McCrory's Lady (24 page)

      
Maggie bit her lip in concentration, willing her hand not to shake. The rasping scrape of his whiskers felt wildly erotic, sending jolts of excitement tingling down her arm. Strange, she had shaved Bart when he was ill and never experienced anything like this.

      
“Must you always go around with your blouse half unbuttoned?” Colin said crossly before he realized what he had blurted out.

      
“Mmm, is it?” she replied absently, seeming to concentrate on plying the razor.

      
“Ouch! You cut me.”

      
“Then quit squirming around and hold still. It would help if you'd stop looking down and raise your chin,” she added sweetly. She reached across to tilt his jaw, and her ruffled blouse brushed his bare chest. She heard a hiss of breath as he inhaled sharply. Smiling to herself, she began to hum softly while she completed the task.

      
The following morning, Maggie rose early and went downstairs to fetch Colin a hearty breakfast. His recovery was progressing far more rapidly than she would ever have imagined. When she mentioned this to Eileen, the old woman laughed.

      
“Sure and he's a tough one. Broke his leg in two places, last summer it was, when the great beastie he was breaking rolled with him beneath it. Doc Torres said he niver seen bones knit so fast. That was when the Whittaker hussy first began comin' round, her with her fancy airs. She niver fooled me. A cold calculatin' one, she is.”

      
“We've already crossed swords. The first week we arrived—at Lucille Guessler's house,” Maggie said with distaste, recalling Mariah Whittaker's wintry grayish eyes and cold patrician features. “She wasn't at all happy to hear Colin had married. Eden had already warned me about her.”

      
“Just don't be turnin' yer back on the likes of that one,” Eileen called after Maggie, who was backing through the swinging door with a full tray.

      
As soon as she reached the upstairs hallway she heard the sound of footsteps and cursing. Setting the tray hastily on a marble-topped side table by the door, she rushed inside to where Colin stood, holding onto the bedpost. He was wearing the brocade dressing robe that had been hanging in his wardrobe—across the room.

      
“You've been walking!” she accused.

      
“I find it preferable to crawling at my age. It's easier on the knees,” he said, trying to sound casual. Sweat beaded his forehead and he was weakened by his exertions. He studied her fresh beauty, always so wholesomely startling for a woman with her past. She wore a demure gown of apple green muslin buttoned all the way up to her slender throat. But on someone with her curves, it was far from a sedate little day dress. She filled out every inch of it as the soft cotton molded to her breasts and waist.

      
“Let me help you back into bed.” She noticed his perusal as she crossed the room and reached out to place his left arm over her shoulder.

      
“Not to bed,” he replied stubbornly. “I'm going to eat sitting up in a chair. Food can't digest properly when a man is forced to swallow while he's reclining.”

      
“The Romans managed,” she said smoothly.

      
“Their empire fell, didn't it? I'll sit in the chair by the window,” he commanded.

      
She helped him to the chair; but just as she released his arm, Colin stumbled against the wall. Maggie grabbed for his arm; but his foot tripped her, and she fell against his chest. His arms instinctively reached out for her in spite of the pain in his side when he raised them.

      
With a muffled oath, he fought off a wave of dizziness while clinging to her. She braced one hand behind him against the wall.

      
“You're not strong enough to walk yet.”

      
“I bloody well am if you'd keep from crushing the air from my lungs by falling on me.” He could smell her perfume and feel the curves of her flesh through her thin muslin gown.

      
“Don't you wear anything beneath your dress?” he asked as one big hand splayed across her back.

      
“First you complained about the buttons on my blouse being open, now it's my undergarments. You must be feeling stronger to take such notice, Colin,” she said mischievously, not being able to resist rubbing her body very subtly against his. He tried to shift away but not before she felt the bulge beneath his robe.

      
She was mocking him, the damnable crafty tart! “Just let me sit down and I'll feel well enough,” he growled.

