“All her life. She’s the town barber’s daughter.”
Gilly burst into laughter. “You’re teasing me.”
“No. Vance met her when he moved here a few years back.”
Her humor was infectious, and he grinned when she started laughing again. Until his eyes passed over the fake volumes of books.
“Gilly, you aren’t going to rob Calhoun.”
“No, Jim. I admit, I’d consider it under different circumstances, but this cast definitely hinders my style. It’s difficult to be stealthy in one.” She thumped the heel against the floor. “And impossible to fit one in a stirrup. Important when making a getaway.” She grinned.
He smiled back. The sound of a fiddle and piano awoke in the interior of the house. He didn’t quite feel up to dancing with Margaret Calhoun yet. He wanted to spend time with Gilly. Even after spending four days alone with her, he hadn’t had enough of her company.
“Let’s go outside for a few minutes,” he suggested, opening the French doors to the porch and offering her his arm.
Outside the air was sweeter, cooler, and the moonlight brushed her skin with a faint blue glow.
Gilly hugged herself and rubbed her hands briskly over her upper arms. Jim shrugged out of his jacket and draped it over her, his hand brushing the velvet warmth of her shoulders and lingering.
“Thank you.” Her eyes met his and held his gaze. Something as smooth and intoxicating and fiery as brandy flowed between them. She cleared her throat. “I wish Calhoun had shown us his trophy room. I would have liked to see his firearms.”
“That’s right. I almost forgot that you’re ‘one of the best shots in the territories.’ ”
She shook her head, smiling ruefully. She leaned on the railing, looking out over the darkness stretching endlessly away. “I’m an average shot at best,” she said slowly. “Maybe a spot below average. What I am is fast. Very fast.”
“Then how did you get a reputation for being a crack shot?”
“All right.” She turned around, leaning on her elbows against the rails, as though she’d come to a decision and was relieved at having chosen it. “I’ll tell you. On one of my first robberies I was cornered in a saloon by a couple of kids who’d lit out after me with their daddy’s gun. They were scared. Almost as scared as I was. Heck, they caught me mostly by accident.
“So there we were. Two boys looking to save face and me looking to save my life. No one else in the saloon had a gun. Just me and these two kids. Now, behind the bar were shelves lined with liquor bottles. I figured I had one chance at bluffing my way out of there alive, so I said, ‘Before you start something you can’t finish, men, I want you to see this.’ They stopped, more from surprise than anything else. I don’t suppose anyone had called them ‘men’ before.” She smiled, an utterly self-deprecating smile that charmed him more than any bravado could have, and he wondered if she knew and had gauged its effect.
“Yes?”
“So with one hand I started pointing up at the shelves and saying, ‘See that bottle? The one with the bright label— Boom! Quicker than I’ve ever drawn before, I fired off a shot.
“Glass shattered. Liquor sprayed all over the place. I holstered my gun and, praying harder than a nun with her rosary, I looked those two kids square in the face and said, ‘Well, you don’t see it anymore, do you?’
“It took maybe five seconds before the bartender, bless his nearsighted little hide, exclaimed, ‘I never seen anythin’ like that! She done hit that bottle square, boys! Save your lives and put up your guns!’
“The boys put up their guns. I don’t know who was more relieved. And that’s how I got my reputation. I pulled that stunt twice more, always making sure I was in a town with strict gun ordinances, at bars without too many customers, and always making sure that those customers who were there were surrounded by a whole lot of empty glasses. Voila! I’m a sure shot.”
He stared at her. One of her dark, elegant brows rose as if daring him to refute her. “I don’t know what to believe about you.”
The smile drained from her face, leaving it vulnerable. “That’s a problem, isn’t it?” She took a deep breath and straightened up. “Let’s go back inside, shall we?”
*
Though they stayed for only another forty minutes, it seemed like hours to Gilly. She’d told things to Jim Coyne she’d never told anyone else, but still he wanted more. Even though she realized that each fact she gave him could lead straight back to her real identity, she hadn’t been able to stop herself. Heaven help her, she wanted to tell him everything.
