by Robin Gideon
“I can get out of this myself,” Pamela replied. She squirmed on her knees, her waist surrounded by the Midnight Phantom’s thighs. His arm was still around her. “Give me back my gun.”
“No. And be quiet. I want to hear what Darwell’s saying.”
When Pamela turned toward the open window again, Garrett tried to pay attention to the people inside the room. But that wasn’t possible. Not when he had Pamela so close to him, and he could feel the heat and strength of her body, not when he could see her striking profile, definitely aristocratic, which was ironic, since he knew she came from a family that had never been able to get two dimes together at the same time.
Her unexpected presence added a dimension to his plan to strike at the heart of Jonathon Darwell. As the Midnight Phantom, Garrett found her a nuisance, reducing his odds of success and jeopardizing him needlessly. But as Garrett Randolph, the lawyer, he thought Pamela’s presence terribly sad since he was certain that sooner or later she would get caught stealing, and then he would have to defend her in court, possibly before the corrupt Judge Robert Dahlmann.
Suddenly both Jonathon Darwell and the scarred gunman left the room. At almost the same time, Garrett heard Angie’s voice, low and authoritative, telling someone to take his hands off her that instant or she was going to change him from a stallion to a gelding.
Garrett smiled as he adjusted his mask. Obviously, Angie’s evening wasn’t turning out the way she’d wanted, and Garrett knew her well enough to realize that tomorrow she was going to be impossible to be around.
Garrett rose silently to his feet, reaching down to take Pamela’s hand to help her up. She refused his aid. Smiling in the moonlight, he pulled aside the curtain and bowed theatrically. Pamela scowled at him.
“You want to tell me what you’re doing here?” Garrett asked, his voice still low, though not as low as it had been before.
“I could ask you the same thing. Who are you anyway?” Pamela shot back.
“The Midnight Phantom.”
“I know that much. I mean behind the mask.”
With the mask over his eyes, his hat pulled low, and the ebony cape draped over his shoulders and hanging nearly to the floor, the Midnight Phantom looked dangerous as sin. But Pamela couldn’t help noticing that his smile was devastating and put the dimple in his cheek on display. The shimmer of moonlight off his white teeth was dazzling, and despite his clipped manner, Pamela could tell that he was disguising his voice. He seemed—she was going on instinct here—like an educated man. But why would an educated man become the Midnight Phantom?
“If you think you can steal from Jonathon Darwell and live to spend whatever you get, you’re taking one hell of a gamble. There are easier ways of making money,” the Phantom said, sounding rather disgusted with Pamela.
“I’m not looking for easy money for myself,” she replied.
“Then what are you looking for?”
“Justice. Revenge.”
“So you’re fed up with the lawlessness rampant in Whitetail Creek and had decided to do something about it?”
“Of course. Everybody is, but most people are just too scared to do anything about it.”
For several seconds Garrett pondered her statement before casting it aside. As the Midnight Phantom, he could not afford to have friends or allies.
He had to keep his identity secret. He believed that if two people knew his secret, it would only be a matter of time before three people knew, and shortly after that, everyone would know that Garrett Randolph, firebrand attorney for the downtrodden, was also the Midnight Phantom.
“You won’t find justice in Jonathon Darwell’s bedroom,” Garrett said finally. “But you will find money. Let’s have a look in that safe.”
“It’s locked. You’ll never get it open without dynamite.”
Garrett smiled. “Never underestimate the skills of the Midnight Phantom.”
He went to the portrait, kneeling on Jonathon Darwell’s bed, and swung it open. When he thought of how furious Jonathon would be when he discovered that the Midnight Phantom had been traipsing through his bedroom, Garrett’s smile broadened.
“It’s a combination lock,” Pamela whispered, kneeling on the bed. “I already looked at it.”
