by Carol Arens
"I'd bet a thief's reward that you take after your pa."
"Mother used to say so before..." Words stuck in her throat like dry crackers. Before Papa died and the world turned over, she tried to say. Before, when her mother would laugh at the things that she and Suzie did because they reminded her of Papa.
"Gracious, it seems that you've gotten every knot from my hair," she murmured through the brittle crumbs lingering in her throat.
She leaned forward and gathered up Muff to scoot toward the far side of the fire. With her hair finished, there was no seemly reason to remain snuggled between the safehold of his thighs.
Zane's hands closed about her elbows, pressing heat into her cool flesh. "Sit here for a while."
She shouldn't. The proper thing would be to remove to her own side of the fire and shiver, or to be respectably devoured by a foraging wolf.
Evidently, taking the silence of her inner battle as consent, he leaned forward, wrapped his arms around her ribs then slid her backward. His chest rose and fell against her back with his even breathing. His heart pumped half a beat slower than hers did. Heat bubbled around her like a simmering pot.
This side of the fire or that, hot or cold, she shivered.
"When I was fourteen, I turned my uncle in for a fifty-dollar bounty."
Chapter Eight
What on God's green plain had made him confess that? Had he been distracted by star-kissed hair and the scent of a woman? It might have been her spell-weaving voice that brought him to the brink of believing that hokey butterfly-moon tale.
The hell if he'd told her because he hoped that she might understand why he had betrayed his own kin.
"Oh, mercy, I can't count the times I've yearned to do that to Edwin." Her exasperated sigh pressed against his chest.
"Yearning and doing aren't half the same thing." This was one conversation he needed to get out of. He had said too much already.
"I only yearn it for a minute, anyway. Poor Edwin became a man before his time, taking on the household after Papa died and dealing with me and Suzie." She was quiet, looking at the fire and likely seeing things from her past. Flames and a quiet prairie night could do that to a person. "In some ways you and my brother are alike."
"About as alike as that wolf out there and your little white pup."
To his surprise, Missy laughed. Her voice tinkled across the dark land.
"Something like that," she said. "But what I meant was that you both became men when you were still children. You each gave up your youth for the good of others."
"What makes you so sure I turned in the old crook for anything noble? Maybe I just wanted the reward."
"You make me sure, Zane."
He grappled for a cynical reply to that. How was he to keep the woman at arm's length when she was wiggling a path from between his knees straight into his heart? Hell, when had he reached down and taken hold of her hands and begun stroking her cold, slender fingers like a smitten schoolboy?
"He was planning to rob a bank and I was tired of being hungry. I never agonized over the right or wrong of betraying kin. Afterward, I got a clean hotel room, ate a fat meal and slept warm and full with a smile on my face."
"I admire you for that." She turned her heart-shaped face up to look at him. He couldn't detect a single mocking or accusing thought behind those round blue eyes. "He must have been a horrible man."
"He was a greedy son of a gun. I never understood how that weak-principled cuss could be related to my mother."
"There are some things that just don't make any sense." Missy glanced back at the fire and sighed.
"He was the only kin I had after my mother died." Mentioning his mother's death cut him to the quick. He never spoke of her passing, not even to Maybelle. He didn't recall his father's death, he'd been too young, but at six years old, the loss of his mother had left its mark.
"I do love Edwin, even though I complain at times." He was thankful she did not press him about his mother since he seemed to be unable to keep from spilling his soul to a woman who viewed life as a story to be written down for the country's entertainment.
"My uncle was unprincipled and greedy, but he did take me in." Once again, Missy did not press him about his mother even though he knew she must be yearning to hear the story. He didn't know why, but it seemed natural to tell her about his past. Someday, he might find every word written in a dime novel, embellished ten times over, but for tonight, it felt right to talk.
"For eight years he dragged me around the countryside committing petty crimes to get us by. Now and then I wonder if I ought to be grateful, but then I remember what hungry times those were... Sometimes, he'd be gone for nights on end."
"He ought to have been whipped for that," Missy whispered and squeezed his fingers.
"Maybe, but those were the good nights."
He couldn't tell her why. It was pitiable to think back on when he used to watch other kids through their windows at night. He'd hide in a shadow and peer through the glass, pretending to be the kid who sat on his father's knee or got patted on the head. He'd taste the sugar when the boy inside got fed a treat then trundled off to bed. Later, when he lurched off into the night he would hold tight to a vision of the goodnight kiss that the kid had gotten from his ma.
"The old man was lousy company," was as much of the truth that he was willing to admit.
Missy plucked her hand from his and reached back to stroke his cheek with the backs of her fingers. The brush of her smooth skin reminded him that he hadn't shaved in days. Compared to the beaus she would have known in the East, he must seem like a heathen.
"Sometimes the heart aches so that a body can't speak of it." She turned, kneeling between his legs to look at him. Her hand brushed aside the mess of hair that had fallen across his eye. "If you ever want to, though, I swear on the butterfly moon that I will never tell a soul...and lightning strike me if I write it down."