She had no reason to trust him. He’d said himself that a good story was the most important thing to him. What she’d planned as a nice, even trade-off—a fistful of highly improbable exploits for the use of his name and room—had turned into something else. For the first time in years, she was thinking of the future with a sense of longing, saw something she wanted for herself, and that was Jim Coyne. And that wasn’t good.
She was courting heartbreak. In a few weeks, when he found out the truth about her, he’d never want to lay eyes on her again. She should be able to accept that.
But she hadn’t expected to meet anyone like Jim. Funny that the very things that would ultimately keep them from having a future together—his outrage at injustice, his disregard for personal consequences in exposing that truth—were the very things that drew her to him.
But there were other qualities that drew her too. Worldly without being weary, knowing without being jaded. Big, strong, a little worn around the edges, with a sardonic, self-effacing wit and a shrewd intelligence. The least vain man she knew, he was also the most capable. Nothing she’d seen in her life was more appealing than his big, mature body, his rumpled silver-shot hair, the laugh lines radiating from blue eyes that had seen more than enough and yet still remained open, looking for more.
She knew better than to hope. Once she’d thought that after Lightning Lil had disappeared, Gillian Jones would live happily ever after. She’d given up on that notion years ago. But now Jim Coyne had resurrected dreams she was better off without. Yet, with every step she took, with every act she planned, she killed every potential that that dream could survive.
“You’re slowing down,” Jim said. “Are you tired? Do you want to stop and rest?”
“No. I’m fine. I just—”
“Jim Coyne!” A voice boomed from the door of the Cattleman’s Saloon. A huge, neckless, bald-pated man stepped out of the smoky haze and marched stiff-legged down the walkway, directly toward them.
Jim pulled Gilly closer to him.
“Friend of yours?” Gilly asked.
“I’ve never seen that man in my life. I would remember.”
“I’m sure you would,” she agreed.
“Jim Coyne, you are going to rue the day your sorry ass landed in Far Enough, Texas!” the gargantuan bellowed.
“I already do,” Jim said over his shoulder, turning and shepherding Gilly down the steps onto the street.
They were almost to the center of the street when the hulking man called, “Stop right there, you lily- livered pantywaist!”
Jim didn’t stop. Wise, wise, wonderful man, Gilly thought happily.
“Gutless wonder!”
He kept marching.
“Course, I might be running, too, if’n I had a wife like that. Maybe after I’m done with you, Coyne, I’ll just comfort the widow. Nice piece of—”
Jim spun around. “Do not say it.”
Gilly ground her teeth in frustration. “He didn’t say anything.”
The gargantuan, who’d followed them out onto the street, stopped and chuckled. Curiosity seekers, alerted to the possibility of entertainment by the bull-like man’s shouts, began drifting out of various saloons and buildings and forming an impromptu circle around them. Among their number was Mort James, who, on seeing Jim, hastened forward.
“Who is that guy?” Jim asked him.
“Ox. I warned you about him, rememb
er? Tommy’s uncle?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Let’s go, Jim,” Gilly urged, tugging his arm.
“I’m gonna teach you to mess with my kin.” Ox smiled. More of a baring of broken teeth than a real smile, but Gilly supposed it was as close an approximation as he could manage. She tugged harder.
“Listen, Ox,” Jim said, “those kids jumped me. Whole thing was over in a few minutes.”
“You broke my nephew’s nose.” Ox took off his shirt and threw it on the ground. Muscles bulged like knotty gourds beneath an oily layer of flesh.
“Oh, come on,” Jim protested. “It wasn’t anything special to begin with.”
“I’m gonna tear you apart, New York City man.”
Jim emitted a gusty sigh and peeled Gilly’s fingers from his coat. The Carmichael twins appeared at the far side of the crowd, their little eyes gleaming with battle fever.
“Hey, Mrs. Coyne!” one of them shouted, waving her plumed headdress high above the crowd. “How you doin’, sugar? I got me ten bucks says your husband there beats the hell outta old Ox!” She beamed like that bit of news was supposed to make Gilly feel better.
