by Lisa Plumley
Frowning, Amelia pushed her forefinger a bit lower. Perhaps it had slid aside—the chain and key were always there. She’d chosen that hiding place specifically for its security. A sense of alarm tightened her stomach, and she swabbed her finger quickly to the other side of her neck. The key wasn’t there.
The next note of her tune died in her throat. How would she deliver her book orders if she couldn’t unlock her J.G. O’Malley & Sons satchels? How would she pay for food and her room at the Palace Hotel, with all her money locked away? A burgeoning sense of despair tightened her throat as she glanced down at the filthy pink rag that passed for her pink Polonaise dress. How would she even change clothes? She could hardly represent her father’s company dressed like this!
A questioning noise from Mason’s direction made her look up. He’d been watching her. His eyebrows lifted, but beneath their overly innocent arch, Amelia recognized a familiar gleam. It was the same light that filled her brothers’ eyes whenever she’d fallen unwarily into one of their pranks. Instinctively, she straightened against the back of the leather-upholstered bench, looking around her as she tried in vain to spot the joke.
“Mmm—mmm?” came Mason’s rumbled inquiry.
She paused, having spotted nothing. “What? What are you trying to say?”
His reply was a nod toward her satchel. Could he possibly know where the key was?
“Do you know what I’m looking for?” she asked him, desperation pushing the question from her lips in spite of the disapproving stares of her fellow passengers. This was no time for pranks or propriety. She had to have that key.
Mason made another indistinguishable sound.
“Can you tell me where it is?” she asked, leaning toward him. He remained silent, but above the gag his dark eyes twinkled at her, warm with amusement. She’d have appreciated it more, had she not been the subject of his good humor.
“Do you really think it’s safe to speak with him, Miss O’Malley?” asked the plump lady to her left. “He appears quite dangerous to me.”
He did to Amelia, too. Without his hat, the outlaw’s thick coffee-colored hair stuck up in aggressive little shafts, and his jaw looked bristly with beard stubble. His broad, muscular body dwarfed those of the men seated beside him. They’d removed his rifle and gun belt, but rather than mellowing his demeanor, the weapons’ absence only made Mason’s natural strength seem twice as prominent. He looked like he could take apart a man with his bare hands—and enjoy the diversion.
“He—he won’t hurt me,” Amelia said. Her fingers fairly itched to remove the gag and hear what the outlaw had to say, but she didn’t dare. Doubtless she’d have a bigger earful than she’d bargained for.
More importantly, she still hoped to keep their fellow passengers from realizing they were together. What if they believed she was the poet bandit’s accomplice, and locked her in jail, too?
“Wave your arms,” she begged Mason. “Maybe I can guess.”
Muffled masculine laughter came from behind the gag.
Amelia felt like shrieking aloud in frustration. Tapping her fingernails against her smooth rubber cloth satchel, she narrowed her eyes at Mason and considered her options. He couldn’t speak unless she ungagged him—and she doubted the other passengers would allow that. And he refused to cooperate by giving her visual clues. Perhaps she could search his person for the key! He was helpless. How would he stop her?
She lowered her satchel to the floor, her heartbeat coming faster as she rose to her feet. The stupefied stares of the other passengers made her knees feel wobbly as she crossed the small distance to the outlaw’s seat. She stopped when her skirts brushed his knees. Sucking in a deep breath to bolster her courage, she shifted her concentration wholly onto Mason.
“This is your last chance,” she told him, wishing her voice sounded stronger, surer, than it did. Bracing her arms on the seat back behind him, Amelia leaned slightly over him in an attempt to keep their conversation private. “If you know what I want,” she said slowly, “please give it to me. Now.”
She wouldn’t have thought it possible, but behind the gag, Mason’s grin grew wider. His gaze dropped to her wilted pink bodice and lower, an intimate sweep that somehow made her feel hot and cold at once. She should have been insulted, Amelia knew—but somehow she didn’t have the will to manage it.
