Lady X's Cowboy (8 page)

“Y’know,” he murmured after popping a whole slice of bacon in his mouth, “I never really ate like this before, but maybe my folks did, or their folks.  Seems kind of strange that all this,” he gestured around the elegant little room with his knife, “is buried in me somewhere.”

“Breakfast rooms?”

Will grinned.  “Nope.  England.  I was raised a Colorado cowpuncher, but there’s this vein of Englishness in me that could be waitin’ to be discovered.  Like the silver in the Rockies.  Somethin’ fine stuck in the middle of hard rock.  Funny, ain’t it?”

She looked at him, assessing.  Maybe, if he wasn’t wearing his outrageously foreign Western clothing, and if he didn’t open his mouth to let his honeyed twang wrap around every word, and if he didn’t saturate a space with his expansive democratic personality, he might, just might, pass for an Englishman—in the fairness of his coloring and the precision of his bone structure.  But there were a lot of
if
s that needed to be negotiated before that hint of Englishness came through.

She had never been overly fond of the English archetype.  National pride dictated that the women of England were to love the Anglo-Saxon sons of their home country, but for her tastes, those men often seemed delicate and retiring, a bit like Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Patience
.  Picturing Will carrying an oversized sunflower and wearing velvet knee breeches made her smile.  Absurd; incongruous.

Will saw her smile and must have thought she found the idea of him as an undiscovered treasure amusing.  “Yeah,” he said, slightly dispirited as he poked at his eggs, “funny.”

“Oh, no, Will,” she said quickly, “I was thinking of....”  She didn’t know how to explain the ridiculous notion of Will, the cowboy, in aesthetic dress.  “That is, I think that you could have a great deal of Englishness in you.”

He brightened, and she realized that in many ways, Will Coffin was rather young.  “You think so?”

“I do, but I wouldn’t be so quick to cast off your Americanness just yet.  I think it’s rather nice.”

Will said with a grin, “Thanks.  But I’m pure cattle pusher, through and through, and I’m glad about that.  I just wonder, sometimes.”  He shrugged and took a big bite of toast.

“I can’t imagine what it must be like to know nothing about yourself,” she said thoughtfully.  “No father, mother, brothers or sisters.  Just an empty, clean expanse of history to shape yourself as you please.”  She thought about her own family and David’s, and a whole world that knew who she was and what she was going to be even before she had been born.  “It must be wonderful.”

“Sometimes.”  He drank down the last of his coffee.  “And sometimes...”  Will looked out the mullioned window that faced the back garden, and there was an unguarded longing in his eyes that made her heart feel brittle.  “Sometimes I wanted to send a photo home to my folks like the other boys did at the end of the trail, but Jake moved around and there wasn’t anybody else.”

She wanted to apologize for his solitude, even though she hadn’t been responsible.  She wanted to take that longing away from his eyes.  She wanted a lot of things, things she didn’t know she wanted until very recently.

Instead, she suggested, “Shall we take a turn in the garden?  Most of the flowers have gone, but it’s still lovely this time of year.”

He visibly shook off his melancholy, transforming from a man in search of something into an easygoing cowboy.  “That’s another thing I ain’t done,” he said with a grin, standing up and then pulling out her chair, “take a turn in the garden.  Sounds fine, indeed.”

She hoped he would still think so after she waylaid him.

“October in London can be rather gray, I’m afraid,” she remarked.  She ran her fingers over the glossy green leaves of a neatly trimmed hedge, and Will could see where the blossoms had withered with the coming of autumn.

“It ain’t so bad,” he said, but he was looking at her, not the hedges.  His boots crunched loudly while her dainty little shoes—though he couldn’t see them—hardly made a sound at all.  They strolled down the narrow gravel paths of her little back garden, and though she did not take his arm, they kept gently bumping up against each other until Will was half crazy.  She hadn’t said anything about their kiss last night, and he had learned enough to know that if a lady didn’t want to talk about fooling around, she wouldn’t appreciate a body bringing it up.

But the funny thing was that it hadn’t felt like fooling around.  It felt different than stealing kisses from the church-going daughters of the ranch owners, and it was a hell of a lot different from the rough tumbles he would get in town with more worldly women.  He’d felt a little something stir inside him when he and Olivia kissed, and it wasn’t just his John Thomas.

