Wild Fire (Wild State)
Page 6
No wonder he wasn’t interested. Honestly, she was probably lucky he hadn’t filed a restraining order, given the plethora of texts, voice mails, and e-mails she’d sent his way over the past months. Normal people didn’t hold on to memories of a single night for a decade.
But what a night it had been.
Apparently finished readying herself, Fiona packed up her case. “Did he fall for you, too?”
Sadie rose, shrugging. “I thought so. But like I said, it was a long time ago. And I shouldn’t have pursued him this time like I did.”
She hadn’t been able to help herself, though. When she’d seen him again on the set for Vendetta, for the first time in ten years, she had felt…empowered. Like a lightning bolt had hit her, and she had suddenly seen, with astonishing clarity, exactly what she’d needed.
What she’d needed, with all that empowering electricity zinging through her veins, was Ryan Young. The one who got away. The one who, if she was honest, could count as a failure now twice over.
Bloody hell, but Sadie hated failing. “What time is Declan arriving?”
Back in the bedroom, Fiona checked her phone. “The car will be here any minute.”
Sadie slid into ruby-red stiletto heels, which the stylist had packed into a box along with a tiny gold-sequined clutch, and checked her appearance one last time in the tall mirror. Declan had called the other night and offered to be her escort on the red carpet, but she’d assured him she was happy to walk alone. After all, she was a thirty-year-old multimillionaire, and often referred to as the “leading actress of her generation.” She didn’t need a man on her arm.
No matter how much she may have wanted one.
Understanding that Declan’s offer came from a place of friendship, however, she’d suggested they drive together, leading to Fiona packing up her bags to put in the trunk for the duration of the premiere. “Thank you for coming,” Sadie said as they headed down the two flights of stairs toward the front door. “You didn’t have to do my makeup, you know.”
“Well, Declan doesn’t let me put pretty, pretty lipstick on him, so feel free to consider yourself practice material,” Fiona said with a cheeky grin. “Plus, I’m the right price.”
“Indeed.” All Fiona’s expertise had cost her was a glass of wine, an hour of gossip, and a little painful baring of her soul. Tires sounded on gravel outside as they reached the foyer. “Our chariot awaits,” she said as she held the door open for Fiona, keying in the four-digit code to lock it behind her as they stepped into the California sunshine.
She turned to watch as the driver emptied Fiona’s laden arms, which allowed Fiona to flow directly into Declan’s, where he stood next to the sleek black car. He pressed his face into the side of her neck, appearing to breathe her in, and murmured something too low for Sadie to hear.
Whatever it was, it turned Fiona positively radiant.
Pulling back, the Irishman eyed Sadie and whistled. “You are impossibly gorgeous tonight, Bit,” Declan said, using the nickname of her character from their film. He’d never quite been able to kick the habit of calling her that, and she found she didn’t mind, there was so much affection for her in his voice.
She moved forward with a smile when he offered his hand to help her into the backseat of the car. “You’re not too shabby yourself.” The actor did look especially dapper this evening in a finely tailored three-piece suit of dark navy and soft silver tie. “Excited for your first world premiere?”
His dark eyes gleamed. “You know it.” He handed Fiona in after her, then settled next to his girlfriend, across from Sadie, and they were on their way.
As the plush town car whisked them toward the Regency Village Theatre in Westwood, where the premiere was being held, Sadie gazed determinedly out the car window. It wasn’t that Declan and Fiona were being overt—they weren’t—but there was a…a connection that seemed to radiate from them, like sunlight. And Sadie had forgotten to wear shades.
The trio chatted amicably during the drive about nothing in particular, a fact for which Sadie was grateful. It would be too easy to focus on her decision to put Ryan in the past, where he belonged, when she ought to be thinking about the future. Her future.
She was, after all, a thirty-year-old multimillionaire. The leading actress of her generation. And not exactly hard on the eyes, to boot. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find a man who made her feel the same way Ryan did—or rather, had.
