A Stranger's Wife

by Maggie Osborne

  “The housekeeper is Spanish and speaks no English,” Quinn explained. “Cookie spends most of the day in the summer kitchen and will until the end of the month.” He met her thick-lashed eyes. “For the most part, we’ll have the house to ourselves. That’s why Paul and I decided this week would be spent here rather than in town.”

  “From now on,” Paul said, “you must call her Miriam. If you call her Lily even once, anyone who finds the new Miriam puzzling will be pointed toward figuring out the truth.”

  Quinn doubted he would address Lily by name. Referring to her as Miriam was a final capitulation that he was not prepared to make.

  “Use this week to practice relating to each other as if you have been married for several years. From now on,” Paul said to Lily, “your past does not exist, and you should make no reference to it. Any reference should be to Miriam’s past.”

  She blinked. “I won’t be able to talk!”

  Paul laughed. “Yes, you will. You can invent whatever you like about the sanitarium you’ve supposedly been in, as long as it sounds reasonable. Take your cue from whatever others say to you. You’re quick, you’ll come up with responses vague enough to steer you away from trouble.”

  Drumming her fingers lightly on the table linen, she looked back and forth between them. “And what do I say if someone refers to the fire or Susan’s death?”

  Quinn set down his coffee cup and felt his stomach tighten. “No one will mention Susan or the fire,” he said firmly.

  Frown lines appeared between her eyes. “It irritates the hell out of me when you make sweeping statements like that. You can’t possibly know what one of Miriam’s,” she hesitated, then swallowed and drew a deep breath, “what one of my friends will say to me in private. They very well might refer to the fire or—my—daughter’s death.” The last words made her cheeks pale.

  She was thinking of her own daughter, Quinn guessed. The last time Lily had seen her baby, Rose had been three months old, the same age as Susan at the time of the fire. Lily’s wound was older, but similar enough to Miriam’s that she would be convincing if anyone was rude or tactless enough to make a reference to that night.

  “Paul and I have made it clear to—your—acquaintances and friends that—you—cannot bear any reference to the fire or Susan’s death. The only person who might breech that request is Helene Van Heusen. All you need to do is looked distressed and murmur that you don’t wish to speak of the incident.”

  “Excellent,” Paul said, smiling at them. “That’s exactly the way you should speak to each other. As if you’re really Miriam. Don’t drop the pretense, even in private.”

  Lily had been relaxed and companionable during their ride and through breakfast. Now her gaze hardened, and she shoved her plate away. Her lips thinned, and her jaw tightened. Her narrowed eyes reminded him of the moment when she had discovered etiquette could also be wielded as a weapon.

  “The loss of our daughter devastated me,” she said, staring at him. “Why didn’t it devastate you? How can you mention Susan’s death so unemotionally?”

  He was right to be concerned. She wouldn’t be content until she had pried open Pandora’s Box. “You know the reasons,” he said, staring back at her. If she had hoped to force revelations by addressing him as if she were actually Miriam, she was mistaken.

  Paul also understood what she was trying to do. He pulled his chair next to Lily’s and took her hand, glancing down at the rings on her finger. “I suppose it was inevitable that you would become fascinated with the woman we’ve hired you to portray. But there are lines that you are not permitted to cross.”

  “I hate it when you take that threatening tone,” Lily said, pulling her hand out of his grasp.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Oh yes.” She flicked a glance at Quinn. “The two of you don’t want me to know the real Miriam or what happened to her.”

  “The private side of my relationship with my wife is none of your concern,” Quinn stated flatly. “And you don’t need to know my feelings about Susan in order to play your role convincingly.”

  “What we want from you is a surface performance, Lily. You know what happened to Miriam. She disappeared. She ran away. As for learning about the ‘real’ Miriam, if you mean her private nature, Quinn is correct. Restrain your curiosity because that isn’t your concern.” He pushed his chair back in place. “With apologies to my friend Quinn, I assure you that Miriam was not an especially interesting person. There’s no mystery about her, nothing to hide, nothing to explain. Miriam was an ordinary woman who led an ordinary life.”

