Two Brides Too Many (4 page)

His mouth dropped open, and he stood, balancing himself with one hand on the bar, nearly upsetting a small vase of posies in front of the blonde.

“This the gal from Maine?” The question came from the bustled woman.

Kat folded her arms, fighting the urge to scream. Why would such a woman know about Patrick’s personal business…her private matters? “I sent you a wire saying I’d arrive early, Mr. Maloney. Didn’t you receive it?”

Patrick let go of the bar and swayed a little, then stood up and tugged his overalls smooth. “I’m sorry I wasn’t at the depot to meet you, ma’am, but you said you’d be here Tuesday.”

“This is Tuesday.”

His eyes wide, he removed his hat and held it against his chest. “My deepest apologies. Must’ve gotten my days mixed up. I assure you, Miss Sinclair, if I’da known you were coming, I never would have planned my party for tonight.”

“That’s what you call this? A party?”

Patrick stuffed his hat back on his head. “Ladies,” he said, gesturing toward Kat, “I’d like you to meet my lovely bride, Miss Kat Sinclair.”

The woman from the Cash and Carry smiled, her red lips turning up at the corners. “I’d say I done a mighty swell job on them letters,” she said.

Kat jerked. She felt like she’d been slapped in the face. “You didn’t even write the letters?”

“Had a little help is all.” Patrick nodded, and the feather in his cap wagged. “No need to get your stockings tangled.”

Kat looked up at him, feeling dazed and humiliated.

“I have a house for you, and you can pretty it up to suit yourself. We can get hitched tomorrow.”

“Hitching is something you do with a horse and a wagon, Mr. Maloney.” Kat stepped toward Paddy and looped her index finger over the bib of his coveralls, then pulled on it. With her other hand she grabbed the vase off the bar and dumped its contents, posies and all, down his front.

Cheers echoing around her, Kat handed the vase to the woman from the Cash and Carry, then paraded through the crowd and out the door.

F
OUR

L
ewis P. Whibley pulled a pair of denims over his union suit and grabbed a red shirt, a gift from a doe-eyed widow on the opposite side of Denver. Could’ve been afternoon by now for all he knew. Tucked away in this frosty downstairs room, he couldn’t tell morning from midnight. At least the price was right, especially since the old maid who owned this place had taken pity on him. There was something he could be proud of. He’d managed to outclass his daddy in the profession of con artist, although Lewis preferred the term
charmer
.

He pulled a silver pocket watch out of his coat, hanging on the peg by the door, and rolled the timepiece in his hand. He’d charmed it from a Scottish miner last month. He glanced at the hands on the clock. 2:00 a.m.

He’d left the saloon by 1:30 this morning. Had to have been at least 2:00 a.m. before his head hit the pillow. Lewis tried to reset the lazy mechanism. He wound the mainspring, then rapped the face of the watch, much like his mother had thumped his forehead to get him out of bed in the mornings. He stared at the second hand but saw no
movement. Like most of the people in his life, the blasted thing refused to show him any charity. He shoved it back into the coat pocket and buttoned his shirt.

Morning…noon…what’d it matter? One sour day rushed in on the heels of another in this hole. The only time of day that did matter to him was the hour his prey showed up and sat at his faro table. He was counting on them this week, since he wasn’t quite ready to leave Denver. He needed at least one more miner’s payout before he moved on. Two would be best. That is, if he didn’t wear out his welcome before then—a veritable hazard in his trade.

Next to boatloads of cash he’d long spent, his favorite win had been a place in Cripple Creek. Almost a year ago. What a haul, and the greenhorn never saw the sting coming. That one had
easy mark
scrawled all over him—from the Easterner’s peacoat to the jingle bobs on his spurred work boots. A snicker bubbled up from Lewis’s gut. His job was more fun than was socially acceptable. Plus, he could be as lazy in the mornings as he pleased.

Unfortunately, after that grand haul, he’d lost his good sense and failed to walk away in a timely manner. That costly mistake still pained him clear through to his backbone. His daddy had never lost anything that big.

’Course he’d never won as much in one sitting as Lewis had either—three hundred big ones, a mule, a cook, and a place on a hillside. If only he’d quit playing before that lousy drunk stumbled down the sporting stairs to the table. Lewis thrust his fingers through his hair. Grabbing the strop off his washstand, he set his mind to sharpening his razor. He slid the dull razor against the thick leather band, his tension easing a bit with each stroke.

A savory, meaty scent wafted into his room, and Lewis sniffed. He returned the razor to its place beside the washbowl. Shaving could wait till tomorrow evening, when he’d go out to find his next mark. His lady friend Widow Sanchez wouldn’t mind a little scruff on his jaw. She might even find it appealing this evening.

The aroma from the kitchen made his mouth water. Lewis could imagine the spread the old maid upstairs was setting out for her boarders. Ham. Biscuits with honey. Fried eggs. Hashed potatoes. The rumble in his gut begged him to leave his room and take the stairs two at a time, but he didn’t dare show that woman his face today. He’d made too many promises and kept none of them. He’d best give her a couple of days to set something else on her mind. He pulled a piece of jerked beef from a sack on the table and bit off a tough end. This would do until supper. Widow Sanchez had turned out to be a good seamstress and a good cook if you had a taste for tamales and chili peppers, which he did. Anything was better than the fusty stuff he was trying to appease his hunger with now.

