Kitabı oku: «Quicksilver's Catch»

Chapter One

North Platte, Nebraska 1874

“Shine your boots, mister?”

“Scat.”

“Aw, come on. Them boots of yours could do with a little spit and polish, and I sure could do with a nickel. What do you say, mister?”

“You’re a pest.”

“I’m enterprising.”

“Same thing.” Marcus Quicksilver thumbed up the hat that was shading his face in order to get a look at the kid who’d been buzzing around him like a gnat for the past five minutes. He expected to see a chubby, apple-cheeked tycoon, but instead his eyes lit on a skinny boy with smallpox scars and a single suspender that was failing miserably at holding up a pair of too-big pants.

“How old are you, kid?”

“None of your beeswax.” The boy aimed his pitted chin into Marcus’s face as if it were the barrel of a nicked and battered derringer. “Nine, if you have to know. How old’re you?”

“Ninety.” Marcus grinned, then quit when his forehead felt as if it were splitting down the middle. He muttered a soft curse, offered up another promise never to touch bar whiskey again, and closed his eyes. “Make that ninety-five.”

“You could sure use a shave, mister.”

Marcus traced his fingers along his jaw, where the three-day growth was old enough now to feel soft, rather than bristly. “Wait. Don’t tell me. You’re an enterprising barber, too. Right?”

The boy laughed. “Naw. But for a nickel, I’ll set you up with the best danged barber in town.”

“No time.”

“You waiting for the train?”

“Yep.”

The boy fished a gold watch from his pocket, clicked it open and studied its face. “Aw, you got a good twenty minutes before the westbound’s due. That ain’t enough time for a haircut, maybe, but it’s plenty for a shoeshine.” He dropped the watch back in his pocket and peered at his potential customer. “Well? How about it?”

Shifting in his chair, Marcus unwound his legs and stretched them across the planking. He stared at his boots a moment, wondering when it had ceased being important to him to have shined boots, a shaved face or well-pressed clothes. Wondering if he was as unkempt inside as he was outside. If his heart and soul were as disreputable as the rest of him. Wondering if he cared.

“You win,” he said at last, with a sigh of resignation. “Have at it, kid.”

“Yessir!” The boy snapped his soiled chamois rag, knelt, then promptly spat on Marcus’s left boot and got to work.

“Mighty nice timepiece for a bootblack,” Marcus said casually, looking down at the top of the boy’s head. The hair there was yellow and wild as fresh pitched hay, and probably hadn’t seen a comb all month. “Did you lift that watch from a fella heading east or west?”

“Neither.” He stopped working the shine rag long enough to pat his pocket. “This here watch is a legacy from my pappy. He was rich.”

“Uh-huh,” Marcus drawled. “What was your rich pappy’s name?”

“Joe. Joe Tate.”

“Mighty poor speller for a rich man.”

The boy glanced up now, his eyes big and quizzical. “What…what do you mean?”

“The initials on your watch, son.” Marcus winked. “Somebody named N.F.R. is walking around somewhere right now, scratching his head and wondering whether it’s ten minutes till or ten minutes after, I expect.”

The pockmarked little face flushed with color, and the boy swallowed hard. “You won’t tell anybody, will you, mister?”

“Not as long as you promise me you’ll quit stealing watches.”

The boy released the chamois cloth just long enough to sketch a quick cross over his heart. “I swear,” he said. “Honest I do.”

Marcus sighed and closed his eyes again. I swear. Honest. It wouldn’t surprise him one bit if, ten years from now, he was tracking this kid, once he graduated from watches to payrolls, from petty larceny to felony or worse. Now that was a depressing thought—Marcus Quicksilver still in the saddle riding down lowlifes a decade hence, at the ripe old age of forty-four. God almighty. He’d probably need spectacles to read the Wanted posters.

Not that his keen eyesight was doing him any good at the present. His last three bounties had been pure busts. He’d gotten to El Paso on the heels of Elmer Sweet, a rival manhunter, who’d had himself a great guffaw when he led his thousand-dollar prisoner right past Marcus’s nose. A month after that, he’d had the hell kicked out of him by a horse thief named Charlie Clay, who turned out of be the wrong Charlie Clay, one with no bounty on his head. And damned if three days ago Marcus hadn’t arrived in Rosebud just in time to watch his quarry take a long drop from a short rope in the town square.

He never used to lose bounties before, Marcus thought. Every man he set out to catch, he caught. Over the past decade or so, he’d earned himself a fearsome reputation. Often as not, if a man heard that Marcus Quicksilver was on his trail, he’d know he was as good as done for and just turn himself in to the nearest available lawman.

