by DAVIDSON, Carolyn. MALLERY, Susan. WILLIAMS, Bronwyn (in) Montana Mavericks
Now her life had taken an irreversible turn, and this time she had only herself to blame. No one had compelled her to promise Cam her services as an entertainer. She had set the rules, herself. She would perform five nights a week, the rest of the time being hers to do with as she pleased. And for that she would be paid a percentage of the business she brought in.
“Now, how d’ye figger that, little lady? I been doing a land-office business in this here place ever since I bought it off’n the man that built it. Got so successful I had to expand.” He hadn’t taken her seriously at first.
“You might have to expand again. Let me use the new room—you don’t have your billiard table yet, anyway, so it won’t cost you anything. The men can buy drinks up front, but once they come through that door, I get a percentage of what they spend.”
Cam had brayed like a donkey, but Lizzy had stood her ground. “For every night there are more than ten patrons in the theatre—” she had already begun calling it that in her own mind “—I’ll give you the recipe for a fancy drink. That way, you can draw on a more sophisticated clientele.”
The grizzled proprietor had had a field day with that, mimicking her Carolina accent, which she had done her best to play down once she’d left Charleston.
“Good American whiskey, home brew and applejack for them that wants it. I got no call to serve fancy drinks.”
“The ingredients don’t cost that much more and you can charge several times as much. If the new drinks don’t sell you can take the ingredients out of my pay.”
So they had settled on the terms, and now Lizzy sang her heart out from Tuesday through Saturday, two hours each evening. And Cam learned how to mix a Floater, a Smasher and a Virginia Fancy and charge three times more than he did for a shot of straight whiskey. Once it was known that Lizzy was the source of the recipes, the men had fallen all over themselves to be the first to try one of what they called Angel’s drinks. It was hard to keep a straight face, seeing the tough, rawhide types who frequented the Double Deuce, clutching a fancy cocktail in their horny hands.
Cicero was waiting to escort her to the boardinghouse when she finished her evening’s work. Mrs. Harroun had agreed to allow them rooms if Cicero would take on the job of handyman until her regular help had recovered from a snakebite. He’d wanted to refuse, but one level look from Lizzy was all it had taken to remind him of just who was responsible for the fix they were in. Earning even a little was better than losing everything.
“Seventeen men were waiting by the time I walked into the room,” Lizzy proudly announced as they shared a nightcap of cocoa and buttermilk pie on the porch of the boardinghouse. “By the time I finished my first number, several more came in, and—and,” she stressed, “three of them were drinking my cocktails.”
“Where’d you learn how to mix drinks?”
“Remember my maid, Sally Lee? Her father was the bartender at Papa’s club. I let her borrow my Jane Austen and she lent me her father’s recipe book.”
Cicero snorted in disbelief and she said defensively, “Well, it was all the poor girl had to share. I couldn’t very well hurt her pride, could I? I only glanced through it, so I could only remember a few of the recipes. I might have gotten a few things wrong, but nobody seemed to notice.”
“I wish we could go back to the way things were,” Cicero said wistfully.
“Well, we can’t. And knowing how things really were, I wouldn’t want to. Poor Mama…”
“Poor Papa. You don’t know how it is, Sissy. One day you’re playing cards with a bunch of friends, maybe losing your allowance, maybe winning someone else’s. Next thing you know, you’re in way over your head, and the only way you can reach shore is to keep trying and hope your luck will turn. That the next card, or the one after that, will get you out of the hole you’re in, only somehow, it never turns out that way.” He sighed, looking tired and scared and far younger than his nineteen and a half years.
There was no longer any doubt in Lizzy’s mind as to who would be looking after whom. Rising from the porch rocker, she moved to stand behind his chair, resting her cheek on the top of his sandy hair, murmuring words that were meant to be comforting. “It’s going to be all right, Ro. Once we get out of debt, we’ll leave town and go to Wyoming, and maybe you can work for your rancher friend, and it’ll be almost as good as owning your own ranch.”
