Lucky Penny (14 page)
Brianna snapped the book closed, determined not to let her imagination run away with her. Only now that the suspicion had crept into her mind, she couldn’t shove it back out again. Who was David Paxton? Was that even his real name? What if he had gotten his hands on all her and Daphne’s letters by foul means? From the start, Brianna had prayed she was writing to a nonexistent person. She had envisioned the Denver postmaster holding the missives for a time and then tossing them out onto a burn pile or into a trash barrel to be carried away to the local dump. What she hadn’t considered was that the correspondence might fall into the wrong hands.
Now, suddenly, Paxton’s crazy behavior didn’t seem so crazy, after all. A blond little girl like Daphne, so fair and blue of eye, might bring as much as a thousand dollars in Mexico, making it well worth the while of a criminal to get his hands on her. Brianna’s employer, Ricker, had always dictated what she should write in the letters. Had he encouraged her to tell David that his little girl was a flaxen-haired beauty? Brianna had written so many missives she couldn’t remember. Ricker had been anxious to be rid of
Brianna from the beginning. He’d hoped to hire a more accommodating woman who would not only keep house and tutor his sons, but also warm his bed. On that count, and others, Brianna had been a huge disappointment to him. Within a month of her arrival in Glory Ridge, he’d started insisting that she write weekly letters to her errant husband in Denver to bring him back to heel. It made sense that he might have told her to include specifics about Daphne: her age, her coloring, her progress with academics.
If so, Daphne’s physical description would have been enough to make any slave trader drool over the profit he stood to make if he could get his hands on her.
Tossing the book back in the trunk, Brianna faced the unthinkable. The events today had not been twists of fate. That ruffian who called himself David Paxton wasn’t here with honest intent. He’d somehow gained possession of those letters, and now he was bent on taking Daphne to sell her across the border so he could lounge about in a cantina somewhere, swilling tequila and availing himself of prostitutes.
“Drat and tarnation!”
Brianna muttered the exclamations under her breath so as not to wake Daphne. Hands shaking, she held up Mrs. Pauder’s gown, staring with dismay at the left underarm seam, which she’d just sewn to the waist with the wrong sides together, leaving the raw edges showing. What in heaven’s name had she been thinking? Blast that man to perdition for rattling her so. Now she’d have to carefully rip out each stitch, no easy task with dusk soon to descend and the light of only one lantern to see by.
Just then Brianna heard a tap at the front door of the shop, which she’d locked a few seconds ago when the clock struck five. She groaned and tossed the dress aside. As she circled the curtain, she saw her new nemesis through the glass and stopped dead in her tracks.
David Paxton
, or whatever his
real
name was, bent to peer past the Closed sign and poised his knuckles to knock again. Brianna considered ignoring the summons, but she’d seen the glint of determination in his eyes earlier and knew he wouldn’t hesitate to make a racket if she dared. She wanted no more
unpleasant exchanges with her employer today. She absolutely could
not
lose this position.
Her stomach felt as if she’d just swallowed an entire handful of jumping beans, but she forced her feet to move. He wasn’t going to conveniently disappear, and like it or not, she had to deal with him. As she neared the glass, she took measure of his person. To her frightened gaze, his chest looked at least a yard wide, an illusion she felt sure was enhanced by the saddlebags that he carried over one shoulder. She felt diminished by him. Disengaging the deadbolt with trembling fingers, she cracked the door to peer out at him. He straightened, forcing her gaze upward in order to maintain eye contact. His chiseled features were cast into shadow by the brim of his leather hat. The faint scent of bay rum drifted to her on the chill air.
“The judge and marshal have agreed to see us in ten minutes at the marshal’s office. I would have given you more warning, but I had to fetch my saddlebags.”
Brianna clenched her hand on the doorknob. “I
told
you, I cannot afford to miss any more time today. Do you have cotton in your ears?”
His even white teeth flashed in a slow grin. He leaned his right arm against the doorframe, forcing the portal to open wider despite her attempts to brace against his weight. “No cotton in my ears, but I do have money in my pocket. I’ll reimburse you for the lost wages.”
“I don’t
want
your money, Mr. Paxton, if that’s even your real name! I want nothing to do with you, period!”
He didn’t budge, making it impossible for her to close the door. “You should have made that call seven years ago, darlin’.”
Rage surged through Brianna so hotly she felt the burn at the back of her throat. She yearned to stomp on his foot to make him back away from the opening. “I can’t leave right now. Daphne is doing a recitation at the church hall this evening. When she awakens from her nap, I must get her ready and make sure she arrives there on time.”
“This meeting won’t take long—thirty minutes, maybe, an hour at the most—and I can help get Daphne ready for the recital.”
Brianna glared up at him. “The program starts at seven, sir! It is now shortly after five.”
“I said I would help get her ready.”
“No!” she cried. “I refuse to allow you to interfere with my work schedule twice, and you will not so much as
touch
my daughter again, you low-account reprobate.”
He actually chuckled. “A low-account reprobate? My, my, I’m flat moving up in the world.”
Ever since Moira’s death, Brianna had struggled, day in and day out, to be a mirror image of her sister—sweet, well-mannered, and difficult to rile, a lady of the first cut who was fit to be Daphne’s mother. But right then, seeing David Paxton’s smirk, she wanted to toss all that aside and give way to her
true
nature, which was volatile and Irish to the bone. This man would have the surprise of his life if she socked him in the eye with all her might and then slammed the door on his foot.
But, no. She couldn’t allow him to attend that meeting alone. Then the judge and marshal would hear only his side of the story.
Brianna stepped back from the doorway. “Very well. Have it your way. I shall inform Miss Martin of my forthcoming absence and get my shawl.”