His mind had to stretch to recall a time when someone, other than Maybelle, had touched him with tenderness. Memory stretched so thin that it nearly broke before he recalled the time with Emily, before she turned to the sporting life. Too many years had passed.
The intimacy of fingertips against his cheek and the graze of Missy's hand through his hair made his heart ache. She offered a human bond that had been long lacking in his life.
He'd be a fool to believe in a promise vowed by someone who believed in butterfly moons. What she offered was not for him. A man on the hunt, chasing his demons, could not afford the bond that her touch hinted at.
He'd be wise to treat Missy Lenore Devlin the way he had treated every other woman in life, touch her body but never her heart.
"Words can come hard, Zane, but once they're said, for some reason heartaches aren't as sharp." She slid her palm along the line of his scratchy jaw then turned and stretched. She plopped her round bottom on the ground, staring deeply into the fire. "For instance, if I say to you, 'Papa died, Suzie was paralyzed and all I got was a bruise on my chin,' the truth of it hurts like anything, but saying it makes me feel better. Who knows why? Maybe if I think you feel what I feel, that makes it easier."
"You could get hurt, being so trusting. What if I laughed at you?" What if he kissed her?
"You are a better man than you give yourself credit for. I trust you." What if he laid her down in front of the fire?
"There are a lot of folks who wouldn't say that." He drew the hair away from the back of her neck. The chilly air puckered the tender skin he had exposed.
"Do you think I'd go into the wilderness with a man I didn't trust?" He nipped at the curve between her neck and shoulder and felt her flesh turn smooth under the warmth of his mouth.
"As I recall, you didn't have a choice." He curled his fingers around her ribs, high up so that his thumbs grazed the weight of her breasts. The thrum of her blood pulsed under his fingertips.
"Just because you picked me up and set me on your horse doesn't mean I didn't make a choice."
The woman was a delicacy, like a bottle of golden whiskey that he might sip in glorious delirium and never feel the consequence of until dawn.
"You never do what you don't want to do?" he asked. She couldn't know what he had in mind.
He rose to his knees then crawled in front of her, over her. The night narrowed to the crackle of the fire and the beating of her heart. It made him feel like a predatory cat. He crept forward until his knees braced her hips. He pressed her shoulders back against the log and gazed into eyes so round that they looked like a pair of blue moons.
"Just ask Edwin," she whispered.
It tickled his conscience that she had spoken her guardian's name, but not enough to make him turn back. Her lips glistened with a reflection of stars. The wind caught a lock of her hair and blew it across her mouth.
"I don't think I will," he murmured close to her lips.
He brushed aside her windblown hair and saw her smile the instant before he kissed her, as though she was the one who had gotten what she wanted. Who was the hunter and who was the prey?
Missy touched his hair, she cupped his ear with the palm of her hand. She sighed his name against his lips. He knew this kiss was different, clear to his soul. Her touch and his response was not at all what he had imagined. He would never be content to touch this woman's body and not her heart.
Dear Lord, he felt as if he'd guzzled that bottle of spirits and seen a thing that looked like forever floating at the bottom of it.
Someone needed to stuff the cork back in the jug. Judging by the way Missy seemed unwilling to give up his mouth, it was not going to be her.
"You're playing on dangerous ground, darlin," he managed to pant over the free tumble of his heart and the breathless condition of his lungs. "Anything could happen when you kiss a man like that."
"Probably something I could never write down."
He touched his forehead to hers. Missy's skin simmered but his steamed like a screaming teakettle. Her quick, shallow breathing mingled with his heavy sigh.
A pack of coyotes yipped in the distance and Muff, tossed from the fold of Missy's skirt, answered with a puppy howl.
Night air nipped at his back, but Missy's body sizzled an invitation more welcome than the campfire.
A quiet voice inside urged him to meet with Edwin, suitor to guardian. And then what? a louder voice roared. Drag her around the countryside where she would grow tough as hide while he made his ugly living? Or leave her alone in a fine little house while she wondered if he'd make it home at all?
"Darlin', someday, a man from your own world will be lucky to have you as his wife."
He was relieved when she didn't speak. Her silence, along with a shift of her eyebrows, must mean that she didn't take the kiss and the touching as a permanent commitment.
Then she smiled.
Damn! Thinking on it, the woman did seem to get everything she wanted, in one way or another. Heaven help them both if that pretty curl of her lips meant she had felt the kiss as deeply as he had.
* * *
Sixteen hours and twenty miles later the promise in Zane's kiss lingered on Missy's lips.
She stood beside the second-story window of her room in the Dewton Hotel waiting for her bath to be delivered. Even though she gazed at the tidy street below, her mind saw last night's campfire reflecting the promise of something forbidden on Zane's wickedly handsome face.
In the end, he had spun her heart into turmoil by declaring the kiss to be ordinary. Like volcanic eruptions and shooting stars were ordinary, she had whispered back. At that he had scrambled up, dropped the only blanket over her and gone to shiver the night away on the far side of the fire.
The contrary bounty hunter could deny the attraction from now until the Fourth of July, but she knew when a man's touch meant forever. If it hadn't, she would be a compromised woman by now.