It wouldn’t, but it was all she had to offer.
AFTER A FEW DAYS of roughing it on the river, Will had cleared his head enough to accept the truth. Lizzy was gone, and it was his fault. He should have told her how he felt, but for once he hadn’t trusted his own judgment. That same judgment, based on knowledge, experience and intuition, had led him to some spectacular coups.
It had also led to a few spectacular failures.
And now, because of where he’d found her—because he was a selfish bastard who was too impressed by his own worth and too damned stupid to see beneath the surface to hers, he had thrown away the most valuable thing of all. The one thing that could have given meaning to his whole life.
What good was success if there was no one to share it with? Back when he’d first begun to make a few good deals—and then a few even better ones—he had celebrated with a night on the town, as often as not with a lovely companion whose name he would have forgotten before they parted company the next day. Shallow, meaningless pleasures.
Given a choice he would rather share one of Lizzy’s culinary failures in his own kitchen than dine at Chicago’s finest restaurant with the most expensive courtesan in the world.
He would rather have one of Lizzy’s kisses than a week in the bed of Delilah DeLyte, with all her remarkable skills.
To think he might have had it all, he mused dismally as he rode into town and dismounted in front of Harry’s barbershop, if only he hadn’t been so blind. At first when he’d begun to suspect how he really felt about her, he hadn’t believed it, then he hadn’t known quite how to approach her. If she knew how much he had paid Cam for her freedom, her precious pride would have been shattered beyond repair.
Timing. It all came down to timing. Maybe he’d better give up on trying to open a bank and go back to work on the ranch.
LIZZY TOOK a deep breath before sweeping back the curtains that had been hung just yesterday over the back door of the new extension. Making an entrance was a part of her performance now. Small things mattered, she was discovering. Such as the rose she carried with her each night. Heaven help her when Mrs. Harroun’s rosebush stopped blooming, because there wasn’t a florist closer than Helena, so far as she knew.
But the important thing was that the woman who had learned to touch her cheeks and her lips sparingly with rouge and pile her hair into a seemingly artless arrangement that allowed curls to escape to brush her face, was Lizzy Price. Not Juliette Elizabeth Price-Hawthorne.
They called her the Golden Angel, which made Ro swell with pride. After only a week and a half, he was already talking about managing her career as a professional singer in big cities, maybe even as far west as San Francisco.
The stomping and whistling that invariably greeted her entrance ceased the moment the curtains fell shut behind her. Hushed reverence took its place. For the first time, a few of the town’s more independent women were among the audience, not just the other girls who worked there, who always managed to sneak in for a few minutes each night. They were among her staunchest supporters. Even Cam had been known to stand in the door for a few minutes, a scowl on his weathered face.
She sang several Stephen Foster songs, and then an old ballad she only half remembered from her childhood. Melly used to sing it in the kitchen, with Sally Lee singing harmony. It came as close as anything had in ages to breaking her composure.
“Thank you, thank you so much,” she murmured. Stepping forward, she prepared to toss her rose, now sadly wilted from being clutched in her hot hands, out into the audience.
That’s when she saw him.
If a pit had opene
d up before her, she would have willingly stepped into it and disappeared. He was here.
Will was here!
As quickly as she could, she eased back behind the curtains, escaped onto the balcony and made her way toward the back stairs. Ro would be waiting to escort her back to the boardinghouse.
“Lizzy!” She hadn’t been fast enough. “Lizzy, dammit, you come back here!”
She flew down the remaining stairs, but he flew faster, his feet pounding on the new wooden steps.
“Here now,” Cicero cried, moving to stand in front of her the instant she reached the bottom. “You’re not to bother the angel, sir, she’s done for the night. Come back tomorrow night and—”
“Angel, my sweet arse, she’s a liar and a—”
Ro aimed a blow at his jaw. Lizzy groaned. Will swatted the fist away and growled, “Go inside and tell Cam to serve you a sasparilla, boy. The lady and I have some talking to do.”