For one selfish minute, she allowed herself to remember. The train, the snow, the kiss…the “wow.” Her shabby flat on Christmas Eve, and her parents’ townhouse on Christmas Day. How she’d waited by the phone for hours and watched her mailbox for days, and then, when he hadn’t gotten in touch, had made a list of Next Steps she could take to find him—and promptly discarded when her best friend Marie had said, in the no-nonsense tone so at odds with her romantic French accent, “If he wanted to see you, he would have found you by now, non? You are not hiding.”
Yet part of her, she’d discovered when she came face to face with Ryan Young after so much time apart, had indeed been in hiding. For nearly ten years, she had held onto the hope of him, tucking it away in the corner of her heart relegated to naive dreams of love—the forever kind of love, which she saw exemplified in her parents every single day.
Forever-love wasn’t for everyone. She and her brother Kai had talked about it once, when he’d flown in from New York to see her house, shortly after she had made the move from London to L.A. permanent. “We can’t all be lucky, like Mum and Dad,” he had told her as they sat on her deck, sipping white wine and watching the sun set over the boats on the canal. “They got the best of both worlds—to-die-for love and insane financial success. You never hear one of them complain, do you?”
She had stared into the depths of her glass. “I’d rather trade the latter for the former,” she’d told him, and maybe, just maybe, she had been thinking of Ryan in that moment.
Now, possessing the latter in spades, Sadie attempted to lock up the corner of her heart convinced she and Ryan had unfinished business. By the time the town car stopped at the foot of the red carpet, her most beatific—and most professional—smile was firmly in place. Declan and Fiona allowed her to exit the vehicle first, and she began her slow trek down the line of press, paparazzi, and waiting fans.
It took more than half an hour to work through the sea of interviewers with oversized microphones and minuscule cameras, to smile and turn for the fashion police with the loud clicking of single-lens shutters and the bright flash of bulbs. Sadie was more than familiar with the routine, having made her first big movie at age twenty-one, and had quickly discovered she enjoyed red-carpet events such as these. Some actors never adapted to the seemingly shallow demands of fame, but she saw it as a trade-off for being able to do what she loved and not having to worry about her next paycheck.
Upon reaching the end of the line, she glanced toward the historic movie theater’s entrance—
—and nearly tripped over the hem of her gown to see Ryan standing inside the first set of glass doors, watching her. Even from here, she could see the glint of green eyes, watching her every step bring her closer to where he waited.
“No,” she whispered, chastising her traitorous heart for leaping at the sight of him. The man had made it painfully clear that he had no interest in seeing what, if anything, existed between them now that they were older and wiser, and Sadie wasn’t willing to let her heart be trampled any more than it already had been.
Lifting her chin as she walked through the door held open by a uniformed theater usher, she did her best to pass him without meeting his gaze. She didn’t want to look into those irises of forest green and allow the deluge of memories to sway her from her course. No, she was stronger than that.
Age thirty. Crazy-rich. Badass actress with an Oscar nom under her belt. She had this, man.
“Sadie.”
God damn him, his rich baritone voice, and its charming American accent.
She could have tugged her hand free. He would let her go, if she told him to release her. But he was touching her, and tendrils of sensual heat wound around her arm, licking a path to her bare shoulder before spreading into her chest. Her pulse thudded in her ears as she stood, her back to his front, and waited as he asked of her.
His grip gentled, but he didn’t release her wrist, instead stepping closer until she felt the warmth of his body against her naked back, revealed by the cut of her dress. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your e-mails.” His mouth hovered over her ear, and she shivered at the accidental—because it must be accidental, mustn’t it?—brush of his lips over sensitive flesh. “Or your voice mails. Or your texts. I should’ve called you back.”
“It would have been ten years too late, anyway,” she hissed, surprised at the venom in her own voice. But venom masked the hurt, and she decided she was grateful for the anger that had sprung to life the moment he touched her.
She could almost feel his wince behind her. “Can we talk?”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing, Ryan?”
He shook his head as his body aligned with hers. “Somewhere private.”
