The Duchess and Desperado (8 page)

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Authors: Laurie Grant

Tags: #Romance, #Historical Romance, #Nineteenth Century, #American West, #Protector

BOOK: The Duchess and Desperado
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But Morgan didn't seem to find her remark stupid. “His name is Rio,” he said. “And he thinks he's handsome, too—don't ya, boy?” he asked, scratching the horse's ear. The stallion tossed his head as if to agree. “Here in the west, though, we call horses like that
pintos
, or paints.”
“I see.” It was a moment of perfect harmony. “I-I'd best look m on my mare.”
“I'll come with you. I'm done here.” He let himself out of the stall. “What're you planning for today, Duchess?” he asked as they strolled down the aisle to where Trafalgar was stalled.
“I've been invited to a luncheon at the home of Mr. and Mrs. John Byers----he owns the newspaper, and apparently he's quite a prominent developer here in Denver, as well. And I'm invited to the mayor's for dinner. Ah, there you are, my beauty,” she said when her bay mare poked her well-shaped head over the stall door at the sound of her mistress's voice. “Are they treating you well? But you're bored, aren't you? Yes, I managed to obtain an apple for you,” she said, laughing, when Trafalgar butted her hand with her soft black muzzle. She pulled it from her pocket and watched while the thoroughbred lipped it delicately from her hand.
“Beautiful animal,” commented Calhoun.
“Thank you. Morgan, do you think we could take our horses out for a ride? Trafalgar badly needs some exercise, don't you, girl? You're getting fat, with nothing to do but eat your head off.”
Calhoun looked dubious. “I don't know if that's such a good idea, Duchess. It'd be awful hard to protect you out in the open. I could take the mare out for you, if you like. She's a big one, so she wouldn't have any trouble with a man's weight.”
Sarah quashed the impulse to argue. She didn't want to destroy the progress they'd made. “Oh, please... We could leave before dawn, before any self-respecting evildoer is awake.”
Her attempt at humor won a smile from him. “We'll have to see how things go, Duchess, all right? Let me think about it.
 
