by Jo Goodman
Scarlet Lies (Author's Cut Edition)
Historical Romance
Jo Goodman
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Copyright 1988; 2018 by Jo Goodman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Reader Invitation
Sweet Fire
Purchase Sweet Fire
Also by Jo Goodman
About the Author
For my very special family of friends at the Milton Hilton.
Chapter 1
On the Mississippi, 1868
Brook Hancock spared the smallest of glances for the stranger. She was immediately and curtly reprimanded.
"Don't look at him," Phillip Sumner said. His lips barely moved around tightly clenched teeth. His voice had a certain gravel roughness. "You'll spoil everything."
"He's the one, then?" she asked. Brook casually turned away from her companion, giving her back to the stranger. She felt it was an unnecessary gesture because in the short time the man had been aboard he had taken no notice of her. Now he was deep in conversation with the captain of the Mary Francis, though Brook had only seen him nod his head politely in response to the captain's more animated speech.
"Yes," Phillip said impatiently. He also turned away from the stranger, leaning forward a little at the rail of the great paddle wheel as Brook was doing. "He's the one. He wants to make a wager. I can feel it in my bones, Brook. He's ripe for it."
"A boat race?"
Phillip smiled thinly, patting the back of Brooklyn's hand as it rested tightly on the polished brass rail. "You sound almost hopeful. Can it be you've changed your mind?" He glanced sideways at her tense profile. The clear classic planes of her face fascinated him; the coolness of her expression taunted him. He was struck anew by this evidence of composure in a woman of only seventeen years. She gave very little of her inner thoughts away. If not for the lift of her chin or her white-knuckled grip on the rail, Phillip would have thought she was indifferent. He knew better. He knew her better. "You want to go home, don't you?"
Brooklyn's full mouth lightened briefly. "Of course I do." To return to San Francisco was what she wanted more than anything, and damn him, Phillip knew that, too. "Naturally I would prefer that you make a wager on a boat race."
"There is no guarantee there will be a race. Certainly there is no guarantee that I will win the wager. A sure thing m'dear. That's what we require if we're going to earn our passage home. I'm feeling lucky today."
Brook knew there was little luck involved. Phillip didn't really believe in it. He imagined himself an engineer of fate and, as her self-appointed protector, he managed Brook's fate as well. He expected her to assist him in securing their passage home. Brook stared at the Mississippi shoreline. A family of river otters watched the progress of the sternwheeler with casual interest. She felt a wave of homesickness as she was reminded of the sea lions that sunned lazily below Cliff House on the ocean beach.
Brook would have preferred to remain in San Francisco while Phillip conducted his business in New Orleans, but it had never really been a choice. To stay at the Silver Rose without Phillip's guardianship would not have been safe, and no one, least of all Phillip, had had to remind her of the fact.
Having more than a nodding acquaintance with Phillip's failures, Brook had been aware that this latest endeavor might go badly. Still, she had not expected that they would find themselves stranded in New Orleans without the funds to return home. Phillip had been so certain he would strike the mother lode this time that Brook had allowed herself to be swept up by his excitement. She had never asked him the precise nature of this venture. Not only did she believe it was not her place to question his business, she believed he would not tell her the truth. Phillip Sumner was a practiced equivocator, preferring the middle ground to black and white realities.
Even now she did not know precisely what had gone wrong in the city. While she had waited in the small hotel room Phillip had reserved, he had flitted about the town on business that was made all the more mysterious by Phillip's own reticence to discuss it. The mother lode had never materialized, and now they were forced to secure passage home by fair means or foul. Brook had never doubted which method Phillip would use. It was like the early days of the rush, he said, when he was living hand to mouth, eeking a living from the land, and the land yielded gold. The initial disappointment over his failure had vanished, and now he was savoring the idea of earning their passage through his wits.
Brook eased her hand from beneath Phillip's, and so her intent to be free of him would not be obvious, she pushed back a tendril of hair that flickered at her cheek. "Are you certain he is the man you want to cross? He doesn't look the sort who will be easily taken in. Not like that poor sod you cheated a week ago."
"That poor sod we cheated," Phillip corrected, tapping his fingers on the rail with a touch of impatience. "And, yes, he's precisely the man I want to cross. You can see for yourself that he's a gambler."
"I am not so quick in my judgments as you," she reminded him.
"Really?" he asked archly. "You've as much as said you think he's dangerous."
"Point taken."
"Anyway, what choice do we have? By my reckoning we don't have enough money for even one of us to take the next ship home."
