“You know it ain’t the money, Jackson,” G. D. said, exhaling on an explosive sigh. “There ain’t no easy way to put this, but Bridger and I have been thinkin’, and we can’t help bein’ concerned.”
“Concerned?” Jackson said, giving his friend a level look. “In what way?”
“For the girl’s welfare, her future. It’s a long damn way to Saint Louis.”
“And you and Tom do not trust me to get her there safely?” Jackson surmised, his voice taking on an edge of annoyance.
“Now, don’t go getting your drawers in a twist,” G. D. said. “It ain’t nothin’ personal, it’s just that... well, you’ve got something of a reputation, and that girl’s got no one—no family, no kin—to speak on her behalf.”
“And so you and Tom have decided to take the place of her family,” Jackson said coolly. “To play at being her older, wiser brothers. How altruistic of you both. How uncharacteristic.”
“We only want what’s best for her,” G. D. countered.
“The implication being that I do not,” Jackson replied, his temper slowly flaring to life. He’d been questioned by the round-bellied charlatan posing as a man of God, had aspersions cast upon his character by the girl’s kin, and witnessed her fear when he but looked in her direction. He would not be questioned by his friends, his compatriots, as if he were totally devoid of honor. “So much for friendship, for loyalty!”
“Climb down off that soapbox, son. Who would speak plainly to you, if not for me?” Strickland demanded. “Who else knows that you broke Kate’s heart when you left her for Allegra? And that one you wounded, too.”
“Kate was a whore,” Jackson said flatly, “who knew the stakes when she welcomed me into her bed, and you are being damnably generous in assuming that Allegra Santana has a heart! As for your bid for sainthood, I seem to recall you joining me in a weeklong debauch the last time you were in Saint Louis. I would say that puts some tarnish on that armor you’re wearing, wouldn’t you? As for Reagan Dawes, she has nothing to do with either of them.”
“A whore and a faithless jade,” G. D. said with a snarl. “You make my point for me without even trying! You’re a frequenter of bordellos, Jackson, a rakehell and worse, and while you may be used to buying your women, that girl is not used to being sold.”
“If you think for a moment that I purchased her freedom in order to possess her body, then it would appear that you do not know me at all.” Jackson’s voice lost some of its deadly quiet as he turned away. “Go back to your whiskey! Drown in it, for all I care! Reagan Dawes does not require your concern, and neither do I.” He’d had enough of quarreling with G. D., but it was all too obvious that G. D. was not ready to let it go. He grabbed Jackson’s arm, forcing him around to face him.
Jackson reacted immediately, instinctively, roughly planting a broad hand in the center of Strickland’s chest, shoving him forcefully back and away. “I have counted you among my friends these past eight years,” he warned in a low voice. “If you wish it to remain that way, then do not attempt to lay hands on me again. The next time you do, you’ll be picking yourself out of the Popo Agie.”
G. D. stood his ground, his jaw thrust forward, yet he wisely refrained from touching Jackson again. “Damn it, Broussard!” he said. “Don’t you bring her to grief. She’s suffered enough. Hurt her, and I swear to God you’ll answer to me.”
Without a word, Jackson turned his back on his friend and his recriminations. As he stalked through the buffalo grass, a million stars shining brightly overhead, his anger slowly waned, yet the tension that had gripped him through the entirety of the evening remained an unsettling constant.
For years he’d kept his feelings bottled up inside him, buried so deep that at times even he could not find them. The trying little wretch who had located them so easily and dragged them forth to nag at him had fallen asleep in his absence, and was curled on her side, her face to the firelight. Her expression was soft in repose, the last trace of absurdity lent by her rough talk and ill-fitting garb having miraculously tumbled away. In its place was a slightly grubby fallen angel, ejected from heavenly grace for unseemly conduct and landed squarely in the dust and the buffalo dung at Jackson’s moccasined feet.
In that moment Jackson’s dilemma loomed incredibly large, and he began to wonder if perhaps G. D. was right about one thing: she was certainly different from any woman of his doubtful acquaintance, perhaps any woman that he had ever known.
