But she kept on. The houses were a fire hazard, the men were a hazard to themselves, their salaries were going toward credit, many men had left town already, discouraged by the working conditions and the work, there were new single women arriving in town every day, painted ladies who were renting every available room in town. They sashayed up and down the streets at night; they enticed the men by day, coming out to the building sites in wagons that offered the space to take a sensual respite; and they raked in the money the men were so willing to spend. There had been two fights over favorites.
If Maggie had been among them, he thought lustfully, someone would have been killed. They would have all wanted her if they had even a notion of her whorish nature or the fact that a mere cowboy was servicing her over her damned desk in the dark of the night.
He adored the contradiction of it, and the fact that only he knew.
He couldn’t wait for Logan’s return.
She watched the track coming closer day after day and thought the day would come when it would run right over her.
In a week where a day seemed like a lifetime, finally there was only another day to be gotten through before she would see Logan. She had pushed out the paper for another week, with all her concerns headlining the front page. She knew already the church women were up in arms about the prostitutes, but they were a minority. She didn’t know how far to push, and thought that far probably wasn’t far enough. Meanwhile, the excitement of Logan’s lovemaking had receded into a distant memory, and she hated that. Only at night could she resurrect the intensity of it, and after a while she stopped doing that because her yearning was too overpowering.
If she were living at the ranch, she thought the forbidden thought, she could have seen him every night. He would have come home to her, tired from his day’s work, hot, sweaty, rigid with a clamoring desire which could only be slaked by her; and she would have been waiting for him every night, ripe, seductive, excited by the scent of him and his throbbing need to possess her.
She needed him just like that, but she needed this too, she thought, as she sat alone in the remnants of the week’s work, without the stamina to rise up and finish the chores that had to be done.
Jean came to her rescue this time, offering to return in the evening and help her clean up. She did not know if there were enough money in Frank’s legacy to pay him for his loyalty to her.
Once again they worked side by side dismantling type frames and cleaning the press. They worked for the most part without speaking, and she felt grateful to him.
But then she looked at him for one unguarded moment and caught the passion flaring in his eyes. She turned away, straight into the outstretched hands of Reese, who had come downstairs when he heard noises. She knew he had seen the same unchecked desire and that he was intensely displeased.
“You shouldn’t encourage him,” he said sharply when Jean had finally left. You should encourage me, he thought savagely. Me.
“I haven’t,” she protested, pacing edgily around the backroom. She supposed he had to say what he was going to say for Frank’s sake, because no one would be pleased that she had had a moment’s weakness for an itinerant artist. Nonetheless, Reese didn’t really have the right to chastise her like that.
“You didn’t see his eyes.” Did you see mine? They’re hungry for the sight of you naked, Maggie.
“I saw.”
“You’re an amazingly seductive woman, Maggie,” he said daringly. Oh yes, oh yes. Now.
“Me?”
And look at her playing sweet innocent when she knew exactly what she did with that sweaty, cow smelling cowboy with his hands all over her.
“I think it’s the idea of you in this position of power. Men want to conquer you.” I want to seize you and throw you under me, take you by force.
“Nonsense,” she said testily. But Dennis had said the exact same thing. “Men would love to step on me and push me out of the way and I won’t let them do it. Look at you.”
He drew in his breath in an angry hiss. I would love to step on you and push you, Maggie. Let me do it to you; I know how to do it just how you like it.
“I thought I was helping you,” he said stiffly. “I am not trying to trample you, Maggie. I do have feelings about you, if you don’t remember.” Feelings, oh God, do I have feelings. If I told you my feelings would you present yourself to me and let me do anything I wanted to you? Oh Maggie, I just dream of doing it to you.
“I do remember.”
I’d like to give you something else to remember, Maggie. “I’m glad Maggie. We said we’d be friends. I was hoping that after these two weeks we worked together you’d feel that we became a little closer.” A lot closer, like you were that night with the cowboy. Could you get that close to me, right now? I’m engorged with feelings for you, Maggie. I’d just love to show you how solid they are.