  Lily returned his smile in kind. Her lips curved, but her gaze was hard and wary. “I’m starting to like you, Paul, but I wouldn’t believe you if you swore the sun set in the west.”

  “You can believe me on this point,” Paul warned. “You know where the line is. Don’t cross it.”

  She placed her napkin beside her plate and hesitated just enough to allow Quinn to rise and pull back her chair. At the door of the dining room she looked back at them. “Do all politicians lie, or is it only you two?”

  Her fighting spirit might have made Quinn smile if their circumstances had been different. And though it worried him, he also admired her for refusing to surrender. He also understood why she had received more than her share of prison beatings.

  “Good-bye, Miriam,” Paul said fondly, smiling at her. “I’ll see you again next week when you return to the mansion.”

  She glared, then her mouth relaxed into a genuine smile and she threw out her hands. “You’re a sly scoundrel, Paul Kazinski.”

  “That’s what I get paid to be.”

  “Notice that I didn’t call you a lying son of a bitch.”

  Paul laughed. “I noticed. And I applaud your progress.”

  “You enjoy her, don’t you?” Quinn asked after Lily’s footsteps had receded down the hallway. He poured another cup of coffee and added fresh cream.

  “Actually, I do.”

  Leaning back in his chair, Quinn lit a cigar and studied Paul through the haze of blue smoke. “Did you enjoy Miriam’s company?” he asked curiously.

  “Frankly, I’ve never thought about it.”

  It was the answer a friend could be expected to make, tactfully vague, less embarrassing than a blunt no or an expression of indifference. Quinn might have answered the same if Paul had inquired if he enjoyed Effie Mallory’s company. Paul’s mistress was a beautiful young woman with absolutely no opinions to clutter her brain and nothing interesting to say.

  “Looking at Lily doesn’t evoke private memories for me as it undoubtedly does for you,” Paul said, blotting his lips with his napkin. “I see her objectively in a way I never saw Miriam until near the end. Then, frankly, I saw Miriam only as a political liability that needed to be handled and quickly.”

  It was a sad admission and one he deeply regretted, but Quinn privately conceded that he had viewed his wife in much the same way. He remembered telling Paul shortly before his wedding that it didn’t matter whom he married, not really, because all women were basically alike. They were cut from the same pattern. All ladies embroidered, read the fashionable literature, sang a little, played the piano a little, devoted hours to fashion and their appearance, organized their lives around social events. Their conversation was as predictable as the seasons. Aside from appearance, women in his class impressed Quinn as largely interchangeable.

  Looking back, he wondered if Miriam had been unique or merely another version of a familiar pattern as he had assumed. If they had talked more, had spent more time together—if he had encouraged her to state her opinions freely, if he had shared more of his life with her—would he have discovered some of the qualities that made Lily so fascinating?

  These thoughts pointed him in a direction he did not want to go. He couldn’t turn back the clock and conduct his marriage differently, so there was no point in pondering the might-have-beens. Miriam was gone. And God help him, he hadn
’t known her well enough to miss her. When he thought of her, his strongest emotions were guilt, injured pride, and deep anger.

  * * *

  The week flew past. Lily practiced everything she had learned, went over and over the cards describing people and relationships, learned Miriam’s mannerisms and tried to make them habit, reviewed her etiquette books.

  Finally, she pored over the blueprints of the rebuilt mansion, memorizing the layout of the rooms, trying to visualize the furnishings as Quinn described them.

  Having never lived with servants, everything to do with staff interested and worried her.

  Leaning over the prints spread across Quinn’s office desk, she studied the narrow staircases that climbed three floors at both ends of the house, flanking a central staircase that she and Quinn would use. The two extra staircases were provided to spare the lady or gentleman of the house the indignity of passing a servant carrying a pile of laundry or whatever. Servant and master kept to their own spheres.

