by DAVIDSON, Carolyn. MALLERY, Susan. WILLIAMS, Bronwyn (in) Montana Mavericks
“I’ve never done anything like it before, you understand, but if you’re willing to take a chance, I promise to do my very best to please you.” She was staring down at the tips of her worn gray kid shoes, but he could see the color seeping into her cheeks. “What I meant was…”
She wanted to please him? Well, bless her heart, maybe she would have made a right fair saloon girl, after all, if he hadn’t decided to rescue her. Will cleared his throat and said, “We haven’t talked about your salary.” He named a figure, and her head snapped up again.
“I’ll hardly be here long enough to earn all that.”
“You will if you see the job through. Once everything else is finished, I’ll still need a hand in picking out furniture. This is the first house I’ve ever owned.”
“Yes, well…I never actually furnished a house before, either.”
“But you’re a woman. Women know about things like that—curtains and those little ruffle-edged tables and all.”
“Pie crust.”
“Beg pardon?”
“They’re called pie crust tables.”
“There, you see?” He made the most of the minor confirmation.
Late afternoon sunlight slanted down through the filthy windows, capturing millions of dust motes. Will cleared his throat again and ran a finger under his collar. “Now, about your living quarters,” he began.
“That’s what that little bedroom is for, isn’t it? I wondered about it. You have to understand, though, that if you’re planning on moving in right away, I can’t live here. My reputation would be ruined.”
Will didn’t have the heart to tell her that after working in a saloon it was already in tatters, even if she hadn’t done all that much upstairs work. He himself had paid for a couple of nights, and he didn’t figure Cam for the most discreet man in town. He had taken her up those stairs with half the men in the barroom cheering them on. To all intents and purposes, she was already a fallen woman.
“I’m staying at Amos’s hotel in town. The room’s yours if you’ll take it. Otherwise I’d have to arrange for daily transportation, and—”
“Oh, please—there’s no need for that. And I want you to know I intend to pay back every penny you’ve spent on me. I know you paid Cam for—well, for my time.” Color flared in her cheeks again. He couldn’t remember ever seeing a woman with thinner skin. It was a wonder she hadn’t poisoned herself with all that junk she put on her face.
From something Cam had mentioned about a debt owed him by the man who had left her there, Will was probably going to have to pay a damned sight more for her freedom than the cost of a couple of nights. She didn’t need to know about that, though. Even a saloon girl could have pride. It was a new concept, one he had never considered before, and didn’t particularly want to consider now, but there it was. There was more to a woman than her profession.
“Thank you, Miss Lizzy,” he said gravely. “Now, I’ve arranged for a woman from town to come out every day for the heavy cleaning. You’re to tell her where to start. I’ll send supplies out with her, and—oh, yeah—if you can find the time, I’ve had the kitchen cleaned up a bit, too. Once the new range is delivered, do you suppose you could see to feeding the workmen? Things will go a lot faster if they don’t have to go home for dinner.”
Another sop to her pride, the little minx. If she was determined to earn her keep, he might as well direct her energies. Otherwise there was no telling what she’d get up to.
SO IT WAS SETTLED, Will mused on the way back to town. Lizzy, sitting as far away on the hard plank seat as possible, had been silent ever since they’d left the house. “I’ll take you back to Cam’s place and let you get your things. Then I believe I’ll look into getting you a dog, just so you’ll have some company. A guard dog. One that would scare the devil out of any would-be prowlers.”
Kincaid’s Folly, he mused, just beginning to sense how deep a hole he had dug for himself.
CHAPTER FIVE
BY THE LIGHT of the oil lamp, Lizzy stared down at the orange water in the china basin and fought back tears. Crying wouldn’t help matters. She had learned that lesson long ago. Scouring her head another ten times just might. At least her hair was now more the color of a persimmon instead of the bright shade of orange it had been when she’d started.
When the other girls had suggested dying her hair as a means of improving her looks, she’d still been in a condition of shock at finding herself held hostage for her brother’s gambling debts. Ashamed, she had told no one, letting them believe she was there only because she needed a job and was not too particular.
