Training Ivy [How The West Was Done 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (2 page)

And she graced him with the most open, rounded, pleasing vision of a face.

She was such a fancy article, Neil couldn’t speak. Sure, he’d not had much truck with the female sex. His history being hobbled—imprisoned—in New South Wales had made sure of that. But he was intelligent enough to know that he could go years, another decade, without being graced by such a rare vision. She was all rounded shapes—gently rimmed eyes, mouth as though she’d just eaten a fistful of berries.

Dust settled on the shoulders of her green velvet jacket, and the dyed feather in her jaunty hat drooped in exhaustion. She was togged out to the nines for evidently having just arrived on the stage. Tendrils of long auburn hair now straggled about her ample bosom, and Neil was struck dumb.

“Good afternoon,” she panted. Neil spied a boy wheeling a cart away—he no doubt had brought this vision and her luggage. “I see it says ‘Vancouver House’ on the cornice.” She nodded and looked upward, as she still held onto her earlobe. “I’m told this is Simon Hudson’s house.”

Like a beached fish, Neil opened his mouth but no sound came out. It took that half-witted dumbhead Ezekiel to spring through the entrance and grab one of the beauty’s portmanteaus.

“Indeed it is!” Zeke affirmed. “Welcome!”

But she held out her free hand in warning, indicating that Zeke should be still. Zeke froze like a stiff on the receiving end of a necktie party, his fingers hovering above the portmanteau handle. “I’m sorry,” the beauty said apologetically. “But if you could please not move for a moment. I’ve only just now noticed that I’ve lost one of my earrings. Can you help me look around for it? It’s a dangling emerald item—you can see the one on my other ear here.”

She waggled her head, displaying her earring that dazzled Neil with a myriad of diffracted shards of light. When she smiled, she revealed cunning little teeth like a beaver’s. She seemed to have eyes only for Neil and seemed to speak directly into his dazed soul when she said, “I only just put them on when I arrived at the depot, not wanting to wear them on the stage, as you can expect. I wanted to impress my father—Mr. Simon Hudson.”

Her father!
Hudson had four daughters back East in New York. Neil was finally galvanized into action and fell to the beauty’s feet to feel around for her earring. She lifted her velvet skirts and took a small step aside, the better to assist Neil. If he’d wanted to, he could’ve looked right up the layers of her skirts from his vantage point on hands and knees. Just as this thought shamed him, Zeke was on the porch next to him, feeling around, his bugged eyes fixed on Neil.

“Did you hear?” he whispered excitedly. “Her emerald earring! What’re the odds of that happening? One in a thousand? This is a
sign
, I tell you, Neil—a sign from beyond the grave!”

“Will you please
stow
it?” Neil snapped. “She’s upset about losing her earring. She doesn’t need the additional distress of listening to you and your rank mouth!”

But the flatheaded jackass had already shot to his feet, and Neil could hear him clear as day chirping out to the lady, “Miss! I must ask you! Does your family coat of arms, by any chance, depict a castle?”

“Why
yes
, it does, Mr.—”

“Ezekiel Vipham, at your service!”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well, it might sound highly irregular, but you’ll soon discover things are done differently here in the Far West, Miss Hudson. You see, there’s this visionary fellow who lives nearby with some Indians, name of Caleb Poindexter…”

Neil crawled around at Miss Hudson’s feet, enduring the flatheaded bison story again. He shuddered with delight and his prick stiffened when he had the legitimate opportunity to touch her ankle, to soundlessly request she move her boot. When her skirts rustled, they oddly enough emanated a scent of pine. Oh, it was a good thing Hudson didn’t wake from his trance and find his head of security down on all fours under his daughter’s skirts! Even worse would be the penalty if Hudson discovered the nature of Neil’s thoughts.

He imagined snaking his palm up her gam, clamping it around her well-turned knee. When he lifted her skirts, he’d take a bite out of her billowy thigh, whiter than a clean sheet, just above her stocking. He’d catch her calf between his thighs like a vise, giving her a sign of his well-endowed—so he’d been told many a time—bull’s prick when he humped it against the tender arch of her foot, and—

“I found it!”

