Read Heart of the West for Free Online Page A

you'll always find me a dead serious man."
    "Dreams..." she echoed.
    He raised his hat. "Tomorrow, Miss Kennicutt."
    He lifted the battered ordinary out of the gutter as if it weighed no more than a stocking stuffed with feathers. She watched him walk away from her, watched the people in his path part before his wide shoulders, watched his gray western hat bobbing among black silk top hats and beaver bowlers, watched until there was nothing left of him to see.
    She climbed the broad granite steps and passed through the columned entrance of the Tremont House in a daze. A gentleman does not ask a girl he scarcely knows, knows not at all, to be his wife. A gentleman is one who has known you forever, whose parents have known your parents forever. A gentleman wears a frock coat and a top hat, and he does not ride an ordinary pell-mell through the streets. A gentleman—
    Her mother's voice, though never loud, still managed to reach her over the refined whispers and rustling silk in the hotel lobby. "Clementine, what on earth has happened to you? Your bonnet is askew and you've dirt on your face, and look, there's a rip in the sleeve of your new jersey."
    Clementine blinked and saw her mother and Aunt Etta standing beside her. "I was struck by an ordinary," she said.
    "Gracious." Julia Kennicutt expelled a sharp breath, and Aunt Etta echoed her gasp. "Those devil-driven wheels will be the death of us all," Julia said and her sister clucked her agreement. "They shouldn't be allowed on the streets. Only a hooligan would even think of driving such a... a boneshaker."
    To hear slang on her mother's lips nearly shocked a smile out of Clementine. "He's not a hooligan," she said, and then a laugh did roll up and out of her throat, a laugh that was loud and rather unseemly. And quite shocking, coming as it did from a girl who rarely laughed. "He's a cowboy."

    The clock on the square white tower of the Park Street Church showed that it lacked five minutes to eleven. Clementine pulled her cloak close around her neck. It was more seasonably cold than yesterday. The big elms cast deep shadows onto the sidewalk, and a stiff breeze blew in off the bay.
    She paced the length of the wrought-iron fence that separated the street from the tombstones of the Old Granary Burial Ground. She looked again at the clock on the tower. A long, agonizing minute had passed.
    She decided to play a little game with herself. She would walk along the fence to the Egyptian-style gateway that led into the cemetery, and when she turned around, he would be there—
    "Miss Kennicutt!"
    A black rattletrap gig pulled up beside her with a protesting creak of its wheels, and she looked up into a man's sun- browned, smiling face that was shaded by the broad brim of a big gray hat.
    "You're here," he said. "I wasn't sure you would be."
    "I wasn't sure you would be either."
    Laughing, he leaped down and helped her into the gig. "Sorry about the shabbiness of this conveyance, ma'am," he said as he climbed back onto the seat beside her. "My uncle has five sons, and there's always a shortage of vehicles in the family stables—Get up, there!" he yelled to the horse, and they pulled out into the street at such a spanking pace she instinctively gripped her hat. The motion jostled her so that she fell against him. He was solid and surprisingly warm. She stiffened, scooting away from him as far as she could, until her arm and hip were pressed into the iron railing that wrapped around the seat.
    His eyes smiled at her. "I probably don't want to know this, but just how old are you, Miss Kennicutt?"
    Her gaze fell to the gloved hands she had clasped so tightly in her lap. She thought about lying, but he had said he was a man of his word and she wanted to be worthy of his regard. "I am seventeen."
    "Seventeen... Oh, Lord, help me."
    She looked behind her, into the empty space where the gig's hood would have been folded, if it'd had one. "Where is your ordinary?"
    "I left my cousin to rope