Lawman

by Lisa Plumley

  He wanted her. His need for her was as real as the red-papered walls, statuary, and ornate paper lanterns surrounding him. Worse, it grew with every moment they spent together, made itself known with every shared breath they took.

  But the price of having Megan would be his job. And Gabriel had no intention of paying a price so high.

  Not ever.

  Plainly put, he couldn’t serve justice and at the same time dally with his prime suspect’s daughter. He couldn’t track the truth while feeding her lies. But he could—he must—use whatever information Megan could give him.

  The trick lay in not taking advantage of her while he did.

  His reputation, his livelihood, and his future all relied on tracking down the man who’d committed the robbery at Kearney station. Surely he could do that without compromise. Although Megan might doubt he possessed the morals to do so, Gabriel knew no such uncertainties. He’d proven himself time and again.

  Winter brings in the right man at the right time.

  The sooner he got on with it, the better. He spied Megan at the outskirts of the bustling dining room, hands clasped at her skirts, gazing with rapt interest at the painted menu board nailed to the wall. Was she waiting for the proprietor? Or waiting for Gabriel to join her before proceeding into the sea of customer-filled tables?

  Despite himself, he liked the notion of a woman waiting for him. Liked the notion of Megan waiting for him. With a hopefulness more foolish than he wanted to consider, Gabriel made his way toward her.

  All around him exotic spices perfumed the air, pungent with spicy-sweet ginger and fresh-brewed green tea. Cutlery clattered against plates; tea poured into cups with greedy swirls of sound. As he passed further into the dining room, the steady murmur of chattering voices grew louder, a mixture of ambling western speech and staccato Chinese.

  For an instant, the sound threw him home to the narrow, hilly streets of San Francisco, to the Chinatown in its midst. Gabriel waited for homesickness to strike, waited for some sign he was ready to go back there…and felt nothing.

  Had he been on the trail as a Pinkerton man for so long that the need for home couldn’t touch him? Or was the emptiness he felt only natural for a man fully grown, with no family of his own to hold him in place?

  Something told him it wasn’t. He trusted that sense even less than he did the motives behind Megan’s upturned, suddenly smiling face when she spied him approaching her. Another plan had formed between those bejeweled ears of hers. The open-armed greeting she gave him did nothing to convince Gabriel otherwise.

  Her gloved hands squeezed his shoulders with a trace too much enthusiasm. “There you are! I thought you’d left me here alone.”

  If he hadn’t known better, he might have believed the quaver in her smile. He might have believed she spoke truly, and felt sorry for letting her precede him into the restaurant without an escort. But after this morning, Gabriel knew better than to believe so readily.

  “And stop short of finding out what it is you think I need from this place?” He shook his head and gave her a wry twist of his lips that might have passed for a smile. “Not this Pinkerton man, darlin’. I’m not one to pass up any clues—even the nonsensical ones.”

  Color brightened her smooth freckled cheeks. She fluttered her eyelashes downward and, looking wounded, examined the tips of her shoes with a remarkably realistic air of betrayal. “I didn’t bring you here to help you make your case against my father.”

  “At least not intentionally.”

  “Not at all!” Her head came up. This time, those lonesome brown eyes of hers flashed with more than enough ire to back up her words. “This just goes to show how much you needed to come here with me, agent Winter—”

  “Gabriel.”

  “—and how much you need that sweetness I told you about!”

  Considering all things sweet—and better savored slowly—he skimmed his gaze over her. Damn, but she looked pretty. Too freckled and square-jawed for classic beauty, but with a vitality and softness that appealed to him strongly, all the same.

  “Oh, I need sweetness, all right,” Gabriel said, with a smile turned genuine. “You’ve got me pegged there, Miss Megan.”

  “I’m pleased you agree.”

  Her curt reply seemed to close their conversation. She tapped her gloved fingers over her hair to straighten it, adjusted her hat, then drew a deep breath and sent her gaze searching over the dining room beyond them. Gabriel watched her, and couldn’t help wanting more of an answer than she’d given him. Was she being deliberately coy? Or did she really not understand their differing versions of sweet and sour…and salvation?

