by Laurie Grant
It seemed he’d been asleep only moments when he woke to feel someone shaking him awake.
He had his hand on the gun he always left by his right hand and was cocking it even before he managed to get his eyes open. Then, as he was struggling to focus his gaze on whoever was bent over him, his nose identified the scent of roses.
“Lord, Duchess,” he muttered, now recognizing the woman who knelt by his bed. “You don’t know how close I came to shooting you.” He was angry at himself for falling so deeply asleep.
“Sh, Morgan,” she whispered, her breath whisper soft on his face. “I don’t want to wake the others.”
“What’s up?” he said, instantly alert. Had she found some proof that her uncle was indeed the man behind the threats? Was she looking to escape?
But no, she was smiling, and even in the dim light of the lamp she’d lit and left with its wick barely showing, he could see the mischief dancing in her blue eyes. She was wearing a dark-colored riding habit, and her golden hair was coiled under one of those charming but useless bits of fabric she called a hat.
“We’re going riding, and I don’t want the others—especially my uncle, who can be a bit of a worrier, you know—to know till we’ve gone,” she added with a wink. “They’ll just come up with all sorts of reasons why we shouldn’t go, or why we should wait until my uncle and half a dozen others can join us, and I’ve no wish for a large party. I just want to go for a gallop on my mare. I’ve nothing scheduled today, so it won’t matter if we’re gone for hours! We’ll leave a note, of course,” she said as Morgan frowned and opened his mouth.
“But Duchess—”
“But nothing. You promised me yesterday, remember? I very much need to get out into the fresh air—especially after what happened last night Besides, the horses are all ready—I told Ben what we’d be doing. And I managed to leave a note yesterday for the kitchen staff without any of my people seeing it, requesting a picnic lunch for two be ready in the stable at dawn. So you see,” she said as she sat back on her heels, grinning, “it’s all arranged. All you have to do is get dressed.”
Morgan started to protest that he hadn’t promised her they would go for a ride, he’d said he wanted to think about it, but he could see it was about as much use as arguing with a Texas twister. Besides, if he got the duchess off by herself, it would be easier to tell her about the poisoned hog and the French cook’s disappearance. And once he got her attention with those facts, maybe he could even persuade the headstrong lady that her uncle was the most logical person behind the threats, and that she needed to get away from him. Lord, he hoped that groom of hers wasn’t in on the plot, since she’d taken him into her confidence about the ride. Just to be on the safe side, he’d lie to the crusty old groom about where they were going.
Morgan sat up, rubbing a hand ruefully through his bedrumpled hair and over his beard-roughened cheeks, all too aware that he was wearing only a union suit beneath the sheet. “I need a shave.”
“No, you don’t,” she insisted. “The horses won’t care, and if you start clattering about with your shaving mug and getting water and everything, the others will wake. Besides,” she said, running a hand playfully over his chin and pretending to wince when she encountered his bristliness, “you look like a desperado. Surely no one we meet would dream of molesting me with a tough hombre like you along.”
If you only knew just what a desperado you’re talking to. “You’ve been readin’ too many of those silly novels, Duchess,” he said, turning his back to her as he stood so she wouldn’t see how her nearness, her touch and the scent of roses that clung to her had affected him physically. “Now, go on back into your room for a few minutes so I can get dressed.”
They rode steadily westward out of Denver, away from the rising sun. He’d let the duchess and her bay mare with that ridiculously fancy name have their gallop for a few minutes, keeping pace on Rio until the kinks and the deviltry had been run out of the horses. He didn’t know how any woman managed to stay on a galloping horse when riding sidesaddle, but he had to admit Sarah Challoner was an excellent horsewoman. She managed the spirited mare with ease, even when Trafalgar had tried to unseat her mistress with some unexpected crowhops.
Clearly Rio found the leggy thoroughbred mare as entrancing as Morgan secretly found Sarah Challoner, but when the pinto stallion got too friendly, Trafalgar made it clear with a few kicks in his direction that she was not interested. Rio seemed to take his rejection in stride, however, and soon the horses were walking amicably along together, tails swishing in unison.
