Chapter 2 #3
He cleared his throat. “Well, not a salesman per se. He says any good business magnate needs to start at the bottom and work their way up. This time, that means I’m going to be a master of commerce by starting as a traveling salesman.
” It was hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, even with someone as lovely as Miranda sitting across from him.
“ This time?” She arched her other brow. The fact that she’d switched from one to the other was so unusual and quirky that Randall couldn’t stop himself from smiling.
“Let’s see.” He took another sip of tea, then leaned back in his chair.
“In the last five years, I’ve been a deck hand on a merchant ship because my father thought I should be a ship’s captain, a porter on a train because my father thought I should be a railroad magnate, and an office boy because my father thought I should be a corporate executive. ”
Miranda blinked, looking as startled as he felt when he reviewed his life. “And none of those professions…took?”
Randall heaved a sigh and smirked. “Not really. Father says it’s because I refuse to apply myself.”
“But you’ve spent the last three months traveling in an attempt to sell brushes,” Miranda said. “How could he possibly not see that as applying yourself?”
“You haven’t met my father.”
“I’m not sure I would want to,” she burst out, then instantly looked sheepish. “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s rude of me to say.”
“Not at all,” he chuckled. In fact, he had a sudden urge to bring Miranda home to do battle with his father. Instinct said she would either charm or argue him into submission. Or perhaps that was just hope talking.
She continued to study him over the lip of her tea mug as she drank. When she finished and swallowed, she said, “All right, Randall Sinclair. You’ve tried shipping, railroads, offices, and brushes. What is it that you want to do?”
A warm rush filled him, almost as if the tea she’d made had infused far more than his stomach. The heat and comfort of it had spread all the way to his heart. “No one’s ever asked me that,” he said.
“No one?” For a moment she looked taken aback, sad almost. Then her expression resolved into gloomy, heavy understanding. “Well, I certainly know what that feels like.”
“Do you?” Why did it make him happy to know that she had shared something of the misery of being pigeonholed in places she didn’t belong?
Miranda lifted her hands and looked around at the rugged interior of the saloon. “Do I seem to you like someone who would naturally incline to operating an establishment like this?”
He’d had that same thought several times since entering the building. “No.” He shook his head. “So how did you end up with it?”
Miranda sighed. “My Uncle Buford. He left it to me in his will.”
Randall hesitated. “I’m sorry for your loss?”
Miranda made a dubious sound and rolled her eyes.
“Uncle Buford was my father’s twin brother.
For some inexplicable reason, I was always his favorite growing up.
My sister, Vicky, was everyone else’s favorite.
What made even less sense to me was that Uncle Buford always had a wicked, adventurous streak to him.
I haven’t been wicked a day in my life.”
She stopped and gasped at that statement, pressing a modest hand to her lips.
The gesture might have been meant to show her embarrassment at sharing something so personal, but to Randall, it had the strange effect of showing that whether she had been wicked or not, Miranda Clarke did, in fact, have a streak of wickedness in her.
It was in the flash of her eyes, the blush on her cheeks.
“Do go on,” he urged her, desperate to hear more about this non-wicked streak of hers.
“Well.” She recovered with a sip of tea.
“I will confess that as a child, I adored Uncle Buford. We went on many imaginary adventures together. But then I grew up, and as is the case with all young women of a certain background, I had to develop the skills and decorum to become presentable to society. Society has so many rules,” she added with more than a little weariness.
“Tell me about it,” he drawled.
Her eyes flashed with that spark of kinship that had warmed him from the moment he stepped into the saloon.
“I continued to write to Uncle Buford, even after he moved up here and scandalized us all by opening such an establishment. Unfortunately, he became ill this past summer and passed away, in spite of the efforts of Mistletoe’s wonderful female doctor, Dr. Callahan, to save him. ”
She lowered her head for a moment. Randall wanted to reach across the table to comfort her. He restrained himself, and a few seconds later, Miranda took in a breath and went on.
“I was alerted to the fact that I was named in his will, but I wasn’t able to make it to Mistletoe until the first of this month to discover why. Imagine my surprise when I arrived, only to be handed the deed to a saloon .”
