Lady X's Cowboy (17 page)

She didn’t want to admit how much she basked in his attention, how having him watch her as he did now, with his forearms braced on the lid of the piano and his gaze on her alone, filled her with an unaccountable gratification.  He was handsome, yes; what woman did not enjoy being the object of a good-looking man’s interest?  But it was more than that.  She felt so much more comfortable with Will now than she’d had at Charlotte’s dinner party.  In truth, she felt freer, more herself, than she had been in a goodly while.

She poured that feeling into the piano, letting the music express what she knew words could not.  From Beethoven she ran into a Mozart piano sonata in G major, finding herself smiling and nodding over the keys, bent over them in a way her piano instructor would never have approved, though it felt so good.

When the Mozart came to an end, she rested her hands on the keyboard.

“Have I bored you, yet?” she asked, only partly in jest.

But Will looked serious.  He reached down and laid his hands over hers.  She felt the heat of his skin against hers.  “I could stand here all night and listen to you,” he said with a shake of his head.  “Between the music and the woman, I’m up to my Stetson in beauty.”

She found herself blushing again, as flustered as if she were still in boarding school.  All knowledge of music fled under the onslaught of his natural charm, which was that much more remarkable because it was uncontrived, spontaneous.  When he took his hands away, she missed his touch acutely.

“Would you mind,” he said, after a pause, “if I give it a whirl?”

She glanced up, eyebrows arched in surprise.  “The piano?”

He looked boyishly flustered, the faintest hint of red blossoming along the high planes of his cheekbones and along the bridge of his nose.  “Forget it.  I’m bein’ stupid.”

“No, no,” she said quickly, rising up so fast she nearly knocked over the bench.  “Please.”  She gestured to the seat.

With a slight self-conscious grimace, Will came around the piano and sat down.  He tugged free the tails of his evening coat and let them drape down to the floor.  Interlacing his fingers, he stretched his arms out in front and Olivia heard a popping from his knuckles.  When she made a face, he smiled, sheepish.  “Sorry.  The boys in the bunkhouse used to say my crackin’ knuckles could be heard from the Dakota Badlands to the Gulf of Mexico.”

For a few moments, he studied the keys, as though reading a map to a foreign country.  And then, without flourish, he began to play. 

It was a simple, rollicking tune, boisterous, with a pace suitable for galloping across the floor, and Olivia began to laugh with the exuberant joy of it.  There was nothing elegant or refined about the tune, but it was, to her mind, as wild and Western as the man who played it.

“You are a veritable font of talents,” she said to him as he played.

“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed with a wink and a grin.  As he moved into the next song, a lilting country ballad, he said, “There ain’t much work in the winter for cowpunchers, so I played piano in saloons and sometimes for the theatrical troupes that’d come through town.  Y’know, melodramas.”  And here he played a comically exaggerated, threatening tune befitting a mustache-twirling villain, as he wiggled his eyebrows.  She laughed again.

“How you amaze me, Will Coffin,” she said, admiring and humbled that one man could be so protean.

“This is surely finer than any of the beat-up wooden boxes I played in Leadville.”  He smiled and continued to play.  “Take a seat, Liv.  I ain’t used to having stand up audiences.”

Instead of pulling up a chair, as she ought to, Olivia found herself sitting next to Will on the bench.  If he was surprised, he didn’t show it, but she astonished herself.  Even through the yards of silk in her skirt, she felt his legs underneath the piano, working the pedals, and high-leaping currents set off inside her chest as his arm would brush against her as he moved along the keyboard.

“This tune’s called ‘My Grandfather’s Clock,’” he explained as he played a fast, comic song.  “The boys always got a big kick out of this one.  I won’t frighten you to death with my singin’.  Usually there were girls who sang.”

Olivia had a fairly good idea what kind of girls those singers were, but she decided not to comment.  Will played more another quick, silly tune.

“This one’s ‘Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,’” he said.  “After a few rounds, everybody got up and did a little cakewalk dance to it.  Except me, since I had to play.”

“What is that one called?” Olivia asked after he trotted out the next funny song.

He grinned at her.  “‘Smick, Smack, Smuck.’” 

“How racy,” she laughed.  “I should slap your face.”

