Midnight Cowboy

by Adrianne Lee

  The sense of familiarity persisted. Andy shook her head at herself. Of course she’d feel a twinge of déjà vu. After all, this was the seventh Western ghost town she’d visited in as many weeks. That was all it was.

  Her destination—the Motherlode Motel—was at the far end of town. The sooner she got there and checked in, the sooner she could get to her interview with Black Jack. Andy shoved the long sleeves of her gauzy shirt up to her elbows. Sunlight fell across her left wrist, highlighting an old scar, three lines of raised, puckered skin that looked as if she’d once escaped the talons of a huge bird of prey.

  Chapter Two

  “Yer cabin’s all ready,” Mrs. Minna Kroft, the proprietress of the Motherlode Motel, informed Andy as soon as she’d introduced herself. “Even got the desk ya asked fer.”

  Minna’s face was flat, with a hint of half-moon cheeks below slanted amber eyes, her hair a fluffy, flyaway gray. If Andy didn’t know it was impossible, she’d think the woman and the big Persian cradled in her arm had the same ancestry.

  She tapped the registry book. “Jest need yer Jane Doe.”

  As Andy reached for the pen, something warm and furry nuzzled her leg. She flinched, glanced sharply down and found herself looking into the fierce yellow eyes of a long-haired black cat with four white paws. Inexplicably a shiver scurried down her spine and a word spilled from her. “Boots…”

  “Pardon?” Mrs. Kroft was reaching for the cabin key. She glanced over her shoulder. “You say somethin’?”

  “No. It was nothing.” Andy had no idea why she’d called the cat Boots, nor why her throat suddenly felt as if she’d swallowed a fur ball. But she could swear the room was shrinking. She quickly scrawled her name, then followed Mrs. Kroft outside.

  “So, yer a writer?” She set the Persian on the porch, then led the way toward a knoll behind the motel office. “What kind of stuff do ya write, anyhow?”

  “Historical romance novels, heavily laced with adventure.” And steamy love scenes—created strictly from fantasy and for which she’d been both praised and condemned. If her critics only knew the limits of her experience! Andy shoved the thought away.

  The sun was rapidly dipping out of sight, streaking the sky with long ribbons of pink and yellow, and a brisk breeze was blowing. Ahead were thirteen cabins that looked as though they’d been slapped together in the late 1800s and abandoned as soon as the gold strike in Alder Gulch ran dry.

  Mrs. Kroft glanced over her shoulder. “Can’t say I’ve ever heard of ya. But we’ve got us a real famous author lives right here in town.”

  Andy asked, “Who is that?”

  “Goes by some bug’s name, but he’s really Eugene Mott. Likes to be called Gene.”

  Mott as in Cliff? But Andy could think of no “real famous” author named Mott. “The name doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “Probably not, but ya wouldn’t forget any of his stories. They’re the kind that cause a body to keep the light on all night.”

  Behind the cabins, the prairie rolled into the distance as far as Andy could see, and at the moment the breeze was lifting dust and swirling it along the bleak knolls like miniature tornadoes. Mrs. Kroft startled her when she stopped abruptly and spun around. “Gypsy Moth! That’s Gene’s writing name.”

  Andy stopped in her tracks. Her mouth had dropped open. “Gypsy Moth, the queen of horror, is actually a man?”

  “Yep.” Mrs. Kroft chuckled. “Gene lets people think he’s a woman ‘cause he likes his privacy. Never goes on them talk shows or has his picture in any of his books.”

  Andy didn’t think she’d put her photograph on her book jackets either if she wrote the kind of dark stories Gypsy—Gene Mott—wrote; however, it was interesting that he was Iiving in Alder Gulch and that she’d probably met his relative—ole Cliffie. She might not care for Mott’s stories, but she did respect his talent and maybe she could wangle an introduction before she left town.

  Mrs. Kroft climbed the porch of the farthest cabin to the left and unlocked the door. Although there were clearly only thirteen cabins, Andy’s bore the number fourteen. She stifled a grin and joined Mrs. Kroft on the porch.

  The motel owner shoved the door inward, creating a gaping opening that looked as if it led to a black hole. Andy had a sudden sense of what her heroines had faced in the world before electricity. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she could write the novel, or most of it, in this cabin?

