“That sounds fine to me.”
She returned his smile, helping herself to one of the seats at the table. “I’m sorry your efforts to sell brushes in Mistletoe haven’t gone well so far. Maybe in a few days.”
“Is that how long it takes for an epidemic to be over?”
“I’m not sure.”
She paused, scrambling for some way to sound intelligent and personable as they waited for the tea to brew. Easy conversation had never been her strong suit. That was more Vicky’s talent. Which probably explained why Vicky had waltzed off with the prize, leaving Miranda cold and alone.
“Why don’t you do your brush presentation for me?” she suggested in a hurry. Somehow thoughts of the debacle of Micah didn’t seem right while sitting with Randall.
“Do you mean it?” He sat taller.
Miranda smiled, his flash of excitement contagious. “Absolutely.”
“You’re on.” Randall nodded and leapt up from the table. He fetched his trunk, lifting it in both hands, and carrying it closer to the table. “I just need some place to set up.”
“Why, the stage, of course.” Miranda gestured to the small dais at the front of the saloon. “I can’t wait to see what you can do.”
The last time Randall had looked forward to doing his brush presentation for someone was… Actually, he had never looked forward to doing it.
“The stage is perfect.” He switched directions, carrying his trunk to the front of the saloon. “I’ll need a couple of chairs, though.”
“Let me help.” Miranda jumped up and dodged between the tables to reach the front of the room. She lifted one chair onto the stage as he lifted the other. Together, they positioned them as Randall directed, close enough that he could rest his trunk on them and open the lid.
“Now just you sit back, Miranda, and prepare to be bowled over by the selection and quality of Mendel’s Marvelous Brushes.” He repeated the words that had been drilled into him during training sessions, even though he knew he sounded like a fourth-rate actor in a bad play.
Miranda hopped off the stage and scurried to take a seat at one of the tables near the front. There was something about the woman that was a breath of fresh air in an endless string of towns and faces and audiences. She seemed so out of place in the saloon. Her dress was a smidgen too high-brow, not to mention conservative, and her soft, brown hair was tucked into a simple bun. She was pretty, though, but not in the sort of way women in saloons were usually pretty. To top it all off, Randall could sense a certain, nameless energy pulsing right under her surface. He would have called it frustration, yearning, even, if she didn’t have such a delightful smile.
“Are you ready?” he said once he had the trunk in position on the chairs and all of the straps and closures undone.
“I’m ready,” she answered, clasping her hands together and resting them in her lap. Her hazel eyes sparkled with expectation.
Randall straightened and cleared his throat. “Mendel’s Marvelous Brushes,” he announced, then grabbed the lid of his trunk and pulled it open with a flourish.
Instead of the variety of brushes that were carefully strapped into place in the display contained within the trunk, a burst of his wadded, dirty laundry spilled out. Randall’s heart stopped, and his face burned. He’d undone too many clasps, opening the hidden compartment in the trunk that secured his clothes. Everything from shirts to trousers to long underwear spilled to the floor on the stage in front of him.
Miranda’s eyes went wide, her mouth forming a round O. A second later, she clapped her hands to her mouth, eyes dancing with laughter. Her shoulders shook.
Randall had a hard time not laughing himself. “Um, right.” He reached into the trunk, pulling out the wide-head broom and handle attachment that rested on top of several other brushes. “This is a demonstration,” he explained, screwing the handle together to assemble the broom. “Yes, a demonstration of the sweeping power of Mendel’s top-of-the-line broom.”
With the broom assembled, he turned to sweep up his clothes, pushing them under the trunk between the two chairs. It did nothing to hide the random bundle of garments, some of them unmentionable.
“And when you’re done with that,” he continued, setting the broom inside and reaching into the trunk for a hand broom and dust pan, “you can tidy up the mess and get rid of it.”
He bent over to brush a spare sock into the dust pan. There was no place to put it—it would have taken him several minutes to sort out the clothing compartment of the trunk—so he shrugged and tossed the sock over his shoulder.