He’d found his voice as well! Neil gripped the little green gem between thumb and forefinger, digging it out from between the porch floorboards. He was so ecstatic at his accomplishment he completely forgot where he was. As he straightened up to stand and proudly hand Miss Hudson the earring, he caught at least three of her skirt hems on the crown of his head.

For a brief moment, he
was
looking up her skirts. It was hot under there, steamy and humid, the pine scent mingling with that of fish and dust. The brief glimpse of her drawers so astounded Neil that he fell back on his ass as she whisked her skirts from about his head. He had to blink several times to rid his head of the image of a lace ribbon cinched above a dimpled knee.

That was an image he’d not soon forget. He really had to pay a visit to the bawdy house soon and dab it up with a few women. His awkwardness around women could really become a liability.

What a day!
First, Ivy’s stagecoach had almost been robbed by a bandit, and then she had nearly lost her mother’s emerald earring.

Now this stranger had found it. Why, Ezekiel’s story about the visionary must be right—something good
must
be in the air. After all, the earring was now back in her ear. And she hadn’t even
known
the outlaw was about to rob their stage until a shot had rang out and a fellow on a nearby hillock had dropped to the ground. An unknown Good Samaritan had shot the outlaw from a great distance in the leg so as not to kill him, just scare him off. None of the passengers even knew the story about the Good Samaritan until they’d arrived at the Laramie depot an hour later.

And this stranger was exceedingly handsome by anyone’s standards, especially those of an old maid such as herself. Something strangely wonderful indeed was in the air. And she’d been oddly stimulated to have a man’s head and shoulders underneath her skirts in…well, for the first time ever.

“Mister? How can I ever thank you? I never would have seen my earring between those wooden boards. I’m a bit hard of seeing, too.” And would have corrected the problem with new spectacles had she not run from her fiancé in New York, who had promised to provide that and everything else a girl could ever want.

“Mr. Neil Tempest,” said the stranger. “I’m the head of security for the fort and now the railroad.”

His long arms dangled attractively, his sunbrowned and veined hands hanging about muscular thighs. He wore his gun belt in that cocky manner she’d noticed men in the Far West did—hips thrust forward assertively, leather holsters worn in the shape of the six-shooters they cradled, obviously drawn many a time.

Mr. Tempest’s chestnut hair was shorn carelessly and spiky, as though to recently rid him of head lice and grown back in a devil-may-care way—probably having no wife to show him a mirror. Sharp blue eyes observed her acutely above a hawk’s nose—an expression Ivy might’ve taken as disapproval, but he looked as though he wore a permanent squint. Most people seemed to, here in the windswept heat of the limitless prairie.

“I’m Ivy Hudson. I’ve just come across this Great American Desert, and my head’s still bouncing around from the tortuous lack of springs in that Concord coach.”

“Well, great balls of…” Mr. Tempest said thoughtfully, and Ivy tried to pinpoint his accent. He was decidedly British but with an unusual lilt she couldn’t determine. He seemed to jolt from his daze then and leaped to grab a couple of her portmanteaus. He held the door open with his boot. “Is Mr. Hudson expecting you? I didn’t hear him say anything about a daughter arriving.”

“Nor would you,” Ivy said vaguely, following Mr. Tempest into a grand foyer. While stone blocks made up part of the outside structure of the house, the interior was awash in polished wooden floorboards, wainscoting, and a curved staircase that led to the second story. Why had her father built such a lavish mansion with his entire family stuck back in New York? Perhaps it was to enhance his image in Laramie as a Far West captain of industry. “Because I didn’t tell him.”

Now that he was out of the harsh sun, Mr. Tempest stood before her and smiled effortlessly. Ivy saw he was quite charming really, almost in a boyish way. An unusual quality in a man so devilishly handsome—one who had probably been sought after by the most gorgeous belles. Briefly she wondered what he was lacking that he wasn’t jaded yet. That he could allow her to see his charming naivety.

“Well, when we left him a couple minutes ago, he was sleeping.” A nod of his head indicated a downstairs room, not a bedchamber.

Ivy laughed. “Oh, does he still do that? Sleep sitting up?”

Mr. Tempest joined in her laughter. “Yes, quite often.”

