Think logically, Kit. This man is on his way to Oregon. If he’s going west, he can’t be at MacKlenna Farm selecting Thomas’s gravesite when he dies on January 25, 1853
.
He wasn’t her ghost, but whoever he was, he had an unnerving effect on her. His close proximity and the look of puzzlement in his eyes sent her heart drumming to a loud, irregular beat.
Worry about getting to South Pass. Nothing else matters.
She didn’t even know for sure she’d arrived in the right year. A quick sideways glance at the newspaper and an inward laugh bubbled up.
April 4, 1852. Good God. I did it.
Granted, the paper could be a week old, but assuming it was a reasonably current edition, she could estimate the number of travel days she needed.
She mentally calculated. The distance from Independence to South Pass was nine-hundred-fourteen miles. Traveling an average of twenty miles a day, the trip would take forty-six days. April 4 to June 16 totaled seventy-three days. That gave her twenty-seven days for layovers and river crossings. If she left Independence soon, she could arrive in time.
The Highlander shook the shoulders of a man sleeping in a chair with his legs propped on a crate marked textiles. “Henry, the widow wants to join our wagon train, but she’s got no family.”
He opened his eyes and peered at her beneath droopy eyelids. Deep grooves etched his leathery, wind-burned face. Faded cavalry pants and an unbleached cotton shirt covered his burly frame. Graying hair fell short of his collar. He dropped his feet and his boot heels scraped the floor. Then he put his hands on his knees and stood, grunting under the effort. The joints in his bowed legs popped and cracked with each step he took. He skirted the desk and drew to a standstill in front of her.
“Sorry for your loss ma’am, but we got rules. Single women ain’t allowed ’less they’re traveling with family.”
A swell of outrage surged through her. She leveled her best you’ve-got-to-be-kidding glare.
“Why?”
The question eked out in a shriek, and she wanted to snag it and reel it back in. First impressions were important, and she didn’t want to appear to be a shrew.
“Three reasons.” He ticked them off on stubby fingers. “One—pretty little things without a man around cause trouble. Two—you cain’t do the work. Three—you ain’t strong enough.”
Kit puffed out her chest.
Never mind first impressions.
She mirrored his three fingers. “I can take care of myself, my wagon, and my animals.”
He gave her a one-shoulder shrug. “You ain’t going. Not by yourself.”
“Then I’d like to speak to your supervisor.”
He screwed up his face. “Ain’t nobody else. Just me."
The Highlander’s eyes held a quickening of interest, but he didn’t intervene. She tapped her foot. Maybe she could buy her way onto the wagon train. Smiling, she directed a question to the old soldier. “What will it take for you to…uh… reconsider?”
He picked up his pipe and tobacco pouch off the desk and leveled a smile, cold and unmoving, that didn’t match his warm brown eyes. “Ma’am, I’m sorry. Single women ain’t allowed. That’s all I’m saying ’bout it.”
“But—” She stopped herself. Arguing would not change their minds. Their
no single women policy
reeked of blatant discrimination and there wasn’t a thing she could do. Or, was there?
The smoke in the room settled over her in a choking cloud. She coughed.
If she donned the shorthaired wig and britches she often wore during the Annual Old Kentucky Farm Days Celebration she could pass herself off as a boy. The disguise would fool the old codger. She chewed her nail as she devised a plan.
I’ll change my clothes, lower my voice, put some dirt on my face, then come back and try again.
She gave them her best just-you-wait smirk, turned on her heels, and left the office.
Chapter Three
CULLEN MONTGOMERY WATCHED the honey-haired beauty gather her pride and walk out, leaving behind a hypnotic vanilla scent. When she’d first spoken, her dulcet voice had glided across his skin, soft and silky like early morning dew on his Highland hills. Although tempted to lower the newspaper and glance at the woman, he didn’t want to be disillusioned when he discovered the voice of his dreams had the face of his nightmares. Then she spoke again, announcing she was widow, piquing his curiosity even more. But he’d still refrained from gazing at her until she stood so close he could feel her warm breath on his skin. Finally, he relented and looked her way.
