Read A Lady Never Trifles with Thieves for Free Online Page A

like sixty to admit it, but the only device left to me was the truth. That is, the shade of lavender that had come to simulate the truth for having told it to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who’d sought a personal audience with the agency’s namesake.
    The banker and the stamping mill owner would not be amused when informed that Papa’s arrival in the city had been unavoidably delayed. Lo, it proximated gospel enough to pinch my soul whenever I thought it, much less said it aloud.
    How ironic, being acclimated to him being abroad as much as he was home, my mind was still a storehouse of things tagged Don’t forget to tell Papa and Wait’ll Papa hears this or sees that. Bittersweet would be the day it became habit to take two plates from the cupboard instead of three.
    Harp not on that string, I thought, quoting Shakespeare. Sagacious advice, and like most admonitions, a whole lot easier to say than heed.
    A horse’s familiar nicker reached my ears. Izzy, my father’s Morgan gelding, was harnessed to our buggy, pulled up alongside the boardwalk. Having spent most of his life as a saddle-mount, his disdain at being relegated to part-time dray horse was pronounced.
    No driver with a pigtail coiled under a gray felt Stetson occupied the buggy’s seat. My heart tripped a beat. Seldom did Won Li wander afield. The neighborhood ran to seedy, and the Chinese were no better admired in Denver City than they were in Ft. Smith—or, to my knowledge, anywhere in the U.S. of A. It behooved him to wait with his chin tucked and hat brim pulled down like a bona fide, red-blooded American.
    Why folks resented the Hop Alley denizens’ cheap labor I couldn’t comprehend, as few, if any, detractors would work as long and hard for the same coin.
    Also a country mile short of endearing were the Occidentals’ strange garb, singsong lingo, and peculiar customs. Conventional wisdom decreed that Chinese men lived in filth, feasted on rodents, gambled to excess, worshipped false idols, smoked opium, and lusted for white women. By contrast, Caucasians were pillars of hygiene, eschewed squirrels and beaver as entrees, were prudent gamblers and devout Christians whose lungs were as chaste as their fleshly desires. What mostly tied people’s goat was the Asian proclivity for bowing, scraping, and all the while smiling like incumbent politicians. Won Li was an exception, but it seems that happy-go-luckiness can be construed as mockery and punished accordingly.
    Fearing it had, my eyes fell on a tall, burly gent buttressing the agency’s door frame. This time, it wasn’t anxiety that put the skitter in my pulse. From our first meeting, city constable Jack O’Shaughnessy had sundry effects on my physiognomy. I wasn’t prone to swoons, but that sly, mustachioed grin of his limbered my knees.
    Jack was ten years my senior and a tick or two shy of handsome, as his features were hewn rugged by travail. He was of excellent character, however, and possessed of a ready humor.
    The latter presented itself the night he and other members of the police force stormed Madame Felicity’s sporting house. I was engaged in a high-kicking, petticoat-swirling cancan when Officer O’Shaughnessy swung me down from the bar to provide escort to a horse-drawn paddy wagon.
    Into his ear, I’d whispered, “Please don’t give me away, but I’m really not a dancer.”
    He’d grinned and drawled back, “Believe me, ma’am, I noticed that right off.”
    After J. Fulton Shulteis restored my good name, Jack began dropping by the office, claiming an eagerness to make Papa’s acquaintance. When it became apparent I was the Sawyer in whom Jack was most interested, I informed him that romance was at the bottom on my list of ambitions.
    “Happy to hear it,” he’d said. “I’m not the marrying kind, either.”
    That took me aback, though by all rights, I should have been relieved. A woman of lesser gumption and greater arrogance might have felt insulted by his abrupt,