Don’t think hogwash
.  He kicked his toe into the path and sent a few stones clattering.  There couldn’t be anything going on with him and an actual lady.  Especially since the night was past and it was getting on for him to grab his gear and go.  He still had a lot of work ahead of him.

“If we had met a few months earlier,” she continued, “you would have found my garden a much more beautiful place.”

“I like it as it is.  It reminds me a touch of the public gardens in Denver.  Tidy but smart.  A little smaller, of course.”  He felt a bit like a giant, like that fellow Gulliver, towering over the trim hedges cut into refined blocks, and just as clumsy, though he suspected Olivia was more the source of his ungainliness than the garden.  Any minute, he felt he would go tumbling into a flowerbed.

“Naturally.  Perhaps when you get the opportunity, you should visit Hyde Park.  You ought to find its wide-open spaces to your liking.  People even go riding there.  I do, when I have the time.”

It pleased him to think she was a horsewoman.  He didn’t think he could really like a body who couldn’t sit a horse—it seemed unnatural, somehow.  He hadn’t ridden in nearly three weeks, a fact which made him almost sick with longing.  No self-respecting man could call himself a cowboy and be on foot for so long.

“Maybe if I get the chance,” he answered. 

“And you brought your own saddle,” she added.  “Which looks a trifle different from English saddles.”

“That’s ’cause mine is meant for workin’.”

She’d led him towards a little stone fountain, which was dry and had a few dead leaves resting in its bowl.  She picked the leaves out and scattered them on the ground, but she did this so diligently that Will suspected something was on her mind.  “This is one of my favorite spots back here.”

“It’s powerful pretty,” he said slowly.  She wanted to tell him something, something she was having a hard time saying.  He had a suspicion what that might be, and it made him a bit low, though it wasn’t a surprise.

“It dates from the eighteenth century.”  She kept looking at the fountain, which was a fine little thing, nicely carved with leaves and flowers, but surely not deserving so much concentration.  She avoided meeting his eye.  “It once belonged to Sophie, Viscountess of Briarleigh.  She was a famous botanist.  Some of her theories are still being used today.”  A small, melancholy smile curved Olivia’s lips.  “She was lucky.  She had a husband who believed in her and enough fortune to ignore society.  Things were different then.”

“Sounds like a remarkable woman.”

Olivia nodded.  She chewed on her bottom lip, and Will was torn between trampling all the pretty shrubs in order to flee and taking two steps around the fountain and laying his mouth right down on hers.  She probably wouldn’t cotton to him kissing her again, since it seemed she was readying herself to tell him he could never take any more liberties with her.

“Lady Briarleigh could speak her mind,” she said darkly.  “I wish I had the same fortitude.”

He knew what she wanted to say, though politeness or breeding kept her from saying it.  “Look, Lady Xavier,” Will burst out, tired of waiting, “I’m planning on leavin’ this mornin’.  You don’t have to tell me to go.”

She looked up at him, shock and dismay in her eyes.  “No,” she said quickly.  “That’s not what I want at all.  I hope I didn’t...Lord, no!”  She gestured to a small stone bench.  “Please sit, Will.  I just want to talk to you for a few minutes.”

He took a seat gingerly, feeling relieved and also confused.  It seemed that every opportunity he managed to prove what a yokel he really was.  She continued to stand by the fountain, but at least she looked at him now.  Glancing down, he noticed that he took up the whole bench, which was probably meant for two people.  Everything here in England seemed so much smaller than back home.  He felt like a big, lumbering draft horse in a country of ponies.

“What do women do where you live, Will?” she asked.

He frowned.  “Do?” he repeated.  “You mean, for a livin’?”

“Exactly,” she said, nodding.  “Do they stay at home?  Do they work?”

He reached up to tug thoughtfully on his mustache, then realized when he touched bare top lip that it was gone.  His heart sank.  That had been one of the stupidest things he’d ever done, if Olivia’s horror-struck look had been any indication.  But he’d just wanted to start fresh, be someone different for a while.  He should have known that you can’t make a sirloin from chuck.

