Rocky Mountain Marriage

by Debra Lee Brown

  Marry me, Dora.

  John’s proposal echoed in her mind, haunting her.

  He took another step toward Chance, jarring her from her thoughts. “I don’t want her staying here with you another night.”

  Dora moved between them, seeing the banker in a new light. “John, I know you mean well, but this is my home, at least for now. I’m perfectly safe here, from everything and everyone.” She gave Chance a hard look.

  “Dora.” John took her arm.

  Chance went for him.

  “Stop it! Both of you.” She untangled herself from the two of them and moved behind the bar, out of reach. Jim ran out from the kitchen when he heard the ruckus. Chance backed off.

  Dora addressed all of them. “I’m staying here tonight and every other night, until I find a buyer for the saloon and the ranch.” Her mind was racing with new thoughts, terrible thoughts, and the rivalry between John and Chance only served to distract her. “Please, John, I wish you’d go.”

  The banker looked at her, stunned. Unlike Chance, John Gardner was a man who wore his emotions on his sleeve for all to see. The hurt in his eyes was so genuine, she nearly called him back when he grabbed his hat and overcoat off a chair and stormed out.

  “Good riddance,” Chance said.

  She asked Jim to give them a minute, and the bartender slipped back to the kitchen.

  “I want answers.” She came around the bar and faced Chance. “Now.”

  “You’ll get them, but not tonight.”

  “The money’s real, isn’t it? At first I didn’t think it was, then I did, but for the past few days I wasn’t sure, anymore. It’s here somewhere, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. She knew from the look on his face that he believed it one hundred percent.

  “Did my father really swindle his customers, like Lee Hargus said?”

  Chance looked at her, his face tight with emotions she couldn’t begin to fathom. “Yes.”

  “He was a counterfeiter?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “His…partner then. This silent business partner the congressman alluded to—he’s the counterfeiter.”

  Chance said nothing.

  And then it struck her.

  “He didn’t know, did he? Not until…recently.” She fished her diary out of the pocket of her gown and paged through it, rereading some of her notes.

  Chance remained silent.

  “He fed my father counterfeit currency to use in the saloon. That explains the fake bank notes we found. In return he expected real currency. Only my father held some back, held a lot back, if you believe some of the rumors. His partner found out about it, didn’t he? When my father refused to tell him where he’d hidden the real money, his business partner shot him.”

  She glanced at the spot behind the bar. “Right here in the saloon.” She met Chance’s steady gaze. “I’m right, aren’t I? This partner, whoever he is, wants the money, and thinks he can find it.”

  Chance’s eyes turned cool. He toyed with his watch fob, then began to twirl it, his gaze pinned on hers. For the second time that night, she was mesmerized by the pewter trinket. A moment before Dickie Hargus had drawn his gun, she’d made the connection. In the commotion, she’d forgotten—until now.

  All the hairs on her nape prickled.

  It was entirely possible she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life.

  “John may not have been armed,” she said, gathering her courage, “but I am.”

  She raised the hem of her gown, revealing her father’s derringer, which she’d secreted in an ankle holster she’d found in his study earlier that evening. Just in case.

  “You’re full of surprises.”

  She feared he’d approach her, but he didn’t.

  Looking pointedly at his watch fob, she arched a brow at him. “So are you.”

  A few minutes later, locked in her cabin, a chair jammed up against the door and the derringer within easy reach, Dora slid the tintype out of her diary and studied every detail.

  In the image her father was leaning against a battered, wooden table in a room she didn’t recognize. It couldn’t be here at the ranch. She’d been inside every room at one time or another, and in all the outbuildings. Never had she seen that particular table, nor the ornate birdcage sitting atop it.

  He had a relaxed, faraway look on his face, the same expression Chance often lapsed into while engaged in one particular activity.

  Dora stared hard at the smudge in the bottom left corner of the tintype, near her father’s right hand, and knew for certain what she’d only guessed at in the saloon. It wasn’t a smudge at all. The image was blurred due to an object in motion—a watch fob, the very same one that hung from Chance Wellesley’s belt.

  She smiled, noting her father twirled it in precisely the same manner as Chance. Or perhaps it was the other way around. She’d looked at the tintype dozens of times in the past three and a half weeks, and she’d simply never recognized what she was seeing.

  What else had she missed?

  She ripped open the desk drawer and retrieved her spectacles. She hadn’t needed them much lately, now that her nights were occupied not with reading but with running a saloon. Popping them on, she placed the tintype on the desk and drew the lamp up close.

  Despite the fact that her father had very likely been involved with a counterfeiter, he’d also been a clever man. Dora was now one hundred percent convinced that this was no ordinary tintype. It had been taken with a single purpose in mind—to provide her, and no one else, with clues that would lead her to the money he’d kept secret from his business partner and had hidden here at the ranch.

  “Good Lord!”

  She hunched over the desk, peering closely at the background captured in the tintype. The light-colored walls of the room in which her father stood were…swirled. No, not exactly swirled, but… Where had she seen walls like this before? They were almost like—

  “Masonry!”

