, and she decided to postpone her cleaning venture until the next day.
It proved to be a wise decision, since she awoke the next morning with a clear head and a renewed determination to make the best of her stay in the West. Even the weather seemed resolved to put on its best face. It was a brilliant, cloudless day. The stream sparkled like liquid diamonds and the valley beyond looked green and inviting. Amelia thought for a moment of taking a short ride across the meadow before she started her work, but firmly pushed the idea away. Her first task was to do laundry, and since she had never in her life washed so much as a handkerchief, she figured she’d better get an early start.
Parker was on his best behavior, evidently as determined as she that their six weeks would be pleasant. He agreed without fuss that Morgan should stop working on the mine long enough to help her fill the washtub they had cut from a barrel and haul water up to the new copper boiler she’d purchased in town.
Once she had her system set up, Amelia told Morgan that he could go back to helping Parker. She would handle things from here on. What could be that difficult about boiling and rinsing clothes?
Feeling a touch of that independence Parker had boasted about, she prepared the first batch. She remembered that Meggie, the Irishwoman who came in once a week to supervise the laundry at the Prescott household, always put the light-colored things together, particularly the more delicate…unmentionables. As she started to choose items from the pile that Parker had gathered for her the previous evening, it dampened her enthusiasm a bit to discover that it wasn’t only Parker’s house that hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. But she persisted and added some things of Morgan’s and her own until the boiler was chock-full. She ladled out a spoonful of soap. She had no idea how much to use nor how long the things should boil, but it didn’t seem that such considerations should matter. After all, she had been the star pupil at Miss Longworth’s Female Academy four years running. How hard could it be to do a little laundry?
Gabe gave his horse free rein across the last flat stretch of meadow. Yesterday he had resisted the urge to walk with Parker and Morgan to see Amelia. Her refusal to dine with him had made it fairly clear that she was not interested in cultivating their acquaintance. But this morning he’d found himself mounting up to ride out to the mine with absolutely no excuse whatsoever except the beauty of one of the last hot days of summer. Amelia Prescott might not want to see him, but she’d left him with a bur under his saddle that had to get combed out…or at least scratched a bit.
Parker and Morgan were upstream at the far end of the digs, so Gabe hitched his horse, untied a paperwrapped package from the back of his saddle and headed for the little cabin. The paper contained a slab of salt pork. Not the most romantic of offerings, but he knew the state of Parker’s larder and figured that by now the lad’s Eastern visitors could be getting pretty hungry. They weren’t used to living on scrawny rabbits and scavenged wild vegetables like the more veteran miners up and down the Black Hills.
He couldn’t hear any noise from inside the cabin. Perhaps Amelia was upriver with her brother. Tentatively he pushed open the door and looked inside. He couldn’t decide whether the scene that met his eyes was comical or tragic. Amelia sat next to a large tub with her legs stuck straight out in front of her. The dirt floor underneath her had turned into a giant mud puddle that had splattered her light blue dress with polka dots of mud. She was surrounded by soaked, muddy articles of clothing. The water in the tub was black. A copper boiler lay on its side by the fire, more clothes tumbling out of it onto the ground. Amelia held one item in her hands and was viewing it with an expression of mourning.
She turned when the door opened. “Oh, fine,” she said. “Now my day is complete.”
“You’re glad to see me, I take it,” Gabe answered. The comical was winning out over the tragic, but he kept his expression neutral.
“What do you want, Mr. Hatch?”
Gabe looked around the room. “I…ah…heard you were determined to clean this place up.”
“Mr. Hatch,” she said in a slow, deliberate tone, “I’m sure your business is with my brother. He’s up the hill somewhere with Morgan. Please go find them and leave me alone. I am, as you can see, very busy.”
Her voice was a strong contrast to the forlorn picture she presented. No one would say that little Amelia Prescott lacked pluck. “Can I help?” he asked mildly.
