Warming Emerald: The Red Petticoat Saloon

by Maren Smith

  “Why do you do that?” he asked, and her whole body felt it—a shiver that sparkled through every vein inside her. He twined a lock of her hair around his finger, winding twice before letting the strand slip back out of his gentle grip. “Why do you wrap yourself in so much anger? Do you think it somehow makes you less desirable?”

  “Do you think smiling so much makes you friendly?” she shot back, hating how easily he affected her like this.

  His eyebrows arched. He placed a hand over his heart, affecting a wounded stance. “I’m incredibly friendly.”

  “Happy then.” She confronted him full on. That was perhaps a mistake. Facing him now meant they were chest to chest again, just like in the jail when he’d pulled her into his arms and danced with her. They’d been dancing ever since. Hell, they’d been dancing for months, it seemed. First in nervousness, now in seduction thinly-veiled to appear like an argument. Her heart knew the difference, though. It beat so fast as he shifted closer and she pressed back against the window. He braced his hands upon the sill and made himself comfortable leaning into her.

  She had the most absurd urge to put her hand on his chest. Not to shove him back; she honestly didn’t think she had strength or will enough for that. Not necessarily to pull him closer either, although she already knew she’d never be able to trust herself to do something as self-preserving and sensible as that. No, she was losing her barbed wire shawl. Little by little, smile by smile, one teasing touch at a time—he was slipping it from her shoulders. She could feel herself losing control. She could feel every intangible thorn she had ever used to keep others at bay now being turned against her, raking her hide from head to toe and leaving her marred by all the furrows. He should have been the balm to soothe those illusionary wounds, but he wasn’t. He was salt and vinegar being scoured into them, and still she couldn’t make herself push him away. The only benefit to his overwhelming closeness was that now when he smiled, it was a whole lot easier to see just how completely that lie on his lips was not reflected in the stone-grey of his eyes.

  “Self-defense,” Garrett finally answered. “Sometimes men do things they’re not proud of. Sometimes they think they have no other choice, and sometimes they just… raise their head up one morning with the smell of gunpowder still burning their nose, still feeling the… stickiness of blood on their face and their hands, even after they’d washed in the creek a dozen—a hundred times. Sometimes they realize they’d rather put their own gun in their mouth and pull the damned trigger than to keep doing what they had been. I’m not perfect, Lydia.” His fading smile turned lopsided. “I’ve done things I don’t want to talk about, that I won’t ever talk about. I left that part of me buried out in the wilderness in an unmarked grave I don’t want to honor, not with words. Not even with excuses. That man is gone. That’s not who I am anymore.”

  “Who are you, then?” she heard herself ask, quavering and soft.

  He shrugged with his mouth and the faintest tip of one broad shoulder. “I’m making that part up as I go along. Offhand, I’d like to think I’m the kind of man who wouldn’t hold another’s past mistakes against them.”

  Prickles of that old, familiar anger built at the unspoken implication. She kept her hand where it was, feeling the heat of his body burning through his shirt and into her fingertips. The slow, steady beat of his heart pulsed within her palm. Her own was pounding much harder, much faster, and so was her temper as she coolly lashed out. “Exactly how many mistakes do you think I’ve made?”

  A spark of something she couldn’t quite read ignited in his eyes. Smile growing even more lopsided, Garrett held up one finger. “You keep refusing when I ask you to marry me.” He waggled his eyebrows. “We could rectify that. Tonight. Right now, in fact. Word is, the gems have got an ‘in’ with the local preacher.”

  Lydia snorted. “Be serious.”

  “I’ve rarely been more serious in my life.”

  “Some catch I’d be,” she said bitterly. “A whore and her half—” She caught herself, but Garrett had already tipped his head. His smile never twitched, but his eyes hardened.

  “Go on,” he dared.

  Now she did try to push him away. Not that he went. She might as well have been shoving on a mountain boulder. She gave up and ducked around him instead, to walk away and get enough space back between them so she could think straight. Unfortunately, he adjusted his arms against the sill to keep her trapped between them.

