Lady X's Cowboy Read Online Free PDF Page A

unpleasantness. 
    He neared his hotel.  He’d traversed London enough to know that he managed to find one of the lowest, roughest and most shoddy hotels in the whole city, but it was cheap and it had been blissfully near where his ship docked.  All he’d wanted when he staggered off that boat was someplace that didn’t pitch like a bronc. 
    Now it wasn’t the motion of the ship that unsettled him.  It was the lady’s eyes that kept haunting Will as he walked through London, as he lay down last night, and all the times in between.  They were the precise color of the sky just as night eased into morning.  He’d seen that color a lot when he’d had last watch on the drive, and it always took him by surprise that something like a color could fill a body with pleasure.  But he hadn’t counted on seeing that gorgeous shade of violet-gray in a woman’s eyes.  He could lose whole days of his life looking into Lady Xavier’s eyes.
    Despite all this, it wasn’t her beauty that had kept her returning again and again to his thoughts.  Some cattle baron had once bought a glass vase from a company called Tiffany in New York, and made sure all them men who worked for him had a chance to see it, to show them what success had gotten him.  It was a pretty thing, to be sure, a mass of colors that fair glowed under the gaslight, but it was empty, and an empty thing just wasn’t worth much to Will.
    Lady Xavier wasn’t empty, though.  Like he had told her yesterday, she was full of pepper—spirit, grit, gumption.  He saw it in the way she tried to hold off the men hassling her.  She didn’t scream, didn’t faint, just held her ground.  Even now it made Will smile.  What made him smile even more was the sass she showed afterwards, firing back at him with those fine words of hers, that high-class accent that made him feel like he’d drunk a fifth of fine whiskey. 
    He waited outside his hotel to finish his cigarette.  All the ranch wives had frowned on him taking tobacco indoors. 
    Lady Xavier was, Will realized, watching the smoke uncurl from his cigarette, the kind of woman a man—hell, this man—wouldn’t mind setting up housekeeping with.  When the time came.
    But then she’d offered him money for doing what any man with a speck integrity should do, and he’d understood that Lady Xavier really was as beautiful and remote as a high-flying falcon.  He’d been angry at first that she’d thought so little of him as to try and pay him off like some kind of hired hand.  But he’d seen that she was just being what she was—a lady—and he was just a cowpuncher who didn’t even know his parents’ names.  Yet. 
    A lamplighter made his way down the street, only a bit more than a boy behind his dirty face and bulky clothes, and in his wake the street turned into an ugly, sulfurous alley, narrow and grimy. 
    Will might be able to afford a better lodging house, but sometimes a body didn’t know when his money was going to run out.  It was better to practice economy.  Sooner or later, he’d have to buy a ticket home.  He was comfortable with hard living, so a few rats and dripping storm drains didn’t trouble him.
    Crushing the remains of his cigarette under his boot heel, he smiled grimly to himself.  Lady Xavier wasn’t used to rough company, even though she stood up to those bullies yesterday, and he felt pretty certain she would find his bunking-down arrangements less than satisfactory.  He turned to head inside.
    And ran right into trouble of his own.
    The hotel was one shade better than a mining camp bunkhouse, with faded, torn wallpaper, warped floorboards and ceilings stained black from the gaslamps.  The walls were so thin Will could hear his neighbor’s every sneeze, scratch and snore.  And every now and then Will would be awakened by the sound of a scarlet lady practicing her trade in the room above.
    None of this seemed to bother the management.  They had no problems with the drunk