“No,” Gilly said, yanking at Jim’s arm. The din of the crowd had risen and Ox was flexing his muscles. Jim glanced down at her.
“Mort,” he said, “she doesn’t want to see this.”
Mort nodded. Ignoring her protests, he grabbed Gilly’s arm and began dragging her away. Jim let him do it, casting a look after her that said in no uncertain terms that he’d just as soon someone were hauling him away, too. His expression awoke her worst fears.
Even though they looked to be near the same age, Jim was probably some years older than Uncle Ox. Ox had lived like . . . well, an ox, and that tended to put years on a man’s face. For all Gilly knew, Ox might be a decade younger than Jim. All too obviously he was also a savage, bare-knuckle grappler, who’d think nothing of gouging eyes—even Jim’s glorious Irish blue eyes! Not to mention breaking bones and—
She twisted free of Mort’s hold and started hopping one-footed toward the melee, the need to rescue Jim spurring her on.
“Stop it! Leave him alone!” she hollered, red-faced with her efforts to get back into the closed circle of loud, drunk, cheering spectators. She tried to push her way through them, but they were having none of it, repelling her most determined efforts to break in. Mort caught her hopping up and down on the outskirts of the crowd and grabbed her around the waist, hauling her backward, her cast leaving a deep groove in the dirt.
“Come on, Mrs. Coyne,” he panted. “You heard Jim. He doesn’t want you witnessing this.”
A loud pained “uff” rose from the center of the crowd.
“Just wait over here and—”
“Wait for what?” Another cheer went up from the bloodthirsty crowd at the dull smack of flesh meeting flesh. “My husband to get torn apart? I have to stop this! Jim could get hurt!”
“Ma’am?” Mort blinked at her incredulously.
“You’ve got to help me stop this before Jim gets hurt!”
“Jim get hurt?”
“Yes! Are you deaf?”
“No, ma’am. But Ox’ll be the one who gets hurt. I mean, Ox is nasty, but he’s no champion like Jim. You didn’t know that?” His brow furrowed in perplexity.
“Champion of what?” She broke free of Mort’s grasp just as the wildly cheering crowd parted, and Jim Coyne, one sleeve ripped off, blood trickling from one corner of his mouth, hair curling riotously, walked calmly from their midst. Behind him, she could just make out a prone figure lying in the dirt.
She noted Jim’s rueful, apologetic expression, and tears started in her eyes.
“Let’s go home, Jim,” she said, securing his arm and leading him down the street.
Behind them, a thoughtful Mort James watched their departure.
“I made me twenty-seven bucks betting on Jim Coyne.” Merry appeared at Mort’s side, waving a handful of bills under the front of his nose. “What’s wrong with you, Mortie James? You weren’t fool enough to bet on Ox, were you?”
“No,” Mort said, gaze fixed on the flash of plaster appearing and disappearing beneath the belling swing of Mrs. Coyne’s skirts. “Miz Carmichael, wouldn’t you think it’s odd if a wife didn’t know her husband was the 1880 New York State Middleweight Boxing Champion?”
“Huh?” Merry said, searching her person for a place to stash her winnings, finally tucking it deep in her cleavage.
“Never mind,” Mort said.
Chapter Eight
“Take your shirt off.” Her tone brooked no argument, so he did as he was told and stripped off his shirt while she went into the bedroom to get her dratted old horse liniment.
“Come in here.”
He appeared in the doorframe , looking wary.
“I’ve spread a sheet on the bed. This stuff stains terribly and it stings at first. At least Juniper always twitches when I . . .” Her voice trailed off and as her gaze fell on his chest. “Sit down.”
He sat. She approached cautiously, warily, as though he were a suddenly unknown quantity and not a man with whom she’d shared five damnably blameless nights, and scooped out a little dollop of the oily-looking salve and placed the jar on the table before stepping between his splayed knees.
She swallowed, and his gaze fell on the movement with the intensity of a predator’s on its prey. Her skirts brushed his inner thighs.
Business. It was all business, she told herself sternly. Gingerly, she spread the ointment on his left shoulder near the yellowing bruises that Tommy and his pals had given him a few days before. He winced and she winced in empathetic reply. Then he rolled his shoulder into it, working the sore muscle.
