Sloan eyed Janice intently. “But I understand he’s been out of town. Who’s in charge when he’s not here? Does he have a foreman or a supervisor?”
Her forehead cleared. “Oh, that’s Dan, Dan Cummings. He’s Mr. McCord’s supervisor.”
“Do you know him?”
“Dan? Sure.”
“How well do you know him?”
Janice tried to judge what exactly it was that Sloan wanted. It would be exciting to think that he wanted her! Dan was all right, but no man had ever affected her like Sloan Lassiter. But much as she would like to think there was jealousy in Sloan’s question, she knew there wasn't, so she told him the truth. “As a matter of fact, Dan’s the one who talked me into comin’ out here.”
“He wanted to see you more often?”
She nodded. “Yeah. And it pays to go along with what he says, believe me. Besides, most of the time it’s fun.”
He took her elbow. “I need to talk to you, Janice. Is there somewhere we can go?”
She couldn’t stop the hope that leapt into her eyes. “My tent is right behind us.”
Sunlight spilled through the windows of the hotel’s front parlor to splash onto the rose-patterned gold wool rug. Gazing out the window, Brianne absently rubbed the olive velvet upholstery of the serpentine-backed sofa on which she sat. Beside her, Phineas was babbling about his travels, and over at the piano Henrietta was pounding out a most energetic version of “Bringing in the Sheaves.” Brianne had no idea where Kamanahua was. She supposed she should be worried about him, just as she should be listening to what Phineas was saying, not to mention appreciating the hymn that Henrietta was playing. However, Sloan kept crowding everything else out of her mind.
They weren’t going to make love, of course. Instinctively, she knew he wouldn’t force her. Adamantly, she told herself she would never allow it to happen. Still …
Soon Sloan’s life would be in terrible jeopardy, if it wasn’t already. He had chosen the perilous path of revenge and it might very well end in his death. He knew it, and he didn’t care.
She cared. That was the problem. She cared desperately. She didn’t want him to die. She wanted him to live and be with her. She wanted – what did she want?
She felt her hands taken into a squeezing grip. “Miss Delaney, Brianne, you must listen to me! I’m trying to tell you that my circumstances are a bit more dire than I first led you to believe.”
With extreme difficulty Brianne tore her thoughts away from Sloan and tried to focus on Phineas. “What?”
A quick glance over his shoulder assured Phineas that Henrietta was absorbed in her hymn. Nevertheless, he took the precaution of scooting closer to Brianne and lowering his voice. “Well, a while back, not too long ago actually, just before I met you, a certain … Mr. Fairfield bought several bottles of my Tooley’s Miracle Restorative in order to increase his, uh … ”
“Yes?” Brianne prompted.
“Flagging virility. Evidently, the gentleman couldn’t decide whether to take the medicine internally or to apply it externally. He did both. The results, he claims, have rendered him bald in a most embarrassing place.” Phineas wiggled his eyebrows up and down in what he considered a significant manner to make sure she was understanding him. “Plus, I’m afraid, he has a lingering case of diarrhea.”
Brianne stared at him. “You aren’t serious, are you?”
Solemnly, Phineas nodded his head.
Brianne gave a heavy sigh just as she noticed Kamanahua edging his head around the door of the parlor, his black eyes trained steadfastly on the gleaming mahogany upright piano.
“Oh, Kam, there you are. I was wondering – ”
Suddenly, he jumped into the room, holding in the air something that, to Brianne, looked like a white iron bedpost, and lunged across the room toward the piano.
“Auwe! Auwe!” he cried, and began beating the piano with the bedpost.
Henrietta jumped back in alarm. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”
“It is the missionaries!” he shouted, bringing the iron bedpost down again and again on the piano, his black eyes wild with fear. “They have found me!”
Brianne hobbled on her one good ankle over to him. “Kam, stop beating the piano!”
“The missionaries have congealed themselves within this wooden box!”
Phineas was fascinated as he hastened over to lend an arm to Brianne. “Congealed?”
“He means concealed,” Brianne told him, pulling on Kamanahua’s arm. “Kam, stop it this instant!”
