by Craig, Emma
“You’re crazy,” the man with her said, his voice shaking as if a violent wind was blowing it.
“Perhaps,” she said calmly, pleasantly. “But if I am, you made me so.”
“But I didn’t mean it!” the man cried. Gabriel clearly heard the panic in his voice. “Dammit, lady, it was a mistake! I didn’t mean it! It was an accident!”
“Oh? I see. You murdered in error, so you should be forgiven? Is that so?” An uncanny, unearthly chuckle emanated from the darkness of the alleyway. “I don’t think so, Mr. Hardwick.”
Hardwick! Good God in a graveyard! Gabriel sped up. He barely heard Dmitri speed up, too, and commence trotting behind him. What in holy hell was Sophie Madrigal going to shoot Ivo Hardwick for?
“I didn’t mean it. Shit, lady, I didn’t mean it!” Hardwick started to sob.
“I don’t care what you meant, Mr. Hardwick. You’re an animal. A rabid animal. Rabid animals need to be exterminated so they can’t infect the rest of humanity. And I’m very happy to be the executioner in this instance.”
“No!” Hardwick wailed.
Gabriel was out of breath by the time he screeched around the last corner and saw Sophie, illuminated under the pallid light of an upper-story window, holding a small gun on Ivo Hardwick, who held his arms in the air and shook from head to foot with terror.
Both Sophie and Hardwick heard Gabriel arrive. Sophie swirled around, and Gabriel saw an expression of blind panic on her face the second before her gun discharged. The report sounded like a cannon blast in the confines of the alley. Dmitri hit the dirt behind Gabriel. Gabriel swore viciously.
Sophie screamed, “Damn you, Gabriel Caine!”
Nobody heard what Hardwick said, but when the dust cleared, he was scrambling over some fallen trashcans, making for a tiny space between buildings. Sophie, seeing this, tried to aim at him, but Gabriel caught her by the wrist and struggled to foil her aim. He had a hideous vision of Sophie killing Ivo Hardwick and hanging for it—and of him wiring the Pinkerton Agency and telling him he’d been thwarted by a female. The notion made him sick.
“Stop it!” she screamed. “Let me go!”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Gabriel hollered, too furious by this time to be the least bit nervous.
“I was trying to kill that man!” Sophie shrieked. “Until you spoiled it all!”
“Why the hell do you want to kill him?”
“Damn you!” Sophie cried again.
“To hell with damning me!” Gabriel hollered back. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I think you shot Dmitri!”
“What?” Wriggling like a maddened animal, Sophie glared over Gabriel’s shoulder in an attempt, he presumed, to assess any damage to her faithful compadre. Her attention thus diverted for a second, he wrenched the gun out of her hand and stuffed it into his back pocket. It was a tight fit.
“Nyet,” Dmitri muttered. He picked himself up with some difficulty and tried to dust himself off. Given the state of the alley, Gabriel wouldn’t give him odds.
“Thank God,” whispered Sophie, and struggled harder.
“No thanks to you,” Gabriel growled, gripping her more tightly. “You might have shot him. Or me, for that matter.”
“I wish I had shot you. Damn you!” Sophie shrieked again, renewing her struggle. “You were only trying to scare me when you said I’d shot Dmitri!”
“Christ,” Gabriel said, enraged. “I think you’re crazy.”
“I’m not!” she bellowed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Well, then, tell me, for God’s sake!”
“Never!”
Gabriel figured he wasn’t going to win this argument anytime soon, so he elected to save his breath. He needed it to keep a clamp on Sophie, who wasn’t giving up easily.
She fought like a wildcat for about a minute. For fully half of that time, Gabriel feared he wouldn’t be able to contain her. For all her soft femininity, Sophie Madrigal was no China-
doll miss. She was a large, full-bodied female—a fact Gabriel used to appreciate a lot—and she was strong.
He was still bigger and stronger than she was, however, and she began to tire after about thirty seconds of furious fighting. He held her wrists and pulled her body to his in an effort to stifle her struggles. She was more than a handful, and Gabriel would have appreciated her succulent body pressed against his had the circumstances been different.
