Romancing the West (3 page)

“Tea, coffee, and French macaroons,” she said, setting dainty cups and a plate of cookies between them. “Freshly baked. Do enjoy.” She spun away and greeted Doc Gentry as he lumbered into the cafe mumbling something about crumpets and jam.

Seth watched her go.

Paris kicked him under the table. “About you and Emily . . .”

He focused back on the half-pint. “Swear to God, Paris, if this is some sort of elaborate matchmaking scheme--”

“Of all the . . . honestly! You’re the one who brought it up. I was just thinking that if you chased off the person who’s making her life miserable and she just happened to fall in love with you at the same time--and you with her--well, I was just thinking I’d be all right with that. Better you than Mr. Bellamont.”

Never mind that she’d just insulted him, again. “Who in the devil is Bellamont?”

“Claude Bellamont. He proposed two weeks after Preacher McBride’s funeral. Emily turned him down, thank goodness. But what with her financial difficulties . . . Let’s just say she’s not herself these days. I’d hate to see her marry someone for the wrong reasons.”

Seth’s head threatened to explode.

Paris reached across the table and grasped his hand. “It’s not like you have anything better to do. You’re in between jobs, right?”

“Right,” he was obliged to say. He tasted his coffee. Black and strong. Good, but just about now a quart bottle of whiskey would be even better.

“Besides, you owe me.”

That coaxed a smile out of him. “How do you figure?”

“You forced me to marry Josh.”

No way, no how did he feel bad about initiating a shotgun wedding. Besides, he’d never known two people more in love. “Sweetheart, if I hadn’t hurried along the proceedings, your brothers would have. Josh compromised your reputation.”

“All he did was--”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Then hear this. If you don’t go, I will.”

He wouldn’t put it past her. “I’ll go.” He was going anyway. Only now his mission was twofold.

She blinked back more tears. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Stop fretting. And stop doing fool things like disappearing on Josh.”

“Mercy! What time is it?” She wrapped the macaroons in a napkin and bolted to her feet, the tea untouched. “I need to get back to the house before he discovers I’m missing and calls out the Rangers.”

Seth left money on the table, sorry he hadn’t gotten to taste one of those cookies. Glanced over his shoulder at Mrs. Dillingham, sorry he wouldn’t be getting a taste of her. Damn. He really needed to visit Fletcher’s.

He led Paris out onto the boardwalk, groaning when she tugged him into the alley. “What now?” “I have an idea.” “God, help me.”

“I’m thinking you should pretend you’re Phineas Pinkerton,” she whispered. “Emily’s already expecting him. Instead of staying at the local hotel, I suggested he rent a room in her house. She’s taking in boarders to earn extra money because of, well, you know. I’d feel better if you stuck close. That is until you dupe her tormentor, because who knows what he’s capable of? People won’t talk, because Mr. Pinkerton is, well, that is to say he favors . . .” She cleared her throat. “Let’s just say he’d be smitten with the likes of, well, you.”

“Forget it.”  That Paris even knew about such things amazed him. Then again she was in the theater business. She’d probably seen it all. “Write to your friend and tell her there’s been a change of plans.”

“But . . .”

“No.” Yes, he’d just told Athens he could take on another man’s identity, but in this case--thankfully--it wasn’t necessary.

She blew out a dramatic breath. “Fine. But you better take care and not compromise her reputation, Seth. She’s got enough to worry about. Oh, and remember, if Emily comes up in conversation tonight--”

“--I’m to say nothing of my impending . . . trip.” He tugged on his hat, frowned as she fiddled with her hair, twisting, untwisting. He stilled her nervous actions. “Emily’s secret, whatever it is, is safe with me.”

“Promise?”

He looked into those doe-like eyes thinking she was slicker than a clay hill after a rainstorm. He did, however, respect her motivation and loyalty to her friend. “Sure.”

Twenty minutes later, Josh stormed Fletcher’s. “I need a favor.” He didn’t care beans that Seth had one hand on a bottle of whisky and the other on a dove’s bodacious ass. The matter, he said, stopping his friend midway up the stairs, was urgent.

Five minutes after that, Seth had issued a third promise. To deliver Emily McBride to Arizona Territory by hook or crook and before his friend’s wife worried herself bed sick. He’d done so without revealing his previous conversations on the matter with Athens or Paris. He didn’t like withholding information from Josh, but a promise was a promise and the objective was the same.

He told himself that he hadn’t given his word to anyone in vain. First order of business: clean up whatever mess Emily had made. A preacher’s daughter. A librarian. A woman the Garretts described as a shy woman with a heart of gold. How bad could it be?

Clean up the mess then deliver Athens’s proposal and escort Emily to Arizona Territory. If he was going to tame the west, he could sure as hell save one tarnished angel.

Napa Valley, California - Two weeks later

“D
amnation!” Emily McBride covered her mouth, shocked she’d blurted the curse aloud. In the library of all places. Thankfully, no one was within earshot. Well, except God. He heard everything. He also saw everything, knew everything, and she couldn’t help wondering if this was part of her punishment.

She envisioned her father shaking a condemning finger, imagined his slurred voice.
“This is what you get for being deceitful!”

“Drat!” She paced between the non-fiction stacks, told herself to get a grip. Being asked to read an I. M. Wilde dime novel aloud at the Lemonade and Storytelling Social Club wasn’t divine punishment, just bad luck. “Snap out of it, you ninny. You’re paranoid.” She bumped up her spectacles and pinched the bridge of her nose.  “You’re also talking to yourself. You really need to stop doing that.”

