“Can I help you?” Cash asked in a tone that was purposely unwelcoming.
He came to his feet and laid his hand over the six-shooter at his right hip as the stranger removed his—her hat, and a wealth of dark hair came tumbling down around her shoulders. She shook out that warm brown hair and clutched the hat in pale, small hands.
Cash’s heart damn near burst through his chest.
“Danny?” she whispered in a voice he still recognized too well. That softly spoken single word cut right through him, sharp as any knife.
She was the only good woman he had ever cared for, the only woman he had ever loved. They had been together a lifetime ago, so long ago that the man who had known her was nothing at all like the man Daniel Cash was today.
Taking tiny, uncertain steps, she walked into the saloon, her hat in her hand, her eyes wide with fear. And her face... her face was as beautiful as ever. Creamy pale, every feature delicately carved. The lips temptingly full, the cheeks a little leaner than he remembered, the green eyes... sadder. The years had been kind to her; she looked almost exactly like she did in his dreams. Her lips parted, as if she tried to speak but could not.
He had faced more guns than he could count, but his heart had never threatened to pound through his chest the way it did right now.
This was the woman who had created the Daniel Cash who existed today. The Cash who didn’t care about anyone or anything. The Cash who could kill without blinking an eye. She was the one who had taught him about betrayal.
No matter what, he couldn’t allow her to know that she was such an important part of his life. Only one thing mattered: getting her out of Rock Creek as soon as possible.
“Nadine,” he finally said, his heartbeat steady once again, his voice calm and low. “What the hell are you doing here?”
* * *
Well, what had she expected? A warm welcome? A hearty hug and a friendly “How are you?”
“We need to talk.”
She would have known Danny anywhere, and yet he was not the man she remembered. He was harder. Cold and distant in a way the boy she had loved could never be. Fifteen years had aged him, as those same years had aged her, but physically he carried the years well.
He was an unusually handsome man, just as he had once been an unusually beautiful boy.
But there was something within him that he did not carry well. She saw a quiet disturbance in his dark eyes, in the coiled tension that radiated from him. In his perfectly cut black suit and ruffled cuffs, with those six-shooters hanging so familiarly on his hips, he appeared sleek and polished. The mustache and well-trimmed beard hadn’t been there fifteen years earlier, though she was not surprised to see them. In the drawings she saw in the newspapers, Daniel Cash always appeared the same. The dapper dress and perfectly trimmed facial hair. Black-eyed and unquestionably deadly.
Precisely cut black hair lay against skin too pale, as if he didn’t leave this dark cave of a place and step into the sun often enough. And his hands... his hands were long-fingered and beautiful, a man’s capable hands. Tension was coiled through his long, lean body, a tension she could sense more than she could see.
But she looked at him and saw more than the carefully crafted picture he presented for the world. She saw pain. Not a normal physical pain, but something so dark and deep, it made her shudder.
He took a step toward her, moving with a panther’s grace. “What on earth could we possibly have to talk about?”
“I need your help,” she whispered as he came closer, every step calculated, the gaze he shot her way intense and cutting.
Danny smiled, and a shiver ran through her. The man she had loved had been warm and kind. Young, but... good at heart and generous to a fault. But this smile was as cold as ice. It was not the smile of a kind man.
“Did you come all this way to hire me? How unexpected.” He moved closer still, one step and then another, those dark eyes roving over her dusty, worn clothing and finally landing on her face. “I don’t take many jobs these days, but for an old friend I might make an exception.” He leaned toward her and whispered in her ear, “Want me to kill someone for you? Is that why you’re here?”
“No!” she said, stepping quickly back. She was tempted to lift a hand to her ear where his breath had touched her and started a tingle that rippled through her body, still. She refrained. “I most certainly do not want you to kill anyone for me.”
“For Joseph, then.” He circled around her, and she felt like nothing more than defenseless prey. A wounded rabbit to his panther. “A gift for the husband?” She couldn’t help but hear the bitterness in his voice.