Though Morgan had said it would be hard to protect her out in the open, he’d felt his anxiety about the duchess’s safety lessening more and more as they got farther away from Denver and any signs of human habitation. Here there was nothing but buffalo grass and the occasional cottonwood tree. They saw rabbits and a couple of groundhogs, and once, a skunk went ambling away from them through the tall grass.
Then, as they reached the beginning of the foothills, the inclining, rock-strewn path into the pines narrowed, and they had to ride single file. Morgan led the way, constantly scrutinizing their surroundings in all directions. He heard the duchess humming, and while he didn’t recognize the tune, the melody was in perfect harmony with the sunshine and crisp air.
Finally, when the sun was high in the sky, they reined in their mounts on a level rise, and decided to eat their picnic there. It was a good open spot, where anyone or anything approaching them could be seen a mile away Dismounting, Morgan could see the town nestled on the plain below, with the silvery ribbon that was the South Platte River winding through the middle of it.
“It looks like a toy village, doesn’t it?” he commented, pointing, after the duchess had dismounted. “Hard to imagine anyone down there could want to harm anyone.”
She made some noncommittal remark, staring blankly in the direction his finger indicated. For a moment he thought the second thing he’d said had upset her by reminding her of the danger she faced, but then he realized what the problem was. “You can’t see what I’m seein’, can you, Duchess?”
Slowly she shook her head in chagrin. “No, I’m afraid not It’s just a soft blur.”
“Then why don’t you put on your spectacles?” he asked, mystified.
She looked away. “Vanity is such a stupid sin, is it not?”
“Duchess, do you mean to tell me you care more about how you look than seeing where you’re going? Does this mean you couldn’t see all the pretty scenery we passed all the way up here?”
She shook her head at that last question. “Not exactly. Actually, I can see things fairly well if they’re within oh, say, six feet or so, like that tall evergreen over there. So I have enjoyed the beauty around me—”
“Did you even bring your spectacles with you?”
She nodded, her face wary, but made no move to bring them out.
He made an exasperated sound. “Duchess, don’t you even want to know if that fine mare of yours is about to put her hoof in a gopher hole?”
She paled at that. “Oh! You’re right, of course,” she said. “From now on I shall wear them when riding.” She reached into the breast pocket of her riding habit and put them on, coloring a little as she did so. For a moment she stared silently at the scene below, then she turned to him, the glass slightly accentuating blue eyes that looked suspiciously moist. “I know you don’t understand this, Morgan—I know I must seem a vain and silly creature to you, but... just feel like such a bluestocking, so awkward and ugly when I’m wearing these things!”
He stared at her, hardly able to believe what he was hearing. The gloriously golden, beautiful woman before him thought anything so minor as putting spectacles on could make her ugly? “Ma‘am, I don’t know what a bluestocking is, but no, ma’am, you’ve got it all wrong, if that’s what you think,” he said, before he could wonder if what he was saying was too forward for a bodyguard to be expressing to his employer. “You’re way too pretty for a little bit
o’ wire an’ glass to make you ugly.”
She blinked. “You’re...you’re very kind, Morgan.”
“I’m just tellin’ the truth, Duchess.”
For a long moment they just stared at each other, awareness humming between them. Then she said, “Shall we unpack our luncheon? All this fresh air makes me rather hungry. And what shall I do with Trafalgar, tie her to a tree? I’m afraid she isn’t trained as yours is,” she added, referring to the fact that Morgan had just dropped the reins over his mount’s head when he dismounted, “ground-tying” him.
“I have some hobbles,” Morgan said, reaching in his saddlebags for the pair of attached, braided-leather loops that encircled a horse’s fetlocks and kept it from straying too far.
After hobbling the mare, he helped spread the large checked cloth out over the grass and then helped the duchess unpack the food. The cook at the Grand Central had sent cold chicken, biscuits, an apple pie, cheese and a corked bottle of wine—though she had apparently forgotten they would need a corkscrew for the wine. Sarah stared at the bottle, crestfallen. “I suppose we can always wash the food down with the water in your canteen....”