      
“I think you feel pretty good right now.” Maggie leaned away from him and he slid over to the chair and plopped down with a grimace.

      
“My breakfast's probably cold by now.”

      
“Nobody's fault but your own, you stubborn Scotty.” She thought she heard him mutter something about a conniving Sassenach beneath his breath as she fetched the tray with a smile.

* * * *

      
While the cat's away, the mouse will play—but Ed Phibbs' expression was anything but mousy as she watched Clement Algren's fat backside disappear into the outbound stage headed for San Francisco. He was off on newspaper business for several weeks, leaving her in charge of the
Miner
. She had put on a meek and obedient facade for him the past weeks. In fact, her interview with Colin McCrory's new bride had been so saccharine it even irritated Fatty Algren.

      
The publisher had wanted some good juicy dirt on McCrory's sudden marriage, and she had written a silly bit of fluff instead, detailing Maggie McCrory's fashionable gown and describing the romantic way she met her future husband in San Francisco. Then, Ed had tended to society-section business, reporting on garden clubs, tea parties and Eastern fashions to lull Algren into complacence. Now, her patience would pay off. She had several hot leads to track down dealing with corruption at the White Mountain Indian Reservation.

      
Last week, she had quite accidentally overheard a conversation between a member of the assembly and Win Barker. The two men had been walking down the hall in the Yavapai County Courthouse. When she heard their voices whispering in furious argument, she had been sitting in a hidden alcove rewriting her notes from a horse theft trial she had just covered. They were discussing Lamp's increasing demands for larger percentages of the profits on the sale of supplies to the reservation Indians. Barker had been placating, assuring the legislator that he could control the agent; but the politician's voice was imperious and brisk with anger, downright threatening.

      
Ed would have given a new printing press to know who the scalawag legislator was. He almost seemed to have the upper hand over rich, influential Win Barker. But before she could sneak a peek at the unknown man's face, they had turned the corner and entered the gentlemen's lounge. Unfortunately, she could not follow them inside. The facility was crowded with a number of men from the legislature as well as sheriff's deputies and various other local businessmen. Barker emerged a half hour later looking haggard, and then departed on the afternoon stage for Tucson.

      
Rumors about the infamous Tucson Ring had been circulating around the territory for years. Recently, Colin McCrory and a few others in Prescott had been stirring up so much protest that a special investigator from Washington was due to arrive next month. If she could only break the story before he hit town! Just thinking of it made her nose twitch. That ancient relic Clarence Pemberton, who had been her mentor back in San Antonio, had always said a good reporter could smell a story the way a bear smelled a bee tree. She knew she was onto something big.

      
Ed had tried to interview McCrory's hired gun Wolf Blake when he was in town the past week. But Blake had been as taciturn as his employer, who was at Crown Verde recuperating from a gunshot wound. McCrory had made an enemy powerful enough to try murder. She was positive the assassination attempt was related to the corruption at White Mountain.

      
She planned a trip to the reservation that very day, as soon as she had the morning editorial and a few filler columns polished up for the
Miner's
typesetter. The editorial was a clarion call for a thorough housecleaning in Indian affairs—from the territorial capital here in Prescott all the way to the commercial center of Tucson. The cycle of starving the Apaches, then getting rich supplying the Army when the savages took to the warpath, had to stop.

      
Ed Phibbs' long strides soon took her back to the
Miner
office where she set to work. Within an hour she had left the newspaper with its press clanking and whirring out the morning edition. The ride to White Mountain would take the rest of the day. Then, there was the matter of bearding Caleb Lamp in his den of iniquity.

      
She had heard of the conditions under which the Apaches there lived. The agent might tidy things up when the Washington politicians arrived, but he would not be expecting her tonight. She would see firsthand everything there was to see.

      
Ed had learned to cultivate her natural propensity toward eccentricity as a means of concealing her keen intelligence. Most of her acquaintances thought her merely a peculiar old maid and humored her—until she pulled the rug from beneath those who got between her and a story.

