by Lisa Plumley
Her heart squeezed at the determination in his expression. Wanting to go to him, but knowing she should not, Julia tried a jest, instead. “It shan’t be that difficult,” she offered. “I’ve yet to have a student turn toes up on me.”
Graham’s face cleared, but for the gratitude—if she wasn’t mistaken—she glimpsed in his rough-hewn features. “You’ve tutored others before me, then?” he asked gruffly, setting the box down with the others.
“Not precisely,” she admitted. A moment lapsed before Julia spoke again, a moment during which she found herself quite fascinated by the play of muscles in Mr. Corley’s back and shoulders as he continued stacking crates in an orderly way. Giving herself a mental shake, she continued:
“But I have inadvertently found myself in such a position before, yes. When I returned from Vassar, with my three published etiquette guides tucked in my trunks and what I suppose was a newly acquired gleam of Eastern sophistication—”
“I’m sure you positively sparkled.” The scoundrel paused in his work and winked at her.
“Suddenly, the ladies in town seemed willing, eager, even, to follow my lead. In matters of etiquette, social interaction, taste and even fashion.”
“Fashion?” He cast a doubtful eye over her dress and hat, then grinned. The rascal.
Raising her chin, Julia finished. “Despite what you may think, I seem to have started all manner of fads since my return. So you see, I’ve become quite the instructress, without having even tried. I’m sure that, with some determined efforts from you, we’ll have you reading the likes of Shakespeare and Wordsworth in no time at all.”
She smiled over the notion of a rough-and-tumble man like Graham Corley sitting down with a volume of romantic poetry. He’d more likely fancy one of Beadle’s dime adventure novels, or an issue of Punch. But of course, she couldn’t begin with such lowbrow material, Julia reminded herself. As an etiquette instructress, she owed it to everyone around her to be a model of perfect behavior.
Miss Julia’s Behavior Book, volume one: To be a well-trained woman is to be courteous, cheerful, polite, pious, moral and benevolent, and to avoid gossip, slander, tale-telling, fault-finding, grumbling and public display of quarrels. Decorum is all.
Even while deprived of one’s gloves? Julia wondered mischievously, and her smile took on a new width. The feelings Mr. Corley aroused in her were scandalous, indeed.
The man himself paused at that instant, and caught her bemused expression. Dropping the final crate, Graham narrowed his eyes and put his hands on his lean, twill-covered hips.
“What’s so funny?” he demanded.
Julia started, embarrassed at having been caught. “Nothing! I was merely, er, contemplating our first lesson.”
His expression darkened. “I warn you,” he said. “I’m not above exposing your secret if you expose mine. I’d lay odds you won’t want the town to know you hired me to…what was it? Be wild with love for you.”
Recognizing her own intemperate words, she looked away. No, indeed she would not want the town knowing she’d hired a man. Especially for such outwardly bawdy purposes. Misunderstandings were bound to result.
Amidst her silence, Graham Corley stalked closer, all hard man and unknowable, roughly clad threat.
“Even a man who loves you completely—” his fierce, half-growled delivery turned the words she’d uttered earlier from an innocent requirement to a sensual promise “—can be pushed too far. Understand that, Miss Bennett?”
She gulped as he stopped before her. “Yes! Yes, I understand you perfectly. I won’t reveal your tutoring without your approval, I promise.” She drew in a breath. “Although my father will have to know, of course. It will provide us a reason to appear together.”
Graham nodded, a barely perceptible tilt of his head.
“We—we have a deal, then?” she croaked out.
How she’d found the courage to validate their bargain, Julia would never know. But she did—and found herself steered, inelegantly, toward the seating area Mr. Corley had fashioned from several stacked crates. He swiped one clean with the sleeve of his duster coat, then seated her on it.
“A deal?” he repeated, raising his eyebrow. “Yes, we have a deal…and now we’re going to confirm it.”
“Confirm it?” Julia tightened her fingers on the crate beneath her. It felt strange and rough to her ungloved palms—as strange and rough as the bounty hunter suddenly seemed, looming over her with an unreadable expression on his face. “With a handshake, you mean?”