“No, we don’t,” Lizzy chimed in. “Ro, you stay right—”
Will glared her to silence. “Go away, son, this doesn’t concern you.”
Cicero Price-Hawthorne, of the Charleston Price-Hawthornes, manfully stood his ground. “Anything that concerns my sister concerns me, sir.”
Lizzy moved to stand between them, hands on her hips. Dear Lord, Will looked awful! There were shadows around his eyes and he looked as if he had been ill. “Are you all right?” She had to ask. She’d been half expecting him to come storming after her all week. “Has something happened to the Folly? That lightning storm we had the other night…”
“What about your fancy ranch?” Even his voice sounded raw and painful.
“My fancy ranch? Oh—that ranch. Well, you see, we decided—that is, I thought it might be better to—”
“What my sister is trying to say is that I lost the money we were going to use to buy it—at least, to start buying in.”
“Your sister,” Will repeated. Oh, God, yes. He was her brother, all right. The same delicate build, the same guileless blue eyes. With that choirboy face, he’d be an easy mark for every cardsharper in the state of Montana. He was beginning to see what had happened.
“Cicero, this is Mr. Kincaid. He was—that is, he’s the man who hired me when I left Cam’s place.”
The kid bristled all over again, thrusting his jaw, fisting both hands. If he shaved more than a couple of times a week, Will thought, it would be a waste of shaving soap.
“Stop it, Ro. Mr. Kincaid has been—”
“Will.”
“Mr. Kincaid,” she repeated, glaring at him until it was all he could do not to kiss her senseless. And he’d thought she was a victim? She was a Valkyrie. “Mr. Kincaid,” she stressed again, “has been my friend as well as my employer. You owe him money, because he had to pay Cam what you owed him before Cam would let me go, so you can just apologize. Right now,” she snapped when both men stood slack-jawed a moment too long.
To his credit, the young man managed to recover his aplomb. Good breeding in there somewhere, Will mused. The boy apologized with a mixture of reluctance and sincerity. Will accepted the apology with a nod, wondering not for the first time just who the hell this woman was. Where she’d come from. At least he was beginning to see how she had come to be working in a place that most respectable women would have shunned like the devil on horseback. Working, this time, on her own terms.
“Lizzy, we have some talking to do.”
“You’ll call her Miss Price-Hawthorne, sir, and anything you have to say to my sister you can say in front of me.”
“Go to your room, Ro, I can handle this.”
“But Sissy—” the young man protested. The look she gave him would have sent a lesser man scurrying for cover. “All right, but I’m going to wait up until you get in, and if you’re not in your room in half an hour, I’m coming after you.”
They waited silently until he turned the corner. “Protective little dickens, isn’t he?” Will said, taking her arm and steering her away from the saloon. As it happened, they’d been standing not five feet away from where he and Caleb had recently buried a couple of trinkets and a small fortune in gold.
“You have to understand, I’m all he has left. We take care of each other.”
Will bit back a remark about the quality of her brother’s care. From now on, that wouldn’t be a problem. “No other family?”
She shook her head. A few of the curls that had been temporarily tamed tumbled over her forehead. “I know how much you paid for me, Will, and I want you to know you’ll get every penny of it back.”
“Lizzy—Lizzy, don’t. It wasn’t you I paid for, it was—call it a termination settlement. You see, I needed you more than Cam did.”
God, wasn’t that the truth!
“Don’t.” She stopped and turned to face him, looking younger, more vulnerable than ever in the light from a full moon. “Will, I’m tired of living a lie. I’m tired of pretending, so if we’re to maintain any sort of a—a friendship, don’t say things that aren’t true. Mrs. Gibson would have done a perfect job as housekeeper. You didn’t need me, you were just being—kind, I suppose.” Her shoulders drooped, but the light of battle still hadn’t quite left her eyes. “I don’t want your pity, I want—I want the truth.”
“The truth,” he repeated slowly. “Cards on the table, so to speak.”
She sighed, and the hot coals of resentment he’d been fanning ever since he read her note burned out, leaving only the warm promise of hope.
