In the photographs Kearney was raw, bustling, like an adolescent boy who’d spurted up, awkward in its own skin.
But Kearney was all grown-up now, crisp-edged and decorous, the tumble of lopsided, hasty wood buildings replaced by sturdy brick structures and whitewashed frame houses. In the three days they’d been there Laura worked her way along the street that paralleled the railroad, faithfully recording what she saw.
She chose a small park that day, pretty with clipped green hedges and a white gazebo, filled with families enjoying a warm Saturday afternoon, a full mix of ages and sexes, another change from when the town had been populated mostly by men—railroad workers and cowboys and those who owned the businesses that catered to them.
And she was working, for the moment at least, blessedly alone. Her three traveling companions had already gotten impatient with the tedium of watching her work, and so they were off to other activities today, Mrs. Bossidy, shopping, and the two men off somewhere that they wouldn’t reveal. They’d all had to admit she was safe enough in a public square on a pleasant afternoon.
She had vastly underestimated the time that her preliminary studies would take, mostly because, having always worked undisturbed, she hadn’t budgeted for the frequent interruptions of people who wandered by and stopped to chat.
She couldn’t bring herself to mind. Even when her health had improved to the point that her parents allowed visitors, they were carefully selected and rigidly scheduled. She would not have been surprised to discover they’d been required to undergo a medical examination first. But it was such a joy to have people stop by merely to say hello, a motley, wonderful collection of young and old, fashionably dressed and intriguingly scruffy. She’d only vaguely known such a breadth of humanity existed, for in her ordered, privileged world even the servants were well kept and well dressed. To her starved eyes, variety was a heady, wonderful thing.
But this afternoon she’d had a stretch of uninterrupted time, and now she frowned over the resulting study. She’d roughed in the outlines of the square, the tall false fronts of the stores on the far side, the wedding-cake spear of the gazebo. The proportions were good. Not perfect, but good. She would have preferred perfect, but she would have had to spend another three weeks on the square alone to achieve that.
She sighed and pulled out her palette. The greens of the grass and the trees, a deep vibrant spill of impending summer, would be the most difficult to capture. She dabbed pure green on the page, then swirled in yellow, blue, a tiny bit of white.
More yellow, she judged. She picked up the tube and squirted, rewarded only by a tiny bubble.
Darn. If she didn’t have enough paint with her, the light would be gone by the time she fetched some and returned to the square. Still squinting at the paper, trying to decide whether a smidge more blue would help, she groped for her canvas bag. She could have sworn she’d left it in reach, right there…there…she finally gave up and glanced to her right.
Her bag was a good three feet away, two scuffed black boots planted beside it. She looked up, and up, the full length of two very long legs. Past narrow hips encased in faded denim, a broad chest, truly impressive shoulders, and here she had to clamp her hand on her crown to stop the slippage of her straw bonnet.
My goodness. She’d conjured him up a dozen times since that day on the train. She’d battled the urge to stop scribbling the landscape outside her window and draw him instead, even though she knew that would be a terrible mistake and she could never do him justice.
But she discovered she hadn’t been doing him justice, anyway, because he was ten times more arresting in person than he’d been in her memory.
He’d shaved. And yet she’d recognized him immediately, as if she’d known all along what he’d look like without the beard.
He wasn’t skilled with a razor. A day’s growth shadowed his very fine jaw, marred by a couple of nasty nicks from the blade.
“You’re getting it all over your hands,” he said.
“What?”
He pointed at her hand. “The paint.”
“Oh. Oh!” Bright yellow smeared her fingers. She scrabbled for her bag, dug through brushes and pots in search of a cloth.
“Here.” He handed her a thin, rumpled square of linen.
“I couldn’t. It won’t wash out, it’s—”
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll consider it my contribution to the art world. Lord knows it’ll never happen any other way.”
She shook out the handkerchief, hoping for a monogram, any hint at his identity. No luck. The yellow stained the white and smeared over her skin, and she finally gave up.
“It’s only making it worse,” she said with a laugh. “It’s a losing battle, anyway.” To prove it, she held up her hand. There was blue beneath her nails and a wide patch of red on her left thumb. “I’m sorry about your handkerchief. I could have it washed. If you want me to return it…” She trailed off, hoping he’d supply a name, an address.
“Keep it,” Sam Duncan told her. He’d pondered how to approach her for days, what would be the best way to attach himself to her party. Try to get hired? Play the suitor and get himself invited along? Finally, he’d concluded he’d simply have to get to know her a bit to judge the right approach.
Laura let her hand drop to her lap, the cloth crumpled within, conscious all the time that he watched her with minute care. Did he suspect that she’d do just that? That she would hide it in a drawer, a keepsake like a young girl saving her first dance card? It seemed a terribly adolescent thing to do, embarrassingly so, but her illness had caused her to miss out on such things at the appropriate time.
She couldn’t bring herself to discard the handkerchief. But she could hardly fold it up and tuck it safely away while he stood there, could she?