Gamely, she extended one hand. The scoundrel scoffed.
“With a promise?” she guessed, her heart beginning to pound with the anticipation of having her way at last. “I could write a—”
He shook his head, and his smile turned wolfish. “I didn’t move these crates so you could sit and scribe. I moved them so you wouldn’t swoon from the pleasure of what came next.”
“Whatever do you mean?” Julia asked, wrinkling her brow. Men really did seem to complicate things unnecessarily. “It’s simple, really. In order to be binding, our agreement truly ought to be sealed—”
“With a kiss,” Graham finished, and he’d scarce got the words from his mouth before he came forward, bent on one knee, and moved to claim his prize.
Chapter Five
“Damnation, Corley! What the hell happened to your face?”
At the question, Graham squinted through the gloom of the livery stable he’d just entered. Reflexively, he put one hand to his left eye, and felt the lump that had grown up below the socket. “Got on the bad side of an ornery female,” he muttered.
The men murmured in commiseration, making way for him in their group around the unlit potbellied stove. As in many other towns scattered throughout the Territory, the livery stable in Avalanche was both business and sanctuary for the local males. Within its two-story, boxlike space and unpainted lumber walls, everyone was equal—and equally deserving of sympathy.
“A filly you ain’t had long can be like that,” said the night man, putting away the last of the harnesses he’d been cleaning. “Pure temper. Once she gets used to you, she’ll settle down.”
“That’s right,” chorused the other men. “Hell, yes.”
Graham had his doubts about that.
Nevertheless, he made a noncommittal sound and withdrew a cheroot from his duster pocket. Lighting it, he settled on the edge of the assemblage to listen, soaking up the tone and tempo of town news the way he’d first learned to do as a green bounty-chaser.
He steadfastly did not point out that the “filly” who’d walloped him had two legs, not four. Nor that she wore an outrageous flower-bedecked hat instead of a bridle. He left the men surrounding him to their assumptions. They did not need to know it was feisty Miss Julia Bennett who’d planted a sockdolager to remember on Graham Corley’s face…no matter that he had the blackening eye to prove it.
Who’d have thought he’d lose his knack for sweet talk, and so rapidly, too? One minute, Julia had been all doe eyes, fluttering eyelashes and quivering hopefulness beside him. The next, she’d waylaid his intentions to seal their bargain with a kiss—by planting her hand on his chest, grabbing the nearest object at hand, and beaning him with it.
Unfortunately, that object had turned out to be a half-pound bar of pressed castile soap, discarded in a box of herbal nostrums. Graham supposed he ought to count himself lucky that Julia hadn’t snatched up the heavy earthenware bottle of cod liver oil or package of antipain plaster stowed along with the soap…but he didn’t. Not when the soap had encouraged a shocked Julia to blurt, “Perhaps that will clean up those vulgar notions of yours!”
At the time, he’d been too surprised to do more than gape as she’d exited the cast-off building behind Bennett’s Emporium with her head held high and her skirts in a flurry. But now, with his shiner ripening like a sour plum several hours later, Graham was starting to feel a bit testy.
He’d stolen countless kisses in his thirty-odd yea
rs of prime bachelorhood. He intended to go on stealing many more. If prissy Miss Julia didn’t want to count herself on the receiving end of one of them, that was just too bad for her, wasn’t it? It wasn’t as though he’d ever swooned in on a woman who didn’t want to be kissed, after all.
No, sir.
And it wasn’t as though she hadn’t been wearing all the right signs, either, Graham reminded himself. For a single instant, as he’d leaned forward to kiss her…Julia had closed her eyes and actually swayed toward him. Near enough that he’d felt the whisper of her breath across his lips. He figured he might be able to live on the memory of that moment alone for quite a while.
’Course, a heartbeat later she’d poleaxed him with a cake of P. Q. Brown’s Original Castile. But for an instant, she’d almost yielded. And that was all he needed to know. For now.
