A Wanted Man (5 page)

But she’d been shielded from that all her life. He sorted through the few people she’d been allowed to meet, ensuring that anyone he introduced her to was either as rich as her father—and there were few enough of those, even in Newport—or hid their awe extraordinarily well in her presence.

Well, someday she would have to face the world without her father’s shield. She had pleaded and cajoled and finally threatened to be allowed this trip, assuring her parents over and over that it was only about the work and completely necessary to it. But deep inside she’d been truly thrilled at the prospect of meeting the world without the filter of her position and her family’s protection, for though her companions were meant to serve in her father’s stead, no one could ever be as effective in that regard as Leland Hamilton.

She sighed deeply and turned to face him. She could have picked an easier man to practice on. Even her father, famed for his perception, might have had trouble reading this one. “What do you want?” she asked, narrowing her eyes, alert for signs that indicated the truth from the lies. Given enough practice, she should be
good at this. As a painter she was accustomed to noting visual details: shadows, the slightest change in form, delicate gradations of color.

Interest flickered in his eyes, an avid heat.
Here it comes
, she thought, and steeled herself, wondering what the story would be. A dying daughter, an orphanage? Or perhaps it would be an irresistible investment; a mine to rival the Silver Spur, if only he could raise enough capital to start blasting.

He gestured toward her easel. “May I?”

“What?” She was certainly successful in her chosen profession, as such things went. And while she understood her talent’s limitations, she’d never doubted its existence. But her preliminary studies weren’t valuable enough to make it worth his trouble to ask for one.

“Do you mind if I look?”

“Oh.” The sketch, with its imperfect outlines and blocky patches of colors, was extraordinarily rough. She wanted to say no; there was nothing there that would impress an untrained eye. But he waited so patiently, with that slight lift to his mouth, and she was curious to see what else he wanted. “Of course.”

He moved around to stand behind her, studying the page over her shoulder. She leaned back to allow him a better view, and her shoulder brushed…oh, mustn’t think about what she’d just bumped up against! She jerked forward, her cheeks so fiery hot that she was glad he was behind her, for she couldn’t have faced him straight on. “I’m sorry!”

“Don’t be.”

Laura sat bolt upright on her chair, stiff as a statue, afraid that if she softened her posture even a fraction she’d brush against him again, for he hadn’t moved a step. She’d no idea if he meant that the contact was so
slight and insignificant that it wasn’t worth thinking about, or if—oh, goodness!—he’d
enjoyed
it, and so she should not worry about it.

Clearly she’d left this—men in general, and specifically dealing with an attractive one—far too late in her life. Once the railroad project was out of the way perhaps she’d take some time to work on this skill. There was something not quite right about a woman of twenty-five having such a ridiculous and ungovernable reaction to the presence of a man, even such an overpowering specimen as this one.

So she took refuge in the one constant in her life, and turned her focus where it belonged: her work. It had been a steady presence as long as she could remember, company for a lonely young girl who had few playmates and was often too weak to keep up with them in any case, a soaring, unbounded outlet for hopes and dreams that were restricted in so many other ways.

“What do you think?” she asked.

He was silent behind her, which gave her time to collect her wits, and she dared a look over her shoulder. That must be what they meant by a poker face: hat low, eyes hooded, mouth set, any hint of emotion completely extinguished.

“Well?” she prodded.

It took a moment for Sam to collect himself enough actually to register what was on the paper. His head was swimming, caught up in that potent and completely unexpected jolt of heat from when she’d brushed up against him.

Well, this was a surprise. Not to mention a complication. It should have been too brief and innocent a touch to spark such a powerful reaction.

“Mister…?”

He blinked. Her work, he reminded himself. And his. “Ah…it’s very nice,” he said neutrally, tiptoeing around the topic so as not to hurt her feelings.

Laura burst out laughing. “It’s all right. I know it doesn’t look like much yet. It’s not supposed to.”

“It’s not?”