“Let me go!” Her voice was weakening. Gabriel thought he heard despair in it.
“No,” he said flatly, still angry. “I’ll be damned if I’ll let you go until you quit fighting me.”
She gave up all at once, and with a wretched groan collapsed into his arms. Confused for a second, Gabriel wondered if she was trying to trick him. He wouldn’t put it past her. He was horrified when he realized she was crying. More than crying, really. Huge, wracking sobs shook her body.
“Here,” he said softly, loosening his grip but not letting her go. In fact, he pulled her more closely to his body. Her patent misery hurt him, a fact he would have found astonishing had he taken time to think about it. “Here, Sophie, don’t cry. It’s all right.”
“It’s not,” she moaned pitifully. “It will never be all right again.” Gabriel felt awful. Her emotional pain was so overtly evident, that his heart—that part of his anatomy he’d successfully ignored for years until Sophie Madrigal obtruded herself into his orbit—ached for her.
He searched over the sobbing Sophie’s pretty blond headin an attempt to locate Dmitri. After a minute, he saw the little man, leaning against a building, trying without much success to pat the dust off himself by smacking his clothes with his cloth cap. Dmitri looked up, took a gander at Sophie’s condition, shook his head, and was about to return to his work when Gabriel caught his eye.
“What’s wrong with her?” Gabriel mouthed, exaggerating the shape of the words for Dmitri’s sake.
Dmitri shrugged, which didn’t help much, and went back to whacking at his coat sleeve. Gabriel, realizing he wasn’t going to get any help from that quarter, returned his attention to Sophie.
“Oh, Lord. Oh, God. Why?”
The words were broken into pieces by her anguish. Gabriel thought the word “heartbroken” would have been appropriate to her condition. It surprised him. Sophie Madrigal? Sophie, the great stone monument to womanhood? The impenetrable fortress against his most devious wiles? The beautiful ice maiden with the little ugly dog?
Shattered. That word fit too. Gabriel couldn’t stand it much longer. If she carried on in this vein for another few minutes, his own fortifications would crumble, and he’d be groveling at her feet and begging her to let him take care of her. He’d sooner join a monastery and be celibate for life than let that happen.
Since he still felt sorry for her, though, he was gentle when he next spoke. “Sophie? Here, Sophie, let me take you back to your hotel. I’m sure Miss Juniper will be worried about you.”
After sucking in a shuddering breath, Sophie seemed to make an attempt to get herself under control. She pulled away from Gabriel a little bit, but he didn’t let her go, and not only because he remained worried about her state of mind. He also harbored a soupçon of doubt about the veracity of her emotions. Although, he had to admit to himself, if she was acting, she was doing the best job he’d ever seen in his entire life—and he’d been reared by actors, more or less.
At last she lifted her head from where it had been buried against his shoulder, leaving a wet patch that felt cool in the evening breeze. Gabriel gazed down at her in an attempt to assess her state, and his heart reeled.
Good God, the woman wasn’t acting. Or if she was, she was another Bernhardt. “Here, Sophie. Here, take my handkerchief and wipe your eyes.” He used the gentlest voice he’d ever heard issue from his lips, nearly startling himself into looking for a stranger in the alley. But the voice had come from him, and he realized it in a second.
She took the handke
rchief in hands that shook and wiped her cheeks and eyes. No makeup was thus removed, Gabriel noticed, thereby proving his belief that Sophie’s charms were natural.
She whispered, “Th-thank you.”
Since she didn’t add anything else, not even a disparaging comment about his morals, behavior, or person, Gabriel judged she was still pretty well upset. “Are you—better?” He had been going to ask if she was all right but, remembering her last response to the same question, he altered it.
She nodded and blew her nose.
That was all right with Gabriel. He’d gladly sacrifice a handkerchief to the cause. “Are you able to walk, Sophie? Do you need me to carry you?” It surprised him to realize he’d be happy to carry her—over hot coals, if necessary. He considered this a bad sign and endeavored to toughen his newly found heart.
“No!” she said with some force, from which Gabriel deduced with an internal sigh that she was recovering her composure.
Rather than snap back at her, he repeated mildly, “Are you able to walk, Sophie?”