Her chin came up another degree. “I’m doing just fine, thank you.” When he continued watching her with a sympathetic look in his eyes, she added, “Except…except…”
Finally there was the slightest tremor in her voice. He moved closer, just to the edge of the ring of mud, and crouched down. “Except what?” he asked gently.
She pulled her bottom lip through her teeth. Her mouth was full and red, Gabe noted idly. Ripened.
She lifted the soggy piece of clothing from her lap, then let it drop with a sodden splash. With an intake of breath that could have been close to a sob, she said, “This was my only nightgown.”
Gabe glanced at the garment. It appeared to be made plainly of a serviceable white cotton. What had been white cotton. “Are you having trouble getting it clean?”
She shook her head. “It’s ruined. Look.”
He leaned close as she picked it up once again. The entire piece was covered with sticky black globs.
“What water did you use?”
She looked confused. “Well, just…water. From the stream.”
“Ah.” He stood and walked through the mud to pick up the fallen boiler. Then he began dumping the dirty clothes back into it. “The streams around here are full of minerals. See how the clothes have turned yellow?”
He spoke calmly, as if to a child, and gave Amelia time to compose herself. She picked at one of the little black balls. “Will these ever come off?” she asked.
“Perhaps. With patience. But the way to start would be to wash everything again. Doesn’t your brother have a rain barrel?”
She gave a forlorn shrug.
“You need fresh water and lots of soap. How much did you use?”
She cupped her hand to indicate the size of the spoonful. The skin of her palm was bright red.
“You’ve burned yourself!”
She quickly turned her hand over, but he reached for it and gently spread her fingers out. “It’s nothing,” she said.
“Didn’t you pour cold water over the clothes before you took them out of the boiler?” She didn’t answer. He dropped her hand with a shake of his head, then collected the soiled nightgown from her lap. It appeared to have fared worse than most of the other garments. “Whenever you have to use river water, you need to use a lot of soap.”
“I didn’t think it would make any difference.”
He smiled at her. “It’s not quite the same as turning on a faucet over a washtub back home, is it?”
“Mr. Hatch, I have never in my life turned on a faucet over a washtub.”
Her expression had regained some of the defensive haughtiness he had found so intriguing the other day. He liked it better than the sadness he had seen in her eyes when he came in, which had put an uncomfortable soft spot in the middle of his gut.
“Well, then, you can learn from the beginning.” He reached out his hand. After a slight hesitation, she took it and let him pull her up out of the dirt. “We’ll start by moving this operation out of Mudville, here. There’s a nice grassy bank behind the cabin that will do just fine.”
By late afternoon it was done. Gabe’s brisk manner and gentle jokes had helped Amelia overcome her initial embarrassment at seeing him, his white ruffled shirt rolled up to his elbows, scrubbing away at her most personal items of clothing. She’d never in her life seen a man do laundry, but Gabe seemed to think it nothing extraordinary. A few of the garments had been beyond remedy, including her nightgown. Sadly she’d crumpled it into a ball with the other ruined things and tucked them away in the corner of the cupboard to use as rags.
She sat back against the little hill bank and surveyed the results of their efforts. Freshly cleaned clothes, now only slightly yellowed, flapped in the breeze from the clotheslines Gabe had strung between three small trees in the back of the cabin. The boiler had been dried and put away in the cabin and the barrel washtub was emptied and lying on the ground bottom up.
She was glad that Parker and Morgan had taken their lunches with them this morning and had not returned to the house at midday. She didn’t think she could bear having them see the mess she had made. They would be home soon, though, and hungry as usual. She didn’t have an ounce of energy left to prepare a meal, and she had no idea what they were going to eat. The squirrel stew was gone, and neither Parker nor Morgan had been out to catch anything else. Remember stores? she thought to herself. Stores where you bought food in boxes and cans? Restaurants? Restaurants where you sat at tables covered with snowy linen and fine china and were served course after elegant course by a discreetly hovering waiter?