Brook withheld comment. It was Phillip's dream that had come to nothing because of his failure. Reminding him that their present predicament was entirely his doing would have been like rubbing salt on a wound. She couldn't do it. "Will you engage him in a game this evening?"
Phillip nodded. "The sooner the better, don't you think?"
"I suppose."
"Such enthusiasm. Where's your spirit, Brook? This will be like old times."
Brook smiled faintly at Phillip's attempt to tease her into good humor. "I think I've lost my taste for it. What
if he isn't rich, Phillip? What then?"
Phillip nudged her with his elbow. "Stop worrying. He's filthy with it. Look at the way he's dressed. No, don't look now."
"I wasn't going to look," she said, turning to face Phillip. "I cannot believe what I'm hearing from you. Look at the way we're dressed! If clothes are the telling point one would think we are rich as Croesus."
That startled Phillip for a moment. He glanced at the tailored sleeve of his jacket, the crisp white edge of his cuff. His dark eyes glimmered with amusement as they traveled over Brook's hunter green taffeta gown. It had come directly from a Paris salon. "Hmm. There's something to what you say. Perhaps I'll have a peek in the gambler's room. I've been thinking about doing it ever since he boarded." He smothered Brooklyn's objection in a hug. "You see that he's occupied. Give me thirty minutes to determine if he is indeed the mark we want."
"You're incorrigible," she said, laughing. Nothing would ever come of arguing with Phillip. It was impossible to be angry with him for any length of time.
Phillip set Brook away from him. "You flatter me, dearest." Lifting the tip of her chin with the back of his hand, Phillip placed a kiss on Brook's cheek. "Don't fail me. I won't be long."
Ryland North excused himself from the captain as soon as he saw the couple on the deck below part. They were everything Jacob Geary had told him they would be: smooth, polished, and larcenous. Poor Jake. He thought he had stumbled into heaven a week ago on board the Miss Alice. Easy money. An easy woman. An easy beautiful woman, Ry amended. His hooded gaze swept over the delicately pure profile that was presented to him when Brook turned his way. Poor Jake. He never had a chance.
Ryland took the steps to the lower deck slowly, never taking his eyes from the woman. He was surprised that when he caught her attention she did not look away. Too confident by half, he thought. She would find in good time that he was not the rube Jake Geary was, nor did he possess his friend's fine and forgiving heart. Ry tilted his head slightly in acknowledgment of her bold stare, a glimmer of a smile twisting his lips before he turned toward the passageway that led to his cabin.
Brook felt a moment's panic. She had to attract his attention, else he would catch Phillip out. There had been an instant when she thought he would approach, then nothing. Brook had not missed the vaguely contemptuous turn of his mouth as he briefly paused before moving away. She found herself mystified and more than a little intrigued.
Thinking quickly, Brook loosened the pins anchoring her hat to her thick chestnut hair. An obliging breeze carried the hat on its back as Brook flung it from her. Her accuracy could not be faulted as the hat landed directly in Ry's path, but her immediate satisfaction faded as she watched him crush the bonnet beneath his foot.
Ry bent at the waist and swept the hat off the deck in a single fluid motion. He pivoted on his heel, pretending to look for the owner. "Yours, ma'am?" he asked, extending the sadly abused hat toward Brook as she approached. Ryland hid his surprise; she was little more than a child. The woman who had made a fool of Jake Geary had to be thirty years his junior and at least ten shy of Ryland's own twenty-seven years. Her age did quite a bit to explain Jake's reticence when Ry offered to get his friend's money back. Clearly Jake was embarrassed by his own role in Phillip Sumner's crude but effective and inviting wager.
Ryland felt her hand brush his as she took the hat, and he wondered if the contact was deliberate. She might not have been very old, but from Ryland's cynical perspective she was not so different from the rest of her gender: a practiced sorceress. He had known his fair share of the sweet witches during the war, trying to wrest secrets from him in subtle and not so subtle ways. In regard to a woman's wiles, Ryland North counted himself among the immune.
"Your pardon," he apologized smoothly, somewhat taken aback when Brook's almond-shaped eyes never wavered from his frankly open stare. In similar circumstances he had known other women to flush and flutter, then stammer something unintelligible. Not only did she not flush or flutter, her voice washed over him like a chilly autumn rain.
"I would be pleased to accept your apology if it were well and truly meant," she said as she fingered the brim of her hat. "You stepped on this deliberately, and nothing you can say will make me believe otherwise. What I don't understand is why."