She froze as intimate memories assailed her of waking up on Christmas morning just like this, his tall, rangy frame curved possessively over her much smaller one. Hating the effect his nearness had on her, the ache gathering in her chest and threatening to subsume her pounding heart, she turned abruptly and stared up at him.
He wasn’t exactly handsome, per se, but his face was compelling, with angular features and strong jaw. His nose was a little too long, and his lips slightly thinner than expected, given his wide mouth, but she remembered loving how the tip of that nose touched her cheek as they kissed, and how those lips shaped hers so perfectly that first time, and all the times thereafter.
His messy light-brown hair that so easily picked up streaks of sunlight when regularly exposed to it had been neatly combed for tonight’s premiere, the scruff that usually shaded his jaw shaved away, as well. All six feet and two inches of him had been stuffed into a slick designer suit of stark black and white, and he wore a rather formidable frown as he gazed down at her.
Looking at him stole the breath from her lungs, so her heart made the decision before her head could think better of it. “Where did you have in mind?”
Sliding his fingers past the bracelet, he linked their fingers in a move both familiar and not, and whispered, “Come with me.”
Return to the western frontier with this excerpt from Wild Chase, coming soon!
Don’t scare her. She’s just a little girl.
Standing alone on the small, square station platform as a light snow drifted down, waiting for a plume of dark smoke to appear on the colorless eastern horizon, Alonzo Hood growled. The voice in his head—David’s voice—just wouldn’t leave him alone today.
It’s not her fault she is the way she is.
“Of course it is, you fool.” Lon popped the collar of his black wool overcoat to shield his neck from the col. He knew all about Esther Beldonne, and that conniving Louisiana tart had made her own lawbreaking bed. Now he was going to make her lie in it.
David couldn’t have been blamed for his blind eye, however. Esther’s childhood had taken place far away from Danton House, in the wild, sin-rich city of New Orleans. David and Esther may have shared a mother, but after she met a criminally minded Cajun, that mother had wanted nothing to do with her husband and eight-year-old son.
What David had never understood, but Lon did, was that Esther had been faced with a choice between right and wrong, and she had chosen the latter. She had chosen the latter again and again and again. Lon had known exactly who his best friend’s younger half-sister was the moment he’d laid eyes on her six years ago, when she had lifted his Yale signet ring and his purse. The money he hadn’t cared about, but the ring….
Taking the ring had been her biggest mistake. Because there wasn’t a chance in hell Lon would ever forget its loss, or the party responsible. Which made her a target.
His target.
You promised you’d look out of her.
Far in the distance, a tiny black cloud puffed up in the sky. The train was coming.
You promised, Lon.
“Shut up,” he muttered at David’s chastising voice, at the very same moment the cheerfully rotund stationmaster stepped out onto the platform.
The older man’s smile faltered, and he cleared his throat and tapped the watch fob pinned to his waistcoat. “Ten minutes ’til arrival, Marshal.”
Lon managed a polite nod, pretending as though he hadn’t noticed the stationmaster’s gaze turn wary. It wasn’t the first time hearing David’s voice caused some strange looks to be directed Lon’s way. If this was a haunting, David was doing a damn poor job of it, his prodding voice more annoying than eerie.
If Lon could make his dead friend disappear, he would.
He stared down the tracks, waiting for the first sight of the engine. Or maybe he wouldn’t banish the voice. These conversations with David warmed the shadowed recesses where he’d secreted away his memories, casting them in a gentle glow and allowing him to revisit, at his leisure, a childhood that had been at times both lovely and harsh.
Days spent wandering through the designated safe areas of the Danton arms manufactory, nights spent peeking in nearby whorehouse windows. Lon would be hard-pressed to choose which memory he loved more, and each with David Danton at his side.
Except today, he wanted the voice gone, because he had promised to look after Esther. He’d promised almost a year ago, when he’d found David dying with cruel slowness from his war wounds in a makeshift hospital in Virginia, that he would do his best to keep Esther out of trouble.