“You’re healing.” The bruise around his left eye had slid from purple to yellow-green. The scrape on his cheek was fading, and the shape of his mouth—what she’d been able to see beneath his beard when they’d first met—had changed, his lips thinner, as if they’d been slightly swollen before.
“Healing?” he asked. And then “oh!” He pressed two fingers beneath his damaged eye, remembering his wounds. They were minor compared to many he’d had, hardly worth thinking about. “It happens. Not as fast as it used to, though.”
Laura couldn’t imagine what had happened to cause him so much injury. He’d handled the dangerous situation on the train so competently. Surely it had taken more than a simple bar brawl. A riding accident, perhaps. Or maybe he was a prizefighter…he looked too lean for the ring, but he moved with such confidence and controlled strength.
She hoped he might volunteer the information but said nothing. It was too forward a thing to ask, but oh, she wanted to know.
A bird chattered in a nearby elm, making the silence all the more obvious when it flew off.
And here was another thing she’d missed at the appropriate time. She’d never learned how to make light conversation with a man. The rituals of flirtation were a mystery to her, imagined from novels, glimpsed through carriage windows.
“You were…I saw you on the train.”
“I remember,” Sam said, injecting some warmth in his voice, testing for her response.
She flushed, immediate and bright. Her skin, flawless, overly pale, hid nothing.
He’d expected her to be sophisticated, perhaps a bit jaded. She was the famous daughter of an even more famous father.
And yet she seemed flustered and uncertain, maybe a bit shy. Would she be that easily led? The thought was surprisingly bitter. He had no problem using others’ weaknesses to further his own ends, and it was not as if she would be hurt by his simply attaching himself to her party until they reached the Silver Spur.
But it would have been easier to try and charm her if he thought she’d been a flirt who’d charmed a hundred men herself.
“Have you been standing there long?” she asked hesitantly.
“Maybe an hour.”
<
br /> “An hour.” Oh, heavens. She knew she often got lost in her work; her mother used to say the house would tumble down around her while she was painting, and she would never notice. But she would have expected that somehow, something in her would have noticed his presence. For certainly she was aware of him now. Her skin tingled, her heart raced.
She tried frantically to recall if she’d done anything mortifying in the last hour. Scratched in unladylike places, perhaps. “That must have been terribly uninteresting.” She waved her brush in the direction of her easel. “It is not an action-packed activity.”
“I wasn’t bored,” he said, in that velvet-draped voice that was the only smooth, soft thing on a hard and rough-edged man.
The silence settled again, prickly and obvious. Laura tried to study her work but the colors and shapes only swam before her, a kaleidoscopic spin.
She sneaked a glance at him. He appeared utterly at ease with the silence. So many people were uncomfortable with it, rushing in to fill it with whatever sprang to tongue. She herself was digging for words, searching for a conversation that would sparkle and intrigue. And yet he also answered effortlessly, without any trace of the stultifying shyness that often afflicted those who preferred the silence. Finally, she asked, “Did you get everyone taken care of?”
“Everyone?” He wore his hat low, a deep line of shadow across his face. She wondered if his eyes changed in the sunshine, if the light drew any color at all out of the blackness of his irises. “Ah, our inept bandits. We put them off in Papillon. I assume the authorities knew what to do with them.”
“You certainly did.”
He shrugged it off. “They weren’t all that good at it, if you want to know the truth. Your guards probably could have handled them just fine.” Perhaps she was a flirt after all, Sam decided. The fluttering and blushes and shy, shimmering smiles had their own appeal. It was flattering to a man to think he could cause that reaction.
“My guards?” she asked.
“Weren’t they? They looked like guards.”
“I suppose they are, though I guess I don’t think of them that way.”
“And how do you think of them?” he asked.
“As part of my life,” she admitted. For so many years she’d never ventured out. For months her world had been bounded by her bedroom, then the house, and, finally, for a very long time, the great iron fence that surrounded Sea Haven. But when she’d finally pushed and pleaded enough that her parents allowed her to ease her way out—just a few blocks at first, a brief carriage ride along the road and back, which had them both breathless with worry—either Mr. Hoxie or Mr. Peel or both had always been at her side.
“How did you know they were guards?” she asked.
“Makes sense that you would have guards.” In Sam’s opinion she should have had more. The ones she had were, well, not inept, exactly. More like complacent, as if they were accustomed to having the situation completely controlled. They treated her more like a sister than a job. It spoke well of her that they were so fond of her, but being overfond of your charge damaged your ability to make difficult decisions if they became necessary.
It would be a terrible shame if anything happened to Laura Hamilton. The thought caught him by surprise. It was no business of his, and if a man like Leland Hamilton could not protect his own, who could?
But she was…like sunshine. Open, happy, smiling. And the world held far too little warmth as it was. He liked the idea that it existed, even if he could never have it in his life again.
“Oh.” A hint of disappointment discolored Laura’s previous pleasure at his presence. What had she expected, really? That he had sought her out only because something about her appearance and manner intrigued him? “You know who I am,” she said flatly.
“You don’t exactly make a quiet entrance,” he said. “From the moment they hitched those cars up to the train it was buzzin’. For sure you were rich enough to need a couple of guards, at least.”