“No.” She pointed with her brush. “The final product will look nothing like this. I need proportion, impressions, a sense of light and motion. Most of all color, because I can’t ever get that from photographs.”

“And when you’re done, what’ll it look like?”

“Do you know what I paint?”

He seemed to be pondering the question before he spoke. “Why don’t you tell me?”

That wasn’t really an answer but she was enjoying herself too much to worry about it. She felt much easier with him now, on familiar ground. Her work she knew. “I paint panoramas. Ten feet high, sometimes as much as three thousand feet long. Have you seen one?”

“A few.”

She nodded. “I’m doing the Union-Pacific Railroad, fifteen years later. The full length of the railway, attempting to show how much it has changed the land it rolls through, the cities and lives it has touched.” She smiled. “You need a grand subject. I can’t come up with one much grander than this. Almost the entire country.”

“How long will it take you?”

It was hard to believe that he was as interested as he appeared. But he gave no hint of boredom. His gaze didn’t flit behind her, around the square, searching for something or someone of more interest; he remained fully focused on her as he stood unmoving, hipshot,
arms loose at his side. The man was certainly not a fidgeter.

“The preliminary sketches? I’m not sure. I’ve not used this method before, and there’s no particular schedule to keep. Perhaps four or five months. The painting, though, anywhere from a year to six. It depends. I’ve always been on the quick side, but this one…”

“That long? I’d never have the patience.”

I’d never have the patience
. She collected the words greedily. He’d been tossing questions her way, drawing her out, making her reveal herself, and he’d given her nothing in return. This was the first tidbit he’d revealed: he was not a patient man. And yet not
impatient
, she’d wager. He stood too still, too comfortable, without any of the simmering edginess of the truly impatient.

“You might be surprised,” she said. “Some things are worth a large investment of time.”

She thought that he was really going to smile this time. Amusement crinkled the corners of his eyes, tugged at his severe mouth, suddenly making him look years younger. Now what, she wondered, had she done to draw that reaction?

“Very true,” he agreed. “Have you done one before? A panorama?”

“Oh, a few,” she said airily. If he could be casually dismissive about his exploits on the train, she could pretend that she worked with effortless ease, too. “I did a collage of Revolutionary War battlefields.” She frowned. “Not entirely successful, I’m afraid. It was my first, and I didn’t have the stomach to play up the blood the way the public likes. The voyage of the Pilgrims.
That
was quite popular. The length of the island of Manhattan—”

“I saw that one.”

Oh, wonderful,
she thought.
That would have to be the one he saw.

“In Kansas City. I remember it.”

“That’s nice,” she said quickly, hoping he’d move on.

“It was lovely. Your work is very precisely detailed. Almost photographic.”

“Not photographic enough,” she muttered.

“Excuse me?”

She considered prevarication. She doubted
he
was ever less than perfectly competent at anything he attempted. But what was the point? The truth was the truth. And it was not as if it had not been splashed over every newspaper in the Northeast. “I made mistakes.”

His brow furrowed in puzzlement. “It happens.”

“No, you don’t understand,” she said. She believed in knowing your strengths and accepting your weaknesses. She’d had no choice. “You pegged it right off. That’s what I’m known for, my precision and accuracy. But in the New York canvas, I made mistakes.”

“What happened?”

She was glad he didn’t shrug it off as if it were unimportant. Her parents had, and Mrs. Bossidy. What were a few mistakes? they’d asked her. Artists take license all the time. But she’d never considered it that way. She was bringing places to people who’d never have a chance to see them otherwise. And because she knew so well what it was like to long to witness a place you had little chance of seeing in person, she took that responsibility very seriously. “I hadn’t been there since I was a child. Never been much of anywhere, when it comes right down to it, until now.”

“Anywhere?” He lifted one brow in surprise. “How could you paint?”

“From photographs, from descriptions. Sometimes
I’d even send someone there to take detailed notes for me.” She smiled. “There are some advantages to not having to worry about the expenses, you know.”

