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“I’m mesmerized,” he murmured.
She smiled. He was definitely more charming in person than he’d been in his letters. His letters had been intense and serious. She had detected no sense of humor in them, but then, what man showed his humorous side on a page? It wasn’t as if she was marrying Mark Twain, for heaven’s sake.
“Well, as I said, I was born in Chicago. My parents died early, sadly, both from tuberculosis.” When she was fourteen and had never even heard the word before. She’d become their caregiver for a solid month, getting instructions from the doctor and learning how to make chicken soup on her own, change bedsheets with a person still in them, and sit in the darkness night after night listening to their rattling breathing and praying they’d make it. God had never answered her prayers, and it had taken her years to forgive him.
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
She frowned gently. She’d already told him that in her letters. Didn’t he remember?
He seemed to, for he corrected himself. “I mean to say—sorry to hear it in person.” His mouth twitched in genuine sympathy.
“Thank you,” she said sincerely. “But I had a lovely upbringing with my grandfather. We didn’t have much, just each other. We lived above his jewelry shop.”
“His jewelry shop. Tell me more about that.”
“I thought you’d be interested in his business, seeing how much it is that you and I have in common.”
A line in his cheek flickered. “My thoughts exactly.”
“His shop wasn’t big, but he had a lot of customers. At first, I’d help him by working the counter. You know, taking in the cash, putting it in the drawer, making change. A couple of years later, I helped him with the watches.”
“The watches?”
“Pocket-watch repair. Cuckoo clocks. Grandfather clocks. He wouldn’t let me do much but hold the pieces for him. But I studied what he did. Sometimes if we were behind, he’d let me do an order. Then we expanded to repair gold rings. To reset loose stones in other pieces of fine jewelry. The business got bigger and bigger.”
He frowned. “And then you must’ve...you lost it in the Great Fire?”
She nodded.
“And your grandfather passed away....” He prodded for more.
She promised herself she wouldn’t get weepy. His death was more painful to her than her parents’. “That he did, unfortunately. A few days after the fire, when things had cooled down and it was safe, we were sweeping the streets of charred debris. One minute he was teasing me that I looked like a chimney sweep, and the next he was clutching his heart and falling to the ground. Apoplexy. His speech was so slurred I couldn’t understand him. We never got a chance for another conversation.”
“That is a shame.” He reached over the tablecloth and touched her hand. His large, warm fingers pressed against her slender ones. Such a difference in size. Such pleasure in his touch.
“Then I placed the ad,” she said on a brighter note. “And here we are.”
“Yes, indeed.” He pulled his hand away. “Tell me again why you chose my letter,” he said, “above everyone else’s.”
“But I’ve already told you.”
“Tell me again. A man likes to hear in person what his bride thinks of him.”
“There were dozens of respondents, as I mentioned, but yours stood out. It was so well worded. Your education truly does you justice with the written word. When I discovered you were putting your business education to good use in your jewelry enterprise, I thought I could be very supportive to you.”
“Supportive. Hmm.”
“And that’s why I posed the question. The one you’re still thinking on.”
“Ask me again,” he said softly. “Tell me more directly so I get a true sense of what’s on your mind.”
She inhaled. “Well, it’s just that I believe that you and I could build quite a business establishment as a couple. We could do this together, Jarrod. We’d be twice as good, twice as big, twice as profitable. I know the jewelry business.”
“And so...?”
“I’m asking you if you’d please consider letting me join you in your travels. You know, do whatever needs to be done?”
She sipped another smooth mouthful of red wine as he leaned back in his chair and stared at her so intensely that she thought he would shatter his wine goblet.
* * *
She was in on it, thought Simon with rising anger. Sure as thunder came before lightning, Natasha O’Sullivan was devoted to helping Ledbetter’s criminal jewelry business. How much more obvious could she be?
He tried not to moan. He tried not to flinch as he sat watching her. He tried not to move a muscle in his face to indicate in any manner that he was affected by her request to join him. She knew about jewelry repair and was quite willing to indulge her would-be husband by jumping in with 100 percent enthusiasm.
How could a man from Harvard accomplish so much and yet now be so dead?
Why did Simon feel such disappointment in her?
She had many positive attributes. Why did she wish to become a criminal herself?
Greed?
All right, he’d play along. After all, she might know the whereabouts of the missing three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cash and jewels and lead him directly to it. In fact, if she was guilty, that would let him off the hook for how he should treat her. He’d met criminal women before, and they were just as vicious and deadly as men. Didn’t he owe it to Eli and Clay to put her behind bars? Some of her cohorts had shot them in cold blood! They’d made Simon go mad at the scene, trying to stifle the flow of blood from Clay’s neck where a gunshot had severed the artery. And poor Eli with a bullet straight through the heart.