“Some have jobs, I guess,” he said meditatively.  He snapped off a dead twig and began to flip it along his fingers.  “There ain’t too many women out West, so they can pick and choose what they want to do.  One lady I met ran the town newspaper, and another owned the dry goods store.  ’Course,” he added, “a lot either work at or own cathouses.”

“They don’t mention that in Mr. Ingraham’s novels.” She gave a nervous laugh.

“I don’t expect they would.  Don’t want impressionable ladies readin’ about soiled doves.”

“No, indeed.”  She picked at a spot of moss on the fountain.  “But would you say that women in Colorado have freedom?  Freedom to pursue lives outside of their homes?”

“Some do,” he answered cautiously.  He wasn’t sure exactly where she was leading, but it was starting to make him a bit suspicious.  He longed for a good piece of timber and a whittling knife.  When he got antsy, he carved, and he knew he could probably carve a whole armada of wooden ships about now.

“I...” she said, struggling to find the right words.  “Let me put this another way...”  She braced her hands against the fountain and leaned against it.  “In those books I read about the West, there were often farmers who are being forced off their land by evil cattle barons, or bad railway men, or someone who wanted what they had.  And those bad men used whatever means they had at their disposal to get what they want, even if it wasn’t right, even if someone got hurt.”

“I think I know what you’re talkin’ about.”  He added, “Those are just books, though.  It ain’t real life.”  He did know of a few instances where sodbusters had been run off their land, but it happened a lot less than the melodramas and dime novels made it seem.

“But for me, it is real life.”  She came quickly around the fountain and sat beside him on the tiny bench.  She moved so fast, he didn’t have time to scoot over, and even through her layers of petticoats and skirts, he could feel her leg pressed against his.  But she didn’t seem to notice.  He almost toppled into the bushes.

“My brewery is in danger,” she continued.  She looked at him intently and he found he could not turn away.  “Those men you beat the other night were only a small part of a bigger problem.  And I fear that the man who sent them will only become more and more desperate as time goes on.  He wants Greywell’s, very badly.”

“Why don’t you just sell him the brewery?”

She shot to her feet, energy and outrage crackling through her like an electrical storm.  “Because it’s mine,” she said hotly.  Pacing in the small enclosure around the fountain, Olivia reminded Will of a caged mountain lion, spitting mad and ready to fight.  “Because no one thinks I should have it.  Because people think women shouldn’t be in business, especially not a woman of my ‘station.’  Because,” she concluded, turning to face him, and he could feel her force like a tornado, tearing down the prairie, “I will not be bullied.  Not by George Pryce, and not by anybody.” 

It was hard not to go to her, give her a little squeeze of encouragement, but there was no way on this green earth that such a gesture by him would be welcomed by a lady like her.  Still, he found himself admiring her gumption, which she had in spades. 

The twig in his hand snapped, and the sound made them both look down in surprise.  He tossed it aside.

She forced herself to take several deep breaths, letting the hot color in her cheeks recede.  “Suffice it to say, Greywell’s belongs to me, and I have no intention of letting anyone take it away from me, regardless of their tactics.”

“Sounds like you’ve been guardin’ the henhouse for a while.”

“George Pryce is worse than a fox,” Olivia said darkly.  “At first, he simply tried to buy me out, but when I refused, he started threatening me, my family.  But the other day was the first time he made good on those threats.  He thinks his breeding can get him anything, that it justifies any behavior, including base intimidation.”  She clasped her arms and held them against her chest.   “I am certain that it will only grow worse.”

He stretched out his legs, unused to keeping them inactive for so long.  “So just report him to the sheriff, or the judge, or whatever you’ve got here.  They’ll throw Pryce into jail and your problem’s solved.” 

She pressed her lips together, clearly frustrated.  “Come with me,” she said suddenly, and began to walk hurriedly back towards her house.  He followed at a goodly distance, both out of self-preservation and also, he admitted to himself, to keep himself away from her.  He kept wanting to reach out and touch her, just a little bit.  She seemed to him both powerfully determined but also very alone, a combination which he was finding difficult to resist.

Back inside, she picked up a fresh newspaper which was sitting in the breakfast room.  After flipping through the pages for a few moments, she folded the paper back to one section and held it out to him.

“Read this,” she said in a voice that would not be argued with.