The safe was a Barns & Bradley Model 6, but Garrett had known this even before he’d set eyes on it. When he’d first begun practicing law, he had defended a bank robber who’d specialized in banks using Barns & Bradley safes. When the client was finally apprehended, it was discovered that he had worked for the company. One of the man’s last official acts as an employee of the Barns & Bradley Safe & Lock Company was to install a wall safe in the residence of Jonathon Darwell.
In exchange for his legal services for the bank robber, Garrett had received lessons of a most peculiar and helpful nature for a defense attorney.
He now spun the dial four times around in a clockwise direction then did the same thing counterclockwise. Finally, very slowly, he began turning the dial, listening carefully to the clicks as the internal tumblers turned, only his fingertips touching the metal.
On number thirty-eight, he felt the unlocking handle register ever so faintly and the tumbler falling into place. Garrett smiled. The only flaw with Barns & Bradley safes was that when the tumblers fell into place, they tapped lightly against the unlocking handle, and if a person’s touch was sensitive enough, it could be felt.
It took Phantom nine minutes and four tries, but he eventually got all four numbers correct and swung open the safe door.
“Amazing,” Pamela whispered.
She was suddenly aware of how ill-equipped, both educationally and emotionally, she was to be a thief. She had no idea how Phantom had managed to open the safe. To her, it was magic, pure and simple.
Garrett smiled at Pamela and let his gaze touch her for just a moment longer than necessary as they knelt side by side on the bed. He’d never really cared much for tomboys, for those who acted, he felt, like men. But Pamela possibly could change his attitude. Daring and brave, even wearing Levi’s and a cotton shirt, she was all woman. Her breasts were large and round, pressing against her shirtfront. Though this wasn’t the time for Garrett to be wondering exactly how feminine Pamela Bragg really was, the memory of holding her close against him came back with such startling intensity that he felt his cock begin to stir, coming awake.
He forced himself to look away from her and into the safe. There were a number of bound stacks of paper money, which Garrett counted, surprised that the bundles contained varying sums.
“Bribery money?” Pamela asked, breaking the silence.
“They’re not marked.” Garrett counted all the bills, which came to nearly two thousand dollars. He split the sum approximately in half, handing some bundles to Pamela. “Be careful how you spend it. You don’t have the cash to get showy with it and not draw Darwell’s suspicion.”
“It’s not for me,” Pamela said, folding the money in half and stuffing it into the back pocket of her Levi’s. “I told you, I’m not in this for the money. I’m in it for justice.”
“That’s what every thief says.”
“The money’s not for me. It’s for the people the Darwells have hurt, the ones they’ve crushed.”
Phantom looked at Pamela, thinking he’d never before met a woman quite like her. Though he didn’t entirely believe she was not out for personal gain, he did believe she would not steal from an innocent person. As a lawyer, Garrett had been lied to too many times for him not to understand the power and allure of stolen cash.
“Sure,” he said, deliberately letting Pamela hear his skepticism. He turned back to the safe and began inspecting the papers still inside.
Garrett was disappointed with what he found in the safe. The rest of the legal documents were mostly deeds to property that Jonathon Darwell controlled. Although this let Garrett know that, among his other criminal activities, Jonathon Darwell was also loaning money to ranchers at usurious rates, it accomplished little els
e.
He closed the safe, spun the dial, and returned the portrait to its place. Easing off the bed, he waited until Pamela got off then smoothed out the wrinkles on the bed linen.
“How had you planned to get out of here?” Phantom asked.
“The same way I got in. Over the front wall. But I’m not leaving yet,” Pamela replied.
“That’s your great plan?” He was aware of the condescension in his tone. He could see that she was doing all she could to control her temper. “You’re leaving now,” he said, moving a half step closer so that his chest nearly touched her. “If you’re going to be a thief, you’re going to have to know when you’ve stolen enough.”
“I’m not a thief,” Pamela replied, looking up into his eyes. It was eerie how, with his broad-brimmed hat and his mask, he could keep himself in shadow and darkness, yet his eyes could gleam in the moonlight. She wanted to step backward, but she didn’t want to appear willing to follow his orders. “And you’ve still got my gun. I’d like it back now, if you please.”