“Now what’s the problem?” Gabe interrupted her thoughts.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You look gloomy again. The laundry’s done. The floor inside has almost dried. The only thing left to do is get you cleaned up,” he added, gesturing to her now completely filthy dress.
She felt her cheeks color. She couldn’t believe she was sitting on the bank, her dress wet and clinging to her in what must be a most indecent way, her skirt pulled up inches above her ankles and her feet bare, since she had abandoned her soggy shoes halfway through the afternoon. She must look like the worst kind of hoyden. “I am a sight,” she said ruefully.
“Yes, you are,” he agreed easily, his eyes bright as they roamed the length of her.
“We’ve used all the rainwater.”
Gabe grinned. “I don’t think your skin will turn yellow if you use the stream. It’s not even too cold this time of year. You’ll find it refreshing.”
Amelia’s eyes widened. “You mean…bathe…in the stream?”
He nodded. “Unless you want to ride into town to Mattie Smith’s. She’s got a bathtub upstairs the size of a dance floor.”
Amelia scrambled to her feet. “No…ah…no. I have no intention of ever setting foot inside that woman’s establishment. And I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t mention it when you come around here.”
Gabe’s grin died. “You could do worse than make friends with Mattie, Miss Prescott. She knows this territory, understands how to live out here. Whereas you—” he gave a suggestive glance at the laundered clothes “—are what we would call a tenderfoot.”
“I know…I’m as green as spring grass. But I’m going to learn, Mr. Hatch. And I don’t intend to learn from the likes of Mrs. Smith.”
“You didn’t object to learning from me,” Gabe observed.
“I didn’t really have much choice in the matter. But, anyway, at least you don’t own a bawdy house. You’re only a…a…”
“A dissolute gambler and unrepentant drunkard?” he supplied with a serious face.
Amelia’s flush deepened. “You have told me that you don’t make a habit of imbibing, and I shall take you at your word. However, you do make your living gambling, and I can’t say that it’s a profession I admire.”
Gabe got to his feet, smiling once again. “At least you’ve forgiven me for my uncharacteristic appearance the day we met. It’s a start.”
“Please don’t count on it being a start to anything, Mr. Hatch,” she said primly. “I’ve promised Parker that I won’t object to your presence here, since you seem to have won the right to be here. But that doesn’t mean I have to entertain you or treat you as anything but a business associate of my brother.”
He stood just down the bank from her, so that their eyes were nearly level. “Oh, but I was greatly entertained this afternoon, Miss Prescott, and you weren’t even trying. I can’t imagine what it would be like if you truly made an effort.”
“Nor will you find out,” she said, then spun on her heel and started down toward the stream. Gabe watched her go. Her wet dress clung to her back and hips and molded itself around her tantalizing little bottom. He gave himself a shake. It had been a long time since he’d resorted to paying for something that usually fell into his hands with very little effort. But perhaps he should give Mattie’s girls another look. He sure was feeling the itch these days.
Amelia marched up to the edge of the stream, paused, then continued walking right into it, clothes and all. Gabe called to her in surprise, “You’re supposed to go in without your clothes.”
She didn’t turn around. “Not likely with you standing there, mister. Anyway, the dress needs bathing, too.”
She was up to midthigh when her heavy, wet clothes started dragging her along with the current. Gabe ran to the stream and plunged in after her, grabbing her hand and pulling her back toward shore.
“Lord almighty, woman. You don’t need a teacher, you need a keeper.”
Amelia pulled her hand out of his grasp, wincing. “You didn’t have to grab me like that. I was fine.”
“It was either grab you or go collect you in a heap five hundred yards downstream,” he said angrily.
Amelia was rubbing her reddened palm.
“Your hand is burned, isn’t it?”
“It hurts a little,” she admitted.