  Tim would understand, probably even encourage the idea. After all, she had a deadline. Sometimes she wished he wouldn’t be so blasted understanding.

  Mrs. Kroft hit the light switch, chasing out the darkness and presenting the brightest pink walls Andy had ever seen.

  “Pretty color, don’tcha think? Painted it myself.”

  “Cheery,” Andy lied, thinking it ghastly. Paint had been slapped thickly on the walls as if someone were trying to cover a crime. However, she couldn’t fault the clean look or smell of the place. Even Gram—a neat freak—would have approved.

  The single room was twelve feet square with bathroom, kitchenette, dinette set and an iron-framed, antique bed. A hot-pink cloth draped a doorframe, obviously the closet, and a potbellied stove with a stack of chopped wood hugging its side claimed another corner. The linoleum floor—which might once have been red and black—was now pink and gray. Braided rugs attempted to cover its present humiliation.

  “Hope this’ll do.” Mrs. Kroft hovered near a metal desk that stood beneath one of the room’s three windows. “Furniture’s scarce as hen’s teeth ‘round here. I was lucky ta come by it. Purely fate.”

  “Yes, fate,” Andy agreed. Something had had a hand in her coming here, something beyond her own machinations. She could feel it in her bones. “It will do nicely.”

  A pleased smile crinkled the woman’s feline features. “Well, if there ain’t nothin’ else—I’ll let ya get settled.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Kroft, there is something. I passed a museum just up the road. Is it open for business during the day?”

  Standing in the doorway, Mrs. Kroft nodded her head vigorously, causing her fluffy hair to wave like a detached hand. “Opens up every day ‘round eleven. That and the library. Duke Plummer runs ‘em. Been Plummers in Alder Gulch since the first gold strike. Anything ya wanna know about this town, Duke is yer man.” She closed the door.

  Alone in the ancient cabin, Andy took another stroll around the room, imagining the walls were as rustic as the outside suggested, that the floor was hard-packed dirt and the only light came from an oil lamp. With her eyes closed and her arms wrapped around her rib cage, she could almost smell the dirt, the lamp oil. The wind whining against the outer walls sweetened the images in her head.

  Andy opened her eyes and spun around once. “Oh, Gram, I feel such a connection with Alder Gulch…as if I’ve lived here in another lifetime.” Sadness crept into her voice and grabbed her heart. “I wish you were here to share it with me, Gram. I know Alder Gulch would have changed your mind about Montana.”

  Fearing she’d give in to the tears burning the back of her eyelids, Andy busied herself unpacking the Cherokee and her luggage and organizing the room to her liking.

  In the bathroom she removed her tinted contacts and inspected herself in the mirror above the sink. Her oddly colored eyes—one blue, the other three-quarters brown and one-quarter blue—looked weary. Her hair was limp and dusty. She started the shower and, half an hour later, felt and looked a hundred percent better.

  She brushed her shoulder-length, coffee brown hair off her face and contained it in a ribbon at her nape, then donned a short-sleeved sundress the exact blue of her tinted contact lenses. She placed a wide, hammered-silver bracelet over the scars on her left wrist, then checked the time. Unbidden anticipation rushed through her at the idea of seeing Black Jack again, of interviewing him.

  She lifted her purse from the bed. The vision of the mysterious man in the photograph that was tucked within its depths flashed into her mind. She withdrew the sepia pri
nt. The man featured stood before an assay office…which was what had sparked the story idea of a heroine swept up with gold fever, willing to risk unimagined hardships to strike it rich and save her sisters and herself from a life of mortal sin.

  The man’s face was unfamiliar. Was he a relative? Or a stranger? There were no printer’s marks, no studio name on it, but although it appeared old, the expert she’d consulted claimed it was taken in the late 1960s, or mid-1970s.

  The man was dressed in the garb of a miner from the 1800s, but something about his shoulder-length hair, his ragged beard and his loose-limbed stance suggested his real wardrobe consisted of bell-bottom pants, tie-dyed T-shirts and headbands. But where had this picture been taken? Why had Gram hung on to it all these years? Hidden it in her sewing box?

  “Who is he, Gram?” she asked aloud. The awful thing was, Andy had the prickling notion she ought to know.