A friendly group for the most part, the five other girls—women, actually, for all were older than she—had treated her as they might a doll, trying on first one outfit, then another, painting her face and teasing her hair until it stood up around her face like dandelion fluff. That and the dye, which they had sworn was not permanent, had made it impossible to comb ever since.
At the time Lizzy hadn’t cared. The less familiar the face she confronted in her mirror, the easier it was to pretend it was someone else installed in the tiny room at the end of the hall in the rambling, noisy, smelly old saloon in a town that was new and raw and barely even civilized.
Except for a bit of backbiting when one of them was perceived as infringing on someone else’s territory, the other girls were surprisingly good-natured. Back home in Charleston, such women were spoken of in whispers, if at all. At first Lizzy had been too stunned at finding herself in such a place to react when they had surrounded her like a flock of colorful birds, chattering and touching her face, her hair, criticizing her clothes, her figure, her way of speaking.
But she had learned many things since her parents had died and she’d been left in the tender care of an immature brother. One of the first lessons was that nothing would ever be the same again. No more paddling on the river. No more lawn tennis. No more parties, where she would allow herself to be talked into singing, and later, after the minister’s wife had left, dance herself breathless to ragtime music played on a grand piano.
When her world had suddenly come to an end, she had learned to adapt, and thus to survive. She was still learning. She had done her best to be a good waitress, for that was what saloon girls did when they weren’t occupied upstairs. Cicero had made Cam promise that she wouldn’t be required to go upstairs. A week, he’d said. He would return in a week with the money he owed the proprietor, who had bought up his IOUs, and then they would move on to another town and start afresh.
So she’d served drinks and waited for Cicero to return, and counted her blessings when Cam hadn’t forced her to work upstairs. Two weeks had passed, and no Cicero. Her luck had run out the night some drunken fool had pulled out his gun and started shooting and she’d dropped a tray and spilled whiskey all over a paying customer.
In a moment of weakness, with perhaps just a touch of self-pity, Lizzy allowed her thoughts to drift back to the past. If her entire world hadn’t shattered back in Charleston nearly a year ago, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Cicero Price-Hawthorne, the third, would be preparing to officially launch their only daughter into society. She would be wearing white crepe, white slippers and her birthday pearls, with her pale, curly hair tamed into a fashionable pompadour.
With a swipe of her arm, Lizzy smeared the tears across her face and tackled her hair again. At least no one in Charleston would ever know how far she had fallen. Bad enough that everyone who was anyone in Charleston had known about her father’s gambling. Everyone knew, although they were far too well-bred to mention it, that in one last desperate attempt to recoup, he had lost their home—the only thing he hadn’t already gambled away—and then recklessly driven himself and his wife into the Ashley River. They had called it an accident—it had been pitch-black and raining hard, and the Price-Hawthornes had been on their way home from a party, where, as usual, her father would have had more to drink than was wise.
But Lizzy, who had been called Juliette then, had kno
wn in her heart that her father had taken the easy way out of his disgrace. Henry Cicero, the third, had been too deeply in debt ever to recover, thanks to a lifelong addiction to gambling.
And Henry Cicero, the fourth, had sworn on his father’s grave that he would never again touch a deck of cards or a pair of dice. But as the spoiled only son of a prominent Charleston family, he’d been too weak to keep his promise.
They had left Charleston with little more than their shredded pride, their clothes and Cicero’s gig, which had broken a wheel before they even reached the Tennessee border. Cicero had sold his horse, bought two tickets on a train headed west, and from there on, he had paid their way by gambling.
Lizzy had known what he was doing, of course, but as they had already sold everything of value they possessed, including the pearls her father had given her for her seventeenth birthday, she could see no other way. It wasn’t as if either of them had been trained to earn a living.
