by Lisa Plumley
Looking aghast at his revelation, Julia snatched back the paper. She folded it in half, then folded it again and again, muttering a string of apologies. “Oh! Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Corley. I never guessed—I mean, you seem so…well. Well.”
Silence descended. Graham couldn’t stand it. “I can still find your damned fiancé for you,” he said, driven to make the offer by the utter dismay that had clouded her delicate features. “I’m good at what I do. Ask anyone.”
“I know you are. That’s part of the reason I chose you.”
This was more like it. “Never lost track of a man I was after. Or a woman, for that matter.”
“Oh, I’m sure you haven’t,” she agreed, nodding.
Clasping her hands behind her back in a prim gesture, Julia marched to the window and looked outside. Outlined in sunlight and blue skies, her figure looked womanly enough to warm a man for all his days…and all his nights, too. Graham couldn’t help admiring the sweet side-to-side swoosh of her skirts as she paced nearer to him again.
She paused before him with a decisive tilt to her chin. “But I don’t want to hire you to find someone,” she said.
“You don’t?”
“No.”
Graham watched as she opened her reticule and tucked the folded paper inside it. For a woman who’d just given up on the man she had hoped to snare into wedlock, Julia Bennett seemed remarkably serene. “What about your fiancé?” he felt compelled to ask.
“I’ve already found him.” At his doubtlessly confused expression, she actually laughed. “From the moment I saw him, I knew he’d suit perfectly. Or, that at least he could be made to suit perfectly. It’s you, Mr. Corley.”
“Me?” He rubbed his jaw in aggravation. “What about me? I already told you, I’m headed out of town this after—”
“Why, I want to hire you, of course,” Julia interrupted, looking far too much like a cat with cream to suit Graham’s peace of mind. “To be my fiancé. And I’d like to get started right away, too. That’s why privacy was required.”
Privacy. At her softly spoken explanation, a dozen ribald thoughts chased themselves through his mind, doing more to spark his blood than anything had in months. Maybe years. Maybe a lifetime.
It was worse than he’d imagined. Graham shook his head to clear it. Unfortunately, the motion did nothing to dislodge the sense that he’d gotten in over his head this time—and there were thunderous rapids and a waterfall further on down the line.
Beside him, Julia smiled brightly. Now that she’d finally gotten her proposition said and out of the way, she seemed visibly cheered.
“Shall we shake hands on the deal?” she inquired. “Or will my word be good enough for you?”
Chapter Four
Graham shook his head. Either his brains had been scrambled by all the whiskey and five-card stud he’d indulged in over the past three days, or Miss Julia Bennett had actually suggested she needed to hire a fiancé.
More specifically, needed to hire him as her fiancé.
Standing before him still, she awaited his reply, her gloved hand outstretched as though he might actually agree to shake on her preposterous proposal. She’d cocked her head at an expectant angle, putting her hat at serious risk of toppling sideways, and to all appearances, Miss Julia Bennett meant what she’d said.
Why, I want to hire you, of course. To be my fiancé.
To cover his befuddlement at this unexpected turn of events, Graham gave her a grin. “I’d say a woman like you, Miss Bennett, could have her pick of fiancés.” So long as they didn’t mind being jawed to death with conversation. “Why hire yourself one?”
Impatience flashed across her features—that, and something that looked an awful lot like…embarrassment?
“It’s expedient, Mr. Corley,” she said, as though a rapid answer could erase the vulnerability that had showed, so briefly, in her face. “A modern woman deliberates, makes a reasoned assessment and then acts accordingly. I see no reason why matters of the heart should be conducted any differently, or any less rationally.”
Graham folded his arms and looked her up and down. “A rational person generally chooses a fiancé she’s acquainted with.”
“This is a special situation.” She lowered her hand, evidently sensing he wasn’t ready to seal their deal. “Requiring special measures.”
“I see.” No, he didn’t. “But why hire a stranger for a fiancé? There must be dozens of unmarried men in Avalanche.”