Chapter Three
When Reagan woke, the dawn was breaking. Scarlet ribbons curled across a field of robin’s egg blue, bathing the red sandstone bluffs in the near distance in a deep blood red hue.
For a brief interval she lay still, a rough trade blanket tucked closely beneath her chin, certain that she’d fallen asleep in the meadow near the banks of Allison’s Creek not far from Bloodroot. Then the first rays of the rising sun turned the snowcapped peaks of the Teton Range a brilliant gold, and her reluctant benefactor let go a soft snore, mumbling low in his sleep, drawing Reagan’s gaze and annihilating the sense of false security with which she had awakened.
Jackson Parrish Broussard was sprawled on his back in the buffalo grass, his shirt hanging open so he was half-naked to the waist, his elbows cocked and his hands pillowing his raven head. The posture enhanced his impressive breadth of shoulder, displayed to advantage his deep chest and taut pectorals, attributes that Reagan could not help but admire.
He was beautifully made, long, lean, and muscular, without the bullishness that rendered other men of his height graceless and hulking. Unsure why this realization so surprised her, Reagan let her gaze roam over him, from head to toe and back again, touching him with her eyes in places no virtuous maid would acknowledge even existed.
“Are you merely assuaging your feminine curiosity?” he asked, opening one green eye a crack, causing Reagan to start, “or is it possible that you like what you see?”
Caught, Reagan blushed to the roots of her hair. “Don’t flatter yourself, Frenchman,” she drawled carefully. “I seen half-naked men b’fore, and as far as I can tell, you ain’t nothin’ special.”
A wicked half smile tugged at one corner of his sensual mouth. “It’s obvious you haven’t seen everything I have to offer... not yet, in any case.” Leaning close, he stretched his hand toward her and, with a flick of one lean brown finger, deftly knocked the hat from her head. “Keep looking at me the way you’ve been, however, with an invitation in those big gray eyes, and trail grit or no, it’s a circumstance I may decide to remedy.”
“Blackguard,” Reagan said, snatching up the trade blanket, flinging it at his handsome head. “Your threats don’t worry me none!”
Peeling the wool blanket from his face, Jackson watched her stomp off in the direction of the Popo Agie River. Once she was out of sight, he released the breath he’d been unconsciously holding. “My dear Miss Dawes, I assure you it was no idle threat. I fear that I am not the sort of man a woman toys with.” Josephine chose that moment to put in an appearance, sidling around the comer of the lean-to. Slinking to his side, the young mountain cat pushed her nose under his hand, begging for attention. Jackson stroked her broad head, scratching her ears and watching as she closed her eyes in a perfect show of feline ecstasy. “Bon jour, ma petite. You’ve had a good prowl, and now you come home to Papa, eh?” He laughed low as Josephine tried to insinuate herself onto his lap, then pushed her off good-naturedly. “Alas, cher, things have changed since you went off to have your sport. There is another woman in camp. An irascible young woman, quite impossible to ignore.”
Impossible to ignore, Jackson thought. Reagan Dawes was definitely that, and he already regretted taunting her, probably due to the fact that he wasn’t altogether certain just how much of what he had said was jest, and how much was truth. He knew only that when he had awakened to find her smoky gray gaze locked on him, he had reacted instantly, instinctively. His body, already in a state of arousal, had hardened to the consistency of granite,
and he had wanted nothing more in that moment than to strip the mannish clothes from her fine white body, to lay her down in the grass and....
Unconsciously, his fingers tightened in Josephine’s fur. The cat gave a soft yowl of protest, and with a sigh Jackson released her. Those ill-fitting rags the girl wore, her disheveled state, should have been deterrent enough to keep her safe from his rampaging lust. Yet he seemed to have no trouble gazing through the dust and baggy linen, the old felt hat, and the perpetual scowl to the beauty beneath.
Sighing once more, Jackson sat up, closing his fringed shirt, belting it at the waist. Though he hated to admit it, G. D. had been right about one thing: he had no business setting himself up as the girl’s protector. It was rather like appointing a marauding wolf as shepherd to a flock of tender newborn lambs.