If this woman was involved in any manner, she deserved what was coming.
Simon could only pray that she wasn’t too bright and wouldn’t pick up on the fact that he wasn’t really her beloved partner in crime, Ledbetter.
But maybe he was jumping the gun. Maybe he was assuming too much, assuming that she knew what she was getting involved with, that it was a criminal enterprise with Ledbetter.
Slow down, he told himself. Let’s not pull the trigger yet. Give her the benefit of the doubt.
How much, thought Simon as his pensive gaze swept over the caring eyes and the pursed feminine lips, did she know about Ledbetter’s business? The lawmen were still looking, but as far as they could gather so far, they hadn’t been able to uncover any stores that Ledbetter had actually opened in any town. Yet he’d claimed he had several. The man knew a lot about jewelry, but maybe only because he’d been a thief.
But surely the man hadn’t written too much in his letters for fear of incriminating himself. Or maybe he had. Maybe the braggart couldn’t help himself. All he had to do, once he’d trusted her and revealed his hand, was tell her to burn his letters.
“Well?” she prodded. “What do you say? Shall we run this business together, Jarrod?”
In all the years he’d been chasing criminals, he’d arrested only two women. He’d never injured one before, for neither had resisted arrest. Laws were laws and whoever broke them would come to justice.
“Before I answer that,” he said, bringing the French Burgundy to his lips once more, “I need to ask if you’ve kept any of our correspondence.”
She frowned at the question and lowered her voice. The grapes on her bonnet flashed in the candle’s flicker of light. “I did as you asked. However, I don’t see why I needed to burn them all,” she whispered, “even though I do understand your need for privacy and security, seeing how many jewelry shops you intend to open. And how you’ve been robbed yourself just recently.”
He quirked an eyebrow. So he’d been right. Ledbetter had asked her to get rid of all his letters. “Thank you kindly for understanding.”
“I admit, I thought it odd at first. But the more you explained, the clearer it became.”
Clearer? His side was getting murkier. They were speaking in riddles. How much did she know? Was she a criminal or simply in over her head?
Hellfire. He couldn’t send her home on the next train or stagecoach yet. He had to find out how much she knew and whether she could lead him to the jackpot. It was what his superiors at the detective agency would expect him to do. To follow through on every lead, and certainly not to feel sympathetic toward a possible criminal only because she was a head-turning female.
He pushed away his plate and tried to act civil and calm, as Ledbetter would do in this situation. All in a day’s work for that bastard. “Would you care for anything sweet? I saw raspberry pie on the menu.”
She leaned her pretty frame back against the chair rails, smiled down at her empty dinner plate and sighed in contentment. “I don’t think I can fit another morsel. Thank you for the wonderful meal and the wonderful company.”
“Pleasure’s all mine, Natasha.”
She kept flushing at the mention of her name. It did feel rather intimate to him, too, sitting here across from a seemingly lovely lady who soon expected to be his bride.
If these were normal circumstances, if he was allowed to be himself as Simon Garr and she was his mail-order bride, he’d be as nervous as a trapped cougar. He’d seen what sort of marriage his parents had had: his father walking out, his mother drinking herself to death. No way on this earth he ever wanted that.
She lifted the white napkin from her lap and folded it across the table. She looked rather nervous, pursing her lips as though straining to find the right words. “What—what did you have in mind for the wedding ceremony? How soon would you like to do this?” The smooth muscles in her throat moved up and down with her delicate question.
Everything about her was a trap. Her smooth voice, the soulful brown eyes, the scattered freckles on her face that made her seem so innocent.
He silently cursed. There’d be no damn wedding.
He was saved from answering by their waiter.
“May I offer you some coffee?” the man asked as he gathered plates. “Perhaps some pastries, miss?”
She shook her head and nervously brushed her sleeves. Pastry was the last thing on her mind, he guessed, for she had a marriage to pursue.
“Please send the bill to the front desk,” said Simon, pushing his long legs back from the table. “I’ll settle up when I pay for Miss O’Sullivan’s room.”
“My room?” Those cinnamon-and-brown-sugar eyes flashed at him again as if to add, Not our room? We won’t be married tonight?
“I thought you might like to settle in. Find your way around town, rest up a few days before we plunge into this.”
She might be beautiful and tempting, but he was not Jarrod Ledbetter. Fortunately, she was not his mail-order bride and it was not truly him who needed to make decisions about an upcoming wedding.
He wanted no part of wives and obligations and possible children who’d grow attached to him and...and detective agents who’d deliver the news, as they had to Clay’s widow and Eli’s mother, that their loved ones had been killed in gunfire in the line of duty. God almighty, Clay even had a young boy, Tucker, who’d been left behind. Simon knew all too well how it felt to be deserted by a father.
He reminded himself again.
Natasha O’Sullivan was poison.
