Nuzzling the downy curls on his chest, Charity started to giggle uncontrollably.
“What now, Mrs. Devereau?” She was an armful of cuddly, girlish delight and he prepared himself for another of her unexpected remarks.
Charity opened one eye, still laughing. “Quick—which Bible verse describes what you just did?”
He groaned, thinking back to when he’d sat on a church pew beside his mother. “Uh . . . ‘Adam knew his wife.’ Something like that.”
“Close, but the dealer wins this one,” she replied gleefully. “Try the Twenty-third Psalm—‘Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me!’”
“That’s disgusting! Only a preacher’s daughter would think of it.”
As her giggles subsided, Charity rested against Dillon’s lean frame and savored the contentment she always felt after they made love. She belonged in this man’s arms as surely as she drew breath, yet her hold on him would remain tenuous until a scoundrel named Erroll Powers decided her fate. An unsettling thought.
Charity ran a finger along the brown swirls that met in the center of his chest. “Dillon,” she said hesitantly, “did I do the right thing? Are you glad I came after you?”
It was a woman’s question spoken in the vulnerable voice of a little girl, and Devereau felt an overwhelming love for her flooding his soul. “Yes, sweetheart,” he whispered. “You challenged the hand I dealt you, and you were absolutely right.”
Chapter 23
In Denver they switched to the Union Pacific, and the private Pullman car Dillon requested had Charity wide-eyed as they pulled away from the station. The domed ceiling was inlaid with mosaic tiles in deep blue, ivory, and a crimson that matched the damask curtains. The walnut woodwork glistened richly, and again they had a tub and a dining table. “It . . . it’s like being in our own home,” Charity breathed, although she’d never in her wildest dreams pictured herself living in such luxury.
“A cozy thought. And if we grow tired of gazing at each other,” Devereau said softly, “we have the Colorado landscape to enjoy. Dozens of times I’ve ridden these rails and I never tire of the scenery.”
The reverence in his voice sent Charity to the window, where she saw rugged mountain peaks emerging from green forests, and a crystal-blue sky so bright it made her squint. Up ahead, the train snaked around a curve behind a brass-trimmed engine that belched a gray cloud. It looked as picturesque as she’d imagined, until a lithe figure emerged from the vapor trail and leaped onto the roof of the next car. “There’s a man out there, Dillon! Could it be one of those robbers you read about? Maybe Jesse James?”
Devereau chuckled and came to stand behind her. “You’d better hope it’s a brakeman, honey. Those spoked wheels on the roofs keep the cars from careening down the mountains faster than the engine can stay ahead of them.”
Embarrassment singed her cheeks. “I knew that,” she insisted. “Missouri banks are more Jesse’s style anyway.”
As he studied her defiant profile and the way she watched the brakeman, Dillon had a devilish idea. He let his tongue trail along her hairline until it tickled her ear. “If it’s outlaws you fancy, I know a rogue who’d gladly rob you of your clothes,” he murmured. “I’ll tie you to the bedposts, naked, and make you my prisoner of love—until we change trains in Utah anyway.”
Charity felt a sultry giggle coming on, but it caught in her throat when the train lurched. They were climbing higher, wending their way toward the Continental Divide, and the breathtaking view suddenly left her short of air. “I...I feel—”
“Sweetheart, are you all right?” When Devereau saw her rosy complexion pale to a sickly green, he grasped her firmly by the arms.
“—a little funny,” she finished weakly. “Better . . . sit down.”
“Bed’s the place for you, young lady,” he teased. He scooped her into his arms and laid her gently atop the large bed, where he began to unbutton her blue gingham dress. “We’ll both feel better when you’re out of these clothes, and—”
“You are a rogue,” Charity mumbled. She closed her eyes against a wave of nausea that turned her stomach upside down and dropped it. “Dillon, the last thing I feel like doing is making love, and I’m—”
“I know that, honey,” he replied. “I suspect it’s mountain sickness, caused by the thinner air at this altitude. A common problem until your body’s adjusted.”