The enigmatic beauty stood caught in a beam of light streaming through the partially opened slats on the shuttered window. Stunned, his breathing had stopped, his step had faltered, and words had abandoned him. Unable to speak, he whistled as he gazed into emerald green eyes that burned with intelligence and something else. A spark of recognition.
Impossible. He didn’t think he’d ever seen the woman. If he had, he certainly would have remembered, but the look in her eyes still puzzled him. He rubbed the crook of his index finger across his chin, musing—a beautiful widow. The heated rush of sexual desire coursed through him.
With a breath of regret, he slapped Henry’s shoulder. “You’re all horns and rattles, old man.”
The old soldier remained silent while he took a pinch of tobacco between his thumb and forefinger, loaded the bowl of his presidential-face pipe, lit it, and drew on it several times. “You know dang good ’n well I only wanted to change her mind ‘bout travelin’ alone.”
Cullen looked into his friend’s glum face. “The lass brought up memories of Mary Spencer, didn’t she? You’re not to blame for her disappearance.”
Henry wagged his pipe-holding hand. “I told her she could join up, and then she vanished. If I’d sent her packing like the little missy just here, she’d still be alive. She would have gotten back on that boat and gone home instead of hanging around town waiting on the wagon train.”
Cullen strode across the room to the window and opened the wooden shutters to a square shaft of sunlight. “You don’t know she’s dead.”
“I know she ain’t around no more. Neither is her wagon.”
Miss Spencer was gone, and he couldn’t help her, but he could help the widow. “Maybe there is a solution.”
“You’re as wise as a tree full of owls, son. You’ll figure it out.”
Cullen fixed Henry with a stare, and then headed toward the door, opening it.
“Where’re you goin’?”
The words to one of Cullen’s favorite poems came to mind, and he elocuted,
“
To help my lady with the gold o’ morning sun shimmering in her hair. The saints be with the Highland lass who rides her mighty steed, beyond the heather she brings the glory light for my soul too dark to see.”
Henry feigned a coughing spell.
“Ye wander far across the loch, oh lads o’ Callander…”
Cullen continued. Then with the keening sound of his favorite pipe tune playing in his mind, he went to help the bonnie lass.
WHEN KIT RETURNED to her wagon, she found Tate sitting on the bench seat doing his best imitation of a sphinx. Sitting next to him doing his best imitation of a junior sphinx was Tabor.
“You came, too?”
Although the dynamic duo’s charm was disarming, she sagged all the way through to her feet. Tabor leaped into her arms. “What am I going to do with you?”
Tate tilted his head, waiting for a report or more likely a reward for staying put.
“I struck out,” she muttered under her breath. “They won’t allow single women traveling alone.” She set down the cat. “Y’all didn’t notice a phone booth where I could change clothes, did you?”
Tabor scratched his chin with a hind paw, and Tate barked.
“Guess not.” As she silently watched an array of Indians, Mexicans, and bullwhackers walk in and out of the groggeries surrounding the public square, Kit’s hand eased into her pocket and clasped the Derringer. The weapon provided only a small measure of security. She seriously doubted it would scare off a man threatening her with a bullwhip or bowie knife.
The freight office door opened behind her, and she heard the Highlander quoting poetry.
Then the sidewalk creaked under firmly planted footsteps. She shot a quick glance over her shoulder. He swaggered in her direction as if he were on a mission to mark an item off his to-do list.
“Ma’am,” he said, walking until he stood close to her. “My name’s Cullen Montgomery.”
She grabbed the wagon wheel and laced her fingers between the spokes. Surely, he wasn’t
the
Montgomery in Frances Barrett’s journal. She cleared the nervous knot from her throat. “I’m Kitherina MacKlenna.”
He placed his hands on his hips and tapped out a silent rhythm with his fingertips. “I might be able to help you, Mrs. MacKlenna, if you’re interested.”
Mrs. MacKlenna?
That was her mother’s name, not hers. But the wedding ring she twisted on her finger said the name now belonged to her. “What’d you have in mind?”
He searched her face so intently that heat spread across her cheeks. “Do you have funds to pay someone to drive your rig?”
“Do you know someone I can hire?”
“I can’t make promises before talking with John Barrett, but his lads are old enough to hire out. He might be willing to let one work for you for reasonable wages.”
