Kate Welsh - A Texan's Honour

Now that she was free to move away she hesitated. He looked so awfully tortured, though she couldn’t imagine how she could help or why she should considering trying. About to get to her feet now that she’d thought through the foolish impulse, he spoke absently with his attention still beyond the glass.

“I’ve been thinking your Christian name could be a problem.” He glanced at her, blue eyes somber, then back at the scenery speeding by. “Changing it could be one, as well. You might not answer to another as instinctively as you should.” Again he spared her half a glance as he said, “I think it would be better not to speak it in public until we reach our destination.” Again his visual attention drifted out the window. “It could catch the attention of someone who’s heard of the search for a woman named Patience. Perhaps the Winstons could use a pet name for you.”

“My mother used to read Mother Goose to me.” The wistful memory made her smile. “She called me Patty for Patty Cake—my favorite nursery rhyme. I could be Patty to them during travel. I believe I would automatically answer to that.”

She was unsure if he’d heard her but was equally sure he was trying to gather the tattered vestiges of his devil-may-care persona. Did he know how unusual it was that he’d learned the porter’s name and bothered to use it? Or that he’d given away who he was under the mask once again. “On that last trip across America, didn’t you learn that people call all of the porters George after George Pullman? I believe coachmen in your country are all called John Coachman.”

Then he looked back at her and nodded, an insolent grin in place. “So, Patty , do you play chess?”

“I meant I should be called that by Heddie … no, Mum ,” she corrected before he could tease her for forgetting her role as the Winstons’ daughter. She was almost sorry—but not quite—that she’d worried for his feelings. He was a man and men took advantage of any weakness they glimpsed. “I meant they could call me Patty. Are you always so impertinent?”

“Oh. Yes. Always,” he said and grinned.

“I shall remember not to take you seriously in that case. As for chess, I was the unofficial champion at Vassar for my last two years.”

“Amazing.” He flipped over the table top between them. The flip side hid a chessboard. “Black or white, Miss Winston?” he asked and slid open the drawer containing the ivory and ebony pieces.

She took up the ivory pieces and set up her side of the board. At first she played her usual restrained game, allowing Alexander to win. He teased her for losing to an unschooled barbarian, reminding her all men became barbarians when alone with a woman. But they weren’t alone and he all but begged for a rousing game. So she played to win and it felt wonderful. She made first one daring move, then another and another.

Watching Alexander try to anticipate her next move brought a strange kind of gladness to her heart. Then she began to recognize that feeling again. It was like learning to ride the bicycle her father had brought from England when she was eighteen. Achievement. Triumph. Victory.

Alexander fought hard, yet he didn’t seem to mind when she ultimately won. It was the first time she’d enjoyed chess in years. Against Edgar she’d had to walk a fine balance between losing and not making it obvious she had done so intentionally. The few times she’d miscalculated either way, she’d paid in bruises.

She could admit now that somewhere inside her she’d been elated to see Edgar Gorham so humbled and furious at being bested by the wife he called a failure at every turn. Had she not been so embarrassingly bruised later, Patience might have done it more often. Fear had taken over, though, and it was she who’d been humbled.

“Now what, I must ask myself, is that smug little smile about?” Alexander asked.

Fear poured unchecked through her. Did she look smug? Had she annoyed him? Her heart pounded. The blood drained from her head. Time and place seemed to shift and she was back with Edgar in the mansion in Syracuse. She could no longer hold on to the present.

“Was I smiling?” she whispered, her voice warbling around a lump in her throat the size of New York City.

Then she looked up and her gaze met Alexander’s sparkling eyes. His teasing smile. And she was back on the train headed west. It was September the thirteenth. Relief replaced fear and she could breathe again.

This panic that washed over her at the unexpected sound of a man’s voice was a reflex she had to learn to fight or she was sure to bring notice upon herself. She saw it now. Concern flooded his gaze as surely as the terror had flooded her senses. She could not let them do this to her any longer.

Moving her hand forward, she lifted her remaining bishop and slid it forward till it mated his king. “Checkmate.”

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