“I see your nap didn’t do anything to improve your disposition, Mr. Quicksilver,” she said, tilting her pointed little chin up into his face.
“Nope. My mood’s about as wrinkled as your skirt.” Marcus bit down harder on the weed. His head was starting to ache again, and he could feel a vein throbbing in his temple, threatening to burst. Not only was Amanda Grenville a spoiled brat, but now, on top of that, she was proving to be a careless and outrageous flirt. Everything about the little blonde had begun to nettle Marcus, and yet he found her impossible to ignore.
She dismissed him now, quite thoroughly and efficiently, the way a goddess would dismiss a mortal, with a brusque little cluck of her tongue. “I’ll be so glad to get my luggage when we arrive in Sidney,” she said, turning her full attention back to various pleats and folds of fabric.
“Uh-huh,” he answered noncommittally, thinking she did look a bit more bedraggled now than she had earlier today, when he first saw her skulking outside the depot in North Platte. Traveling, especially by stagecoach, tended to wear people down. Women in particular. This woman, who wasn’t used to prairie heat or road dust or old jolting coaches. She’d probably never gone anywhere without at least one maid to see to her every need and comfort.
And yet here she was with no one to take care of her. She’d run away from all that, hadn’t she? Or so the Wanted poster claimed. Marcus wondered why. Then he scowled and wondered why he wondered. What difference did it make why she’d abandoned a life of great wealth and perpetual ease? Once Marcus delivered her to her grandmother and collected his well-deserved five-thousand-dollar reward, he’d never see Amanda Grenville again, much less think of her.
He plucked the weed from his mouth, tossed it to the ground and went to see about Sarah B., who was tethered, and not too happily, either, to the back of the coach.
“Two minutes, folks,” the driver called down from his lofty perch, where he was all but invisible behind a blue cloud of cigarette smoke. “If we push it, we’ll be getting into Sidney just about dark.”
While Marcus readjusted Sarah B.’s bridle and reins, he spoke to the mare softly, apologizing to her for making her run behind a dust-making stage, promising her a warm stall and a fat bag of oats that night.
“Mmm… A fat bag of oats,” sounded a wistful voice close by. “I’m so hungry even that sounds delicious.”
Marcus gave a last yank to the knot in the reins, then braced his forearms on the mare’s neck. Bedraggled or not, Miss Amanda Grenville looked beautiful in the mellow light of late afternoon.
“When did you eat last?” he asked her, then watched while her smooth brow furrowed and her eyes turned a deeper, thoughtful green as she pondered his question.
“Yesterday. No. The day before that.” She gave a mournful little laugh. “To tell you the truth, Quicksilver, I’m not sure. But I know I must be famished if a bag of oats sounds appealing.”
“Here.” Marcus unbuckled his saddlebag and withdrew a piece of jerked beef. “This is a little better than oats.”
She took the mahogany-colored dried meat and stared at it a moment, turning it this way and that, before she looked back at Marcus. “What is this? Leather?”
“Edible leather. It’s beef jerky. Go ahead. Try it, brat. If it doesn’t fill you up, at least it’ll keep your mouth occupied for a while.”
She studied it some more, bending it, bringing it to her nose and sniffing it. Anyone would have thought he was trying to poison her, Marcus thought disgustedly. Ten to one she’d hand it back to him and refuse to even try it. He watched in silence, then, as her pretty mouth twitched and her front teeth tested the dessicated meat. She tugged at it like a terrier then, to no avail.
Marcus retrieved a second piece of jerky from his saddlebag. “Not that way,” he said. “Like this.” He clenched the tough morsel in his back teeth and ripped off a good-size portion, which he proceeded to chew.
“Oh.” She eyed the dried beef as if it were about to bite her back before she sank her molars into it and nearly growled as she sheared off a piece. Then she chewed. And chewed some more. Soon she was staring off into the distance, grinding her teeth as if that had become her lifelong occupation.
Marcus had never seen anyone quite so dogged about food. Or so unsuccessful. “Spit it out,” he told her.
“Mpht,” she answered.
He motioned toward a nearby clump of weeds. “Go on and spit it out before you wear down your damn teeth.”
She spat as if she’d never done that before, either, and walked back dabbing a hankie to her lips. “That was terrible,” she exclaimed. “I believe I’d prefer eating a roof shingle.”
“I expect a person has to develop a taste for jerked beef,” he said, more amused than apologetic. He wasn’t all that fond of jerked beef himself.
“Well, I’d much rather redevelop my taste for rare roast beef or oysters. Now those a person doesn’t even have to chew.” Her eyes lit up, and she smiled brightly. “Oh, do you suppose there will be a decent restaurant in Sidney?”
“Probably. Do you suppose you can afford to eat in it, brat?”
“Stop calling me that,” she snapped. “And yes, of course I can afford it, once I get my suitcase back. I might even consider treating you to supper, Quicksilver. What do you think of that?”
She spun around and walked away, treating Marcus to a view of her haughty backside. He shook his head. Actually, he thought they’d be lucky to eat a boiled egg on a slice of moldy bread this evening, but there was no point in telling her right now, then having to watch her sit and sulk for the next few hours till they arrived in Sidney. The duchess would find out soon enough that her suitcase was still riding the rails west, along with all the money in it.
As was customary on stagecoaches, all the passengers returned to their previous seats when the driver shouted that their stretch stop was over and that anybody who wasn’t back inside the vehicle in half a minute would be left behind. “No exceptions, ladies.”
Linus Dobson had lumbered back from his stroll just in time to offer Amanda a boost up into the coach, and then the burly oaf had trampled her toes once more before reclaiming his seat beside her. Marcus Quicksilver sat directly opposite from her again, and even though it was now somewhat dim inside the vehicle, he retreated once more beneath his hat brim.
Despite the gathering dark, however, Amanda still had a fairly good view of his half-open shirt, with its exceedingly distracting fur, which, at present, she found much more appealing than his personality. The next time he called her a brat, she decided, she’d show him just how contrary she could be, by launching her foot into his shinbone.
“Well, well. Here we are again,” Linus Dobson said, nudging her with an elbow while sending a moist breeze of peppermint and onions in her direction. “Say, I don’t believe I caught your name, honey.”
Here we are again, Amanda thought morosely. The gnawing sensation in her stomach had gotten worse after her attempt to chew the dessicated beef, and it didn’t help one bit when the hunger pangs were coupled with those peculiar flickers every time her eyes drifted below Marcus’s collarbone.
She was missing her grandmother, too, all of a sudden, which struck her as odd, when she was doing her best to escape the old woman’s clutches. But she’d lived with Honoria Grenville nearly all her life, ever since her parents—Joshua Grenville and his young wife—perished in a steamboat explosion while vacationing on the Rhine. Her grandmother had really been more like a mother to her for twenty years. She was a stubborn, overbearing mother, however, and one who refused to let Amanda make decisions for herself in even the smallest of matters.
But she had decided, hadn’t she? When she wound up quite by accident and quite alone in a carriage with the dashing Angus McCray, and when