Down Jasper Lane (Amherst Island Trilogy)

“I know you don’t,” he assured her with a little laugh. “You made that quite clear when you refused my invitation last night.”

Ellen flushed. “It wouldn’t be proper—”

“No, indeed. I should never have put you in such an awkward position, but you quite fascinate me, you see.”

“Fascinate?” she repeated, as if she had never heard the word before. She hadn’t, at least not in relation to herself.

Henry McAvoy smiled with the confident ease of a person born to wealth and privilege. “There is a ladies’ lounge in the main hall. May I escort you there?”

Ellen decided that seemed safe enough, and she was intrigued enough by this sophisticated gentleman and his apparent fascination with a country bumpkin like her. “Very well. Thank you.”

He hoisted her valise along with his own, and soon she was following him through the crowds to a discreet, wood-paneled door on the side of the hall. “You can rest here,” Henry McAvoy said. “Are you waiting for another train?”

“I’m spending the night in the city,” Ellen told him. “Before I leave for Santa Fe tomorrow.”

“Santa Fe! You bear no end of surprises. If you are staying in Chicago, please let me assist you to your lodgings. I am quite familiar with this city, having traveled here several times before.”

“But you’re Scottish,” Ellen observed and he smiled, showing very straight, white teeth.

“You did look at my card, then. Or did you simply hear my burr?”

“You have very little accent,” she replied, “and of course I looked at your card. I had to know what kind of man is so persistent with a lady not of his acquaintance.”

“Now I’ve been put properly in my place!” His dark eyes sparkled, and rather belatedly Ellen realized what a handsome man he was. So unlike Jed or Lucas or any other man she’d known. Henry McAvoy was from another realm entirely. “Please, let me at least help you into a hansom that will take you to your lodgings.”

Ellen hesitated. She knew it wasn’t proper to chat with a strange gentleman in the middle of Union Station, no matter how charming or sophisticated he seemed, but she felt she had little recourse. She was lost, she was overwhelmed, and she didn’t know how to get to her boarding house. And he intrigued her... perhaps as much as she intrigued him.

“Very well, I accept your kind offer. Thank you very much.”

“Splendid.” He held out one hand. “Henry McAvoy, at your service.”

“Ellen Copley.” She told him the name of the hotel where she was staying, and he hoisted her valise once more. “Am I correct, Miss Copley,” he asked as they walked towards the entrance of the station where a dozen hansom cabs waited in a gleaming black line, “in believing I hear a bit of the Scots’ brogue in your voice?”

“Yes, you are. I came from Springburn, originally.” She found she said this proudly.

“And I am, as you must have surmised from my card, a Glasgow man myself.”

“The Glasgow School of Art.”

“Had you heard of it?”

“No, not really.”

“And yet,” Mr. McAvoy said, his gaze turning speculative, “I think you must be something of an artist.”

So he had seen her sketches. Served her right, she supposed, for drawing in such a public place. “Not an artist,” she said quickly. “I just do a bit of drawing.”

“I saw something of your sketches as I walked by you in the parlor car yesterday. They drew me in immediately.”

“They’re nothing much—”

“Do not sell yourself short,” Mr. McAvoy told her. “That is the first thing you will have to learn.”

Ellen did not ask what on earth he meant by such a statement, for they’d reached the queue for the cabs. Buildings at least a dozen stories tall towered over them and she could hear the tooting horns of at least twenty motorcars on Van Buren Street—more automobiles than she’d ever seen before in one place.

“I must look a right greenhorn, gawping at all this,” she said with a little laugh. “I haven’t been in such a big city for a while.”

“I find it charming. You know the address of your hotel?”