he couldn’t. He paced outside the sheriff’s office that also housed Defiance’s small jail and swore under his breath. So what if that skinny, pinched-mouth miss had wanted to speak with him? He didn’t owe her his time. He doubted she could have looked more disapproving of him or his place of business. Like he’d thought before—he didn’t owe her anything.
Lucas walked back and forth on the wooden plank sidewalk, hating himself for being curious about what she wanted and wishing he wasn’t thinking what he was thinking. That she might just be the answer to his problem. Yes, he needed an answer and fast, but Emily Smythe? He couldn’t really be considering her could he? He shuddered.
But time was passing quickly and he’d run out of options with last week’s post. Grumbling under his breath, he pushed into the sheriff’s office and asked to see the pinched-faced spinster.
Emily Smythe sat on the edge of the thin mattress in her jail cell. Her back was straight, her expression haughty. Even her black eye looked almost regal. She was the kind of woman who made a man feel he hadn’t washed good enough and that he was going to put every foot wrong. She was cold enough to freeze off a man’s privates. He shuddered again, wishing he could bring himself to ask one of Miss Cherry’s lovelies to help him out. There he’d find a warm, willing woman with plenty of curves and the skill to keep a man purring long into the night.
At least the sheriff kept a clean jail, and it was nearly warm in the spring late afternoon. No doubt Wilson would see reason within an hour or so and let the lady go free, despite her unfortunate aim.
“Miss Smythe,” he said, nodding his head.
He’d remembered to slip on a jacket before leaving the saloon, but he hadn’t grabbed a hat. So when he reached up to tip it, he found his fingers gasping for air. He had to think quick and instead smoothed back his hair, as if he’d planned that gesture all along.
Emily regarded him with as much pleasure as she would an infestation in her flour. “Mr. MacIntyre. What are you doing here?”
Lucas cleared his throat. “Yes, well, ma’am, you mentioned wanting to talk to me.”
“You weren’t interested before.”
He wasn’t now, either, but he felt guilty. Why the hell couldn’t he have lost his conscience when he’d lost his soul? He’d had more use for the former than the latter these past years.
“I was trying to be polite,” he said. “I can see my effort is not welcome. Good day, Miss Smythe.”
But before he could leave, she sprang to her feet and approached the bars. “No, wait.” She grasped the metal with both hands and squared her shoulders. “I would very much like to speak with you, sir. I have a business proposition.”
He was too startled to give her any reaction. In the space of time it took him to absorb her words and wonder if she really meant what she said, he noticed that she’d seemed to brace herself. As if she was expecting him to be angry…or perhaps laugh. There was pride in the haughty angle of her chin, but there was something else in her blue eyes. Apprehension? Fear? Embarrassment?
“What sort of business proposition?” he asked warily, thinking of only one way a woman could have business with a saloon. He doubted that was what someone as proper as Miss Smythe would have in mind.
She glanced left and then right, obviously aware of the men in the other cells unabashedly listening to their conversation. She leaned a little closer to the cell door and lowered her voice.
“I wish to speak with you about your saloon, Mr. MacIntyre. Or more precisely, the rooms upstairs.”
“What about them?”
“I understand they are empty. I wish to change that.” She cleared her throat. “I wish to use them to open a hotel.”
Lucas didn’t know what to say. There were plenty of empty rooms upstairs. In fact the Silver Slipper had been built to have a saloon on the ground floor and rooms to rent above, but he’d never wanted the trouble of running two businesses. The saloon was enough.
“Why?” he asked.
She sighed. “I believe a hotel will be successful. I’m a competent businesswoman—”
“You weren’t much of a schoolteacher,” he said.
She caught her breath and glared at him. She was a little thing, coming to his shoulder. But then he was tall, so most women were little things to him. She was as scrawny as a plucked chicken and she wore the ugliest gray dresses he’d ever seen. Her blond hair was a decent color and he’d noticed it turned nearly gold in the lamplight of the saloon, but she wore it all scraped back, with not a single curl to soften the effect.
“I was an excellent schoolteacher,” she informed him in a voice sharp with that cold he’d been worried about before. “I taught those children more in the nearly eighteen months they were my students than they learned in the previous three years with the other teacher.”
“But they left.”
“The families returned to their homes in Maryland. That decision had nothing to do with my teaching skills.” She removed her hands from the bars and pressed her fingertips together. “Unfortunately, those eight children were the only ones in town at the time, which left me without a position. I cannot wait for another family with school-age children to appear, which means I have to find other means of employment. A hotel is the perfect solution.”
“Uh-huh.”
Lucas eyed her doubtfully. He didn’t know anything about Emily Smythe save that she’d once been the schoolteacher in town and that she hadn’t been born out West. He would bet that her trip to Defiance had been her first journey west of the Mississippi. So why didn’t she just go home?
“You don’t have any family?” he asked.
“They have nothing to do with this.”
So she did have relatives somewhere. Then why wouldn’t she return to them? He doubted anyone as straitlaced as she could have done something to disgrace herself. Emily Smythe wasn’t the type to cause a scandal.
“You’re a teacher,” he said. “What makes you think you know anything about keeping a bunch of miners, ranchers and who knows what kind of riffraff happy in bed?”
Color flared on her cheeks, but she didn’t otherwise respond to his gibe.
“Mr. MacIntyre, I have traveled extensively along the Eastern Seaboard and abroad. I have stayed in exquisite hotels in dozens of cities. In addition, I have a head for figures and I’m not afraid of hard work. I know I can make the hotel a success. I also understand your reticence in allowing me to open my business above your saloon. Let me assure you that in addition to a modest rent, I would be willing to pay you a percentage of the profits.”
“Generous,” he muttered, taking a step back from her.
She wasn’t ugly, he told himself, despite what the miners at his saloon had said earlier. She was a bit on the plain side, but she had big blue eyes he kind of liked. Her skin was pretty—all soft looking and smooth, with a hint of color at her cheeks. Her mouth was a tad pinched, but maybe if she didn’t stand so stiff all the time, the rest of her would relax.
His