  He’d wager she understood him well enough.

  If not now, then soon.

  He looked down to find her too-contemplative gaze transferred from their surroundings to him. Ominously, Megan added, “If it’s not already too late, that is.”

  “Too late for what?”

  “You.”

  With that cryptic explanation, she rose on tiptoes and waved to someone over Gabriel’s shoulder. He turned to see a neatly dressed Chinese man approach, wiping his hands on the apron tied around his waist, and call out to Megan.

  “Miss Kearney! These old eyes must deceive me. That can’t really be you, come back to Hop Kee’s place after all these years.”

  “It is me, Mr. Kee. I haven’t grown and changed all that much, have I?” Smiling, Megan fluffed out her skirts and stood straighter, as though to help bring about the answer she hoped for.

  Gabriel stared in amazement. Was she really so unsure as her actions suggested? It had to be another ruse, he reasoned…until he noticed the way she’d drawn her lower lip between her teeth, waiting for the older man’s reply.

  Her obvious unease was almost enough to make him wish he hadn’t mussed her dress and hair, hadn’t criticized her choice of restaurants and set her on guard with jibes about how she’d brought him there to find more clues.

  I thought you’d left me here alone.

  For an instant, he thought of how she’d seemed to him just moments ago, with her wobbly smile and fingers clenched tight against her skirts. To his eyes, she’d seemed genuinely afraid he had abandoned her. But the rest of him knew that notion flew in the face of everything Gabriel had experienced since meeting her. Brave, deceptively clever Megan, afraid? Never.

  But now she wore that same expression while she waited for Hop Kee, as though expecting he’d find her appearance lacking. Find her lacking. And recognizing that fear in her struck Gabriel deeply.

  Which was the true Megan? The no-holds-barred, conniving lady sharper he’d come to know? Or the woman poised on the edge of heartbreak he saw now?

  Frowning, he stepped closer to her and turned to face Hop Kee as he came closer. With his shoulders nearly blocking her view, Gabriel would be ready to shield her from Kee’s disapproval. He’d be ready to soften its impact before it could touch her…before it could steal the eagerness from her eyes and the lightness from her step.

  For all her scheming, squirming, and foolish readiness to believe in her father’s innocence, Megan still stood in a Pinkerton man’s care. As long as she did, Gabriel vowed, he wouldn’t allow any harm to come to her.

  You could cause the most harm of all, a part of him reminded. If Joseph Kearney turned up as guilty as Gabriel thought he would, it would wound her far more than a restaurant owner’s rebuke. Only one of them could be right about her father. Only one of them could win with this. Gabriel had sworn it would be him.

  Hell.

  But neither he nor Megan needed to have worried over Hop Kee. The Chinaman stopped and bowed before them both, and Gabriel realized that this man cared nothing for her rumpled skirts or coverlet-mussed hair. He looked beyond such things as dresses and millinery and regal posture—or the lack of them. The proof of his vision was in his lined face when Kee looked at her, in his broad smile and the joyful clasp of her hands in his.

  “Not so much grown, but changed in
all the most beautiful ways,” he announced, squeezing her hands gently. Like a doting father, he took in her appearance from shoes to hat, and sighed. “You turned out pretty fine, Miss Kearney. I always told your papa you would.”

  His flattery eased Gabriel’s aggressive stance, and at the same time brought a blush to Megan’s cheeks. Her heightened color betrayed how unused she was to such compliments—however worthy of them she might be.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly, “but I’ve come to visit you, not to talk about me! I hope you’ve fared well, over the years. You have, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, yes. It hasn’t been so long, after all.” Kee nodded and released her hands. As though only just then noticing Gabriel stood there, he gave him a measuring look. “Except long enough for you to find a husband, I see?”

  “Oh, no! Not a husband. No, no, no.”

  “No?” Kee’s eyebrows vanished into his straight, dark hair. “Are you sure?” He looked from Megan to Gabriel, then back again. “Because the two of you seem to me like—”

  “No!”