They were standing in about a foot of water at the edge of the stream. Gabe gave an exasperated sigh, then grasped her shoulders and turned her to face him. Before Amelia could stop him, he unbuttoned her lace collar, took it off and flung it up on the bank. “Now the dress,” he said, reaching for the top button.
Amelia took a step back into the stream. “Don’t you dare!”
“I will if you don’t do it yourself. Dress and petticoats, too. I’m sure you’re wearing some kind of dudedup Eastern underclothes that will serve just fine to protect your modesty. Then you can go in, but stay on this side—don’t go into the middle where the current’s too swift.”
Amelia looked around helplessly. “I can’t…I have to…” Finally she concluded weakly, “Parker and Morgan will be coming home wanting their supper.”
Gabe lifted his finger in the air. “I forgot. In all the fuss, I didn’t mention that I brought supper—a tenpound slab of salt pork.”
“Salt pork,” she said, looking uncomfortable. “Ah…thank you.”
Gabe cocked his head and tried to get her to meet his eyes. “What’s your favorite way to cook it?” he asked.
“Cook what?”
“Salt pork.”
She looked up at him. “Fried?” she ventured
He grinned. “Excellent. That’s my favorite, too.”
She looked relieved.
“But you’ve had quite a day,” he said. “And your hands are burned. So how about if I go ahead and fix it while you’re taking your bath?”
“You’d fix the supper?” Her chin dropped.
“It wouldn’t be the first time. I rather like cooking, to tell you the truth.”
Amelia felt a little dazed, and her feet were beginning to get numb from the cold water. The day had certainly not gone as she had planned. But she hadn’t eaten since breakfast and if Gabe was willing to put some food on her table, she’d let him do it. She didn’t care if it was rattlesnake. “I’d be very grateful, Mr. Hatch,” she said after a moment.
He tipped up her chin to force her to look at him once again. “There’s a price for my services,” he said softly.
Something bad changed in his voice, and it made the rest of her go as numb as her feet. “What do you mean?” she asked, her throat sticking on the words.
“You have to start calling me Gabe.”
Amelia cleared her throat. “Back East it wouldn’t be proper for—”
“You’re not back East anymore, tenderfoot,” he said with the same husky tone. Then he touched his finger to the tip of her nose and turned to leave. As he slogged out of the water in his wet boots he turned back to her and said. “Supper’s on in half an hour.”
Chapter Five (#ulink_25e381ed-6b0a-5645-af8f-5ec11504e84a)
Parker and Morgan didn’t seem the least surprised to find Gabe hunched over a big iron spider on the fire grate when they came in from their day’s work. Amelia had been sitting in the rocker watching him, but she jumped up guiltily when her brother came through the door.
“I see you finished the washing, sis,” he said. “Good job.”
Amelia glanced down at Gabe, who gave her a conspiratorial wink. “Some of the things are a little yellowed,” she said.
Parker laughed. “Yellow passes for white out here. Those kinds of things aren’t as important as they were back home. Can you imagine what Mother would say to a batch of yellow clothes?”
Amelia giggled. “She practically has a case of the vapors when the laundrymaid puts a little scorch mark on one of Father’s collars.”
They all laughed together, then Morgan said, “Something smells mighty good.”
Amelia’s smile died. “Mr. Hatch…Gabe… brought us some salt pork and insisted on cooking it himself.” She looked over at her brother, expecting to be reproved or at least teased for putting a guest to work, but Parker looked unaffected.
“Morgan’s right. It smells wonderful. I could eat a polecat,” he said.
Amelia let out a long breath. Gabe stood up holding the handle of the frying pan with a towel. “She’s ready and waiting,” he said.
Amelia had already set the table. She held out Parker’s tin plates as Gabe served up the food. She had found it fascinating to watch him as he had efficiently and expertly prepared the food. He’d cut the pork into slabs, which he’d first parboiled, then rolled in flour and fried. In the grease that was left he’d fried onions, which he then poured over the cold potatoes Amelia had left from breakfast. To Amelia it looked and smelled more delicious than anything she’d ever tried in the elegant tearooms of New York City. They all sat down at the table and, with little conversation, dug in. She ate until she thought her sides would burst, and then, to the amusement of the three men, she ate a few bites more.
