That night Rand couldn’t sleep. Neither could Alice, as far as he could tell. He couldn’t hear her breathing, and he suspected she was lying awake four feet away from him, wondering whether he was asleep. Being in a hotel room with her wasn’t like sleeping rolled up in blankets beside a campfire; this was far more dangerous.
The problem was he had surreptitiously watched her peel off that red dress and a silky-sounding petticoat, and then he’d kept right on watching right down to her lacy camisole and frilly drawers. By the time she crawled under the blue quilt covering her bed, his groin was swollen and he was plenty hard.
This is just plain damn crazy.
Now he lay awake, aching and feeling lonelier than he’d ever been in his life. He realized suddenly that nothing was going to help until two things happened. First, Dorothy’s murderer was caught. And second, he could hold Alice in his arms and kiss her for as long as he wanted.
But God knew that might never happen. Not the catching the murderer part, but the Alice part. He was sure of his ability to apprehend a killer; he was less sure about Alice. Lolly Maguire might want him to kiss her, but what about Alice Montgomery? What would Alice want?
He flopped over and closed his eyes again.
Alice listened to Rand toss and turn for another hour until all at once she couldn’t stand it one more minute. “Rand!”
He sat straight up in bed. “Yeah? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Everything.”
“Well, which is it, ‘nothing’ or ‘everything’? Or maybe it’s just ‘something,’ huh?”
She twisted to face him. “Rand, you are absolutely no help in a crisis.”
“What crisis? What are you talking about? We’ve barely started to solve your sister’s murder... What crisis are you referring to?”
“I’m...worried. And I can’t sleep.”
“Maybe you’re hungry.”
She had no answer to that. At midnight he had conducted her downstairs to the dining room, where she had devoured fried chicken and mashed potatoes and he had downed a platter of dry scrambled eggs and bacon.
“Actually,” she said hesitantly, “feeling hungry isn’t the problem.”
“But?” His voice sounded both sleepy and exasperated.
She couldn’t answer. She lay still for a long time, wondering what was wrong. She was feeling hungry for something, but it wasn’t food.
“I don’t know what’s wrong, Rand. Something is nagging at the back of my mind, but I don’t know what it is.”
“And this is your crisis, is it?” he said in a tired voice. “Something ‘nagging’?”
“Well, yes. I’m feeling restless and upset and confused, and I’m starting to realize how alone I am now that Dottie is gone. I feel lost, Rand.”
He groaned, and the next thing he knew she started to cry and he was sitting on the bed beside her. He pulled her upright and held her tight against him.
“Alice,” he breathed.
“Don’t talk, Rand. Just hold me and listen. All of a sudden I’m frightened. Not about play-acting as Lolly Maguire, I know I can ferret out information from the miners at the Golden Nugget that you can use to catch Dottie’s murderer. It’s something else, something I’ve never felt before.”
“Want to try to put it into words?”
“No. It’s too unsettling.”
“Try, Alice. You might feel better if you talk about it. Sometimes that cuts things down to size.”
She hesitated, then drew in an uneven breath. “Dottie’s death has brought my own life into clear focus, made me wonder about things I never thought about before.”
She stopped and mopped the tears off her cheeks. Rand gave her a little shake. “What things? Seems to me you’ve done a good deal of thinking up until now. What’s puzzling you?”
“Well... Oh, Rand, it’s hard to admit this but deep down underneath I am frightened, really frightened, for the first time in my life. And I am surprised at how much I enjoy pretending to be Lolly Maguire.”
“Yeah,” he said drily. “I’m surprised, too.” He could feel her body trembling and it brought out all his protective instincts. “And?” he prompted.
“And it makes me wonder who I am. I mean who I really am inside. Am I a librarian who is play-acting at being a seductive siren? Or am I a siren play-acting as a librarian?”
He tried not to laugh at that, but she went on without pausing.
“And then I start wondering what is my life worth, really? What is worth doing in life?”
“Alice, I don’t want you to be frightened. And I sure as hell don’t want you to get hurt. Maybe we should give up on this plan?”
She twisted to face him. “No. I want to find the killer. If he shot Dottie, he could kill someone else.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then without thinking he bent his head and kissed her. She was warm and tentative and unknowingly inviting, and he was lost the instant his lips touched hers. After a moment he realized her mouth was opening under his, soft and inviting, and...
He broke away, his breathing ragged. For a long moment she didn’t utter a word, and then she shocked the stuffing out of him.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “I will never forget that.”
He blinked. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice trembling, “maybe you should have.”
“No. We’ve got a lot of things ahead of us before...” He pressed her head into the curve of his shoulder and whispered against her hair, “Before we can think about other things besides Pinkerton and being a US Marshal.”
“Rand, I think—”
He clamped his jaws together. “Don’t think, Alice. Go to sleep.”
In the morning Rand woke before it was fully light and lay staring at the lump under the quilt next to him. His mind felt bruised. What had happened last night to make him crazy enough to kiss her? Guess he’d better knock off the beer at the Golden Nugget!
Jumping jennies, he wanted to knock off everything, the murder investigation, his undercover plan...
And Alice. Most of all, Alice.
But he knew he couldn’t. He was a sworn US Marshal and his duty was clear. The way forward had nothing to do with how scrambled up his insides felt. It had to do with Lolly Maguire and her clever ways of prying information out of half-drunk miners at the Golden Nugget.
“Alice. Wake up.”
“I’m awake,” she said, her voice sleepy.
“We have work to do.”
“Yes...work,” she muttered. She rolled over and curled into a ball under the covers.
“Alice, the sooner we finish what we came to do, the sooner you can get back to Smoke River.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Alice.”
She sat up. “Oh, all right,” she said. “I was having the loveliest dream, and you spoiled it.”
He didn’t want to know about her dream. If it was anything like his dream, she would still have the quilt pulled over her head and wouldn’t speak to him for a week.
“After breakfast we’re going to visit your sister’s assay office, see what we can uncover.”
“Who will I be today, Rand? Lolly or Alice?”
“Lolly.”
“Well, Lolly is hungry.” She tossed back the quilt and swung her bare legs to the carpeted floor. She’d slept in her drawers and that lace-frosted camisole, and he tried not to look as she padded across to the basin and water pitcher on the bureau to splash water on her face. Then she dug a hairbrush out of her travel bag and began pulling it through her dark hair.
Rand closed his eyes.
“I’m going to have flapjacks for breakfast,” she announced. Her voice sounded funny, and he snapped his lids open. Her head was hanging upside down while she brushed away at her hair. He seized the moment and pulled on his jeans and a shirt, buckled the revolver at his hip and buttoned his sheepskin vest across his chest.
When she finished arranging her hair, she donned her petticoat and the sparkly red dress while he tried to focus on the window overlooking the street.
“It is amazing to me,” she remarked as they descended the stairs and entered the dining room, “that I could be so hungry after all that late-night food and liquor I drank last night.”
“What liquor? The drinks those miners are guzzling are full-strength, but the ones they buy for you are pretty well watered down.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I bribed Lefty Donnell to water them down. He just dribbles a teaspoon of whiskey into your glass. That’s how the Golden Nugget makes money, watering down drinks.”
“Why, that’s cheating!”
Rand chuckled all the way through his scrambled eggs and two cups of coffee while she ate a big stack of flapjacks and sipped a cup of tea.
After breakfast they stepped out onto the boardwalk and headed up the street.