Ryland could not remember the last time he had been rendered speechless. She was correct, of course. He had trampled her hat deliberately. As an act of revenge it was petty and beneath him and singularly unsatisfying now that he had been found out. Ry reminded himself that the young woman and her companion deserved something in kind for what they had done to Jake. "It was not very flattering as hats go," he said, reaching out to brush back a lock of hair that had fallen over her shoulder.
Brook steadied herself against the intimate touch, her clear blue-gray eyes frosting over as his hand dropped casually to his side. "I had no idea you were an arbiter of fashion," she said.
He ignored her sarcasm, fascinated by the cobalt blue rings that rimmed her stormy eyes. "I'm not, but I know what I like. And this," he took the hat from her hands and flicked the pheasant's feather that adorned it, "is an abomination." With no warning he sent it sailing over the side of the Mary Francis.
The mature poise that bewildered Phillip Sumner and intrigued Ryland North broke for the first time. Brooklyn's full lips parted, revealing the slightly uneven line of her lower teeth, and her dark brows arched upward in astonishment. "How dare—" She stopped. It was no use. No sooner had she closed her mouth than laughter bubbled to the surface. She raised a hand to her lips but the edge of her smile could still be seen. "It's no good berating you. It was an abomination, and you did the humane thing, killing it quickly and giving it a decent burial."
Ryland's cinnamon eyes darkened to a deeper shade of brown as his mind worked furiously. It was small wonder that Jake had been captivated into making such an insane wager with Phillip Sumner. She was utterly disarming. "Then I have not fallen from your grace," he said.
"You were never in my graces," Brook said evenly, raising her shield again. She was quite sure she didn't like the way this man continued to inspect her as if he were considering her for some private collection. For a brief moment she had forgotten this was Phillip's mark. She wished again that Phillip had chosen someone else. Nothing in her brief acquaintance changed her impression that this was not a man to cross. There was a watchfulness about him and a whipcord strength that his expensively tailored clothes could not hide. Neither did his clothes hide the outline of the weapon beneath his tailored coat. She identified it as a derringer, the small handgun preferred by most gamblers and some women. Brook knew because she carried one herself, and her stiff taffeta skirts hid that fact much better. The advantage was hers, but she did not think it merited lowering her guard again.
"Perhaps I could be," Ryland said. "In your graces, that is."
"I hardly think that's likely, Mr.—"
"North. Ryland North."
Brook extended her hand. "Brook Hancock, Mr. North."
Ry held her fingers briefly before raising her hand in a small salute. "Miss Hancock." He made a bow.
Brook withdrew her hand. "Awkward, is it not? Men do not seem to know what to do with a woman's hand anymore. Half a century ago you would have kissed it. Today men seem inclined to waver between a real handshake and a token greeting from the past."
"Which do you prefer, Miss Hancock?"
"Either would suit. I have no patience with half measures."
Ry's head tilted to one side as he watched her consideringly. He reached for her hand and grasped it firmly. "A shake then." After releasing her hand he offered his elbow. "Would you care to accompany me around the deck?"
"I should like that." Brook slipped her arm beneath his and forced herself not to glance over her shoulder in search of Phillip. She matched her walk to the leisurely pace Ryland set, nodding occasionally to other passengers who greeted her. Without looking at her companion she asked, "Tell me, are you always so
impulsive?"
"I take it you are referring to the matter of your hat."
"Yes."
"Then I must tell you it was not an impulsive act. I had been thinking of little else since I first laid eyes on it."
"You jest."
"I do not. How did you acquire such a—"
"An abomination, I think we agreed. It was a gift."
"I see. From the gentleman who was with you earlier, perhaps?"
"As a matter of fact, yes. Not that it is any of your concern."
"Most assuredly it's not," Ryland agreed easily. "Still, you must admit that it's rather odd, a woman of your few years traveling with a man so much older than you."
"I admit no such thing," Brook said crisply. "Really, Mr. North, you overstep yourself. Phillip could be my father, my uncle, or my guardian."
"Is he any of those things?"
Brook inclined her head to one side and observed Ryland through a heavy fan of dark lashes. "No," she said. "None of them. There, I have shocked you. If you do not want the answers, you should refrain from asking impertinent questions."
"At the risk of being impertinent again, may I ask your age?"
"Only if you won't be tiresome about it." She paused, schooled her features, and lied through her teeth. "I'm twenty-one."
Ryland's step faltered briefly. "But you look no more than-"
"See, you are tiresome."
"And boorish, I'm afraid."
"That also," she said, her mouth quirking to one side in a tiny smile. "But I can forgive a man much for admitting his faults." Ryland's deep chuckle and boyish grin caught Brook unawares, and her smile widened with genuine pleasure.