“That must have been a shock.”
“Believe me, it was.” The earnestness in her wide eyes made him believe far more than just that.
“As soon as I had a grasp on the situation and understood that I had to run the saloon or it would close, I sent for my belongings and moved into the apartment in back. I’m still trying to get my bearings and figure out what to do with this wretched place. ”
A zip of excitement shot down Randall’s spine. Miranda was far more interesting of a person than he suspected she thought she was. He shifted in his chair, leaned closer to her, and asked, “Why didn’t you just let it close? Why stay and take over?”
Miranda blinked and stared at him. “Because the responsibility was entrusted to me. Because that’s what Uncle Buford wanted.”
Randall shrugged. “You have to admit, it’s highly unusual for a lady such as yourself to tackle something like this. You could have let it go or sold it or washed your hands of the whole thing and gone home.”
Now she blinked rapidly at him, her cheeks going red with something that wasn’t bashfulness or embarrassment.
“And you could simply ignore your father’s wishes and pursue whatever career you wanted to instead of bending to his whims.” She spoke forcefully, but as soon as she was done, she pressed her hand to her mouth.
A slow, wry grin spread across Randall’s face. “We’re in the same boat then.” He raised his tea mug, saluted her, then downed the rest of the lukewarm liquid.
Miranda sighed, her shoulders dropping. “I suppose we are, then. Neither of us is free to pursue the path we would prefer.”
For a moment, they sat there in glum silence.
Randall would have given anything to be able to take Miranda in his arms to assure her that everything would be all right.
The trouble was, everything she had implied was spot-on.
He could ignore his father and do what he wanted. The question was, what could that be?
“Well, it looks like it’s gotten dark out there,” he said at length, gripping the side of the table and standing. “I’d better pack up Mendel’s Marvelous Brushes and see if I can’t find a hotel room for the night.”
Miranda rose as well and walked with him to the stage to help him pack his things. “If the hotel can’t take you, I think there’s a boarding house in town.”
Randall nodded. “That might do. I doubt there will be another stagecoach coming through. I can take the next train.”
“There should be one tomorrow.”
Their conversation struck Randall with so much sadness that he moved as if through molasses as he gathered his clothes and packed them back into the secret compartment of his trunk.
Miranda gathered the brushes that had ended up scattered throughout the saloon.
She returned the errant shaving brush last. As she handed it over, their hands touched.
Randall was seized with a jolt of longing more powerful than anything he’d ever felt. He closed his hand around Miranda’s and the brush. Holding his breath, he leaned closer to her, so desperate to kiss her that the air around them sizzled.
But of course he couldn’t kiss her. They may have shared a similar fate, they had even gotten along splendidly in their brief evening together, but Miranda was a respectable woman, a business owner, and he had been raised to be a gentleman. He leaned away.
“Well, goodbye, then.” He let go of her hand.
“G-goodbye,” Miranda whispered. The look of longing in her eyes was so potent that he almost dropped everything and scooped her into his arms. He couldn’t, though. He just couldn’t.
He turned and finished packing his trunk, then shut it and did up all of the fastenings. Next he strode across the room to snatch his coat up from the chair where he’d left it, bundling up. Once that was done, he retrieved his trunk and headed for the door.
“It’s been a true pleasure, Miss Clarke,” he said, smiling at her with his whole heart.
“It has,” she agreed, following him to the door. “If only…”
She let her words drift off into the ether, even though they both continued to stay there, hoping there was something more.
“Well.” It was all Randall could say. He smiled, heart breaking that their association had been so short, and turned to the door.
As he opened it, a fierce blast of icy wind slammed into him.
It was a hundred times stronger than the wind that had chased him into the saloon.
The flurries of that afternoon had transformed into thick, pelting snowflakes.
The strength of the gale, the cold, and the snow was like walking into a wall.
In fact, it was so ferocious that he couldn’t walk into it at all.
It was all he could do to shut and secure the door.
Winded from ten seconds of effort, Randall put his trunk down and turned to lean against the door. “Well, Miranda, it would seem we have a blizzard on our hands.”