The Midnight Phantom smiled, saying, “I don’t please.”
Pamela wanted to slap the smile from his face.
“Give…me…my…gun,” she whispered slowly through clenched teeth, refusing to be intimidated, taunted, or aroused by him.
“Little girls shouldn’t play with guns. You’ll only get yourself hurt.”
“I’m not a little girl!” Pamela snapped.
“Shhh! You’ve got to keep your voice down,” Garrett replied.
At that moment, he thought himself the most foolish man in the world for standing in Jonathon Darwell’s bedroom and taunting a woman into an argument. She was, without doubt, the most—what was the appropriate word for her?—different woman he’d ever spoken to. Her determination and feistiness were unheard of in the wealthy social circles Garrett frequented, where mothers groomed their daughters to be wives of wealthy men.
“Keep the damn gun then,” Pamela whispered heatedly.
Stabbing him with her angry gaze, she turned on her heel and headed toward the bedroom door, but he caught her wrist.
“Don’t try to stop me,” she whispered. “After tonight, Darwell’s going to have a thousand men watching this house. I’ll never have the chance to get in here again, so I’m going for it all tonight.”
Garrett nodded after a moment, realizing the logic of her statement. He really hadn’t intended on making any money by breaking into the mansion as the Midnight Phantom. He had been hoping instead to find documents that would put Jonathon Darwell and his sons in prison. He wasn’t in it for cash. Just the same, if the Midnight Phantom could cause Jonathon to lose a night’s sleep, then the evening would be successful.
“Just do what I tell you,” he whispered in his flinty tone, the one that brooked no opposition.
Pamela was stubborn and proud, but she was also intelligent, and she knew that the Midnight Phantom was considerably more skilled at this sort of thing than she was. After all, hadn’t he been tormenting Jonathon Darwell for nearly two months, intentionally leaving behind a series of tantalizing clues that seemingly led nowhere?
“Just don’t slow me down,” Pamela whispered, realizing it was nothing but stubbornness that made her say the words.
They made their way down the hall to Michael Darwell’s room. Garrett walked over to the window. He quickly noted all the latest little gadgets—among them a new alarm clock with small soldiers that circled on a battlefield when the alarm rang, and a cigarette-rolling machine—that the youngest male Darwell apparently found so fascinating.
Pamela discovered a small wooden box, intricately carved and held closed with a small gold lock, beneath the bed. She smiled broadly as she placed the box on the bed.
She looked up, about to inform him of what she’d found, and for an instant, she lost her breath. To see the Midnight Phantom moving in the shadows of the bedroom, half-illuminated by the moonlight streaming through the balcony windows, touched Pamela in a secret, primordial place. Though she would never admit it to herself, she was conscious of her clitoris suddenly beginning to tingle, her nipples tightening, and the lips of her vagina swelling slightly. Whether she wanted her pussy to be conscious of Phantom or not, it was. In fact, her entire body was responding in one way or another to Phantom’s ostentatious virility.
He was tall, perhaps a little over six feet, with broad, powerful shoulders and a thick chest, yet his waist was narrow. He moved with the supple grace of a stalking cat. With each move, the long cape fluttered slightly, streaming over his shoulders and down his back. The mask over his eyes, though it continued to conceal his true identity, no longer was frightening to Pamela. Rather, not knowing his true identity, knowing him only as the Midnight Phantom, added something inexplicable to his allure.
He was, she thought then, absurdly handsome. In reality she could not see very much of his face—just his eyes and his beautiful smile—so she certainly couldn’t say that he was handsome. But her intuitive self knew that he was, and it was her intuition that her body was listening to.
His hands were beautiful in the moonlight as he handled the letters on the small writing table near the windows. She’d watched them masterfully work the dial of the wall safe and had guessed them to be extraordinarily dexterous. And she had felt his firm right hand over her mouth, holding back her scream of protest.