“None who’ll have me,” he thought he heard her mutter as she moved past him toward the window. “Blast it!”
Graham blinked. He couldn’t have heard aright, that much was plain. He decided so when he looked at her again, and saw that Julia had fisted her hand in her skirts. With her back straight and her chin lifted, she looked every inch the ruffle-clad warrior princess going into battle. A woman like that would not admit a weakness of any sort. He had to admire her spirit, even as he wondered at her motives.
“Besides, I don’t want a genuine fiancé,” she explained.
“Now there’s a relief,” Graham said, even more confused than before.
“What I want is a seeming fiancé—”
“A pretend fiancé. A counterfeit.”
She ignored the plain face he’d put on her plan. “Someone who can make my father believe he’s wild with love for me.” At this she blushed, but continued on, nonetheless. “Someone biddable, temporary and eager to leave town once this is all over with. You fit the bill on all three accounts, Mr. Corley.”
“Biddable?” He couldn’t help but grin at the un-likeliness of it.
“Hirable, at least,” Julia amended. When she turned from the window to face him straight on, he saw an answering smile on her pretty, lively face. “And who could be more temporary than a bounty hunter who, by his own admission, can’t wait to leave Avalanche? As I said in the park, you’re ideal.”
“True as that may be—” Graham delighted in her open-mouthed expression as he agreed with her assessment of him as an ideal man “—your telling me what kind of bogus fiancé you want doesn’t explain why you need a sham engagement in the first place.”
It also didn’t explain why he cared at all, why he hadn’t already pulled foot for a less complicated town, inhabited by less mystifying women. Frankie would have said ’twas Fate that kept him here…but then she’d always had a touch of the fanciful in her, despite the circumstances of their growing up. Graham had known better. Almost from the start.
Julia sighed. Her gaze measured him, examined him, and in her face he saw the same kind of quick-mindedness that helped him nab slippery desperadoes time and again. Perhaps they had more in common than he’d thought, he and Miss Julia.
“Very well,” she said briskly. “I can see you’re a man of exceptional perceptiveness. I suppose I owe a man of your powers of deduction a tad more explanation.”
He tried not to smile anew at her praise. ’Twas uncommonly hard to resist, Graham discovered to his dismay. He wanted to smile at her…wanted to see her smile at him, in return.
Had so little time in domesticated, family-packed Avalanche softened him as much as that? Or was it something in Julia herself that made him think such mush-hearted thoughts?
“The truth is,” Julia continued, not looking at him as she fiddled with her reticule, “I have an urgent need to travel East in approximately one month’s time. I’m recently returned from attending college in the States—”
“Ahh, that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Your highfalutin’ ways. I understand higher learning sometimes affects females that way. Makes ’em uppity. Understandable, really,” Graham said, “given the way education crams a woman’s head with information she can’t put to use.”
“I’m a Vassar alumnus, yes.” Her voice had suddenly filled with starch. “And given the urgency of my situation, I’ll have to let your woefully misguided views on the subject of women’s education go unchallenged
for now.”
“Misguided?” He liked sparring with her, Graham decided. Liked witnessing the swift workings of her mind and hearing the remarkable things she said. “Says who?”
She didn’t rise to the bait. “I’d rather not discuss it.” Primly, Julia went on explaining. “My father worries about me. He refuses to allow me to revisit the East unless I’m accompanied by a husband—one who loves me completely. One who, furthermore, fully supports my professional aspirations in New York City. That’s why I need…someone like you.”
Graham let the subject of “loving her completely” rest for now, intriguing as it was. “Professional aspirations?”
She stiffened still further, as though his simple question insinuated something very different. “I have an opportunity to be hired as an etiquette columnist at Beadle’s Magazine. It’s something I’ve worked toward for years now.”
Etiquette columnist. He shuddered. “And?”
“And I won’t be able to accept unless my father believes I’ve found a husband in time to make the trip. Thus, my need for a fiancé to set things in motion.”