She sniffled, took a tentative step away from his embrace, which displeased him, and nodded again.
“You sure?” She was looking up at him so forlornly that Gabriel wished he could kiss her. Her lips were succulent in the dim light of the alleyway, and she looked so unhappy. Everything about her roused instincts within him that had never been roused before. This, too, was bad, in his opinion. How the prickly, unpleasant, self-sufficient Miss Sophie Madrigal could be stirring his protective instincts was beyond him—except that at the moment she wasn’t prickly, she wasn’t being unpleasant, and she was far from being self-
sufficient.
Struggling to get his own emotions to behave themselves, he said softly, “I’ll walk you back to the hotel now, Sophie.”
He stopped himself from asking her if that scenario met with her approval, because he feared she wouldn’t give it. And he wasn’t going to let her go again tonight until he was absolutely sure she was safely tucked up and in the gentle, caring hands of Miss Juniper.
She nodded again, then said, “Where’s my gun?”
Damn. She would remember the blasted gun, wouldn’t she? He said, “Your gun is safe, and I’m not going to give it back to you now.”
Her eyebrows dipped. Gabriel considered this the first real sign of her improved mental health. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t trust you with it.”
She sniffed, but didn’t argue. Gabriel thought wryly that he’d been right not to trust her with it.
“Come on, Sophie. If you’re well enough to walk, I’ll see you and Dmitri back to the Cosmopolitan. I’m sure your aunt is wondering what’s become of you.”
“She knows.” Sophie’s voice sounded oddly dull. Gabriel chalked this phenomenon up to emotional exhaustion brought about by her recent temper tantrum.
“I’m sure she doesn’t know you tried to shoot a man.”
Sophie shrugged, as if she didn’t care if he believed her or not. She was acting very much like an individual who’s given up something precious—who’d fought hard and been defeated. Her attitude made Gabriel’s insides hurt. He jerked a nod at Dmitri. “You all right, Dmitri?”
“Yah.” The little Russian looked as morose as ever, but as he didn’t limp or look bloody, Gabriel took him at his word.
“All right. Let me support you, Sophie.”
“I don’t need you to support me.”
For the first time since he’d met her, Gabriel was pleased to hear the grouchiness in her voice. She’d be all right now; he was sure of it. At least, she’d recover from this particular fit. He had no idea what had propelled her to announce that nothing would ever be all right again. Maybe he could get Miss Juniper to tell him. Never having experienced an itch to learn about another person, Gabriel mistrusted this one. Hell, maybe he was turning into a gossip in his old age.
He had his arm around her shoulder still, and Sophie’s weight still pressed against him. He found himself wishing it would stay there all the way back to the Cosmopolitan. Her body was soft and supple and the parts he could feel through the fabric of her shirtwaist felt grand against him. He’d noticed her bosom with approval before; now he felt it with equal approval. He hoped one day he’d be able to see it, although he wasn’t going to hold his breath.
Slowly and with great care, he led her down the alley, around the corner, and out into the street. There, lights from the buildings flooded the boardwalk and the motley assortment of men milling about. Several men glanced at Sophie, Gabriel, Dmitri. One or two of them looked interested in Dmitri. Three or four of them looked interested in Sophie. One astute fellow garbed as Gabriel imagined a dapper gambling man might be, winked at him as if to congratulate him on his conquest. If he only knew. Still, Gabriel discovered himself pleased to know that he’d been taken for Sophie’s lover.
Shoot, he was sinking fast. The notion terrified him and, at the same time, made him feel kind of good. Whatever was to come of his strange relationship with Sophie Madrigal, at the moment, he was enjoying her lush flesh pressed against him.
Alas, she straightened after a few steps, and her pace picked up.
After about two more minutes, she turned her head and looked up at him.
“Thank you, Mr. Caine, I believe I am able to walk on my own now.”
Gazing down into her watery eyes, Gabriel found himself loath to release her. “I think I’d better help you a little while longer.”
He heard Dmitri make a disparaging, snorting noise, and frowned at the little man. Dmitri looked no different than he ever did.
“I’m perfectly able to walk on my own,” Sophie said with a hint of the old grandeur back in her voice.