He’s an outcast, just like me, she thought.
She flinched at the thought. Never before had she believed there was anyone like her, with the singular exception of her brother, Jedediah, the bounty hunter.
Her movement caught Phantom’s eye, and he turned toward her. She pointed to the carved jewelry box on the bed and grinned.
“It’s locked,” she whispered.
As he approached her, his ebony silk cape billowing around him, she flushed. She thought he looked like a gigantic bird of prey. Would he devour her?
He knelt on the floor beside her, inspecting the locked box. For the first time, with moonlight shining upon his face, Pamela saw him closely.
He is handsome, she thought.
“This doesn’t look like much trouble,” the Midnight Phantom said, reaching inside his cape. “Where did you find it?”
“Under the bed.”
“That’s where the best secrets always are.”
And what’s that supposed to mean? Pamela wondered.
Phantom removed a slender leather case from an inside pocket. He opened it to display a series of small, silver instruments that, to Pamela, looked like those a dental surgeon would use. He extracted one of the long, slender instruments and inserted it into the gold lock. A moment later Pamela heard a soft click, and then the lock opened.
“As I said, no trouble.”
“You’re arrogant,” Pamela whispered. “But I am impressed with your skill.”
“I’m confident. There’s a difference.”
“Not with you,” Pamela said, wondering if the Phantom was interested in her and trying her hardest to convince herself that she wasn’t interested in him.
The locked box contained letters from a woman working in a bordello that, from what Pamela and Phantom could glean during their brief perusal, Michael Darwell either owned or frequented.
The box was returned to its place beneath the bed, and for an instant, Pamela and Phantom were both on their knees, their faces close together.
“I…I’m sure there’s more here…somewhere,” Pamela whispered, her throat feeling tight with the closeness of the Phantom. She was more conscious now of her clit tingling. It was an unprecedented response to a man’s nearness.
“We’ve already gotten quite a bit. How much is enough?”
Pamela looked into his eyes, realizing for the first time that they were dark brown, and in them was a hint of playfulness that told her the Midnight Phantom had a boyish side to him that, perhaps under other circumstances, she might find it entertaining to bring out.
“I don’t know how much is enough,” she said fi
nally.
Phantom took a lock of her hair and curled it around his index finger. “It varies with each person,” the Phantom explained, and Pamela suspected he was not talking about stolen cash. “For myself, I can, on occasion and when truly inspired, become quite greedy and never get enough. But even in the midst of my greed, I never forget to share.” He released her hair. “You see, sharing is very important—vital, even. Because, when you share, you actually get more in return, which makes you want to give more, which makes you get more…and so on, and so forth. It makes life much more gratifying.”
Pamela watched Phantom’s lips moving as he spoke. They looked to her, at that moment and in the eerie glow of the moonlight, delicious.
Delicious?
She’d never before thought of a man’s mouth as delicious, but that was how his lips appeared to her at that moment. And she wanted to taste them.
Angie Darwell’s voice sounded in the hallway outside Michael’s bedroom, shattering Pamela’s libidinous thought. She crouched lower, hiding herself behind the bed. The Phantom, however, did not flinch.
“That’s Angie. She’s still complaining to the man she brought up here to the second floor. She won’t come in.”
Pamela felt a prickly sensation running through her system. She looked at Phantom and thought, He recognizes the Darwells’ voices and knows where their bedrooms are. Who the devil is he?
“How did you get in?” Phantom whispered, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder.
“I jumped over the wall then climbed the ivy brace to the second floor,” she answered as softly as she could.
“And nobody saw you?” Phantom sounded surprised.
Pamela shook her head.
“Follow me. I’ve got a better way out.”
He took Pamela’s hand in his and led her out to the balcony. Her fingers laced with his, her own hand dampened with fear and a little trembly, his dry and strong. She wished his confidence could seep through his palm into her.
Where’s he leading me? she wondered, not really caring so long as Phantom was with her.