Читать книгу Once A Gambler - Carrie Hudson - Страница 12

ELLIE SANK BACK on the pillow, her smile slowly fading. 1876? What the hell was going on? What he’d said couldn’t be true. None of this could. And yet…

She threw the sheets aside and tiptoed toward the porthole window. Outside, only a thin sliver of moonlight illuminated the blackness. She squinted into the murky darkness over the ship’s bow. Moonlight wavered across the surface of the water like a snake, but did little to reveal the shape of the land on the distant shoreline or, from this vantage point, anything else.

Her mind spun back to the expression on her captor’s face as he’d watched her undress. Shocked. That was the word. She’d shocked his nineteenth-century sensibilities. But she’d gotten what she wanted. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t stripped practically naked in front of strange men before. She’d done it a thousand times backstage at runway shows or fittings. But most of those men had fortunately been more interested in each other than in her.

Jake definitely did not come close to fitting into that category. And beneath the shock, behind those extraordinary hazel eyes, rumbled an unchecked hunger that nearly filled the room. It had scared her. And she didn’t want to wait around for him to come back to find out what else he had in store for her. She studied the porthole window beside the bed with a fresh eye and considered her options.

She hurried to the wardrobe from which she’d escaped only minutes ago. If he thought he could keep her prisoner here by taking her clothes, she had a thing or two to teach him about modern women. She had to get out of here and get her bearings. And she had to find a way off this boat.

She pulled his only other shirt off a hook in the closet and tried it on. It would do. His second pair of pants that lay neatly folded on a shelf fit her nearly perfectly. Thank God for tall men. His clothes carried his scent, and almost against her will, she found herself pressing his sleeve to her nose.

Okay, just because the man smells good does not make him a good guy. Who knew what he was capable of?

Something caught her eye, wedged under a saddlebag, and she reached for it. It was the picture. The one of Reese. She must have dropped it in the wardrobe when she’d…when whatever had happened to her happened.

She clutched the photo between her fingers, staring at it. If there had been any doubt in her mind before, in the attic, there was none now. It was absolutely her sister, staring at her out of the antique tintype frame. Reese, who had swiveled in her direction with a look that implored her to—what? Help her? See her? Save her? Had this same thing happened to her, too?

But what did that mean? And where the hell was she?

Ellie shook her head and tucked the tintype in the waistband of Jake’s pants and decided to think about it later. Right now she had more important things to deal with.

It took some concerted effort to wedge herself through the tiny round window, but she did it, tumbling out onto the deck a few feet below like a landed trout. The pain of the ensuing thump subsided only as she stood up and took in her surroundings.

The place seemed deserted. It was, after all, she guessed from the rise of the three-quarters moon, the middle of the night. Strange time for a card game, but who was she to question the sanity of anything at this point.

Ellie took a few steps to the wooden railing and gripped it with both hands. From the darkness below came the chug of the ship moving through the water and the heavy turn of a paddlewheel slicing through the current. Now she could make out more of the shoreline. It was merely an inky shadow in the darkness, but what she could see held no clues as to her location. The landscape was bereft of any sign of civilization. No phone poles, no roads filled with late-night travelers, no headlights, no electrical lines or cities or even, she realized suddenly, any traces of civilization. Just…a rolling empty swell of land that seemed to disappear into the black night.

“We’re twelve hours out of Memphis, a day out of St. Louis,” Jake had said. How could that be true? Surely that was one of the most populated shorelines of the entire Mississippi River. There would be houses. Businesses. People.

Lights.

She gripped the rail harder. What if it was true? What if it wasn’t a dream or a joke? If she had somehow leaped into the past?

Oh, God. Panic started a small tremble that grew inside her. Her normally rational brain took an unexpected turn into a Twilight Zone frame of mind. Perhaps she’d soon hear the rat-a-tat-tat of keys typing on some unseen rooftop, informing her she was merely part of some elaborate story, her every move controlled by some twisted, unknown author.

Oh, hell, she thought. That’s just crazy talk.

No, there had to be a rational explanation. One she could make sense of. Perhaps she hit her head when she fell in the attic and, like Dorothy, had awoken in Oz. And Jake and the pug-faced man and Petunia were merely figments of her overactive imagination. And all it would take would be one swirling ride on a hot-air balloon—if she could only find one—to get her the hell off this freak show and back to Aunty Em…er, Dane. Perhaps, à la Dorothy, there was some great lesson she needed to learn from all this. Like There’s No Place Like Home. But now, looking out into the bleak gray beyond the rail of this boat, she could not imagine what that lesson might be.

On the other hand, there was that picture.

Ellie stared down into the black water moving swiftly below the bow. If she jumped in, could she swim to shore from here? How far was it? And once—if—she reached the shore, what then? She had no money, no transportation, no phone.

Phone.

Her cell phone! She’d had it in her pocket in the attic. She’d spoken with Bridget just before—

It must have fallen out of her pocket, probably when she was in that wardrobe. If there was a signal—any signal—it would prove once and for all that this was just some kind of elaborate prank.

She would call Dane, beg his forgiveness and get herself booked on the next flight out of St. Louis.

She cast one last glance at the lifeboats lashed to the side of the steamer. They looked heavy. Too heavy to manage alone. She filed them mentally in the “last ditch emergency” column and headed back to Jake’s window.

It was when she was poised, squirming half in and half out of that devilishly small portal that she felt someone’s hands clamp around her ankles and yank her backward.

Fire scraped across the front of her chest as she was dragged along the metal window edge before landing gracelessly on the deck again.

“Ow!”

“Get outta there, ye mangy thief, you!” a man shouted at her, reaching down to clasp one of her hands behind her back to yank her upward.

“Hey!” Ellie yelped as he clapped an arm around her chest, then almost as quickly, released her as if she’d burned through a layer of his skin.

“Holy Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Yer a…a woman!”

She rubbed her aching shoulder. “Cleverly deduced, Sherlock. But it’s not what it looks like.”

“It’s Captain to you, ye sneaky little badger.”

It wasn’t until that moment that she’d noticed he was dressed in a navy-blue uniform that barely covered his protruding belly. He had a face full of neatly trimmed gray whiskers, and despite or because of that official-looking insignia on his lapel, he was officially peeved.

“Badger?” she repeated warily. Whatever that was, she didn’t like the sound of it.

He snatched up her arm again without mercy and shoved her in the direction of the door to his right. “Female or no, I don’t tolerate no knucks on my steamer. Ye’d better have a good explanation as to why ye were climbin’ in that window, missy. Or you’ll be pickin’ Mississippi mud from between yer teeth before the night’s out.”

THREE QUEENS.

A beatable hand, to be sure. But he’d had worse. Jake eyed Bill Jackson as he lowered the corner of his hand back to the table. A man of the cloth, Jackson was well-known to be one of the best gamblers on the circuit and regularly won big pots. His religious affiliation had no apparent influence on his penchant for gambling, nor on his ability to hold his liquor, both of which he’d consumed enthusiastically tonight. In fact, Jake knew, it wasn’t usually until his fifth whiskey that the “tell” he normally kept under wraps became apparent. At least, apparent to Jake.