“Wait ‘til you hear the words,” he said with a leer.  Then he played a slower, sadder piece, gently longing and melodic.

“Whenever the miners or cowboys got homesick,” he said, “they all asked for this one: ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.’  Especially the Irish men.”

But nothing he had played prepared her for the tune he played next.  It was deceptively simple, low and keen, with rolling notes that blended together to form an undulating current of heartbreaking wistfulness that pierced straight to her heart.  For this song, he bent deep in concentration over the keys, almost frowning, as this music, fierce and slow, billowed forth from what had at one time been a perfectly ordinary piano but had somehow, under his fingers, transformed into the reverberations of her own heart.

Then silence as the song ended.  Olivia blinked back tears she did not know were gathering in her eyes.  “What,” she said, then cleared her throat, “what was the name of that song?”

“I don’t know,” Will said quietly.  “I haven’t thought of a name for it, yet.”

She could not help it.  She gaped.  “
You
wrote that?”  

He looked at her, nodded.  “Can’t read music, though.  It’s just somethin’ I’ve been workin’ out in my head for a while.  Sounds pretty good on this fine piano of yours.”

“It isn’t the piano.”  They sat close together, turned into each other, so that the distance separating them was narrow.  Her gaze moved over his face.  She continued to be amazed that one man could possess such masculine beauty, and she saw such profundity in the tropic warmth of his blue eyes, she nearly drowned.  “It’s you.  You’ve created the most beautiful music I have ever heard, Will.  And you had that inside of you...I don’t...”  Her eyes automatically lowered to his mouth.  “I don’t know what to make of you.”

“I’m just a man, Liv,” he said, his voice husky.  The keen handsomeness of his face grew sharper with unmistakable desire, as his own gaze traveled along her face, down her neck, over the bare expanse of her shoulders and chest.  Wherever his eyes moved, she felt her skin heat in response. 

“I know…” she breathed, but then her breath deserted her as he leaned closer, bringing his rough, hot palm up to cup the back of her neck.

The heat of his hand traveled all the way down into the liquid core of her, and she nearly gasped aloud at the contact.  She let him draw her closer, or she leaned in herself—she couldn’t tell where his will and her own began—but she knew with certainty that she had to feel his mouth.  He tilted her head to accommodate him and then she felt his lips move against hers.

There was, perhaps, half a second of tentative exploration, before he growled with certainty and opened his mouth, moved himself into her, and they both became fevered, straining into each other, commingling tongues and inhaling each other’s breath in quick, hungry gulps.  She gripped his biceps tightly, his muscles bunching through layers of linen, wool, and the skin of her own hands.  He threaded his fingers into her hair, gently massaging her scalp, and his other hand came around to cup just beneath her breast.

She hated that her corset kept a rigid wall of bone and fabric between them.  God, why was she wearing so many clothes?  When every part of her body needed to feel what her mouth was feeling, the febrile coalescence of her flesh with his.  Such a hot explosion between them, as though it had been building for hundreds of years, finally given release.

Had it only been last night that they had kissed for the first time?  It couldn’t be possible.  Several lifetimes had passed in the space of a night and a day.

He groaned and shifted them around so she could sit on his lap.  She brought her arms up and around his shoulders—there was no padding in his coat, the breadth of the jacket was purely him—and pressed against the unyielding mass of his chest.  Desire threatened to overwhelm her, but she had moved past caring.  Her world had reduced to him, his mouth, his hands, his muttered benedictions as he tried to gather her in all at once.

She didn’t mind at all when, swearing, he reached under the front of her bodice to touch her.  The nimble fingers she had watched moments before on the piano keys now played down the soft skin of her breast to find the hardened tip of her nipple.  She arched up, rocked with acute, devouring pleasure, trying to offer herself up to him, to these feelings.  As she did, her elbows hit the piano keys.

A sharp, jarring burst of unmusical noise sent Will stumbling backwards, knocking over the piano bench.  She actually had to catch herself on the front of the piano to keep from toppling forward.  She hoisted herself up as she watched him struggle to collect himself.  He was panting, as though he had run a long distance, and she could tell from the tenting of his woolen trousers that he was as aroused as she.  He looked around wildly, like a feral animal herded indoors.

“Will—”  She reached for him.