“I thought Mr. Calhoun asked you not to look out the window,” Celia commented from her seat in the landau as it rolled through the streets of Denver toward her luncheon engagement at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Byers. The servant was accompanying Sarah to the event, since her uncle and her secretary had gone to check on the seating order for the dinner party at the home of the mayor, to make sure it followed protocol.
Sarah, wearing her spectacles, since only Celia was inside with her, shot a guilty smile at her dresser. “I know, but it's such a gorgeous summer day and Denver's such a pretty new city. Surely it won't hurt if I just take a peek now and then, especially if Mor—if Mr. Calhoun is up on the seat with Ben and doesn't know? It's not fair that I must go from place to place in a dark cage as if I were a vicious lioness.”
Celia looked prim and unconvinced. “Perhaps not, but you've been threatened twice in less than twenty-four hours, and shot at once,” she observed, speaking freely with the ease of a valued servant.
“Just once more...” Sarah promised with a sigh, and lifted the curtain again just as the carriage was passing a particularly attractive row of businesses.
A man was standing in front of one of the buildings, staring at the carriage from the doorway of a building. He was blond and tall, with a dashing mustache. Goodness, he reminded her of Thierry, she thought fondly, though of course Thierry would never have been here, dressed as an American civilian. In the next letter she had Celia post secretly, she'd have to tell him he had a double in America!
Just as the carriage was rolling past, the man stroked his mustache, just as Thierry so often did.
Was it Thierry?
Might he have decided to join her here, rather than in Santa Fe, and be out looking for her? She had to see!
“Ben, stop the carriage!” she cried. “Stop it at once, I say! Thierry!”
The vehicle rolled on for a few more yards, and Sarah became frantic, beating at the roof and the window like a caged bird.
“Stop the coach
!”
“Whoaa!” Ben called. Sarah felt the carriage slow just as she pushed on the door handle and got it open.
“Your grace, what are you about?” she heard Celia ask in a mystified voice, but she ignored her, determined to see if the man could actually be de Châtellerault. What a joyous reunion they would have, even if it would be awkward explaining it to Frederick! How much Thierry must love her if he couldn't stay away any longer!
She opened the door just as Calhoun jumped down from the driver's seat to the ground beside her, landing with a thud.
His face was alarmed and he looked her up and down. “Duchess, what're you screamin' about? Are you shot?”
Frantically, she looked past his body to where she had seen Thierry in front of the building. There was now no one there. She tried to force her way past Calhoun, but he caught her wrist. “Let me go!” she cried. “I—I saw someone I know back there!”
“Who?”
“A friend from home—
please!
I have to catch up with him before he goes away He must not have seen me—he must have gone inside one of those buildings!” Suddenly she succeeded in pulling herself free, and she was off and running back down the street in the direction from which they had come.
With Calhoun's boot heels pounding right behind her, Sarah reached the row of businesses, and peered inside, seeing within only clerks and a few customers—but no one who resembled her handsome French fiancé.
Calhoun caught up with her. “Have you gone loco, Duchess?” he cried. “Get back in the coach!”
She ignored him, dashing into the middle of the business establishment, a men's haberdashery. Calhoun followed
“Have you seen a fair-haired man in here? A Frenchman?” she asked the astonished haberdasher.
“No, miss ..”
Narrowly eluding Calhoun's grasp, she ran back outside and tried the adjoining business, a printing office. The man hadn't gone in there, either.
Calhoun had given up trying to stop her and just silently followed her into the third establishment, a drugstore.
She asked her question again. This time, the proprietor pointed to a back entrance. “A man like you're talking about went out through there.”
“Did he have an accent? A French accent?”
The man's brow furrowed. “Don't rightly know, ma‘am. He didn't say nothin', just went out our employees' entrance back there without so much as a by-your-leave.”
“May I?” she said, indicating the back door. “It—it's very important that I catch up with him.”
The man shrugged, and Sarah dashed through the rear entrance with Calhoun at her heels.
The alleyway was empty of everything but ash cans and a stray cat.
“You mind tellin' me what that was all about, Duchess?” Morgan demanded.
“I—I thought...I s-saw someone I knew,” she panted, feeling utterly foolish.
“Who?”
She was not about to explain now about her secret fiancé. “Just s-someone from home,” she stammered, still out of breath. “B-but I must have been mistaken.... It was too silly of me, wasn't it? I'm sorry to have startled you. Oh, well, I suppose we can go back to the carriage now,” she said with an elaborately casual shrug. She dared a glance at him through her lowered lashes, and saw her explanation hadn't mollified her bodyguard. Calhoun was looking all around them, his face set in hard planes.
‘“Too silly' doesn't hardly begin to cover it, Duchess,” he said. “Did it ever occur to you that you coulda been shot at? Let's get back to the carriage before ‘a patriott' notices what you did.”
Suddenly she felt exposed and vulnerable in the vacant alley, and a thousand times more stupid than his face told her he thought she was Wordlessly she obeyed as he indicated she was to retrace her steps back inside the drugstore and back to the carriage.
Once he'd given her his arm and assisted her inside, however, he leaned in and drawled, “Duchess, by the way, since when do you wear spectacles?”
Sarah gasped. She had completely forgotten she still wore them. Her hand whipped out and yanked them off as her face flooded with heat.
“I...well, now you know my secret,” she said, embarrassed but glad she could distract him. “I'm afraid I can't see very well without them.”
“So why don't you wear them all the time?”
“Vanity, I suppose. Lord, what a foolish creature I must appear to you!”
She couldn't read his suddenly shuttered eyes. “I reckon we'd better be going, or you're going to be late, Duchess.”
Chapter Eight
 
