by Zoë Archer
Will found himself absently stroking his mustache. Xavier had a mustache, too. Not that it was unusual. Most men sported some kind of hair on their face of one variety or another. It was a sign of maturity, manly pride. He had started getting his first beard when he was fourteen. Anxious to prove himself a man and able to work, he’d let it grow in and hadn’t been bare-faced since. Only once before had he shaved his face completely, and he’d gotten so much riling from the boys in the bunkhouse and catcalls from the girls in town, he’d grown his mustache back as soon as he could.
That’d been six years ago. He didn’t know what he’d look like without it. Someone else. Someone different.
Different from David Xavier.
Chapter Four
A stranger walked into her breakfast room.
Alarmed, Olivia rose nearly out of her chair, her morning toast and tea half consumed, to summon Mordon. Her butler never let strangers in without at least announcing them, and she wondered what he could have been thinking to admit this unknown young man.
And then the stranger opened his mouth and Will Coffin’s voice came out. “What do you think?”
She slowly lowered herself back down, stunned beyond words. He had shaved off his mustache either last night or this morning. The transformation was astonishing. And disquieting.
If she had suspected him handsome before, now she had full proof that Will Coffin was one of the most magnificent-looking men she had ever seen in her life. It was no wonder his kiss last night had felt so marvelous—his mouth was perfectly sculpted, just shy of being too full, too sensuous—and all tempered by the clean, sharp severity of his good looks. And somehow his eyes were lighter, more intense, drawing her own eyes immediately to them by the purity of their cool blue blaze.
Oh, God, this stunning man had stayed the night in her home? And she had kissed him? A disaster.
Seeing the dismay on her face, Will Coffin grimaced. “That ugly, huh?” he asked. He paced to a mirror over the sideboard and looked disapprovingly at his own reflection, touching the tips of his fingers to his clean upper lip.
“No, no,” she said. “Not ugly at all, Mr. Coffin. You’re quite...agreeable.” Which was the equivalent of calling the Pyramids headstones.
Still staring critically at himself, turning his face from side to side, he muttered, “I don’t know what I was thinkin’.”
Her modest breakfast room was filled with him. She ought to have taken her morning meal in the dining room—at least in that formal, large space, she would be less aware of his outsized masculinity, which took all space and left little to breathe. Shaving his mustache had not domesticated Will Coffin at all. Now, he was like a well-groomed lion standing in front of the rosewood sideboard, ready to pounce.
Something else occurred to her as she watched him critique himself. “If I may ask, how old are you, Mr. Coffin?”
He turned and faced her with a wry smile. “Call me Will. This ‘mister’ business makes me feel like a trail boss, which I sure ain’t.”
“Very well.” She struggled to compose herself. Everything was growing more complicated by the second, and if she asked him the question she’d been thinking about all night, she would have to keep her wits. “How old are you, William?”
He grinned, and her heart contracted. It did not seem right that one man could be so attractive, especially this man. “Just Will, ma’am. Jake never got around to the rest of the name. But to answer your question,” he continued, thoughtfully and hypnotically running a finger back and forth over the expanse of fresh skin above his top lip, “I don’t know. When my folks died, I was about knee high, but there weren’t records of my birthday, so I just estimated.”
“And what is your estimation?”
“About twenty-seven, twenty-eight, or so.” He shrugged. “It never made a difference. Long as I could push cows, none of the foremen ever cared how old I was. Are you all right? You don’t look so good.” He took a few steps forward and she pressed herself back into the cushions of her chair.
“I’m fine,” she said, though she knew she looked ashen. She tried to cover by drinking her tea, a futile gesture. “I just...did not expect you to be so young.”
He chuckled, moving back, and she swallowed. “Where I come from, I’m an old man. Folks like me are lucky to live so long.”
Olivia smiled wanly, then stared down at her plate, where her toast had grown hard and cold. She doubted she could swallow another bite, anyway. Despite what Will said, he really was young, four or five years younger than herself, and between his age and his good looks, Olivia’s carefully wrought plans were beginning to appear unfeasible.
But what choice did she have? Things were starting to grow desperate.
Managing to recollect herself, she said brightly, “Why don’t you help yourself to some breakfast, Mr....Will? I’m sure you didn’t mean to start your day with my discourtesy.”
“Nothin’ discourteous at all,” he said, and his manner was so affable and genial she knew she would have to be on her guard. He took a plate from the sideboard and heaped it with eggs, bacon, fried bread, tomatoes, and sausages. The Sèvres china looked fragile and childlike in his large, square-fingered hand, something to decorate a well-appointed doll house. “You eat all this, yourself?” he asked, sitting down beside her. “If so, I’m amazed. You’re no bigger around than an aspen sapling.”
She shook her head. “Of course not. But since you’re here, I thought you might appreciate something more substantial than my usual marmalade and toast.”
And it did appear as though he appreciated it. Will began to shovel his food into his mouth with the speed of a fireman stoking coal into a train’s firehole. He must have felt her eyes on him, because he abruptly stopped. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said with a sheepish grin. “No chuckwagon can compete with the grub you got here.”
“Don’t apologize,” she said. “I’m glad you enjoy the food. And perhaps,” she hesitated, then continued with more conviction, “you might call me Olivia. ‘Ma’am’ makes me feel a trifle old.”
“Old? You?” He shook his head in disbelief. “You’re as fresh and lively as a field of columbine. But if it’s Olivia you want, I’m happy to oblige.” He sipped his coffee and smiled. “This ain’t Arbuckle’s, that’s for damned sure.”
She decided to let him finish his meal in peace before springing her proposition on him. As critical as the situation was becoming, she did not spend those years at finishing school in Geneva to rudely accost her guest with projected schemes. So they ate quietly together—or rather, he ate and she sipped at her tea. She thought briefly about correcting his hunched-over posture, which indicated that he was protecting his food from any scavengers, or the way he held his cutlery like weapons, or even the napkin he had tucked into the collar of his shirt. She had no intention of playing Pygmalion with Will Coffin. He was not her project, her raw clay to be formed and shaped to her liking. Besides, table manners notwithstanding, she rather enjoyed him the way he was. Even though his youth and appearance had unsettled her, she found the experience of breakfasting with Will much more agreeable than she had anticipated. Almost homey: domestic, yet with a frisson of wildness—somewhat like taking tea with a slightly trained grizzly bear.
“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 ifs 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,” sh
e 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.