“You’re even more beautiful than I remember,” James said when she took his arm. He led her onto the floor just as the band began to play a new song.
She blushed. Not because of the flattery, but because he hesitated before taking hold of her machine. It was only a brief pause, but it was there. When he did take her machine without being crushed, he finally loosened up and settled into the dance.
The music was more modern than anything she’d encountered at other coming-out parties. The singer was a young woman with long knotted hair and filigree tattooed on her face. She plucked and thumped at the strings of her stand-up bass, the gears and cogs spinning and steam coming from small stacks on the side as she played. A frantic banjo solo turned ladies’ skirts into chiffon turbines as their dance partners spun them across the floor.
“You dance wonderfully. Who taught you?” James asked. There was a hint of a black eye still remaining from his fight with Cain in the general store.
“My pa.”
“Nigel?”
They were both looking at Nigel. He was dancing with the widow Myrtle Grey, arms barely able to wrap around her ample waist. At first glance he looked elegant with grace and an exquisite carriage, but south of his waist Nigel was a mess, stampeding all over her feet.
“My real father.”
Her father had loved to dance. Mostly dances made for country folk, but he knew the proper ones too. He could waltz with the best of them.
“Do you still miss him?” James asked.
She returned her focus to James. He had the kind of strong jaw girls lost their manners over, and kissable lips. She thought of Alistair’s lips too and was saddened to find it hard to remember what they looked like with James standing there.
“Every day.” She glanced at her machine, noticed how James’s fingers grazed the copper pieces. How she wished she could feel it. “What about you? You must miss your family, with you being here and them being—well, wherever they are.”
“My parents also passed away when I was young, and I have very little memory of them. I know my father had the same name as me, and he was the mayor of Sacramento before Ben Chambers, but that’s all.”
She scolded herself inwardly, remembering the news about the former mayor’s passing. She’d just moved in with Nigel when she’d heard about the horrible accident. “I’m sorry to hear that.” She hurried to find something else to say, but it didn’t feel right going into trivial topics like parties and talk of investments. She decided to take a chance and speak from the heart. If she was going to learn anything about the Fairfields, she needed James’s trust. “It gets lonely at times, doesn’t it?” she said.
“Yes, though there are times I am thankful not to remember my parents, for seeing their faces and remembering their touch would make me feel all the more guilty.”
The faces of her family flashed into her mind, her parents bound by the fire waiting to be slaughtered while she ran to her salvation. Tripp’s severed leg . . .
She swallowed hard. Guilt was a feeling she knew all too well.
“Why would you feel guilty?” she asked.
“My mother and father died in an airship crash over the Sacramento airfields when I was just a boy. I was sick and they were traveling to seek medicines for me. If I wasn’t such a weakling, they would never have been on board.”
“I’m so sorry, James.”
“Don’t be sorry for me. Your life is no less full of heartache.”
She didn’t want to travel down the path of her own heartache with him, so she steered clear, keeping to his story.
“It was very kind of the Fairfields to take you in,” she said.
He let out a humorless snort. “Good indeed.”
“They haven’t been good to you?”
Her eyes met his. She remembered them being a lighter green when she first met him. Under gaslight, with the sparkle of the chandelier overhead, they were the color of emeralds.
“Good enough, but anyone would be with the amount of gold they were given to take care of me. Since they’re my only living relatives, my parents left them money with the stipulation that they’d keep me in their charge until I could take over my trust when I turn eighteen.”
“It must have been a great deal of money for them to take care of a sick child,” she said.
“Eight gold bars.”
“Eight gold bars?”
She choked on the words and looked around, afraid she had spoken too loud. No one seemed to notice. Nigel still danced with Myrtle, and the Fairfields sat at a table talking to the mayor.
“One could live two lifetimes on eight gold bars.”
“Not the way Lavina and Hubbard spend money. They’re likely to blow through the whole thing and dip into my trust when they’re done.”
“They can’t do that,” Westie insisted. “There are laws.”
“Lucky for them, they know a former lawyer who’s excellent at finding loopholes.”
Ben Chambers, of course. She remembered Nigel mentioning that he’d been a property lawyer before he became mayor. No doubt he knew his way around tied-up estates.