“I...” he said, dragging his hands through his hair.  “I have to get a drink.”

And then she heard the sharp raps of his boot heels on the floor, followed by the sound of the front door opening and slamming shut.

Will was out on the street before he knew it, walking under the haze of streetlights, as fogged as the night that surrounded him.  He had no idea where he was going, but he kept heading south, until he hit a huge expanse of land.  This was the place Olivia called Hyde Park, but he hadn’t had a chance to see it until now.  No one seemed to be out except himself, and he moved through this giant stretch of green, trying to take some comfort in its open spaces.

He came to the bank of a kind of river and watched the movement of the wind on the water.  How long he stood there, he didn’t know.  His mind was wrapped in flannel and the aching heaviness in his groin made much thought beyond watching the river impossible.  He barely felt the chill of the October night.  His blood was still thick and hot with the feel and taste of Olivia.

“Evenin’, sir,” a voice said behind him.

Will turned quickly and faced some kind of lawman, dressed in a dark blue uniform with a helmet that looked like half a loaf of bread.

“Evenin’,” Will returned cautiously.  He wondered if he was going to get arrested for trespassing or loitering.

“A bit late for a stroll in the Park, eh, sir?  With no coat or hat?”

Looking down, Will realized that he had run off without anything more than the fancy clothes on his back.  “I was in a hurry.”

“You ain’t from these parts, are you, sir?” the policeman inquired.  “D’ye need directions?”

“Where can a man get a decent drink in this town?” Will asked.

“Well,” the lawman said thoughtfully, “there’s the Friar, and the Three Tuns.  They’re both pretty posh.”

“I mean a place where a workin’ man can bend an elbow,” Will explained.  He gestured to the evening clothes.  “This ain’t my usual gear.”

The policeman’s stern face broke into a grin.  “Oh, you want McNeil’s.  That’s near Covent Garden.”  Pulling out a watch from his jacket, the policeman consulted its face and said, “In fact, I’m off duty now, and I can take you there.  A pint at McNeil’s sounds like just the thing.”

“Thanks,” Will said.  They started walking east.  “You’re all right.”

The policeman chuckled.  “My missus don’t always think so.  I’m Ernie, by the way, Ernie Portbury.”

“Will Coffin.”

“You from Texas?”

“Colorado.”

Portbury sighed, disappointed.  “Too bad.  I always wanted to meet me a real Texas cowboy.”

Fortunately, Portbury was chatty enough for the both of them, since Will didn’t feel much like talking.  The policeman led them through streets genteel and otherwise, crowded and empty, until they came to one street, pure working class,
his
class, where music and laughter tumbled out of a saloon.  Portbury pushed open the door, his hand guiding Will ahead, and they were met by a raucous chorus of “Ernie!” from the people inside.

Will knew that Portbury had steered him in the right direction.  Unlike the pub he’d visited with Olivia the day before, there weren’t too many amenities at McNeil’s.  Just a long bar with a footrail, a framed license, an upright piano where someone banged out a tune accompanied by a fiddle, and rows of tables where men and women were talking happily over their tall glasses of beer.  A well-dusted print of the royal family, or so Will supposed the group of sour-faced stiffs to be, hung behind the bar.  Aside from the few tips of the hat towards England, Will recognized McNeil’s as the British counterpart to the countless saloons and taprooms he’d been in back home. 

“Who’s your swell friend, Ernie?” the barkeep asked as they stepped up.

“This is Will Coffin, all the way from Texas,” Portbury announced proudly as he set down his hat.

Will didn’t bother to correct Portbury, but shook hands with the barkeep.  He fished out some coins from his pocket and slapped them on the worn bar.  “A pint for my new friend, and one for me, too.”

Portbury grinned.  “You’re a good chap, Coffin.” 

Two glasses appeared in front of them.  Will took a hesitant sip.  It was warm, but eventually he grew used to the temperature.  “This is good,” he said, surprised.

“It’s Greywell’s,” the barkeep said.  “We just started sellin’ it.  Folks seem to like it a great deal.”

He’d never tasted the beer from Olivia’s brewery before.  It was mighty fine, and he could tell that she put a lot of pride into her work.  No wonder she refused to let Pryce take it away from her.