  If Megan shook her head any more vehemently, she’d rattle the jumble of flowers and ribbons and dark-colored laces clean off her hat. As though realizing that fact, she edged in front of Gabriel instead, giving him a look spiked with ire when she had to jostle him and his protective shoulders aside.

  “I’ll never be married, Mr. Kee,” she confided to her friend. “Especially not to a black-hearted, blarney-tongued, citified excuse for a—”

  “—friend of the family, like me,” Gabriel finished for her, grinning. Next, she’d be revealing his employment with the Pinkerton agency, and all it entailed. Most certainly, that had been her intention. He’d never learn anything about Joseph Kearney’s whereabouts that way.

  “Friend of the family?” Megan mimicked. In the midst of straightening her hat, she stopped to gape at him. “Friend of the family?”

  Apparently, she couldn’t get anything more past her lips than those same repeated words. Thank God. Taking advantage of her silence, Gabriel winked at her.

  “You’re right, that doesn’t quite describe it, does it?” He moved nearer, letting his gun belt brush against the rose-scented drape of her skirts. “In fact, we’ve been even closer together than family, especially lately. Much, much…much closer.”

  His reminder of their sprawled union on the hotel room bed had the effect he’d expected…for all of two ticks of the Celestial Kitchen clock on the restaurant wall behind her. Then Megan’s voice returned.

  He should have known it wouldn’t take long.

  Ignoring her sputter of outrage, Gabriel leaned toward Hop Kee. He grasped the other man’s hand in a steady handshake as he introduced himself. “Gabriel Winter. I can’t begin to tell you how welcome Miss Megan has made me feel since I’ve arrived here in the Territory.”

  “Oh, do tell, Mr. Winter.” She grasped his elbow in her gloved hands and simpered, “I wouldn’t mind if the whole wide world knew exactly how I feel about having you here.”

  As though she hadn’t just insulted him, Gabriel smiled and patted the hand she’d nestled in the crook of his arm. “Isn’t she something?” he asked Hop Kee. “I’ve never met anyone more willing to help her fellow man—”

  “Right onto the next train out of town,” Megan muttered from behind the gaudy fan she’d withdrawn from wherever ladies kept such things.

  “—however unworthy of her assistance, and protection, that fellow man might be,” he finished meaningfully.

  Her dark-eyed glance from behind her fan told him Megan had understood him perfectly. And didn’t like it one bit.

  “Pshaw, Mr. Winter!” she said, fluttering her fan like the greatest of coquettes. “No one should presume to sit in judgment of another person’s worthiness. I think we’d all agree on that score.”

  “Would we?”

  She snapped her fan closed and gave him a stiff smile. “Of course.”

  “Then I must have been mistaken.” Gabriel bowed slightly. “I was under the impression you’d already formed an opinion on my account.” And it wasn’t a favorable one.

  “I—” Her stricken gaze, golden brown and widened with new insight, met his. She hadn’t thought of the double standard she’d imposed. He could see it in her eyes, and in the contrite softening of her mouth. “I—I guess I never thought of it that way.”

  Hop Kee smiled, his face jovial and knowing beneath his skull cap. “Leave it to an Irishman to turn around your thinking. He’s a persuasive one, Megan. Just like you.”

  Gabriel raised an eyebrow. Megan, like him? They weren’t alike at all, he told himself. To Kee, he said, “However much I assure her we’re all filled with charm and good humor where I come from, Miss Megan seems to believe I’ve been sent here to Tucson just to bedevil her.”

  He and the older man shared a grin. Beside them, Megan all but stamped her foot.

  “Bedevil me?” she asked. “I wish it were so simple. Mr. Winter may be accustomed to keeping secrets, but I’m not. The truth is, Mr. Kee, that he’s come here for one thing only.”

  She was putting him in an indefensible position. Chances were good that the Chinaman knew where to find Megan’s father. The last thing Gabriel needed was to scare away a potential source of information.

  “And I don’t understand why he doesn’t just come right on out with it,” Megan went on serenely, “when the truth is, he really came here to—”

  “—woo her.”

  At Gabriel’s announcement, she turned a horrified look in his direction. “What?”