“Don’t give up yet,” Morgan told her with a grin, charmed by the way an errant breeze had loosed several strands of her chignon. Now those golden tendrils caressed her neck—as he’d like his lips to be doing, he realized with an inner groan. He reached inside one of his boots and brought out the knife he always carried with him.
He saw her eyes widen at the sight, then went to work trying to impale the cork on the narrow knife blade.
To his dismay, the best he managed to do was push the cork down into the wine, but she just laughed as she saw the cork bobbing around in it. “Don’t worry, it’ll taste just fine,” she said as she held out her glass. Then she waited, and finally said, “Aren’t you going to have some, Morgan?”
“Um...maybe I’d better just drink the water, Duchess,” he muttered. Wine was just what he didn’t need, out here alone with the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
“Don’t be silly,” she said, shrugging out of her riding jacket and leaning back on her elbows, so that her starched white blouse gleamed in the sun. “Unless you’re abstaining for...ah...religious reasons? There’s a whole bottle here, and we might as well not let it go to waste. We shan’t be able to bring what’s left back with us, now that we can’t use the cork anymore.”
He had to smile at the idea of himself abstaining for religious reasons. The abstinence pledge he had taken at the Baptist church as a youth seemed a century ago.
“All right, Duchess, I reckon I’ll have a little, then.” But you’ve already gone to my head.
Chapter Ten
“I vow I cannot eat another morsel!” Sarah said, falling back on her extended elbows in mock exhaustion. Thank God Celia had not been awake to insist she wear a corset! She’d long ago taken her spectacles off, feeling no need to see anything beyond Morgan.
“It’s good to see a woman enjoy her food, not just peck at it like a little bird,” Morgan countered with a grin.
“Enjoying one’s food is one thing, devouring it like a plowman is quite another,” she informed him, trying to sound prim and failing utterly. It was too glorious a day, and she was too happy to be out in the fresh air with the sun beating down on her back, alone with this dangerously attractive American man, for her primness to be convincing.
Morgan had relaxed, too, his face losing its expression of constant, wary vigilance. He looked open, approachable, and, despite the night’s growth of beard shadowing his cheeks, too damnably appealing to a woman who was supposed to be in love with another man.
Somehow she couldn’t manage to condemn herself at the moment, though, for her fascination with Morgan Calhoun. Maybe the wine had exacerbated the feeling. She probably ought not to drink any more of it. But whether she was tipsy or not, right now her “understanding” with Thierry seemed a distant, unreal thing....
“There’s more pie,” Morgan observed, mischief dancing in his green eyes. He had taken his pistol out of its holster and laid it on a rock within arm’s reach, and was lying on his side as he polished off the last chicken leg. All Morgan needed was a laurel wreath on his head and a toga on that long, lean body, and he could pass for a Roman senator rechning at the banquet, she decided, and chuckled at the thought.
“What’s so funny?”
She couldn’t very well tell him what she had been imagining, so she said, “Oh, nothing...everything. It’s just so...liberating to be up here so far away from schedules and protocol and Uncle Frederick’s nagging.” And those threatening messages, she wanted to add, but she didn’t want to spoil the pleasant day by mentioning it. Besides, she could see by the shadow that flitted across his eyes that he had the same thought, and she silently blessed him for not saying it either.
“Duchess, you haven’t said—where does your tour take us after Denver?” Morgan asked.
She smiled, grateful for his implied promise to continue as her bodyguard for the rest of the tour. “When we leave Denver in three days, I’d planned to take advantage of the new transcontinental railroad to go to California, see the Pacific and San Francisco and so forth, and then travel back through Arizona and New Mexico Territories—I’m particularly eager to see Santa Fe,” she said, thinking of her planned rendezvous with Thierry in that city. “Then we’ll just travel overland until we can connect with a railroad that will take us into Texas.”
