by Sharon Ihle
Maybe in time, Gant mused, he could actually learn to associate the term family with something other than the word gang. He liked what he saw between Maria and Rayna, and wondered if that sense of sharing or whatever it was couldn’t be one of the things missing from his emotional pockets, one of those little fillers that could ease up on the emptiness inside.
Over at the washbasin, unaware that his brother’s thoughts and gaze were so intently upon him, J.R. dampened a cloth. “Want to roll over on your gut so’s I can wash up your back?” he asked as he hurried over to the bed.
Groaning with a fair amount of pain, Gant adjusted his body until he was lying face down on the mattress. He turned his head to the side and gave himself up to his brother’s ministrations. Then he set out to gain some information on the family he’d tried so hard to forget.
“How are the rest of the boys, J.R.? Are junior and Lou still taking orders from the old man?”
“Yeah, I suppose you could say that, but some of us takes orders better than the rest.”
“Oh? Like how?”
J.R. shrugged, careful not to disturb Gant’s wounds. “They’re a little like me, I guess,” he explained. “You know, trying to do right by the old man, but always messing up. Like today. Hell, if pa’d been there to see me faint dead away after you got hurt, he’d have shot me on the spot. The last time that happened to me, it was all Junior could do to keep him from leaving me where I was stretched out.”
Gant raised his head. Ten years was a long time, but from what he remembered, that particular Gantry was almost as ruthless as his twin.
“Junior saved your hide? Are you sure? That doesn’t sound like the brother I remember.”
J.R. cut loose with a giggle. “I guess it don’t. Junior ain’t been the same since he got hisself a woman of his own.”
“A woman? You mean Junior went and got himself married?”
“Not married, but no one else is allowed around this little gal. Pa keeps saying that Junior’s in looove.” He giggled again. “Then Junior gets so mad, his eyes get all bugged out and he turns red.”
“Now that sounds like the Junior I remember.”
J.R. hung his head. “That ain’t nothing compared to what his eyeballs are gonna do the day Pa gets his hands on that little gal. He means to break that woman to the saddle a time or two hisself the first time Junior ain’t looking. Told me he was gonna, he did.”
Knowing that J.R. hadn’t exaggerated, Gant grumbled to himself. Nothing had changed with the Gantry family. He rested his head against the mattress again and thought of his youngest brother, who’d been a sickly boy of eight the last time he’d seen him. Had he grown up as jaded as the rest?
“What about Lou,” Gant made himself ask. “How does he take to running with the gang?”
“Not so good.”
The sadness in J.R.’s voice brought Gant’s head up again. “Is he thinking of breaking away?”
J.R. flung the washcloth across the room. It landed with a splash in the basin.
“I don’t know, Gant,” he said through a heavy sigh. “Lou’s still busting his butt trying to prove that he’s man enough to be a Gantry.”
“That poor kid doesn’t have a chance.” Gant leaned forward, easing the strain on his torn muscles, and took a couple of deep breaths. When the pain subsided, he went on. “Tell me more about Lou. Can he make the break like you did?”
J.R. eased down on the mattress beside Gant. “I don’t know for sure. Remember how skinny and delicate he was? He never did get bigger than a cactus needle, and even now he’s not hardly as tall as me. Tween that and his curly blond hair you could say he’s kinda pretty.”
“How does the old man treat him?”
“He calls him some of the names he likes to call you. He pokes a lot of fun at him.”
Gant knew exactly what J.R. meant. “How does Lou take it?”
J.R. shrugged. “He just keeps doing crazier things trying to prove he’s tough enough to be a Gantry. Last time I fainted it was kind of Lou’s fault. That bastard of a father we got uses him as the front man, you know, sends him in first to see if the coach passengers have guns.”
“I remember,” Gant said wryly. “He used to use me that way until you came along.”
“Yeah, that’s right. And after me, Lou.”
Keeping J.R. on track, Gant asked, “So why did you faint that day?”
“Right.” J.R. scratched his head. “Pa decided we ought to hit this stagecoach, and told Lou to do all of the talking. So Lou says to the stage driver, ‘You open your mouth to say one word, and I’m gonna blow you off the damn stage.’ So the driver turns to the guard sitting next to him and says, ‘toss your shotgun over the side,’ and damned if the old man didn’t fire a load of buckshot at the driver, screaming at him all the while, ‘Did you hear what the kid said? This ain’t no little girl you’re dealing with here.”
J.R. shuddered at the memory, and then went kind of white. “When we saw the mess pa made of that driver’s arm cause of what Lou told him to do and he didn’t, Lou started to cry. I fainted.”
Gant patted J.R.’s trembling shoulder. “I guess nothing has changed in the family, except for you, of course. Thank God there aren’t any more Gantry’s.”
“For now, anyways,” J.R. muttered.
Another question he was afraid to ask. “What does that mean?”
J.R. gave him a sideways glance. “Remember Guadalupe?”
Gant had to give it some thought, but he couldn’t come up with a recollection of this woman. “No.”