“I didn’t know you even realized I had married.” How could he know? Danny had never stepped foot in Marianna after he’d left for the war. He didn’t even care enough to visit, to let her know he was alive and well.
“Oh, I realized,” he said. “How is Ellington? Is he with you? Waiting outside, perhaps, while you beg for a favor?”
He moved in closer, leaned down, and whispered in her ear again, “What is he willing to let you do for that favor, Nadine? I usually charge cold, hard cash, but for you I might make an exception.”
He broke her heart, what little bit wasn’t already in shreds. She’d come looking for an old friend and found a stranger. A stranger who was, it seemed, determined to hurt her. It didn’t matter.
“Joseph is dead,” she said simply. Something in Nadine wanted to reach out and touch the man who moved restlessly around her. Just a brush of her fingers on his black coat. Perhaps a caress of the unexpected frill at the cuff of his fine shirt. Her Danny had been wonderfully warm and alive, bright in every way. The Cash she confronted now seemed to have no fire at all. If she could touch him, however briefly, would she be relieved to discover the warmth she remembered? She kept her curious hands to herself.
“Am I supposed to avenge his death? Is that why you’re here?” He continued to circle around her, staying too close, breathing on her, studying every inch until she wished she’d taken a bath and changed clothes before rushing to the saloon to see him. She’d been so eager to lay her eyes on him that she hadn’t even bothered to shake off the road dust.
“Joseph died nine years ago,” she said softly. “Pneumonia. There’s no one to blame for his death. No need for revenge.”
“Nine years,” he breathed. “I imagine you have another husband by now. Maybe you’ve been through two or three. You were never much of one for... waiting.”
Her heart leapt, but she ignored the response. “I never remarried, and this visit has nothing to do with revenge or killing. I need your help, Danny.”
He grabbed her arms, too tight, and she lifted her face to look him in the eye. So dark a brown they appeared to be black, those eyes bored into her. “Danny is gone, sweetheart. He’s been dead a long time. You can call me Cash, like everyone else.”
She swallowed hard. “All right. Cash, I need your help.”
He released her. “Sorry. I’m not in the rescuing business anymore.”
She sighed. This was so much more difficult than she’d imagined it would be! And she had not imagined for a moment that this would be easy. “I don’t need to be rescued, Da—Cash.”
“No one needs to be rescued, no one needs to be shot,” he said with a touch of biting humor. “Sorry, honey, that’s all I do, unless you have an urgent need for a poker player.”
He wasn’t going to make this easy, so she’d just have to blurt it out. “My son has decided he wants to be a gunslinger. I need you to talk him out of it.”
Ah, at least she managed to surprise him. His eyebrows lifted, and he took a wary step back. His entire body stiffened. “Your son? And he wants to be a—” His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How old is this kid?”
“Thirteen,” she said, the word fighting to make it through her dry mouth. He’d be fourteen in the fall, a detail she didn’t bother to add. Not yet.
“Thirteen. You didn’t waste any time, did you,” he s
aid wryly. “How many kids did you and Ellington have?”
“I have only one child,” she whispered. “And I can’t just sit back and allow him to make this mistake. You know... you know what the life of a gunslinger is like. He’s entranced by the glamour and excitement that’s portrayed in the dime novels and the newspaper serializations, but you and I both know that’s not what it’s like.”
“Glamour,” he scoffed. “If you call learning to sleep with one eye open glamorous—”
“Tell JD that,” she interrupted. “Tell him how horrible it is to live this way.”
Again, his eyebrows. “I didn’t say my life was horrible.”
“He’ll get killed,” she argued. “I know he will.”
“Is he any good?”
He finally managed to make her angry. “What difference does it make! He’s a child, and he has no business—”
“I was on my own at thirteen, if you remember. I was a man. Maybe he is, too.”
She clenched her jaw. “You can do this one thing for me,” she whispered. “You owe me that much.”
