Heaven with a Gun

by Connie Brockway

  Her lashes swept down, shadowing her dark eyes and making him uncertain whether she knew how his body was interpreting her words. He was going as hard and taut in belly and thigh as blood and imagination can make a man. But as much as her career choice suggested a hard and calculating woman who’d use anything—her body as well as her wiles— to get what she wanted, there was too much joy in her to let him believe it. Her sass had softness; her bite lacked teeth.

  Taking the opportunity to regain some composure, he found paper and pencil and returned. “Okay. Tell me about yourself. What’s your name?”

  “Gillian. Gilly for short, but I don’t think you better call me that around here. Sounds too much like ‘Lil.’ Too many people could make the connection.”

  “What should I call you?”

  “Darlin’ will do just fine.” She chuckled at the color flooding his tanned skin.

  He cleared his throat. “Okay, darlin’, where were you born? Where did your parents come from? Start at the beginning.”

  “All right, Mr. Coyne.” She straightened. “I was born in the gold fields of Colorado, in a shanty behind a bar.”

  He started to write.

  “My father was a poor, wretched miner, and my mother was a dance-hall girl.”

  “Hold on.” He held up his hand, waving away her start of surprise. “Hold on just a second there. If Dad was a miner and Mom was a saloon girl, how did you learn Latin?”

  “Good question.” Her brow furrowed in consternation before smoothing. “Daddy was a professor at. . . at Harvard University before the gold bug bit him. One day a respected member of the academic community, the next a swill-guzzling shell of a man, scrabbling from slag heap to rock slide, ferreting like an animal into the bowels of the earth, searching, always searching for that vein of gold, the mother lode, El Dorado!” She gave a dramatic sigh. “Tragic, is it not?”

  “Yeah,” Jim answered sardonically. “I’m surprised Dad found time to bed Mom what with all that searching and scrabbling and ferreting.”

  Her lids fluttered in becoming modesty. Fake becoming modesty. “Well, Mama was a stunner.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “You don’t believe me?” she said, looking so affronted he nearly laughed.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe. It matters what my readers believe. And this Harvard shi—” He caught himself in the knick of time, “stuff isn’t going to go down smooth. Everyone knows someone who went to Harvard. It would be too easy to check Daddy’s credentials.” He leaned back, cradling his head in one hand. “Try again.”

  “Well, if you don’t want—”

  “What I want is ‘the story of my career.’ Listen, lady, I’m risking more than a job here. I’m risking a nice little stay in a territorial prison for harboring a notorious outlaw.”

  “Suspected thief. I’ve never been convicted,” she corrected haughtily.

  “Yeah. Right. At this point, I’m not sure that isn’t just a matter of time. Unless you’d care to deny the allegations?”

  “Would that make a better story?”

  “Nope. Everyone denies allegations.”

  “Then I won’t. I don’t want to be hackneyed.” She dimpled, looking incredibly young and appealing. He shook his head, trying to clear it. She must put off some sort of electricity that he acted as a giant conductor for. He’d read some amazing studies of electrical fields and the human body. He’d be willing to bet a year’s paycheck that this woman put out one helluva charge.

  “Shall I try again?” she asked ingenuously.

  “Be my guest. Heck. Go for broke. Try the truth.”

  “The truth? But of course. 1 was born into a circus family. My father was an escape artist, which accounts for my gift with locks and fasteners. . . .”

  *

  He’d stopped writing anything down a half hour ago. He’d set the pencil firmly away and folded his hands behind his head, leaned back, and stared at her. He’d been staring at her ever since. Only the infinitesimal tightening and relaxing of his mouth changed his expression.

  Since he hadn’t said a word and she had no idea what this close scrutiny meant, she’d just babbled on, spinning through a fourth attempt at an “honest narrative of my youth” before her voice finally cracked and gave out altogether. She trailed off in midsentence and just sat too, meeting his blue-eyed gaze straight on. They sat like that for five minutes.

  “Are you done?” he finally asked in a deceptively gentle tone.

  She nodded.

  “Good.” He smiled. “We’ll start again tomorrow.” He rose, looked down at the pages he had scribbled, and gave what looked like a shudder.