She managed a quavery smile. “Sorry. That prisoner of love idea sounded interesting.”
“We’ll keep it in mind for later. You just rest.” When her eyes fluttered shut, Devereau removed his own clothes and slipped between the sheets, lending her clammy body his warmth while she napped.
As he watched over her, he pondered his dilemma. Charity’s devious reappearance pleased him more than he cared to admit, and he was truly enjoying her company. But wanting her so keenly could pose problems when it came time to confront Erroll Powers: she could unwittingly make herself the con man’s target, or distract him when he most needed to concentrate on Powers’s next move.
And there was no denying how difficult it would be to end their marriage if Charity ever decided he was too despicable to live with, because he was desperately in love with her. The only logical thing to do was to refrain from touching her, which meant her mountain sickness might be a blessing in disguise.
She looked so pale and pitiful lying in his arms. Dillon stroked her hair back and found himself checking her uneven breathing every few minutes. And despite his intentions about weaning himself from her physical pleasures, he kissed Charity the moment she smiled up at him from the cradle of his embrace. Ever so gently he loved her, showing her ways to accept his affection that wouldn’t upset her system. Hours he spent, cuddling and kissing and returning the rapture he saw reflected in her clear jade eyes, until they both drifted off in a sated sleep.
You’d better find a new profession, he warned himself when he awoke to find his limbs entwined with hers. This marriage could kill you, Devereau.
But a gambler’s heart beat in his chest and Charity’s adoration was the sweetest prize he’d ever played for—a risk that made his pulse thunder the way it had when he won the Crystal Queen on the turn of a card. High stakes kept a man alert, gave him a purpose.
“What on God’s earth are you thinking about?” Charity asked with a chuckle. “That scowl makes me wonder if you’re keeping Satan at bay single-handedly.”
Once again her perceptive remark won his admiration. “Perhaps I am,” he answered, unable to remain morose in the sunshine of her smile. “And it’s time to show you the tools I’ll use to conquer him.”
Charity watched him open his camel-back trunk, still in awe of his graceful physique even though she knew every golden inch of it by heart. As Dillon leaned over, giving her a provocative view of his firmly muscled backside, he seemed as intriguing as the first time she saw him. Only his expression betrayed his serious mood as he returned to bed with two flat wooden boxes that were inlaid with mother of pearl. “Your cheating gadgets?” she asked.
“My equalizers.” Devereau lifted the top of the tallest box and removed his card trimmer, a flat brass square with a ruler along one edge and a steel blade attached to the end. “This trimmer’s perfectly legitimate. Cards are only paper, and if their edges get tattered, they don’t shuffle or stack properly.”
Charity warily ran her finger along the trimmer’s cutting edge. Then she watched him lay a card against the ruler, lift the blade, and slice a mere fraction of an inch from the top of the ace of clubs. “So if all these cards aren’t exactly the same size, you can feel the difference when you deal them out?”
“Precisely.” He flashed her a pleased grin. “You must have been a card sharp in a former life, Charity. And here’s the companion piece—a corner rounder. Also legal, and mostly used to mark the high cards, as are all these gadgets.”
Studying the small brass stand, she watched Dillon place the ace along its right-angled ridges and then plunge the handle down
. The card he handed her appeared no different than it had before. “If all professional gamblers use these, and they all mark the high cards,” she began as she turned the ace over in her hand, “then why bother to cheat? You know each other’s systems.”
“An excellent point, sweetheart.” Dillon chuckled and put the two items back in his box. “A gambler knows how much he shaves off his own cards, whereas his opponent’s cards feel different—trimmed more at the bottom than at the top, for instance. Here’s a card pricker like Enos Rumley used to mark his queens.”
The brass tool was small but heavy. It had a handle with a slit to hold the card while a plunger raised a bump on the back of it. “But you caught Mr. Rumley, and it cost those men the game.”
“The hazards of being a tinhorn. Any sensitive hand could have felt the dot on his card—and as you’ve discovered, I have extremely sensitive hands,” he added with a dimpled grin. “Why, I can feel your nipples straining against that sheet, and I’m not even touching you.”