  “Woo her and win her,” he went on telling Kee. He paused to aim an especially besotted smile at Megan. She wouldn’t do any more damage to his case, wouldn’t reveal all his plans to track down Joseph Kearney—not if he could help it. And he damned well could. “With your blessing, of course, Mr. Kee.”

  “Of course!” For all appearances, Kee looked absolutely charmed. A romantic, Gabriel thought. All the luckier for him.

  “Woo? Woo me? Woo me.” Megan seemed dumbstruck at the notion.

  “And to do that,” Gabriel went on, bending to speak with Kee, “I’ll need a special table. A very private, very special table.”

  “I have just the one!”

  A man with a mission, Kee gestured for them to follow. He wound his way between rows of customer-filled tables, past restaurant workers and exotic-looking statues, while Gabriel and Megan kept pace.

  Beside him, she walked with the stiffness of a woman whose plans had gone terribly awry. “You’re incorrigible,” she whispered fiercely, keeping her gaze on Kee as he led them toward a distant corner of the restaurant. “Lying to my friend that way! How can I ever—”

  “What makes you believe it’s a lie?”

  They reached their table. Upon it, evening sunlight drew a brilliant square against a tablecloth as red as full-bodied wine. Behind it, a door swung on double hinges, set in constant motion by the passing of restaurant workers back and forth from the kitchen to the Celestial Restaurant’s bustling dining room.

  Momentarily oblivious to their surroundings, Megan tugged off her gloves with trembling fingers. She drew them to rest in her palm, just as she had in the stage station office, then squared her shoulders to face him.

  “Of course it’s a lie!” she said, casting a cautious glance toward Hop Kee, who was busy speaking with one of the restaurant workers. “You couldn’t possibly have meant it.”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Perhaps I’ve only just now come to my senses, Megan, and decided to pursue you after all.”

  “Pursue my father, you mean!”

  “That has nothing to do with what’s happening between us.” Or did it? Damn, he wished he could be sure of it.

  Apparently Megan harbored no such doubts. “Nothing is happening between us,” she snapped, tossing her gloves onto the corner table they would share. “And nothing ever will.”

  He put his hand to the curve of her waist, meaning to guide her closer to her chair,
and to calm her in the process. Instead, the warm, supple feel of her body beneath his fingers stayed his hand—and put a hundred doubts in his mind. Had he meant what he’d said? Or were the words only the means to an end, another way to solve his case?

  “Are you sure about that?” Gabriel’s gaze met hers. “Even Hop Kee could see it. He could feel it.”

  He traced the indentation of her waist, the alluring flare of her hip, so wonderfully round and soft beneath his hand. He tightened his fingers, wanting to draw her closer still—and knowing she’d likely stomp the shine from his boots if he did.

  “There is a great deal between us,” he said.

  “Yes. Enmity.”

  “Not as much as you wish.” Not as much as would be wise. “This is something more.” His brogue strengthened with the urgency he felt; even Gabriel could hear it. Powerless to stop it, he hoped she wouldn’t recognize what drove him if she heard it, too. “Can’t you feel it, this…attraction between us?”

  Stillness overcame her. A small sound slipped from between Megan’s lips, seconds before she glanced up at him at last. Barely more than a sigh, to Gabriel her response made all the commotion around them recede. The whole world narrowed to the woman at his side, and her reaction to his question.

  Defiantly, she jerked her hip sideways. Her chin came up, another sure sign of her fighting spirit. It was a quality he admired in her, despite the fact that she typically aimed it against him.

  “If I ever do feel whatever it is you’re talking about,” Megan informed him airily, “then I’ll be sure to extinguish it. Completely. And thoroughly. Without fail and—”

  “There’s no call to belabor the point. I understand.” Despite himself, Gabriel grinned. To his immense surprise, she did, too. She might not want the attraction between them—but neither did she want outright war, it seemed.

  Her wish for some measure of accord between them was something he’d need to encourage, if he were to gain any ground with his case. It wasn’t likely she’d help him, as long as she saw him as an enemy to be bested. Could he encourage an alliance between them?