“There are
lots
of advantages to it.”

“True.” Even now, her gut clenched at the memory. “It worked fairly well. But this time there were mistakes. A photograph I relied on had been printed backward, and I put St. Patrick’s Cathedral—
just
finished—on the wrong side of Fifth Avenue. Not to mention the color of the Brooklyn Bridge was several shades off. I suppose I might have made similar mistakes before.”

She scowled, hating the thought. For a month after she’d first learned of it, she’d considered pulling every panorama she’d ever done from tour, going out and comparing every inch of her painted landscapes to the actual ones and not releasing them again until she could ensure that they were absolutely accurate.

“People are not as familiar with those places, though. But this was New York, and the bridge and the cathedral are so new they are fresh in everyone’s mind. The work had been on exhibition less than a week before I heard of the problems.”

He listened patiently, his eyes level on hers. And suddenly she realized how she’d been blathering on with only the slightest encouragement from him. In all likelihood he was only being polite—whether it was a quality he held naturally, or because people were
always
polite to Hamiltons.

She dropped her gaze to the brush she still held in her lap. The yellow paint was drying on the sable, graphic evidence of just how long she’d been spilling her soul to the man. Was it some quality of his that drew it from her, his calm, patient encouragement, his
well-timed comments? Or was she simply so unused to the attention of an attractive man that her mouth kept spilling out words in an attempt to keep him around?

More than attractive, she realized as she looked up again, no more able to resist studying him than she’d been able to forget a single word of the reviews about the New York panorama. She understood she had little to compare him with. The handsome men in her life tended to reside between the covers of art books. And yet she doubted that he’d have any less effect on her if she’d met every man on the eastern seaboard.

His face was not perfect. Far from it; there was a break in his right eyebrow where a half-inch scar bisected it. His nose had a definite bump and veered to the left. His hair was badly cut, longer on one side. And, of course, there was that fading bruise, the remnants of violence.

But absolute visual perfection was boring. One of the first things her painting instructor taught her was that the eye craved some tension. Beauty always showed to best advantage when contrasted with the ugly.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Going on about that. I know that, as problems go, placing a building, even a church, on the wrong side of the street in a painting is hardly life-shattering.”

“You have pride in your work. I admire that.”

Warmth bloomed, as if the sun had just stoked up the fire.

“How about you? I—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Mrs. Bossidy clipped across the square, her skirts snapping with each determined stride, her voice carrying clearly on the spring breeze. “Did I not tell you to stay beneath the umbrella? You are
unused to so much sun so early in the year, and it is much stronger here.”

Laura jerked, then squared her shoulders. She had nothing to feel guilty about, she reminded herself. Not about getting perhaps a bit too much sun, which felt wonderful on her head, her shoulders. Nor about spending a few moments conversing with an interesting man, something Laura had no doubt Mrs. Bossidy would be addressing as soon as the “sun” issue was settled.

One wouldn’t have thought Mrs. Bossidy could cover so much ground so quickly without breaking into a run. As soon as she gained Laura’s side, arriving in a cloud of rosewater perfume and a rustle of stiff petticoats, she twisted the pole of the large umbrella out of the ground, moved it forward until its protective shadow covered Laura completely, and jammed it back into the pebbly earth. “You must promise to stay beneath it, dear, or I won’t have you out here at midday again.”

“It ruins the light,” Laura complained.

Mrs. Bossidy fisted her hands at her hips. “Fine, then. See how well you hold a paintbrush when you’ve blistered the back of your hands.” Her expression softened. “I’m not just protecting your pearly complexion, you know. You’ve spent so little time in the sun, Laura, it’s more dangerous to you than most.”

But it seemed like everything wonderful was more dangerous to her than most. Parties, travel.
Life
. She’d been healthy for a long time, something that Mrs. Bossidy and her parents and everyone else she knew often failed properly to consider.