“Of all the high-handed, arrogant, low-minded ...” Reagan searched the dark recesses of her mind, but she couldn’t find a fitting epithet to describe his ungentlemanly behavior. Pausing on the banks of the Popo Agie River, the dark waters of which reflected the ever-changing sky, she tried to analyze which made her more angry: his bold hints at seduction, or the fact that his scandalous talk thrilled some secret part of her, the part that had been caught ogling a strange man in a most improper manner while he slept.
“I wasn’t ogling,” she insisted softly. “Not really. I was curious, was all.”
But the argument sounded lame even to her own ears, and a furious blush leaped to her cheeks, bringing with it uncomfortable heat.
To combat it, Reagan knelt by the river’s edge, and cupping her hands, plunged them into the icy flow. Then, catching sight of her reflection, she froze, her dripping hands poised in midair.
The creature staring back at her from the placid surface of the river bore little resemblance to the prideful young woman who’d pranced and sashayed through Bloodroot, dashing the hopes of potential suitors to bits with her scathing glance. The strain of the past few months had put hollows in her cheeks and smudged the fragile skin beneath her eyes with pale blue shadows, barely glimpsed beneath the thin layer of grit clinging to her face, hands, and throat. Here and there strands of dark hair stuck through with bits of dried grass and twigs straggled near her face, eliciting an anguished groan dragged from the depths of her feminine soul.
Oh, that he had seen her thus rendered his taunts all the more cruel!
Liquid hurt welling up in her eyes, Reagan glanced back along the trail that led to the campsite... a trail that was blessedly deserted. Perhaps he’d gone back to sleep, or had decided to leave her to her morning toilet, or better yet, maybe he’d gone in search of Luther to demand his money back.
It didn’t really matter which applied. All that mattered in that moment was that she was alone and there was adequate water handy. If she were exceedingly lucky, and did not waste a minute, she might just have time for a bath.
Abe paused in the deep shade of a cottonwood tree on the north shore of the Popo Agie and, resting the butt of his rifle on the ground, watched with a kindling interest as the girl disrobed. All night long he had lain awake, ruminating on the manner in which she’d been stolen from him, scheming about just how he’d get her away from the man they called Jack Seek-Um.
Seek-Um was a deadly hand with the pistols he wore in his belt, and Abe knew for a fact that he could wield a knife with equal precision. Broussard wasn’t a man you could tangle with and come up a winner... leastwise, not if a body fought fairly. It was a truth that Abe had pondered at great length. When his thinking was done, he’d arrived at the conclusion that he could have the girl, but only after he’d sent Jackson Broussard to meet his maker. He possessed the strength, the unscrupulousness, the cunning.
All he required was an opportunity, and he was quite surprised that the opportunity he had been hoping for had presented itself so soon. Abe took that as a sign, an outright omen.
He and the girl were fated to be together.
Inhaling deeply, Abe turned to retrace his steps. If he circled back around and forded the river a few hundred yards downstream, he could come upon her unawares and clamp his hand across her mouth before she could utter a scream.
The minutes ticked away, and Jackson fought down the urge to follow in Reagan Dawes’s footsteps, choosing instead to prepare a breakfast consisting of bacon, month-old biscuits, and a pot of strong black coffee.
After setting aside a portion for the girl, he ate his fill. Attempting to woo a rasher of bacon for herself, Josephine set up a sputtering purr loud enough to rival that of a steam engine and wove around his legs so enthusiastically that she nearly knocked him into the fire.
Tossing the scraps to the cat, Jackson frowned at his timepiece. “She should have been back by now, don’t you think?” Josephine showed a decided lack of concern as she nibbled the delicacy, but Jackson was beginning to have doubts about Miss Reagan Dawes’s delay and the reasons for it. Had she taken to her heels, deciding to take her chances in the wilderness rather than remain in his doubtful company? Or had she gotten lost?
He found his thoughts unnerving. “Come, Josephine, ma petite chat. Let’s go for a stroll, shall we?”