  She pulled open the cabin door. A black cat with white paws scurried off the porch, spooking her as thoroughly as she’d spooked it.

  Ten minutes later, the spooky, spooked cat all but forgotten, Andy shoved through the swinging doors of the Golden Broom Hotel. The restaurant was packed, vibrating with the clink of silver and glass, the gabble of conversation, the occasional loud guffaw, the whine of a tired child and the unrelenting lilt of hurdy-gurdy music issuing from a player piano.

  Seeking Black Jack, she swept her gaze over the dining room, over diners perched on rough-hewn wooden chairs pulled up to equally rustic-looking tables—indulging in various stages of the five-course meal offered as the evening fare—and over the slew of college-aged women who waited tables dressed as dance-hall girls of old in gaudy costumes and garish makeup with ostrich feathers in their hair.

  Not finding him, she spun toward the bar and caught a whiff of stale cigarettes and whiskey, an odor prevalent in such establishments. A massive brass-andmahogany antique bar consumed one entire wall. Behind it, huge mirrors hung on either side of an oil painting of an amply endowed nude reposing on pillows. Andy’s pulse took an unexpected leap. Therei he was… below the nude…standing with his back to the bar, looking right at her.

  JACK STARETT, JR., still wearing his Black Jack costume, propped his elbows on the bar behind him, hooked a bootheel on the brass footrest and arched his back against the aged mahogany. The beer he’d just downed had wiped the taste of dust and horse from his throat and was now working on the knot in his stomach.

  Like the soft haze of cigarette smoke, his gaze floated through the dining room of the noisy Golden Broom Hotel until it came to rest on the woman framed in the wide doorway.

  “Hey, pardner, checkin’ out the fillies?”

  Jack peered sideways at Cliff Mott. A lock of white blond hair dangled artistically over his forehead and his grin was lascivious, his gaze suggesting they were sharing a lewd joke. Jack knew plenty of men like Cliff—swinging bachelors, no strings, leery of roots and commitments. The exact opposite of everything Jack wanted for himself. “I’m just enjoying my beer. I’ll leave the conquests to you.”

  “Hey, that’s the pretty little piece I was talking to this afternoon. Now, there’s a conquest you’ve already made.”

  Jack glanced again at the woman standing in the doorway. “You’re nuts. I’ve never seen her before.”

  “Sure you have. This afternoon. You nearly rode the Appaloosa through her car grille.”

  It came back to him in a rush…the woman in the red Cherokee he’d tipped his hat to. He hadn’t known why he’d done that or, for that matter, why he should recall her at all. Doing two shows a day, he paid little attention to the tourists; it was the residents of Alder Gulch who occupied his thoughts. But he did remember her.

  BLACK JACK WAS even larger than she’d recalled…a great bear of a man. His hat was absent and his thick black hair was combed straight back off his high forehead, revealing a scowl as savage as that of a grizzly and giving him the look of a man with an attitude. A big bad attitude.

  “What do you think, Gram? Isn’t he perfect?”

  She could almost hear Gram say, “Nobody’s perfect, you foolish child.”

  Andy felt her first faltering hesitation and had to admit that on her way to the hotel she’d been wondering if she’d feel the way she had this afternoon about him. He might fit the role physically, but what if he was a mental dud, or worse, a nerd? She drew an unsteady breath as her gaze—starting at his dusty black leather boots and lifting slowly upward—caressed every lean, muscular inch of the gorgeous man.

  “MAN, I’D LIKE TO BE in your Tony Lamas,” Cliff said in a low aside to Jack.

  The woman was beelining for them, and Jack had to admit she was easy on the eyes: at least five-seven, slender, yet curvaceous enough to hold his attention, especially in that long clinging blue dress. The way she moved, a graceful, long-limbed stride, spurred a vision of her in denims and boots, astride a restless stallion, a Stetson angled sexily atop her shiny brown hair, the brim grazing her sienna brows and accentuating her startlingly blue eyes.

  Without looking away from her, he asked, “Are you sure it was me she wanted to see?”

  “Yeah. I don’t understand it, either. I offered her steak—” Cliff poked his own chest as though he were tapping a tender filet mignon. “But she said her tastes ran to chopped liver.”

  Before Jack could respond, the woman was there.

