that he realized he hadn’t answered the question it had posed.
He balled up the boot rag, tossed it onto the planking, then tugged his watch from his pocket. “It’s five past eleven, miss. The westbound’s due any minute now, if it’s running on time.”
“Good. I certainly hope so.” Saying that, she whisked her skirt around and walked back to the edge of the depot, where she’d been standing earlier.
Well, not standing, exactly. It was more like skulking, Marcus thought now, vaguely aware of a little flicker of disappointment in his gut. He was used to women making advances toward him, some shyly asking the time, despite the watches pinned to their breasts, others coming right out and telling him they’d never seen a more handsome devil in all their born days and was he married or promised or going to be in town long? None of them, however, ever skittered away to skulk once the connection had been made. Ever.
He didn’t consider himself a ladies’ man, exactly, but he wasn’t a rock by the side of the road, either, dammit. This little lady’s obvious disinterest had definitely taken a chunk out of his male pride. He scowled at his boots a minute and rubbed his jaw before getting up, stretching and sauntering her way.
“Nice day.”
He might as well have been a rock, the way she ignored him.
Marcus nudged his hat back a fraction. “You headed west, miss?”
Her pretty face tipped up to his, and those green eyes regarded him with cool disdain, less like a rock now than like something that had crawled out from under one.
The hell with her. Marcus would have turned on his heel and bidden her good-day and good riddance then, if he hadn’t noticed the tiny trembling of her lips and the way her fingers shook when she reached up to brush a stray wisp of blond hair off her forehead. She was nervous. No. More like frightened. Scared to death. Only you couldn’t tell it by her voice.
“I’m not in the habit of talking with strangers,” she told him in clipped, cool tones, then added an icy “Go away,” just to make sure he got the point.
He got it, all right, and—scared or not—he was about to give her a view of his departing back when she muttered, almost under her breath, “Where the devil is that little boy? What in the world could be taking him so long?”
“Pardon?”
She sighed and spoke as much to the clapboards on the side of the depot as she did to Marcus. “I asked that young shoeshine boy to purchase a ticket for me. I gave him two twenty-dollar gold pieces and told him to hurry. He ought to be back by now.”
Or halfway across the state by now. No wonder the little son of a bitch had been in such a sweat to leave Marcus and his boots and his damn nickel behind.
“Excuse me, miss.” Touching a finger to the brim of his hat, Marcus turned and walked away.
Amanda peeked around the building for a last glimpse of the stranger, whose whiskers hadn’t totally concealed a strikingly handsome face. Even the shade of his hat hadn’t been able to hide eyes that were bluer than a prairie sky at noon. And now, as he walked away, Amanda couldn’t help but notice how wide his shoulders were and how his gunbelt hugged his narrow hips. If eastern dandies had the merest notion how the slant of a bullet-laden gunbelt set a woman’s heart to pounding, she was convinced that New York and Connecticut would soon be as wild as the West.
“Oh, my.” But even as the wistful sigh escaped her lips, Amanda reminded herself that a woman who was engaged to be married had absolutely no business noticing the physical attributes of men. Strange men, too. Ones who, for all she knew, were only interested in dragging her back to her grandmother and pocketing the five-thousand-dollar reward.
She’d only escaped two days ago, tossing her hastily packed valise from the train as it slowed for the Omaha depot, then jumping after it, while her grandmother snored in her big upholstered chair. “Over my dead body,” the old woman had blustered. But as it turned out, over her snoring body had been adequate.
Amanda smiled, still quite pleased with herself for outfoxing the stubborn old vixen. She didn’t for a minute believe her grandmother didn’t have her well-being at heart, but this time Honoria Grenville was wrong. This time—for the first time in all her twenty-one years—Amanda knew what she wanted and, by heaven, she was going to get it, even if it meant slinking around train depots and begging favors from raggedy little shoeshine boys.
And where was that boy, anyway? Surely he’d had ample time to purchase her ticket by now. She’d have gone into the depot herself, but with those reward posters tacked on every available inch of wall, she didn’t dare. Her grandmother must have had them printed within minutes of her escape, then hired half the men in Nebraska to post them.
She paced back and forth now, squinting up at the sun, wishing she’d remembered to take her watch with her when she jumped off the train. If she had remembered it, though, she wouldn’t have had an excuse to ask that darkly handsome man for the time, though, would she?
A tiny grin itched at her lips. How shocked her grandmother would be at Amanda’s bold behavior. Of course, she hadn’t expected the man to pursue the brief conversation. Or her. That worried Amanda considerably. What if he had seen one of the posters?
It suddenly occurred to her then that the little boy might have seen one of the dratted posters inside the depot and run for help. Her fingers twitched at the sides of her skirt, ready to hike it up and make yet another escape, when she heard the soft jingle of spurs just around the corner of the building.
“Here you go, miss.”
When the handsome stranger held out a ticket, Amanda snatched it from his hand. Thank God, she wanted to wail, and had to swallow hard to keep from showing her incredible relief. But before she could subdue her vocal cords enough to offer a single word, the man quite literally chilled her with those blue eyes of his.
“You’re welcome,” he said with undisguised sarcasm. “Always glad to help a lady in distress.”
What did he think she was, an ungrateful, illmannered boor? She was a lady, after all. That was practically her sole credential. And as for distress, well, she’d gotten along just fine for the past two days, despite the fact that she was being hunted like a dog. And, like a dog, Amanda could feel her lips pulling back in a snarl when she said, “I’m most appreciative of your chivalry, sir. Keep the change, won’t you?”
“Keep the—?”
Marcus dragged in a calming breath as he looked down at the four silver dollars in the palm of his hand. He’d just sprinted a quarter mile to catch a nine-year-old thief, caught the boy by the scruff of the neck, upended him and shaken the two double eagles loose.
“Don’t you ever steal from somebody who trusts you,” Marcus had warned him. “Especially a lady who’s scared and in trouble and is depending on you for help. You got that, kid?”
After nodding and blubbering about how sorry he was, the little bastard had proved just how much the advice meant to him by kicking Marcus in the shin and hightailing it into a grove of elm trees.
And now here he was—Marcus Quicksilver, knight errant, slayer of dragons and shoeshine boys, humble ticket bearer—being told by his damsel in distress to keep the goddamn change!
He was tempted to swipe the railroad ticket right
