Page 94 of Snowbound Surrender

“It’s my father’s fault,” he explained without having to be reminded. “He thinks I should be somebody.”

“Be a brush salesman?” The arch of her eyebrow was so feminine and delicate that Randall found himself wanting to kiss it.

He cleared his throat. “Well, not a salesman per se. He says any good business magnate needs to start at the bottom and work their way up. This time, that means I’m going to be a master of commerce by starting as a traveling salesman.” It was hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, even with someone as lovely as Miranda sitting across from him.

“Thistime?” She arched her other brow. The fact that she’d switched from one to the other was so unusual and quirky that Randall couldn’t stop himself from smiling.

“Let’s see.” He took another sip of tea, then leaned back in his chair. “In the last five years, I’ve been a deck hand on a merchant ship because my father thought I should be a ship’s captain, a porter on a train because my father thought I should be a railroad magnate, and an office boy because my father thought I should be a corporate executive.”

Miranda blinked, looking as startled as he felt when he reviewed his life. “And none of those professions…took?”

Randall heaved a sigh and smirked. “Not really. Father says it’s because I refuse to apply myself.”

“But you’ve spent the last three months traveling in an attempt to sell brushes,” Miranda said. “How could he possibly not see that as applying yourself?”

“You haven’t met my father.”

“I’m not sure I would want to,” she burst out, then instantly looked sheepish. “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s rude of me to say.”

“Not at all,” he chuckled. In fact, he had a sudden urge to bring Miranda home to do battle with his father. Instinct said she would either charm or argue him into submission. Or perhaps that was just hope talking.

She continued to study him over the lip of her tea mug as she drank. When she finished and swallowed, she said, “All right, Randall Sinclair. You’ve tried shipping, railroads, offices, and brushes. What is it thatyouwant to do?”

A warm rush filled him, almost as if the tea she’d made had infused far more than his stomach. The heat and comfort of it had spread all the way to his heart. “No one’s ever asked me that,” he said.

“No one?” For a moment she looked taken aback, sad almost. Then her expression resolved into gloomy, heavy understanding. “Well, I certainly know what that feels like.”

“Do you?” Why did it make him happy to know that she had shared something of the misery of being pigeonholed in places she didn’t belong?

Miranda lifted her hands and looked around at the rugged interior of the saloon. “Do I seem to you like someone who would naturally incline to operating an establishment like this?”

He’d had that same thought several times since entering the building. “No.” He shook his head. “So how did you end up with it?”

Miranda sighed. “My Uncle Buford. He left it to me in his will.”

Randall hesitated. “I’m sorry for your loss?”

Miranda made a dubious sound and rolled her eyes. “Uncle Buford was my father’s twin brother. For some inexplicable reason, I was always his favorite growing up. My sister, Vicky, was everyone else’s favorite. What made even less sense to me was that Uncle Buford always had a wicked, adventurous streak to him. I haven’t been wicked a day in my life.”

She stopped and gasped at that statement, pressing a modest hand to her lips. The gesture might have been meant to show her embarrassment at sharing something so personal, but to Randall, it had the strange effect of showing that whether she had been wicked or not, Miranda Clarke did, in fact, have a streak of wickedness in her. It was in the flash of her eyes, the blush on her cheeks.

“Do go on,” he urged her, desperate to hear more about this non-wicked streak of hers.

“Well.” She recovered with a sip of tea. “I will confess that as a child, I adored Uncle Buford. We went on many imaginary adventures together. But then I grew up, and as is the case with all young women of a certain background, I had to develop the skills and decorum to become presentable to society. Society has so many rules,” she added with more than a little weariness.

“Tell me about it,” he drawled.

Her eyes flashed with that spark of kinship that had warmed him from the moment he stepped into the saloon. “I continued to write to Uncle Buford, even after he moved up here and scandalized us all by opening such an establishment. Unfortunately, he became ill this past summer and passed away, in spite of the efforts of Mistletoe’s wonderful female doctor, Dr. Callahan, to save him.”

She lowered her head for a moment. Randall wanted to reach across the table to comfort her. He restrained himself, and a few seconds later, Miranda took in a breath and went on.

“I was alerted to the fact that I was named in his will, but I wasn’t able to make it to Mistletoe until the first of this month to discover why. Imagine my surprise when I arrived, only to be handed the deed to asaloon.”

“That must have been a shock.”

“Believe me, it was.” The earnestness in her wide eyes made him believe far more than just that. “As soon as I had a grasp on the situation and understood that I had to run the saloon or it would close, I sent for my belongings and moved into the apartment in back. I’m still trying to get my bearings and figure out what to do with this wretched place.”

A zip of excitement shot down Randall’s spine. Miranda was far more interesting of a person than he suspected she thought she was. He shifted in his chair, leaned closer to her, and asked, “Why didn’t you just let it close? Why stay and take over?”