“I think you’ve settled in nicely, actually,” she temporized.
“I do too.” But I haven’t settled in nearly as hard as I want to, Maggie. And you’ll feel it when I do, every inch of it.
“Jean wishes I would poke my nose somewhere else.” And I wish I could poke something else in you.
“We need his talents, Reese.”
And I need your talents, you whore. Just like the cowboy. How did he seduce you, or did you beg him dammit? “Don’t fall for him, Maggie; women always fall for men like him. Don’t be kind. Let him know as only you can that he can’t have you.” Only me, only me.
“You’re assuming so much, Reese. He has affection for me. I know that. Maybe he feels a little more.”
You preening whore, He’d love to feel a little more. “You cannot let it go beyond that. He is merely an assistant at work.” Who’d love to work his way into you, bitch, and you know it. “I won’t say anything more. Maybe it isn’t my business.”
“Maybe it isn’t,” she shrugged. “And maybe I like your consideration.”
Then consider me, Maggie.
“I’m tired,” she added, and he looked for the signal, the beckoning, but there was none, unless he counted her inviting little yawn and the way she opened her mouth, or the enticing sway of her hips as she made her way up the stairs. He raged that he hadn’t taken her that other night, on the stairs, with her taut nipples and naked body already there for him, without her whore’s games and bitch’s denials.
He watched her primping and readying herself to meet Logan. She was going to the hotel to have lunch with Logan.
“Oh, what a coincidence,” he murmured. “It happens I’ll be there myself. Mother and I …”
It was so late, it was well after church, well after her patience had nearly ground down to the breaking point.
“Walk with us,” Reese suggested, and she couldn’t think of a way to excuse herself.
They made an odd threesome. Reese held Maggie possessively by one arm, all the while bending a courteous ear to his mother, who was shooting black looks in his direction that he refused to heed.
“It doesn’t hurt to let him wait a little while,” Reese said.
“You know he’s an old friend,” Maggie said. She didn’t quite know what to think about this public display or Reese’s vacillating humor. Today he seemed absorbed, faintly aloof.
She would have run a mile, he thought, if she knew he were planning to follow her all day. They stepped up into the hotel entrance and were taken immediately to the dining room.
Logan was waiting, and the sight of him took Maggie’s breath away.
When had she ever seen him dressed like a gentleman? His eyes met hers, clear as the sky, and he smiled gently at her.
“Maggie. Reese. Mrs. Colleran.”
Oh, he was so damned polite, a cowboy dressed up in a man’s clothes, Reese thought snidely. “Ramsey. Well, Mother and I have a table waiting. Excuse us.”
Maggie watched them walk away and then the waiter seated her. “Why here, Logan? I wanted to come to you.”
“And I wanted to come to you,”
he said softly, his eyes roaming her tired face, noting that the sparkle had gone from her eyes. “This is for you, Maggie. I believe there is more to us than just our lovemaking.”
“But I wanted …” But how could she say what she wanted in the midst of an afternoon crowd of people, some of whom she had known all her life.
“I do too.”
“Where? When?”
“There’s time.”
“Oh God, I feel like there’s never been time.”
“No,” he said consideringly, “not like this there isn’t.”
“I know. I thought about it.”
“So did I.” Her eyes rested on his hands and she caught her breath. Thinking was nothing; wanting and completion were everything. Desire spumed in her like a living thing.
“How can I eat?” she demanded.
He smiled, because he was feeling exactly the same. “I’d take you on the table if I could, Maggie.”
She opened her mouth to say something provocative and then closed it again as she met Reese’s heated gaze from across the room.
Reese looked away. What was she saying to him, the lusty bitch? She was probably negotiating with him, maybe even teasing him by telling him she couldn’t do that anymore. Yes, he could imagine such a conversation very nicely, but that vision was superseded by the image of them together the previous night, and his rage that Logan had had her grew in proportion to his own desire.
