THE DEVILS DIME Page 5

  Thank you for the glove? Or thank you for the introduction.

  An extraordinary heat scooted up the back of his neck as Jess stood in the coat room and contemplated her intent. Rooted to the spot where this most unexpected encounter had taken place, he found himself surprisingly hopeful that it was the latter.

  Chapter Four

  She had been so wrong, so terribly wrong. Nothing was worth the smarmy feel of Hamilton Jensen’s roaming fingers. Now she’d never hear Joplin again without squirming in her skin. By Sunday afternoon Addie had not yet calmed down from her silent fury of Thursday evening, when she had no recourse but to be polite to him through the horrid hours in the Astors’ elegant music room. He had introduced her to everyone as his discovery, the marvelous new violinist in town. And he hadn’t even heard her play.

  Half the people there were potential employers for one event or another, so Addie had no choice but to appear grateful to him. And a desperate need to keep her job at the bank had forced her to bite her tongue raw.

  She shuddered, remembering her fear when Hamilton had maneuvered her into a secluded hallway and pressed a disgusting kiss. She’d practically laughed in his face when that wonderful police chief had accidentally intruded.

  “Good evening, Mr. Jensen! I see you’re keeping lovely company this evening.” He’d swept an elegant bow, and his cape slipped off his shoulder in a rakish swirl. Hamilton stammered out an introduction, and Addie found herself drawing away from him as she offered Chief Trumbull her hand. The chief’s eyes had swept the length of her, and when they returned to her face, she saw interest. Not exactly fatherly, but much more debonair than the leer Hamilton usually shed upon her.

  And then the dear man had begged a ride home, saving her the horrors that a dark carriage might have presented, had she been alone with Hamilton. She could have kissed him.

  But today another man was the object of her interest. It was high time she faced that initial visit to her father, even if Hamilton had left her out of sorts. If she put it off once again, she might never face up to the task. So today was the day.

  It was too far to walk in the heat of the afternoon, but a ride on her pennyfarthing would get her there just fine. The antiquated three-wheeled, two-pedal women’s cycle was in sad shape, but it never failed to get her where she needed to go. And upon it, she could outrun anyone, even someone with ill intent. That is, if she left her corset at home and allowed her lungs the freedom they needed.

  Addie maneuvered her mechanical conveyance through Sunday afternoon traffic along the twenty-one block route to Sutton House and parked the pennyfarthing in the air shaft that served as an alley just east of the apartment building. The task of negotiating traffic had been cleansing in its own way, and as she mounted the stairs to her father’s fourth floor apartment, she actually smiled.

  He didn’t know that today was the day he was going to get his family back.

  . . .

  Jess had worked through the weekend getting his Monday column ready, but by Sunday afternoon he’d found himself drawn back to his apartment, and deep into the Samaritan files, oblivious to the sounds of life beyond his window. But when he propped his front door open to draw a breeze through his sitting room, Jess couldn’t miss the tense tones coming from the floor above, tones that were rapidly escalating into an argument.

  “I’m sorry I interrupted your reading. I won’t bother you again!”

  A terse female voice that filtered down from the upper hallway teetered on the edge of control. She must be fairly shouting for her words to be heard so clearly, or perhaps the stairwell served to amplify the sound. Whatever it was, her voice came through clear as a bell. Jess looked up from the notes he was penning and tried to make sense of a mumbled response, but it was indistinguishable.

  “You’re quite mad, you know. Whatever possessed me to think—“ Her strained tone sounded very much as if it were being delivered through clenched teeth. Someone upstairs had worked up a temper.

  Jess cocked an ear toward his door as the voices grew louder, accompanied by several hesitant footsteps. One of the parties was leaving. End of drama.

  He stretched and re-read the list of locations he intended to scout out. If he’d plotted the addresses correctly, four of the Samaritan crime scenes lay on a direct line between his residential area and the dock laborer’s union hall.

