It sat on her shoulder nibbling the treat. After a moment she tucked the furry creature back into the special pouch under a large satin flower that was attached to the brim of her hat.
“Go back to sleep until dark. It’ll be Hades own chaos if a passenger sees you.”
To her relief, the mouse snuggled into his space and became still.
Not even Uncle Patrick knew that her best friend was a rodent.
* * *
Moonlight reflected off the liquid face of the Missouri River.
From the cabin deck of the docked River Queen, Travis Murphy watched the sparkling ripples gliding past, not in a straight line, but with the twisting tug of the current.
The sight kept him mesmerized, since at the moment, his life resembled those twisting ripples. It sure wasn’t traveling the straight line that he hoped this journey would take him on.
The future of the Lucky Clover Ranch depended upon him finding Miss Eleanor Magee. But it seemed the harder he searched the more twisted the trail became, the pursuit more urgent.
At one point, he’d nearly caught up with the woman, but his horse had come up lame. It had taken some time for the poor creature to heal properly.
That delay had been frustrating, but he’d finally made it to Coulson, a day ahead of the steamboat.
Now, here he was, the boat finally arrived, but he sure didn’t see anyone who resembled the woman’s twin sister, Agatha.
Travis swatted a moth away from his face. The determined insect seemed intent upon incinerating itself on the lamp hanging over his head.
Where the blazes could Eleanor Magee be?
Hell, he’d only learned of Eleanor’s existence when his boss, the man he loved as much as he remembered loving his own father, confessed on his deathbed that he had another daughter.
That revelation had nearly kicked Travis to his knees. He’d always felt like a member of the family, believed he’d known everything about them.
When, at six years old, his parents had been put in the grave, Travis had wanted to leap into the hole with them. But Foster Magee had been there, his big hand pulling him back from the shadow of death. He’d taken him to the big house and raised him as his own.
But another daughter? In the moment he’d demanded that Foster tell him why this girl’s existence had been kept a secret, why she had not been raised at the ranch.
The reality was, he’d had no right to demand anything of Foster. But in that moment he had been a stunned son, not an employee.
The reason turned out to be a divorce agreement. He’d learned the full story while watching tears drip down his mentor’s disease-ravaged face—his stand-in father’s face.
He’d given up Eleanor in an agreement with Mollie Clover Magee.
“She was a beauty, my wife,” he’d admitted.
The proof of that, her portrait, still hung over the mantel of the huge fireplace in the great room back at the ranch.
“She was a wild flower, a free spirit, the plain opposite of me. Fire and ice I reckon.” he whispered, his voice hoarse, weak from the effects of his illness.
It was true. Foster Seamus Magee had been a man of purpose. His desire to have the largest and most influential ranch in the state had consumed him. A proper life of social niceties, all the rules of etiquette observed, this was what he’d striven for.
“My Clover, she was never cut out for that kind of life. I watched her dry up in front of my eyes. My pretty wife... The life I sought sucked the life out of her.
“Son, you understand that I never stopped loving her, but I had to let her go when she wanted to...just not all of her. I wouldn’t let her have Agatha because of the two girls she’s the one who reminded me of my Clover, with that blaze of red hair and those emerald-colored eyes. Turned out, though, she didn’t have her mother’s high spirit. The girl is sickly...well, you grew up with her, you know.”
He did know. Agatha was a shut away. She was frail, retiring, and lacking the vigor that the demands of inheriting the ranch would place upon her. He only hoped that Eleanor was different from her twin.
A lot of livelihoods depended upon her being strong, but even more, that she was willing to step into her role.
Sweat trickled down the back of his neck, not with stressful thoughts of past and present, but because the heat of the day lingered on the land and shimmered over the water. In the mountains nearby the temperature would be different. He reckoned just a short distance away the night was getting cold.
Well, not the night so much anymore, but the wee hours. Even the gamblers had taken to their beds.
He swiped the ticklish moisture from his neck while he strolled to the side of the boat facing west. Maybe there would be a breeze off the water.
There wasn’t a breeze...but there was a woman.
A naked woman.
Naked women weren’t so unusual in Coulson. But here on the riverboat at this hour? Perhaps she’d been entertaining a gambler.
Propriety told him to look away. Nature urged him otherwise.
The woman stood on the lower deck, her back toward him and her arms reaching for the night sky. When she lifted her face toward the moon, he saw the slim line of her nose but nothing else.
He smiled, wished he was the moonglow. That elusive finger of light touched the curve of her hip, shimmered in the fall of blond hair tumbling down her back. It cupped the lovely round orbs of her bottom.
She bent her knees, pushed off the deck, and dove headlong into the water.
She came up, grinning, then went under again. Her fair-skinned body skimmed inches below the surface of the water as she swam alongside the boat.
Hell, now he wished he was the river, with the right to touch her so intimately.
Spinning about, he strolled toward the other end of the boat, hands shoved deep in his pockets.
Whoever the woman was, she was not Eleanor Magee. From what he’d learned from the Pinkerton he’d hired, Miss Eleanor was watched over by her uncle. It was hard to imagine the guardian who would let his niece loose at all hours of the night, who would allow her to leap into a river naked.
The fact that Patrick Malone was Eleanor’s guardian, and that she’d grown up on this boat, was all he knew of Miss Magee. He couldn’t be certain that she even lived here any longer since the Pinkerton had never actually laid eyes on her. For the price Travis had been able to pay, all he’d got for his investment was a bunch of the man’s “educated guesses”...leads that may or may not find the Lucky Clover’s heir.
If the investigator was wrong in his information, Travis had wasted a valuable month away from the ranch.
* * *
The nosey gambler was supposed to be abed but Ivy felt his gaze between her shoulder blades...and lower. She longed to twitch, to ease the burn on her back.
Gosh-almighty, she wouldn’t give the voyeur that satisfaction. This was her boat and her time. To her way of thinking, swimming bare was no sin. Eavesdropping was. Let him be the one to squirm before the preacher of a Sunday.
Doing her best to ignore the intrusive gambler, who was probably too drunk to really see her anyway, Ivy dove into the cool murky water.
She burst the surface of the river, grinning. Wasn’t this as close to paradise as a body could get?
Treading water, she inhaled, savored the scent of damp mud, of verdant plants growing at the water’s edge.
“Howdy-doo,