Her expression earnest, Julia came closer. Evidently, her desperation to hie herself off, to New York City, of all places, overrode both her etiquette training and her wariness of him.
“It won’t be a real marriage, if it comes to that. We can obtain an annulment the minute we leave Avalanche. And I can pay you well for your trouble. My mother’s legacy was substantial. I’m sure that—”
“I don’t need money.”
She snapped her mouth closed, but not before her gaze whipped over his much-mended clothes and disreputable-looking boots, lingering just long enough to put his dander up.
“And I don’t have any interest,” Graham continued, frowning over her continued skepticism about the state of his finances, “in being any woman’s fiancé—or, God forbid, her lapdog husband—at her beck and call for even so little as a month.”
At that, Julia snorted. Graham raised an eyebrow.
“As though,” she said, looking not the least bit abashed at having emitted such an unladylike sound, “anyone could expect that of you. Why, you must be the least malleable man I’ve ever met.”
Paradoxically, her observation made him feel slightly more agreeable. Mold me, he thought, distracted again by thoughts of her hands against his skin, her touch gentle as the kiss of rain on the parched desert ground. Let me show you how amenable I can be.
“And as for that lapdog nonsense you mentioned—” she must have glimpsed the heat in his gaze, because her eyes widened and she stepped backward again “—well, pish posh. I’m sure I won’t be requiring your services in such a manner.”
“You won’t?”
“Certainly not.”
But she sounded uncertain, even intrigued, by the intimacies her scheme suggested. And despite himself, Graham was, too.
“I can be persuaded, even made a bit more malleable,” he told her, quietly. Unable to resist, he raised her hand from her skirts and clasped its gloved softness in his. Looking into her eyes, he rubbed his thumb over the expensive kid that kept their bare skin from touching. “And I understand a bargain as well as the next man. What I can’t see is what I stand to gain from this scheme.”
Julia’s mouth opened, then closed again as she visibly struggled for words. Her gaze swerved from his face to their joined hands, then skittered away to the cast-off furnishings surrounding them. “Money. You stand to gain money, as I’ve said.”
“Not interested.” And those prissy gloves of hers had separated them long enough, Graham decided. He worked the first button through its loop, already anticipating the warmth of her skin against his. Unbelievably, she didn’t stop him.
“Favorable mention,” Julia said rapidly, “once I’m ensconced at Beadle’s? It’s quite a popular periodical. The publicity might well improve your hiring rate.”
Graham shook his head and freed another two pearl buttons. “I have all the work I want. When I want it.”
She trembled in his grasp, but gamely continued to bargain. “The satisfaction of having aided a lady in need? Even a rogue such as yourself must—”
“Ahhh.” His smile widened. Another button came free, exposing a tender glimpse of bare skin. “My reputation does precede me, then. Graham Corley…bounty hunter by trade, rogue by reputation, drifter by choice.”
Squirming, whether with frustration at her bargaining gone awry or something sultrier, Julia gave a frustrated sound. “There must be something you want!”
Graham paused. With utmost care, he slipped away her glove and set to work on its mate. When it, too, was tugged from her hand, Julia released a pent-up breath. Shakily, she grabbed for her gloves, and came up empty when Graham tucked them playfully behind his back.
“There is something I want,” he said. Looking down, he thought he saw defiance whisk over her features…defiance, and a hint of curiosity, too. “Something I’ve wanted for a very long time. And this seems just the opportunity to get it.”
Thoughtfully, he rubbed his fingers over the gloves he’d captured. Somehow, they seemed to symbolize the differences between them…Julia, so refined and pure. He, so rugged and careworn. After a moment, Graham fisted the gloves in his hand, and felt the pliant leather yield to his strength—the same way Miss Julia Bennett would yield, if he had his way, to all that he wanted.
She simply didn’t realize it yet.