 
T
he luncheon was so pleasant that Sarah almost forgot about the anonymous notes she had been receiving. The wives of the ten most prominent businessmen of Denver were genuinely friendly, absorbed with Sarah's tales of the queen and her peers back home, and clearly impressed with the fact that Sarah held the duchy in her own right.
“Why, I wouldn't be
anyone
if I wasn't ‘Mrs.' Someone,” one of them said. “Just imagine, being your own mistress...”
It was obvious they found Sarah's bodyguard fascinating, too. Even though Morgan withdrew to a corner of the room near the door while the luncheon was going on, Sarah noticed more than one of the ladies closest to her staring at Morgan Calhoun's lean form and handsome visage with expressions that could only be described as longing.
But she was pleased that from what she could see, Morgan seemed totally unaware of the eyelashes being batted in his direction. Every so often he would rise to peer outside the windows, and then, apparently satisfied, he would sit back down and seemingly withdraw to some place inside himself.
On the way back to the hotel Sarah caught no glimpse of the man who looked like Thierry de Châtellerault. Surely the sighting had been merely wishful thinking, she told herself after greeting her uncle and Donald, as she and Celia headed for the privacy of her bedroom so she could change her dress.
She stopped just inside the room, nearly causing Celia to collide with her.
There was no disorder, but nothing was as she had left it. A book she had left on the bedside table to the left of her bed was now on the table on the other side of the bed. The ormolu clock that sat on the mantel now faced the wall. A framed picture of Kathryn, which Sarah always kept on her bedside table, was lying facedown.
Feeling the hair prickling at her nape, she strode forward and peered into the chest of drawers where Celia always laid out her clothing in the precise order Sarah preferred—gloves and handkerchiefs in the top drawer, chemises in the second with her stockings, petticoats in the third, nightgowns in the fourth, corsets and corset covers in the fifth.
Everything had been changed. The gloves were now in the bottom drawer, the corsets in the top. Her chemises were now where her nightgowns should be.
“Celia...” she murmured as she crossed the room to look into the wardrobe where her gowns hung and her shoes were kept. “Did you rearrange things in my drawers while I was taking breakfast this morning?”
Her dresser blinked at her. “Why, no, your grace. I folded your nightdress and dressing gown and left the room.”
A glance into her closet confirmed Sarah's expectation. Here, too, garments had been moved around. And Sarah's shoes and boots, always precisely arranged, had been matched up with different mates, so that a kid slipper was now placed next to a riding boot, a brown high-buttoned shoe with a black one.
“Uncle! Donald! Morgan!” she called. “Come in here!”
Morgan led the other two at a run. She explained what she had found. “Uncle, was aught amiss in the other rooms when you and Donald returned?”
Lord Halston, his face grim after Sarah's announcement, shook his head. “Actually, Donald returned ahead of me, didn't you, Donald?”
“Oh?” Morgan, who had been peering into the wardrobe, was suddenly alert. “And why didn't you come back with him, your lordship?”
Lord Halston glared at him. “I remained behind to chat with Jerome Chaffee about possibly investing in one of his mines,
Mister
Calhoun. What on earth are you implying?”
Morgan's gaze was steady. “I'm not accusin' you of anything, your lordship, so don't get your feathers ruffled. Do the hotel maids have access to this room when no one's here?”
“No,” came Halston's prompt reply. “The rooms were cleaned under my watchful eye after her grace left this morning, before Mr. Alconbury and I departed.”
Morgan looked thoughtful. “And nothing was out of order in your rooms, gentlemen?”
Sarah saw her secretary shake his head. “Nothing, Mr. Calhoun. Everything was just as I had left it.”
“Not that I noticed,” muttered Halston. “Perhaps I'd better take a second look.” He turned on his heel and left the room.
Sarah watched as Morgan went over to her bed and ran his hand over the coverlet, then pulled the coverlet back and felt the pillow. Even from where she stood she heard the crackle of paper. Morgan's hand dived into the pillowcase and came out holding a folded piece of paper.
“Give that to me, please,” she said, feeling an icy fist squeezing her heart.
Morgan handed it to her, still folded. Inside was the same nearly illegible, misspelled scrawl she had become all too familiar with: “Ive bin this close, duchiss. Walls and locks cant keep me out. That guard cant save you neither. And it dont matter wher you go. I will git you. A patriott.”
Sarah read it through once, then tried to read it again, but her hand was shaking too badly. She gave up and handed it to Morgan.
She raised her eyes to her bodyguard's after he had read it. “Well, so much for the theory that all I had to do was leave Denver to be safe,” she said, attempting a wry tone and failing miserably.
“He might be bluffing about that part,” he observed.
“But we can't be certain, can we?” she retorted.
“No,” he admitted. “We can't be certain.”
“In that case it seems to me I might as well go ahead with the social events scheduled,” she said, meeting his gaze.
His lips compressed to a thin line, he said, “I reckon I'd better go have a talk with the hotel manager. Lock the door behind me.”
 
Peering through a window in the attic of Mayor John Harper's residence, he watched them arrive. The hired bodyguard rode up front with the coachman, as he had the evening before. This time he had a rifle cradled in his lap. The watcher saw the bodyguard's eyes scan the area thoroughly before he hopped down and went to open the coach.
He knew the bodyguard couldn't see him watching from the darkened room.
No, my would-be white knight, you will not see me aiming my rifle from this window, or from a rooftop, this time. I am not one to keep trying any tactic repeatedly. I am more deadly now because I am even more invisible.
As he continued to stare at the coach below, the duchess alighted. To look at her, one wouldn't think Sarah Challoner had a care in the world, he thought, much less that she had received several assassination threats. Dressed in a gown of midnight blue, with a low, square-cut neckline edged in lace that was echoed at her wrists, with a matching blue band threaded through her golden curls and pearls around her neck, she was blindingly beautiful, like a goddess come to earth.
Did her American bodyguard think so, too? he wondered. From what he had seen of Calhoun's face, it did not look as if he betrayed his feelings easily.
Just then the watcher saw Sarah Challoner give her bodyguard a dazzling smile and murmur some pleasantry, and he saw the bodyguard's lips curve slightly in response.
The duchess's smile sent a dagger of jealousy straight through the secret witness's vitals.
I knew I could not trust you not to betray me. You will die for that smile—painfully, tonight. Calhoun is but one of many, I am certain, but I will take my revenge on him separately.
“Oh, there you are, Pierre,” said a voice. She pronounced it “Pee-air,” as if it were two separate words, which irritated him even though it was but an assumed name. “What're ya doin' up here in your room spyin' on the guests when I need ya in the kitchen? You promised t'make me that special sauce to go over the venison.”
He smoothed his features before turning around, and when he spoke his voice was bland and deferential. “I am coming now,” he said. “I just had to glimpse the beautiful duchess, before I am busy cooking for her, yes? Like a fairy-tale princess, is she not?”
The rotund black woman eyed him stolidly. “I dunno about that, but you better hustle yo' French behind on down to the kitchen, Pi-erre, or ya won't get the chance to cook for no duchess. I bin the mayor's only cook fer a long time and he didn't need no special Frenchie cook before this duchess-woman come, and I don't have time to go lookin' fo' ya every time I need ya.”
Muttering a curse in French under his breath at the cook, he followed the servant down the narrow attic steps that led from the servants' quarters. What he would achieve tonight before he suddenly disappeared from the mayor's house would make these minor irritations more than worth tolerating.
 
