Gabriel's Lady. Ana Seymour
other. Amelia mothered Parker, injecting some caution into his wild schemes, and Parker provided Amelia with a father’s strength and protection. At least, he had until he had taken off without a word.
“It’s very good to see you, sis,” Parker amended, tenderly pinching her cheek with a callused hand that Amelia did not recognize as belonging to her brother. His appearance was different, too. His dark brown hair was longer and had reddened in the sun. His skin was tanned and leathery, making him look years older. “But what in blazes are you doing here?” he asked. “Surely you didn’t come all this way by yourself?”
“Morgan’s with me. He’s down at the telegraph office sending a wire to Mother and Father.”
“How are they? And Matilda? I bet she misses having her pies stolen right off the cooling rack now that I’m gone. And Chops?”
Amelia smiled and motioned to Parker to slow down his questions. “Matilda says she always knew you were a scoundrel, and when you come home she’s going to give you a piece of her mind, if not a licking with her wooden spoon. And Chops wouldn’t eat for a week after you left until we finally took to mixing his food with liver paste. So now we call him Golden Chops. As to Mother and Father…” She bit her lip. “They were terribly hurt, Parker.”
Parker looked down at Mattie’s rose-patterned carpet. “I know. It was the one bad thing about this whole plan. I never wanted to hurt them.” He blinked and swallowed hard. “Or you, either, sis.”
Amelia let out a deep breath and asked the question that she had been waiting to ask for the past six months. “How could you do it, Parker? How could you leave us that way?”
Their identical brown eyes met, hers accusing, his guilty. “It seems a lifetime ago, you know. At the time I thought I was leaving because I was sick of Father trying to badger me into working at his precious bank. And I was miffed when Cindy Wellington threw me over for Jack Hastings…”
Amelia gave an incredulous huff. “Cynthia Wellington goes through men faster than she does hankies. She’s had at least a half a dozen since Jack Hastings, and besides—”
Parker stopped her with a wave of his hand. “Come on and sit down. Just listen to me for a minute,” he said, leading her to the rose sofa. “I said I thought I was leaving for those reasons. But as soon as I hit the prairie west of St. Paul, I knew that none of those things were important.”
“Then what—”
Parker put a finger on her lips. “If you can keep still long enough, I’ll try to explain, though it’s all beyond words, really.”
He shifted his gaze from her to look out beyond the pink curtains to the view of the canyon rising above the buildings across the street. “I’ve never seen anything like the West, sis,” he continued in an almost reverent tone. “It’s fresh and majestic, wild and exciting. It…” He turned back to her as he searched for the words. “It fills me up. I don’t know any other way to say it. It fills all those places in me that were so empty back in New York.”
For once Amelia had no reply. It was as if her brother, the person she had always known better than anyone else in the world, had passed a boundary into a place she couldn’t follow. She had been prepared to demand that they return to New York immediately. Their father needed them, needed Parker. But as she watched this totally unfamiliar expression on her brother’s dear, familiar face, the words wouldn’t come out.
“Listen,” Parker said in a brisk tone designed to squelch the emotion that had crept into his voice, “I can show you what I mean better than telling you. Let me take you out to my place to see the mine.”
Amelia looked around once again at Mattie Smith’s parlor. “Well, at least let’s get out of here.”
Parker followed her gaze with amusement. “What do you suppose Mother would say if she knew we were sitting in a bawdy house parlor?”
The notion did not seem so shocking to Amelia now that Parker was beside her. In fact, nothing did. Not the broken-down stagecoach nor the fight out on the street. Parker would take care of her now. And she would take care of him. She gave a happy giggle. “She’d haul us up in front of one of her crusading friends—The New York Ladies’ League for the Rehabilitation of Fallen Doves, or some such.”
Parker stood with a grin and reached for Amelia’s hands. “Mother and her colleagues would have a field day in this town.”
Amelia had to admit that the scenery as Parker led them up the trail toward his mine was breathtaking. When they had left Mattie Smith’s parlor, the little proprietor had been nowhere in sight, so without taking their leave they had made their way back to the stagecoach to find Morgan and retrieve their bags. Then they had gone to the livery where Amelia and Morgan had rented horses over Morgan’s protest that there wasn’t anywhere he couldn’t go on the two good feet that God had given him.
Amelia’s mount was a trim brown mare that had taken to her new rider immediately. The stableboy had said her name was Whiskey, which had caused Amelia and Parker to burst into one of the laughs they had shared so often through the years.
“I’ve been in Deadwood less than a day and I’ve already visited a brothel and acquired a horse named Whiskey,” Amelia said, choked with mirth. It was remarkable how just a short time in her brother’s company had restored her good humor.
“You shouldn’t have gone into that place, Missy,” Morgan called from behind them. “Your mama’s going to say I didn’t take proper care of you.”
Amelia turned around in her saddle. “I suspect there are a few things about this trip that Mother will never know, Morgan.”
Parker threw back his head and laughed as he spurred his horse up a sudden incline in the trail. “It’s called independence, Morgan. Isn’t that what you left the coal mines of Wales to find?”
Morgan shook his head. “Independence is not about doing things your mama and papa wouldn’t approve of.”
Parker’s smile stayed in place. “I know. Maybe after a few days in the West you’ll start to understand the kind of independence I’m talking about.”
Amelia looked affectionately from her brother to Morgan, who appeared gangly and uncomfortable on the small gelding they’d rented. “You need a bigger horse, Morgan,” she shouted back.
“This one’s plenty far off the ground for me, Missy. I don’t need to go breaking any bones in my old age.”
Morgan still had the strength of men half his age, and there was not a gray strand in his thick black hair, but once he’d passed what he had figured was his fiftieth birthday last year, he’d started talking about being old.
Amelia smiled and turned to the front again. The trail had leveled off and they emerged from the piney woods into a small valley. She’d seen such a vista once on the stereopticon at a party at the Hastings’, but it couldn’t prepare her for the real thing. Long grasses swayed green and golden in the sunlight, sloping down to a sparkling blue-gray stream where a group of deer drank and grazed. On every side pine-covered hills formed a dark majestic backdrop against the bluest sky she’d ever seen.
“Here we are,” Parker said, stopping his horse and throwing his arms wide like a circus ringmaster. “Pronghorn Valley.”
“Look at the deer!” Amelia said with a little squeal of delight.
“They’re not deer. They’re pronghorn antelope—the sweetest critters you’d ever want to meet.”
“It’s a beautiful place, Parker,” she said, her voice dropping.
Her brother nodded. “The mine’s right across the valley, upriver. Come on. I’ll race you.”
His horse took off gracefully in response to his signal. Amelia spurred hers to follow him, shouting back to a frowning Morgan, “We’ll wait for you.”