  “Hello again,” Andy said, stopping in front of Jack, but directing her gaze and her comment to Cliff.

  “Evening. I was just telling our bandit here that you wanted a few words with him.”

  Andy felt Black Jack’s assessing gaze whisking her like the fine strokes of a painter’s brush. Her pulse skipped annoyingly. What was the matter with her? It was one thing to imagine herself in the nineteenth century and quite another to feel like some demure flower of the Old West whose propriety kept her from looking a man squarely in the face. Andy lifted her chin and smiled sweetly. “Actually, I’d like an interview.”

  “An interview?” Alarms went off in Jack’s head. Was this fantasy-stirring little beauty a fellow reporter who was about to blow his cover sky-high?

  Cliff said, “Well, I can see you two want to be alone, and my uncle is beckonin’ me from over yonder.”

  Andy watched him cross to a table where one of the diners sat in a wheelchair, and she wondered fleetingly which of the men at the table was EugeneGene—Mott. But—as though his very aura were magnetic—her attention never fully left the man beside her. Oddly self-conscious, she extended her hand toward Black Jack’s massive chest and gazed up into his sage green eyes. Her mouth was as dry as scorched grass. “My name is Andrea Hart.”

  Unusually disconcerted, Jack stared at her hand for a five-second beat, then reached for it. “Jack Sta…uh…Black. Jack Black.” Her touch sent an electric current through him, but the heat in his face was for his faux pas. That was the first time he’d faltered over his alias. It had better be the last. Fortunately, no one was standing nearby, but he didn’t want another misstep within the wrong earshot.

  Jack’s deep voice relieved Andy’s earlier doubts; the unexpected tingle his touch caused both dismayed and pleased her. There was nothing dudish or nerdy about a man who made her this aware of her sexuality. Too aware of her sexuality. Oh, yes, he was A-one hero material.

  But she was an engaged woman. This response to this man was wrong. She tried concentrating on her interview. On her story. The name Jack Black would never do. She’d have to come up with something better for her fictional hero.

  Jack made no move to release her hand, which felt as warm and smooth as the underbelly of a calf in his big, callused one.

  “Ooh, what’s that in the tank?” Andrea’s lovely face was scrunched in a grimace, her gaze focused on the small, rectangular glass tank that hugged one corner of the bar. An engraved sign warned: Dangerous. Do Not Touch.

  “Scorpion. We have some native ones, but this fellow is particularly nasty—the deadliest of his specie
s. Belongs to the owner of the hotel.”

  Although the yellow critter with two black stripes on its back huddled in one corner of the tank looking more shy than deadly, Andy shuddered. “Yuck.”

  Jack nodded, distracted by her mouth. It was puckered as if she were expecting a kiss. Unexpectedly, he wanted to oblige her. It took willpower to hold back. “Would you like a beer?”

  “I’d love a beer.”

  He ordered two, then, taking her elbow, steered her toward a vacant table in a deserted corner. She had his male hormones working overtime and the skin at his nape prickling. Before he acted on his baser desires, he’d better figure out who she was and what she wanted from him. “Are you a reporter?”

  “What? Oh, the request for an interview. No. I’m an author. I’m researching my latest novel, and you’re very like the hero I have in mind.”

  She watched his ebony brows twitch, first in surprise, then in thought. He was either a methodical thinker or…slow. She fervently hoped for the former and decided methodical was a good trait for the hero in her book, especially if she could capture with words the essence of this Jack Black and the Jack Black already taking shape in her mind.

  Hero? Jack grimaced. If he hadn’t stuck so long to his belief that Nightmare Man was a random serial killer, Karen Bradley might still be alive. The thought filled him with a self-loathing that spilled over into his words. “I’m nobody’s hero, lady.”

  Andy peered up at him. The man couldn’t be more wrong. His brooding tone and self-deprecation—not to mention the erotic images he stirred in her—made him the perfect wounded hero for a romance novel. “I guess that depends on your description of hero. I don’t expect you’re as bad as the character you play, either.”

  “Don’t count on it.” Jack’s grip tightened on his beer bottle. Being nice to the tourists was part of his job and some of the town council were in the dining room tonight, but having his attention diverted by the delectable Ms. Hart would get him no closer to finding his quarry.