Coming Home to Wyoming (Peaceful Valley Series Book 1) (8 page)

With the new fences finished, and the end of summer getting closer, Griff took the buckboard into town to stock up on what he and his three hands would need to get through the approaching fall and winter. This far north, fall could turn cold quickly, and winter sometimes showed up early, and without a lot of warning.

The town of Mill City still wasn’t much to look at, yet, but it was off to a promising start. The hotel and mercantile had been there before he came, along with a livery stable and a blacksmith, and two saloons. But a lot of new businesses had begun to appear, as well. As he drove in, he noticed a new assay office, two cafés, a barbershop, and what looked like a women’s dress shop. The sign hanging over the door read, “Le Bon Chapeau—Ladies Parisian Fashions and Elegant Accoutrements,” and a smaller sign hanging underneath advertised “Fine Millinery for the Discerning Woman.”

Thinking that he might find a small gift to send to Martha for her birthday, he pulled the team over, and climbed down to take a closer look at the merchandise being offered for sale in Le Bon Chapeau’s large window. The window was frankly astonishing—a wildly cluttered showcase of things feminine, swathed in a filmy froth of pink and lavender netting, and more bows, ribbons, rosebuds and white paper doves than Griff had ever seen all together in one place before. A headless mannequin in a white lace gown stood in the exact center of the display, decked out in strands and loops of artificial pearls and
more
pink ribbons. The decapitated lady was flanked on all sides by a collection of small, white wooden stands, each of which held a different model of what Griff recognized as the wide-brimmed “picture hats” he’d seen for sale in various catalogues. Someone had festooned the unwieldy headgear with enormous dyed ostrich feathers, silk flowers and artificial cherries, and what looked to Griff’s untrained and
un
fashion-conscious eye like a lot of newly dead pigeons with their outstretched wings pinned or glued down to the floppy brims.

He was still staring with amazement at the crowded window when a woman came out of the shop—a stunningly
attractive
woman—actually, with a glistening mass of black curls piled on top of her head, and a corseted waist a man could encircle with his two hands. Not surprisingly, she was wearing a pink silk dress with a nosegay of pink rosebuds at her waist and another in her hair. Exactly the sort of woman you’d expect to be browsing through a female fairyland like Le Bon Chapeau
.
It wasn’t until the woman said, “Good morning,” and added a dazzling smile, that he noticed the tape measure in her hand. Not a customer after all, but the shop clerk.

“Is there something I can do for you?” she asked. “A lovely new hat for your wife, perhaps? Most of the designs you see in the window are my own, but I’ve just gotten in some positively
enchanting
new items from back east, as well. Would you like to come into my shop and see them?”

Griff quirked one eyebrow. So, not a salesclerk, either, but the proprietress, herself.

He politely declined the invitation, wished the woman a good day, got back in the wagon—and immediately regretted not having introduced himself. It was too late, though. The most beautiful woman he’d seen in years had gone back into her beribboned shop, leaving a delicate whiff of
attar of roses
in her wake.

As he drove on to the mercantile to do what he’d come for, Griff smiled and shook his head. He’d be surprised to find the shop still there on his next trip into town. Most of the women who lived in or near Mill City were the wives and daughters of small ranchers, with a sprinkling of faded, tired-looking farm wives—none of them with a lot of cash to spare, and hardly the kind of well off patrons a female confection like Le Bon Chapeau would need to stay in business.

But Griff couldn’t have been more wrong. A week later, when Jim McKenna rode in to pick up the mail, he returned with the news that there was a line of women a half-block long outside Le Bon Chapeau
,
all of them waiting their turn to get
inside
the damned place. “I swear to you, Griff,” Jim reported, “it looked like they might a’ been givin’ away five dollar bills.” He had also learned that the owner’s name was Amelia Pomeroy, that she had come to Mill City from back east somewhere. More importantly, and as far as anyone had been able to discover, there was no
Mr.
Pomeroy hanging around anywhere. Which meant that Amelia Pomeroy was available, and in cattle country parlance, fair game.

Which was why Griff decided it was about time he rode back into town to purchase that now belated birthday present for Martha that he’d been thinking about.

The present—a small-silver plated music box with an even smaller silver-plated bird on top that hopped back and forth and chirped in a tinny mechanical voice—set him back a half-month’s grocery money for four hard-working men with hearty appetites. The little box was pretty, though, and he knew that Martha would like it. While he was counting out the bills to pay for the box, he asked Amelia Pomeroy to have dinner with him at the new hotel in town—rather grandly named the Kensington House. When she graciously accepted his invitation, Griff was pleased, but he had known enough women like Amelia Pomeroy to be realistic. He’d spent far too much money on what was basically a useless trinket, which had probably led her to believe that he was cattle-rich—instead of just another small rancher who worked his butt off every day, and shared ownership of his small spread with the Mill City Bank and Trust.

* * *

But Griff was wrong for a second time—this time about Amelia Pomeroy. Two months after they met, Amelia was spending all day Sunday and an occasional weekend at the ranch with him—during which time she’d had an opportunity to thoroughly assess his financial status. Amelia wasn’t looking for an especially
rich
man. She was looking for a man who wanted to get married—in the very near future. And somewhere, Amelia had learned how to trade what she
had
for what she
wanted
.

Which meant that the weekends at the ranch were affectionate, but strictly proper, since that was the kind of woman Amelia was—a lovely, maddeningly alluring woman who was also an intensely
proper
and determined
lady.
A lady who had no intention of unveiling her
most
alluring features until there was a diamond ring
and
a gold band on her finger, and not one moment before.