Miranda laughed outright, then slapped her hand over her mouth again. “Oh, dear.”
“Never you mind that.” He went back to his salesman routine, overly-confident, stilted voice and all. “Mendel’s Marvelous Brushes has the right tool for whatever domestic job you have. We’ve got cleaning brushes, as you’ve seen, personal grooming brushes…”
He reached into the trunk to take out a fancy, women’s hairbrush with one hand and a man’s shaving brush with the other. His grip on the shaving brush wasn’t quite what it should be, and as soon as he pulled his arm up, the bristly thing went flying. It hit a bottle that had been left on a nearby table, breaking it.
“Oh!” Miranda jumped at the crash.
Randall’s mouth dropped open. It was that or burst into laughter himself. “Hold on.” He dropped the hairbrush back into the trunk and rummaged around. “I’m sure I’ve got something to clean that up.”
“Won’t the hand brush and dust pan do?” Miranda stood and hopped onto the stage, coming to stand beside him and peer into the trunk.
Randall discreetly removed some underwear that hadn’t escaped in the initial explosion. He cleared his throat. “Believe it or not, Mendel’s has a special brush designed for cleaning up glass. Ah! Here it is. Complete with a hand guard.”
He took out a brush that looked very much like a standard hand brush, but with a curving bit of wood attached to the handle, like the hilt of a sword. Miranda rested a hand on one hip and sent him a teasing, scolding look that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
“You broke that bottle on purpose to show me this brush, didn’t you?”
Randall couldn’t hold his laughter in any longer. “I swear to you, I didn’t. But isn’t it handy that they make something like this?”
He stepped over to the table with the broken bottle and began to sweep it up with the special brush. When he realized he hadn’t brought the dust pan with him, Miranda fetched it and carried it to the table. She handed it over with mock solemnity.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?” Her eyes teased and flirted in direct contrast to the modesty of her demeanor. The contrast did things to Randall’s heart that he hardly dared to think of.
“I’ll confess, I’m not,” he answered her with a sigh, sweeping up the glass.
“Then why pursue a profession that doesn’t suit you?” she asked, then added in a mumble, “Not that I’m one to talk.”
Randall studied her with a curiosity that burrowed deep into his soul. He liked Miranda Clarke, new though their association was. She was the kind of woman he would want to spend much more time with, if his ventures didn’t demand he move on. There was something about her that made him feel like he could share anything with her.
“I can assure you, it wasn’t my idea.” He took a step back, dust pan in hand. “Is there a place where I can dump this?”
“Over here.” Miranda started away from the table, an arm outstretched toward the bar. “I have a special bin for broken glass.”
“Thanks.” He followed her, dumping the glass into a bin full of shards.
“Our tea is probably ready now, if you’d like to take a break from presenting to explain why you’re doing it in the first place.” The mischievous glint was back in her eyes.
“I’d love to.”
They retired to the table, where Miranda poured two tin mugs of tea for them. She added just enoug
h cream and sugar without him having to ask. If that wasn’t a sign of a good woman, he didn’t know what was. He took a sip, settling back in his chair, counting himself uncommonly lucky to have met Miss Miranda Clarke.
“It’s my father’s fault,” he explained without having to be reminded. “He thinks I should be somebody.”
“Be a brush salesman?” The arch of her eyebrow was so feminine and delicate that Randall found himself wanting to kiss it.
He cleared his throat. “Well, not a salesman per se. He says any good business magnate needs to start at the bottom and work their way up. This time, that means I’m going to be a master of commerce by starting as a traveling salesman.” It was hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, even with someone as lovely as Miranda sitting across from him.
“This time?” She arched her other brow. The fact that she’d switched from one to the other was so unusual and quirky that Randall couldn’t stop himself from smiling.
