“What are you grinnin’ about, boy?” Crocker asked.
“Oh.” Sam wiped his mouth with his napkin, a luxurious rectangle of thick linen, and adjusted it in his lap until it lay smoothly. “My apologies. I realize it’s most impolite not to share my amusement. It was merely a private reminiscence, however, and unfit for public consumption, I’m afraid.”
Laura had both her eyebrows lifted almost to her hairline. She’d be haranguing him later, relentless until she pried an answer from him. And wouldn’t it just serve her right if he told her the truth?
But then, he wouldn’t be seeing her later. He planned to be out most of the night, looking for Griff or something that belonged to him. And it was not as if Sam could sleep in that stuffy room they’d given him anyway, with its deep, curtain-draped bed that would surely cut off his air supply.
They’d given him a room in a separate wing, the entire length of this monstrous house between him and Laura. And that bothered him. He’d spent more than a month with little more than a few yards between them at all times. Even in Kearney, before he’d joined her party, she’d always been in reach; he’d been closer to her most of the time than she, or her guards, had ever suspected, because he’d no intention of allowing her to slip out of town before he had an opportunity to attach himself to her party.
It was unsettling to have her that far away, even though Haw Crocker had every reason in the world to keep Laura safe. He’d be facing the wrath of Leland Hamilton if he didn’t, and even Haw Crocker’s considerable power faded to insignificance when compared with the Baron of Bankers. And yet…Sam was going to worry every single moment they were on Silver Spur land. Maybe every moment after that until he saw her safely back inside the gates of Sea Haven.
And maybe, he thought, his stomach sinking in dread, he might worry about her until the day he died.
“How’s your work going?” Crocker waved over one of the serving boys, who quickly refilled his wineglass. He’d been doing that a lot but as of yet it’d had no noticeable effect on Crocker. Still, it was one sliver of information Sam hadn’t had before: Crocker liked to drink, and he held his liquor well.
“Quite well, thank you,” Laura answered.
“Care to share?”
“Oh, I don’t think—”
“Please?”
Laura puckered up her mouth in thought, then her face lit. “All right.”
She dashed out of the room in a swish of pale green silk. Moments later she returned clutching her sketchbook, her smile fixed and vacant.
The woman was up to something. She’d acquiesced too quickly, was trying too hard to appear shallow and feather-headed, as if her work was merely an entertaining hobby rather than something she put her heart and sweat into.
She tugged her chair nearer to sit at Crocker’s elbow, pushing aside plates to clear a good space on the table. “Here you go,” she said eagerly.
She leaned close to Crocker as he sifted through the sketches, spilling a torrent of commentary about light and shadows and proportion that had Crocker’s eyes glazing over.
“And this,” she chirped, “I started just yesterday. At the other side of your ranch, I believe, and this…oh. That’s just some doodling, you don’t want to see—”
“No.” Crocker’s beefy hand came down flat on top of the page. “I want to see it all. What’s this?”
“Well.” She flicked a delighted glance at Sam. Oh, but he was going to have to keep a close eye on her. She taken to this like she’d been born to the job. But she’d never had any experience with the darker side and the things that could happen when you took too many chances and pushed it too far. And so it would be up to him to protect her.
“It’s the strangest thing,” she said lightly. “I was just there sketching, minding my own business, and all of a sudden this odd man just started running toward us, shouting something we couldn’t understand.” She shrugged as if it were something vaguely interesting but ultimately unimportant. “And then some men on horseback ran him down as if he were a wild calf! Can you imagine? I meant to ask you about it, actually, but I forgot.”
The broad charm vanished from Crocker’s face, his expression unnaturally blank as he studied the sketch. He lifted it in his thick fingers, tilting it from side to side as if it might help jog his memory. Then he shook his head. “Nope. But I’ve got hundreds of employees, and dozens more come and go on any given day. I wouldn’t recognize most of ’em.”
He tossed the sketchbook in front of Carl, where it fell with enough force to raise a crumpled napkin on a poof of air. Ben peered at it out of the corner of his eye, his bland face paling.
“Carl? How about you?”
Crocker’s and Fitch’s gazes met, a warning flashing between them.
Carl cleared his throat. “Ah—” He barely glanced at the page. “Yeah, that’s Chan. Hired him to work in our mines about a year ago.” He shrugged. “Felt sorry for the guy. Most places won’t take on a Chinaman these days. It was a mistake, though. He just went crazy one day. Attacked his supervisor, screaming at nothing. Stopped speakin’ English, so we couldn’t make a word out.”
“Oh, the poor thing,” Laura said. “What did you do then?”
“Wasn’t much we could do. Called in the doc, but he said there wasn’t anything he could do to help. So we rigged up a room where he couldn’t hurt himself or anybody else and kept him there.”
“You didn’t institutionalize him?”
“We’re short on sanitariums out here in the Utah Territory, miss. And since we didn’t know anythin’ about him or his family, if he even had one, it seemed like it would be better to keep him in familiar surroundings. Maybe it’d help him come out of it.”
“Oh, that’s so kind of you,” she said, beaming in admiration.