“But they torment me with that noise!”
“Kam, listen! The music has stopped.”
Apprehensively, Kamanahua looked around the room, his arm halted in midair, ready to deliver another blow. “Where are the missionaries?”
“There were never any missionaries here. The piano is – was ” – Brianne corrected herself as she glanced at the pile of splintered wood that had once been a piano – “a musical instrument, and Henrietta was playing the hymn on it.”
Kamanahua cast a suspicious gaze at Henrietta.
Shaking her finger at Kamanahua in her best schoolteacher manner, Henrietta said, “We’ve discussed this before. I am not a missionary.”
Brianne pulled Kamanahua’s arm down. “Let me see what you have there. It looks like – ”
“My bedpost!” Mrs. Potter screeched from the doorway. “My bedpost!”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Brianne muttered.
Mrs. Potter advanced into the room. “Oh, my God, my piano! ”
“I do not like a joyful noise unto the Lord,” Kamanahna pronounced defiantly.
Brianne squeezed her eyes shut and counted to five. Unfortunately, she felt no better when she opened her eyes, but she pasted a smile on her face and swung into action. “Now, Mrs. Potter, you are not to worry about a thing. Your piano will be replaced, along with the bed in Kam’s room.”
Mrs. Potter jerked her handkerchief from under her belt and held it to her nose, sniffing. “You can’t replace those things! I treasured them!”
“And,” Brianne continued doggedly, “I will add enough money into the bargain so that your distress will be amply compensated for.”
Mrs. Potter stopped sniffing. “That would take a lot of money.”
Brianne nodded. “I realize that, believe me. Now, if you wouldn’t mind leaving us alone, I need to talk with Kam.”
Mrs. Potter looked up at Kamanahna, then down at the bedpost gripped tightly in his hand.
“I dissembled the bed,” Kamanahna explained. “A warrior must have war club and spears.”
Brianne called out to Mrs. Potter's retreating back. “He means disassembled.”
Phineas watched her go, his eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “It's obvious to me that the good lady’s extreme bad humor stems from a suffering of piles. One-half pint of my Tooley’s Miracle Restorative mixed with one-half pint of the oil of the oldest and strongest bacon we can find, and applied each night will give her great relief. The cure is highly celebrated, I assure you.”
All at once exhausted, Brianne slumped back down onto the sofa and started to laugh.
By dinnertime Sloan was back in town and well satisfied with his day’s work. For he had offered Janice a sum of money that would insure a comfortable retirement for her whenever she wished if she would help him. She had agreed, as he had known she would. Whether he could trust her or not remained to be seen.
Sloan washed and changed for dinner. Instead of eating in the hotel dining room, though, he headed for the cafe down the street. The cafe was plain in service and decor, but it had something that the hotel dining room didn’t – Wes McCord’s patronage.
Sloan slipped quietly into the cafe and stood against the wall for a moment. The room was about half full, the customers mostly men. The few women in the room he recognized as having seen around town. The clinking of knives and forks against plates could be heard along with the murmur of voices. Gingham curtains hung
at the night-darkened win- dows, and square-cut calico cloths covered the tables. A variety of baskets and dishes were stacked on a scrubbed-oak sideboard.
Nothing remarkable, nothing to give Sloan pause, except that Wes McCord sat at a table along the far wall. He was facing Sloan, but he kept his head down as he ate. When he did raise his head, it was to speak to the man who sat across from him. Sloan observed him closely.
In fifteen years Wes’s chest and shoulders had filled out, and his facial features had become more sharply defined. There was even a bit of gray in Wes’s hair.
As Sloan threaded his way around the tables, an icy calmness settled in him, isolating him from everyone else in the room. In his imagination he had taken this walk a thousand times. He no longer heard the noise of the people or silverware clattering against china; he no longer smelled the food. His senses were all attuned to Wes. He drew up to his table and stopped.
Wes looked up inquiringly. “Yes, can I help you?”
“Hello, Wes. It’s been a long time.”