“Let’s see.” He took another sip of tea, then leaned back in his chair. “In the last five years, I’ve been a deck hand on a merchant ship because my father thought I should be a ship’s captain, a porter on a train because my father thought I should be a railroad magnate, and an office boy because my father thought I should be a corporate executive.”
Miranda blinked, looking as startled as he felt when he reviewed his life. “And none of those professions…took?”
Randall heaved a sigh and smirked. “Not really. Father says it’s because I refuse to apply myself.”
“But you’ve spent the last three months traveling in an attempt to sell brushes,” Miranda said. “How could he possibly not see that as applying yourself?”
“You haven’t met my father.”
“I’m not sure I would want to,” she burst out, then instantly looked sheepish. “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s rude of me to say.”
“Not at all,” he chuckled. In fact, he had a sudden urge to bring Miranda home to do battle with his father. Instinct said she would either charm or argue him into submission. Or perhaps that was just hope talking.
She continued to study him over the lip of her tea mug as she drank. When she finished and swallowed, she said, “All right, Randall Sinclair. You’ve tried shipping, railroads, offices, and brushes. What is it that you want to do?”
A warm rush filled him, almost as if the tea she’d made had infused far more than his stomach. The heat and comfort of it had spread all the way to his heart. “No one’s ever asked me that,” he said.
“No one?” For a moment she looked taken aback, sad almost. Then her expression resolved into gloomy, heavy understanding. “Well, I certainly know what that feels like.”
“Do you?” Why did it make him happy to know that she had shared something of the misery of being pigeonholed in places she didn’t belong?
Miranda lifted her hands and looked around at the rugged interior of the saloon. “Do I seem to you like someone who would naturally incline to operating an establishment like this?”
He’d had that same thought several times since entering the building. “No.” He shook his head. “So how did you end up with it?”
Miranda sighed. “My Uncle Buford. He left it to me in his will.”
Randall hesitated. “I’m sorry for your loss?”
Miranda made a dubious sound and rolled her eyes. “Uncle Buford was my father’s twin brother. For some inexplicable reason, I was always his favorite growing up. My sister, Vicky, was everyone else’s favorite. What made even less sense to me was that Uncle Buford always had a wicked, adventurous streak to him. I haven’t been wicked a day in my life.”
She stopped and gasped at that statement, pressing a modest hand to her lips. The gesture might have been meant to show her embarrassment at sharing something so personal, but to Randall, it had the strange effect of showing that whether she had been wicked or not, Miranda Clarke did, in fact, have a streak of wickedness in her. It was in the flash of her eyes, the blush on her cheeks.
“Do go on,” he urged her, desperate to hear more about this non-wicked streak of hers.
“Well.” She recovered with a sip of tea. “I will confess that as a child, I adored Uncle Buford. We went on many imaginary adventures together. But then I grew up, and as is the case with all young women of a certain background, I had to develop the skills and decorum to become presentable to society. Society has so many rules,” she added with more than a little weariness.
“Tell me about it,” he drawled.
Her eyes flashed with that spark of kinship that had warmed him from the moment he stepped into the saloon. “I continued to write to Uncle Buford, even after he moved up here and scandalized us all by opening such an establishment. Unfortunately, he became ill this past summer and passed away, in spite of the efforts of Mistletoe’s wonderful female doctor, Dr. Callahan, to save him.”
She lowered her head for a moment. Randall wanted to reach across the table to comfort her. He restrained himself, and a few seconds later, Miranda took in a breath and went on.
“I was alerted to the fact that I was named in his will, but I wasn’t able to make it to Mistletoe until the first of this month to discover why. Imagine my surprise when I arrived, only to be handed the deed to a saloon.”
“That must have been a shock.”
“Believe me, it was.” The earnestness in her wide eyes made him believe far more than just that. “As soon as I had a grasp on the situation and understood that I had to run the saloon or it would close, I sent for my belongings and moved into the apartment in back. I’m still trying to get my bearings and figure out what to do with this wretched place.”