  She jumped up from the table, upending the chair as she ripped off her spectacles, which clattered to the floor.

  While it took her barely a minute to wrestle herself out of the gown she’d borrowed from Delilah and don her gray dress, she forced herself to wait. She extinguished her lamp and climbed into bed, not prepared to sleep but to think, for two more hours, until she could no longer hear any sounds coming from the house or any of the outbuildings.

  Then, swiveling silently out of bed, Dora slid the tintype back into her diary beside her father’s letter, and jammed it into the pocket of her dress along with a candle and two matchsticks.

  Into her other pocket she slid the derringer. Ankle holsters were all well and good when one was dressed in an evening gown and had no other place to hide a gun. But she was no seasoned sleuth, she was a schoolteacher, and preferred to have the weapon close at hand.

  After parting the draperies to peek outside, assuring herself no one was lying in wait, Dora removed the chair from beneath the knob and slowly opened the door. Nothing happened. So far so good.

  It was a cool night, and the mountain air cleared her head. Glancing up, she noticed Chance’s room was dark. That meant nothing, particularly now that he knew nearly everything she knew. Probably more. She’d have to be very careful.

  There were no lights on in the house when she crept across the kitchen into the hallway. It was so dark, in fact, she nearly tripped on the carpet. The air was heavy with stale cigar smoke and the smell of Irish whiskey wafting from the blackness of the saloon.

  Dora breathed shallowly, her heart in her throat, as she tiptoed down the hallway and, quiet as a church mouse, opened the secret door to the basement. Once she was safely down the stairs, she lit the candle.

  The masonry was the same.

  This was definitely where the tintype had been made. Dora held the candle high and searched the room, weaving carefully in and out between rows of boxes and old furniture, looking for the battered wooden table
and the birdcage. They, too, might be clues.

  After combing every inch of the storeroom, three times over, she gave up. Frustrated, she plopped onto an old, overstuffed chair. A cloud of dust exploded around her, and she let out a violent sneeze, promptly dropping the candle.

  “Fiddlesticks!”

  It took her several minutes to find it, scrambling around in the dark. She congratulated herself on having the foresight to have brought another matchstick. After relighting the wick, she righted an old mirror leaning up against the back wall of the storeroom.

  “I look a fright.” Her dress was covered with dust. She set the candle down on a box and prepared to clean herself up, but that was as far as she got.

  “What on earth…?”

  A shadow on the wall caught her attention. Pushing the chair aside to get closer, she studied it, realizing right away that it wasn’t simply a flaw in the masonry. It was some kind of indentation.

  She retrieved the candle and held it close, as she ran her fingers over the impression. It was carved…no, it was molded. It wasn’t masonry at all, it was metal, painted over to look like masonry.

  She made a fist and knocked on the wall. It resounded with a hollow echo.

  “Good Lord!”

  Knocking softly along the wall, using the echo to guide her, she discovered it wasn’t a wall at all. It was a door! The edges had been painted over, and not long ago. The paint was definitely fresher here than on any other portion of the wall.

  If this was a door, then…

  “It’s a lock!”

  She held the candle up to the molded metal impression. It was definitely a lock, close to the edge of what she was certain now was a door. She set the candle down, and retrieved her diary. Again she cursed. No fountain pen!

  There was a box of coal in the corner. She grabbed a small chunk, turned to a clean page and began to draw.

  The shape of the lock seemed oddly familiar, yet, how could it be? She’d only been in the storeroom once before, and she’d never seen it. She wondered if Jim knew it was here. He’d have to know. How could he not?

  As she put the finishing touches on her sketch of the door and oddly shaped lock, she heard the creak of floorboards in the hall above her. Dora went statue-still. Listening hard, she thought she heard soft footfalls. A man’s? A woman’s? She couldn’t tell.

  Stuffing her diary into her pocket, she grabbed the candle and tiptoed across the earthen floor toward the stairway. Someone was up there, waiting. Her hands were shaking now. Gathering her wits, she blew out the candle and exchanged it for the derringer.

  She waited what seemed a lifetime before she dared move another inch. When all was still above her, she crept silently up the steps, cringing when a couple of them creaked. At the top she waited again, longer this time.

  Then she tripped the cleverly devised latch from the inside, and cracked the secret panel leading back to the hall. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the blackness of the basement, it didn’t seem nearly as dark in the hall as it had before.

  She peeked out. All was clear. Quick as a fox, she stole back the way she’d come, toward the kitchen. At the end of the corridor someone struck a match.

  Dora froze.

  “You’re up late again.”

  “Ch-Chance.”

  He lit the taper in the wall sconce behind him, then blew the match out, letting it drop to the carpet.

  “I…couldn’t sleep.”

  “Me, neither.”

  Her heart pounded in her chest. Her head throbbed with a riot of suspicion, conflicting information and fear. All of it vanished when she looked into his eyes.

  Then he saw the gun in her hand.

  “Dora?” He moved toward her.