Ten years. Twelve. How long had it been? Marcus stared at the yellow-headed kid now, thinking the boy hadn’t even been born when he collected that first bounty. Suddenly it seemed like the criminals were getting younger and faster with each passing year, while he was getting older and slower and…

“That’s not true, dammit.” Marcus said it out loud as he jerked his leg and pushed himself straighter in the chair.

“Hey, watch it,” the kid snapped. “Who’re you talking to, anyway?”

“Nobody. Mind your own business.” Marcus settled back in the chair again, attempting to relax his leg and to clear his aching head of such dismal thoughts.

Hell. If he wasn’t getting any younger, he certainly wasn’t getting any richer, either. It kept getting harder and harder to save that last few thousand dollars toward the land he’d hoped to buy. Even when he did collect a bounty these days, by the time he got back to Denver he’d be honestly surprised that most of it had slipped through his fingers.

Since they’d hanged Doc Gibbons in Rosebud, there wasn’t even sand to slip through Marcus’s fingers this time out. Still, here he was sitting in the sunshine at a train depot in Nebraska, getting his boots shined for a nickel when his pockets were very nearly empty. That realization made his head ache all the worse.

“Psst.”

He opened a single eye at the sound of the nearby hiss but didn’t see anyone, so he settled deeper in the chair.

“Psst. Yoo-hoo. Little boy.”

The brisk cloth stopped moving across Marcus’s boot when the boy said, “You calling to me, lady?”

Marcus hadn’t seen anybody—lady or otherwise—but when he opened both eyes now he caught a glimpse of a little female in fine traveling clothes peeking around a corner of the depot.

“Yes, I am calling to you.” She smiled and crooked a gloved finger. “I’d like to speak with you. Would you come here a moment?”

The kid dropped his chamois rag and tore off in her direction, leaving Marcus with one boot shined and the other still covered with trail dust. He started to curse, but then he laughed instead. It wasn’t the first time a young entrepreneur had let his business go all to hell when beckoned by a pretty smile. He, himself, had lost a bounty or two when distracted by other, softer pursuits.

He leaned forward, picked up the rag, and went to work on the dusty boot, thinking maybe he’d keep the nickel—Lord knew he could use it—but knowing he wouldn’t deduct even a penny from the scrawny little hustler’s pay.

“There you go frittering away money again, Marcus,” he murmured to himself, shaking his head with dismay more than disgust. “When are you going to learn?”

Both boots looked pretty good, in Marcus’s opinion, by the time the kid reappeared a few minutes later. But instead of returning to finish the job he had started, the boy walked right past Marcus’s chair, toward the door of the depot.

“Whoa. Wait a minute,” Marcus called after him. “You started something here, pal. For a nickel, remember? Here’s your shine cloth.” Marcus waved it at him.

The scrawny boy stopped for a second, his hand on the door, and then he shrugged. “Aw, that’s all right, mister. You keep ‘em. The nickel and the rag both. I don’t need either one of ‘em now.” He flashed a lopsided grin before he disappeared inside the depot.

Marcus sat there a minute, shaking his head in bafflement while staring at the dirty and now abandoned rag in his hand. Then, just at his shoulder, a throat was cleared with polite insistence.

“Excuse me, sir. Could you possibly tell me what time it is and how soon the train is due?”

Marcus looked up into a pair of eyes the color of money, the shade of greenbacks fresh from the press. They were bright and clear and rich with promise. Below those was perched a delicate nose, and somewhere in his field of vision there was a mouth that struck him as sensual and eminently kissable, for all its primness. It was only when that mouth twitched with impatience at each corner that he realized he hadn’t answered the question it had posed.

He balled up the boot rag, tossed it onto the planking, then tugged his watch from his pocket. “It’s five past eleven, miss. The westbound’s due any minute now, if it’s running on time.”

“Good. I certainly hope so.” Saying that, she whisked her skirt around and walked back to the edge of the depot, where she’d been standing earlier.

Well, not standing, exactly. It was more like skulking, Marcus thought now, vaguely aware of a little flicker of disappointment in his gut. He was used to women making advances toward him, some shyly asking the time, despite the watches pinned to their breasts, others coming right out and telling him they’d never seen a more handsome devil in all their born days and was he married or promised or going to be in town long? None of them, however, ever skittered away to skulk once the connection had been made. Ever.

He didn’t consider himself a ladies’ man, exactly, but he wasn’t a rock by the side of the road, either, dammit. This little lady’s obvious disinterest had definitely taken a chunk out of his male pride. He scowled at his boots a minute and rubbed his jaw before getting up, stretching and sauntering her way.

“Nice day.”

He might as well have been a rock, the way she ignored him.

Marcus nudged his hat back a fraction. “You headed west, miss?”

Her pretty face tipped up to his, and those green eyes regarded him with cool disdain, less like a rock now than like something that had crawled out from under one.