“Barrett? I…I’d like to meet him.” Were these random events coming together to form a grand design or just plain old coincidences? If she had to place a bet, she’d go with a grand design, and she found that unnerving.
Cullen scratched under his chin with the backs of his fingers. “Barretts are camped outside of town. Stay here. I’ll be back.”
She gulped. No way was she letting him out of her sight. “I’ll go with you.”
Tate barked, and Cullen turned toward the dog. “Pretty. What is he? Never seen the breed before.”
Oh great.
She cleared her throat and told her next lie. “He’s a mix. He’s also a stowaway.”
The dog had jumped into the nineteenth century uninvited, and his ancestors wouldn’t come along for another ten years.
Cullen issued a playful growl. “Stowaways have to earn their keep.” Then he spotted the cat. “And, what do we have here?”
The pressure of questions she couldn’t answer hovered in the air. “That’s Tabor. He’s a stowaway, too.”
Cullen scratched the cat’s head and gave Kit’s Thoroughbred an appreciative glance. “You have quite a menagerie.”
A menagerie was exactly right. How was she going to keep them healthy? She’d prepared for Stormy and the oxen but not the little ones. Why couldn’t she have snuck out of town without them? Maybe she should
take them home and start over. But what if the brooch operated like a revolving door and left her spinning between two worlds?
Oh, that’s a scary thought
.
Cullen placed warm hands at her waist and lifted her to the bench seat, then climbed up beside her. His clothes carried the pleasing apple and cherry aroma that had been present in the office. She bounced her leg and refrained from chewing her thumbnail. Stacks of sketchpads lined the shelves in her bedroom closet. Each pad had drawings of the ghost who resembled the man beside her. Every line on his face seemed familiar to her, but he had no scar below his right ear.
“Get-up.” The animals moved out on his command. “You’ve got a well-trained team and larger than other oxen around here. What’d your husband feed them?”
“My
husband
fed them Kentucky bluegrass and hay.” The lie sank her feet deeper into the proverbial hole, caking her boots with thick Missouri mud?
Cullen weaved the wagon through the crowded street, wearing a tight jaw look of concentration. When they reached the edge of town, he halted the team and pointed to a group of wagons nestled in a grove of oak trees. “The Barretts are camp there.”
She stood, intending to go meet them.
He stretched out his arm, blocking her movement. “Whoa, lass. It’d be best if you stayed behind.”
Stay. Is he kidding?
He climbed down and walked away from the wagon.
She swung her leg over the side, but stopped abruptly when her annoying internal voice reminded her that she was out of her element and needed to be patient. “Damn.” She plopped down on the seat and twiddled her thumbs.
Cullen forged his way through the overcrowded campsites, shaking hands and slapping backs. Children hugged his legs and women offered plates of food. Kit had seen politicians work crowds, but this part-Highland-bard, part-American-cowboy seemed to have disarming charisma. She stopped twiddling and watched the ease at which he moved—relaxed, yet with an air of confidence.
She shook her head, baffled, not only by the Highlander, but also by the magical stone. Why didn’t the brooch send her directly to South Pass instead of putting her through an eight-week journey that forced her to impose on people she didn’t know? Granny Mac would tell her if she stayed preoccupied with the questions, she might never discover the answers.
Oh well.
She went back to twiddling and hummed a little rock and roll
.
Cullen reached the Barretts’ campsite and assisted a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man heaving sacks into a wagon. When the work was done, the two men leaned against the tailgate and crossed their arms across their chests. The man she assumed was Barrett lit a pipe. As he smoked, he occasionally pointed in her direction with his pipe-holding hand.
Jeez, she’d love to be a hub in the wheel and hear the conversation.
I bet Montgomery is telling him I’m a helpless widow?
The thought sparked a kick-ass reaction—a need to prove she was the least helpless female she knew. She tapped her foot and twiddled so fast her thumbs rammed together.
As soon as I secure a spot on the wagon train, I’ll set Montgomery straight.
She’d wager a sack of gold coins that she could shoot straighter, ride faster, and hum Bach concertos he’d never heard before.
“Helpless. Pshaw.”