“Have you completely lost your mind, Will Tate?”
Will chuckled. “Well, now, I’m not sure. I don’t think so. Not completely anyway; maybe only a little.”
“I’d really like to meet the woman who’s got you investing in mean-tempered weasel-hounds and dressing like an east-coast dandy.” Thomas’s voice held genuine awe.
“Well, we’re dining at the Palace tonight, if you want to drop by. As long as you don’t stay too long.”
“You’re taking her to dinner at the Palace? I don’t remember you ever taking a lady out to dinner before.”
“I’ve taken lots of women to dinner, Thomas, and you know it.” Will was just the tiniest bit embarrassed as he dusted off his tall beaver hat.
“I said a lady, Will, not a woman. There’s a difference, my friend.”
Will gave Thomas a lopsided smile. “You told me yourself there were worse things in life than spending time with a lady, Thomas. I remember your saying it.”
“So do I, Will, but I didn’t know you were going to make a career of it. I’ve hardly seen you since you met Aunt Emily.”
“Well, Thomas, Miss Emily is different,” he said on a sigh.
“She must be.”
Will turned with a flourish of black cape and cane. “How do I look, Thomas?”
“And I’ve never known you to care how you looked, either. But if you must know, you look like a courting lover.”
Will laughed in genuine amusement. “Maybe I am, at that, Thomas. Maybe I just am.”
After Will’s arrival at the Schindler residence was announced that evening, he and Emily assessed one another with candid pleasure, she from the upper landing, and he from the somewhat musty elegance of her aunt’s foyer.
The only adornment to her person, save the lace on her basque, were the two carved ivory combs holding her hair in place. The fact that the combs looked as though they might be old, expensive, family heirlooms appealed to Emily. In reality, she had bought them, after much strenuous bargaining, from yet another estate auction. This evening she had piled her hair into an upswept do copied directly from one of Mr. Gibson’s ubiquitous drawings, and she was very pleased with the result.
So was Will.
In a determined effort to seduce Will Tate—for such was her admitted intention; she was desperate at this point—Emily had once again plumped her bosom and laced her corset tight. Although she felt anything but confident, she gave the appearance of a sophisticated, self-assured young lady as she descended the stairs to greet him.
Will had no idea what her intentions were, but he heartily approved the result of her efforts. He had ever admired the soft curves of the womanly form; seldom had he seen them displayed to better advantage. What’s more, he had an almost overwhelming desire to explore these particular ones by hand.
“My saints and stars, Miss Emily, you are the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.” He peered down into her brilliant blue eyes and decided he wanted to sweep her up into his arms and carry her away with him forever.
As for Emily, she forgot for a moment that she had set herself on a course of deception and deceit. Her first impulse upon seeing Will in his dashing evening finery was to fling herself into his arms and beg him to have his way with her—with or without marriage vows and financial rescue attached. She could hardly believe it of herself.
“Thank you, Mr. Tate.” Her tongue felt dry, as though she had left it outside in the sun while she’d been about her business indoors. “You look—you look truly elegant this evening.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” Will gaped at her in perfect imitation of a tongue-tied country lad; only he wasn’t pretending. She had just about deprived him of speech.
Thomas Crandall’s town carriage was a splendid vehicle, and his coachman was a master. He opened the door and flipped down the stairs for Emily in one smooth movement. Emily was terribly impressed. She placed a hand on Will’s arm and stepped daintily into the carriage.
Thanks to Will’s clever planning, liberal tips, and prior patronage, the Palace was expecting them and was prepared with their best. The maitre d’ welcomed them with a low bow and then preceded them to a candlelit table tucked away in a romantic corner.
Emily scarcely had time to appreciate the setting before a white-gloved waiter arrived with an ice bucket and a bottle of the restaurant’s best champagne.
“Oh, Mr. Tate,” she whispered, “this is so elegant.” She felt a little silly, since it was she who was supposed to be teaching him things about fine living. But she couldn’t help it.
