by Cat Cahill
Thomas couldn’t take his eyes off her, and she hadn’t even noticed him.
Eventually he realized he must look a fool, standing there, covered in sawdust, water dripping down his shirt, and staring at this girl who looked as if she’d blown in on the breeze. He shook his head and clamped the worn brown hat back on it.
The shelving. He needed to get back to this project, or else McFarland would have no use for him.
Rather than waste the wood he’d already worked with, he decided to trim off the notches on each piece and try again. This one could be a smaller shelf to hang just inside the door for those items used most often. He began to saw into the wood, letting the misshapen notches he’d made earlier fall to the ground.
“Pardon me.” A higher-pitched voice sounded over the grind of metal through wood. “Pardon me!” it said again as he yanked the saw through the last bit of wood.
He looked up, knowing exactly whom he’d find in front of him.
And he wasn’t wrong.
The petite blonde girl stood in front of him, one hand on her hip, the other one holding out a delicate glass. She wore the soft gray dress and white apron that all the Gilbert Girls wore under a black cloak, and a small, matching gray hat perched on her head.
“Good morning, miss,” he said as he pulled off his hat and ran a hand over his wet hair. His words were smooth, but his heart leapt in a strange way to see her this close to him.
“Good morning,” she said shortly. “Would you mind terribly if I asked you to relocate your . . . woodworking?”
She looked a bit ruffled, and something about that delighted him. But he schooled his face into an impassive expression. The last thing he wanted was for this beautiful woman to think he was laughing at her. “How come?”
The woman held out the glass. He looked at it, but all he saw was, well, a glass.
She shook it a little in her small hand. “You’re getting sawdust in the stemware.”
He stepped around the workbench and peered into the glass. One tiny piece of sawdust sat on the side of the glass. He reached in, pressed it against his finger, and lifted it out. “Fixed,” he said, holding his finger out to the girl.
She stared at his hand as if he held a dead mouse in his palm. “You dirtied it! Now I have to wash the glass and let it dry before I can rub the spots off it.” Her words were so carefully formed, almost as if she were speaking to the queen of England and not a man born and raised in Texas by a barkeep father. He had only scant memories of his mother, but according to his father’s tales, she would’ve gotten along well with this pretentious fussbucket of a girl.
The way she kept looking so appalled at his hand made it impossible to keep the laughter in. It burst out like a rush of wind. “I apologize for sullying your glassware. But to be truthful, no one is going to notice one tiny piece of sawdust in a glass.”
She drew herself up to her fullest height, still nearly a foot shorter than Thomas. Wisps of wheat-colored hair floated around her face and her blue eyes shot fire at him. “The Gilbert Company does not serve its guests from glasses with even the tiniest speck of dust, sir. Now will you kindly move your bench away from my work area?”
He couldn’t keep the grin off his face. She was livid. That only made him want to poke at her more, almost to see if she’d drop her high-society facade. “No, ma’am. I don’t believe I can. You see, I set up here first—at the request of the head chef—and here I intend to stay. You’d best find yourself a new place to scrub at your glassware or just get used to filling it with all of this sawdust.”
The girl’s face went bright red. “I—” She didn’t finish, only clamped her mouth shut and spun on her heel back to her chair.
Thomas laughed to himself as she picked up her crate and marched away toward the garden. She was awfully pretty, he had to admit as he picked up a knife and the recut piece of wood. Beautiful, in fact.
But far too prim for his liking.
Chapter Four
Caroline scrubbed at the glass much harder than was necessary. That man. How dare he? she thought for about the tenth time since she’d relocated her work from behind the kitchen to the now-dormant garden behind the ladies’ parlor. Just thinking about how infuriating he was made her hands shake as she picked up another glass. No man in Boston would’ve ever treated her so. Not that she particularly liked the way they handled her as if she were a piece of this stemware, prone to snapping apart at the slightest tremor. But at least there had been respect, and politeness, and . . . and . . . She was so angry, she couldn’t even think straight.
It wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t keep finding her eyes drifting toward him every other minute. She thought she recognized him from the building crew, but those men had all but left. Perhaps he was here to handle loose ends, such as carpentry that blew into her work. Her temperature rose yet again as the man whittled away at a piece of wood, his attention focused completely on his work. She was too far away from him to tell for certain, but he appeared intent, pulling his hat off and leaving it on the ground. His warm blond hair was ruffled and just a tiny bit too long. It would make Caroline’s mother recoil in horror. Barbaric, she could almost hear Mother’s voice in her ears. For some absurd reason, it made her smile, particularly as he absentmindedly ran a hand through it, messing it up even more. Certainly no man in Boston wore his hair in such disarray.
A bird of some name—Caroline could never tell the difference—chirped overhead, reminding her that she was staring at this most irritating man and shirking her duties. She hurriedly wiped clean the glass in her hand and picked up the next. Spending hours daydreaming instead of cleaning glassware was not the path toward demonstrating she was the best choice for head waitress.