“Stay still.” Her voice sounded a little breathy, even to her own ears, but she didn’t care. His chest was beautiful, dense, with long, sloping muscles tight beneath supple, bronzed skin. She flattened her palm on his pectoral and smoothed the warming oil across the bulging muscle, working it in with the heel of her hand and her fingertips, kneading the resilient flesh deeply, finding little knots of tension and easing them out. “This speeds up healing all kinds of injuries,” she murmured. “Cuts and scrapes and bruises.”
Her fingertip brushed across his flat nipple and returned, moving across his broad chest, back and forth, soothing, rubbing, stroking him.
Lord in heaven.
Though he sat absolutely still beneath her touch, the heat rushing up from her palm swirled through her entire body, making it hard to breathe. He was smooth and hard and warm, and she wanted to fondle and stroke and urge his virility into expression, to make the male in him answer the female in her, to touch her lips to his skin, test the heated temperature of his body with her tongue, move—
“Gilly.”
She struggled out of her sensuous torpor. Slowly, her gaze refocused. He was regarding her strangely, his head cocked to one side. The curls at the nape of his neck hung in damp ringlets that she wanted to—
“Darlin’.”
“Hmm?”
“There aren’t any cuts or bruises there.”
“What?” Her voice was hazy, unfocused. She could look into his eyes for hours, locked in their blue embrace. . . .
“I wasn’t injured there.”
“Oh? Oh!” She broke eye contact with a jolt. She glanced down. Her hand was on his left breast; fingers spread wide, barely denting the muscle beneath. There wasn’t a mark on him.
Embarrassment rippled in a molten current through her, steaming her cheeks with color. She wheeled.
“Gil!”
She stopped, counted to ten, and dared a glance back over her shoulder. He sat where she’d left him, hands clenched into fists on top of his knees, head bowed slightly, lips parted, and eyes riveted on the floorboards.
“We have a business arrangement.” He looked up at her, tension in his voice, in his hard face. “Don’t we? Isn’t that what this is?”
She wanted to say no, to deny it.
To deny the past she hadn’t asked for and the future she didn’t want. But that wouldn’t be fair to him. She didn’t want him despising her more than he already would. “Yes. It’s business.”
“Then keep up your part of the bargain. Tell me.”
“What?” she asked in confusion.
“Tell me the truth. Why are you a thief?” It was a demand, an urgent imperative.
He couldn’t have made himself any more clear. He had her heart, but he didn’t want that. He wanted her story, and even that must be on his terms. She wouldn’t give it to him. It was the one thing she had left. Her identity.
“Sure.” Her voice was clipped and hard. She swung around. “Where should I begin?” She flopped down sideways in the upholstered chair, swinging her cast nonchalantly over the arm, petticoats playing peekaboo with him. “I suppose birth would be too early?” He didn’t comment. Just sat watching her, his flesh rimed by the soft light, beautiful and unreachable. She pulled the tortoiseshell combs from her hair and shook her head, tilting it back so the unbound tresses fell to the ground. “Okay. I’m the daughter of an outlaw queen. I guess that makes me an outlaw princess, don’t it?” She let loose a coarse chuckle.
“Outlaw princess.”
“Yup. A hard-riding, hard-shooting woman who takes what she wants when she wants it. No questions asked, no answers given.”
“Really?” His tone dripped doubt. “I suppose you’re the James brothers’ lost sister too.”
“Sister? Hell, I hope not. You don’t do with a sister the things me and the James boys have done. Shouldn’t you be writing this down?”
“Had a lot of lovers, have you?” he sounded only mildly interested. Damn him!
She tilted her head far back and kicked her loose leg toward the ceiling, laughing harshly. “Lovers? I’ve had more lovers than a Gatling has shells. But my chamber’s empty now, and I’m lookin’—” She heard his chair clatter to the ground, his boot heels hard on the floor. She turned her head and found herself staring at his wool-clad thigh. She didn’t look up any further.
“Yeah?” she sneered.
Heaven with a Gun Page 6