Hello, all, and happy July!
As has become my custom, I'm heralding the July 15th release of the latest Cowbird Creek historical romance, What Shows the Heart, with a week of pre-release excerpts. (Here's the cover again, which I promise not to include every time . . . .)
And here's the first excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 1.
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Mamie inspected the bottle of blonde hair dye, almost empty, and set it on her overcrowded dressing table, where it barely fit between the silver-backed brush and the flask of perfume. There should be time for the next bottle to arrive before she needed to touch up her hair again. She’d just managed to stay on schedule and get the job done before the party guests had started showing up. Most of them, anyhow — just one more, and she could lock the front door. Ten men altogether, enough to fill the special dining room, and one of them the marshal — for three more days.
Here Cowbird Creek had finally got big enough to have their own marshal, and he’d gone and got himself engaged to a woman too fainthearted for the West, and smart enough to do something about it. Men always underestimated the power of a timid and clever woman. First she started on about how the only decent dressmaker had run off with a medicine show, and she just had to get her wedding clothes back East. And then, how important it was to have everything fitted in person, but she couldn’t possibly make the trip without her strong brave protector by her side, and it was all right because they were engaged already. And then, oh, she’d gotten the most wonderful letter from her daddy, who knew about a grand opportunity for a man like her husband-to-be, an office job where he wouldn’t be risking his life and leaving her lying awake at night, and he wouldn’t want her to risk her health with all that worrying, especially once she was in a delicate condition . . . . And now it would be a wedding in New York, and the city council would have to find another marshal or do without, and hardly enough time for them to give him a good sendoff.
Good thing for all those men that she knew how to throw a party, and had better booze than most any of the saloons. And good for her that they were willing to pay her prices for the booze and the space, so long as she let them make all the noise and mess they wanted — up to a point — until morning if they didn’t drink themselves unconscious first. (One of the younger council members had told her they’d talked about having the party at the church. She’d laughed out loud at the thought of it, and the council member, after a moment’s self-consciousness, had laughed along.) She’d made them pay enough that she could close down for the night, and not have to keep the usual customers from busting in on the mayor and council members and banker in their fancy suits.
Right on time, there went the first broken bottle, the crash and the laughter loud enough for her to hear it up in her office.
She’d need to make an appearance soon, just to remind them not to start breaking the furniture. She checked her hair in the gilt frame mirror, making sure she’d covered the red roots (darker than they used to be) and put the color on even. No gray hairs yet, at least. No telling how much longer she had before they turned up, what with her less than a year from turning forty. Her mother had died with no gray showing, and Mamie hadn’t seen her sister — gone now too — since she was newly grown and Mamie far from it. They’d had an aunt who went silver quite young, before she got to Mamie’s age, and it had looked fine enough, but Mamie couldn’t let her own hair go that direction. Can’t have customers look at her and start thinking about their mamas.
The sound of shouting, now — but not the sort of shouting she should be hearing. Mamie hustled out of her room to the stairs and leaned from the top of the banister to see what sort of trouble she’d have to deal with next. Girls were spilling out of the small parlor — they must have been having their own little party to celebrate the night off — and out of bedrooms. She started down the stairs as fast as she could without running. “All of you go back to your rooms! I’ll handle this.”
This being a cowboy, dirty and scruffy and belligerent, and big and drunk enough to be giving her latest bouncer some trouble. The cowboy was slurring his words, naturally, but she could more or less make out what he was hollering as the two men shoved and wrestled just inside the doorway. “I been on a drive, and I’ve got my pay, and what do you mean you’re closed, you’ve got all these women and I hear men inside, and I’m comin’ in, and you’d better get out of my way before I lay you out and walk over you!”
Well, whatever happened, and however she got rid of this fellow, she’d be hauling her bouncer over the coals. What was she paying him for, if some cowboy could push him around?
And just what was she going to do now? Pry the marshal away from his party, she supposed, and wouldn’t that just make the guests happy. They’d be demanding their money back next. Mamie gritted her teeth and headed for the party room. The fellow was still marshal, though he might be too drunk by now to walk straight, let alone do his job.
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