Townfolk whispered words like
dotty
and
moody
whenever they spoke of the late Preacher McBride’s daughter. They used to call her
shy.
Only she’d never really been shy, just content to dwell in the background, nose in a book, head in the clouds. She’d spent countless hours committing her own stories to paper, although she’d learned early on to keep the tales to herself. Her imagination cooked up scenarios unbecoming of a preacher’s daughter. Or so many said, including her father. Her mother, an avid reader herself, had cut her most deeply.
“Listen keenly to my words and remember this always, daughter. Emily McBride must channel her talents in a more respectable direction.”

That night her heart had cracked, and never since healed.

“No one understands me,”
she’d cried into her pillow. No one except Paris, a fellow artistic soul. The day the townfolk shunned the only female in the Garrett clan, they shunned the only child of the McBrides as well.
“Artists have to stick together,”
Emily had said, comforting her friend with a hug. Used to being around four older brothers, Paris suggested they shake on a lifetime friendship like men. So, they’d spit into their palms and clasped hands.

Paris became a recluse and Emily with her. She’d been the subject of hurtful gossip ever since. The other day she overheard someone call her crazy. Just because she’d swapped her conventional gowns for men’s shirts and split-riding skirts and started practicing sharp shooting. Just because she’d turned her father’s rural home into a boardinghouse and taken in Mrs. Dunlap, a forgetful widow with a knitting obsession. She had good reasons for these actions, not that she felt compelled to share them. For the first time in her life, her business was her own. At least it had been.

An anonymous busybody was currently making her life a living . . . Hades.

I know your secret.

Those four little words, typewritten on ordinary writing paper, delivered a mighty blow to her brave new spirit. The taunt filled her with guilt and dread. Now she wasn’t the old Emily, or the new Emily, just a confused Emily stuck in between. These days, she didn’t know whether to amend her Grand Design or ditch it. Her nerves were threadbare and things were about to get worse. Thanks to Paris, she was supposed to welcome a poet into her home. A
man.

Her friend’s missive had arrived two weeks ago, give or take a few days. Mrs. Dunlap had misplaced the mail. By the time Emily read the letter, it was too late to relay her objections. The man was on his way. Though Emily appreciated what Paris was trying to do, she simply couldn’t accept the gesture. Or, rather, Mr. Pinkerton. She’d have to send the gentleman packing and that’s all there was to it. No matter how badly she needed his money. No matter how tempted she was to pick the intuitive detective’s mind as Paris suggested.

Confiding in him meant entrusting him with a secret. It meant putting her life in someone else’s hands, giving over control. The mere thought made her chest ache. She wanted to live life on her own terms. She wanted to voice her thoughts without fear of being struck by a lightening bolt or chided by opinionated prudes.

No, sir. She wouldn’t be leaning on Mr. Pinkerton or anyone else. Besides, she couldn’t take on a male boarder, even one with delicate sensibilities. She couldn’t withstand the added speculation as to her good sense, or lack thereof. If she didn’t mind her actions, her narrow-minded neighbors would pack her off to Napa State Asylum for the Insane.

Those same neighbors circulated a few feet away in the magazine and newspaper section of the library, gossiping over lemonade and cookies as they awaited the official start of the meeting.

Wound up from her agitated pacing, Emily rounded the corner and rested her forehead against the shelf stocked with the works of Charles Dickens. If only the committee would’ve voted
Nicholas Nickleby
as today’s feature as opposed to
Showdown in Sintown.
Was it possible that her anonymous tormentor, the cause of her financial and emotional woes, was on the Lemonade and Storytelling committee?

“There you go being paranoid again.” On the other hand, she had good reason to be wary. Two good, cryptic reasons signed,
Your Savior.
Dwelling on the gut-twisting mystery just now would only add to her immediate anxiety, so she blocked it from her mind. One crisis at a time. She clutched the dime novel to her chest, a swarm of emotions buzzing in her belly. The illustrated cover featured a heart-pounding sketch of Rome and Boston Garrett--Wells Fargo detectives and hometown heroes--in a showdown with a notorious road thief. It wasn’t the gun blazing scene that tripped Emily’s pulse, but the sight of Rome. She’d had a fearsome crush on Paris’s brother since she was nine. Unfortunately, the attraction was one-sided. Even though she was now twenty, he still regarded her as Preacher McBride’s bookish little girl. Emily McBride, the socially backward daydreamer.

Sighing, she sneaked another peak at the dime novel cover. The artist’s rendering of Rome was exquisite. So handsome in his brown duster and Stetson, menacing holster slung low on his lean hips. These days he wore his fair hair longer, making him look all the more rakish. She’d spent many a night wondering how it would feel to kiss a rake. Specifically, Rome Garrett.

“Mooning over your fantasy beau?”

Emily whirled. Mary Lee Dobbs, formerly Bernbaum. The woman Paris had once humiliated in song at a Lemonade and Storytelling Club picnic as payback for Mary Lee calling her Goofy Garrett. Self-conscious, she pressed the dime novel into the folds of her buckskin skirt. “I wasn’t mooning.”

“Yes, you were. Dream on, Emily. Men like Rome Garrett don’t fall for women like you. You look like Calamity Jane, for pity’s sake.”

Like that was a bad thing. Emily liked wearing her wavy blond hair in two braids. She liked dressing similar to the frontierswoman who’d ridden alongside legends such as Wild Bill Hickok and Charlie Utter. An accomplished horsewoman and a crack shot, Calamity Jane was courageous and adventurous and Emily admired her with all of her heart. She didn’t care what Mary Lee liked. She didn’t like Mary Lee.