A zip of excitement shot down Randall’s spine. Miranda was far more interesting of a person than he suspected she thought she was. He shifted in his chair, leaned closer to her, and asked, “Why didn’t you just let it close? Why stay and take over?”
Miranda blinked and stared at him. “Because the responsibility was entrusted to me. Because that’s what Uncle Buford wanted.”
Randall shrugged. “You have to admit, it’s highly unusual for a lady such as yourself to tackle something like this. You could have let it go or sold it or washed your hands of the whole thing and gone home.”
Now she blinked rapidly at him, her cheeks going red with something that wasn’t bashfulness or embarrassment. “And you could simply ignore your father’s wishes and pursue whatever career you wanted to instead of bending to his whims.” She spoke forcefully, but as soon as she was done, she pressed her hand to her mouth.
A slow, wry grin spread across Randall’s face. “We’re in the same boat then.” He raised his tea mug, saluted her, then downed the rest of the lukewarm liquid.
Miranda sighed, her shoulders dropping. “I suppose we are, then. Neither of us is free to pursue the path we would prefer.”
For a moment, they sat there in glum silence. Randall would have given anything to be able to take Miranda in his arms to assure her that everything would be all right. The trouble was, everything she had implied was spot-on. He could ignore his father and do what he wanted. The question was, what could that be?
“Well, it looks like it’s gotten dark out there,” he said at length, gripping the side of the table and standing. “I’d better pack up Mendel’s Marvelous Brushes and see if I can’t find a hotel room for the night.”
Miranda rose as well and walked with him to the stage to help him pack his things. “If the hotel can’t take you, I think there’s a boarding house in town.”
Randall nodded. “That might do. I doubt there will be another stagecoach coming through. I can take the next train.”
“There should be one tomorrow.”
Their conversation struck Randall with so much sadness that he moved as if through molasses as he gathered his clothes and packed them back into the secret compartment of his trunk. Miranda gathered the brushes that had ended up scattered throughout the saloon. She returned the errant shaving brush last. As s
he handed it over, their hands touched.
Randall was seized with a jolt of longing more powerful than anything he’d ever felt. He closed his hand around Miranda’s and the brush. Holding his breath, he leaned closer to her, so desperate to kiss her that the air around them sizzled.
But of course he couldn’t kiss her. They may have shared a similar fate, they had even gotten along splendidly in their brief evening together, but Miranda was a respectable woman, a business owner, and he had been raised to be a gentleman. He leaned away.
“Well, goodbye, then.” He let go of her hand.
“G-goodbye,” Miranda whispered. The look of longing in her eyes was so potent that he almost dropped everything and scooped her into his arms. He couldn’t, though. He just couldn’t.
He turned and finished packing his trunk, then shut it and did up all of the fastenings. Next he strode across the room to snatch his coat up from the chair where he’d left it, bundling up. Once that was done, he retrieved his trunk and headed for the door.
“It’s been a true pleasure, Miss Clarke,” he said, smiling at her with his whole heart.
“It has,” she agreed, following him to the door. “If only…”
She let her words drift off into the ether, even though they both continued to stay there, hoping there was something more.
“Well.” It was all Randall could say. He smiled, heart breaking that their association had been so short, and turned to the door.
As he opened it, a fierce blast of icy wind slammed into him. It was a hundred times stronger than the wind that had chased him into the saloon. The flurries of that afternoon had transformed into thick, pelting snowflakes. The strength of the gale, the cold, and the snow was like walking into a wall. In fact, it was so ferocious that he couldn’t walk into it at all. It was all he could do to shut and secure the door.
Winded from ten seconds of effort, Randall put his trunk down and turned to lean against the door. “Well, Miranda, it would seem we have a blizzard on our hands.”
Chapter 3
Wild Western Women Mistletoe, Montana: Sweet Western Historical Holiday Box Set Page 22
