The Cowboy's Cinderella. Carol Arens

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СКАЧАТЬ breath at the brokenness of his expression. “I thought you were my friend.”

      “I never meant to hurt you, Ivy. I didn’t know who you were.”

      She lifted the necklace from her throat and shoved it at Travis’s balled-up fist. It tinkled when it hit the floor.

      While it hurt like a hornet’s sting to give up the remembrance of her mother, the past was the past and she was headed to a future of her own making.

      * * *

      What Ivy needed was time, Travis decided. Time to think things through. That’s why he didn’t go after her when she ran out of the pilothouse yesterday afternoon.

      That’s why he’d spent fifteen minutes knocking on her door this morning only to discover that she had fled in the night.

      Just when he thought his problem had been solved, he found himself chasing the heir to the Lucky Clover all over again...and rain was on the way.

      Travis rode alongside the river, guessing that’s the way Ivy had gone. The Missouri was her comfort and chances were that’s where she would seek solace.

      “I reckon if she’s set on piloting a boat, she’ll be looking for work on one,” he explained to the horse. It made sense, when he said it out loud.

      Late in the afternoon he came upon a small paddle wheeler docked at the river’s edge. When he asked about Ivy, he discovered she’d been there.

      It irked him that the men were still laughing at her...at a woman thinking she could do a man’s job.

      But it worried him too. Ivy had been sheltered, had grown up under the protection of her uncle and the men on the River Queen. She didn’t know the dangers that could befall a woman alone. Sooner or later she would come upon a man who wouldn’t be laughing.

      At twilight, the rain began to fall. He reckoned he ought to seek shelter, but he’d rather be wet than sit inside warm and dry, worrying about her.

      Could be he was a fool and she was the one who had taken shelter, the one who was warm and dry.

      “Well, hell,” he muttered, riding past an inn whose welcoming fire glowed through the big parlor window.

      She might have taken shelter there, but he doubted it, given that she had left a note with her uncle, giving him all of her money and begging him to take it and not to sell the Queen.

      In Travis’s opinion, money had nothing to do with the sale. Patrick Malone, captain, pilot and owner of the River Queen, would be well set financially. But the man understood that the river life was taking its last gasp. He wouldn’t want his niece wasting her future on it.

      Travis took off his hat, shook out the water gathering in the brim. His coat was not yet soaked through, but it soon would be.

      If Ivy hadn’t taken a room at the inn, she couldn’t be far ahead of him, given that she was on foot.

      He’d ride another hour before he sought shelter.

      As luck would have it, fifteen minutes later, he spotted a campfire among the trees. He tethered his mount to a bush beside the river, then walked fifty feet through the woods toward the fire.

      Ivy sat with her back toward him, huddling under the shelter of a tarp that she had strung across some branches. She must have heard him crunching across twigs and fallen leaves, because she turned her head, glanced at him then back at the flames.

      “I’m sorry,” he murmured.

      “I reckon I was harsh on you. This isn’t your doing.”

      It felt to him like it was all his doing.

      Maybe he should go home and try once again to convince William English to marry Agatha instead. She was a Magee, just as Ivy was.

      But Agatha was not the heir. She was an invalid and not the sort of woman the neighbor needed to promote his political career.

      “I’ll take your word that she is a lovely person, Travis,” William had argued the last time Travis suggested Agatha instead of Ivy. “But as far as I can tell, she never comes out from the shadow of her balcony. The couple of times I’ve seen her she just sits in her chair watching the world go by. There is no spark of animation in her. I need a woman who is genteel, gracious—ready to get out among the people, shake hands and win votes.”

      And have children. It was William’s firm belief that a man without children was unelectable. All of Travis’s arguments ended there. No one would expect Agatha to fulfill that demand.

      “There’s an inn a ways back,” he said, crouching beside her. “It’ll be warm and dry. We can talk.”

      “I’m dry enough where I am.” She looked at him then. “But you aren’t...if I were you I’d scoot closer to the fire.”

      “All right, I reckon we can talk here. But if you start to shiver, I’m hauling you back to the inn whether you want to go or not.”

      She glanced at the dreary sky and shook her head.

      “Did my uncle change his mind about selling the Queen?” Her eyes seemed red and swollen. It cut him to the quick to know she’d been weeping. “I reckon he was threatening to sell in order to get me to leave with you.”

      “I’m sorry, Ivy. He went to the captain of the Belle this morning...they made an agreement, shook hands on it.”

      Rain tapped on the tarp. Ivy drew her knees to her chest and hid her face. When she looked up a single tear rolled over the curve of her cheek.

      “The Queen is his life.” She wiped her sleeve across her face. “Can’t imagine what he’ll do now.”

      “Look, Ivy, I spent a long time talking to your uncle the other night. The boat is not his life...you are. The decision he made, it was because it was best for you.”

      “That’s not for anyone but me to decide.”

      “As right as that sounds, sometimes life decides for us.”

      She reached across the distance separating them and squeezed his hand briefly. Maybe she forgave him...a little bit anyway.

      “Reckon you didn’t feel so in control of life when your folks died and left you alone.”

      “I wanted to crawl in the grave with my ma and pa.” Even now it was hard to think about the desolation he’d felt. “But your father was there with his big hand on my shoulder. After a while I was glad to be alive after all.”

      “Well, ain’t I a sniveling ninny?” She straightened her shoulders, flashed him an unreadable glance then wriggled her fingers at the flames. “Boohooing like a spoiled child.”

      “Not a spoiled child, Ivy. The life you wanted has just been taken from you. You’ve a right to your grief.”

      “I tried to get a job on a boat, got laughed at all the way back to shore...and all because I was a woman.”

      “I know...I spoke with СКАЧАТЬ