“Well, ma’am, I came over here this afternoon after I saw you to home and fixed it up with the staff. They got right nice, obliging folks workin’ here.”
Emily, who had long been under the impression that the Palace was the most snobbish establishment in San Francisco, was pleased to hear him say so.
“I’m so glad, Mr. Tate. I think it’s very important for people to be courteous and easy to work with when one has to do business with them.” Emily’s soft voice held absolute sincerity.
It took a good deal of effort to suppress his laughter, but Will managed. He had a vivid recollection of the Palace’s haughty chef staring down his nose as Mr. Potter, the manager, handed him Will’s request for this evening’s dinner. Will didn’t mind. The expression on Emily’s face was worth having to deal with a stuffy French chef any day of the week.
“To you, Miss Emily.”
He held up his champagne glass and tilted it ever so slightly toward her. The look in his eyes was one Emily wished she could store in a locket and keep with her forever.
“Thank you, Mr. Tate,” she whispered.
Their glasses clinked, and Emily took a tiny sip of her champagne. It tickled her throat wonderfully.
The Palace was meant for evenings like this. Their carpeting was thick and elegant, muffling the sound of the waiters’ shoes as they toted viands back and forth. Although gas lighting was in common use in the metropolis, the table at which Will and Emily sat was lit by the soft, flickering glimmer of candle lamps.
The gentle light from the lamp at their table cast a delicate, warm glow over Emily. Will liked the way she looked at him across the table, as though she were not quite sure of herself.
He found himself oddly glad to discover the capable, efficient newspaper columnist, “Aunt Emily,” could be so easily transformed, by his own meager efforts, into this creature of delightful fragility. Although, he acknowledged, she was assuredly not fragile. Anybody who had managed to keep her crazy relatives solvent and Clarence Pickering at bay for so long was definitely a person of infinite strength. But she was a fetching, feminine little thing in spite of that.
A waiter brought them their first course, a wonderful concoction of crab in a puff of delicate pastry, and then silently departed. Will took another appreciative eyeful of Miss Emily von Plotz, and dipped his fork.
“I hope you like this, Miss Emily. It’s one of my favorites.”
“I’m sure I shall, Mr. Tate.”
They spoke then of things of little consequence. Will told her a few of his more repeatable, amusing adventures in growing up, and Emily spurred him to more than one out-and-out belly laugh as she related tales of her family’s doings. Will’s genuine appreciation, the restaurant’s pleasant ambiance and, perhaps, the champagne, seemed to lull her into revealing more than she had intended to.
“You mean he was actually eating the plants?” Will had to wipe his eyes, he was laughing so hard.
“Oh, my, yes, Mr. Tate. Uncle Ludwig is often given to spur-of-the-moment scientific experimentation. I’m afraid the chief horticulturist was not sympathetic. I had to beg him not to press charges. It was—it was very embarrassing at the time.”
A giggle rendered Emily’s last words somewhat wobbly, and she watched Will with a warm welling up of emotion in her breast. Nobody had ever before made her feel like this, as though there were nothing inherently wrong with her because her relatives were batty.
The words were spoken with such delicate inflection that at first Will didn’t know whether she understood how ironic they sounded. One peek at her twinkling eyes told him she did, though, and his mind almost boggled on a sudden realization.
He wasn’t bored. Will Tate, who found the empty, endless chatter of the more refined members of the female sex almost brain-numbing, was not bored. He was listening to Miss Emily von Plotz tell him stories about her crazy aunt and uncle, and he was hanging on every word that tripped from her perfect rosebud mouth. He, who had to suppress yawns every time he was in polite female company, was laughing now as much as he had ever laughed with Flaming Polly, and with infinitely more genuine pleasure.
Will had to admit that Flaming Polly, while amusing, was rather crude and a little weak of intellect. But Emily did not suffer from either of those two shortcomings. Far from it. There was nothing the slightest bit crude about Emily, yet she wasn’t prudish. And she was smart as the proverbial whip, but she was not at all starchy.