“Harry Talbert—the barbershop just down the street? Harry was singing the praises of Cam’s new entertainer. Woman called the Angel. Yellow curls, kind of choppy looking, but pretty—blue eyes, not much of a figure, but a voice that would make the devil lie down and weep.”
She opened her mouth and then closed it again.
Oops. His diplomatic skills definitely needed polishing. “Or maybe what he said was that you, uh—you didn’t take up much space.”
She lifted her brows in open disbelief. Will thought—he couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if the corners of her mouth twitched a bit. So he gathered his courage and waded in. “All right, then, here it is. The plain, unvarnished truth. First, I’m so crazy in love with you that I can’t even eat—haven’t been able to sleep more than a couple of hours at a time since I found out you were gone. Second, I’ve squandered so much money on that old ruin I’m going to have to cut back on the size of my bank—I guess it was pretty pretentious, anyway, for a town this size.” He was ticking the items off on his fingers. “Thirdly—” he said, when she grabbed his hand and clasped it between her own.
“Wait,” she said breathlessly. “Go back to the first one.”
“The first what? Oh—you mean where I said I love you?” Standing in the shadow of the old saloon, Will gazed down at the woman who had stolen his heart before he’d even realized it was endangered. “It can’t come as any surprise. For weeks now I’ve been acting like a jackass high on locoweed, and I’m generally conceded to be a fairly intelligent man.” He tried to make light of it, as if his heart weren’t lodged in his throat. “Some might even say suave.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Her eyes were dancing like moonlight on the water. Emboldened—at least she hadn’t taken a swing at him—he started to reach out for her, then thought better of it. Anything he needed to say, he’d better get it said before he laid a finger on her, because once he touched her—once he kissed her again…
She went on staring up at him, her eyes big enough to swallow the moon. He said, “What? What, Lizzy?”
“Open your arms.”
And when he did, she walked straight into his embrace. Just like that, the battle ended, the only shot fired being the one that had shattered a mirror and tumbled her into his lap.
They ended up out at the Folly. Will wasn’t about to take her to the hotel. The boardinghouse was out of the question, as the last thing he needed was an interfering brother and a nosy landlady.
The old house had never looke
d so grand, nor the future more promising, as it did when he carried her inside. His footsteps rang hollowly on the bare floor as, laughing, they crossed the foyer that still smelled slightly of scorched beans, climbed the staircase that smelled of beeswax, and entered the small bedroom that smelled of lilacs and fresh linens and Lizzy.
“YOU UNDERSTAND, I’m talking marriage, kids—the whole kit and caboodle,” he said sometime later. By now, he figured, her brother would have got up a search party. It wouldn’t be long before they had company.
Holding her in his arms, he leaned back against the plain wooden headboard of the bed he had slept in for the first twenty years of his life. Someday their son would sleep there. A daughter would have one of those fancy poster beds with a ruffled canopy.
Things would change—the old house would ring with new life after decades of standing alone. His hair would grow thin, Lizzy’s gold would slowly turn to silver. But for as long as he lived, he suspected that one thing would never change. One look and he would want her. One touch—a kiss, and he would be helpless against the spell she had woven around his heart.
They had to get married quickly. Yesterday wouldn’t be any too soon. But before he did anything else, he had to put her mind at ease about her brother. The kid couldn’t do much more damage on the ranch than he himself had done had at that age. It was worth a shot.
“Would you rather be married here, or in town?” he asked after a long, sleepy kiss that threatened to reignite banked coals.
Her fingers idly twisting the hair around his nipple, she considered the question. “Do you think your brother would allow us to be married where you grew up? I’d like that—the family thing. Your family, I mean—and Ro.”
They had got past the will you or won’t you before they’d ever left town. She would. He would. The details they could work out later.
“They’d love it. They’re going to love you, sweetheart. Wait’ll you meet my little brother, Brock. He’s not home now, but sooner or later, all the Kincaids wind up here.”