For Griff, having a woman in his life that he wanted, but couldn’t have, was not just unusual and frequently painful, it was perplexing. He’d never met a woman that he knew this well and for so
long
who hadn’t been ready to get in bed with him and allow nature to take its course—with a lot of enthusiastic help from both parties.

Amelia was fine with kissing—with much of the kissing going well beyond friendly. There had even been occasions—rare but memorable—when she’d permitted him to undo the top buttons of her demure bodice and press his mouth to the soft, warm swell of her breasts that peeked over the top of her corset.

But that was as far as Amelia could be enticed to go—something Griff had excellent reason to know, since he’d already tried every enticement he could think of. Amelia was the embodiment of that much heard modern phrase, “straight laced.”

The first time she remained at the house overnight, she asked Griff to spend the night in the bunkhouse—because of “the way things might look to the
employees
.” He reluctantly agreed, and then had to endure an evening of grins, and winks from the employees themselves.

The second time, it was Amelia who conceded that it might be all right for him to sleep on the back porch, or in case of a heavy rain, on the parlor sofa—as long as he turned the sofa so that the back of it was facing the bedroom.

Amelia was beautiful, intelligent, well-read, and a pleasure to talk to. She was an excellent cook, who seemed to enjoy preparing his favorite meals. For a man who worked hard every day, immersed in dirt and dust and grime, Griff had always made a point of keeping a neat house, but each time Amelia came to the ranch, she came prepared to clean the place again, from top to bottom. When she went home late on Sunday afternoon, the simple pine-plank floors were always freshly scrubbed, and the newly waxed tabletops gleamed in the lamplight. Beauty, good cooking, and a spotless house to come home to seemed to be the method Amelia had chosen to get what she wanted.

On a recent visit, she had arrived with two bolts of calico—one blue with tiny red flowers, and the second red, with tiny
blue
flowers. By the time Griff took her back to town, he had calico curtains in the kitchen and parlor, and a promise of solid blue ones in his bedroom on her very
next
visit.

There was no question that Amelia Pomeroy would make some lucky man a wonderful wife. At this point, Griff just wasn’t entirely sure that he was ready to
be
that lucky man.

* * *

One Sunday morning a few weeks later, Griff was working behind the barn, pounding a new fence post into the ground, when he heard someone call his name. The unwelcome interruption was especially annoying, since the split rail holding pen he was trying to repair had to be back in place as quickly as possible. It had been trampled into firewood the night before by Sultan, the young Hereford bull he’d bought only three days earlier, and who was now wandering around loose, somewhere, looking for a few attractive bovine ladies to add to his harem. Exactly the job a lusty young bull was supposed to do, of course, but after the exorbitant price he’d paid for the animal, solely because of his excellent blood lines, Griff had hoped to be the one to choose which lucky ladies would be receiving the only body fluid of Sultan’s worth its weight in gold.

Griff swore under his breath, dropped the hammer, and turned around, expecting to see Amelia standing there, which would have been unusual, since she rarely ventured out of the house and the fenced yard. Unless she wanted something done, that is, and when none of his “employees” was around to do it. She had explained to him that she was frightened being around too many horses and cattle all at one time, but Griff knew the real reason. Despite her story about being from “back east,” he had learned that Amelia had started life just twelve miles away, on a small ranch similar to his own—a situation she hated and managed to escape when her widowed mother married a Mr. Harold Pomeroy, of Galveston, Texas.

For someone born and raised in cattle country, though, Amelia was surprisingly squeamish about the indelicate possibility of “stepping in something”— more or less a daily certainty on a cattle ranch.

The fact was, Griff’s hard-working and usually reliable cowhands usually did their best to
not
be around during Amelia’s weekend visits. Helping to hang curtains wasn’t the sort of work they’d been hired to do, and the lady’s standards for
whatever
she wanted done were often unreasonably high—especially for the kind of men who spent twelve to sixteen hours a day in sweat-stained shirts and muddy boots that had been “stepping in something” pretty much
all
day.

So, when he stopped what he was doing and turned to ask what she needed, he was surprised to find that it wasn’t Amelia who’d called him after all, but a very pretty young woman in a pale green dress.

“You need some help with that?” she asked, pointing to the wrecked fence. “I’m kind of little, but I work cheap.”

If it hadn’t been for the shining red hair, Griff might not have immediately recognized the woman smiling at him from her perch on the only remaining undamaged section of fence. In the four years since he’d last seen her, Elyn had changed, and the change was
another
surprise—an astonishing one. The skinny kid with freckles and an unkempt tangle of copper-colored hair had turned into a beautiful young woman, with all the necessary attributes.

“It’s good to see you again, Eileen a ‘Roon. Or do you still want to be called Elyn?”

“Elyn’s good, for now, I like my old name better than I used to, but I’m kind of used to Elyn now, so… You’ve got a pretty place, here,” she observed—a bit sadly, it seemed to Griff. “And it looks like you’ve made a it a real home—like you always wanted.”

Griff nodded. “All the modern improvements a little cash and a whole lot of credit can get you. A genuine copper tub in the bathroom, a cast iron stove with an oven big enough for whatever you want to put in it, and a brand new red cast iron hand pump in the kitchen. Works just like the catalogue said it would—as long as you keep the cistern filled. Come spring, I’ll have it connected to the well.”

“Abner told me he didn’t know where you were living now. Around here, somewhere?”

She shook her head, but didn’t elaborate.

“What about a husband? Abner said you might have found someone you wanted to marry.”

“That was a while ago,” she said simply, then changed the subject—as well as her tone. “I asked up at the house, and there was a woman there who told me where to find you. Abner wrote that you were seeing a woman, so, I naturally assumed that she was your wife, but when I didn’t see a ring on her finger, I figured she’d taken it off—while she was scrubbing the outhouse or slopping the hogs—something wifely like that.”