He heard footfalls on the steps outside his door. He stopped chewing. They were coming closer. Lewis moved to the table and opened his valise, which held the most important tool of his trade. But when he recognized the shuffle on the steps as the mousy old maid’s gait, he relaxed. The steps he’d need his two-shot for wouldn’t be that cautious and slow. The mouse was probably coming down to invite him to breakfast. After all, it was Wednesday, prayer meeting day.

“Mr. Whibley.” A sharp pound on the door followed the woman’s clipped call. Sounded like she still had his debt stuck in her craw, and he wasn’t of a mind to quibble with her. “Mr. Whibley, I know you’re in there. And you had best open this door.” Another pound.

This was no invitation to a hearty breakfast. The woman seemed set on pitching a conniption. Fine. He was a professional, and he could handle her outbursts. He knew just the trick that would tilt her.

Lewis unbuttoned the top four buttons on his shirt and roughed up his chest hairs. He held a deep breath, trying to produce the effects of a blush before he yanked open the door. “Why, Miss Landers.” Fumbling with the buttons, he tried to appear discomfited by her intrusion.

Her eyes widened, and her jaw sagged. His ploy was a success. “Are you all right, Miss Landers?”

Her face and neck the color of raspberry pie, the old maid stared at a paint stain on the floor beside his stocking feet. He’d touched up a scuffed spot on his table and had apparently gotten sloppy with the red paint.

“I…I am fine, Mr. Whibley.”

“That’s good news. You worried me with your curt inquiry.”

Her nose twitched. “If you do not have my rent money ready, Mr. Whibley, it will not be good news for you. Of that you can be sure.”

Prattle. Prattle. Prattle. The woman’s favorite pastime. This was proving to be more difficult than he’d given her credit for. He needed to step up his game. “How can you be so offhand, Miss Landers, on prayer meeting day?” He reached for her work-worn hand but only brushed it before she snatched it away from him.

“Wednesday or not, Mr. Whibley, you owe me three weeks’ rent. That is fifteen dollars. And let me remind you that fifteen dollars is due right this very minute.” She shoved her hand at him, palm up.

“A man can’t get his hands on his money on an empty stomach, Miss—”

“Then you had best find your bag and pack it.”

She was kicking him out, or at least she intended to. He’d had the money last week, but his exit timing was still off a bit. Never guessed that itinerant preacher would be so skilled at faro—an imposing charmer, that one. Lewis knew he was only in a patch of bad luck. In a slump is all. It happened to the best of ’em. Happened to his daddy more times than Lewis could count. But his daddy had always turned it around, and he would too. His big break would come soon.

Lewis moved close enough to her to smell the bacon fryings on her flour-sack apron. Failing to meet his gaze, the mousy spinster lowered her hands to her apron pockets. She wasn’t one to carry a weapon, so it had to be a stance of surrender. He had finally worn her down. That’s what he believed until the woman pulled a small supper bell out of a pocket and wagged it in front of his face like a schoolmarm. He reared his head back. The tiny thing sure could make a lot of noise.

Lewis covered his ears, unsure of how to best counter her childish action. “Really, Miss—” A couple of clomps on the steps outside his door paralyzed Lewis’s tongue and set his heart racing.

Miss Landers stilled her bell. “That would be Karson.”

Lewis backed away from the door. “Karson?”

Clomp. Clomp
.

“My brother.” She dropped the bell into her pocket.

Clomp. Clomp
.

“I never mentioned him?”

Lewis shook his head, wishing like never before for a window in this downstairs cell.

Clomp. Clomp
.

It seemed like this was as good a time as any to return to Cripple Creek and win back his lucky silver flask and his home, and see where things went from there.

F
IVE

T
he sisters spent most of Wednesday morning washing eight days’ worth of soiled travel clothes. After fighting a stiff wind to hang their garments on the line at Hattie’s, Kat fully expected that their laundry would be dry by the time she and Nell returned from town this afternoon. Finished with that chore, Kat drafted a quick telegram to send to her two sisters and Aunt Alma. She and Nell wanted to let them know they’d arrived safely, but both agreed to keep the details of their abrupt introduction to Cripple Creek to themselves for now.

After lunch with Hattie and the other boarders, Kat and Nell slipped into their capes and stepped out onto Hattie’s porch, but Kat couldn’t forget the memories of last night’s visit to the saloon. She had come all this way to please Father—to put his mind at ease, and for what? She didn’t have the heart to tell him that the solution to his financial concerns for her was nothing more than a complication. And the confrontation with her intended had only compounded the problem. She couldn’t “get hitched” to Maloney, and Nell hadn’t yet heard
from Judson Archer. Kat wanted to believe the man who had won her sister’s heart through his letters wasn’t cut from the same cloth, that there were respectable, trustworthy men here, but why hadn’t he been at the station waiting?

Please, Lord, don’t let him be like Patrick
.

Father had limited funds, and what Kat and Nell had left would cover only five more days at the boardinghouse. Nell needed Judson to be a man of his word. She needed him to marry her soon. And Kat needed to find some way to support herself.

Rounding the corner at Hayden, the sisters dodged a wagon full of lumber and started down the hill to the telegraph office, both of them holding their wraps tight.

“How can you be so patient?” Nell’s question carried a sigh. “Aren’t you dying to find out about Patrick?”

Kat felt a twinge of guilt, and she swallowed hard against it.

“Why haven’t we heard anything from them?” Nell said, ducking her head against the gusty wind. “They sent us train fare. We sent them wires about our arrival, and then not a word.”

Kat’s skin crawled. Nell needed to know about her escapades last night. They usually told each other most everything, but ladies—even sisters—didn’t normally discuss such places, let alone frequent them.