      
Fatty Algren would be furious when his rug was yanked, but what a thump when he hit the ground! If her story sold as many papers as she thought it would, by the time he returned she would be too valuable an employee for him to fire. Whether he fired her or not, she was going to take the chance and see her exposé through to its conclusion.

* * * *

      
Maggie's campaign to seduce Colin was producing mixed results. She had used his confinement to his bed and then to his room as a means to subtly tease and tantalize him. It worked. He was certainly aware of her as a woman. He desired her. But he had done nothing to indicate he would act on his desire. Short of climbing in bed and attacking him as he slept, she was running out of strategies—and time.

      
That morning he had come downstairs for breakfast and strolled around the porch of the big ranch house, then headed to the stables. Soon, he would be fully recovered and able to hold her at arm's length again. Perhaps, he would visit one of the fancy houses in Prescott—or even Mariah Whittaker, if she would still have him now that her matrimonial hopes were dashed. The image of her husband entwined in the arms of another woman sent a furious surge of jealousy through Maggie unlike any emotion she had ever experienced.

      
“Ye're lookin' so low ye'd have to get better to die,” Eileen said as Maggie sat on the porch swing, staring out to where Eden worked in the flower garden, cutting zinnias for the evening dinner table. “The child will mend, Maggie.”

      
Although she was not too certain about Eden, Maggie's troubled ruminations had not been about her young charge but the girl's father. She put him out of her mind and motioned for the housekeeper to join her. “You've been awfully good, you know—in fact, wonderful, allowing me to come and intrude in your place with Eden as well as your place running the household.”

      
Eileen sat down on the big wooden swing beside Maggie. “Saints preserve me, if I'm all that wonderful,” she said with a warm chuckle, patting Maggie's hand. “I knew when I saw the two of ye together that Eden had formed a bond with ye that was special, that she needed ye. After what happened to her, I understood. As to bein' mistress here—ye've scarce intruded at all.”

      
“That's because I'm a terrible housekeeper and even worse cook.”

      
“I think it's because of yer troubles with the mister,” Eileen said bluntly.

      
“I've been taking your advice,” Maggie replied, crossing her arms on her chest defensively. “I've done everything but hold him at gun point and make him strip his clothes off. He may desire me, but he's determined not to do anything about it.”

      
A devilish gleam came into Eileen's brown eyes, which crinkled at the corners as she grinned. “A woman's got to do what a woman's got to do, me mum used to say.”

      
“And exactly what is that?”

      
“I'd not be usin' a gun—just yet, mind. But I do think the time for drastic measures is here. It's fearful stubborn the Scots are, but when a man's mother naked in his bath...well...it tends to weaken his resolve—especially when he can't be hidin' what his body feels.”

      
Maggie remembered the times she had held her body close to his and felt the hardness of his staff pressing against her. “I know what his body feels. It's his mind I can't seem to reach,” Maggie replied disconsolately. “I won't approach him that brazenly. I can't.” She rubbed her temple, then said, “Speaking of baths, I think I'll take a good long soak in the tub while Colin's not here.” She rose and headed for the door.

      
Eileen did not move but called after her, “Don't be forgettin' them lily-smellin' bath salts.” Sure and the mister does love ‘em. If she timed it just right, with a bit of subterfuge, those two fools would be at the end of their frustration by tonight! Once Maggie had disappeared upstairs, Eileen set to work. The first thing was to send Rita down to the stables to summon the mister.

Chapter Eleven

      
Wolf watched as Maggie and Eileen went into the house, leaving Eden alone in the flower garden. Then he approached her with the big shaggy dog they had rescued in Prescott walking beside him. He looked down at the small figure with her silvery blonde hair falling in a curtain of curls down her back. Slim white hands worked skillfully, snipping and pruning, selecting only the largest and most perfect yellow and orange blossoms.