Pale gray eyes narrowed on Sloan. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”
There was no reason in the world that Wes should have recognized the man standing before him as the scrawny kid he had left stranded in the middle of West Texas fifteen years before. If he looked at the matter objectively, he could remember that Wes thought he was dead. Still, anger quickly reached the boiling point in him. He waited until Wes had raised his glass of whiskey to his lips. “Yes, as a matter of fact, you do,” he said quietly. “I’m Sloan Lassiter.”
Surprise flared in the depths of Wes’s gray eyes along with something else that he quickly banked before Sloan could identify it. Carefully, Wes set the glass down. “Well, well, just imagine seeing you after all these years.”
“Just imagine,” Sloan agreed.
Cool and calculating, Wes leaned back in his chair and hooked his thumbs in his belt. “So what brings you to Chango?”
Sloan kept his eye on Wes’s hand, making sure it didn’t drop to the gun in his holster. He also watched the man sitting across from Wes for any sudden movement. “I have business here.”
Light brown eyebrows rose. “Oh? Funny, I haven't heard about it.”
“You’re hearing about it now,” Sloan pointed out.
“So I am.” Suddenly, the smile that Wes had used to charm Sloan and David so many years before spread across his face. “We have a lot to catch up on. Sit down.”
“I think not, not tonight anyway. I just wanted to come by and say hello.”
Wes’s smile thinned. “Maybe some other time then?”
“I’m sure we’ll be running into each other.”
Sloan turned to go, but Wes’s words stopped him. “By the way, how’s your brother? David, wasn’t that his name?”
“Yes,” Sloan said quietly. “That was his name. And he’s dead.”
* * *
“I haven’t found your brother,”Sloan told Brianne as soon as he walked into Brianne’s room that night. “Don’t worry,” he said in a softer voice when he saw her disappointment. “I’m sure Patrick will be back with you soon.”
His reassurance somehow made Brianne feel better. “I know.”
Sloan slung the saddlebag he had carried into the room onto the foot of the bed and hung his holster and gun on the bedpost. Then, restlessly, he swung toward the dresser. He picked up her silver-backed mirror and ran his finger over the raised vine pattern. Abruptly, he thrust it away, but then he reached for her brush and again traced the silver pattern on its back.
Brianne watched him curiously. He wore buff-colored trousers and a cream-colored shirt, the sleeves of which were turned back to reveal his forearms. Always a man who gave off an air of raw power, tonight his hard, lean body was fairly bursting with a strange, restless energy.
“How’s your ankle?” he asked.
“It's much better. In a day or two, I expect, it will be able to take my full weight.”
“I wouldn’t rush it,” he remarked offhandedly, his attention suddenly caught by her sketchpad. He picked it up and flipped through the pages until he came to the sketch she had done today. It was of him. Studying it, he saw the harsh strokes she had used to draw his face, the lines forming his mouth especially hard and dark. His eyes weren’t completely formed yet, but in them there seemed to be a mixture of emptiness, passion, and pain. And then he noticed the tenderness. She was wrong, he thought. There was no tenderness in him. He thrust the pad away.
“I saw Wes McCord this evening,” he said.
She was suddenly numb with a cold apprehension, and she remembered how, this afternoon in the parlor, she had admitted to herself that she would care very much if anything happened to Sloan. How could she have come to care for a man who showed no signs of having a soul or a heart? How could she have come to love – love? Love.
She heard Sloan chuckle. “Wes didn’t recognize me. Every minute of the last fifteen years has been lived with the day in mind when I would finally see Wes McCord, and the son of a bitch didn’t recognize me.”
“I – I think that’s understandable. After all, you were expecting to see him, but he wasn’t expecting to see you.”
“Hardly, since he thought I was dead.”
“Dammit, Sloan, do you have to go on with this vendetta?”
Surprise crossed his face. “Of course.”
“But it’s so dangerous. You could be killed.”
He sat down on the side of the bed and raised his hand to her cheek. “Brianne, the need to avenge my brother’s death by killing that bastard McCord has been in me so long, if it were to vanish suddenly, I don’t know whether or not there would be anything left inside me.”