When they had finished, she insisted that she would do the washing up, and she literally pushed Gabe down into the rocker as Parker took out his bag of tobacco and passed it around. It was a new habit of his that Amelia found repulsive, but she refrained from commenting and went to wash the dishes. When she had finished, she stood silently for a few minutes, watching the men enjoying each other’s company. Though she was utterly exhausted, she was reluctant to interrupt their camaraderie by insisting on having her bedroom to herself.
At the first lull in the conversation, Gabe looked over and saw her standing idly by the fire. “It’s time for bed, gentlemen,” he said, getting up. “Thank you for the fine evening.”
“Thank you for the supper,” Parker replied, also getting to his feet. He waited for their visitor to head for the door, but Gabe hesitated.
“I have a last little item of business with Miss Prescott,” he said.
Parker lifted a questioning eyebrow.
“It will just take a minute,” Gabe said. He made no move to leave.
Finally Parker shrugged and turned to go out. “C’mon, Morgan. That gold dust will be waiting for us bright and early tomorrow.”
The two men left, leaving Amelia looking uneasily at Gabe. “I thank you for the supper, too,” she said softly. “And for everything else today. Especially for not telling my brother what a coil I’d gotten myself into.”
Gabe smiled gently. “It wasn’t so very much of a coil. As you say, you’re learning.”
He still stood without moving, his eyes intense and gleaming in the firelight.
Amelia smiled nervously. “Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?”
Gabe shook his head, then advanced slowly toward her. She could see the stubble of his beard, the flinch of a muscle along his straight jaw. When he was close enough to see tiny reflections of the flames in the blue of his eyes, he stopped. She swallowed.
“You said you had some business with me.” Her voice came out as a near whisper.
“Yes.”
He was not smiling now, and something in his expression made the breath stop dead in Amelia’s chest. He leaned closer. She closed her eyes and had a swift, unbidden memory of the moment in the stagecoach when his hard thighs had rubbed against her.
Her entire body swayed as she felt him brush against her. Then she opened her eyes in surprise as he bent to reach past her toward a crock on the floor next to the fire. He scooped up a handful of the contents and straightened up, facing her.
“Give me your hands,” he said.
Amelia was still trying to locate her last breath.
“Your hands,” he said again, seizing one of them. His fingers were covered with pork grease, which he started to gently smooth over her still-red palms. He spread it slowly in small circles. “It might not smell as pretty as that lemon soap you like to use, but it should help that burn heal.”
Amelia felt the light pressure of his fingertips all the way up her arms. She took a deep gulp of air, which seemed to steady her. “It was kind of you to think about it,” she said.
Now he smiled at her, which lightened the tension that had grown between them. But Amelia’s heart was still beating far too fast.
He finished with one hand and repeated his ministrations with the other. Then he stepped back and leaned over to grab a towel to wipe his fingers. “That should do it,” he said. “Now I will bid you good evening.”
He walked to the door, retrieved his hat and opened the door. “Thank you for a most enjoyable day, Miss Prescott,” he said with a little bow.
As he started to leave, Amelia called, “Gabe.” He turned back to her. “You may call me Amelia.”
He looked taken aback for a moment. Then he grinned, nodded and went out the door.
“So what’s put the bee in your bonnet, Gabe Hatch?” Mattie Smith and Gabe were in her office where Gabe was finishing up her monthly accounts. When she had given up the dance hall circuit and gone into business for herself, Mattie had insisted on two things. Her girls must keep themselves clean and healthy, and in return she promised to be scrupulously accurate in seeing that they got their fair share of the earnings. The latter had become easier when Gabe Hatch had come to town. Mattie had never much liked numbers herself.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mattie,” Gabe answered absently.