  She stepped back, raising the derringer, her whole body shaking. She knew she wouldn’t fire. He knew it, too, and kept coming. She was unsure of him and of John, of everyone who’d tried to help her. She’d gotten herself involved in something she hadn’t been prepared for when she’d stepped off the stage in Last Call.

  Chance stopped an arm’s length from her. He could have grabbed the derringer out of her hand, but he didn’t.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I deserve to be shot.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Make me understand.”

  She wanted to believe that her instincts about him were right, that he’d respected her father and had had nothing to do with his murder. She wanted to believe he wasn’t William Fitzpatrick’s silent partner, a counterfeiter, a killer.

  It could be him, her brain told her. It could be, but—

  Out of habit Chance reached for the watch fob hanging from the chain attached to his belt. She wondered if her father had given it to him, or if Chance had taken it after he’d died—or after he’d killed him.

  Dora studied the pewter fob as Chance fingered it.

  All at once her blood ran cold.

  The shape of the fob was identical to the sketch she’d made in her diary. It was the key to the secret door! Behind that door in the basement was another room, and inside that room was the money.

  Dora knew what she had to do in order to get it.

  If you’re willing to take a Chance…

  Her father’s words held new meaning. At last she’d deciphered the clues.

  Looking into Chance’s dark eyes, she slowly lowered the gun. A moment later he took it from her shaking hand and slipped it into his pocket.

  “Take me upstairs,” she said.

  “To the parlor?”

  She knew there’d be no going back once she started up that spiral staircase.

  “No.” She took his hand. “To your room.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Her purpose was singular, to get the key to the secret door from Chance’s belt. In order to do that, she’d have to remove the belt from his trousers, and in order to do that, she’d have to remove the trousers.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  He lit a lamp whose soft light bathed the room in an amber glow. She studied their surroundings, paying attention to the precise scattering of objects on his bureau, the garish pictures on the walls, his clothes strewn a little too carelessly across a chair. His bedroom was like him, deliberately flashy on the surface, drawing one’s eye away from its true character.

  “I’m perfectly aware of that,” she said, facing him.

  Downstairs the thought had occurred to her that she simply could have waited until he was asleep, then crept inside his room and stolen the watch fob. Yet she hadn’t. She’d come here with him of her own volition, and she knew her eyes revealed to him why. Perhaps her purpose wasn’t so singular, after all.

  “I’m not who you think I am.”

  “No?” She moved toward him, placed her hands on his chest. “I disagree. I know exactly who you are.”

  He looked at her but didn’t move, didn’t risk touching her, for the same reason she went no farther than to rest her palm against his heart and feel the heat of his body through his clothes.

  “You’re a man my father trusted.”

  “You sure about that?”

  She glanced at the watch fob hanging from his belt, and knew it couldn’t be coincidence. “Yes.”

  His hands slid around her waist. “Sometimes trust is misplaced.”

  “Not this time.” Looking into his eyes, she rose up on tiptoes and pressed her lips to his. It was the boldest thing she’d ever done in her life.

  At first he didn’t respond. The house around them was quiet, the wind in the trees outside the only sound. As she wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing herself against him, she heard his sigh.

  “Dora,” he said, then kissed her back.

  Abandoning her good sense, she closed her eyes and let herself be swept away by her senses, expecting more of the same frenzied coupling they’d shared in the darkened hallway two long weeks ago.

  His kiss was soft, achingly ten
der, and in that moment she knew her true purpose for being here had nothing to do with the watch fob at all.

  She was in love with him.

  Not the roguish gambler who tried too hard to convince her he was the kind of man who didn’t deserve her respect. She was in love with the man who’d helped her father when other men hadn’t, the man who’d followed her back and forth to town that first week to make sure she was safe, who’d advised foolish girls to get an education and unfortunate women to muster the courage to change their lives. She was in love with the man who, when her own life was threatened, had stepped in front of Dickie Hargus’s gun.

  “Stop me,” Chance whispered against her lips.

  She looked into his eyes and read a tangle of self-reproach and desire. His hands, twined around her waist, were quivering. “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  Gently she brushed a hank of dark hair from off his face. She considered simply telling him, taking him back downstairs and showing him the secret door inside the basement storeroom, revealing his watch fob as the key.

  “My father left me a gift,” she began.

  “No. What he left you was trouble. If he’d any damned idea what was to come, he’d never have done it.” He kissed her again, softly, holding himself in check, just as she was.

  “I don’t mean the money. I mean you.” She slid out of his embrace and retrieved her diary. Her father’s last letter to her was tucked inside. She unfolded it on the bureau near the lamp.

  “I’ve read it,” he said.

  “I know. I was there, remember?”

  Recognition flashed in his eyes. “You wanted me to read it. Why?”

  She turned purposely into his arms. “To see if you could make more of it than I had. After all, you knew him, I didn’t.”

  “He was a good man. You would have liked him.”

  On impulse she stepped back and looked pointedly at the watch fob hanging from his belt. “This was his.” She drew it toward her, gauged the weight of the cast pewter in her palm.