  “What?” she snapped, her voice cracking. “What do you want, Garrett?”

  “Quiet,” he answered without hesitation. “A nice spread of land and enough cattle to make a good living. A house with a roof that doesn’t leak, a floor that isn’t dirt, and a larder properly stocked so there’s never any lack of a dinner on the table. A warm fire in the winter; cool breeze in the summer.” He reached for a lock of her hair again, giving it a light tug. “A woman to stand at my side for all the days of our lives. Babies, maybe. One in the cradle, another bouncing on my knee, and sweetheart, if the first of them doesn’t look a thing like me, I really don’t care.”

  Snatching her hand from his chest at last, Lydia folded her arms tight across her stomach. She hugged herself, digging her fingernails into her ribs as if she could claw hard enough to bring her barbed wire shawl back by sheer will alone. The pain was slight, but she welcomed it, so long as it continued to distract her from the sheer raw appeal of the vision his words were spinning.

  “You think I haven’t heard those words before,” she sneered. “You think you’re the only man in the whole of this godforsaken town capable of saying what you think I want to hear?” For the first time, she leaned into him. She made her eyes go soft. She tempered her tone, hiding the anger beneath the sultry voice of a well-practiced vixen. “Dozens of men have said this to me, Garrett.”

  Close as she was, there was no missing or mistaking the spark that flared in his returning stare. Not amusement this time. No, she’d just pricked his temper. Digging her fingernails deeper into her ribs, she pressed closer and continued attacking.

  “Hundreds,” she emphasized, “have said this to me. They say it every month. At least one a night, every night I work.”

  He tipped his head, a tic of muscle leaping when he grit his teeth. He kept his breathing slow and steady, and his temper tightly contained. It was hard not to admire his ability to do that.

  “But you know what I’ve learned.” Lydia lay her hand upon his cheek, caressing the tension from his clenched jaw. “Nobody ever really means it when they say they want you. It’s just what most figure they’ve got to say for fifteen minutes of heaven between Emerald the Half-Savage’s sheets.”

  She tried to push him back again, still sultry, still seductive this time. Sometimes that worked with men when nothing else did, but not Garrett. Apart from another bunching clench in his jaw, he did not move.

  “Fifteen minutes?” he echoed.

  She took her hand from his face and stared defiantly back at him. “Fifteen very expensive minutes.”

  “You forgot shameful.”

  He could have slapped her and been kinder, and she honestly didn’t know why it should hurt. Wasn’t he just parroting back the very truth she had just told him? “Whore,” she reminded.

  Again that warning flash in his eyes. “I meant them,” he informed her, his tone all kinds of grim warning. “A real man ought to know a woman like you needs a good hour, at least.”

  Lydia stared at him, shaken as much by how he could make such a thing sound like a threat and even more astounded by the responding “thump” of heat that pulsed through her womb. It struck so hard that at first she thought it was the whole of the building shifting around her. Heat followed, a raw bloom of lust that unfurled in waves no matter how tightly she clenched her legs to halt the spread.

  She flattened against the window only to have him shift a half step closer. It took everything she had not to stammer. “Not many men can afford that kind of time.”

  Taki
ng his hand from the window, he traced a single fingertip across her forehead, sweeping a lock of hair back behind her ear and, with a flick of his wrist, produced a ten-dollar coin.

  Lydia clapped a hand to her ear. “How do you do that?”

  “You meet a lot of interesting people in the cavalry,” Garrett replied. And with that, he dropped the coin into her bodice between her breasts. She tried to track its fall with her eyes, but he caught her chin in his palm and then the gasp that burst from her mouth with his lips.

  No.

  It was the first thing she thought when his kiss took command of her and the last thing she remembered before her mouth yielded to him, opened and welcomed him in. Her back arched. She never meant for it too, but the sensation was nothing short of exhilaration as the peaks of her breasts sought the touch of him. She ought to pull away, but her knees dipped weakly as his hand slid from her jaw to the back of her neck, preventing her retreat as his kiss advanced, attacked, retreated half a pace only to advance again.