  “It seems so silly,” she murmured. She tapped one of the servant’s staircases with her fingertip, but her gaze rested on the connecting bedrooms on the second floor. She told herself that finding confirmation of separate bedrooms was a relief.

  “As you can see, the third floor is given over to the servants’ quarters,” Quinn said, gazing down at the prints. He stood near enough that Lily inhaled the combined scents of cigar smoke, hair oil, shaving soap. “At present there are more rooms than servants, but that will change after I win the election. I’ll require additional staff then, and rooms have been provided to meet that requirement.”

  His ruby cuff links winked in the sunlight as he moved a hard brown hand across the prints and through the light falling across his desk.

  “You’ve mentioned that it would be bad form for the mistress of the house to visit the cook’s domain.” Apparently real ladies did not step foot in their own kitchens except on rare occasions. “Does the same protocol apply to the servants’ quarters?”

  “It’s your house and strictly speaking, you’re entitled to access all areas.” He continued to study the prints. “In practice, a thoughtful mistress respects her staff’s privacy and seldom visits the servants’ quarters unless there’s a good reason. Illness, for example.” His grey eyes lifted, more charcoal than pewter today. “All the servants have been given Saturday night off. You’ll be free to explore every part of the house. If you care to examine the servants’ rooms at that time, you’re welcome to do so.”

  “I think I should see everything, don’t you?”

  “As you wish.”

  By now Lily recognized his “as you wish” signaled a concession he didn’t welcome. “I won’t go into their rooms, I’ll just peek inside the doors.” Leaning over the prints, her shoulder almost touching his, she studied the layout of the third floor. “This area looks more like a small flat than a single room.”

  “It is. Mr. and Mrs. Blalock live here.” He tapped the area she’d referred to. “Blalock has been with me for years. He was my first valet and served as butler after I married. When his eyesight began to fail, he retired from house duty and now oversees exterior maintenance and the gardens.”

  “And Mrs. Blalock?” Lily inquired, easing away from him. She remembered Quinn mentioning that he’d hired a completely new staff except for the Blalocks and Mr. Morely the carriage driver, who were the only servants left who had known Miriam.

  “Mary Blalock came with Miriam from Judge Alton’s household,” Quinn explained, stepping away from the desk and reaching for the coffeepot. Lily nodded when he lifted an eyebrow, then took the cup he offered her, careful not to brush his fingers. “Mary and James were married about a year after Mary joined the household.”

  Lily carried her coffee to the window and gazed out at the distant mountain peaks. Frost had glazed the range this morning, and it would have been uncomfortably cold in Quinn’s office if he hadn’t lit a fire in the corner stove. Not that long ago she had been sweating in the Arizona heat, trying to remember a day like this when the air lay chilly against her cheeks and the last of the autumn leaves fluttered from the trees like falling jewels. A day when the tang of woodsmoke leaking from the stove door reminded one that winter was on the way. Years had passed since Lily last caught a snowflake on her tongue, or peeked through a frost-laced window.

  “Mary Blalock worries me,” she said, dropping her gaze from the mountains to the men forking hay near the corral. “If she came from the judge’s household, then she must know me—” Lily paused, wondering if she would get used to this, “know me well.”

  She felt Quinn stiffen behind her and knew without looking that he grimaced. They were gradually becoming accustomed to Lily referring to herself as Miriam, but this was the hardest part of the deception for both of them. So far, he had not addressed her by his wife’s name.

  “It’s going to be an early winter,” he said from directly behind her. Lily jumped slightly. She hadn’t heard him cross the room. “Already there’s a lot of snow on the peaks.”

  The clean outdoor scent of him filled her nostrils along with the other scents that were uniquely his; and she felt the heat of his body radiating along her shoulders and spine. He was tall and whiplash-slender, but like everything else about him, his appearance was deceptive. She’d seen him lift a saddle to his horse’s back as if the saddle were weightless. Powerful muscles filled out his frame.