Paxton pushed into the shop and closed the door behind him so softly that the bell failed to tinkle. “While you do that, I’ll collect our daughter.”
“
My
daughter.”
Grinning again, he hooked a thumb under the saddlebag strap on his shoulder and nudged up the brim of his hat with his other hand. She wasn’t surprised that he had failed to remove the grimy, sweat-rimmed thing. Men of his ilk knew nothing of how to comport themselves in society or how to show deference to a lady. The nuns had warned her about his kind. This miscreant could smile all he liked. She wasn’t fooled.
“There’s no need to interrupt her nap,” she told him. “The shop is closed. I can lock up as we leave. We should let her sleep.”
Paxton swept by Brianna as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’ll not be leaving my child with that sharp-tongued shrew. If
I’m careful not to jostle her, she shouldn’t wake up. When we get to the marshal’s office, I’ll put her on the bench just inside the door. She’ll be comfortable enough there.”
Brianna wanted to attack him from behind as he bent over her daughter. Instead, she clung to the tattered threads of her self-control, assured herself that the judge and marshal would take her word over his, and stepped to Abigail’s apartment door. With a quick knock, she summoned her employer, explained as briefly as possible that she would be gone for a half hour, and then listened to the woman rant about her leaving for the second time that day.
“I expect a certain amount of production, Mrs. Paxton. You’ve accomplished very little during this shift.”
Brianna opened her mouth to defend herself, but then she remembered the mistake she’d made on Mrs. Pauder’s dress. It was true that she had accomplished little. “Today has been a deviation from the norm. I will do better on the morrow.”
“I shall hold you to it,” the proprietress snapped. “Otherwise I will be reviewing the other applications for this position, madam, and you shall be replaced.”
S
As Brianna stepped up onto the opposite boardwalk, Paxton shifted Daphne into the curve of one arm and caught hold of Brianna’s left hand, drawing her to a halt as he examined her wedding band. With an arch of his burnished brows, he said, “I don’t recall putting that on your finger, so I’m guessing I didn’t.”
Brianna’s legs felt like stumps, and invisible weights seemed to have settled on her shoulders. She saw nothing to be gained by wasting her energy on yet another exchange. As it was, she was sounding like a phonograph stylus stuck in a groove.
With a jerk of his head, he indicated the door of the marshal’s office. “Before we go in, you need to understand that I
know
this is my daughter, and I won’t be leaving Glory Ridge without her. You can choose not to go with us. That’s your decision to make. But I’m not about to let Daphne live like this, sometimes eating food you find in trash barrels. My daughter deserves better, and I intend to see that she gets it.”
A sizzling retort leaped into Brianna’s mind, but it died en route to her tongue. He couldn’t know about her taking food from trash barrels unless Daphne had told him, and Brianna wouldn’t call her child a liar when it was the truth. She’d sunk pretty low over time. No man had put that ring on her finger. Paxton was not her real surname. Daphne wasn’t even her child. But she still had standards, lines she refused to cross.
She tugged her hand from Paxton’s grasp. The touch of his hard fingers had seared her skin like a brand. Searching his clear blue eyes, she saw no sympathy, only grim resolve, and she knew in that moment that he meant to do precisely what he said: establish his paternity of Daphne and then abscond with her.
Brianna would never allow that to happen.
Never.
With Brianna scurrying to keep up, David opened the door and carried Daphne into Marshal Bingham’s dingy office. A lighted lantern hung from a ceiling hook in one corner. The place contained only one barred cell, appointed with two narrow cots, both presently empty. The lawman, a paunchy fellow with brown hair and eyes whom David had guessed earlier to be about fifty, sat across the battered desk from a gentleman David presumed to be Judge Afton. At least a decade older than the marshal, with a bald pate ringed by nearly white hair, he wore a shabby black serge suit flecked with dandruff across the shoulders. Pipe
smoked wreathed his head and drifted away from him in layers of misty gray that hovered in the room like thick winter fog.
David set his jaw when he saw that the two men were playing poker. A small pile of coins and silver certificates lay between them. A half-empty jug of whiskey sat off to one side, and both men nursed tall drinks, the deep amber of the liquor indicating that they were downing the stuff straight. David carefully deposited the sleeping Daphne on the bench just inside the door, put his saddlebags beside her, and strode over to the desk. These men were well into their cups even though it was only half past five. If anyone in his office had pulled this stunt, he would have been out of a job as fast as David could yank the badge off his shirt. David was no puritan, but he never drank while on duty. Apparently Bingham had no underlings to take over while he imbibed—or Glory Ridge was so small that little trouble ever occurred. Given the tight, defensive look on Brianna’s face, David figured that tonight would be an exception. She’d go down fighting, no quarter asked—or given. Damn, but he had to admire that about her. He appreciated courage and grit, even when they came wrapped in an infuriating package.
Afton glanced up and flashed a bleary smile. “You must be Mr. Paxton.”
David extended a hand. “Correct. And I’m guessing you are Judge Afton.”
The older man put down his cards and set his pipe in a green dish caked with a thick layer of ash to give David a limp, clammy handshake. Then he belched and grinned again as he grabbed a gavel at his elbow and rapped the desk with a sharp report. The sound momentarily awakened Daphne. From the corner of his eye, David saw Brianna hurry over to soothe the little girl back to sleep.
“That’s me, the Honorable Judge Afton, at your service, and as you can see, I’ve come prepared to give you audience and make a ruling.” He lowered the gavel to pick up a brass stamp from atop a smeared and dented tin box that David guessed contained an inkpad. “I can’t quite recall what your problem is, but if you’ll hold on a minute, I will
allow you to refresh my memory.” He gathered his cards, glanced at the marshal, and slapped a dollar onto the ante pile. “I call, Barton. I think you’re bluffing.”