  He’d check those out first, record the time it took to walk from the labor hall to each site. Based on what he found, he’d decide if it was worth following up his hunch.

  His list was shaping up nicely, but the argument overhead was rapidly deteriorating. He was a people watcher, not an eavesdropper, and it had obviously become time to close his door. Jess rose.

  “That’s perfectly fine with—” Suddenly the walls rattled as the door above slammed shut. In the next instant, a feminine shriek jolted him to action, and Jess tore on through his door and onto the landing. His feet seemed to assess the situation almost as instantly as his mind had. Jess grabbed the railing and vaulted up the first six steps just as a flurry of skirts careened off the fourth floor landing and into his arms.

  “Ow...”

  “...bloody hell...oo-oo-oo”

  “...dammit-ouch...”

  “...ow!”

  Jess held on fiercely to the female wildcat who was doing her best to throw the both of them down the stairs. If he let go, she’d fall. If he didn’t, they’d both fall.

  His left foot slid to the corner of the stair and he managed to brace it against the wall. In the same instant, he threw his own right shoulder into the woman’s flailing right arm. It was just enough to reverse the forward fall and send them both plunking into an undignified heap on the top step.

  “Good god, woman, you almost got us both killed.” Gallantry vanished as Jess looked through the railing of the fourth floor landing over which they had very nearly toppled.

  “Who the bloody hell are—” The young woman righted her Sunday hat, whipped her head around to get her first glimpse of her rescuer, and clamped both gloved hands over her mouth.

  “Oh!”

  The sound was muffled behind kid-clad fingers, and half her face was obscured. But the half that was not hidden bore reddening eyes brimming with tears.

  Red or not, Jess recognized them as the same eyes that had interrupted his sleep for the past two nights. They’d looked black from across the hotel dining room, dark and flashing as she’d sailed through the Hungarian rhapsody. But he’d discovered their hazel depths just the night before in the cloak room. And the smile that lit them.

  It, of course, was noticeably missing at the moment. Above their smouldering darkness, the auburn hair he’d imagined plunging his hands into had escaped its pins and hung in ragged tufts.

  “You?”

  “You!”

  He marveled at the change to her face as anger fled and embarrassment pounced. The flush turned to a blush. She moved her hands to set about repairing her hair and revealed the full lips that had tantalized Jess when he’d first met her at the Warwick. They were paler now, and quivering. Adelaide. Her name was Adelaide.

  “I just...tripped...I’m so sorry, I...” she winced.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Not really, but...”

  “Where are you hurt?”

  “I’ll be fine. Now if you’ll be so kind as to help me up...” Her voice was thick with threatening tears, and Jess took pity on her state as he helped her to her feet. Something more than tumbling into his arms had upset this woman. The altercation he’d overheard flooded his memory and he winced, perplexed at how or why the man had so adeptly angered her.

  “I’d be ever so...grateful...if we could just pretend this never, oo–” she gasped as she tried to take a step, “–never happened.”

  “Careful!” Jess moved closer and stretched an arm behind to steady her. “Take it slowly, Miss Magee.”

  She stiffened as he tightened his grip, and Jess was slow to realize why she shran
k from his touch. What was he supposed to do? Stand back and watch her struggle to her feet?

  He moved his arm for a better grip around her slim waist and clamped a curtain over his thoughts as he grasped the meaning behind the very pleasant feel of her ribs beneath his hand. To say nothing of her soft bosom pressing into his side.

  He could feel no stays, no wires, none of the usual rigid barriers a gentleman associated with a lady. Just pliant fabric between himself and Addie Magee.

  Miss Magee, he’d discovered, wasn’t wearing a corset.

  “I’m fine! Really!” She pulled away and slipped quickly down two steps and away from his grasp. “Thank you so much.”

  “But...wait! Let me find a carriage for you.”

