Jared's Runaway Woman. Judith Stacy
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hurried up the stairs, Cecil’s thanks fading behind her, a little uneasy at passing moral judgement on the two young people she’d caught kissing, given what she was about to do.
The upstairs hallway was empty as she made her way to the front of the hotel and room number four. The best room in the place. Figured Jared would request it.
With a final quick glance around, Kinsey unlocked the door, slipped inside and closed it behind her. She dropped the key into her skirt pocket and fell back against the door, her heart suddenly thumping in her chest.
Good gracious, she was in a hotel room. A man’s hotel room. What had become of her?
She reconciled herself with a quick look around. Bed, bureau, writing desk, washstand, rocking chair, dressing screen in the corner. Just a hotel room.
Then her breathing quickened and a whispering sensation rippled through her.
Jared’s room.
He came full force into her mind as she stood surrounded by his personal belongings. The rumpled bed linens spilling into the floor, the pillows molded to the shape of his head, his clothing hanging on the pegs beside the door, his satchel and valise in the corner. The room smelled of him, rousing a memory she’d rather forget.
The alley. Her nose buried against his throat. His body pressed close. His hot breath. His lips covering hers, drawing her in until she rose up and—
“Good gracious…” Kinsey muttered in the silent room, once more admonishing herself for her behavior. Jared had the good grace to apologize for his actions that night. Maybe she should do the same.
Except she wasn’t sorry.
Kinsey gasped aloud. How could she have even thought such a thing?
She certainly didn’t have time to figure that out now. Jared was at the White Dove having breakfast, and she intended to be finished with her task here long before he scraped his plate clean.
Yet she couldn’t help but touch his shirt hanging from one of the pegs. Pale blue. Cotton. Big. Clark had been a big man, too. Kinsey smiled faintly at the memory.
At the end of the peg row, she saw Jared’s gun belt. Odd that he hadn’t taken it with him. Nearly every man in Crystal Springs—in Colorado—carried a gun.
Yet it didn’t really surprise her. She suspected that like Clark, Jared was more comfortable with a pencil or ink pen in his hand. All the Mason brothers, like their father, spent their days and nights designing and overseeing construction projects—factories, office buildings, warehouses. The bigger, the better, Clark had said with reasonable pride.
Kinsey touched the holster. The leather was stiff, new. She pulled the pistol out. It was a Colt.44 caliber revolver. The Peacemaker. Well-oiled and immaculate. She sniffed the barrel. Not fired recently, if ever.
She held the pistol in both hands, feeling its weight, its balance, then stretched out her arms and sighted through the window at the dotted i on the sign atop the building across the street. Kinsey knew about guns. Her mother, who’d lived through the ravage of the War Between the States, thought every woman should know how to shoot and had taught Kinsey well.
She remembered Jared’s awkward reaction in the kitchen of the boardinghouse yesterday when she’d mentioned that he hadn’t opened fire when the shooting began at the saloon. Something to keep in mind, she decided, as she slipped the Colt into the holster once more.
She turned to the satchel and valise on the floor and placed them on the writing desk. The valise held folded whites, and she had to force herself to dig past them to the bottom of the case, her cheeks warming as she fondled Jared’s long johns, socks and handkerchiefs. But she found what she expected to find. Stacks of money. Her stomach quivered at the sight, then hardened into a knot.
She knew why he’d brought so much cash with him, what he intended to do with it. Buying her off, obviously, had entered his mind before he left NewYork. It was a side of the man that didn’t really surprise her. Yet it still didn’t give her the information she’d come here to discover.
When she opened the satchel, her heart fell. Technical journals. Pencils. The odd drawing tools she’d seen Clark work with. There was a stack of papers filled to the very margins with pencil sketches. Excellent drawings of mountains, waterfalls, flowers, buildings, portraits of old women, young children. They chronicled Jared’s trip westward. She imagined him seated on the train, looking out the window capturing the passing scenery or sketching unsuspecting passengers. She’d seen in Clark the same compulsion to stay busy. None of the Masons, it seemed, could bear to sit still, their hands idle.
Kinsey put the drawings aside and pulled a large brown envelope from the satchel. A new wave of disappointment swept over her as she pulled out a stack of documents and skimmed them.
A letter from the midwife who’d delivered Sam, confirming his birth date and the names of his mother and father. A report from a Pinkerton detective tracing Kinsey’s flight from Lynchburg, Virginia to Crystal Springs, Colorado, and details on all stops in between. The last item in the packet dashed all hope for Kinsey. An unfinished letter, written in Clark’s own hand, advising the family of the impending arrival of his first child.
The man who’d come to her house yesterday claiming a right to Sam was, in fact, Jared Mason. Kinsey’s shoulders slumped at the realization.
Lying awake in bed last night it had occurred to her that she didn’t know whether the man who claimed to be Jared was, in fact, Clark’s brother, even though she’d seen the family resemblance with her own eyes. The man could have been a fraud, a distant family member, wanting to kidnap the boy and sell him back to the Mason family.
Or maybe she was just grasping at straws.
But there was no doubting Jared’s identity now. Kinsey shoved the documents back into the envelope and—
A key scraped in the lock. Kinsey whirled around, saw the doorknob shake.
There were only two keys to every room in the hotel. She had one of them in her skirt pocket. The other one belonged to—
Kinsey slapped her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming as the door opened.
Chapter Five
Kinsey dropped to her hands and knees behind the dressing screen just as the door swung open. She pressed her lips together to keep from betraying her hiding place with a squeal of terror.
Footsteps thudded into the room, then a mumbled curse.
Jared’s voice. No doubt about it.
Kinsey crouched lower, trying to make herself as small as possible. The door closed. She was trapped.
Trapped inside a hotel room. Good gracious, what had she been thinking? Kinsey silently berated herself for her decision to come here. But he’d been on his way to breakfast—she’d seen him with her own eyes. Why would he come back?
Did he suspect her of doing exactly what she was doing? Had he planned this, set a trap for her, somehow expecting to find her here?
Maybe he hadn’t slept well. The thought flew through Kinsey’s mind like a welcomed cool breeze. Maybe he simply wanted to go back to bed—
What if he went back to bed? What if he took off his clothes?
Heat coursed through Kinsey like ripples through a pond.
What if he took off his clothes?
She leaned forward—just a little—and peeked around the corner of the screen. Jared stood at the bureau, muttering under his breath, fumbling with his gun and holster.
All his clothes on.
Kinsey’s cheeks flushed and she ducked back, silently willing him to leave the room. The wood floor was coarse and bit into her palms. Her knees hurt and her back had started to ache.
To say nothing of how hot the room had become.
Then,