she’d dreamed of being welcomed into intellectual and scientific society—however dubiously framed by a medicine show wagon and a saucy Romany driver—instead Olivia Mouton found herself being inducted into the ranks of the verifiably beautiful. For better or worse, beauty was her sole oeuvre now. No matter how much she loathed its fripperies, she’d simply have to get used to it.
Without her so-called beauty, it was clear to Olivia now, she was no one at all. And that was something she could not bear. So she put on a smile, raised her skirts and went to assume her unwanted role as the prettiest girl in Morrow Creek.
Chapter Three
June 1883, Morrow Creek, northern Arizona Territory
Shrouded by darkness, Griffin Turner stood alone on the train depot platform, surrounded by muddy planks and ponderosa pines and unlimited star-spangled skies, watching the westbound train that had brought him churn its way into the distance.
For the first time in a long while, no one rushed to help him, to kowtow to him or to take his baggage. No one hurried to curry his favor or to ask him to invest in one foolhardy venture or another. No one cared who he was or why he’d arrived.
For now, that was exactly the way Griffin liked it. He’d chosen this rusticated town with a drunken dart toss at a map of his acquisitions and holdings. From the looks of the place, he’d chosen correctly. No one would bother him here. No one would look at his face and laugh, the way she had.
You thought I would actually marry you? Oh, Griffin...
At least she’d called him Griffin, he reflected dourly as he shouldered his rucksack and adjusted his single valise. She could have called him much worse. She could have rejected his proposal with one of those detestable nicknames the press had bestowed on him—the ones they used in their scandalous stories.
The Tycoon Terror. The Business Brute. The Boston Beast.
He’d earned those nicknames, Griffin guessed. He’d earned them through years of scraping and fighting and doing his utmost to raise himself from his hardscrabble beginnings to his current position of success. His only mistake had been in believing that not everyone trusted what they read in the tabloids—in believing that she, most of all, wouldn’t swallow his legend whole.
It was ironic, really, Griffin decided as he surveyed the sleepy, shuttered town below through gritty-feeling eyes. Part of his fortune was based in publishing—in printing stories about disreputable figures just like himself. He’d recognized early on that people loved mudslinging. They loved gawking at strangeness. They loved feeling superior...to people like him.
To people like Hook Turner.
With the publishing arm of his business interests, Griffin gave them that. He gave them supremacy and entertainment and a break from tedium. In return, the press had given him a notoriety that bothered him not a whit. Griffin liked being notorious. He liked being hard. He like being intimidating. He liked knowing that—even though he’d assembled a profitable empire in manufacturing, real estate, publishing and various entrepreneurial ventures—his competitors still saw him as an eye-blackening scrapper from the tenements...as a man who’d give his all to win, because he didn’t have anything to lose.
The punch of it was, Griffin had had something to lose. Finally, he’d had something to lose, and he’d lost it. He’d lost it when he’d arrived on Mary’s doorstep and proposed to her in her family’s humble parlor and seen his longtime dreams dashed.
Oh, Griffin...
The pity in her voice had gutted him. He’d thought he’d finally had enough—enough to impress Mary with, enough to make up for his shortcomings with, enough to prove himself with.
Instead, he’d learned that he could never have enough. He’d gotten it through his thick Hook Turner head that he could never be enough, despite all he’d accomplished. So he’d drowned himself in whiskey. He’d thrown that fateful dart. He’d boarded a train westward with not much more than the clothes on his back, and he’d escaped from a life of hoping for more.
From here on, all Griffin wanted was to be left alone.
Alone to brood. Alone to forget. Alone to enjoy the luxuries he’d worked so hard to attain...and now had no one to share with. Not that he needed anyone to share them with, Griffin told himself. He did better alone. He always had.
He crossed the platform with his boots ringing against the lonesome sound of wind whooshing through the pines, then stopped at the crest of the hill leading to the single road to town. Morrow Creek lay before him, forewarned of his arrival with a telegram but nothing else, ready to welcome him with open arms.
At that sap-headed thought, Griffin gave a wry headshake. He’d never been welcomed by anyone except Mary and her family—and later, more grudgingly, his father—so he had no idea why such a sentimental notion would pop into his mind.
If given the chance, he knew, the people of Morrow Creek would turn their backs on him. Assuredly, they’d first find the wherewithal to point and snigger, but they’d turn on him all the same. The trick was, Griffin understood now, to not care.
Here, he’d be left alone. If he wasn’t, he swore as he strode toward town, he’d use his considerable leverage to change that. After all, he owned at least half the property that Morrow Creek’s citizens had built their saloons and shops and stables and houses on. Until now, Griffin had been a genial absentee landlord, but that could change overnight. His new neighbors would give him what he wanted. He intended to make sure of that.
The Boston Beast had arrived. Soon everyone would know it—beginning with the staff of The Lorndorff Hotel, his first and last destination, where Griffin meant to make his home for the foreseeable future. If he had to, he’d take over the place.
He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. But as a pair of ragged miners saw him coming down the street, gave a yelp of surprise when they saw his face then scurried to the side to avoid him, Griffin changed his mind. Suddenly, he felt in the mood to crush anything or anyone that displeased him...and he felt like starting now. Grimly, he shook out his wild, dark hair, pulled his flat-brimmed hat low over his eyes and took himself off to The Lorndorff Hotel, where—if they knew what was good for them—everyone from the merest maid to the most autocratic manager would be on their toes. Otherwise, he’d know the reason.
* * *
In retrospect, Olivia Mouton knew she should have realized something was amiss from the moment she finished breakfast in the sunny dining room of her father’s Lorndorff Hotel and heard the bellman chin wagging with the desk clerk as she passed by.
“I heard he’s the terror of Boston,” the bellman was saying in a scandalized tone, “with eyes like the devil and a fancy dark coat that drags along on the ground when he stomps by—prob’ly on his way to put some orphans on a chain gang or some such.”
“Pshaw. The way I heard tell, he could put grown men on that chain gang of his and get no guff,” the clerk replied with an offhanded wave hello to Olivia. “I ain’t the one who saw him, mind, but the night clerk told me he was about seven feet tall—”
“Seven feet? Holy moly!”
“—with a fully loaded gun belt and knives strapped to both legs. Dressed all in black, he was. Couldn’t scarcely see his face, ’specially with all that hair. Like a mountain man—”
“I