With talk still humming around him, underlaid by the sounds of animals shifting in their stalls and the clank of the blacksmith’s shop nearby, Graham puffed his cheroot and breathed deeply. The comforting, earthy smells of horses, feed, manure, leather and hay were a balm to his wanderer’s soul.
No matter how far afield he went, in every town the livery stable remained the same. Its constancy could be relied upon, from the walls covered with tin signs advertising all the same equine patent remedies, to the blackboard keeping track of which horses and carriages had been rented. Here in Avalanche, as in most every other town, a hand-lettered sign had been hung over the door:
WHIP LIGHT, DRIVE SLOW. PAY CASH BEFORE YOU GO.
Looking at it now, Graham grinned and carefully stubbed out his cheroot, pocketing the remainder for safekeeping against fire. He’d do well to go slowly with Miss Julia, too…else he might never discover what drove him to accept her wild proposition in the first place. If there was one thing Graham Corley couldn’t tolerate, it was not knowing the whys behind things.
’Twas probably the same poor impulse that had driven him to ask to be taught to read. He still couldn’t believe he’d done it. Yet at the prospect of shouldering into that long-forbidden world, a part of him felt as excited as a boy. Surely the promise he’d made in exchange wouldn’t be that difficult to keep…would it? How thorny could it be to woo a lady, pretend to be her fiancé, and fool a town into thinking the two of them head over feet?
Well…when one of those two was uppity etiquette book authoress Julia Bennett, it might be pretty difficult, Graham reflected. Frowning over his remembrance of the Castile soap incident—and its implications on his current predicament—he cleared his throat and addressed the men around him.
“On the subject of ladies,” he said, speaking on the heels of a joke about a farmer’s daughter and a medicine show drummer, “where are the marriageable females in this town? I’ve got my mind set on finding the future Mrs. Corley while I’m here.”
Ten pairs of masculine eyes gaped at him in astonishment.
“I’m terribly sorry, Miss Libbie,” Julia said to her fourth soda fountain customer that afternoon. “You know I’m not permitted to make a gooseberry soda for Herbert, no matter how much he wants one. I’m afraid you’ll have to take him outside.”
Libbie, nine years old and Julia’s neighbor since her birth into the packed O’Halloran clan two doors down from the Bennett household, stared disconsolately from the opposite side of the counter. In her arms she clutched a white Bantam rooster with a red comb and an eager expression.
“But I earned the money especially for this treat, helping Miss Verna dust the shelves in her mercantile,” Libbie protested. “Herbert is very fond of gooseberry sodas.”
“And you’re very fond of Herbert.”
The girl nodded. Her red-gold curls bounced against her shoulders, partially obscuring the bird tucked so closely against her calico and lace gown. “He’s my best friend.”
She ducked her chin and whispered something to the rooster, then smoothed her cheek gently against his head. Herbert shook himself, then gave Julia a beady-eyed look.
Julia could recognize a fowl threat when she saw one.
But in this instance, she’d do better not to relent. No matter how the sight of Libbie hugging her “best friend” tugged at memories of Julia’s own lonely past. Like Libbie, Julia had wanted someone of her very own to love, someone who would love and accept her in return. She simply hadn’t had the necessary audacity to claim that affection in whatever form it came…even poultry.
She’d like to think she’d grown out of such soft-hearted yearnings. Truth was, she hadn’t. It took nothing more than a glimpse of a courting couple sharing a ginger soda, their bodies close together at one of the Emporium’s intimate round wrought-iron tables, to remind her of that. Even something so commonplace as a pair of lady friends out shopping together, or a mother and daughter whispering over the choice of one of her father’s patented cold remedies, had the power to touch that raw place in her soul. It never eased. Julia had begun to fear it never would.
Plainly put, she was different. From an early age, she’d been able to cipher sums that stumped grown men. She’d easily memorized great quantities of literature and history. She’d understood the way things worked in an intuitive fashion that set her apart from all the other children in Avalanche’s one-room schoolhouse, and even from her schoolteachers. Having those abilities didn’t make Julia need acceptance and caring any less…it only made finding them even more difficult.