“We try to take care of our own here on the Silver Spur,” Crocker said. They were lying. Sam was certain of it. But which part, exactly, they were lying about was a lot harder to detect.
The whole thing might have nothing whatsoever to do with Griff. But there was definitely something a bit…off about the Silver Spur.
“And yesterday?” she prodded.
“Yes, Carl,” Crocker said evenly, “what about yesterday?”
“He got out.” His voice rose on the last word, as if he were asking a question instead of stating a fact. “We didn’t figure he’d last the night bumbling around outside. So we had to bring him in however we could before he hurt somebody. Or himself.”
“Why wasn’t I informed?” Crocker asked.
“Didn’t see any reason to bother you about it,” Carl said. Sweat beaded on his forehead. “He weren’t gone but a couple of hours before we tracked him down. If we came to you with every detail, Haw, you’d be doing nothin’ but hearing reports from sunup to sundown.”
“True enough.” Crocker nodded in agreement “All the same, Carl, if he gets out again, you let me know. I don’t like the thought of the poor demented fella running around free. Maybe we’ll have to hire a nurse, somethin’ like that, to keep an eye on ’em.”
“Sure thing, Haw.”
“Oh, Mr. Crocker!” Laura’s eyes were misty, so richly admiring of Crocker’s compassion that even Sam almost believed her. “That unfortunate lunatic is so lucky to have you.”
Laura retired early to her room. Haw Crocker assured her that he understood her withdrawal; sending her off with a maid and profuse apologies that he hadn’t realized the excitement of arrival and the strain of dinner was all too taxing for such a delicate creature on her first day.
Her father, she decided, must have described her in such a way that Haw thought she was teetering on the edge of death.
Laura knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep, not for hours. But she’d retreated to her room early, pleading the strain of the day, because portraying a brainless twit was far more difficult than she’d expected.
Oh, it was certainly entertaining at first. Taking a bit of her mother’s mannerisms, some of Mrs. Boss
idy’s, a good chunk of that silly maid at Sea Haven who twittered every time a man wandered by. She could see how playing a role, putting something over on everyone, could become addictive. Having to watch every move you made, every expression on your face, forced one to live in every single second, a rushing alertness that reminded you you were alive.
But the constant vigilance was tiring, an undercurrent of nerves thrumming painfully.
It certainly was a lovely room. Peeled logs, glowing soft gold in the lanternlight, formed the outside wall, centered with a big, shuttered window. The other walls were thickly plastered in cream and hung with gold-and-burgundy tapestries. Heavy, dark wood fashioned the furniture, the room dominated by a large, wine-velvet-draped bed with posts the size of tree trunks—which probably had been tree trunks.
The silently efficient maid had neatly stored away her things in a blink. Her dresses were freshly pressed, the skirts peeking out of an open armoire. Her canvases and cases had been stacked in the corner.
She wandered over to the window and pushed the glass wide. The sky was broad, deepening to indigo. A few brave stars winked on, along with a thin slice of bright silver moon.
A lovely evening, the kind of evening that was meant to be shared.
And suddenly she missed her parents terribly.
She’d never really been alone in her life. She’d had them, and Mrs. Bossidy, and guards and maids and nurses. She’d had so much company that sometimes she’d thought she was going to go mad with it, as if even her most secret thoughts did not belong just to her.
And she’d had him. Sam. Though he’d been in her life for a narrow sliver of time, it was an important few weeks, weeks when she’d learned a great deal about herself and what she truly wanted.
She wondered how long, when this was all over, it would take for her to stop looking up and expecting to see him there.
Her elbows on the wide sill of the window, she leaned out. There were lights in the bunkhouses, the squeaky wail of someone practicing a fiddle. Another light glowed, very faintly, in the window of a tiny cottage across the yard.
She breathed in. It smelled so different. All those years, she’d often dreamed of how other places would look. But she hadn’t considered the smell. She’d been so accustomed to the scents of Newport, the brine of the sea, fresh-clipped grass, the lemon wax the maids used on the furniture, that she never really noticed them anymore.
Here she detected the smoky tang of sage. Smoke itself, from a fire somewhere. Horses.
She closed her eyes. Even if the rest of her senses were stripped from her, she would still know she was in another place because the air felt unique against her face. Warmer, drier.
When she opened her eyes he was standing right there outside her window, a mere foot away.
She smiled.
“You don’t look surprised to see me,” he said quietly.
She shook her head. Wasn’t he always there, somewhere, watching over her? Or perhaps her senses detected his presence without conscious awareness: his scent, his warmth, a disturbance in the air stirred up by his potent energy.
“For a moment during dinner,” she said, “I thought that you were going to call a halt to the whole thing and drag me away.”
“I was tempted.” His shirt was very white against the darkness of his skin. A fresh growth of beard shadowed his jaw. Unthinkingly, she touched his jaw, the stubble prickling her fingers, alerting her nerves.
“The most difficult part of your charade is going to be keeping a smooth face.”
Time hung, frozen and potent as the moon.
And then he brushed her fingers away and continued as if she’d never touched him. “Next time you decide to pull something like you did at dinner, it’d be a lot kinder to my heart if you talked it over with me first.”
“It was a sudden inspiration.”