Chapter Three
He wasn’t that taken with her. The hurtful thought rippled through Natasha’s mind at dinner and became even more apparent as Jarrod walked her to her room.
Her high-heeled boots padded along the carpet runner behind him as her disappointment grew.
At dinner, there had been moments when he’d looked across the table and she had sensed that he was drawn to her. He’d waited for her to answer some of his questions as though there was nothing more important to him in the world. But at the end of their meal, she had noticed a slight hesitation, an almost-imperceptible coolness that seemed to blanch his heart. It was almost as though he’d been testing her in some way, and she had failed his qualifications.
Why? What could it be about her that he disapproved of?
She couldn’t help it, but she was also ruffled by the fact that he took charge without much discussion with her—he’d told the front-desk clerk that he’d like one room with a pretty view for an unspecified period. Why not discuss the waiting period with her? Why did he think she wished to rest up before “plunging” into this? The bellboy had left to deliver her trunk to the room, while she and Jarrod remained to fill out the guest register.
She stepped beside him and decided to voice her opinion. “Jarrod, it’s not that I wish to rush into a wedding, but it’s not precisely rushing into it when we’ve been thinking and anticipating it for three months, now is it?”
“Huh?” He rubbed his bristly neck. “It’s just that I wish to give you time to settle in.”
“Perhaps it’s a silly notion, but I fantasized that upon meeting you, you might lift me in your arms and tell me how you couldn’t wait to be with me. That you had a minister waiting this minute.”
“Ah. I see.” He gulped. Why was this conversation making him nervous? “This way,” he said, motioning with his hand and making a sharp left.
She followed in the narrow corridor. Why was he so controlled with his feelings when all she wanted was to be encircled by his arms and held for a little while?
She hadn’t been held for a very long time.
But perhaps she should be happy that he wasn’t rushing her into marriage. That he wished them both to take their time. Perhaps she should learn to temper her loneliness and her desire to connect with another person. It would come in due course. Impatience on her part wouldn’t help.
Her folks had never talked to her about boys. They’d had a loving relationship with each other, and with her, but the pain of losing them made her wary of getting close to a boy and possibly losing him, too. The last man who’d kissed her had been a young man who’d come from an upstanding family her grandfather had known. Granddad had rarely introduced her to potential suitors, had never rushed her nor tried to force her to marry young.
Wait for the right one, he’d often say. Be guarded like your grandmother, dear Elizabeth, was until we knew each other well.
Natasha had liked her last suitor well enough, but there’d been no mad rush to see him, no quivering in the pit of her stomach when they kissed. It had been more brotherly—playing checkers and strolling along the river together. Before him, she’d known several boys while growing up, but none she’d dreamed of with wild intensity. She had wondered if there’d ever come a time when she would meet a man who would turn her heart and soul upside down. She’d wondered it on the entire train journey here. She wondered it now as she watched Jarrod’s thigh muscles flex beneath his wool trousers, as she watched his shoulder blades move beneath the shadows of his jacket.
“I think we’re close,” he said, turning his cheek slightly as he looked at the numbers on the hotel doors to match the one on the key.
They passed the bellboy. “Folks, it’s straight ahead and to the right.” He pointed that way.
Jarrod tipped him some coins, and they continued down the hall.
What had Jarrod thought when he’d first read her advertisement in the paper?
Looking for a man of solid worth. I am a hardworking young woman of good moral standing and excellent health. I adore children. I also have skills in jewelry repair, can handle a revolver and a horse, and would dearly love the adventure of living west of the Mississippi. Please write to Miss Natasha O’Sullivan...
Now that she’d left Chicago, however, she felt an ache in her heart she couldn’t suppress. Her friends were left behind, and she hadn’t realized how much she had relied on them. They were trusted souls who gave her straight answers.
She thought she would find all of that and more with Jarrod. His letters had been cordial and, although a bit detached, had filled her with an intense desire to join him in his travels on the railway, tending to his jewelry shops across the West and scattered over the Rockies, and creating an empire of prosperity.
Yet why was there such a chasm between them?
Granddad would never approve of her becoming a mail-order bride.
Perhaps that was why she’d done it. That thought burned inside her. But there were extenuating circumstances, she reasoned, trying to push away her shameful feelings that she wasn’t quite good enough for her grandfather’s standards.
She’d always tried to be such a good girl, abiding by his rules, listening to all of her elders with politeness, being ever so demure. It was her time now, wasn’t it? Time to do as she pleased with whom she pleased. Time to follow her heart and any desire to fulfill her life with her own dreams, no matter how silly or outlandish they might appear to any onlooker.
She had that right.
“Ah, here we are. Room 208.” Jarrod inserted the key into the door at the end of the corridor.
He turned the knob, swung the door open and stepped aside for her to enter.