He was thoughtful. “Well, Duchess, that last part might be a tad difficult. You have to understand that the War between the States slowed down railroad buildin’ in Texas. Maybe it would be best to take the train all the way back east from California, ’cause I don’t think there’s a railroad connection close enough to New Mexico to do you any good.”
“Oh, but I couldn’t leave without seeing Santa Fe! I’ve heard so much about it—isn’t it supposed to be one of the oldest cities in your country? Besides, our plans are all set to sail from Galveston.”
He shrugged. “Okay, but you’re probably going to have to take a stagecoach clear from California into Texas. That’ll sure be a long, uncomfortable trip,” he warned her.
“I’d have to hire the entire vehicle, of course, since there are five of us,” she mused. “Lord, the thought of traveling in such a confined space with Uncle Frederick for long distances!” She shuddered, then had another thought. “But I needn’t stay inside the coach the entire day—I could spend much of it riding alongside the coach on Trafalgar.”
His face was skeptical. “You haven’t seen the country, Duchess. It’s rocky and dry, and frequently hilly. I really don’t know if a highbred horse like your mare is up to it....”
“But Trafalgar has wonderful endurance!” she protested, stung at the thought that he was criticizing her beloved thoroughbred. “She’s carried me over fences all day when we foxhunt! I’ll make sure she’s freshly shod, and we’ll carry oats for her—she’ll be fine, you’ll see!”
“This trip isn’t a foxhunt,” he told her bluntly. “It’s wild country, full of Indians and outlaws, as well as four-legged varmints like cougars. Even a train trip isn’t without hazards, but if you’re determined to leave the rails, I’m going to insist you hire half a dozen other well-armed men—”
“You’re going to insist?” she repeated coolly, arching a brow in her best haughty-duchess fashion.
He didn’t seem the least intimidated by her hauteur. “Yeah, I’m gonna insist,” he repeated, “or we’ll part company at the train tracks. It’d be plumb foolish to head across such country with only me to protect you and your party. And if you plan to ride part of the way, you’d be smart to trade that ladylike sidesaddle in on a stock saddle and ride astride.”
“Ride astride? Uncle Frederick would be scandalized,” she said with a grin, trying to lighten a conversation that had become too deadly serious.
“And you’d be smarter still to stick that pretty yellow hair of yours under a hat,” h
e persisted.
“Oh? And why is that?” Sarah demanded, tiring of the steely authority in his tone. She disliked being the novice in anything.
“Because Indians especially prize yellow hair,” he told her plainly. “They’d love to have you as a captive, or maybe they’d just take your scalp.”
“I believe you’re trying to scare me, Mr. Calhoun,” she remarked, keeping her voice light, unwilling to reveal just how much his words truly had frightened her.
He surprised her by saying, “Maybe I am, Duchess, but I haven’t exaggerated a thing. I want you to realize this isn’t gonna be some carefree jaunt across a big park like I think you’re picturing.”
Then she remembered all the times he had been right about things. This was his country, not hers, after all, and he was bound to know the realities of the terrain better than she. As much as she disliked being told what to do, she reminded herself she was paying him to keep her safe, so it would be wise to heed his advice.
“All right,” she said stiffly, looking out over the valley below so she wouldn’t have to see the triumph in his green eyes. “When we leave the train, I will be guided by what you say.”
“You look a mite riled, Duchess,” he said.
“I? Of course I’m not riled, Mr. Calhoun,” she insisted, damning those all-seeing green eyes. “I merely dislike playing the ingenue.”
He looked puzzled. “If that’s the same as bein’ a tenderfoot, heck, you can’t help it. We’re all new at something. Why, can you imagine me meetin’ the queen of England? Reckon I’d look right silly doin’ that, ’less someone told me how to go about doin’ it proper.”
She couldn’t suppress an unduchesslike hoot of laughter at the image of Morgan Calhoun, dressed like a Western desperado, being presented to the plump monarch at court. Victoria would faint dead away with shock when Morgan offered her his hand instead of bowing to her—if she hadn’t already swooned just from the sight of him!