“I suppose so.” He’d stood there an hour, patiently waiting. Her father often spoke of spending his life ever-vigilant, constantly aware that the vast majority of the people he met desperately wanted something from him. He’d been very poor, then very rich, and claimed the fact that people were always hoping to separate you from some of your money was the only drawback to being rich. It was, he considered, a small price to pay.
But she’d been shielded from that all her life. He sorted through the few people she’d been allowed to meet, ensuring that anyone he introduced her to was either as rich as her father—and there were few enough of those, even in Newport—or hid their awe extraordinarily well in her presence.
Well, someday she would have to face the world without her father’s shield. She had pleaded and cajoled and finally threatened to be allowed this trip, assuring her parents over and over that it was only about the work and completely necessary to it. But deep inside she’d been truly thrilled at the prospect of meeting the world without the filter of her position and her family’s protection, for though her companions were meant to serve in her father’s stead, no one could ever be as effective in that regard as Leland Hamilton.
She sighed deeply and turned to face him. She could have picked an easier man to practice on. Even her father, famed for his perception, might have had trouble reading this one. “What do you want?” she asked, narrowing her eyes, alert for signs that indicated the truth from the lies. Given enough practice, she should be good at this. As a painter she was accustomed to noting visual details: shadows, the slightest change in form, delicate gradations of color.
Interest flickered in his eyes, an avid heat. Here it comes, she thought, and steeled herself, wondering what the story would be. A dying daughter, an orphanage? Or perhaps it would be an irresistible investment; a mine to rival the Silver Spur, if only he could raise enough capital to start blasting.
He gestured toward her easel. “May I?”
“What?” She was certainly successful in her chosen profession, as such things went. And while she understood her talent’s limitations, she’d never doubted its existence. But her preliminary studies weren’t valuable enough to make it worth his trouble to ask for one.
“Do you mind if I look?”
“Oh.” The sketch, with its imperfect outlines and blocky patches of colors, was extraordinarily rough. She wanted to say no; there was nothing there that would impress an untrained eye. But he waited so patiently, with that slight lift to his mouth, and she was curious to see what else he wanted. “Of course.”
He moved around to stand behind her, studying the page over her shoulder. She leaned back to allow him a better view, and her shoulder brushed…oh, mustn’t think about what she’d just bumped up against! She jerked forward, her cheeks so fiery hot that she was glad he was behind her, for she couldn’t have faced him straight on. “I’m sorry!”
“Don’t be.”
Laura sat bolt upright on her chair, stiff as a statue, afraid that if she softened her posture even a fraction she’d brush against him again, for he hadn’t moved a step. She’d no idea if he meant that the contact was so slight and insignificant that it wasn’t worth thinking about, or if—oh, goodness!—he’d enjoyed it, and so she should not worry about it.
Clearly she’d left this—men in general, and specifically dealing with an attractive one—far too late in her life. Once the railroad project was out of the way perhaps she’d take some time to work on this skill. There was something not quite right about a woman of twenty-five having such a ridiculous and ungovernable reaction to the presence of a man, even such an overpowering specimen as this one.
So she took refuge in the one constant in her life, and turned her focus where it belonged: her work. It had been a steady presence as long as she could remember, company for a lonely young girl who had few playmates and was often too weak to keep up with them in any case, a soaring, unbounded outlet for hopes and dreams that were restricted in so many other ways.
“Wha
t do you think?” she asked.
He was silent behind her, which gave her time to collect her wits, and she dared a look over her shoulder. That must be what they meant by a poker face: hat low, eyes hooded, mouth set, any hint of emotion completely extinguished.
“Well?” she prodded.
It took a moment for Sam to collect himself enough actually to register what was on the paper. His head was swimming, caught up in that potent and completely unexpected jolt of heat from when she’d brushed up against him.
Well, this was a surprise. Not to mention a complication. It should have been too brief and innocent a touch to spark such a powerful reaction.
“Mister…?”
He blinked. Her work, he reminded himself. And his. “Ah…it’s very nice,” he said neutrally, tiptoeing around the topic so as not to hurt her feelings.
Laura burst out laughing. “It’s all right. I know it doesn’t look like much yet. It’s not supposed to.”
“It’s not?”
“No.” She pointed with her brush. “The final product will look nothing like this. I need proportion, impressions, a sense of light and motion. Most of all color, because I can’t ever get that from photographs.”
“And when you’re done, what’ll it look like?”
“Do you know what I paint?”
He seemed to be pondering the question before he spoke. “Why don’t you tell me?”
That wasn’t really an answer but she was enjoying herself too much to worry about it. She felt much easier with him now, on familiar ground. Her work she knew. “I paint panoramas. Ten feet high, sometimes as much as three thousand feet long. Have you seen one?”
“A few.”
She nodded. “I’m doing the Union-Pacific Railroad, fifteen years later. The full length of the railway, attempting to show how much it has changed the land it rolls through, the cities and lives it has touched.” She smiled. “You need a grand subject. I can’t come up with one much grander than this. Almost the entire country.”
A Wanted Man Page 4