“Well, you snapped at Delia when she offered to take you upstairs for half the regular fee. Then you started entering the figures in last month’s account. And in the past five minutes you’ve added the same column of numbers six times by my count. So I figure there’s got to be something on your mind.”
Gabe frowned and threw his pen on the desk. Mattie sat across the desk from him, curled up in an overstuffed armchair that dwarfed her tiny frame. Except for her gray hair, she looked like a plump little child. “I guess I’m tired,” he said finally, pushing back his chair. “Maybe I should finish up on these later.”
“Maybe you should have taken Delia up on her offer,” Mattie suggested. “Best cure for ‘tiredness’ I know.”
Gabe smiled. “No, thanks.” He winked at her and added, “Your girls are lovely, Mattie, but I’m still waiting for you to break down and make me an offer yourself. Why should I settle for second best?”
Dimples appeared in Mattie’s soft cheeks, but she kept her voice stern. “Go on with you, Gabe. An old gal like me deserves some rest in her sunset years. I don’t need any more hassling by young bucks like you.”
“Sunset years,” Gabe scoffed. “Why, you’re barely reaching the noon hour, Mattie, love.”
The dimples deepened. “You’re full of malarkey, Gabriel Hatch. And what’s more, you’re trying to distract me by changing the subject. You still haven’t told me what’s wrong.”
“Yes, I did. I’m tired. It was late when I came back into town last night.”
Mattie leaned forward and demanded, “Came back from where?”
Gabe closed the book and stood. “From my partner’s place.”
Mattie’s gray eyes gleamed wickedly. “Sure, now. Would that be the partner whose sister just arrived in town? A sister with the face of an angel and hair like the mane of a prize bay mare? Is that the partner you mean?”
Gabe rolled his eyes. “Parker’s the only partner I have, Mattie, as you well know. As for his sister, well, yes…she’s quite lovely.”
Something in the tone of his voice made Mattie’s expression grow serious. “You aren’t getting yourself stuck on that fancy Eastern lady, are you, Gabe?” she asked, a line of worry creasing the skin between her eyes.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He started toward the door. “I’ll come back and finish these books tomorrow.”
Mattie jumped out of the chair and went to put a hand on his arm. “You’d be better off with Delia,” she said kindly. “Or any of my girls. Belle’s mighty sweet.”
Gabe patted her hand, then gently removed it from his arm. “I’m not interested, Mattie. At least, not today.”
Mattie shook her head. “You oughtn’t go messing with a lady like Miss Prescott. Why, they say her pappy’s a genuine New York City banker. He’s likely to send some of those Pinkerton boys to blow your head off.”
Gabe leaned down and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I don’t think the Pinkerton agents are for blowing people’s heads off, Mattie. But, at any rate, I have no intention of ‘messing’ with Miss Prescott. Or anyone else, for that matter. The only engagement I have planned is with a deck of cards.”
Amelia sat in the rocker doing her best to mend her brother’s tattered long underwear. She had decided to spend the day on a less strenuous activity after yesterday’s marathon laundry session. And she found herself enjoying the task. Her mother would undoubtedly have been horrified to see her stitching away on a man’s undergarment, even though it was her brother’s. Back home she had never stitched anything coarser than fine linen with silk embroidery thread.
Suddenly Parker burst through the cabin door with a whoop of triumph. He took two leaps to reach her side, then lifted her out of the chair and spun her around. “We’re getting closer, sis! Morgan’s a wonder. He followed a vein straight back into a crevice that I’d never even noticed before. And it looks like it’s rich with ore.”
Amelia couldn’t help being caught up in her brother’s enthusiasm. She laughed and reached to straighten her tumbled chignon. “It’s a fine millionaire you’ll be making, Parker Prescott,” she teased.
He set her down. “I came running to tell you,” he said, trying to catch his breath.
“Do you think it could be the main strike you’ve been looking for?”
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