Free A Lady Never Trifles with Thieves by Suzann Ledbetter Page B

yes it is. Years ago, if I’d asked for approval before I jumped that yahoo and his friends who were beating you to a pulp, would I have gotten it?”
    I took a pot holder from a wall peg, poured boiling water into the teapot, and shrouded it in a cozy. “I told you then, I can’t hash bullies, cheaters, or drunks. All that’s changed is adding killers and thieves to the list.”
    “Your motives are honorable, Joby. They have been for as long as I have known you. It is your methods that are too often impulsive and foolhardy.”
    I kissed the top of his shaven pate. “How many times have we had this argument?”
    “If you will allow a rough estimate, I would say three thousand, four hundred and seventy-nine.”
    “Have you won one, yet?”
    “The knowing enjoy water. The humane enjoy mountains.”
    I groaned. “Again, in English, please. I’m too tired to puzzle out Confucius’s analects.”
    “Enjoy life. Take trouble as a challenge to overcome, but don’t seek it.”
    “I do enjoy life and I’ve never sought trouble. It’s just always had a way of finding me.”

Six
    W ith my nose in a book was precisely how I wakened the next morning. I knew the instant my eyes opened that last night, while I’d been changing my clothes, Won Li had substituted a muscle-relaxing tea for the stimulant I’d brewed.
    He’d also taken the precaution of not being in hollering range when I realized the treachery. Calling his name indoors and from the back porch was to no avail. I didn’t comprehend the thoroughness of his disappearance until I finished my ablutions and ventured to the stable.
    Izzy and the buggy were gone. In a second stall stood Loralei, Jack O’Shaughnessy’s bay mare. He must have toiled deep into the morning hours, then collapsed on a cot at the station house.
    Loralei had been unsaddled and curried to a glorious sheen. I fed her the cubed sugar intended for Izzy and wondered why my treasonous patron thought I’d stay to home, rather than take the liberty of borrowing Jack’s trusty steed.
    Since the age of four, I’d ridden bareback and saddle-mounted for the sheer joy of it, as well as transportation. One of Papa’s few deviations from Victorian mores pertinent to feminine comportment was railing against the invention of the sidesaddle.
    “It’s a pretty seat, with a gal’s skirts and petticoats all caped and aflutter in the breeze,” he said, “but for practical purposes, it’s as worthless as teats on a ladybug.”
    I tried it once, for the novelty and in keeping with my youthful theory that adult opinions were designed to wreck enjoyment of life to its fullest. Imagine my shock when Papa’s judgment of female equestrianship proved accurate. A subsequent yarn about a secret garden where babies were plucked from under cabbage leaves restored my faithlessness in grown-ups.
    Except now that I was past the age of majority, I cringed at thoughts of making a spectacle of myself—well, any oftener than necessity dictated. Unfortunately, a lady riding through town forking a saddle was liable to generate scorn from her own gender and impure thoughts from the opposite.
    The only activity less comfortable and more awkward than riding sidesaddle on a sidesaddle was riding sidesaddle on tack designed for a man.
    For one thing, a typical Western pommel is several inches shorter than its sidesaddle counterpart. Crooking my knee around the former provided as much bracing and balance as a fossilized mushroom and pinched the bejesus out of my calf, to boot. Add to that, the saddle’s curvature created a sensation similar to my buttocks being wedged into a tinware dishpan that’s bouncing down the world’s longest set of stairs.
    Aside from anatomical abuses inflicted in the name of convention, the brief ride into Denver City proper was uneventful—other than the heat wilting me like bacon fat drizzled over spinach leaves. A black cloche and jersey wool dress was mandatory attire for one of my appointed