“I owe you?” He grinned. “Honey, what the hell makes you think I owe you any goddamn thing?”
She looked him in the eye. There was no way she’d lie to him, no way she’d hide something this important. She searched his dark eyes for a hint of the boy she had loved, prayed to see a trace of tenderness mixed in with the pain and the bitterness. For a moment, just for a moment, she thought she saw what she was searching for. Then again, maybe it was just wishful thinking that made her, for one split second, see the boy she’d loved with all her heart in this hard man.
“Don’t do it for me, then. Do it for JD.”
“Why should I?”
Cash stood very still and waited for her answer. Oh, this was a mistake. A horrible, horrible mistake. Had she really thought the man who had deserted her would help her now? That the heartless Daniel Cash she read about would have any regard for her or for JD?
In a disgustingly hopeful moment, she had. She’d ridden toward Rock Creek with such ridiculous notions. But she lifted her chin and answered his question. Like it or not, he had to know.
“Because he’s your son.”
Chapter 2
Cash practically dragged Nadine to the table in the corner, where he pulled out a chair and made sure she sat in it. That done, he dropped into the chair he usually occupied, back to the wall with a clear view of the door.
Although he wouldn’t admit it to her, he had no choice but to sit down. His knees were shaking. A moment longer and he probably would have been forced to sit on the floor at her feet.
He grabbed her chair and swung it around so that she faced him, knee to knee, eye to eye. The sharp squeal of chair legs against the rough wooden floor reverberated in the air.
“I don’t have a son,” he insisted.
“Yes, you do.”
How could she drop a bombshell like this and remain so damned calm? Her eyes were dreamy and easy, her soft lips relaxed and tempting. As far as he could tell, her knees didn’t shake.
One night, one joining. He’d been heading off to war, and they’d said good-bye the way sweethearts sometimes do. Frantically. Not knowing what tomorrow would bring. They’d lost their virginity together that night, on a blanket spread beneath an oak tree half a mile from her father’s ranch house. It had been December cold, but neither of them had felt the chill. He’d been eighteen years old. Nadine had been two weeks from her seventeenth birthday. She’d sneaked out of the house. He didn’t have anyone to sneak away from. She’d cried. He’d promised to come back for her.
“Does he know I’m his”—the word he couldn’t say stuck in his throat for a moment—“father?”
Nadine shook her head. “No.”
“Good. Let’s keep it that way.”
The pain in her eyes was there for anyone to see, but what choice did he have?
“Then how in hell did he get the notion to be a gunslinger?”
The softening of Nadine’s lips might have been the prelude to a smile, but the smile never happened. “You’re quite infamous in Marianna. Local boy makes a name for himself. The kid who used to sweep out the general store has dime novels and newspaper articles written about his exploits. From the first time JD read about you, he was fascinated.”
Cash shook his head in horrified wonder. “Where is he now?”
“We checked into the hotel, and I told him to stay in the room until I’d had a chance to speak to you.”
“So he knows why you’re here.”
Nadine shrugged her shoulders. Even in those baggy, shapeless clothes, he could tell she had a woman’s body. Fuller than he remembered, softer. Un-corseted and inviting and not for him.
“Not entirely,” she said in a slightly husky voice that sent chills down his spine. “When he found out I knew you, he begged me to contact you, to... to ask you if you would take him on as an apprentice.”
Cash’s mouth broke into a wide, harsh smile. “An apprentice? The kid wants me to take him under my wing?”
“Yes.”
He was still trying to absorb the news that he was a father, that he had a son. He didn’t have the ability, at the moment, to think rationally about this predicament.
Nadine leaned slightly forward. The top button of her shirt, a very plain man’s shirt, was unfastened, and dusty fabric fell apart to offer him a tantalizing view of the base of her slender throat. “Please,” she whispered. “Help me. JD is all I have, and if I lose him to this... I don’t know what I’ll do. Save our son, Cash.”