Josephine, busy licking her paws, paused in her toilet to blink at him, then, returned to her washing. Sending a frown the feline’s way, Jackson turned and started down the path the girl had so recently taken, his mind conjuring up dreadful scenarios with his every step. A rabid wolf had rampaged through the encampment two nights ago, causing a commotion, leaving Jackson to wonder if he’d find her torn limb from limb... and there were other predators who walked upright on two legs and who were far more dangerous....
The men attracted to mountain life were misfits, for the most part, slothful louts, and well-heeled ne’er-do-wells. Deemed unacceptable by the standards of polite society, they fled to the high country, far beyond the grasp of the law, where the wilderness and its warlike copper-skinned sons set the only boundaries in existence. They were men with whom Jackson had a great deal in common.
Though born to wealth, he thought like they did. He drank and caroused with the same lusty abandon, he chafed beneath the constraints of polite society, he shunned responsibility, and was generally considered unpredictable and but halfway civilized. Perhaps it was his Choctaw blood—and some factions certainly seemed to believe that such was the case—that rendered him restless and dissatisfied. And though he’d never been the sort to lay a violent or unkind hand upon a woman, there were some nearby of which the same could not be said. That knowledge burned into his brain as he raced down the narrow path, burst through the sparse growth of cottonwoods, and blundered upon the object of his concern.
She was standing in the shallows of the river, her state of undress leaving nothing, beyond the outcome of this encounter, to Jackson’s imagination. With her long, dark tresses streaming moisture and the swift current rippling around her firm, round buttocks, she appeared a water nymph, as wild and untamed as her surroundings. Turned half-aside and gilded by the newly risen sun, she stole the breath from Jackson’s lungs, rooting him to the spot.
He was well aware that he should have warned her of his presence, should have turned back before she saw him, should have done half a dozen things to allow her to save face and him to preserve his sham facade of being a gentleman. Instead, against his better judgment, he simply stood, his blood warming as his gaze caressed her skin.
Blessedly clean and kissed with a fine sheen of pale golden light, it glowed like the rarest of opals, flawless except for the tiny mole gracing the upper curve of one small but perfect breast.
She was thinner than the women of Jackson’s doubtful acquaintance, yet her charms were all the more evident, all the more delectable for the fact that they were less than ample. Her breasts were high and lovely, her nipples a succulent tawny pink, puckered from the water’s chill. Gazing at her, Jackson knew such an insatiable hunger, such an irresistible urge to strip away his clothing and join her there in the cold mountain stream, that he could s
carcely contain it.
Biting back an inward groan, he battled his baser urges, reminding himself that to seduce her would be to prove G. D. and Tom Bridger right and prove he really was a cad, totally lacking in morals.
The battle was quick and decisive. Jackson’s lustful thoughts emerged the victor. He took a step toward her; at the same time, she wiped her eyes to clear her vision, turned toward the shore, and went still.
If she was shocked to find him there, incensed that he dared to invade her privacy, she concealed it well. She met his gaze unflinchingly, the widening of her clear gray eyes her only outward sign that she was aware of the danger in her situation.
The moment drew out, tension throbbing in the air between them like a tangible and electrifying thing, and still she did not tear her gaze away.
What on earth was wrong with her? Why didn’t she flee, or flay the hide from him with some scathing diatribe?
And then it occurred to Jackson that perhaps—just perhaps—she did not wish to run away, did not wish to be anywhere but where she was right now. Mayhap her heart was racing just like his. Mayhap she wanted his touch, his kiss, every bit as much as he longed for hers. “Come out of there,” he said, unaccountably glad that his voice could work independently of his thoughts, for in his mind he was laying her down in the grass, covering her slight frame with his, cajoling away her virginity. “The water’s cold—you’ll catch your death.”
Simple words, emphatic words, couched in the form of a direct command. Reagan bristled. “Fearful of losin’ your investment?”
But he ignored the comment, reaching down to grasp her arm just above the elbow, aiding her ascent to the grassy bank. Then his hands moved to his belt, and Reagan held her breath.
Would he take her now, acting on the sexual threats to which he had alluded not so long ago? More important, would she allow it? For the life of her, Reagan was not sure.
Bride of the Shining Mountains (The St. Claire Men) Page 5