  “No, no! I have a ride.” She was on the lower landing now, each step steadier than the last, and she turned quickly onto the next flight. “Good day!” Her words echoed in the stairwell as her auburn twists disappeared from view. The sophisticated young woman he’d met in Rocky’s cloakroom was nowhere in sight today. This was a girl looking for a place to hide.

  The sound of her quick retreat drifted up to him and reassured Jess that she was not limping. But just for good measure, he loped back into his apartment and out onto the balcony. He needed to know she could get home on her own.

  His eyes swept the sidewalk below him, watching for the stylish figure he knew he’d recognize going or coming. No one emerged from the door. In fact, there were no unaccompanied women anywhere. The usual Sunday strollers ambled along both sides of the boulevard, but Miss Magee was not among them. Had her carriage already pulled away?

  Jess leaned slightly over the balustrade, concerned now that she’d not even left the building. He was just about to race downstairs to see if she’d collapsed somewhere between here and the front door when a female figure darted out of the alley.

  Pushing a dilapidated old three-wheeler.

  She wheeled it into the street, and, still standing on the higher boardwalk, sat herself prettily on the cycle’s broad leather saddle. A wayward curl on the back of her neck was the only sign of her recent tumble down the stairs.

  Jess gripped the railing and watched her auburn head bob in and out of traffic, her long skirts floating charmingly with her effort. In the two days since he’d first cast eyes upon the virtuoso violinist, he’d certainly never imagined her on a contraption like that. Or in his apartment building, for that matter. And certainly not in his arms. Well, not the way she’d landed there, at any rate.

  Jess watched as the figure alternately wobbled and plunged through the carriage traffic. What had she been doing in his building, anyway? Involved in an argument, to boot?

  A huff of curiosity escaped him as Jess reluctantly lost sight of the beautiful, talented, Miss Adelaide Magee wheeling furiously away. The cycle did explain one thing, though, he realized. It cleared up the mystery of the missing corset. Adelaide Magee was a wheeler. A thoroughly modern, independent and liberated free-wheeler. If he could just get her to stay in one place for longer than a moment he was going to enjoy becoming acquainted with this fascinating creature. Immensely.

  . . .

  The old pennyfarthing rattled and clanked as Addie scooted it across the alley in back of her building and pushed it behind the tumble-down shed. Her apartment building wasn’t much to look at from the street, but at least the facade was kept in good repair. Not so the outbuildings by the alley. Still, the shed made a great place to conceal her ancient ride.

  “Rats!” She kicked the wobbling front wheel snugly against the shed’s rotted boards and fumed her way up the back stairs to her floor.

  Drat bicycles and drat libertine women who’d enticed her into leaving her corset at home when she went wheeling and drat her abominable female independence that had gotten her into this mortifying predicament. She’d left home intending to announce herself to her absent father and ended up blubbering and indecent in the arms of the first and only New Yorker she’d taken a shine to.

  Addie winced at the thought, then winced again in alarm at the pain that shot through her right arm when she turned the doorknob. Oh, bother. Her bowing arm. Tomorrow evening’s performance was going to hurt like the dickens.

  But then, that had been the story of her whole day.

  “Far as I’m concerned, I never had a daughter.” Her father’s words had rumbled from deep within his chest to tear at the fragile bond she’d held out to him. His heated indifference had frozen the breath in her lungs, and she had not even managed to effectively plead her case with him. Everything he said just fueled her resentment and she’d found herself doing the absolute opposite of making amends.

  She’d been shockingly unhinged by her humiliation when she’d flung herself away from his doorway and down the steps so quickly that she’d tromped on her own hem, tripped down two more steps, and catapulted herself right into Jess Pepper. Addie felt the heat in her cheeks all over again. Could he tell she’d worn no foundation beneath her summer muslin today? Perhaps, perhaps not. It had only been seconds that he’d held her so close. Hadn’t it?

  Even as she tried to convince herself otherwise, she knew he could tell. She knew, because she could still feel each place he’d touched her. The small of her back. The ribs in her left side. And the soft flesh at her waist. All still held a memory of the pressure of his fingers.

