THE DEVILS DIME (7 page)

Jess had worked through the weekend getting his Monday column ready, but by Sunday afternoon he’d found himself drawn back to his apartment, and deep into the Samaritan files, oblivious to the sounds of life beyond his window. But when he propped his front door open to draw a breeze through his sitting room, Jess couldn’t miss the tense tones coming from the floor above, tones that were rapidly escalating into an argument.

“I’m sorry I interrupted your reading. I won’t bother you again!”

A terse female voice that filtered down from the upper hallway teetered on the edge of control. She must be fairly shouting for her words to be heard so clearly, or perhaps the stairwell served to amplify the sound. Whatever it was, her voice came through clear as a bell. Jess looked up from the notes he was penning and tried to make sense of a mumbled response, but it was indistinguishable.

“You’re quite mad, you know. Whatever possessed me to think—“ Her strained tone sounded very much as if it were being delivered through clenched teeth. Someone upstairs had worked up a temper.

Jess cocked an ear toward his door as the voices grew louder, accompanied by several hesitant footsteps. One of the parties was leaving. End of drama.

He stretched and re-read the list of locations he intended to scout out. If he’d plotted the addresses correctly, four of the Samaritan crime scenes lay on a direct line between his residential area and the dock laborer’s union hall.

He’d check those out first, record the time it took to walk from the labor hall to each site. Based on what he found, he’d decide if it was worth following up his hunch.

His list was shaping up nicely, but the argument overhead was rapidly deteriorating. He was a people watcher, not an eavesdropper, and it had obviously become time to close his door. Jess rose.

“That’s perfectly fine with—” Suddenly the walls rattled as the door above slammed shut. In the next instant, a feminine shriek jolted him to action, and Jess tore on through his door and onto the landing. His feet seemed to assess the situation almost as instantly as his mind had. Jess grabbed the railing and vaulted up the first six steps just as a flurry of skirts careened off the fourth floor landing and into his arms.

“Ow...”

“...bloody hell...oo-oo-oo”

“...dammit-ouch...”

“...ow!”

Jess held on fiercely to the female wildcat who was doing her best to throw the both of them down the stairs. If he let go, she’d fall. If he didn’t, they’d both fall.

His left foot slid to the corner of the stair and he managed to brace it against the wall. In the same instant, he threw his own right shoulder into the woman’s flailing right arm. It was just enough to reverse the forward fall and send them both plunking into an undignified heap on the top step.

“Good god, woman, you almost got us both killed.” Gallantry vanished as Jess looked through the railing of the fourth floor landing over which they had very nearly toppled.

“Who the bloody hell are—” The young woman righted her Sunday hat, whipped her head around to get her first glimpse of her rescuer, and clamped both gloved hands over her mouth.

“Oh!”

The sound was muffled behind kid-clad fingers, and half her face was obscured. But the half that was not hidden bore reddening eyes brimming with tears.

Red or not, Jess recognized them as the same eyes that had interrupted his sleep for the past two nights. They’d looked black from across the hotel dining room, dark and flashing as she’d sailed through the Hungarian rhapsody. But he’d discovered their hazel depths just the night before in the cloak room. And the smile that lit them.

It, of course, was noticeably missing at the moment. Above their smouldering darkness, the auburn hair he’d imagined plunging his hands into had escaped its pins and hung in ragged tufts.

“You?”

“You!”

He marveled at the change to her face as anger fled and embarrassment pounced. The flush turned to a blush. She moved her hands to set about repairing her hair and revealed the full lips that had tantalized Jess when he’d first met her at the Warwick. They were paler now, and quivering. Adelaide. Her name was Adelaide.

“I just...tripped...I’m so sorry, I...” she winced.

“Are you all right?”

“Not really, but...”

“Where are you hurt?”

“I’ll be fine. Now if you’ll be so kind as to help me up...” Her voice was thick with threatening tears, and Jess took pity on her state as he helped her to her feet. Something more than tumbling into his arms had upset this woman. The altercation he’d overheard flooded his memory and he winced, perplexed at how or why the man had so adeptly angered her.

“I’d be ever so...grateful...if we could just pretend this never, oo–” she gasped as she tried to take a step, “–never happened.”

“Careful!” Jess moved closer and stretched an arm behind to steady her. “Take it slowly, Miss Magee.”

She stiffened as he tightened his grip, and Jess was slow to realize why she shrank from his touch. What was he supposed to do? Stand back and watch her struggle to her feet?

He moved his arm for a better grip around her slim waist and clamped a curtain over his thoughts as he grasped the meaning behind the very pleasant feel of her ribs beneath his hand. To say nothing of her soft bosom pressing into his side.

He could feel no stays, no wires, none of the usual rigid barriers a gentleman associated with a lady. Just pliant fabric between himself and Addie Magee.

Miss Magee, he’d discovered, wasn’t wearing a corset.

“I’m fine! Really!” She pulled away and slipped quickly down two steps and away from his grasp. “Thank you so much.”

“But...wait! Let me find a carriage for you.”

“No, no! I have a ride.” She was on the lower landing now, each step steadier than the last, and she turned quickly onto the next flight. “Good day!” Her words echoed in the stairwell as her auburn twists disappeared from view. The sophisticated young woman he’d met in Rocky’s cloakroom was nowhere in sight today. This was a girl looking for a place to hide.

