“It’s all right,” he grunted, his eyes still closed.
“I can’t seem to get this hatbox properly situated up here.”
He’d just about talked himself out of the chivalry business entirely when the train lurched forward and the damsel and her hatbox both wound up in his lap. It nearly knocked the breath out of him, but Marcus knew it wasn’t the fall so much as the feel of her that made his chest seize up.
Suddenly he was caught up in complicated silken curves and corn-silk hair. He remembered now asking to be hit by lightning, and he was fairly certain that his wish had just been granted. When he swore, it came out as a beleaguered sigh.
“Hold still,” he told her as she wriggled on his lap.
Somehow a strand of her blond hair had gotten wound around his shirt button, and the more she squirmed, the worse it got.
“I’m caught!” she squealed.
“Hang on a minute.” He tried to unwind the silky lock of hair.
“Ouch!”
“Hold still, dammit.”
“Ouch!”
“Aw, hell.” Marcus ripped the button from his shirt. “There. You’re free.”
She scrambled off his lap and managed to step on both his feet before retaking her seat. Once there, she fussed with her curls and her clothes, paying no attention to Marcus and blithely ignoring the hatbox, which was still on his lap.
He counted to ten. Slowly. Practicing the patience of a saint. Nine saints. Ten. He sighed. “Your hatbox, miss.”
And just as Marcus had known she would, she looked at him with her rich green eyes, flicked him a small but still imperious smile, and suggested he stash the hat box in the rack overhead.
“By all means, Duchess,” he muttered under his breath as he got up to cram the box into the wire rack. He half expected her to hand him a nickel when he sat back down, but she didn’t. His imperious duchess—the little brat—was already fast asleep.
“Sleep tight, Your Ladyship,” he whispered, knowing his own hopes for a nap had been blasted to smithereens by the mere fact of her presence.
Her Ladyship slept through two scheduled stops to take on water and one abrupt, unscheduled stop when a herd of southbound buffalo took a full five minutes to cross the Union Pacific tracks. She slept with the faith and innocence of a child, even during the commotion when all the passengers shifted from window to window to watch the passing herd. All the passengers except Marcus—former knight errant—whose sole function at the moment seemed to be in serving Her Ladyship as a pillow.
He didn’t mind so much. God, she was pretty. Not that he put a woman’s looks above other qualities. He didn’t. Sarabeth hadn’t been a beauty, by any means, but Marcus had loved her sweet disposition and her sprightly wit and—most of all—her ability to turn any grief or sadness into sunshine. This woman appeared to have the disposition of a shecat, but she was still a pure pleasure to look at. Marcus liked the warmth of her as she leaned against his shoulder, the feel of her soft hair just brushing his cheek and the occasional riffle of her breath on his jaw. He didn’t mind so much being used as a pillow.
What he minded, though, was that when the train finally stopped in Julesburg, Her Ladyship awoke all smiling and refreshed, while he felt like and most probably looked like a rumpled bed. A bed that suddenly remembered that its headboard ached like hell.
She sat up and stretched like a dainty cat, then smiled and exclaimed with innocent surprise, “Oh, I must’ve dozed off.”
“For a minute or two,” Marcus said, rolling his neck and his left shoulder to loosen the kinks and get the circulation going again.
She leaned across him then to look out the window, apparently unaware that her elbow was digging into his thigh or that her breast was snug against his upper arm.
“This must be Julesburg,” she said, gazing this way and that out the window. “What an interestinglooking little town.”
Julesburg? It was a patched-together, put-upovernight railroad town, half clapboard and half canvas, all of it baking in the afternoon sun. Marcus might have called it peculiar at best or downright ugly at worst, but certainly not interesting.
“I guess that depends on where you’re from,” he murmured.
“Do you suppose there’s a dry goods store here?” she asked, still squinting out the window.
“Probably. Yeah. Sure. I suspect there’d be a mercantile wedged in somewhere between all those saloons and dance halls.”
“Good.” She levered off his leg and gave her curls a little toss. “I need to purchase a few items. Tell the conductor I’ll be back shortly, will you? Oh, never mind. I see him up there. I’ll tell him myself.”
“This is a meal stop,” Marcus said. That meant the passengers were going to be given maybe twenty or thirty minutes to wolf down a tough antelope steak and some soggy griddle cakes before the train pulled out again. There was barely enough time to eat, much less locate a privy or do any shopping.
She smiled at him sunnily. She spoke with cheerful dismissiveness. “Yes. Well, enjoy your meal.” Then she made her way along the aisle, gave the same smile to the conductor and told him to hold the train for her.
Hold the goddamn train for her! Marcus could hardly believe his ears. And the poor, slack-jawed conductor was still scratching his head, Marcus noticed, when the duchess descended from the car and whisked purposefully past the depot and the dining hall on her way into town.
When she traveled west the first time, to join Angus McCray in Denver a mere two weeks ago, it had been in a private railroad car that her fiancé had procured for her trip. The accommodations had been luxurious, quite what she’d always been accustomed to, but Amanda hadn’t seen much of the country through the heavily draped windows of that train. Once again, she had found herself walled off from the real world. It was a shame, really. There was so much to see. Even this half-built town of Julesburg struck her as interesting.
For all her wealth, she thought, she’d actually experienced very little—next to nothing, really—in the twenty-one years she’d lived under her grandmother’s stern gaze and firm thumb. Running away to marry Angus was the only way Amanda knew to escape that silk imprisonment and to remedy her inexperience. And she was still bound and determined to do it. In fact, she was more determined than ever, now that she realized how set Honoria Grenville was on keeping her in her gilded little cage and the lengths to which her grandmother would go to achieve her ends.
“Over my dead body, Grandmother,” Amanda muttered as she walked into the little mercantile on Julesburg’s only street. She called a cheerful goodafternoon to the young female clerk behind the counter, but the girl didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic when she merely nodded back.
It was probably her appearance, Amanda thought as she caught a glimpse of herself in a cracked mirror hanging from a nail near the door. Good heavens! Her hair was frightful, and nearly two shades darker than normal from all the dust and cinders on the train. She peered closer into the glass and wiped a smudge from her chin with a dirty kid glove.
It had been two—no, three—days now since she had a proper bath. By the time she got to Denver, Angus would probably find her, well…pungent, to say the very least.
She lifted a vaguely familiar bottle from a nearby shelf and squinted to read the small print on the label. What she had assumed was lavender toilet water turned out to be a tonic for assorted female complaints, but since being dirty and smelling bad was not among them, she put the bottle