At least it had, until she’d discovered Vassar College, and the safe anonymity of the city two days’ ride away. There, no one had looked askance when she’d spent a day reading books. No one had ridiculed her interest in poetry, or her talent for quoting great philosophers. She’d been free. A bit lonely…but free. And honestly, she’d become accustomed to the loneliness. A person did, after a while. Which brought her right back to Miss Libbie and Herbert.
Julia smiled at the girl. Really, she’d be doing Libbie a favor if she encouraged her to stop buying treats for her pet and put Herbert back in his chicken coop. Doubtless, the other children made fun of Libbie for having such an unusual companion. And Julia knew only too well the pain of being laughed at. Teased. Excluded.
A small “harrumph” from her father, at his post at his druggist’s counter, brought Julia back to the present. She glanced at him, and saw the quick shake of his graying head that told her she was meant to make Libbie and Herbert leave the Emporium.
“Listen closely, Miss Libbie,” Julia said, leaning farther over the soda fountain counter to speak with the child. “I have a plan.”
At the whispered confidence she shared, Libbie looked up, wide-eyed. “Do you really mean it?” she asked. “About Herbert?”
Julia nodded. Then she snatched up a fountain glass, expertly worked the ornate levers on the fountain’s dispensing nozzles, and emerged from behind the counter shortly thereafter with two fizzy gooseberry sodas balanced on a tray.
A few minutes’ consultation with her father produced the efficient—if somewhat skeptical—moving of a table and two chairs to the boardwalk out front. With Libbie and Herbert preceding her—and Isabel taking charge of the fountain for the next little while—Julia carried the drinks outside.
“There!” she pronounced, setting down the tray. “A most elegant dining experience. Al fresco, as I’ve heard it’s done in Paris, France.”
Libbie jumped up and down and giggled, causing Herbert to ruffle a few feathers. Asa Bennett gave another “harrumph” and retreated to his druggist’s counter again. And Julia sat down, crooked her pinkie, and initiated the soda-drinking. Libbie joined her quickly, spooning foamy gooseberry-syrup-infused carbonated water from her glass and patiently feeding the treat to the rooster perched on her lap.
Passersby gave sidelong glances to the doubtlessly strange sight of a girl, a rooster and an apron-clad etiquette instructress sharing gooseberry sodas in the middle of the afternoon. But Julia didn’t care. If everything went as planned, because of this Libbie would soon have more friends—of the non-feathe
red variety—than she ever had before. And that would make it all worthwhile.
After walking from the livery stable down the length of Main Street, locating the perpendicularly situated Fir Tree Lane, and muttering his way past seven separate houses, Graham stood at the gate to the eighth and squinted speculatively. The setting sun threw the house into partial shadow, and put a chill in the air that made him grateful for his newly won duster coat. Despite the poor lighting, Graham decided, this had to be the residence he sought.
For one thing, the place wore gingerbread trim like Julia Bennett wore lace—to excess and without apology. For another, its two stories, fancy peaked rooflines, and primly painted three-quarters porch reminded Graham strongly of the fancy-frilly architecture of the dress she’d been wearing earlier. And for a third, its prominent three-bay glass window fairly screamed wealth—the same way Miss Julia’s manner did, when she looked down her nose at his trail-ragged duds. Yep, this was the place all right.
Graham opened the gate and started up the brick walk. The fragrance of flowers reached him as he passed orderly beds; the solid clunk of well-tended painted lumber met his boot heels as he ascended the steps. Growing increasingly uneasy, he ducked beneath the decorative spindled archway that led to the entry, then stopped on the mat and regarded the imposing front door.
It had been years since he’d entered a respectable home on a social call like this one, Graham recalled suddenly. Years since he’d had occasion to sit in a parlor instead of a saloon, making polite conversation instead of finagling a bounty-hunting deal.
The last time he’d faced a proper front door like this one, he’d been eight years old and hopeful as a puppy with a bone too big…and he’d wound up leaving soon after, with his tail between his legs, too. In the end, it had always turned out that way for him. He’d learned to quit hoping, had gotten good at moving on. Now he didn’t quite remember what it was like to stay put.