His Californian Countess Read Free Page B

and some postcards from the Philadelphia Zoo where she’d seen too many exotic animals to count. And all the colorful tickets from everything she’d seen. It was a week she’d never forget.
    Taking in the fair and zoo hadn’t been the first adventurous thing she’d done, though. The first had beenapplying for a post of governess to two small girls of a wealthy California family curious about the state where she’d been born. Then, rather than travel the whole way by train as she’d originally planned, Amber had decided to play decoy to help a friend. She’d left town wearing the clothes of a young woman named Helena Conwell, who was in love with a mineworker Amber had known since childhood. But Helena’s guardian was bent on keeping the lovers apart even though he no longer had any legal control over her. The happy couple had escaped west while Amber, still playing decoy, would travel by clipper to San Francisco while using Helena’s name.
    Amber sympathized with Helena’s wish to marry the man she loved. Amber herself would never marry, though. She’d never have the children she’d always wanted, either. Those dreams had vanished the day Joseph died.
    He’d been gone a year now. But the memory of his final moments when they’d carried him from the mine, clinging to life, would always haunt her. He’d loved her so deeply, so perfectly, that he’d fought pain and death itself just to see her one last time. The memory brought with it a pain so sharp that each time it rose in her mind she still needed to press upon her broken heart to get past the moment. She would never risk that kind of pain again.
    So now she would build other memories.
    Alone.
    She had no choice in that. She’d given her heart and Joseph had taken at least half of it with him. The rest would remain hers and hers alone.
    Now she would help raise two precious little girls. The little darlings had even written her from their homein San Francisco with the help of their mother so they could tell her how excited they were to meet her.
    Excitement was what all this was about. Excitement kept the pain at bay. That was why she’d flirted with the handsome man.
    Amber used to spend holidays and summers with her friends from Vassar at their families’ summer homes on the banks of the Hudson River near the college. She’d always watched those carefree young women act the coquette and now she’d finally done it herself. But she was a bit embarrassed that she had. He must think she was terribly bold. Or a bluestocking, which she supposed wasn’t as bad. Of course he may have thought she was both. The absurdity of that made Amber giggle. No one at home would believe it of her.
    But this voyage was about a change as well as excitement. A different life from the one she led as a teacher in the town where the mine had taken Joseph seemed the only way to forget her pain. With any luck someday she would remember the happiness she’d felt in the arms of her own sweet Joseph without the accompanying hurt.
    Enough of this! She’d said goodbye to that old life. A life better left behind if she could not share it with Joseph. It was time to greet a new day. One on the high seas!
    Suddenly tired from all the turmoil of getting to the pier and the sailing and, yes, of flirting, then remembering all that had brought her to this place, Amber decided not to go back up on deck. She tossed her shawl over the chair in her stateroom and lay on the charming bed. She stared up at the elaborate canopy and realized she dreaded seeing the man from deck again anyway. She’d run outof flippant things to say and she’d been terribly affected in physical ways that she’d never been with Joseph.
    After a while she fell asleep, only to have the handsome man invade her dreams, and she felt things she’d never felt before, either. Oh, goodness, she wished she hadn’t had that conversation about “marriage duties” with her soon-to-be mother-in-law. Joseph’s mother had