And pretty? Lord have mercy. Will looked at her creamy shoulders and collarbone, peered with real longing at the very discreet swell that foretold the delights of her satiny bosom, and his throat tightened. He could have feasted his eyes on her all night long and the rest of his life. The realization almost made him laugh out loud in irony.
He, who had been reared to look upon his fellow human beings with a predator’s eye; who had been taught from the cradle that women served only one useful purpose; who had been brought up from his earliest days on this earth to be a free-wheeling bachelor; whose every childhood lesson, in short, had taught him to take what he wanted and to need nobody, suddenly found himself being sucked under by a quicksand of need. And, more amazing than anything else, he realized that if he had known this feeling Emily evoked within him existed before now, he would have sought her out, dived in head-first, and not waited to stumble into the quicksand by accident.
He absolutely adored her.
Emily had been regaling Will with tales of her aunt’s ill-fated attempts to teach young ladies proper elocution. She stopped all at once, alarmed by the expression on his face.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Tate. I didn’t mean to rattle on and on so.”
Will blinked, astonished by her interpretation of his worshipful gaze. “Ma’am—Miss Emily, ma’am, you can just talk to me forever. I didn’t think you were rattling on. I’m not bored. I’ve never been less bored in my life.”
He was absolutely certain now, after meeting her relatives and Clarence Pickering, that little Miss Emily had set out to entrap him, as “Texas Lonesome”, into marriage. As little as a week ago such an idea would have made him guffaw at its very absurdity. Now, he couldn’t repress the images flickering through his brain of himself and Emily nestling together as sweetly as a couple of doves and sharing moments like this for the rest of their lives.
Will Tate, a domesticated animal. Good grief, maybe he was losing his mind.
That possibility had just entered his head when both he and Emily were ripped out of their cozy intimacy by the booming, hearty, and entirely-too-amused voice of Thomas Crandall.
“Why Will Tate, you old son of a buck! Now what on earth are you doing here?” The appreciative gleam in Thomas’s eyes as he looked at Emily irritated Will.
Will made an effort to suppress his annoyance. “I was trying to eat dinner, Thomas, which should be obvious, even to you. Not that you didn’t know I’d be here, since I told you this afternoon.” Then he added with somewhat grumpy civility, “Miss Emily von Plotz, this is Thomas Crandall. Thomas and I have known each other for several years, and I’m staying with him in San Francisco.”
The hand Emily extended to Thomas was very dainty indeed. “I’m so pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Crandall.”
Thomas had to clear his throat before he could answer Emily with the appropriate degree of politeness. Somehow or other, she seemed to have deprived him of his usual suave urbanity.
“M-miss von Plotz,” he finally stammered, “this is truly a pleasure.”
Emily smiled at Thomas, who stared at her in open admiration. Will’s initial amusement quickly soured the longer Thomas gawked, and he soon began to glare. Thus they remained for a full minute or more, until Emily, becoming uncomfortable in the lingering silence, finally spoke.
“I—I mean—Well—And how did the two of you become acquainted, Mr. Crandall?”
After a gulp and a blink or two, Thomas managed to croak, “I—we—we met in the mines, Miss von Plotz. In Virginia City. We’ve known each other for years.”
“How nice it must be to have been friends of such long standing. Such a good friendship is rare in today’s hectic environment.”
Emily smiled sweetly at Thomas, then glanced at Will. She hoped somebody would take up the conversational gauntlet soon because she didn’t know what to say now.
The poisonous viper of jealousy slithering through Will both startled and infuriated him. Damn Thomas Crandall to blazes.
Completely forgetting he had as much as dared Thomas to come see for himself the manifold charms of his little Emily, Will’s inventive mind immediately indicted his best friend.
Then, in his irrational fit, he misunderstood the expression on Emily’s face. Instead of a clear wish to be rescued from an uncomfortable social situation, Will read into her gaze a harpy’s shrewd appraisal of yet another wealthy victim.