The hell with her. Marcus would have turned on his heel and bidden her good-day and good riddance then, if he hadn’t noticed the tiny trembling of her lips and the way her fingers shook when she reached up to brush a stray wisp of blond hair off her forehead. She was nervous. No. More like frightened. Scared to death. Only you couldn’t tell it by her voice.

“I’m not in the habit of talking with strangers,” she told him in clipped, cool tones, then added an icy “Go away,” just to make sure he got the point.

He got it, all right, and—scared or not—he was about to give her a view of his departing back when she muttered, almost under her breath, “Where the devil is that little boy? What in the world could be taking him so long?”

“Pardon?”

She sighed and spoke as much to the clapboards on the side of the depot as she did to Marcus. “I asked that young shoeshine boy to purchase a ticket for me. I gave him two twenty-dollar gold pieces and told him to hurry. He ought to be back by now.”

Or halfway across the state by now. No wonder the little son of a bitch had been in such a sweat to leave Marcus and his boots and his damn nickel behind.

“Excuse me, miss.” Touching a finger to the brim of his hat, Marcus turned and walked away.

Amanda peeked around the building for a last glimpse of the stranger, whose whiskers hadn’t totally concealed a strikingly handsome face. Even the shade of his hat hadn’t been able to hide eyes that were bluer than a prairie sky at noon. And now, as he walked away, Amanda couldn’t help but notice how wide his shoulders were and how his gunbelt hugged his narrow hips. If eastern dandies had the merest notion how the slant of a bullet-laden gunbelt set a woman’s heart to pounding, she was convinced that New York and Connecticut would soon be as wild as the West.

“Oh, my.” But even as the wistful sigh escaped her lips, Amanda reminded herself that a woman who was engaged to be married had absolutely no business noticing the physical attributes of men. Strange men, too. Ones who, for all she knew, were only interested in dragging her back to her grandmother and pocketing the five-thousand-dollar reward.

She’d only escaped two days ago, tossing her hastily packed valise from the train as it slowed for the Omaha depot, then jumping after it, while her grandmother snored in her big upholstered chair. “Over my dead body,” the old woman had blustered. But as it turned out, over her snoring body had been adequate.

Amanda smiled, still quite pleased with herself for outfoxing the stubborn old vixen. She didn’t for a minute believe her grandmother didn’t have her well-being at heart, but this time Honoria Grenville was wrong. This time—for the first time in all her twenty-one years—Amanda knew what she wanted and, by heaven, she was going to get it, even if it meant slinking around train depots and begging favors from raggedy little shoeshine boys.

And where was that boy, anyway? Surely he’d had ample time to purchase her ticket by now. She’d have gone into the depot herself, but with those reward posters tacked on every available inch of wall, she didn’t dare. Her grandmother must have had them printed within minutes of her escape, then hired half the men in Nebraska to post them.

She paced back and forth now, squinting up at the sun, wishing she’d remembered to take her watch with her when she jumped off the train. If she had remembered it, though, she wouldn’t have had an excuse to ask that darkly handsome man for the time, though, would she?

A tiny grin itched at her lips. How shocked her grandmother would be at Amanda’s bold behavior. Of course, she hadn’t expected the man to pursue the brief conversation. Or her. That worried Amanda considerably. What if he had seen one of the posters?

It suddenly occurred to her then that the little boy might have seen one of the dratted posters inside the depot and run for help. Her fingers twitched at the sides of her skirt, ready to hike it up and make yet another escape, when she heard the soft jingle of spurs just around the corner of the building.

“Here you go, miss.”

When the handsome stranger held out a ticket, Amanda snatched it from his hand. Thank God, she wanted to wail, and had to swallow hard to keep from showing her incredible relief. But before she could subdue her vocal cords enough to offer a single word, the man quite literally chilled her with those blue eyes of his.

“You’re welcome,” he said with undisguised sarcasm. “Always glad to help a lady in distress.”

What did he think she was, an ungrateful, illmannered boor? She was a lady, after all. That was practically her sole credential. And as for distress, well, she’d gotten along just fine for the past two days, despite the fact that she was being hunted like a dog. And, like a dog, Amanda could feel her lips pulling back in a snarl when she said, “I’m most appreciative of your chivalry, sir. Keep the change, won’t you?”

“Keep the—?”

Marcus dragged in a calming breath as he looked down at the four silver dollars in the palm of his hand. He’d just sprinted a quarter mile to catch a nine-year-old thief, caught the boy by the scruff of the neck, upended him and shaken the two double eagles loose.

“Don’t you ever steal from somebody who trusts you,” Marcus had warned him. “Especially a lady who’s scared and in trouble and is depending on you for help. You got that, kid?”

