An Irresistible Temptation

Sophie Malloy had her heart ripped in two and
tossed back in her pretty face. Luckily, this classically trained
pianist has a penchant for travel. From Boston, she sets out for
Colorado to do a favor for her only sister-in-law. Not expecting
excitement in tiny Spring City, she never imagined she’d be knocked
into the street five minutes after disembarking the train. And
certainly not by a dusty cowboy with soft brown eyes and a
devastatingly sexy grin.

Riley Dalcourt is stunned. At first meeting,
he knows Sophie is the woman of his dreams, with her dark hair,
intelligent eyes, and purple unmentionables! Unfortunately, he’s
already engaged. Honor bound, he’s determined to go through with
his commitment to his fiancée. Yet he simply can’t seem to stay
away from the sweet-tempered beauty who has entered his life so
unexpectedly, or forget her when she leaves just as quickly.

With the lively 1880s San Francisco and the
dangerous Barbary Coast as the backdrop, Sophie and Riley reunite
while following their individual dreams. Amid cable cars and
concert halls, they must discover if their undeniable attraction is
true love or merely An Irresistible Temptation.

Cat Whisker Press

Massachusetts

This book is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents either are products of the
author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

Published by Cat Whisker Press at
Smashwords

Copyright 2013 Sydney Jane Baily

Cover: Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

Copyeditor: Chloe Bearuski

All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
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This book is also available in print.

Tim, Pandora, and Jasper

my three constants

With love

I offer heartfelt gratitude to my
enthusiastic beta readers: Renee Sevelitte, who found the first
major story flaws; Tammy Thompson, who went above and beyond the
task, meticulously pointing out typos, while giving me the honest
truth about the first chapter; Pamela Hodgin, who earnestly read my
story despite it being out of her normal genre of interest; and
Holly Meyerhoff, who is almost too polite to be a beta reader, but
made me rethink the latter half of the story.

Thanks to the young man at the San Francisco
Cable Car Museum (whose name I didn’t get), who gave me valuable
information. And to Wendy Kramer, librarian in the San Francisco
History Center at the San Francisco Public Library for sending
much-needed primary sources.

Thanks to my cheering section. You know who
you are. And, of course, thanks to my mom, who read the nearly
final draft, chapter by chapter, right along with me. We had a fun
time.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Epilogue

A Note from the Author

Other Works

Excerpt: An Improper Situation

About the Author

Spring City, Colorado

The train rocked sharply to the left and
Sophie smacked her head against the window for the umpteenth time
that day.
Really!
She rubbed her temple, running her hand
over her dark hair. This was certainly not the smooth ride between
New York and Boston, or even between Paris and Rome, for that
matter. This was the West. This was freedom, she thought to herself
with the merest hint of a smile.

As the train crossed over into Colorado,
heading for tiny Spring City, none of the other passengers would
suspect she was anyone out of the ordinary. Looking at her, in her
well-appointed blue dress, her hands folded in her lap, no one
would know or care that she was a world-class pianist. Her studies
at The Boston Conservatory of Music under its famed director Julius
Eichberg and then at The National Academy of St. Cecilia in Rome
were of little use to her at that moment.

Sophie stretched delicately before turning
her face once again to the window. Briefly, she caught sight of her
own reflection. Although the man she’d believed she would marry had
torn her heart asunder the previous year, destroying her composure
with all the roughness of a piano’s dissonant second interval, she
decided her appearance was unchanged.

Well, perhaps a bit weary-looking around her
eyes, which stared solemnly back at her. On the inside, however,
Sophie struggled to regain the self-possession she’d felt before
Philip went to Oxford University to study philosophy—without
her.

What was the point
, she had wondered
aloud to him,
to debate life and God and Heaven and whatnot?
When she played her pianoforte, she knew the meaning of life. And
she even suspected she’d heard the sounds of Heaven in many a
concerto.
Why debate and deliberate? Why not just live life and
be grateful?

Philip had not invited her to Oxford, and
she’d left Rome alone, returning home to Boston.

She focused on the vastness outside the
train, feeling a little disappointed at having seen so few buffalo.
No great herds were left. Her sister-in-law, Charlotte, who had
lived in Colorado until she’d met Sophie’s brother nearly a year
and a half earlier, had told her about the wide open spaces. Sophie
had never seen the magnificent open plains before, and, in that
respect, she had not been disappointed.