The sound of her quick retreat drifted up to him and reassured Jess that she was not limping. But just for good measure, he loped back into his apartment and out onto the balcony. He needed to know she could get home on her own.

His eyes swept the sidewalk below him, watching for the stylish figure he knew he’d recognize going or coming. No one emerged from the door. In fact, there were no unaccompanied women anywhere. The usual Sunday strollers ambled along both sides of the boulevard, but Miss Magee was not among them. Had her carriage already pulled away?

Jess leaned slightly over the balustrade, concerned now that she’d not even left the building. He was just about to race downstairs to see if she’d collapsed somewhere between here and the front door when a female figure darted out of the alley.

Pushing a dilapidated old three-wheeler.

She wheeled it into the street, and, still standing on the higher boardwalk, sat herself prettily on the cycle’s broad leather saddle. A wayward curl on the back of her neck was the only sign of her recent tumble down the stairs.

Jess gripped the railing and watched her auburn head bob in and out of traffic, her long skirts floating charmingly with her effort. In the two days since he’d first cast eyes upon the virtuoso violinist, he’d certainly never imagined her on a contraption like that. Or in his apartment building, for that matter. And certainly not in his arms. Well, not the way she’d landed there, at any rate.

Jess watched as the figure alternately wobbled and plunged through the carriage traffic. What had she been doing in his building, anyway? Involved in an argument, to boot?

A huff of curiosity escaped him as Jess reluctantly lost sight of the beautiful, talented, Miss Adelaide Magee wheeling furiously away. The cycle did explain one thing, though, he realized. It cleared up the mystery of the missing corset. Adelaide Magee was a wheeler. A thoroughly modern, independent and liberated free-wheeler. If he could just get her to stay in one place for longer than a moment he was going to enjoy becoming acquainted with this fascinating creature. Immensely.

. . .

The old pennyfarthing rattled and clanked as Addie scooted it across the alley in back of her building and pushed it behind the tumble-down shed. Her apartment building wasn’t much to look at from the street, but at least the facade was kept in good repair. Not so the outbuildings by the alley. Still, the shed made a great place to conceal her ancient ride.

“Rats!” She kicked the wobbling front wheel snugly against the shed’s rotted boards and fumed her way up the back stairs to her floor.

Drat bicycles and drat libertine women who’d enticed her into leaving her corset at home when she went wheeling and drat her abominable female independence that had gotten her into this mortifying predicament. She’d left home intending to announce herself to her absent father and ended up blubbering and indecent in the arms of the first and only New Yorker she’d taken a shine to.

Addie winced at the thought, then winced again in alarm at the pain that shot through her right arm when she turned the doorknob.
Oh, bother.
Her bowing arm. Tomorrow evening’s performance was going to hurt like the dickens.

But then, that had been the story of her whole day.

“Far as I’m concerned, I never had a daughter.” Her father’s words had rumbled from deep within his chest to tear at the fragile bond she’d held out to him. His heated indifference had frozen the breath in her lungs, and she had not even managed to effectively plead her case with him. Everything he said just fueled her resentment and she’d found herself doing the absolute opposite of making amends.

She’d been shockingly unhinged by her humiliation when she’d flung herself away from his doorway and down the steps so quickly that she’d tromped on her own hem, tripped down two more steps, and catapulted herself right into Jess Pepper. Addie felt the heat in her cheeks all over again. Could he tell she’d worn no foundation beneath her summer muslin today? Perhaps, perhaps not. It had only been seconds that he’d held her so close. Hadn’t it?

Even as she tried to convince herself otherwise, she knew he could tell. She knew, because she could still feel each place he’d touched her. The small of her back. The ribs in her left side. And the soft flesh at her waist. All still held a memory of the pressure of his fingers.

In these liberating times, a modern woman had unheard of choices. She could be straight-laced, laced up in her overly tight corset so she could stand and sit straight as a steel rod and pass out if she tried to hurry up the stairs, much less ride a bicycle. Or she could abandon her binding stays, set her lungs loose, and be able to ride a bicycle without falling in a dead faint.

Addie wanted both. Or rather, she wanted to be known as straight-laced. And live loose. As long as no one was the wiser. But she’d been caught.

Addie flung her hat and bag on the bed and crept to her small writing desk. She probed her right shoulder delicately, and followed the strained tendon and shrieking nerve down across her collar bone. It wasn’t good. Jess Pepper had thrown his muscled physique into her like a bull on the loose. This was all his fault.

She groaned, ashamed at her disregard for his quick thinking. If he hadn’t acted so swiftly, she might be on her way to a hospital right now, or dead with a broken neck.

What else could she ruin today?

In the last hour she’d managed to cause one man to put to rest any idea she’d ever had of having a father. And another man to reverse what she’d felt was a favorable first impression of her. How could he not be repulsed? Unless...

Addie fingered the embroidered collar points that laid prettily at her throat and wished again her mother were here to talk things through with her. She’d certainly bungled things with her father. Had she bungled things beyond repair with Jess Pepper so that he would want nothing to do with her?

Or perhaps, she blanched at the thought, she’d revealed the very thing that would make him want
everything
to do with her. And for all the wrong reasons. Lord have mercy. How did one explain that one was not that kind of a girl when one had already clearly demonstrated that one was?