Straight For The Heart

by Marsha Canham

  “Including you?”

  “I rarely make the same mistakes twice. And my manners have a tendency to fall by the wayside when someone deliberately asks for trouble.”

  “Is that what you think I am asking for?”

  He shrugged congenially. “It might be what you get if you go back in there.”

  She laughed again. “A Yankee with a conscience. How unusual.”

  “A Rebel still fighting the war,” he countered smoothly. “Not unusual at all … but a bit misguided, perhaps.”

  “Really? How so?”

  “Because I don’t want to fight with you,” he said quietly.

  His words and the way he said them sent a tiny spiral of heat radiating down her spine. It was an innocent enough statement and said casually enough, but there was an unmistakable air of possessiveness about it, as if by not fighting, he assumed they would aspire to some other emotional relationship.

  The notion, surprisingly not an entirely unpleasant one, made her take a closer look at the man who stood so huge and imposing before her. He was handsome almost beyond decency, big with muscles that suggested he was no stranger to hard physical labor. The little creases and lines that life had etched around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth heightened the impression of authority and determination— his was not a face that men scorned with impunity or women rejected out of hand. There was also an efficient grace to his movements, an instinctive balance and agility that implied he was as comfortable walking the decks of a ship as he was a smooth road. It was a trait easy to recognize for someone who had lived by the river all her life. His accent? Pure Bostonian. Blatantly upper crust, although his voice was so deep and carefully modulated, the hardest edges had been worn seductively smooth.

  Michael Tarrington was not unaware of the close scrutiny, and he thought it only fair he should be accorded equal privileges. But with the silvery rush of the river behind her and the muted light from a nearby porthole bathing her face and shoulders in a soft, pearly glow, he was having difficulty regarding her with anything near his usual state of detachment. He wanted to reach out and touch her, to brush the backs of his fingers across her cheek and down her neck to see if her skin was as supple and warm as it promised. He wanted to keep exploring, to run his hands, his mouth, his whole body over hers, to know if her flesh would be as responsive as he imagined. Would she purr when he stroked her? Would she be sweet when he kissed her? Would she let him kiss her now or would she make him go through all the silly motions?

  Now, he thought, and took a measured step closer.

  Montana presented him with a cool shoulder and stared out across the river. “You said you would have bet everything you owned that I was bluffing. Why didn’t you?”

  “Maybe I did.”

  She cast a glance back under the thick sweep of her lashes and regarded him thoughtfully before turning away again.

  “You don’t look like the kind of man who would gamble everything on anything. Or anyone.”

  “You don’t think so? You wound me, madam.”

  “Not fatally, I trust.”

  “You could stop the bleeding … by having a late supper with me.”

  “A late supper,” she said, “would imply a desire to become better acquainted.”

  He drew a slow, deep breath, saturating his senses with the smell of her hair, her skin. He succumbed to an even greater temptation and caught a shiny tendril of her hair in his fingers, fascinated by the slippery, silky texture, wondering how it would look released from its pins and curls. He was directly behind her, his body crowding hers against the rail, his intentions as warm as the smile that brought his lips to within a breath of her ear.

  “Would you rather I just come right out and say it? Shall I simply say that I find you a fascinating and irresistible creature, Montana Rose, and have since the first time I saw you?”

  “The first time?” she questioned with a small frown.

  “It was about a month ago, the last time the Queen stopped in Natchez. I saw you in the salon, talking to the captain—getting him to arrange a seat in a game? As luck would have it, he was too efficient and returned before I had a chance to introduce myself.”

  “How unfortunate,” she said dryly. “And you have been riding the river, watching for me ever since?”

  He defused her sardonic smile with one of his own. “Our meeting tonight was purely accidental, I assure you. I’ve come back on business.”

  “And you wish to invite me along on a business dinner?”

  “I would like to get to know you better. Dinner seems like an amiable place to start. After that …”

  “Yes?”

  Tarrington cursed through another soft laugh. “After that, I was hoping to perhaps mellow that formidable Southern pride of yours. Enough to convince you I never wear blue in public … and never talk politics in bed.”

  The tiny spirals of sensation became disturbingly insistent—almost as insistent as the glaring looks that were coming from the shadowy figure who stood not twenty paces away and who had been observing them—with increasing signs of agitation—for several minutes now.

  “The possibilities sound intriguing, Mr. Tarrington,” she said. “But unfortunately, I prefer to keep my Southern pride intact. I don’t find you fascinating in the least, and the fact that all of your charm and conversation has been in aid of procuring yourself a bedmate for the evening … well, I find that amazingly easy to resist.”

  The gray eyes narrowed sharply. “The war has been over for two long years, Montana.”

  “Yes,” she said, offering an exaggerated sigh as she brushed an invisible fleck of lint from his jacket lapel, “but I’m afraid you will be a Yankee forever.”