They wouldn’t leave yet, he thought, licking his lips with anticipation. It would look exactly like what it was: art assignation with only one purpose.
They ate sparingly and his throat thickened; he would be stuck with his mother while the cowboy was taking his pleasure from her willing body. He had to get rid of his mother. He glanced around hastily and saw that there were people in the room with whom his mother was acquainted.
He ate as quickly as good manners and his rampaging desire would allow, and then pointedly suggested to his mother that there were friends in the room trying to catch her eye, and that if she didn’t mind, he wouldn’t wait.
A few minutes later, Maggie and Logan left, and after a moment’s interval, Reese covertly followed them out of the door.
There was nowhere for them to go, he thought, but the apartment. Perhaps they even thought that he would be so busy with his mother that he wouldn’t notice they had gone. He let himself into the back room by the same rear entrance. Everything was quiet; he was quiet. He heard a step on the stairs, and he heard her groan and the end of a long lingering kiss.
He slipped off his boots and hid them carefully behind the door to the stairwell, which was slightly ajar. He positioned himself carefully to hear everything.
“I hate this,” she murmured. “Where do we find privacy?”
“You tell me, Maggie.”
“I don’t want to think about it now.”
“Then this is what we will have.”
“Does it matter to you?”
“You matter. I told you, Maggie, I was going to come after you and I swore I would give you all the time you wanted. If this is what you think we have to do, then we’ll do it.”
“What do you think?” she asked in a melting voice.
“I think I want you, Maggie,” he whispered, “right here, right now.”
“How?”
“Like this.”
There was a brief pause and then that erotic sound she made at the back of her throat, then her husky whisper, “Oh yes.”
Oh yes, oh yes—the words reverberated through Reese like a gunshot. Oh yes, he could imagine it, the two of them in that narrow confined space, Maggie with her wriggling backside on the step, her dress thrown up, her legs long and enfolding, wrapped around him tightly as he entered her and began his relentless quest to conquer her.
And the whispers, the low moans of pleasure—he could hear them clearly and he was desperate to see. No, he didn’t need to see, he knew what Maggie was like now. She had never been the woman Frank Colleran had thought he had married. She had always been no better than the whore Frank had chosen over her, and the goddamned fool had probably never known it. He had never been aware of what he had missed.
But he, Reese, would not miss.
The question of privacy haunted Maggie. She almost felt as though Logan had maneuvered her into this sensual thrall in order to make her choose. She was violently unhappy about the nature of the alternatives, and there were only two. Either she could settle for Sunday afternoons with him at the ranch, where at least he had control over who was around to see them, or be satisfied with that wrenching coupling on the stairs or in the office, or a hotel if they were desperate.
And on top of that, she was trying to balance the worrisome fear of conceiving against the loss of the cataclysmic pleasure of Logan’s pursuit.
A.J.’s death preyed on her mind. It almost seemed as if the sheriff were doing nothing, and that at some appropriate time, he would storm the door and arrest her for murder on the very premises that Arch Warfield had outlined in his article.
And then the two things she dreaded would happen: Reese would take over running the paper and Dennis would need a power of attorney to allot the money for him to keep publishing. The thought of that made her wonder whether the two of them didn’t have more decisive motives for murdering A.J. than the killer.
But that was fanciful. On the other hand, both had indicated they were ready to be more to her than just friends. Neither of them had been happy about her refusal to consider it. And Reese was almost jealously preoccupied by the fact that Jean wanted her.
God, if they knew about Logan … What had Reese really thought about that lunch at the hotel? What else could he have done? Where else could they have gone?
And she was back to that question again.
There was no answer to anything, just the pervasive feeling that she was like a fish, swimming unaware into a net, and that sometime, somewhere, someone was going to pull it tightly around her and she would never know who and she would never know why.