After a run of hard luck in Kansas, during which they had both washed dishes in a restaurant for their meals, she’d suggested they stay there and work their way into the restaurant business. But Cicero, always a fan of Wild West shows, had had some idea of finding work on a ranch in the real Wild West and someday owning his own spread. “Not many people living out that far, not like home. Land’ll be dirt cheap,” he’d said, his boyish laughter inviting her to share his little joke, to share his dream.
So he had continued to gamble. It was only for seed money, he’d explained, because traveling with a lady was expensive. Once they arrived at their destination, he vowed never to touch another card. Instead, he would find work on a ranch and save every penny he earned. She could keep house for him, and one day they would return to Charleston for a visit. “We’ll go home in style, Sissy, you just wait. But just for a visit, mind, because by then I’ll have my own ranch to come back to.”
She should have known better. She had known better, but Cicero, even though he seemed younger, was actually eleven months older than she was. A gentleman born and bred, he had vowed to take care of her, and without skills herself, she’d had no choice but to let him try.
Well, she thought, examining her sore scalp in the tiny silver-backed mirror—she had managed to get herself out of the mess he’d landed her in without her brother’s help. She loved him—she would always love him, but from now on she intended to stand on her own two feet.
And those feet, she thought with tired amusement, would be wearing her own shoes from now on. Cam must have been relieved to see the last of her, else he would have insisted she stay until Cicero repaid the money he owed.
With that thought Lizzy settled down for her first night’s sleep in the huge, scary old mansion in the shadow of the Crazy Mountains.
THE CREATURE who met him at the door when he came to bring the dog was hardly recognizable as the woman he had brought out here only two days ago. Will tried not to laugh. He tried not to stare at her hair, which was no longer orange. If he had to name the color, he’d be at a dead loss. As for the style, it still stood out around her face, but great chunks of it had been whacked out, as if she’d been victim of a botched scalping. “Good morning, Miss Lizzy,” he said solemnly.
She glared at him, her eyes looking larger than ever now that they were no longer weighted down by layers of shiny blue paint. “Stop staring at me that way, I had to cut out the tangles. If it offends you I can tie a rag around my head.”
Recognizing her belligerence as embarrassment, Will tactfully changed the subject. “I’ve brought you a companion.” He snapped his fingers and a black-tan-and-white dog sat up in the back of the buckboard, its ears pricked expectantly. “Her name is Ruby, and she’s led a hard life. I believe she might have a touch of rheumatism, but if you’ll give her a place in the sun and feed her now and then, she’ll give fair warning whenever anyone comes within range of the house.” He’d intended to buy a guard dog, something to protect his property against transients, but it occurred to him that Lizzy might not like being out here alone with a dog that was half wolf. “She’s got a yip on her loud enough to start an avalanche.”
Lizzy studied the dog. The dog studied Lizzy. “Then it’s a good thing I’ll be gone long before winter, isn’t it?”
THE MASSIVE cast-iron range was delivered by freight wagon from Butte the next morning. Two men from the Kincaid ranch came to uncrate it, and Lizzy stared at it in horror. Surely she wasn’t expected to cook on that thing…was she?
Mrs. Gibson, the cleaning woman, declared it the finest stove in all Whitehorn. “You’ll be able to cook up a storm on that thing, Miss Lizzy. I reck’n Mr. Will’s gonna get his money’s worth there.”
And that was another thing. The salary Will had promised her was far too much. Lizzy knew to the penny how much her parents had paid the household help. She was being paid too much for a job she wasn’t at all sure she could do. She might have lost almost everything she had once held dear, but she still had too much pride to accept charity.
One of the more painful lessons Lizzy had had to learn, however, was pragmatism. Given the choice of working for Will Kincaid, working as a saloon girl—upstairs and down—or starving, she made the only sensible choice.
“I’ll earn every penny of it, just you wait and see,” she whispered fiercely after Will had driven off. Ruby lifted her head, flapped her tail and went back to sleep in a patch of sunlight falling through the newly replaced bay window.
WILL WAITED two days before riding out to the Folly again. It was only sensible, he told himself, to keep up with the progress. It was going to be his home, after all. Riding out every day or so to check on things had nothing to do with the woman he’d installed there.