  Her knees really did buckle then, but she didn’t fall. His other arm had already snaked around her waist, holding her fast to him. She had bit men for taking lesser liberties without permission. Lydia opened wider, allowing him deeper. She had a knife tucked between her mattress and headboard for those who did more than they paid for, or who refused to listen when she said no. She had absolutely no desire to reach for it now.

  Lydia shivered, drawing a shaky breath when his mouth abandoned hers and began a downward assault along the slope of her neck to the mounds of her breasts. Hot, wet heat latched onto nothing more than the creamy flesh above her heart. He suckled, raising an instant mark and slowly killing her with a slew of unrequited sensations that could have burned a whole lot hotter if only he would shift where he was touching her by just a little bit.

  With a tug at the laces weaving up the front of her bodice, he could have freed her breasts. He wasn’t getting to it fast enough, so she did it for him and, oh, how it stole her breath when he rewarded her unthinking impatience by taking the newly bared tip of her nipple into the searing embrace of his lips and nibbling teeth.

  She accidentally banged her head against the window sash. Glass rattled, but didn’t break.

  “No!” she gasped, but his mouth and hands had already released her. He ducked, swooping down far enough to get his hands under the hem of her skirt. He stood, raising all those yards of cloth out from between them. The tips of his wandering fingers trailed fire and need as they skimmed up her legs to her thighs, stopping only when he caught hold of her ass. He lifted her right off her feet, encouraging her to wrap her legs about him as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a man to want to bounce a girl upon his cock while he was standing like this. All fully dressed and inaccessible.

  She tried to get her hands inside his clothes. She needed that skin on skin contact that under any other circumstance and with any other cu—no, ten-coin or not, she didn’t want to think of him as a customer—was the one part she abhorred the most.

  He tore her drawers trying to get the ribbon undone and then his hands were under that cloth too, gripping her buttocks. She dug her nails into his shoulders, swallowing a long-shuddering moan as he unapologetically rediscovered every tender place he’d paddled into her earlier that night, molding the swells of her flesh in his palms. The entire front of his trousers was an abrasive tent bulging out in search of her. She ground upon it, needing in ways women like her weren’t supposed to feel and which she’d never thought she would again.

  He laughed breathlessly. His mouth attacked hers again, biting kisses that offered only passion, not pain. Again and again. Bite by bite, he consumed her. And she wasn’t even in her buckskins and paints. He hadn’t even asked her to speak “savage” to him.

  Her back hit the wall. The clatter of the chair Garrett knocked over when he shoved it out of his way jarred her out of those thoughts. It tumbled to the floor and everything else was immediately forgotten as his fingers delved under her bottom and between her legs in his search for molten wetness.

  “Gawd,” he groaned when he found it. Then groaned again, this time because she’d raked her claws down his back in a desperate grab for his ass. She’d have pulled him into her if she could have, but her arms weren’t long enough to get over or under his and his hips were just out of reach. All she could do was grind, and rubbing was a grossly ineffectual substitute for what her body so eagerly craved.

  In a backwards way, however, it did work.

  “Bed,” Garrett growled, both swatting the side of her hip and then yanking her back off the wall. He spun them both, spotted his new destination and was two steps towards it when he suddenly stiffened… just not in the right way. Grinding on him still, it took Lydia several seconds more before she realized he’d stopped, and then why.

  Paquah stood in the open door, his half-full glass of milk in both hands and his small face somber as he watched them.

  “Uh… I was just…” Garrett hesitated. Seemingly unable to think of any way to end that sentence, he put her down instead. “Thwarted.”

  Stuffing her breasts back in her bodice and shaking out her skirt before she turned around, Lydia went to her son. “Ready for bed?” she asked, forcing enough cheerfulness to cover the unsteadiness. Her legs were trembling just as wildly as her voice. “Do you want help using the necessary?”

  That won her a withering frown. “Mr. Gabriel took me outside already.”

  “Oh.” She encouraged him to come all the way in, glancing up and down the empty hall outside before closing the door. “Come on then. Um, you get your nightshirt and I’ll get your bed ready.”