  “Is there anything to eat?”

  “Eat?”

  “Yes.” She snagged a whiskey bottle from the piecrust table beside her. It was empty. “You may prefer to drink your dinners. I eat.”

  “Lady, leave my bottle alone,” he said with a touch of asperity, though what he had to be irritable about was beyond her. She’d given him a good start for his series on her—several good starts even if you discounted the Atlantis one—and managed to remain even-tempered.

  Thank heaven for the school’s summer thespian program. If she hadn’t had to read through several hundred plays last year looking for one appropriate for sixteen-year-old girls to enact, she would never have had the grist this mill was demanding. In her five years as a thief, no one had ever actually “talked” to Lightning Lil.

  While she was aware of how very dangerous this was, she was also very tired and very near to the end of it all, and so she did not deny herself the small crumbs of enjoyment teasing this big, tough-looking gentleman afforded. He stuck the bottle behind the fainting couch, glowering.

  “Besides, you’re not exactly in any position to be moralizing to me,” he said.

  Gilly felt a wall come slamming down between them like the iron gates of a medieval castle. “You’re right.’’

  She’d been having such a fine time spinning him tales that she’d almost forgotten who and what she was. An outlaw. A woman without morals.

  Funny, she was usually much better at separating Gillian from Lil, knowing exactly what people thought of her outlaw side. The country’s poor opinion of Lightning Lil had never before seemed too high a price to pay for the success of her masquerade. “I’m just hungry,” she said. “I haven’t had anything to eat since last evening.”

  He was immediately repentant. “Chrissake, why didn’t you say something? I’m sorry. Listen, my rent doesn’t include meals, but there’s a couple bars that serve food in the evening. Let me help you up.” He pulled her from the chair and balanced her against the wall as he retrieved her crutch and bonnet. Clumsily, beguilingly, he perched the chip-straw construction on her head and tied a bow beneath her chin.

  She couldn’t remember ever being the recipient of a man’s tender touch. It was intoxicating. His strong, callused fingers brushed her throat, leaving her lightheaded. He wet his lips. She stared. He dragged a deep breath through his nostrils, as though preparing for some physical endurance trial and, before she knew what he was about, picked her up, crutch and all.

  “I can walk.”

  “Not down those stairs, you can’t.”

  “I could try.”

  “You’d just break your other leg.”

  Lord, he felt so massive and safe and strong, and it had been so very long since she’d felt protected, let alone valued. She didn’t argue further, so he started out the door and headed down the stairs. She turned her head and closed her eyes so he couldn’t see her giving herself over to the guilty pleasure of being held. Beneath her ear, his heart beat strongly and his day-old beard rasped agreeably on her temple. He paused, bouncing her in his arms to readjust her weight, an inadvertent demonstration of his strength that sent her pulse racing.

  “Mr. Coyne, who is that woman?” a strident voice from below demanded. “I’ll have no sinful goings-on in my house, sir!”

  Gilly’s eyes snapped op
en and she found herself staring down into the upturned visage of a red-faced termagant of indeterminate age. It took Gilly a second to realize that they’d reached the bottom of the stairs and weren’t still several steps above the woman—she was that tiny. And angry. Her little face was puckered in on itself like a half-gnawed week-old apple. Little graying curls framed her face like mold on cheese.

  “Ah, Mrs. Osby. This is . . . my wife.”

  Jim made no attempt to set her down.

  “Wife?” the little woman exclaimed, all color leaching out of her face except for a thin crimson testimony to her use of lip salve. Obviously, Mrs. Osby didn’t want Jim Coyne to have a wife. She stomped her foot. “You didn’t . . . You never said nothing about no wife joining you!”

  “Her arrival was unexpected.”

  The woman scowled. For a second, romantic disappointment contended with greed. Greed won. “That’ll bring your room rate up two dollars more a week.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And there’ll be no extra linens or towels.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “No drinking.”

  “Of course not.” Amazingly he managed to say this with a straight face. He started by the landlady.