"I'd bet the last chapter of my novel that his lips are as blistered as mine are," she announced to Muff. The puppy, curled in an exhausted heap in the middle of a blue gingham bedspread, didn't wiggle an ear.
For a man who didn't care, he had gone to some expense to rent her this room for a week. She had insisted that she could manage very well on her own, but he had given her a ferocious scowl and all but yanked her inside.
In the way of physical comfort, Zane had been more than generous. If only he hadn't closed up his heart like a sea anemone poked with a stick.
"Truth to tell, Muff, I might not have gotten us this nice room on my own. A bath and a nap in a real bed seem only a cloud away from heaven." Muff would hate it, but as soon as she finished her long soak she would give him a thorough scrub. Keeping a white pup up to purebred standards out here in the glorious West was a bigger challenge than she had expected.
Through the open window, the aroma of baking bread and roasting beef floated up from the hotel kitchen.
Anticipation tumbled her stomach, or maybe it was nerves. Zane had invited her to join him for dinner and she knew that he meant to tell her goodbye.
"He has said that to us before, twice," she called over her shoulder. She tapped her fingers on the windowsill.
"Who was the one to have even mentioned marriage?" She spun about to see Muff's feet twitch, chasing something in a dream. "For a fact, that man has a way of filling a girl's head with possibilities."
Missy walked to the bed and plucked a leaf from behind Muff's ear. She crumpled it in her hand then returned to the window to toss it out. Down below, a boy ran after a barking dog. A young couple strolling hand in hand swung out of his way. In the distance a thundercloud blocked the sun. A humid breeze sifted the hair at her temples.
"Before, all I wanted was adventure," she whispered to the changing afternoon. "Now, let's just see if I don't catch a bounty hunter as well."
* * *
By tomorrow morning Zane's life would be back on track. He would leave Missy in the respectable town of Dewton and then finally be free to track Wage.
A glance around the hotel dining room assured him that Missy would feel at home with the folks of the growing town. Women, respectable in every way, wore dresses with bodices buttoned modestly beneath their chins. Men, speaking to their ladies with cordial voices, wore wool suits and polished boots.
Even though he had shaved, combed his hair slick to his head and tied it with the freshly washed ribbon, it would be a stretch to mistake him for a gentleman. He had tried to leave his gun upstairs in his room but he felt vulnerable, like a bull missing its horns, so he strapped it back on.
Heads had turned when he entered the dining room, giving him a wary eye. Once he had settled down at a table in the center of the room, the patrons' attention quickly returned to eating and conversing.
He sipped a beer, waiting for Missy. It was good to know that he would be able to enjoy her company without feeling she needed looking after. Dewton was a quiet town, a peaceful place to live, where days rolled along in quiet predictability.
Close at hand, a fork clattered on a plate. A glass of wine tipped and dribbled on the floor. Three feminine gasps whooshed though the suddenly silent dining room. Outside, thunder rumbled over the roof while lightning flickered at the windows.
Zane glanced up from his drink to see Missy in a glory of red satin and bosom-kissing feathers standing in the doorway. Her flirty hat tipped across a halo of golden curls and whirls. A tinge of embarrassment pinked her cheeks.
Standing, he scraped his chair backward, defying anyone to say a word against her. By habit, he had begun to reach for his gun, but Missy smiled and his fingers relaxed.
With the proud posture of a queen, she nodded to the room at large.
"Good evening, everyone." She shifted her engaging smile from the astonished diners to him. "Good evening, Zane."
Missy Devlin looked li
ke an angel spat from the underworld. She approached the waiter, speaking to him in hushed tones. The blushing man nodded his head when she pointed to an old but well-polished piano in the corner of the dining room.
Zane felt like the worst kind of a heel. He ought to have thought of providing Missy with respectable clothing. The Dewton diners would not have been more shocked to see her striding through the doorway wearing her fancy blue-bowed underwear.
"What a lovely hat," Missy commented, passing by a woman whose thick eyebrows met in a frown. "Maybe you'll tell me where you purchased it?"
The woman glanced away, but to Zane's surprise her expression had softened.
Missy sat down on the piano bench, settling her skirt in a flounce of crimson. She glanced back at him with a wink that nearly buckled his knees.
He thumped down on the chair then lifted his beer in a salute to her. If the divine Miss Devlin could tame the wild men at Pete's, this group would ooze like honey between her fingertips.
Music washed from one end of the room to the other in a melodious wave. Diners set down forks. Glasses plunked on tables. The woman whom Missy had complimented, wearing the ugly bird's-nest hat, plumped it with pride.
When the elegant piece ended, gentlemen stood up in applause while properly dressed ladies eyed the scandalous sparkle of Missy's gown with, of all things, an apparent stirring of envy.
Missy, after a nod and a curtsey, returned to her seat, flushed with satisfaction.
"Darlin', you are a wonder," he said, and meant it to the bone.
Day by day the lady showed her resourcefulness. So far, he hadn't seen the problem that she had not turned to her advantage. It might take longer than a few days to put the vision of her easy smile behind him. Bidding her goodbye might not be the relief he had anticipated.