  In these liberating times, a modern woman had unheard of choices. She could be straight-laced, laced up in her overly tight corset so she could stand and sit straight as a steel rod and pass out if she tried to hurry up the stairs, much less ride a bicycle. Or she could abandon her binding stays, set her lungs loose, and be able to ride a bicycle without falling in a dead faint.

  Addie wanted both. Or rather, she wanted to be known as straight-laced. And live loose. As long as no one was the wiser. But she’d been caught.

  Addie flung her hat and bag on the bed and crept to her small writing desk. She probed her right shoulder delicately, and followed the strained tendon and shrieking nerve down across her collar bone. It wasn’t good. Jess Pepper had thrown his muscled physique into her like a bull on the loose. This was all his fault.

  She groaned, ashamed at her disregard for his quick thinking. If he hadn’t acted so swiftly, she might be on her way to a hospital right now, or dead with a broken neck.

  What else could she ruin today?

  In the last hour she’d managed to cause one man to put to rest any idea she’d ever had of having a father. And another man to reverse what she’d felt was a favorable first impression of her. How could he not be repulsed? Unless...

  Addie fingered the embroidered collar points that laid prettily at her throat and wished again her mother were here to talk things through with her. She’d certainly bungled things with her father. Had she bungled things beyond repair with Jess Pepper so that he would want nothing to do with her?

  Or perhaps, she blanched at the thought, she’d revealed the very thing that would make him want everything to do with her. And for all the wrong reasons. Lord have mercy. How did one explain that one was not that kind of a girl when one had already clearly demonstrated that one was?

  Addie groaned. What’s done is done. She dragged her violin case across the bed and retreated to the safety of her musical chores. At least here she knew all the answers. Why hadn’t she been content to stay in that world she knew so well? The one with her violin tucked under her chin and the music wrapping its safe buffer all around her.

  Addie opened the well-worn case and smiled at the new German strings she’d strung just the night before. They were the best in the world, the very first thing she’d bought with her payment from the hotel job.

  She switched the violin to her right hand, allowing her healthy left arm and shoulder to do the hard work of tuning the instrument rather than straining her injured side further. It was a shame she couldn’t play that way, and give her inflamed right shoulder a rest for a few days. Because it definitely was inflamed. The rolling burn that had
taken up residence there told her so.

  Addie twisted the tuning pegs until the new strings were tuned several pitches too high, forcing them to stretch further than they needed to now so they’d cooperate sooner, hold an accurate pitch longer. Today she’d forced herself to stretch, too, perhaps tried to reach a little too high. To take a chance on the father she hoped to find. And it had gone sour.

  Addie rolled her shoulder, searching for a comfortable position. When there was none, she knew it was going to get worse before it got better. She was simply going to have to be more careful if she ever hoped to leave the bank and make her living with her violin.

  From now on, she’d stay with things she could be sure of, things that wouldn’t let her down. Or, for that matter, knock her down. She’d stay with things she understood.

  Judging from today’s experience, perhaps that ought not to include men.

  . . .

  Ford Magee smashed his palms into his forehead and kicked the book he’d been reading across the room. His heart thumped brutally in his chest as alarming screeches in his eardrum signaled the blood rushing to his head.

  She had been right there at his very door! His daughter. Addie. There was no doubt it was her.

  His mind kept whipping back to the moment he’d opened the door and thought he’d gone crazy, thought he was seeing a younger, taller Julia standing before him. But it wasn’t Julia. It was Julia’s daughter.

  His daughter.

  Addie.

  Ford’s hands shook as he drew a glass of water from the cool crock he kept on the dry sink. It was her. The same hair. Same accusing hazel-green eyes. The same stricken expression he’d seen when Julia told him she was going away. And taking Addie with her. To her aunt’s place outside Chicago. Where stalkers didn’t lie in wait for brown-haired females on the street.