  If she leaned backward, she could rest against his chest. Her head would fit beneath his chin. A powerful longing overwhelmed her, and she badly wanted to collapse against him and be held and assured that she could do what she had to.

  Pressing her lips together, she turned suddenly and returned to the desk, then cleared her throat. Because her fingers were trembling slightly, she set down her coffee cup. “Will I see much of Mary Blalock?”

  Quinn leaned against the wall next to the window, his eyes narrowed and his voice deep. “Her eyesight is failing and her legs pain her. She seldom leaves the flat, as the stairs are difficult for her to manage.”

  “Then she has no household duties?” She knew the answer, but needed to throw words into a silence that quivered with the strangely electric push/pull that existed between them.

  “No.” Quinn’s gaze traveled down the dark bodice that molded her body to the waist, then he straightened abruptly and pulled out his pocket watch. “I have some things to go over with Smokey Bill. If we’re finished here . . . ?”

  To give her hands something to do, Lily rolled up the blueprints. “I need to review the cards again and pack. What time will we leave tomorrow?”

  “We’ll have an early supper and depart immediately after.”

  “Well. I’ll just . . .” She waved a hand at the door and took a step toward it.

  Their situation was artificial enough that they didn’t meet or part company without Lily feeling uncomfortably awkward. Especially now, knowing that the day after tomorrow the impersonation would begin in earnest and she would be put to the test.

  “Quinn . . . I know you have a lot riding on my success.” She licked her lips and looked down at her hands. “I’m going to do everything in my power to convince people that I’m Miriam.”

  “Thank you.” For a moment she thought he would say more, but he didn’t.

  “Honestly, do you think I can be successful?”

  When she raised her head, he was staring at her. His eyes were so changeable and such an unusual color that they dominated his face. The grey could be hard and cold, a stony wall, then alter to the quicksilver of curiosity or the warmth of ashy coals in a grate. And sometimes, like now, his gaze turned a smoldering smoky color that made Lily’s stomach tighten and made her skin feel hot.

  But he didn’t answer her question. Lifting her skirts, she fled from the room, not sure what she was fleeing.

  * * *

  They had established a pattern during their week together at the ranch. They rode in the morning, worked together during the day to
perfect Lily’s performance, then Quinn took his supper in his office and Lily had a tray in her room. Afterward, she prepared for bed, brushed her hair and braided it for sleep, then read a little.

  Tonight she couldn’t sleep. After tossing and turning, her mind humming with people she needed to remember, with Miriam’s habits and mannerisms, with the jitters of stage fright, she finally threw back the quilts, wrapped herself in a warm shawl, and stood beside the window.

  A square of light illuminated a patch of frosty brown grass outside Quinn’s office window. Hugging the shawl around her shoulders, Lily imagined him sitting at his desk, a glass of whiskey beside him, reading through the dispatches that arrived daily from Denver.

  When his silhouette appeared in the center of the square of lighted ground, she caught a quick soft breath and drew back from the window even though her room was dark, and he couldn’t know she was watching.

  What was he thinking as he gazed out at the cold night? Was he as worried as she about her success? Did he regret forcing her to impersonate his wife? Was he having second thoughts? Or was his mind still focused on the papers strewn across his desk?

  When she and her prison friends listed the things they wanted to do immediately after they were released, several of the women had said they wanted to be with a man, wanted to be held and caressed and loved. They had missed men more than anything else.

  That hadn’t been the case with Lily. The day the sheriff clapped her in irons, she had vowed to turn her back on men forever. Men had been nothing but trouble in her life.

  But she stood in the chilly darkness, watching a man’s silhouette, and her skin burned, and her legs trembled.

  Chapter 8

  Quinn mentioned that he wanted to avoid attracting attention; therefore, he’d instructed his carriage driver to avoid the boulevards lit by newly installed gas lamps, but Lily glimpsed the lamps from cross streets and marveled that man had conquered the night. And she noticed the glow of gas lighting from the windows of many of the houses that grew larger as they turned onto Fourteenth Street.