Truth was, Julia was too busy believing she had the upper hand to allow anything else to interfere. Graham meant to turn their dealings onto a more even footing. Now, or later. He was a patient man.
“What is it?” she asked, her voice betraying not so much as a quaver. “What do you want?”
“If you give it to me, I’ll agree to your fiancé scheme—even a sham marriage,” Graham told her. “For up to a month.”
The fact that they would be deceiving the towns-people and, most importantly, her father, bothered him. But not enough to change his course and not enough to still the idea that had taken hold inside him. Graham couldn’t let himself be swayed by other people’s foolishness. He’d been on the road too long now, depending only on himself, to believe otherwise. And if Asa Bennett didn’t already realize what a schemer he had for a daughter, he deserved his fate.
“A month should be enough time,” Julia said. “That’s the term stipulated in the, um, er—” She broke off, gesturing awkwardly toward her reticule, where she’d stowed the multi-folded hiring agreement Graham hadn’t been able to read. “That’s what I was hoping for. But what do you want in return?”
She bit her lip, awaiting his reply. Graham leaned closer, the better to give his answer in the privacy it deserved.
“’Tis simple,” he said. “I want you to teach me to read.”
Bewitched by the enraptured look on the bounty hunter’s face and feeling at a decided loss without the safe barrier of her gloves, Julia didn’t fully understand what he’d proposed at first. Once she did, her first sensation was one of disappointment…disappointment that Mr. Corley hadn’t touched her since removing her six-button French kid gloves, and dismay that she craved such personal contact at all. It was wildly improper, and decidedly unlike her.
“Oh!” she cried, desperate to seem as though she hadn’t just been lost in a world of completely inappropriate desires. “Teach you to read, you say?”
“Yes.”
His dangerous blue gaze dared her to ridicule his request. With her heart still thumping from her recent glove-removing adventure, Julia found she didn’t have the strength to do so, much less the will. Against all reason, she liked Graham Corley. Liked his straightforward manner, his easy way with a smile, his surprising perceptiveness.
She might have liked the tumultuous feeling being close to him gave her, as well…had it not reminded her so powerfully that becoming smitten with a man had ended many a woman’s ambitions toward greater things. Being in the city at college had been the most at home Julia had ever felt.
There, she’d belonged. In Avalanche, she did not. And there was no power on Earth strong enough to convince her to rusticate here. Not while an avenue away remained open to her.
“I’d be delighted to,” she told Mr. Corley, and it was true. She’d enjoy a chance to help him. “I fancy myself a passing fair teacher and you seem a quick learner.”
His devil-may-care smile flashed again. This time it made her weak in the knees.
“I usually get by well enough,” he said, “with the few words I’ve picked up here and there, from Wanted posters and saloon signs and letters from Fr—”
Graham stopped, making her wonder what he’d been about to say. Letters from Frances? Frederica? Did he have someone special in his life already? The notion bothered Julia more than she wished.
No, never mind if he’d already given his drifter’s heart to another, she told herself sternly. It wasn’t his heart she wanted, was it? It was the appearance of devotion, a seeming fiancé, that she was after. That would have to be enough.
No matter how much she might yearn for more, herself, someday. From someone…
“When that fails,” Graham went on, as though he’d never faltered at all, “most towns have someone willing to read letters and contracts or scribe correspondence for a fee. Often the saloon owners or barkeeps. I get on well enough.”
“But it’s not enough,” Julia said, sensing that much.
He shook his head, his unruly dark hair brushing the tops of his shoulders. “Not nearly enough,” he said, his voice suddenly raw.
As though he couldn’t bear to discuss such things without some action to deflect the feelings they aroused, Graham turned away. Purposefully, he began moving the dusty crates, clearing a space amongst them.
“I want to read a newspaper,” he said as he worked. “To get lost in a book. To know the worlds that have been denied to me.” His hands fisted on the box of discarded patent medicine bottles he held, and Graham stared fixedly at their varied shapes. “I will be good as any man, or die trying.”