Caroline pressed her lips together as she worked and tried to ignore the infuriating man a few feet away. Head waitress. She’d hardly thought she’d be in this position just a few months ago when she was fumbling through the simplest task and wondering if she’d lost her mind completely. Her success so far was due entirely to the support of her friends. Without them, even the burning desire to never set foot in Boston again wouldn’t have been enough to keep her from giving up in those early days.
She held a perfectly clean glass up to admire in the sunlight. It was pleasant enough out here, provided one could ignore impertinent men. The days had turned cool, but not yet cold, the air was crisp and refreshing, and the creek hidden behind the cottonwoods and pines made a pleasant enough gurgling sound. The lovely green and golden leaves of the aspens and cottonwoods, with the snowcapped mountains rising behind them, distorted in the curve of the glass, making Caroline smile.
The abject terror she’d felt arriving at such a remote place last May had tempered over the months. She had to admit this valley had become home. She was safe here, far away from family who would have her do their bidding, from the commitment she’d felt she had no choice but to make, from a society that would never comprehend why she wouldn’t do as she was told, and from a man who scared her even more than the thought of bears in the brush or outlaws carrying her off in the night. It was as if this valley had reached its arms around her and hidden her between its mountains. And she had made something of herself here. She was no longer Miss Beauchamp, daughter of an import company king and Boston society queen, educated in the finest manners and skills befitting a lady of her station. Here, she was simply Caroline Beauchamp, a woman who could support herself, a friend, and someone who could perhaps move up in the Gilbert Company.
She placed the glass with the others and reached for yet another one, as the sound of metal sawing into wood drew her attention back to the man to her left. He was a hard worker too, that much was clear from the effort he expended on the work in front of him and the fact that while the rest of the building crew was gone, he was still here. She wondered at his age. At first, she hadn’t thought him much older than her own newly turned eighteen years—perhaps in his early twenties—but when she’d stepped closer, she wasn’t
so certain. He had a world-weary look about him, almost as if he’d seen more than most men and hoped to forget it.
He paused to wipe his face against his sleeve, and Caroline wondered what he had seen, where he was from, and why he was here. He seemed at ease out here in this valley, as if he were used to the wilderness. Of course, it could have grown on him, as it had on her. Given that he’d had to saw off work he’d already done to redo it, she doubted he’d had much experience in carpentry. How was it, then, that he’d found himself on a building crew?
At just that moment, he glanced up and caught her eye. A half-smile creased his face, and she looked away as fast as she could, her heart pounding. Foolish, she scolded herself as she reached for another glass. Here she was wasting her time staring wistfully at a man in a most unladylike fashion—a man who’d been nothing but rude to her. She was far better off pretending he wasn’t even in the vicinity. She should focus her thoughts on the task at hand and on convincing Mrs. Ruby she would be the perfect candidate for head waitress.
She had nothing but hope for her future, and spending a second’s thought more on the man a few feet away from her would only derail her plans.
Chapter Five
The haughty blonde woman finished her work about half an hour after she started. Thomas watched her return to the kitchen with her crate of glasses even as he told himself good riddance. He didn’t know what he had hoped she would be like when he’d first seen her—gentle, perhaps, but quick to laugh—but she certainly didn’t meet that ideal. It was just as well. The last thing he needed right now was a woman, particularly one he wasn’t even allowed to speak to on anything but the briefest of hotel matters.
He worked for the rest of the afternoon, stopping for a brief bite to eat in the kitchen from the grateful chef. Just as the sun began to sink, he finished the last shelf. It was good timing too, given both the loss of light and the increasing chill in the air. He delivered his work to the pantry. He’d hang the shelves tomorrow morning before the first trainload of passengers arrived at noon. After returning the equipment to the shed, he made his way to the hotel lobby.
What might be in there now had been on his mind all day. He’d hoped—and even prayed, though he wasn’t certain God listened much to men like him—that McFarland had sent that man with the posters packing. Or perhaps the poster he dreaded wasn’t in the man’s bag. Thomas hadn’t exactly made himself scarce all day, and yet McFarland hadn’t come looking for him. That could only bode well, he hoped.
He entered the lobby from the hallway that led back to the kitchen and the ladies’ parlor, hoping that would be less conspicuous than opening one of the large front doors. The hallway had been quiet, and when he stepped into the lobby, only one man stood behind the front desk, scratching out something on a scrap of paper. Thomas nodded at him when the man paused to dip the pen. The man nodded back, and Thomas dared to hope that this was also a good sign.
Scanning the room, he found the posters hanging near the entrance of the men’s smoking parlor and the room that housed the hotel’s lunch counter, off to the left of the front desk and not too far from the hallway where he’d entered. The clerk had gone back to his writing after acknowledging Thomas. When he paused by the posters, he was out of the clerk’s sight. He drew in a deep breath and clenched and unclenched his fists before letting his eyes rove across the papers tacked neatly to the fine wallpaper.
Bandits, murderers, train robbers. These men were the worst of the worst. His eyes stopped on the last poster. There, a crudely drawn image of himself glared back at Thomas. It wasn’t a perfect match, but it was close. The artist had gotten his eyes wrong and made his nose too crooked. The hat he wore in the picture was one he’d lost months ago. It was close enough to be him, but only recognizable to someone who really took the time to see his features. But the best part—the one that lightened his heart more than he’d dared to hope since he’d come here—was the name. Nowhere did it say Thomas Drexel. Instead, it read, Tom the Cat, Wanted for Robbery and Murder of the Sheriff of Barrett Mountain. $700 Dead or Alive.