His eyes met hers again. The playfulness that had filled his gaze before vanished, replaced with a hunger so intense she felt it sweep through her like a physical force. Barely leashed, it called to some part of her Amelia had never recognized before. Her breath left her. Mesmerized, she swayed almost imperceptibly closer.
“Mason?” she whispered.
“Good heavens, Miss O’Malley!” cried the dowager, startling Amelia so badly that she nearly toppled into Mason’s lap.
“Get away from that man,” the older woman commanded. “What on earth is he supposed to give you?”
“Well,” she stammered, at a loss to explain, “I, ahh…”
“I think she’s in cahoots with him,” interrupted the dowager’s husband, the same weasel-faced man who’d been shooting at Mason. He leveled his shifty-eyed, suspicious gaze on Amelia. “Ain’t that right, missy?”
“No! I—” Her face turned, automatically, toward the outlaw. He gave her a hard look, his brown eyes burning with some message she couldn’t decipher. What was he trying to tell her?
“I’m no outlaw,” she cried, turning to address her likeliest allies—the women. “My—my stagecoach left me at the roadside by mistake, that’s all, and I, I….” Her voice trailed away. They didn’t believe her, Amelia could tell. She tried another approach. “I didn’t even know him before yesterday!”
“Yesterday?” asked the dowager.
“Please, I only want to get to Tucson and get on with my business,” Amelia said.
“Business?” echoed the plump lady, raising her eyebrows.
Not again, Amelia thought in despair, remembering her earlier stagecoach companions’ reactions to her status as a J.G. O’Malley & Sons book agent. If that episode had taught her anything, it was that a stagecoach was not the place for business discussions.
She adopted her most genteel manner, lowering her head modestly as she grasped two handfuls of her beleaguered pink Polonaise dress. Good upbringing will always show, her father said. His conviction was about to be put to the test. Raising her skirts slightly, Amelia dipped into a brief curtsy.
“Truly,” she asked, “do I look as though I’d cavort with a common criminal?”
Choked laughter came from the men’s side of the stagecoach.
It was silenced with one icy glance from the dowager. Still seated, she raised her chin and, despite the fact that her head came only as high as Amelia’s waist, somehow succeeded in looking down her nose at her. “Cavort, Miss O’Malley?”
For an instant, she couldn’t fathom what was wrong. When it came to her, Amelia clapped her hand over her mouth. Unfortunately, she was too late to recall what she’d said.
“Conspire! I meant, conspire—not cavort.” A hot blush climbed her cheeks. “I—”
“I think we’ve heard all we need to,” said Mr. Dowager.
“This has certainly enlivened our travels,” remarked the man beside him. “It’ll make quite the feature in my newspaper this week.”
“Your newspaper?” squeaked Amelia. She imagined her name emblazoned on whatever western periodical he spoke of, and felt a wave of nausea overtake her. Dear heaven, please let this news remain here, she prayed. If word of a scandal such as this reached her father back in the States, he’d disown her for certain.
“Yes,” the man said, examining her from above his dark handlebar mustache. “John Clum, Arizona Citizen—at your service, ma’am.”
“Oh, no.”
The plump lady examined Amelia with new interest. “Imagine,” she breathed, “a lady bandit!” Not unkindly, she patted Amelia’s hand.
Blindly, Amelia sank into her seat again
.
“Everything will be fine, dear,” the lady said soothingly. “I understand the justice of the peace in Tucson has a kind heart toward females.”
Amelia did not feel comforted. Glancing toward Mason for reassurance, she spotted the one thing that had the ability to make her feel worse than she already did. Winking at her from a gap in the outlaw’s shirt, a tiny bit of gold glinted against Mason’s bare chest. The chain was barely visible amidst the tawny hair curling against his skin, but the item responsible for setting off the whole embarrassing misunderstanding could be seen plainly.
Her satchel key.
With a teasing lift of his eyebrows, Mason grinned behind the gag. “Mmm—mmm?”
Chapter Seven
“I can’t believe they locked me in here with you!” Amelia cried, tossing Mason an accusing glance.
He sighed, leaning as far from her as the chilly crisscrossed iron bars at his back would allow, watching as she paced yet again across the length of their shared cell.