 
Sarah was more than ready to leave. Her head was throbbing unmercifully and she longed to get out of the tight stays that made eating more than a minimum of the excellent meal an impossibility. There had been numerous and interminable toasts to Anglo-American relations, to future statehood for Colorado Territory, to Lord Halston's investing in the Chaffee Mining Company. Good Lord, there was still the dessert course to endure, and probably after that she would have to go into the drawing room with the mayor's wife and make polite conversation with the other ladies while the gentlemen lingered over port and cigars.
“Delicious, wasn't it, your grace? I was so fortunate to find this Frenchman to cook for us just in time for your visit,” John Harper was saying into her right ear. “Of course, my regular cook's nose is thoroughly out of joint because I hired him, but Maisie sure can't make sauces like whatever that was on the venison.”
“It was excellent.
Sauce au poivre,
I believe. The entire meal was the best I've had in America, without a doubt,” she praised. “Please pass along my compliments.” Harper had bored her to death boasting of his French chef.
“Ah, but you haven't tasted dessert yet. Pierre has promised something special, ‘fit for a duchess,' as he says.”
Sarah forced herself to smile and murmur something polite.
“But I'm sure your grace has sampled the finest French cuisine before,” opined the man on her left, a barrel-chested old real estate speculator named Ellis Edwards, who at least offered an alternative to Harper's boasting, even though he was very hard of hearing and called her “your grace” in every sentence he uttered.
She'd never been
your-graced
so many times in her life. If she ever got done with this interminable evening, she was going to reward herself in the morning with a few hours of horseback riding, and nothing Morgan Calhoun said was going to change her mind. Surely she'd generated enough goodwill with the prominent men of Denver and their wives that she had earned a little pleasure. If Morgan wouldn't go with her, she'd go alone, Sarah thought rebelliously.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw Calhoun still standing between her and the wall, as if he were but another of the liveried waiters hired for the occasion. He'd been there throughout the meal. Without her hated spectacles, she couldn't tell for sure, but she was fairly sure he didn't move a muscle in acknowledgment of her look.
The mayor had offered to seat him at the far end of the table just as if he were a guest, but Morgan had declined—much to Harper's regret, Sarah guessed. John Harper wanted to pretend nothing untoward had happened during the duchess's visit to his city, and would have been happier still if the duchess's bodyguard had consented to eat in the kitchen.
She wondered if Morgan was hungry, standing there watching everyone eat like that. She'd have to make sure the kitchen sent something up for him when they got back to the hotel.
At least William Wharton was sitting just on the other side of Edwards, and she could see and be warmed by the commiserating rolling of his eyes. Sarah wanted to wink back at him, but duchesses did not do such vulgar things, even in the wilds of America, and she settled for smiling down at her plate, knowing he would see and understand.
What a nice man Wharton was, Sarah thought as the waiters cleared the table of the dinner course. She was quite looking forward to their evening at the theater two nights from now.
“And now for the pièce de résistance,” the mayor announced, his French accent exaggerated and incorrect as a waiter brought in an elaborate pastry and set the first one in front of Sarah. Behind him other waiters were bringing in more of the pastries and setting them in front of each diner, until finally all of the powerful and influential guests at this dinner in Sarah's honor had been served.
“What is this, some kinda fancy Frenchie cake?” the real estate speculator asked her in a stage whisper, and immediately plunged his fork into his and shoveled an enormous amount into his mouth.
“D'lishus,” he mumbled through a mouthful of pastry. “Tashte it, Dushess.”
Sarah glanced at Harper and saw that he was speaking to another guest.

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