Ha! Did the sharp-as-tacks “Aunt Emily” find rich-as-Croesus Thomas Crandall more to her liking than she did himself? Was her nimble brain assessing Thomas’s fine clothing and urbane manner and deciding marriage to him would be to her better advantage than to the country-bred “Texas Lonesome”? Well, that was just too damned bad. She was his, and that was that.
“Well, Thomas, I guess you have things to attend to this evening, don’t you?”
Emily looked at Will in undisguised astonishment.
As for Thomas, he finally realized he had been staring with fixed intensity at Emily for some time. When his gaze lit once again on Will, he recognized his best friend’s undisguised jealousy. He laughed, thereby startling Emily into further confusion.
“Well, I can tell I’m not wanted here,” Thomas said with a grin. “Miss von Plotz, I can’t tell you how happy I am to have met you at last. Will has spoken of you often, and I didn’t believe him. But I can see now he was right and I was wrong. You’re every bit as charming and lovely as he told me you were.”
“Why, Mr. Crandall, what a kind thing to say.”
Emily’s cheeks went pink under the praise. Will glowered at Thomas.
“Go away now, Thomas,” he hissed.
“All right, Will. Guess I can’t ignore that blunt request. Good evening, Miss von Plotz.”
“Good evening, Mr. Crandall.”
Thomas tipped his hat and sauntered off.
Will eyed Emily, who was watching Thomas stroll away. He didn’t care for the look on her face, which he assumed to be one of cunning.
Emily, however, although she was consciously doing her very best to ensnare Will Tate, was not vain. She never suspected she could inspire awe in more than one man.
At last she gave up trying to figure out why Will’s friend had behaved in such an odd manner and returned her attention to Will. Her smile died a quick death.
Oh, dear. What had seemed an almost magical atmosphere before Thomas Crandall’s interruption now crackled with something unspoken and ugly. She didn’t understand it, but she wanted to do away with it at once. She wanted the magic back, and she wanted her pleasant companion, Will Tate, back with it.
In an attempt to restore their former blissful harmony, Emily said, “My, it must be nice to have such a good friend as Mr. Crandall, Mr. Tate.”
Will was still stewing in the bitter juices of jealousy. “He’s a lot richer than I am, Miss von Plotz. And he’s not married, either. He’d be a great catch.” T
here. Let the miserable vixen choose between them then, if that’s the way she wanted it.
“Oh!” Emily blinked and wondered why on earth Will had said such an odd thing. An incredible possibility hit her like a jolt of lightning. Good heavens. Could Will Tate be jealous? Of his friend? Because of her? She would have to reassure him that he had no cause to be. Those same unerring instincts that had guided “Aunt Emily” into becoming the best-read columnist in San Francisco now led her to say, confidentially, “Mr. Crandall is a good-looking man, Mr. Tate, but if he is truly seeking a wife, perhaps you should give him a little hint. I believe it would behoove him to trim his side whiskers just a tiny bit. I’m sure he grows them to distract ladies from his bald spot, but honestly, I believe most ladies find thinning hair less objectionable than bushy side whiskers.”
She smiled guilelessly and added, “I hope you don’t think me bold, Mr. Tate. It’s just that, although Mr. Crandall doesn’t possess your charm, he does seem to be a rather nice, solid sort of man.” Then she paused, as if embarrassed, and went on. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Tate. I certainly don’t wish to criticize your friend. How terribly rude of me!”
All at once the bubbling cauldron of Will’s jealousy evaporated as if it had never existed. The magical aura of the evening settled about them once more. Will felt his sudden flame of anger smother and die as though it had never lived.
The smile he gave Emily was so warm, she was reduced to quivering aspic. Lord, the man had a smile that could melt ice. And Emily was definitely not ice.
“I keep telling him that myself, Miss Emily. He thinks the ladies won’t notice his hair if they’re occupied with his mutton chops.”
Breathless as she now was, it was difficult for Emily to speak. “Well, Mr. Tate, I—I think Mr. Crandall could learn a thing or two from you. You’ve never pretended to be anything other than what you are, yet you are a perfectly charming companion. Any young lady would find delight in your company. I certainly do.”
Texas Lonesome Page 11
