Mary McBride – Quicksilver's Catch (страница 5)

She smiled at him sunnily. She spoke with cheerful dismissiveness. “Yes. Well, enjoy your meal.” Then she made her way along the aisle, gave the same smile to the conductor and told him to hold the train for her.

Hold the goddamn train for her! Marcus could hardly believe his ears. And the poor, slack-jawed conductor was still scratching his head, Marcus noticed, when the duchess descended from the car and whisked purposefully past the depot and the dining hall on her way into town.

When she traveled west the first time, to join Angus McCray in Denver a mere two weeks ago, it had been in a private railroad car that her fiancé had procured for her trip. The accommodations had been luxurious, quite what she’d always been accustomed to, but Amanda hadn’t seen much of the country through the heavily draped windows of that train. Once again, she had found herself walled off from the real world. It was a shame, really. There was so much to see. Even this half-built town of Julesburg struck her as interesting.

For all her wealth, she thought, she’d actually experienced very little—next to nothing, really—in the twenty-one years she’d lived under her grandmother’s stern gaze and firm thumb. Running away to marry Angus was the only way Amanda knew to escape that silk imprisonment and to remedy her inexperience. And she was still bound and determined to do it. In fact, she was more determined than ever, now that she realized how set Honoria Grenville was on keeping her in her gilded little cage and the lengths to which her grandmother would go to achieve her ends.

“Over my dead body, Grandmother,” Amanda muttered as she walked into the little mercantile on Julesburg’s only street. She called a cheerful goodafternoon to the young female clerk behind the counter, but the girl didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic when she merely nodded back.

It was probably her appearance, Amanda thought as she caught a glimpse of herself in a cracked mirror hanging from a nail near the door. Good heavens! Her hair was frightful, and nearly two shades darker than normal from all the dust and cinders on the train. She peered closer into the glass and wiped a smudge from her chin with a dirty kid glove.

It had been two—no, three—days now since she had a proper bath. By the time she got to Denver, Angus would probably find her, well…pungent, to say the very least.

She lifted a vaguely familiar bottle from a nearby shelf and squinted to read the small print on the label. What she had assumed was lavender toilet water turned out to be a tonic for assorted female complaints, but since being dirty and smelling bad was not among them, she put the bottle back on the shelf, easily returning it to the exact spot, because there was a perfect, dustless circle to mark the place. Amanda frowned and found herself wondering all of a sudden what in the world the stranger on the train had thought of his sooty traveling companion or how he’d even been able to sit next to her, when she must reek to high heaven.

Not that it made any difference, but a little part of her wished she looked a bit more appealing to the handsome man with the deep blue, nearly indigo eyes. She told herself she was being vain and silly, and that if she thought dreamily of anyone’s eyes at all, it ought to be those of her fiancé. Angus had lovely eyes. They were… What the devil were they? Brown? Green? A muddled shade somewhere in between?

“I was looking for some eau de cologne, miss,” she called out to the salesgirl, who was now leaning both elbows on the counter and gazing out the window instead of being of any assistance. It was far from the behavior Amanda was accustomed to from fawning clerks in fashionable shops in New York, who always seemed to know what she wanted before she herself did, obsequious people who did her grandmother’s bidding. She’d always detested all that flattery and fuss, but right now she had to admit she wouldn’t mind having a bit of it, if it meant finding what she wanted.

“I can’t seem to locate any perfumes or eaux de cologne on these shelves,” she said, trying to sound a little less helpless than she felt, attempting not to sneeze at the dust she had disturbed in her search.

“Oh de what?”

“Eau de cologne,” Amanda repeated, but when she received only a blank look in return, she added, “Toilet water. Any fragrance will do.”

The girl, whose face was as pale and as flat as the moon, continued to stare at Amanda. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

Amanda shook her head, attempting to reassure herself that the question was simply a friendly one, born of natural curiosity rather than dark suspicion. After all, not everyone in Nebraska would have seen those posters, and half the people who might have seen them probably couldn’t read. She hoped.

“So where’re you from?” the girl asked.

“Back east,” Amanda answered nonchalantly as she continued to peruse the shelves.