Taking a calming breath, he leaned back in his chair. He could refuse to accept her story that JD was his child. He could send Nadine on her way without taking so much as a glance at the kid.
But somehow he knew she was telling the truth. Their one and only time together had resulted in a child. The boy was thirteen years old, almost a man. What color was his hair? His eyes? Was he tall or short for his age? Was he smart?
Was he as fast as his father?
“First rule,” Cash said. “No one here is to be told that he’s my son. Not ever. Does anyone in Marianna know?”
Nadine shook her head. “Joseph suspected it was you, of course, but we never discussed it. My father knew, but he passed on not long after Joseph. I never told anyone else.”
“Second rule,” Cash continued. “You do whatever I say.”
Her eyes widened, and for a moment she looked truly afraid of him. Smart woman.
“The only way to make sure JD leaves here determined not to follow in my less than illustrious footsteps is to scare the bejesus out of him. By the time you two leave Rock Creek he’ll be dreaming of the safe life of a farmer or a rancher or a shopkeeper. Or whatever it is you have planned for him. I don’t need you playing mommy and getting in the way.”
She nodded once. “I understand.”
“What’s the JD stand for?”
“Joseph Daniel,” she whispered.
Joseph Daniel, named for the kid’s natural father and the man who had married his mother on a warm spring afternoon.
The wind had been blowing in from the west that day, the sky had been so bright a blue it hurt the eyes, Cash remembered with an unexpected lurch of his heart. The sun had shone down on Nadine in her white wedding dress as her new husband walked her out of the church while a wounded soldier with his heart in his throat and his own blood staining his uniform watched from the alley across the street. He had never suspected that she might be carrying his child. At the time he hadn’t been able to think straight.
The fever had been on him for more days than he could count. The bleeding had stopped, but he’d lost a lot of blood. He’d made it to Marianna on sheer will. Will and the need to see Nadine.
He’d seen her, all right.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Nadine whispered hoarsely.
“Like what?” he asked coolly.
“I thought you were dead. Your name was on a list... that cursed
list of soldiers who had been killed in battle... and I didn’t know what else to do. It was years before I found out you were alive.” Her eyes bored into him. “Years. What happened to you?”
Now, that was a question that would take far too long to answer. “It was a long time ago,” he said as if none of it mattered. “We can’t go back and undo what happened. Everything worked out for the best, anyway.”
She ran an exasperated hand through her hair, a mass of warm brown that was as soft and thick as he remembered. “You’re right, of course. When do you want to meet JD and get started?”
Now. Never. “Tomorrow morning.”
“He won’t like waiting.”
Cash leaned forward and did what he’d been wanting to do since he’d seen Nadine shake out her hair. He reached out and touched her cheek. She flinched but didn’t move away. God in heaven, her skin was like silk.
“If he complains, you tell him this is lesson number one. A gunfighter must have infinite patience.” He trailed his fingers down to her throat, felt her quiver against his fingertips. “We wait, and we wait, and we wait.”
“All right,” she whispered.
He took most of his meals in the Paradise Hotel dining room, but not tonight. Tonight he would prepare himself for what was to come, and he didn’t need the distraction of watching Nadine and her son... his son... munching on Eden’s biscuits and whatever else she was serving to her family and guests. He needed solitude to prepare.
“Thank you.” Nadine started to rise, but he stopped her with a hand on her arm. His fingers closed over her forearm, and he absorbed her body heat through dusty cotton. He felt her softness under the dirty, coarse fabric.
“Don’t thank me yet. There’s no guarantee that I can change his mind.”
This time her hint of a smile blossomed into a half-grin. “You will,” she said confidently. “Mr. Brubaker used to say you were the best salesman he ever had. Said you could talk a man into spending his last cent and make him feel privileged to do so. He also said you could charm a bear out of his honey.”
Cash (The Rock Creek Six Book 6) Page 2