Or rather, to keep her from getting into any more trouble. She and Cassius Redding—her partner and assumed lover—had cut quite a swath from Louisiana to the Carolinas and back again. Confidence schemes were the duo’s stock-in-trade, but over the past eighteen months, their crimes had escalated to outright theft with a side helping of assault and, in one very public instance, manslaughter. Every marshal in the country had the names Redding and Beldonne at the top of his most-wanted list.
Lon frowned, shifting his weight to keep warm as he watched the train chug closer and closer, the clang of its heavy steel mechanisms a rhythmic grunt in his ears. Three months ago, rumors had flown that Esther and Redding had parted ways, with Redding setting up shop for himself in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter…and Esther vanishing. It bothered him, that sudden shift in dynamic, until he’d gotten the letter.
The other letter—not the one he’d received in the weeks following David’s death containing a note with Esther’s name scribbled in David’s messy handwriting across the heavy, embossed stationery. That particular letter he would deliver to her hands in good time…as soon as those hands were shackled in front of her.
No, Lon’s letter was from a Pinkerton agent named J.P. Owens, whom old Danton had hired to stalk his estranged wife’s illegitimate daughter after Esther had allegedly shown up at Danton House in Connecticut last month and stolen…something. According to Frederick Danton’s statement, included in Owens’s letter, Esther had attacked a housemaid during the theft, bruising the girl’s face and splitting her lip.
Esther wouldn’t do that.
Frankly, Lon had his own doubts about the veracity of Danton’s claim, even without David’s voice in his head. Hiding behind those happier memories of autumn days spent playing hooky with David were the remembered instances of what Danton had done when he found out about his son skipping school. The beatings, the twisted words of filth and violence spewing from Danton’s mouth as he wielded the belt—all while Lon had been forced to stand there, shoulders held by the Danton family’s oversized butler, and watch while th
e closest thing he had to a brother endured the pain in stoic silence.
“It’s your mission to keep him on a righteous path, Alonzo,” Danton would say in between lashes, manic eyes never leaving his son’s thin, coltish frame. “Half of him is Satan’s spawn, and he’ll always be tempted to do things he shouldn’t.”
Thwack.
“It’s your job, Alonzo, to rein in his demons.”
Thwack.
“Or prepare to see your friend suffer as the gates of hell open wide for him. But not at my hand.”
Thwack. Thwack.
“I do this for David’s own good. For yours too, Alonzo.”
In those moments, Lon had sought David’s gaze, needing reassurance and offering it in return, and David—the brave, stupid boy—would simply roll his eyes.
No, Danton was not a rational man, but the agent currently in his employ didn’t seem to care—or perhaps Owens didn’t know his employer’s malevolent streak. The letter was dated less than a week ago from Chicago, and felt like a volatile explosive where it rested in Lon’s jacket pocket. His gloved hand hovered over his chest, over the letter, before falling back to his side. The only line that mattered today was one he’d already memorized.
EB in Iowa City via rail on Thurs, then to board stage. Final destination: Denver.
Ester was heading to Denver City. Lon’s territory.
He wanted to know why.
Because of the Pinkerton’s letter, Lon was now waiting for a train in the snow, staring out over the vast sameness of the Iowa plains. The train neared, the clank-groan-hiss of the powerful machine an echo of the labor it had likely taken to build it. A single passenger car hooked behind the engine and coal wagon, windows reflecting the gleaming, gray-white emptiness of the winter sky. Freight cars followed, dull and dirt-streaked, coupled one after the other until Lon glimpsed the caboose with its green-painted roof and flapping yellow flag bringing up the rear.
Lon tugged his gloves higher over his wrists as freezing air and maddened snowflakes swirled around him, blasted into a frenzy by the slow, screeching stop of the train pulling parallel with the platform. The tops of his ears stung, and he knew his cheeks looked as chapped and red as they felt, but he wasn’t about to go inside the station house. Not when she was moments away from stepping off that train and into his custody.