  But Mrs. Osby wasn’t done with Jim yet. She put her little taloned hands on her hips, peering intently at Gilly. She sniffed. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Coyne. A man your age with such a young girl.”

  “I thought to give her the advantage of a mature man’s guidance.” Gilly saw the spark of humor in his eyes.

  “Well,” Mrs. Osby began, “I say an old goat and—”

  Gilly had had enough. She linked her hands behind Jim’s neck, combing her fingers through the crisp, clean curls. “Can Big Daddy Jimmums take Baby Pookums to eat now? Baby’s hungry.”

  “How old are you, child?” Mrs. Osby demanded.

  “Oh, I’m much older than I look,” Gilly said sweetly, all the while fondling Jim’s throat and the nape of his neck. “I’ll be seventeen next month.”

  “Barely legal!” Mrs. Osby’s brows locked into a deep V above her nose. She stared purposefully at where Jim’s hand lay so close Gilly’s breast. “Mind you, no noise past ten o’clock!”

  Jim’s nostrils flared, just a fraction. Then one side of his mouth suddenly crooked up in a devil’s grin and by God if the man didn’t have dimples—long, deep dimples. “Now, Mrs. Osby, don’t tell me you expect to police that?”

  Mrs. Osby’s mouth dropped open and she gaped for air like a beached fish. With a sharp snap of starched muslin, she fled down the narrow hallway.

  Jim looked down into her bemused eyes and grinned again. She shivered. Dimples and a roguish sense of humor. She could be in real trouble here.

  Chapter Four

  Why on earth would a rose-growing, Latin-spouting girl become a thief? He simply couldn’t believe it was for the money. She didn’t seem to have that much. For the thrills? He could imagine that, but it still didn’t quite fit. She looked too tired for a thrill seeker, and there was a certain wistfulness about her mouth in her few unguarded moments.

  Jim hadn’t pumped her for information during dinner. He simply enjoyed her conversation, and even though she carefully steered talk away from any personal information, he learned a lot more about her than she realized. Gilly wasn’t the sort of woman to keep an opinion to herself.

  She thought the Brooklyn Bridge currently under construction was a “monument to graft,” an opinion with which he coincidentally agreed; ergo, she kept herself apprised of New York newspapers. She thought that baseball was a fad, an opinion with which he definitely disagreed; ergo, she was completely uninformed about sports. She thought that a person “had to accept whatever destination the path they walk leads them to,” an opinion he didn’t know whether he agreed with or not; ergo, the essence of her still eluded him.

  And finally, he knew that if nothing else, her mouth should be outlawed.

  For the last twenty minutes, he hadn’t been able to concentrate. He had barely touched his own plate of steak and eggs, simply because after every few bites she cleaned the corners of her mouth with the tip of her tongue. And because when her clean white teeth bit through a crisp apple peel, her bottom lip dragged provocatively against the smooth skin of the fruit. And because when she chewed, her mouth moved and he wanted it moving on him.

  “Something wrong with your dinner?” She pointed her fork at the half pound of steak remaining on his plate.

  “No. It was fine. Just fine.”

  She took a sip of milk, leaving behind a narrow little white mustache above her upper lip, which she licked clean with a flourish of her pink tongue. He closed his eyes and begged for strength.

  “It would be a shame to let it go to waste. Good meat. Mind if I . . .”

  “No. No,” he said, glad for the distraction. “Be my guest. Go right ahead.”

  Happily, she speared the steak and began sawing into it. She ate with such enthusiasm that he wondered if maybe she wasn’t a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, a kid who’d never gotten enough to eat. Poor child.

  The thought blackened his mood. If she was sixteen, then she really was a child, and he was lusting after a girl young enough to be his daughter. “Sixteen,” he muttered.

  “Sixteen what?” she asked, fork half-raised to her sinful-looking mouth.

  Maybe she was real close to seventeen. . . . Eighteen years wasn’t so very—Christ! What the hell was he thinking?

  “When’s your birthday?” he demanded. “You know, you don’t look all that young to me. I would have put your age around twenty-one. For your own sake, when you’re finally caught—and you will be— don’t try pulling any ‘shucks, I’m just a kid. I didn’t know better’ defense. It won’t work. You look old enough to know better.”