“That’s not true!”
He smiled and dropped his hand. “You couldn’t begin to understand.”
She leaned toward him and spoke earnestly. “Maybe I can't understand what you went through all those years ago, losing your brother under those circumstances, and nearly losing your own life in the bargain. But I’ve seen all sides of death, and I know that taking another person’s life is not the answer to anything.”
His hand came up again, this time to her hair. Lightly his fingers lifted a portion of her hair away from her forehead. “You’re so sure of what you say and do, aren’t you? I was first drawn to you because of your laughter, did you know that?”
Mutely, she shook her head.
“Your laughter woke me from a sound sleep and drew me to the window. And there you were, down in that muddy corral. You seemed to be so alive, and when most women would have cried, you laughed.”
Brianne found it difficult to swallow.
“You were magnificent,” he murmured, and lowered his head to take her mouth in a deep kiss of possession. At the same time, his fingers began to untie the ribbons of her gown. Against her lips he murmured, “I thought I told you not to bother tying these bows.”
“I forgot.”
Her opened mouth was the receptacle for his soft laugh. “No, you didn't. You thought if those bows were untied when I came here tonight, I would think you were eager for my hands … and my mouth.”
He was right. She had thought all of those things. And tonight she had been eager for him to come to her. All too quickly her breasts had become accus- tomed to his hands and to his lips on them. He had only to walk into the room for them to begin throbbing. She couldn’t imagine never again having him take her breasts in his strong brown hands and caressing them. She couldn’t imagine never again having him suck her nipples.
But now that she knew she loved him, what would happen, she wondered, when he had found Patrick? She had originally intended to get out of the deal somehow. But now, the thought of him thrusting powerfully in and out of her made her go weak against him and moan aloud.
Sloan pulled away from her and looked down at her lips, wet from his kiss. He would give all he possessed, he thought, to feel those lips around him, pulling, sucking, and licking. As a matter of fact, he would give mos
t of what he possessed just to be able to spend a little more time with her. Soon, though, he would have to tell her that Patrick was safe. He couldn’t bring himself to deceive her much longer.
But that was for another time. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day. For the present she was too close, too soft, too sweetly smelling to let go. He slowly smiled. “I brought you something.”
“What?” Bemused by the expressions she had been watching come and go in his golden eyes, that was the last thing she had expected him to say.
He reached behind him for the saddlebag. Lifting the flap, he said, “I picked some wild strawberries today, and when I got back, I had someone in the hotel’s kitchen wash them.”
Delight lit up her face. “I love strawberries!”
His mouth curved with amusement. “Somehow I knew you would. Here.”He held up a plump red strawberry, she opened her mouth, and he put it in.
“Ummm,” she murmured, and bit down, finding her mouth filled with a juicy sweet tartness. “It’s wonderful.”
“That’s nice, because I’m hungry.” He helped himself to two, and after he had eaten them, he offered her another.
“Didn’t you eat dinner?” she asked, blissfully unaware that a small trickle of juice had escaped her mouth.
With his eyes on her mouth, he shook his head, then bent to lick away the juice. “I want you naked to the waist.”
Addled by his sensuous gesture, she could only stammer. “I’m n-not sure. … ”
“Naked to the waist, Brianne,” he said, and pushed the gown off her shoulders.
Excitement jumped in the pit of her stomach, and she helped. When at last her breasts and arms were bare, and her gown rested around her waist, she lay back against the pillows and waited.
He scooped a handful of strawberries out of the saddlebag and, closing his hand, crushed them. “This is going to be so good,” he murmured, more to himself than to her, and began to spread the strawberries and their juice over her breasts. “So damnned good!”
It was his tongue that touched her first. With his hands planted on the bed on either side of her waist, he bent his head and gave a delicate lick. Then another. Then another. Gradually, the tongue strokes lengthened until he was making hard, sweeping forays in circles around her breast, lapping up the thin layer of strawberries from her skin, leaving behind a trail of damp fire to dry and to cool.
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