They’d made it as far as Maricopa Wells, about eighty miles northwest of Tucson. Once there, their former stagecoach companions had decided to rid themselves of the troublemakers in their midst. The stationmaster had been only too happy to lock up him and Amelia both, in return for the full bounty he expected to receive.
“It’s not so bad,” Mason said, eyeing their cramped adobe cell.
His attempt to offer comfort earned him a dose of rolled-eyed exasperation from Miss Fancy Pants.
“For a prison,” she shot back. “I don’t belong here.”
Two days in their new accommodations had only ripened Amelia’s sense of outrage at being mistaken for his…consort. Unfortunately, Mason was her sole target until the law saw fit to move them to the jailhouse in Tucson.
He shrugged. “You’re the one who jumped off that stagecoach to go after me, Curly Top. You should’ve gotten away from me when you still could. I reckon you implicated yourself.”
He ran his fingers along the iron bars above his head, stretching the kinks from his back. “Besides, it’s not a prison, it’s a stage station.”
Amelia crossed her arms over her chest. Her gaze followed his fingers’ path. “It’s got cell bars.”
“You’d want cell bars, too, if you were holding a pair of outlaws.”
She cocked her head and raised her eyebrows. Mason felt just ornery enough to ignore her unspoken complaint.
“I’ve seen worse,” he finished blithely, folding his arms and propping them behind his head for support. The flat metal cell bars were wearing permanent dents into his skull. He had to figure out a way to get out of there—and soon.
“You’ve seen worse? When?” she asked. “I thought the poet bandit had never been caught.”
Mason hesitated. “I told you—I’m not who you think I am.”
“Then who are you?” Amelia’s eyes narrowed. “Is your name even Mason at all?”
“I can’t tell you any more now.” He couldn’t risk it, not with so much still at stake. What if she revealed who he really was? In the Territory, hanging was too good for a man accused of murder.
The sheriff’s wanted posters might have reached this far north by now—it was only a matter of time before he was recognized. He’d deal with that when it happened. But Mason would be damned before handing over his name to a woman he couldn’t trust.
He might as well slide the noose over his head himself as confide in a female.
“It’s better if you don’t know,” he told her.
“Hmmph.” She straightened and flounced away from him. “You’re just mad because I’m your only captive who ever escaped,” she announced, examining her fingernails with a seeming utter lack of interest in his reply.
“Captive?”
“That’s right, captive. Prisoner, hostage…”
“I know what the word means.”
She smiled, fleetingly. “Call it what you like,” she told him with a carefree flutter of her fingers. “I escaped through cunning and bravery, just like the heroine of a novel—”
Mason tried to suppress a burst of laughter and failed.
“—and it hurts your masculine pride to admit it.”
“I admit nothing.”
Except that Curly Top was right about one thing—the Maricopa Wells stage station was very much like a jail. The place was well-fortified as a presidio, with thick outside walls that squatted squarely around the inner buildings. Those adobe walls served as well to keep prisoners in as they did to keep hostile Indians out. Even if he managed to get out of the damned cell, there’d still be the walls to overcome.
“Ha!” Amelia beamed triumphantly, as though his silence meant he agreed with her. Pacing again, she amused herself with some addle-headed talk about his masculine pride. All of a sudden, though, Mason didn’t have the gumption to spar with her.
With a change of horses—and luck in stealing a mount to begin with—the Maricopa Wells station was only two days’ ride north of Tucson. But it felt a hundred times as far.
Not knowing where the Sharpes had taken his son had been bad enough. Knowing where Ben was and being wholly unable to go to him was worse. He had to find a way to get out.
“And anyway, I’m no outlaw. It’s as plain as that,” Amelia muttered, abandoning her attack on his manhood for a fresh tour of their cell and a loudly hummed hymn.
Mason would swear the woman knew nothing but church music. If they ever got out, he was sorely tempted to teach her a saloon song or two. If folks had to be subjected to her constant prattling, at least they deserved some variety.
