Rebecca Hagan Lee - [Borrowed Brides 02] (36 page)

She sucked in a breath.

“Please…” Will held up his hand. “Don’t sing anymore.”

A startled look crossed her face. “I wasn’t going to sing.”

“Thank God,” he murmured beneath his breath.

“I was going to scream.” She didn’t look up, but continued to stare at his bare chest as if mesmerized by the sight.

Staring down at the top of her head, Will pulled the silk edges of his robe together and knotted the belt. “Don’t do that either.”

“I most certainly will!” she warned, still staring at the bit of flesh left exposed by the wide lapels of his dressing gown, a frown marring the area between her eyebrows. “If the situation warrants it.”

“It won’t,” he muttered. “As long as you don’t sing.”

She looked up at him then, her gaze narrowing in a warning that matched her frown. “What’s wrong with my singing voice? I’m told it’s quite pleasant. And how dare you manhandle me this way?”

Her eyes were blue. Cornflower blue fringed by thick dark lashes and framed by eyebrows that were a dark reddish brown. A tiny sprinkling of lighter reddish-gold freckles dotted her nose. Her hair, beneath her awful military gray bonnet, matched her eyebrows. “Would you rather I allowed you to tumble to the floor?”

“No. Of course not,” she replied. “I thank you for saving me from that, but if you hadn’t come charging half-clothed down the staircase as if the building were on fire, I wouldn’t have been taken unawares or thrown off balance in the first place.”

“You’re blaming me?” Will was taken aback by her audacity.

He stood nearly three inches over six feet tall in his bare feet and was solidly built, while the top of her head barely reached his chest despite the two-inch heels on her boots. She was a tiny, auburn-haired spitfire of a girl standing toe
-
to
-
toe with a man practically twice her size.

A man whose hands, he recalled, were large enough to span her waist.

Yet she refused to be intimidated.

“Who else is there to blame?” she countered, glaring up at him. “You charged into me.”

“That’s because I didn’t expect to find you standing at the bottom of
my
stairs,” he told her. “I thought you’d be wreaking havoc in the saloon.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what all you Salvationists and Women’s Suffrage and Temperance women do.” He looked down at her, searching for an umbrella or parasol—the weapon of choice of nearly all the female crusaders. “You wreak havoc on private property. You sing at the top of your lungs while you smash bottles of liquor and mirrors and plate-glass windows.”

“I’ve never smashed anything in my life!” She was indignant at the very idea.

He gave her a wry look. “You must be new to the soul-saving business.”

“I’ve been a member of the Salvationists for nearly three months.”

“I don’t recall seeing you before. Who sent you to the Silken Angel?”

“No one sent me,” she told him. “I came on my own.”

Will snorted in derision. “How long have you been in San Francisco?”

“Two days.”

He snorted again. “In town two days and you manage to find your way from Mission Street to my establishment.” He looked down at her. “I don’t believe it.”

“It isn’t that difficult,” she told him. “The Salvationists warned us about Sydney Town and the Barbary Coast on the journey and explained that most of San Francisco’s disreputable establishments are located near the waterfront. I came by ship. I disembarked along the waterfront. Returning to it was simply a matter of going back the way I came.”

She was fairly boasting of her ability to navigate a strange and often dangerous city on her own, and Will was impressed in spite of himself. “Who the devil
are
you?”

She stiffened her spine and drew herself up to her full height. “I’m Julia Jane Parham. Who the dev—”

She caught herself before she uttered the oath, took a deep breath, and regrouped. “Who are you?”

Will bit the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning from ear to ear as the little spitfire’s temper got the best of her. “William Burke Keegan,” he replied, offering her his hand to shake. “My friends call me Will.”