  “Thank you for the advice, Mr. Coyne, but there are two minor points I’d like to make: One, I don’t intend to get caught, and two, I’m not sixteen. I’m twenty-seven.”

  “Huh?”

  She laughed. “I’ve always looked young for my years. Granted, not that young—and it isn’t very gentlemanly of you to point it out even if it’s true— but when that woman started in on you I just couldn’t help myself.”

  He relaxed in relief, extraordinary and unaccountable. “You have a diabolical sense of humor.”

  She smiled, flattered.

  Could she be twenty-seven, or was that just another in her string of endless lies? HNah, he believed her. For all her trust and vitality, there was a touch of weariness in her gaze, a tensile maturity in the set of her throat and shoulders, the brand of experience in her humor.

  “Jim!” The thunk between his shoulder blades announced Vance Calhoun’s arrival. Jim offered up thanks that his mouth hadn’t been full. He turned, looking straight up at the undercarriage of Margaret Calhoun’s bosom. He stumbled to his feet.

  Margaret gazed at him with cool amusement. She was a handsome, sharp-featured woman with a bosom worth noting and a possessive, nearly predatory air. He could see her in the role of Lightning Lil far more easily than he could the woman across from him.

  “I heard your wife had arrived in town, Jim,” Vance said, hauling out a chair next to Gilly’s and dropping into it. “I told Margaret we had to come and meet her. Stuck way out here like this, Margaret gets starved for the company of women of her own class.”

  “Mrs. Calhoun, my wife . . . er, Mrs. Coyne,” Jim said. “Mrs. Coyne, Mrs. Vance Calhoun.”

  “Come now, James,” Margaret said. “I’m certain your bride and I shall become close friends. What do you call her?”

  Jim swallowed. His brain seized up as he searched for a name, any name.

  “Darling,” said Gilly softly. “Jim calls me ‘darling.’”

  Margaret’s head swiveled, like a snake watching a particularly colorful bird. The corners of her lips lifted. “How utterly charming,” she murmured. “But I can hardly call you ‘darling’ too.”

  Gill
y didn’t respond; her attention turned to Vance who, having seized her hand, was patting it. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Coyne.” No, the bastard was stroking it. “You’ll certainly be a fine addition to the female population.”

  “Thank you,” Gilly said in an odd, hushed voice. She made no move to retrieve her hand from Vance’s clasp. “Won’t you join us? We were just finishing dinner.”

  “Uh, darlin’,” Jim said, “I don’t think—”

  “Isn’t that sweet, dear?” Margaret cut in, studiously avoiding the sight of her husband playing with Gilly’s hand. “James wants to be alone with his bride. Kind of Mrs. Coyne as it is to invite us, we mustn’t impose on their reunion, Vance.”

  “Course not.” Vance released Gilly’s hand but continuing his slow perusal of her person.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Margaret said. “Come to our little soiree Saturday evening. Just a few of the best people this town has to offer. Though the best is hardly good enough. Eight o’clock, shall we say?”

  “We’d be delighted,” Gilly said before Jim could refuse.

  “Come, Vance. Let’s leave the lovebirds alone. Only look at how anxious James is to have us gone.”

  As soon as they’d left, Jim sat down. “Want to explain that?”

  “What?” Gilly had already begun shoveling another forkful of meat into her mouth and was chomping away in evident pleasure. She looked like a cat that had just been stroked. Which she had.

  “You sure you didn’t get hit in the head by that bullet? The less you and I are together in public, the better. It isn’t going to take a real bright person to figure out that you and I are not man and wife. That was stupid, Gilly—”

  “Hush!” she frowned. “I told you not to call me that in public.”

  “Okay, darlin’," he ground out. “But you better start penning your apologies to Mrs. Calhoun tonight.”

  “I’m going to that party,” she said firmly, fright underlying the determination in her face. Why would missing a party frighten her? “I’m going with or without you. If you think I’m going to sit alone with you in that little two-by-four room for two weeks, clomping outside twice a day to eat, you are wrong. Dead wrong.”