I nod. “All right. Guess I’m…Dead Man goddamn Collier. What’s his name?”
She jerks back, and her face puzzles. “I don’t rightly know.”
I bark a laugh at how stupid this whole thing is. “Well he’s probably got somethin’ in here with his name on it.”
She goes rifling through the desk drawers, the firelight catching her hair like copper. Papers, bills, a cracked pipe, a few coins. Then she stops. Fingers pinch something small between them—a card, frayed at the edges.
She steps closer, the card in her hand, eyes bright. “Merrick.”
“Huh,” I say. I take the card from her, study the faded print. Merrick Collier. Plain as any man’s name, but it hums somehow, like a thing already mine.
“Merrick,” I repeat. “Guess I can live with that.” I glance at her, half a grin twitching. “Suppose you wouldn’t mind bein’ Mrs. Collier, then?”
Her lip curls before she can catch it.
“Damn. That’s how you respond to a man’s marriage proposal?”
Alice’s eyes widen a touch, then she huffs out a laugh, kneeling on the floor before me. “It’s not you, bear. It’s him. Collier. He courted me brutally. The idea of belonging to that man—” She shudders. “It made my skin crawl.”
I lean forward. “You wouldn’t be his. You’d be mine,” I say.
That stops her. Her gaze softens, all the fight slipping out of her shoulders. Like she’s seeing the promise beneath the words. “Yours,” she repeats, almost whispering.
“Mine,” I say again.
She rubs her hands on my thighs, and the tingle of her touch paired with seeing her on her knees looking up at me makes my root twitch.
“So it seems you’ve made your decision,” she says. “Virgil gets the reward and plays the hero, but you get a life, you getme.”
“You’re the sweetest part of this deal,” I say with a smile.
“Collier was a wealthy man. Suppose he probably has his account ledgers around here somewhere.”
I nod. Ain’t bad news, but it does remind me of something important. I sit back, scrub a hand over my jaw. “I ain’t been completely honest with you, Alice.”
Her hands still where they rest on my legs. “What do you mean?”
“Well, when your husband and that dandy brother of his ambushed me, I was comin’ off a job. One of the jobs that pissed a lot of them railroad men off. Now, they think they got it all. Between what they found on me then, and the haul they recovered off that ship in Galveston, I reckon they thought they got everything I hadn’t spent. But they ain’t. Not by a long shot.”
She stares, wary now. “What are you saying?”
“I’m sayin’ that was the biggest job I ever pulled—L&N line outta Kentucky carryin’ payroll for half the state. I hit that train clean and split the take before the smoke even cleared. Stashed it where no one’d ever find. Gonna take some travel to get it, but it’s there. Enough to start a life on.”
“Merrick and Alice Collier,” she says, testing the sound.
“Has a ring to it.”
Outside, the wind scrapes at the shutters. Inside, the fire keeps on burning, and for the first time in a long damn while, I start thinking maybe my best days ain’t behind me.
Chapter 44
ALICE
Summer has arrived, and I busy myself with the work of wiping lenses and twisting calibration dials into precise positions. I focus on the task in order to push the thoughts away, deep into the pit of me, but it seems every time I pause, the cold reality of my empty nursery bubbles back up.
The observatory is full of notebooks tracking the moon and stars, and our bedroom is rife with notes of my womanly cycle. Kodiak even purchased one of those glass thermometers; the doctor having said my temperature would show patterns in my cycle. Tracking the moon phases, my daily temperature, waiting fifteen minutes with a glass rod under my tongue is less than appealing before forming our romantic union, and so far it has been no help at all.
Bless Kodiak and his tender hazel eyes when he tells me, “you’re all I need.” But I’m no fool. He’s been talking about making me “round with his young,” almost since the day we met. I know what he says now is nothing more than kindness. That’s the worst of it; knowing deep down that something in him is missing and he can’t express it while sparing my feelings.
