Free A Wanted Man by Susan Kay Law Page B

already.” He shrugged. “Go right ahead and cable. If you don’t mind bothering Mr. Hamilton withsuch things, that is. For obviously if I’d had wicked designs on Miss Hamilton, or anything of hers, I could have carried them out already, anytime I wanted.”
    Hiram didn’t like that. But he couldn’t honestly deny the truth of it.
    “Oh, why bother?” Laura asked. “It’s just like him, isn’t it? To hire protection and a spy in one? He didn’t want me to make this trip in the first place and insisted I do it on his terms. Not to mention that if Leland Hamilton is going to hire another bodyguard, would he employ any but the most famous and most expensive?” She slanted a cool glance at Duncan. “I assume you are expensive.”
    “Extremely.”
    “Well, since you can obviously be bought…how much would it cost to have you to stay behind when we pull out?”
    “I’m afraid I can’t do that. That reputation you continue to ramble on about rests squarely on the fact that once I accept a job I always see it through to a satisfactory conclusion.”
    “No one would have to know. We’re not telling. You’ve not been traveling with us this far, so no one knows. I will tell my father you protected me with the utmost efficiency. Your reputation can remain intact.”
    “No. Despite what you might think, I do take my word seriously.”
    He was as stubborn as her father. She’d learned the futility of arguing with him years ago.
    “We’re leaving in the morning,” she told him. “Be ready,” she said, spinning to march away.
    “Giving orders already?” he called after her. “Aren’t you going to welcome me to the party?”

     
    “He’s an odd one, that,” Mrs. Bossidy murmured, glancing out the velvet-draped window in the door at the back of their train car. They were alone—Mrs. Bossidy, bent over the knitting she’d taken up three days ago in bored desperation, Laura sorting through her sketches—as the train clicked through western Nebraska. Though they had, very briefly, dipped into Colorado at Julesburg.
    They were two hundred miles, but eight long days, out of Kearney, for they’d unhitched twice to allow Laura to work.
    It was in some ways hard to tell that Mr. Duncan had joined their small party. He preferred to take his meals alone and outside. He seemed to enjoy the food, packing away in brief periods of time an amount that rivaled Hiram’s massive meals. He also declined to sleep in the car when they were stopped, instead choosing to lay out his bedroll beneath the skies. Mr. Hoxie, whose hero worship hadn’t dissipated a whit, attributed that lamentable state of affairs to the volume of Hiram’s snoring, an explanation that could be true. If the windows were open, Laura sometimes heard his rumbling from the next car.
    If they traveled through the night, Laura was uncertain if Sam Duncan slept at all. Invariably when they were under way, day or night, he stood on the back platform of her car. His gaze constantly swept the land they rolled through, turning to locate her every few seconds, as if he expected an attack at any moment. It was ridiculous, of course. What could happen to them out here? But her father certainly seemed to be getting his money’s worth.
    One would think she’d have been able to ignore his presence completely. She was accustomed to having servants, guards, and nurses around her. He hadn’t said more than half a dozen words to her, a reticence she should have appreciated. And yet…she was so vibrantly aware of his presence that often she was conscious of nothing else. He was always there , patient, intent, as if she were the most important thing in the world to him, so crucial that he could not bear to look away. It didn’t seem to matter how many times she reminded herself that it was his job. Her heart refused to accept it. She even found it difficult to lose herself in her work, something she had always done with such ease that her mother despaired that she