He swallowed hard. They’d upped the reward and given him a nickname. Tom the Cat. It had a good ring to it, if he was inclined to such things. He wasn’t, though, not in the least. But he’d gladly take the nickname if it kept him anonymous here. No wonder he’d been left alone all day. Between the imperfect picture and the nickname, no one had put it together that this was him. Smiling, he took a step backwards—straight into someone.
A little squeak sounded from the woman he’d run into. Thomas turned around and yanked off his hat. “I apologize, miss,” he said, his eyes alighting on the slight blonde woman who had given him such trouble earlier in the day.
But she didn’t speak. Instead her gaze went from him directly to the bottom poster on the wall. Then back to him. She tilted her head, then her eyes widened.
She knew.
Chapter Six
Caroline couldn’t keep the tiny squeal from her voice as the man wrapped his hand around her arm and fairly dragged her into the smoking parlor.
“Unhand me, you—you—” Every word that came to mind wasn’t one she could speak in polite company. Although here she was, alone in a room with a man whose image was on a wanted poster, so she supposed she was hardly in polite company. She’d run away from Boston to escape a man whose very gaze made her tremble, despite his genteel outward appearance, and now she found herself alone with someone who was wanted by the law for murder, of all things. If she wasn’t so terrified, she’d laugh at the absurdity of it all.
He let go, but only to quickly close the door to the room.
Caroline’s heart pounded wildly. “How dare you? Open that door immediately!” When he made no move to do as she asked, she moved toward the door herself.
The man’s hand darted out again and grabbed her by the wrist. She tugged against his grip, but he refused to let go.
“Remove your hand!” she demanded, pulling again. “Or else I’ll—”
His other hand clamped over her mouth. It wasn’t rough, but it startled her all the same. Fear snaked its way through her entire body. She couldn’t move. She was frozen there against a dark leather wing chair, alone with this . . . this murderer.
The man’s eyes went soft as they searched her face. They were a blue-gray color and looked nothing like the artist’s depiction. These eyes were kinder, less wild, and more haunted. The second the thought crossed her mind, Caroline chided herself for being ridiculous. Murderers didn’t have kind eyes.
“Just let me speak,” he finally said. “Will you do that? Please?”
His voice wasn’t threatening at all. In fact, he sounded almost scared. No one had ever been scared of her, and the idea made Caroline’s heart slow just a little. This man—as rude as he was earlier—hardly seemed like an outlaw.
She nodded, and he dropped his hand from her mouth, taking with it a warmth she hadn’t noticed until it was gone. She pushed her lips together and tried not to think about how he still held her wrist in his other hand.
“That poster makes me out to be someone I’m not.”
“You didn’t kill someone?” Her voice trembled as she spoke.
“It was an accident. I was working up in the mine at Barrett Mountain. My job was to collect the pay for the whole camp from the narrow gauge. It was just me and the camp sheriff. He told me the boss wanted me back down at the mine. I didn’t believe him, because there were always at least two of us with the money at all times, and usually three. When I refused, he drew, I followed suit, and . . .” He finished, his eyebrows drawn together as if he was begging her to believe him.
And did she?
Caroline wasn’t certain. She wanted to. As angry as he’d made her earlier, now he seemed vulnerable and almost . . . nice. “Why didn’t you explain the situation?”
“No one would’ve believed me. It was my word against the sheriff’s. I didn’t run right away. I hid out nearby, long enough to overhear he didn’t d
ie immediately. He was alive long enough to tell the company officials and his deputy I killed him in cold blood to steal the money. And . . .”
Caroline waited a beat for him to finish. When he didn’t, she prompted, “And?”
He closed his eyes a second and swallowed. “The money had disappeared. Someone else took it, and it wasn’t me. But it sure looked as if I’d done it. So I left.”
“You came here,” she said softly. If what he said was true, her heart ached for him. If what he said was true, that is.
“I came here.” His eyes found hers and held them, almost pleading with her to understand.
Caroline stilled, everything in her coming to a stop as he held her gaze. She couldn’t think. Time paused as they stood there. It could have been seconds or hours for all she knew. Then, as fast as it had happened, it ended as he seemed to realize he still held her wrist in his hand. He let her go, his fingers brushing against her skin in a way that made her shiver.
“Do you believe me?” he asked.
She breathed in and out a few times, trying to piece her thoughts together and ignore the lingering shadow touch of his hand on her arm. Did she believe him?
“I want to,” she confessed. “But . . .” Her heart thudded as she uttered the last word, and a brilliant—if not dangerous—idea came to mind. If he truly was guilty, he wouldn’t let her leave this room. If she was brave enough, she could find out whether he was lying. She said a quick prayer that he was not before drawing up all the strength she’d gathered since she arrived here. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. She held on to the arm of the chair for support. “It’s quite a story, Mr. . . .?”