She traveled past both metal cots, kicking up puffs of dirt beneath her high-laced shoes as she went. Theirs were rudimentary accommodations, at best, designed for temporarily holding hostile Apache prisoners—or road agents like they were assumed to be.
Curly Top had been allowed a bath and a change into a borrowed blue-checked dress, but he’d been unshackled only for meals. His wrists were already rubbed raw from the bindings.
“And I’m not an outlaw’s consort, either!” Amelia added, darting a glance at him from beneath her bangs.
“I told them that,” Mason told her, shrugging. Keeping his back to the bars, he stretched his legs along the hard metal cot. “They didn’t believe me.”
“Of course not!” She whirled on him, the ruffled edge of her dress swinging fast as the change in her mood. “I don’t know why I ever believed you, either,” she went on, her mouth suddenly wobbling with suppressed tears. “I thought you were a gentleman. I—I thought you’d never hurt anyone in your robberies, so why was that man shooting at you? I trusted you, and now, now…”
With a faint cry she pressed her knuckles to her lips and turned away from him, leaving her words unfinished. A moment later, faint sniffling reached him from her corner of their cell. Her shoulders quivered beneath her too-large borrowed dress.
Mason couldn’t keep up. One minute she was arguing with him like a drunk staring down the neck of his last whiskey bottle, and the next she was blubbering like a little girl. He didn’t know how to help her, and he hated it.
“That kind of trusting can get you into trouble, Curly Top.”
She turned back, her eyes large and luminous in the meager daylight that fought its way through the bars of their cell’s single window.
“You mean trusting you can get me into trouble.”
Silence filled the space between them.
Did he? Mason thought of Ellen’s trust in him, thought of his failure to reclaim his son, and couldn’t reply. One look at Amelia’s straight-backed, defensive stance told him more than her words ever could. She’d already lost whatever belief in him she’d found. Now she feared him, too—feared the reprisal her words would earn her.
Shaking off the doubt those words aroused, Mason said the only thing he could think of that might protect her from greater hurt later. “Trust me? I never said I was anything but an outlaw,” he replied harshly. “Forget what I am at your per
il.”
She raised her head, tears turning her eyes a brighter blue. “How could I forget,” she asked, “when we’re locked up together in…in here?”
Her outflung arm took in their cell’s rough adobe walls, packed-earth floor, and crude black iron bars. Her fist balled against her skirt, marking an uneven beat. “I—I just never imagined—”
She was scared, he realized with some amazement. In the time he’d known her, Amelia had seemed snooty, bossy, sometimes foolish—and foolhardy—but never scared. Until now.
“Come here.” Mason swung his legs from the cot, making a place for her, then levered himself into a sitting position. He nodded toward the place beside him.
“No.”
Amelia shook her head, appeared to reconsider, then crossed her arms beneath her breasts decisively. The motion pushed her breasts high and closer together, rounding them beneath her borrowed dress in a way Mason couldn’t help but notice. He tried to focus on something else, and failed.
“No!” she said again, raising her chin slightly. “Why would I want comfort from you anyway? It’s your fault I’m here in the first place.”
Biting back the harsh reply that rose to his lips, he gentled his tone instead. “If not for me, you wouldn’t know what that kind of comfort was like.”
She started to reply, then snapped her mouth closed.
“Come here, Amy,” he said softly. “We’re not enemies.”
Suddenly, the air felt charged around him. All at once, the most important thing in the world was that she come to him. He could protect her, dammit! She was a frightened woman and he was a man, a man who could take care of her until they got free. He only needed a chance to show her. Mason tamped down his impatience, waiting as Amelia made her decision.
She moved a step closer. Warily, she glanced up at him from beneath her eyelashes. He saw a tremor pass through her, quick as lightning in a summer storm, and knew she was deciding on more than a place to rest. Anticipation quickened his heartbeat. He raised his hand to reassure her—and the chains binding him clanked quietly against the metal cot.
Mason closed his eyes against the anger that surged through him. Helpless! He was helpless as hell here, no good to himself, or Amelia…or his child. Was Ben still in Tucson with the Sharpe brothers, or had they moved on already?