“Well now, here’s today’s news,” Reese said, coming in the front door that Wednesday. “Melinda Sable has contracted to build her house finally.”
“The wonder is she could find anyone with the way Denver North has been snapping everyone up,” Maggie murmured in a moderate tone. She really had no quarrel with Melinda Sable. Melinda was really very discreet—look at how she handled Frank. She had a selected clientele, and when a man was loyal to her, she repaid that loyalty a thousandfold.
But this news meant that she was going up against the ladies of the trade with a vengeance. And she wouldn’t be tawdry or shoddy about it either.
“Oh, I expect Melinda has some sweet convincing ways,” Reese said with a faintly arch note in his voice. “I bet she could make anyone do anything she wanted him to.” I bet, he thought, she’d hire you in an instant, o Maggie of the prostitute’s soul. You’d be the star of her show and you couldn’t turn anyone down if you wanted to.
“I know she can,” Maggie said, discomfitted by the way Reese seemed to know all about Melinda. But everyone knew about Melinda. She had wondered all these years what Melinda knew about her. “Where do you suppose her money is coming from?”
“Dear Maggie, she must have money.”
“Or someone or something might be financing her,” Maggie contradicted.
“There is no one rich enough in town to do that,” Reese said emphatically, and then could have bitten his tongue. He understood what Maggie was getting at. He didn’t like her assumption one bit and he said so.
“I think it’s a reasonable supposition. A clean house, clean fun for the working man, more or less, a classy place where he can let off… steam. It sounds like a good investment to me.”
“Maggie, you are not supposed to know about these things anyway,” Reese protested, felt he had to protest, but he knew that Maggie knew all about them. He was steaming for her with her suggestive scenario about Melinda’s place.
“I know
all kinds of things,” Maggie said lightly. “We’ll keep an eye on Melinda, rest assured.”
“That’s a man’s job, Maggie,” he said, with emphasis, watching to see how she responded to that.
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” she retorted, and he thought there was a faintly provocative note in her voice.
He turned away. She was too damned provoking, given what he knew about her. He was finding it harder and harder to work side by side with her and his ever-rising desire. He wanted to test her again, to see whether the invitation he sought would finally be forthcoming.
“Are we driving out to the track site this week?” he asked offhandedly. He had been so good with her, alone in the carriage. But that was before he had caught her whoring with a cowboy.
“I believe we should. I think they’re coming up close near Danforth land now. I’m thinking I’d like to talk to one of the prostitutes, too.”
Oh, would you? he almost murmured out loud. To get some tips?
“All right,” he said, reining himself in. “I’ll check with the sheriff again see how he’s getting on.”
“He’s not getting on,” Maggie said crisply. “I saw him yesterday.”
“Then we’ll go … soon?”
“We’ll go now,” Maggie said decisively.
“I’ll meet you out front.”
“Fine. I can check how Jean’s doing with those church notices he’s printing up.”
Jean looked at her soulfully. “That one is getting very possessive—of you and the things he sees here.”
His perception made Maggie uncomfortable. “And you, Jean?” she asked quietly.
“I? I am hopeless,” he said, and turned back to his work.
He had admitted nothing and very cleverly, Maggie thought later as she and Reese approached the track site. “Busy here,” she commented. “They may be closer than we think. Is Denver North in some kind of hurry? I thought this was a six-month project.”
“I don’t know.”
They pulled in to the day-gang camp. Things were as usual. There was a crew down the line working with the men going up north. There was a supply wagon heading out that way with food and a fresh supply of tools. A one-horse dump cart was rumbling out in the other direction, toward Gully Basin for the initial grading operation. On site, a gang of men were either lined up at the chuck wagon, clearing brush, or laying out posts and string as far as the eye could see. Some wagons were parked away in the distance, and there was movement unrelated to the work of the moment; pastel colors coupled with rough denim, but never anywhere near the sight of a supervisor or a gang foreman.
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