  She swept past him with a regal flourish of velvet skirts and re-entered the brightly lit salon. Tarrington watched her go, her rebuff keeping him rooted to the spot for as long as his mind held the image of her framed by the arched entry-way. When he realized it wasn’t merely a ploy, that she wasn’t coming back, his fingers curled around the cheroot and crushed it in half before he flung it over the rail and consigned it to the swirling eddies of the river. He strode back into the salon without ever noticing the man who stood watching him from the deck rail, nor did he see the man emerge from the shadows and follow purposefully in his wake.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Montana won two hands easily, folded early in the third, and lost a maddening fifteen hundred dollars on a bluff she should have smelled standing a mile downwind. The atmosphere, as Tarrington predicted, was definitely grittier after the short break. Norman Smith chose the role of observer instead of participant, and while he amused himself winking at the hostess and tossing back shots of whiskey, the remaining four players concentrated all of their energies on winning. The air behind the closed draperies became increasingly hot and smoke-filled. The tension and strain seemed to feed upon itself and build until Montana could feel it in the muscles across her back and shoulders. She had announced upon returning to the game that she would be departing at two A.M. whether she was ahead or behind. With an hour still to go, she wondered if her patience would last.

  There was no more light banter. Lyle Swanson had stopped humming, twitching, and tapping. Whitney’s glowering countenance dominated the table and set an undertone of mistrust and belligerence. He studied every play like a hawk; he consumed an amazing quantity of liquor, which only served to make his mood blacker, his remarks blunter. It was distracting enough that Montana was more inclined to lean toward caution where she should have capitalized on several glaring opportunities.

  She lost the next three hands in a row, one to Swanson, two to Tarrington.

  The latter, true to his word, ignored her completely and focused on winning—which he did very well. He swore as fluently as Whitney, drank as heavily, and smoked his accursed little cigars until Montana thought her eyes would catch fire. He lavished tips and attention on the brunette waitress who showed her appreciation by practically spilling her
breasts into his hands each time she bent over to replenish his drinks. Once, when a cloth napkin fell in his lap, she took so long to retrieve it, both Swanson and Whitney stared. Tarrington only smiled. And the waitress’s eyes grew to the size of saucers.

  Montana counted the minutes and held her patience in check. As luck would have it, when it came to play the last hand, she had the deal again and could barely keep the relief out of her voice as she called for the others to ante up. Despite her losses, she was still ahead on the night. It would have given her a warm feeling to see a few thousand more pried out of Tarrington’s billfold, but she was more than content with her profits.

  “You aim to deal those cards or shuffle the spots clean?” Whitney growled.

  Montana glanced over and deliberately shuffled several more times before dealing. She set the deck aside and scanned the hand she had given herself, smiling inwardly when she saw the two aces, two kings, and the six of diamonds, as honest as the day they were printed.

  Whitney seemed less pleased, but since he had abandoned his tactic of taking one or none, he tapped the table twice and said, “Two.”

  Swanson drew two also, but Tarrington only stared across the table at Montana and grinned. “I kind of like what I see; I’ll stand pat.”

  Whitney and Swanson were instantly on guard. He had stood pat twice before and bluffed them out of several thousand dollars apiece.

  “They say a blind man only stumbles into the same wall once,” Swanson muttered.

  “Is that what they say?” Tarrington mused.

  “Indeed. And then his instincts tell him when to avoid it. Mine, sir,” he said, tossing down his cards, “are buzzing like a nest of hornets.”

  Montana met the Yankee’s gaze as he dismissed the banker with a small shrug.

  “Dealer takes one,” she said, discarding the six of diamonds and picking up the eight of clubs.

  Whitney opened with a bet of two hundred.

  “Your two hundred,” Tarrington drawled easily, “and two thousand more.”

  Smith, sitting back in the shadows, leaned forward in his chair and perked to attention. “What am I missing?”

  “Nothing yet,” Tarrington said blithely. “But you’re about to witness the second surrender of the Confederacy.”

  Montana slid her thumb along the top edge of her cards and glared across the table. She knew he was baiting her and she knew she should have shrugged him aside as casually as he had dismissed the banker’s jibe, but it was the last hand …

  “Twenty-two hundred to stay,” he reminded her with a soft, whiskey-induced hiccough. “About as much as what was left in the Rebel treasury when we took Richmond, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Smith guffawed and pulled his chair closer.

  “Your twenty-two hundred,” she said quietly. “And five thousand more.”

  Whitney grinned for the first time all evening and displayed a row of childishly small teeth overlaid by thick pink gums. He threw his cards face down and folded his arms over his chest. “I might just sit back and enjoy this. You two deserve each other.”

  Tarrington drew on his cheroot, clouding the air over the table while he debated the bottomless blue of Montana’s eyes. He remembered then where he had seen the color before. Not in the warm, tropical waters of the Caribbean, where he had first guessed, but in the cold heart of an ice flow he had once encountered on a whaling expedition out of Boston.

  He counted out the five thousand in greenbacks, then went to his billfold for an additional ten thousand.

  Montana curled her fingers around the gold locket, her thumb smoothing over the scrolled letter M. The stakes had risen with a breathtaking lack of warning, no thanks to her own reckless behavior. If he was running a bluff, it would cost her nearly everything she had just to find out. On the other hand, if she called, there would be thousands of dollars sitting under the glare of the oil lamp.