However, she had to admit that each time the
train pulled into a station, no matter how small the pocket of
civilization, she would breathe a sigh of relief. And when the long
sequence of passenger cars, sleeper car, dining car, and baggage
car, all pulled by a strong locomotive and guarded at the rear by
the caboose, left a town behind and wound its way farther across
the deserted prairie, anxiety gripped her anew. She felt as though
she were on a tiny boat in a nearly limitless ocean.

When she finally arrived in Spring City,
Colorado, Sophie stood on the station platform, looking expectantly
for Doctor Cuthins and his wife; Doc and Sarah were old friends of
Charlotte, who was now the toast of Boston’s literary society and
Sophie’s brother’s adored bride. They had attended her wedding in
Boston the year before. Having them there, representing Spring
City, had been a generous gift to Charlotte. Sophie’s gift to her
brother, Reed, and her new sister-in-law was an original
composition, which she played at the reception hall while they
danced.

After the wedding, she’d waited patiently
through the long winter that turned into spring and then the
insufferably hot months for their first baby to be born. At last,
she made her escape from Boston’s smothering atmosphere in early
August.

And here she stood, thousands of miles from
home.

Sophie waited and waited, until the train had
departed and the platform was empty. She was thirsty. Offering—no,
insisting—on handling the task of packing up Charlotte’s things had
seemed a brilliant idea a few months ago. Despite her own brother’s
hesitation over her safety and despite Charlotte’s brother’s offer
to complete the task himself, Sophie had claimed the job; she’d
dismissed Reed’s concerns and then pointed out Thaddeus’s lack of
reliability—Charlotte’s brother was still a bit of an unknown
entity, who never stayed in one place very long. It was the perfect
excuse for Sophie to get away, see the west, and forget Philip. Or
at least, she would try to.

She sat down on her trunk, her carpet bag on
her lap and wondered what she should do. This was not Boston. No
cabriolets happened by to take stranded passengers to their
destinations.

She sighed. It was not the first time she’d
found herself either alone or stranded, or both, in a strange city.
But this was the first time she’d seen a mule pass by, looking as
if it were more composed than she, in fact, felt. Now that she was
off the train, the big open space all around the small town seemed
even bigger, and the town, itself, seemed to shrink, becoming the
littlest oasis in a massive landscape.

Humming to herself, she jiggled her leg,
checked the pins holding her hat, and desperately wished for a cafe
offering some strong Turkish brew and a pastry.

Just then a strange noise took her attention
to the sky; an ugly black bird with a small head and large black
body was cruising lazily back and forth, making a warbled bark. She
shuddered. This was the “wild west,” indeed, as Thomas Reid had
described it, and not for the first time, she wished she hadn’t
read her younger sister’s copy of
The Scalp Hunters
before
traveling.

So, what to do? Obviously, there was no
telephone nearby, and a telegraph office wouldn’t help her now.
Even the ticket window was closed and shuttered.

With resolve, Sophie half pushed, half
dragged her trunk until it landed in the dirt next to the platform.
She took the two steps down to street level and grabbed the handle.
Luckily, having traveled extensively, she was not one to over pack.
Still, it was a struggle as she resorted to pulling the trunk along
the dusty road with her carpet bag perched on top.

Spring City was not big by any standard, and
the station was at one end of the town, but which end was
Charlotte’s home? That, Sophie did not know.

“Main Street” stated the sign, as she
approached the first block of buildings and she paused. It had to
be a joke as she saw no other streets at all. But on the horizon
were mountains, grand, even awe-inspiring. She shivered despite the
heat of the day and the difficult task at hand. She really was on
the edge of nowhere.

All the buildings looked similar, with flat
fronts and squared off tops, though she could see behind the
frontage that the roofs were slanted as any in the east. Some had a
second story, with two windows over two, but that was the highest
she saw. No wonder her sister-in-law had walked Boston’s streets
staring up at the buildings for months after she’d arrived.

Sophie had no idea a town could still look so
. . . so primitive in this day and age. She saw no brick at all,
only wood, even the sidewalks were wood, raised up a step from
street level.

Along the sidewalk was the occasional barrel,
a trough, or a hitching post. Wagons were parked and horses pawed
at the road that bisected the town before stretching, it seemed,
all the way to the mountains in the distance. And, of course, there
were people—not a lot, but some sitting on benches in front of
stores, some standing in doorways. And every one of them turned to
look at Sophie.