Charity giggled. “Keep your thoughts about dots to yourself, Mr. Devereau. I’m trying to understand this complicated profession you’re so good at.”
“And my secret is simple: never use the obvious things, like the blue-tinted spectacles that read phosphorescent ink, or card prickers, or even that shiner you’re wearing as a wedding ring,” he explained as he reached for the second box. “If the wrong man catches you playing crooked, you could wind up dead.”
As though to emphasize his point, he opened the other box and Charity gasped. The center compartment held a deck of Steamboat playing cards, a pair of dice, and a tiny pistol. One of the other velvet-lined sections housed a sinister set of silver rings with a short blade on one end, and a small dagger with an abalone-shell handle was fitted neatly against the edge of the box.
Charity gazed up at her husband. “Do you ...use these, Dillon?”
He slipped the silver-ringed object over his fingers. “I carried these weapons when I worked the riverboats,” he replied in a low voice. “This knuckle-duster belonged to a friend who was accused of cheating aboard the Delta Queen. His accuser also wore one, and he was faster with it—punch, stab. Justice in two strokes.”
It wasn’t so much Dillon’s language as his tone that made Charity shiver. He sounded so detached, as though that knuckle-duster would be concealed in his grip the moment he came into the same room with Erroll Powers. Until now she’d refused to believe her husband could be as cutthroat as he’d hinted, but the weapons in his velvet-lined box gave credence to his darker side.
Devereau read her face and removed the knuckleduster. “I keep these as a precaution, honey. A reminder of how precarious my profession can be,” he said softly. Her lower lip was trembling and he ran the tip of his finger over it. “They scare the hell out of me, too. But if unscrupulous types see them when I open my game case, it keeps them honest. Well—relatively honest.”
Charity nodded mutely.
Her complexion had gone waxy again, so Dillon took out the deck of cards and closed the lid on his arsenal. “Let’s try a few games. Do you remember three-card monte?”
She relaxed against the pillow-padded headboard. “The high card’s the baby, and it’s the victim’s job to find it while the dealer suckers him with some sleight-of-hand.”
Devereau laughed as he shuffled and displayed the first three cards. His wife was perking up again, her eyes following the rapid movement of his hands. As he manipulated the cards with increasing speed, he explained how he could deal from the deck’s bottom without being detected. She in turn called him when he switched cards, or requested that he name them before he turned them over. It was the nicest afternoon he could remember, alone at last with the fetching young woman who seemed such a contradiction of moods and morés at times.
His thoughts strayed again to her seductive body. “Charity, if I didn’t know what a virtuous girl you were,” he began in a teasing voice, “I’d say you were purposely distracting the dealer, letting your sheet slip to reveal—”
A knock at the door made them turn their heads. “Don’t mean to intrude, Mr. Devereau,” a familiar voice said, “but we’ll need to detrain soon. Wobbly trestle comin’ up.”
Dillon pulled his trousers on and went to the door, where George Washington Hollister’s white grin greeted him. “What’s this about a trestle?”
The porter handed him a paper sack. “Here’s some sandwiches for you and the missus. That bridge over the Weber River’s seen some flood damage, and we have to unload to take the train across it. Thought I’d better remind you in case—well, just in case, it bein’ your first anniversary and all.”
Devereau smiled at what must have been Charity’s ruse for gaining entry to his car in Dodge. “You’re a good man, George. And just in time,” he added with a wink. “We’ll be ready to step off as soon as the train stops rolling.”
He closed the door and turned to Charity. “Your friend Mr. Hollister thought you might want something to eat,” he said lightly, “and we need to get dressed for our walk across the Weber. One of the scenic inconveniences on this leg of the ride.”
Dillon went on talking about how routine such a precaution was, out here where canyons and mountain passes were spanned by wooden trestles, which took a beating during blizzards and spring thaws. But his patter did nothing to reassure her. If the crossing was so unsafe, why did they take the train over it at all?