“Get those often?”
“More and more all the time.” Even though they were alone, he still carried himself with Artemus’s posture, his shoulders rounded and back hunched, making him appear both softer and shorter than she knew him to be. “I’m only sorry that I didn’t seem to do much good. I thought maybe I’d bumble some information out of them if they considered me no threat.”
“That’s often the way it goes. You pull at threads all over the place, and none of them seem to lead to anything, then, when you’re just about ready to give up, one tiny piece of information shows up that’s exactly what you need.” He smiled at her; he did that now so easily that she’d almost forgotten how difficult it had been to pull that from him once. “Of course, my usual approach is less patient and a lot more effective.”
“I don’t want to know about it.”
His grin grew wicked. A rogue’s smile, a pirate’s smile. “Back to your illusions about what a fine, upstanding gentleman I am, are we?”
“No,” she said. “But Artemus, now…that’s my sort of man.”
“Artemus is a ninny.”
“Better a ninny than a chest-thumping, brainless gorilla,” she said cheerfully, and he pretended to scowl.
Oh, that life could be this simple, enjoying a warm evening together, friendly banter and harmless flirtation. She had worried that he’d be angry about her unplanned investigating. Oh, he’d given her the obligatory warning, but his rebuke had been mild. Everyone else would have bundled her off for safekeeping and never let her out again. He alone did not treat her like an invalid. Perhaps because he’d never seen her as one, and so did not have that image in his brain of her weak and fragile prevailing over all others.
“I do appreciate what you tried to do tonight,” he said. “This is not your fight, and yet you have thrown yourself into it. I don’t know why you would put yourself out so far.”
She opened her mouth to toss off something light. It was an adventure, it was the right thing to do, it was opportunity to investigate a new career—would the Pinkertons hire her, did he think? And though they were all some small portion of the truth, they were the least part of it.
“You know why,” she said softly.
He went still, his gaze fixed on her. And then he transformed from Artemus into Sam. He straightened, his eyelids lifted from their somnolent state, his chest expanded. For a moment she thought that he might accept what she’d just offered, and they would go on from there, to someplace new and wild and wonderful. Her breath caught and held.
And then he shrugged, shifting his gaze across the broad, empty stretch of yard between the main house and the bulk of the outbuildings. “Anyway,” he said, “we did learn something. They don’t want us wandering around alone, and they were uncomfortable talking about the man you sketched.”
So he would ignore her careful overture, and their relationship would remain light and so much less than it could be. Well, it was probably for the best. If they had begun down that path, where did she really think it would end? No place good that she could envision.
“It could be as simple as what they said,” she pointed out reluctantly.
“Could be. But it’s not.”
“So what’s next?”
“I’ll nose around tonight. See if there’s anyone who likes to talk. And we let some underling or another give us a tour tomorrow.”
“Maybe we’ll even get lost,” she suggested.
“Maybe we will.”
Over his shoulder Laura saw the door to the small cottage open, a flare of light.
“Does someone live there, do you suppose? It seems too small.”
“Where?” He swiveled. “They pointed out every other damn building in the place to me this afternoon. Nobody said a word about it.”
“Well, there’s certainly somebody there now.”
The light in the open doorway silhouetted a small woman, her hair loose down her back. A man, hat in hand, stepped up on the porch.
“You think that’s Collis?” he asked.
“Yes. His left shoulder is always a fraction lower than his right.” She stopped. “Well.
Would you look at that.” The figures twined about each other, and his head lowered.
“Guess Collis’s got a friend.”
She leaned farther out to get a better view. “You think they’re going to do it right out there on the porch?” she asked matter-of-factly.
He lifted an eyebrow. “I suppose a proper guard would be covering your virginal eyes right about now.”
“They’re not virginal.”
Forgetting the show on the porch, Sam snapped around to gape at her. She grinned at his shock.
“I studied art remember? My eyes aren’t virginal.”
“Mmm-hmm.” His eyes gleamed with speculation.
She couldn’t hold his gaze. The rest of me is too darn virginal, or I wouldn’t have had to look away.
“They’re going in,” she said.
“So they are,” he said, as the door swung shut. “I think I’ll go see what’s going on.”
“Sam! You know what’s going on.”
“Never know when a thread’ll start unraveling. Until then you gotta keep tugging.”
“Uh-huh.” Curiosity sparked. “Maybe I’ll come with you.”
“Oh, no you won’t.”
Laura considered trying to brazen it out. The idea of being left behind to rest while Sam investigated caused an automatic kick of protest; it seemed like she’d been ordered to rest while others had fun for most of her life. But then she envisioned what he might see when he reached the cottage and knew she didn’t dare.
“Take care,” she called.
“Don’t I always?”
“No. No, you don’t.”
He grinned and faded into the night.
Chapter 15
Lucy Bossidy had had some difficult days in her thirty-six years. Not that anyone knew she was thirty-six, though unlike most women, she hadn’t been trying to pass as younger. Instead everyone thought her older. And a widow.
The worst of those moments had been many years ago, before she’d come to Sea Haven. It had been a dark time, one she remembered mostly in a blur of incessant terror and worry, and then a long plummet into grief.
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