“In the middle of meetings?”

“In the middle of meetings.”

They paused to smile idiotically at each other. Ivy enjoyed merely gazing upon his classically handsome face. He regarded her as though she were a roasted hen he drooled to gobble up until he completely ruined the moment by saying, “So you have three other sisters, Mr. Hudson tells me?”

Oh! Those damned other sisters!
Ivy loathed thinking about them! She loved her sisters, of course, but to be constantly compared to them was beyond maddening! Naturally, they’d been in competition with each other their entire lives. Who was the most beautiful, the smartest, the most accomplished? One of the things she’d hoped to gain by traveling hundreds of miles into the Far West was to be rid of these constant comparisons!

She turned icy. “Yes,” she said through thin lips. She squared her shoulders and faced the closed study door. “But they are back in New York, and I am here. Now, Mr. Tempest. Can you show me into my father’s study?”

He ducked his head a little with apparent shame, and Ivy felt badly. Of course, he didn’t know that his mention of her sisters would bring out her competitive spirit. “Yes, Miss,” he said obediently. How had he learned this obedient manner? Ivy wondered. Perhaps he’d been married before.

“Call me Ivy.”

Now she had to face her father.

Yes, he was slumped back in his chair, mouth slightly open, looking far older than she’d expected. Perhaps the constant prairie winds did that to one, battered one’s face. When Mr. Tempest touched his shoulder, Simon Hudson gulped and snorted and looked to all corners of the room.

“Father!” she uttered, to waken him.

“What?” he sputtered. “Who’s that? Who’s there?”

Ivy had been dreading this moment for weeks. Racing forward, she enveloped her father in her dusty arms until he seemed to really believe it was her. He stood and held her at arm’s length, looking from her to Mr. Tempest then over to that amusing Zeke fellow, who giggled like a silly baboon.

“Ivy, my dear! Whatever are you doing here?” Mr. Hudson asked, logically. “Where is”—he looked to the wall as if for assistance in remembering—“Mr. John Prahl?” Then he looked around eagerly, as though John Prahl were hiding behind a spittoon.

Ivy shook her father. “John’s not here, Father. We, ah…we never married.”

Instead of becoming angry, her father merely looked confused. Ivy had to sigh. It would be nicer, actually, if one had a father who would become
angry
. On her behalf, preferably. Angry at John Prahl for having the nerve to not marry his daughter. Angry at John Prahl for being such a dunderheaded bore his daughter could not conceive of marrying him. “Why not?”

“I decided not to, Father. I couldn’t imagine…” She sighed heavily, and then it all came out in a rush. “I couldn’t imagine spending the rest of my life tied to a man whose only topic of marital conversation involved valves and ledgers!”

Was it her imagination, or did Mr. Tempest look as though he suppressed a laugh? He turned to a bookcase, and yes, he
definitely
had a smile at the corners of his luscious, well-made mouth. Instead of being irritated with Mr. Tempest, Ivy felt a sort of kinship with him. Perhaps
he
could understand! Perhaps that wife who had browbeaten him had led him to feel the same way—that life was better without them!

“Valves and ledgers?” Mr. Hudson asked vacantly. “Why, what’s wrong with valves and ledgers?” His look turned angry then. Angry with his daughter. “How do you think Mr. Prahl gained his fortune, aside from valves and ledgers? Daughter! You are what, thirty years of age now? I made an excellent selection for you, and you dare to toss it away? What sort of better life are you hoping to achieve for yourself?” He looked around the room in horror. “Especially
here
, in Laramie City?”

Ivy had this all planned out. “I know what I can do, Father! The Pacific Railroad will require hundreds of tunnelers, masons, surveyors, teamsters—”

“And you will drive a team of oxen? Absurd!”

“—teamsters
and
telegraphers! Father, on the train from Omaha to Cheyenne I amused myself by sitting by the telegrapher. A fascinating fellow! He showed me everything—well, not ‘everything,’ surely there’s more to it than that—but he showed me every important detail necessary to run the telegraph. And back in Hyde Park when I would send and receive telegrams from you, I spent
hours
in the telegraph office chatting with the operator, a very nice fellow—”