Charity dressed quickly and ate half her sandwich to appease her husband, but when they stepped out onto the ground, her worst fears were confirmed. The river canyon was scenic, its mountainsides striped with waterfalls. And the process of getting first the flatcars and then the empty passenger cars slowly across the awesome wooden bridge was interesting to watch. But when passengers began stepping from board to board across the trestle, Charity froze.
“I—I can’t do this, Dillon.” Her stomach was upside down again and she wondered if her lungs held any air at all. “L-look at that! Those spaces between the boards—why, one false step—”
“I’ll hold on to you every inch of the way, sweetheart,” Devereau promised as he took her elbow. “I’ve done this a dozen times. It’s rather exhilarating as long as you don’t look down.”
Charity immediately gaped at the river below them, and then she hugged the upright beam at the end of the trestle as though she’d never let it go. “I—I can’t—”
“We have to cross, honey,” he coaxed quietly. “If the train leaves without us, we’re stuck out here.” He felt truly sorry for her. The vein in her throat was throbbing and her face had turned that ghastly green again. He gestured for the passengers behind them to proceed.
“Is everything all right, Mr. Dillon?” Hollister’s voice came up behind them. “The missus must think that river’s quite a sight.”
Devereau gave him a perplexed look. “Charity’s got altitude sickness, I’m afraid. Swears she’s not walking across, and I can’t budge her.”
The porter patted her shoulder with a kind smile. “You’re not the first one who ever got stage fright crossin’ the Weber, Miz Devereau, but it’ll pass. Ole George’d be happy to carry you across—I’ve done that a time or two, and—”
“But what if you step through? We’ll both plunge to our deaths!” she squeaked.
Seeing the alarmed looks on the other people’s faces, Dillon hastened to calm her. “Honey, we have to get started. I’ll go fetch my trunk, and George can help me carry you—”
“How could I breathe, worrying about you two—”
“It’s either that or swim, Miz Devereau,” Hollister teased. “Looky yonder—the first folks are across, safe and sound. We haven’t lost one yet.”
Her pulse pounded as loudly as the water that was rushing through the canyon below them. They couldn’t wait any longer—couldn’t be stranded here because of this silly fear that gripped her insides—but what could she do? A final look at the trestle, and then a glance at the river, made her reach for her top
button. “Then I guess I’ll swim,” she mumbled. “It’s the only way.”
Devereau grabbed her arm. “Honey, that’s insane. That’s ice water—snow melt!—and the current—”
“I was baptized in a river. I’ll take my chances.” She looked him unflinchingly in the eye and then glanced at the porter’s shocked brown face. “If you’ll be so good as to stand as my dressing screen, and give me my clothes on the other side, I’d be very grateful, Mr. Hollister.”
When he saw that she was serious, Dillon searched frantically for an idea that would frighten her into crossing the trestle instead. “But the canyon’s sides are—how’ll you get down to the water, much less—”
“The railroad construction workers did it, didn’t they?” She handed the porter her gingham dress. “I’ll climb down from pillar to pillar, and then swim from one support pole to the next until I’m on the other side. Sounds a damn sight more sensible than stepping between those boards.”
Swallowing his urge to drag her across the bridge, Devereau shrugged out of his coat. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he muttered. “You’d better be all prayed up, young lady, because of all the gambles I’ve ever taken—”
“You thrive on risk, Devereau. And think of the adventure—the stories you can tell your children.”
The possibility that she might be carrying his child gave him pause, but there was no time to waste. “K-keep your shoes on,” he rasped, “because the rocks’ll tear your feet to ribbons. And Mr. Hollister, you do your damndest to keep the train from leaving without us.”
“Beggin’ your pardon, Mr. Dillon, but you’re a crazy man to—”
“Don’t say it. Don’t even think it,” he said, handing the porter his wadded-up clothes. “We will see you on the other side.”
Charity held her breath and began clambering down the canyon wall. The footing was rough, with scrubby bushes and rocks to trip over, so she turned sideways to keep from plummeting toward the water. Her idea about going from one pillar to the next was sound, but she slipped in loose dirt and nearly slammed into the first pole before she could stop herself.
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