He was met by the cheerful sound of hammers, good-natured swearing, and the sight of Lizzy on her hands and knees with a bucket and scrub brush, her shapely rear end swinging in counterpoint with her shoulders. With the door wide open to catch the draft, she was scrubbing the front hallway and singing softly in a voice as clear as a mountain lake.
He lingered to enjoy the sight and sound until it occurred to him that he wasn’t the only man enjoying the impromptu concert. Wheeling around, he circled the house, looking for something to criticize. The men went back to work, and the fact that he found nothing amiss didn’t improve his temper.
She was still at it when he completed his tour of inspection, but the singing stopped the instant his boots hit the bottom step, “Where’s Mrs. Gibson?” he demanded, crossing the front porch to step into the foyer. “I hired her to do the rough cleaning.”
“She’s upstairs scrubbing the walls.” Applying a hand to the small of her back, Lizzy slowly got to her feet.
“Dammit, you’re supposed to be overseeing the work, not doing it yourself!”
“Yes, it is a lovely morning, isn’t it?” she said calmly. “Come and have a cup of tea and I’ll show you what we’ve done so far, and then you can decide how you want to use the rooms.”
If he’d been in danger of forgetting the citified manners he had learned back East, she quickly reminded him. Haughty as a duchess, she made tea in the kitchen, using a battered kettle and the rusted old cookstove, and served it in a pair of saucerless, mismatched mugs that had come from God knows where. The attic, for all he knew. Evidently the dishes he’d ordered hadn’t arrived yet.
“I’m afraid I don’t have anything to serve with it.”
“Tea’s just fine. I wasn’t expecting refreshments.” He managed a gritty smile. If she wanted to play lady, then he could damn well play gentleman. It probably wouldn’t kill him.
So he settled into one of the kitchen chairs he had ordered along with the table and range and watched her pour from a fat brown teapot with a chipped spout. He stared at her hands—the broken fingernails and the long, graceful fingers—and avoided looking at her hair, which was ugly beyond belief. Her face, innocent of paint except for a streak of grime across one cheek, was…
Well, it was hardly beautiful, but inte
resting. Surprisingly interesting. Miss Lizzy Price was a bundle of contradictions.
As soon as he could, he left—fled was too strong a word—making some excuse about an appointment.
THE NEXT DAY Will deliberately stayed away, using his time to round up a few more carpenters, all of them older, experienced men who wouldn’t be so easily distracted. By offering them a bonus he extracted a promise that once they finished the Folly, they would go to work on the bank building he had designed, which was a smaller version of one he had particularly liked in Chicago.
Then, after an excellent midday meal at Mrs. Harroun’s groaning table, he purchased a well-made buckboard and arranged for pasturage for Chili, the mare he’d bought from Caleb, who had refused payment until he’d caught sight of a warning glint in Will eyes. Next thing on the list would be to see to having a portion of his own acreage fenced.
By now, the new range should have been installed. Lizzy might even be cooking the midday meal. Despite first impressions, she was an earnest little creature who obviously wanted to feel as if she were earning her salary. He would rather have her puttering in the kitchen than on her knees scrubbing his floors and driving his carpenters to distraction.
By late afternoon, Will could restrain himself no longer. Collecting Chili from the livery stable, he headed out of town. The ride out, though only a couple of miles, had a soothing effect. By the time he pulled up before the Folly, he was in a far better frame of mind.
Control. There was a time when he’d railed at Caleb for having to control everything and everyone within range. Funny, the way, after all these years, he had uncovered the same trait in himself.
Bathed in the golden glow of a setting sun, the old house looked rather magnificent, even with two men on the roof and another working on the eaves. A portion of the roof sagged slightly. Much of the original gingerbread trim was still missing. New rafters could be had locally, but the millwork would have to be freighted in. The list of needed materials grew daily. He only hoped that once this job was finished he would have enough of his fortune intact to complete the grand structure he envisioned for his bank. One folly was enough for any man; he had already invested in two. The house, and Lizzy.