After nodding and blubbering about how sorry he was, the little bastard had proved just how much the advice meant to him by kicking Marcus in the shin and hightailing it into a grove of elm trees.

And now here he was—Marcus Quicksilver, knight errant, slayer of dragons and shoeshine boys, humble ticket bearer—being told by his damsel in distress to keep the goddamn change!

He was tempted to swipe the railroad ticket right out of her dainty little hand and tell her to walk wherever it was she was headed and good luck to anybody she met along the way. Instead, he reached out for her hand, turned it over and slapped the four coins into the palm of her glove. Hard.

“My pleasure, miss,” he said through clenched teeth. “Enjoy your trip.” And here’s hoping I get hit by lightning before I ever set eyes on you again.

Marcus was still muttering to himself half an hour later as he settled into his seat in the crowded railroad car. He’d had the devil’s own time getting his horse, a chestnut mare he’d christened Sarah B., up the ramp of the baggage car and into her narrow stall. Like her dramatically famous namesake, Sarah Bernhardt, the horse was temperamental. She rarely acted up when the two of them were alone on the trail, but seemed to prefer an audience, usually one of chortling, tobacco-chawing geezers who took great delight and purely perverse pleasure in Marcus’s predicament.

He sat now with his saddlebags on the empty seat beside him, his arms crossed over his chest and his legs stretched out, anticipating a halfway-decent nap once the train got under way and its rocking motion began. It ought to be fairly quiet until the train pulled into the next meal stop, in Julesburg. He listened to the big locomotive building up its head of steam, felt the floor beneath his boots begin to tremble, then heard the conductor bawl out, “All aboard!” Marcus let his eyes drift closed.

With a little luck and a little nap, he hoped his foul temper would dissipate. Maybe his luck would change, too. He hadn’t been lucky of late. Not a bit Now he was just about broke. Again.

Not that it mattered all that much, Marcus thought wearily. A lifetime ago, when he became a bounty hunter, more out of necessity than by choice, his plan had been to collect enough bounties until he had the cash to buy a decent piece of land and try his hand at farming again. Even try his luck at marriage one more time.

He was no closer to that dream today than he’d been a decade ago, and it made him wonder—when he allowed himself to think about the pain of the past and the blank slate of the future—if maybe he really didn’t want that dream to come true.

Hell. Maybe a man was only meant to be lucky once in a lifetime, and his all-too-brief marriage to Sarabeth had been his own brief portion of good luck.

He sighed roughly, shrugging off the haunting memories, settling deeper into the upholstery. Even more than good luck now, he needed the healing power of a good, long sleep.

“Excuse me.” Someone jabbed his shoulder. “I said excuse me, sir. Would you be good enough to remove your belongings from this seat?”

Marcus didn’t even have to look up. That haughty voice was almost as familiar to him as his own now. Her face, as well. Those money-green eyes would be narrowed on him, cool and demanding, and her luscious mouth would be thin with impatience. He hesitated a moment, as if he hadn’t heard her, before he reached over to grab hold of his saddlebags and shove them under his seat.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” Marcus angled his hat over his eyes once more and crossed his arms, more determined than ever to fall asleep, despite—or maybe because of—the feverish activity in the adjacent seat.

She sat. She sighed. She got up. She muttered under her breath and then she stepped on Marcus’s foot.

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he grunted, his eyes still closed.

“I can’t seem to get this hatbox properly situated up here.”

He’d just about talked himself out of the chivalry business entirely when the train lurched forward and the damsel and her hatbox both wound up in his lap. It nearly knocked the breath out of him, but Marcus knew it wasn’t the fall so much as the feel of her that made his chest seize up.

Suddenly he was caught up in complicated silken curves and corn-silk hair. He remembered now asking to be hit by lightning, and he was fairly certain that his wish had just been granted. When he swore, it came out as a beleaguered sigh.

“Hold still,” he told her as she wriggled on his lap.

Somehow a strand of her blond hair had gotten wound around his shirt button, and the more she squirmed, the worse it got.

“I’m caught!” she squealed.

“Hang on a minute.” He tried to unwind the silky lock of hair.

“Ouch!”

“Hold still, dammit.”

“Ouch!”

“Aw, hell.” Marcus ripped the button from his shirt. “There. You’re free.”

She scrambled off his lap and managed to step on both his feet before retaking her seat. Once there, she fussed with her curls and her clothes, paying no attention to Marcus and blithely ignoring the hatbox, which was still on his lap.

He counted to ten. Slowly. Practicing the patience of a saint. Nine saints. Ten. He sighed. “Your hatbox, miss.”

And just as Marcus had known she would, she looked at him with her rich green eyes, flicked him a small but still imperious smile, and suggested he stash the hat box in the rack overhead.