“She’s our ma’s Apache sister. That makes her our aunt or something like that.”
“Indeed it does,” he said, trying to remember the women from his mother’s village, this sister in particular. “What about her?”
“Pa took up with her a couple of winters ago. She’s knocked up bigger than Texas. Might even be twins like Luther and Junior.”
“Just what the world needs,” Gant muttered. “Another Gantry or two.”
His mind full of new worries, Gant pushed up from the bed and reached for the stained Levis that J.R. had tossed on the chair. He needed to work, to spot sawyers for Duke, to do something.
Gant shook his soiled Levis upside down, emptying pockets onto his mattress, and then flung them aside and opened his dresser for a new pair. After he’d stepped into the clean Levis and buttoned them, he turned back to the bed and found J.R. fingering the shiny black jaguar Maria had given to him.
“Where’d you get this?” asked J.R.
“It was a gift from a friend.” Gant slipped into a clean shirt. “Why? Do you like it?”
“Like it?” J.R. rolled his eyes. “It’s a black painter. That’s the animal I want to learn how to train next. That or one of them spotted leopards.”
J.R. continued to stroke the figurine, eyes shining with excitement. “Damn, a real black painter.”
Gant didn’t have to think for long about what he did next. As he pulled on fresh socks and his boots, he said, “Would you like to keep it?”
“Honest?” J.R.’s sloping eyes almost turned up at the corners. “You’d give it to me, just like that?”
“Sure. The lady who gave it to me said it was a lucky charm or something like that. She said if I kept it with me, I’d have good luck. I figure if you’re going to be working with those lions, you need it a lot worse than I do. I’ve gotten as close to Zoltaire and his friends as I plan to.”
“All right.” J.R. leapt to his feet. “I can’t hardly believe it. A black painter for a lucky charm.”
J.R. shoved the figurine into his pant’s pocket and headed for the door. “How lucky can a fellah get?”
Fourteen
That same evening at the port of Memphis most of the troupe members were preparing for opening night. Most, but not Maria, who was still fasting in her fashion. She crept around to the back of the ship, and then leaned over the low railing. Checking first to make sure that she wasn’t being observed,
she pushed two of her pudgy fingers into her mouth and drove them down her throat. After giving up every last morsel of her recent supper, she rinsed her mouth and waddled back to the arena.
An hour later behind the dress circle of that same arena, Rayna anxiously waited for the first show to get under way. She stood out of sight in a narrow walkway that ran behind the seats and down the length of the ship, an area that served as a private passageway between the stables and dressing rooms. The air was filled with excitement, and Gus’s band was busy making raucous circus music. Even the efforts of Toby’s strong wrists could still be heard as he hammered away at the calliope keyboard atop ship. Through the din, Rayna picked out the excited voices of customers as they took their seats.
It was going to be a very good crowd. Already the audience had swollen to at least three times the hundred odd people they’d attracted at the settlement down river. Butterflies took flight in Rayna’s stomach as she thought of her Cleopatra act before such a crowd. She took a deep steadying breath, filling her lungs with the scent of fresh sawdust, a commodity in abundant supply in the war-torn towns during this time of reconstruction. To her it smelled like home.
Rayna sniffed the air again, identifying another, more mouth-watering aroma; popcorn. The Bailey children were set up in a little stand near the entrance, and they were selling not just popcorn, but lemonade and sour balls to customers as they streamed by them on their way to the seating area. Rayna was thinking of hurrying back through the dressing rooms to grab a bag of popcorn for herself when she realized that someone had moved up behind her.
Before she could turn to identify her visitor, a strong arm slipped around her waist and then tugged her bottom up tight against his hips. Sensuous fingers parted her hair and teeth nipped at the back of her ear, lingering there to nibble for one lusty moment.
Then Gant’s husky voice whispered, “Where in the hell have you been? I’ve gone from one end of this ship to the other looking for you.”
Rayna laughed, shivering as Gant pulled her loose hair out of the way. Then he began to work his mouth down the side of her neck. She tried to turn and face him, but that strong arm held her fast while the other, weakened from his injuries, caressed her left hip. He felt good against her, good and right. How could she have ever thought that their attraction for one another was wrong? Tingles ran up her spine as Gant’s lips made the return trip up the side of her neck to the back of her ear.
When he began to nuzzle her there, Rayna said, “I’ve been standing here trying to get rid of my opening night dithers. Had I known these services were available, I’d have gone looking for you a lot earlier.”
“I’m here now, Princess,” he said suggestively. “Let me see if I can’t relax you a little more.”
His injured arm slid across her tummy, and then he began to caress her, dipping lower where he lightly brushed the soft rise between her legs. Fingers splayed, he lingered there, stroking that delicate swell through the cotton of her costume before slowly returning to her abdomen. Rayna’s breath caught and she moaned, the sound a deep primal purr.
“Stop that,” she said, not meaning it. Then with a throaty chuckle she let her head fall back against the hard plane of muscles at Gant’s chest.