“Whereabouts?”

“Such curiosity.” Amanda laughed nervously now, picking up another bottle from the shelf. “Just east,” she said, instead of the more truthful I’m that runaway heiress from New York you’ve certainly read about. The one with five thousand dollars on her head. The one who hasn’t washed her hair or had a bath in days and whom you can probably smell all the way across the store. That one.

“We don’t have any,” the girl said.

“Pardon me?”

“I said we don’t have any of that oh de stuff they sell in the East. There’s a bottle of vanilla extract over there by the pickles.” She pointed. “Smells ever so good when you dab it on. Will that do you?”

Breathing a little sigh of relief, Amanda walked to the pickle barrel and picked up the small brown bottle of vanilla. Her hand was shaking. “This will do nicely,” she said, trying to hide the tremors from the salesgirl as she fumbled in her handbag, found a gold coin and handed it over the counter.

Just as the girl dropped the coin in a metal cash box, the blast of a whistle shook the dry goods store and rattled the glass in the windows, as well as all the bottles on the shelves.

“Train’s leaving,” the girl said casually while counting out Amanda’s change. “How long you staying in town?”

“What? Oh, no. I’m not staying,” Amanda replied, with some amazement, and a touch of amusement that she hoped wouldn’t hurt the clerk’s feelings. It was one thing to do a bit of necessary shopping in a town like this, but the very idea that she would actually stay here was, well…absurd.

The girl, however, didn’t seem to think it was so absurd. She was smiling now, angling her head toward a window in the back of the store. “Oh, yes, you are staying,” she said, just as the big black Union Pacific locomotive steamed past.

The smile on the clerk’s flat face widened, then twisted into what Amanda might almost have called a sneer when the girl added, “You need to buy anything else—toothbrush, toothpaste, a cake of soapto see you through till the next train comes?”

Outside the depot, Marcus leaned against a roof post and scraped a match on the sole of his boot. He’d declined the antelope steak and the griddle cakes, but accepted a cigar from a fellow passenger as they both stood contemplating the Wanted posters tacked up just inside the dining hall. Marcus had pointedly avoided looking at the posters in North Platte, hoping to forget for a while that he was a bounty hunter who’d just lost his last bounty to a hangman’s noose..

“Take a look at that one,” the cigar-smoking fellow had said, pointing to a fresh sheet of paper near the bottom of the array of torn and flyspecked notices. “Now that would be some catch, wouldn’t it?”

Marcus had been reading the Wanted poster for a bank robber named Ed Caragher, alias Chick McGee, alias Robert LePage, and wondering how the culprit kept his monickers straight when his gaze drifted to where the man was pointing. Reward, it said, in bold black print, and just beneath that Runaway Heiress. Of course, as soon as Marcus read the description—blond hair, green eyes, small stature, delicate build—he knew exactly who his damsel in distress was. Some catch, indeed.

He’d done his damnedest then to hide the predatory smile tugging at his mouth. “She’s a hundred miles from here, if she cut loose from the old lady three days ago,” he told the man beside him. “Probably already in Denver by now, if that’s where she was headed.”

The man had sighed, and Marcus had echoed it. A five-thousand-dollar sigh.

“I sure could’ve used that reward the old Grenville woman’s offering.” The man had lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Oh, well. I expect you’re right about that girl not being anywhere near here. Enjoy that cigar. Nice talking to you.” He’d shrugged again and began to walk away.

“Thanks. You too. And you know what they say,” Marcus had called after him. “Easy come. Easy go.”

They also said something about a bird in the hand, Marcus thought as he glanced around to make sure no one was watching when he surreptitiously took the poster from the wall, folded it and stashed it in his pocket.

That explained the duchess’s imperious behavior, especially her blithe request that the conductor hold the train. Amanda Grenville, described in the poster as the sole heiress to the Grenville Ironworks, was used to riding in private railroad cars that did indeed come or go at her command. Marcus was sure it hadn’t even occurred to her that the train wouldn’t wait. After all, time and tide and probably even the Almighty tended to stand still for the obscenely rich.