Gabriel sighed lustily. “I’m not going to let you walk home with only Dmitri to accompany you, Sophie Madrigal, so don’t even think it.” Something else occurred to him and he said grumpily, “And for God’s sake, call me Gabriel. Hell, woman, I’ve stopped you from committing murder and held onto you through a sobbing fit. I think we should be on a first-name basis by this time.”
“Do you?” The ice was back with a vengeance. Gabriel wished it wasn’t. “Oh . . . very well.”
That was something, he reckoned. At least he could call her Sophie and she could call him Gabriel. What a thrill.
Neither of them spoke, nor did Dmitri, as they finished tramping along the mean streets of Tucson. For a relatively small territorial town, the place was noisy. Gunshots rang out twice, dogs barked, and Gabriel was pretty sure he heard coyotes yipping in the distance. Not the kind of place he’d prefer to settle down in, if he were the settling-down type. Nor, he imagined, would it appeal to Sophie, even under more favorable circumstances and when she wasn’t trying to kill someone.
And why, for God’s sake, was she trying to kill someone? And why Ivo Hardwick? Gabriel knew full well that Hardwick had a criminal record as long as the Florida boot, but what was he to Sophie? Had Hardwick swindled her or her aunt? Had he done something beastly to Sophie?
Gabriel couldn’t feature that possibility, since Sophie was probably stronger than the skinny Hardwick. Had he seduced and abandoned her?
That notion had no sooner entered Gabriel’s head than he thrust it violently out again. There was no way on God’s green earth that Sophie Madrigal could have become sexually entangled with Ivo Hardwick. Gabriel’s every nerve ending rebelled at the thought.
No. It must be something else. Although he expected it would be a hopeless question, he asked, “Um, so why were you trying to kill that man, Sophie? What is he to you?”
“Nothing,” she shot back immediately, and said no more.
Gabriel wished she weren’t such a difficult female. He spent a moment or two trying to make his mind’s eye picture an agreeable, obliging Sophie Madrigal, and was singularly unsuccessful. The concept was so insane, in fact, that it startled a chuckle out of him.
“What are you laughing at?” Sophie asked in a hard, suspicious voice.<
br />
“Not you,” Gabriel said.
She muttered an unintelligible syllable. Gabriel grinned into the semi-darkness. “Actually, I was trying to feature you as a sweet-tempered, mild-mannered lady.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“That’s my Sophie.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Gabriel gave up. He did, however, notice that Dmitri seemed to be smiling. Gabriel had never seen Dmitri smile before. It almost gave him heart.
He had no sooner knocked at the door to Sophie and Juniper’s room than the door burst open and Juniper, looking frightened, stared up at him. Tybalt, with more animation than Gabriel had ever seen him display, yipped once and jumped up to paw Sophie’s skirt. Juniper’s eyes widened when she saw Sophie, and she pressed her hands to her cheeks for a second before she reached for her niece.
“Sophie! Oh, Sophie, what did you do?”
Interesting choice of words, Gabriel thought dryly. Juniper knew her niece well enough to know that it would have been Sophie who’d started any trouble that had transpired. Sophie wasn’t as understanding.
“I didn’t do anything,” she said crossly. Releasing her aunt, Sophie stooped and picked Tybalt up. Immediately the dog began licking her chin, and Sophie made cooing noises at it.
Gabriel’s heart went all mushy before he pulled himself together and spoke to Juniper.
“She tried to kill a man,” he said with what he hoped looked like a genial smile for Juniper. Dmitri had gone back to his own room. “I stopped her.”
“She what?” Juniper threw her arms around Sophie again, making Tybalt squeak and Gabriel smile at the sight of the tiny Juniper hugging her large and imposing niece. “Oh, Sophie, you found him.” She sounded certain.
Gabriel ceased smiling. “If you’re talking about Ivo Hardwick, she found him all right. Why was she looking for him, is what I want to know.”
Sophie growled, “Juniper.”
But Juniper evidently didn’t need the warning. She let Sophie go and stepped away from her with a deep, soulful sigh. “I won’t tell, Sophie. But, really, dear, you know Mr. Caine can only help you. The cards say so.”