The sound of her laughter was more aphrodisiac than Gant was prepared for. Suddenly impatient to taste her, to feel the full complement of Rayna’s body against his, he released his hold on her waist. Moving surprising fast for a man with only one good arm, he spun her around and crushed her to him, burying his face into her thick black hair. Gant filled his lungs with the perfume of those locks, a new and strangely cloying aroma, and then leaned back to catch her chin between his fingers. She was more than simply beautiful today, radiant and more bewitching than usual, dressed as she was to represent Cleopatra.
Complimenting Rayna’s white gown, which was criss-crossed at the bodice with gold trim, she wore another golden rope braided as an Egyptian headband. This adornment featured a serpent that rose up from the center of her forehead, drawing attention to her hypnotic eyes. More lustrous and truer a color than the emeralds sewn to her dress, Rayna’s exotic eyes were highlighted and lengthened with smudges of kohl to make them look even more slanted than they were. And her mouth, those full, naturally roseate lips, had been stained a dark crimson, making them seem even riper, pouty. The affect of all this went beyond erotic. It drew every bit of Gant’s savage ancestry to the surface, and then left him simmering with need.
He lowered his head, intending to deliver a hard, passionate kiss, but something other than passion burst inside him at the last instant. Something warm, delicious—terrifying. Thoughts fluttered about in his mind as he stared down at Rayna, almost but not quite landing long enough for him to grasp their meaning. Gant struggled with those thoughts, fending off the more savage instincts of his body until he could make sense of these new, powerful emotions. Then, with a suddenness that startled him, those scattered thoughts formed a whole and settled on the tip of his tongue as a single word. Love. Holy hell—was he actually falling in love?
The shocking reality of those thoughts slapped Gant much harder and ripped him far deeper than Zoltaire’s claws had. This reaction wasn’t lost on Rayna. She’d been standing there, her chin tilted, prepared to accept the kiss he promised to deliver. Now her eyebrows were drawn together in confusion.
“Gant?” she whispered softly as she ran her hands along his hairline to his temples. “Are you all right? You look a little peaked.”
“I’m fine,” he said, sounding hoarse to his own ears. “I was just thinking.”
“About what?”
Should he come right out and say it? And then what? He had nothing to offer Rayna beyond love. What if she rejected him, or worse, laughed in his face?
“Something’s wrong,” Rayna remarked. She brushed her hand across his forehead as if checking his temperature. “What’s bothering you?”
His tongue suddenly too big for his mouth, Gant said, “Nothing.”
She frowned. “It’s Maria, isn’t it? She told me what she said to you about finding your sex with someone else. If that’s what you’re thinking about, I’ll be forced to use my dagger on you again.”
Gant couldn’t have timed her remark better. He laughed, hugely relieved by the change in subject, and then said, “Maria caught me off guard with all that talk.”
“My mother means well,” Rayna explained. “Even so, don’t concern yourself with her. I decide who, what, and where when it comes to these things, not Maria.”
Gus’s voice suddenly boomed throughout the arena.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced. “Welcome to the Bailey Circus. Prepare yourselves now for Hans Jahner and his ferocious African lion, Zoltaire.”
Trumpets blared and the drum roll began.
“Tonight,” Gus continued. “And due to the vicious injuries he received during Zoltaire’s training, Hans will be assisted by his assistant, the Great Gantini.”
Amazed to hear this name, Gant repeated, “Gantini?”
He stepped past Rayna and peeked around the corner. J.R. and Hans were striding across the arena, both wearing capes made of electric blue satin that billowed out behind them with a dramatic flare.
Gant furrowed his brow. “Where the hell did he come up with that name?”
Rayna moved up beside him to watch the opening. “We decided that J.R. didn’t sound dramatic or dangerous enough for a lion-tamer. I helped him make up the new name. How do you like it?”
“It’s certainly interesting.” Gant turned to her with a wicked grin. “It sounds like it might be a combination of Gantry and Sebastiani. A coincidence?”
“Not exactly. I think it’s a pretty good combination.”
He winked. “Maybe I ought to refresh my memory on that.”
With no further words, Gant led Rayna back into the shadows and gathered her into his arms. This time he followed his instincts with no thought of what they might mean, or even of tomorrow.
He lowered his head and kissed her, surprising himself with a milder sense of urgency than usual. The kiss began in his heart, from his very soul, and if that feeling meant love, then Gant was indeed a man in love. It felt good, this emotion, good and all-powerful. For the first time in his life, Gant thought he might be truly liberated, free enough to let himself feel it all. Have it all.
Stunned by the depth of Gant’s kiss, the utter sensitivity and wealth of tenderness behind it, Rayna broke out of his embrace. Never before had any man conveyed such emotion to her, and it terrified Rayna to think what it might mean. She caught her breath and looked into Gant’s ebony eyes. There she found almost the identical message she’d received from his touch. Even the way he was looking at her seemed a caress, an emotional banquet for her love-starved heart. It was a look that drew her to him even as it pushed her away.