  “Well, Miss Montana Rose? Unless my arithmetic fails me, you have enough to cover the bet, with a little left over for a pretty new frock. I don’t know how much experience you have playing this man’s game, but I’ll give you the same advice I gave young Scott: You might want to play it smart and quit while you still have something to brag about.”

  Her instincts were screaming at her to back off, that she had been set up as neatly as Paul Whitney in the earlier rounds—as easily as she herself had set them all up. Greed sent her eyes to the center of the green baize tabletop, to the rich pile of coins and greenbacks that awaited her decision. She had the cards. She wanted the money. It was all or nothing.

  She pushed her bet into the middle of the table and laid her cards face-up beside it, spreading them to show three aces and two kings.

  “Goddamn full house!” Swanson’s eyes bulged and his jowls twitched. The balding dome of his head glowed a deep, exuberant red as he slapped his hands flat on the table. “Goddamn aces and goddamn kings!”

  Montana smiled, if only to ease the strain in her jaw. She was on the verge of sharing some of Swanson’s laughter when she saw Michael Tarrington begin to lay his cards on the table, one by one.

  King. Queen. Jack. Ten. Nine. Of spades.

  She stared at the flush in disbelief and horror.

  “Sorry, Montana,” he said easily. “But you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, talking through lips that felt numb and wooden. “You did warn me. But then that’s all part of the game, isn’t it?”

  When she had watched his long, elegant hands gather the last of the bills and coins to his side of the table, she collected her own meager sum and stood.

  “Well, gentlemen, that has unquestionably finished me for tonight. I thank you for an enjoyable and entertaining evening. Perhaps we will meet again another time.”

  She walked stiffly from the alcove, her heart pounding so loudly in her ears, it drowned every other sound. Voices, movement, laughter, conversations swirled around her as she started down the stairs to the main salon, but she took no notice of anything or anyone. She felt, in fact, as if she were pushing her way through a huge vat of water, with everything moving slowly, and every sound muffled and blurred except for that of her own voice.

  “Stupid,” she hissed. “Stupid!”

  “Yes, it was, wasn’t it?” a voice echoed in her ear.

  Montana whirled around, unaware she had stopped halfway down the stairs or that Tarrington had come up behind her.

  The sight of his gloating smile cleared her senses like a cold, hard slap in the face and she spun away from him, hurrying the rest of the way down the staircase. Force of habit made her gather up her flaring skirts, but the sudden forward lurch she took to get away from Tarrington put her toe in her hem and would have sent her sprawling headlong off the bottom landing if not for the hand that was suddenly, firmly at her elbow.

  “Allow me,” he said, steadying her against the muscled wall of his chest.

  “Let go of me this instant,” she whispered fiercely.

  “Not until you get a grip on yourself. And not until we talk.”

  “We have nothing more to say,” she spat.

  “I think we do.” His voice was insistent and so was the hand that remained clamped around her upper arm, guiding her out onto the deck. She either had to follow along or cry out in pain and create a scene. Screaming and clawing his face to bloody ribbons would have made her feel better, but they were drawing enough attention as it was.

  Once out on the relative privacy of the deck, however, she wrenched her arm free and put several paces’ worth of shadowy distance between them.

  “Thank you very much for the escort. Now, will you leave me alone, or must I call for assistance?”

  “Are you certain I can’t get you a glass of water, or something a little stronger, perhaps?”

  “No!”

  “Pray, don’t tell me the lady gambler with the nerves of steel cannot take a loss in stride?”

  Montana bristled at the sarcasm. “I can take
a loss, Mr. Tarrington. What I cannot endure is a Yankee scoundrel who gloats over his winnings.”

  “It was not my intention to gloat. I only wanted to make sure you were all right. You looked a little shaken when you left the table.”

  “I’m fine,” she retorted. “Thank you. Now will you please take your pious concern elsewhere and find some other poor unfortunate to dazzle with your barbarian wit and charm.”

  “Yes,” he murmured, arching a brow, “you are feeling better.”

  “Then will you please go away and leave me alone!”

  “No,” he said quietly. “I may be a Yankee scoundrel, but it has been quite some time since I allowed a beautiful—and somewhat distressed—young woman to find her own way home. This is neither the time of night nor the type of city to wander around without an escort.”

  “As it happens, I already have an escort,” she snapped. “A very impatient one at that, so if you don’t mind—”

  “Impatient and invisible?” asked Tarrington, glancing pointedly along both lengths of the deserted deck.

  “He won’t be invisible much longer. Especially if I scream.”

  Tarrington moved closer, his long legs slicing through the stream of light that escaped the salon window. “Come now, I don’t frighten you that much, do I?”

  “It would not be fear that prompts me to scream, sir, but sheer frustration!”

  He was close enough to see her face clearly in the light from the salon window. She was angry, to be sure, but also frightened of something—or someone—and Tarrington’s jaw set itself in a grim line. He should have known.

  “So. You have an escort. How will he take it when he finds out how much of his money you lost?”

  Montana felt the heat rise up her throat and bloom in her cheeks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t you? Surely you can’t take a man’s loose change, increase it to nearly twenty thousand dollars, then lose it all— and more—in one misguided hand … and expect him to be amused. I know I wouldn’t be.”