  “I want Garrett to help me.”

  Embarrassment forgotten, Lydia lost every last sense of comfort she had with the situation. It hadn’t been much to start with, but as her wide eyes found Garrett’s she realized just how ill-prepared she was for the kind of vulnerability involved when it came to sharing one’s child with a… with a… she had no idea what he was.

  Garrett shrugged. “Yeah, all right.”

  Lydia shook her head. “No.”

  “Naw, it’s fine. I’ll do it. Where’s your nightshirt?”

  “Mama packed it.”

  Unnamed panic sparked in her chest. “I’ll get it,” Lydia said, turning in a full circle because she’d forgotten where she’d put the half-packed carpetbag she’d thrown together earlier that morning. She found it still lying on its side in the far corner because she’d also forgotten she’d thrown it at Garrett.

  “Lydia.” In two steps, he had her, stopping her from chasing that silly bag down. “I said I’d do it. Get his bed ready.”

  He didn’t give her a chance to argue. Turning her by the arm, he gave her a swat to get her walking and went to retrieve the carpetbag himself, and still Lydia couldn’t make herself move until Paquah added his own censure, “Get my bed, Mama.”

  Slipping out of his jacket, he lowered his suspenders and dropped to sit on the floor.

  “Need help with your shoes?” Garrett asked as he set the bag on the small table by the window.

  “I can do it.” Paquah tugged without untying each brown shoe until he’d pulled them off.

  “Yeah,” Garrett drawled. “You don’t get that from your mother at all.”

  He flashed her a wink; Lydia met it with a frown.

  “Bed,” he told her, pointing and winking again.

  Her frown deepened, but she bent to wrestle the trundle bed out from under hers. She dragged it to her son’s regular corner and set it up. By the time she got the sheets and blankets straightened and the pillow fluffed, Garrett was balanced on one knee with Paquah standing before him in nothing but his underwear.

  “Hands up.”

  Paquah raised both arms, cooperating while Garrett pulled the pale garment down over his arms and, eventually, his head.

  “There you go.” Garrett tweaked the very tip of his nose.

  Angling his head, Paquah waited expectan
tly.

  “What?” Garrett asked.

  “Aren’t you going to check my ears for money?”

  Garrett came as close to chagrined as she’d yet seen him. “You saw that, did you?”

  Lydia covered her eyes. Oh lord, he’d been watching all that time?

  “If you check my ears, I’ll check yours.” The little boy quickly held up a staying hand. “I don’t want the kisses. I just want the money.”

  Lydia straightened, appalled. “Paquah!”

  Garrett snorted, then chuckled, then laughed. “Yeah, that doesn’t sound like your mother at all, either.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The piano stopped playing around 2:00 am. The traffic of the gems and their male visitors trailed away after that. By 4:00 am, the saloon was silent as a tomb and dark. Garrett knew this, because he was still awake at that hour, trying to make himself comfortable first in an armless chair propped against one wall and then lying on his back on the floor, with his hands folded behind his head and his ankles crossed. He could see out the window, but funny thing about the night sky in town. The glow from the lamps lit along the streets was just bright enough to obscure all but the whitest stars. He missed his house. He missed his bed. He had no doubt in his mind that if he left to go home, or hell, left to go downstairs, neither Lydia nor Paquah would still be here by the time morning dawned.

  Yeah, all right. That might be the reason he was currently sleeping on the floor, but it wasn’t the reason he’d stayed. He’d stayed because for a good two hours after Paquah went to bed, he’d harbored hope that as soon as the child was asleep, he and Lydia might pick up where they’d been interrupted. Sadly, even with his newly ear-plucked penny clutched in his hand, sleep did not come to Paquah easily. Either that, or whatever sound made each time he clapped lascivious eyes on Lydia was enough to keep waking the boy. He sat up on his trundle bed each time Lydia moved or Garrett rose from his chair, utterly dashing any chance that an intoxicatingly mortal sin might be committed in this room tonight.