“My father didn't shoot anyone,” Bliss retorted.
“Whatcha doing out here all alone, missy? Who you hopin' to meet?”
“No one,” Bliss mumbled, startled by the malice in the cowboy's voice. Frightened, she started walking along the path again, but one cowboy spurred his horse to ride beside her. He leaned down and Bliss was assailed by the rank smell of cheap whiskey. “You're drunk!” she said in the most disdainful voice she could manage.
“Not hardly, little lady. Leastaways, not enough so's you'd notice the difference. Wanta come on up here and say howdy?”
“I most certainly do not!” Bliss was mortified by his words, horrified by his evident intention. Before she could take breath to scream, the cowboy had yanked her off her feet. He held her with one arm around her waist as he pressed his mouth against hers. His mouth was sloppy wet and his tongue nearly gagged her. Before he could do more, another cowboy had dismounted and dragged her down into his arms. He tripped on her trailing skirt and they both fell to the grassy ground.
“Please stop,” Bliss cried. “Don't touch me. Let me go!”
The drunken cowboys encircled her, some reaching for her flailing arms while others tried to grab her kicking feet. The only sounds were the grunt of one of the men when she kicked him in the groin with her boot, and the foul oath of another as she bit into a hand that clasped hers.
“Let her go.”
The three words hit the silence like bullets. The astonished cowboys stared in awe at the extraordinarily tall figure outlined by the scant moonlight. The man was dressed entirely in black from his hat right down to his boots. The wind lifted his black duster and spread it away from his body. It was too close to Halloween for the same thought not to have risen in every cowboy's mind: Was this apparition real? Or not?
Out of the corner of her eye Bliss saw the cowboy on the ground beside her reach for his gun and shouted, “Look out!”
The gun had barely cleared the cowboy's holster when a shot rang out. The cowboy slumped sideways with a loud groan, his bloody shoulder sliding across Bliss's skir
“Anybody else got any smart ideas?” the apparition demanded in a steely voice. When there was no answer the faceless voice ordered, “Get on your horses and get out of here.”
The cowboys grabbed their wounded comrade and were on their horses and gone in a matter of moments. Bliss wasn't sure whether to be grateful or terrified. The cowboys' attack on her had left her quaking. As the apparition moved closer the trembling turned to terror.
“Please. Don't come any closer,” she whispered.
“I don't mean you any harm.”
His voice was reassuring, gentle almost. Bliss found that even more frightening. Perhaps he only meant to put her off her guard before he took her for himself.
“I only want to help you,” the voice said.
Bliss was too petrified to move. Strong hands lifted her and she was cushioned against a broad chest. She squeezed her eyes shut, afraid of what she would see if she opened them.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Bliss nodded her head vigorously, keeping her eyes closed. She thought she heard a chuckle.
“Can I take you somewhere?”
Bliss decided that no ghost she had ever heard of had a sense of humor. She opened her eyes and peered up into the moonlit face of the stranger who had rescued her.
“Why, you're handsome!” she said, her voice filled with indignation. Suddenly she realized what she had said and her hands rose to cover her face in embarrassment. “I don't believe I said that.”
The man threw back his head and laughed. “Would you be happier if I looked fearsome?” he asked when he'd recovered his voice.
“Well, no. But you sure scared the liver out of me. I half expected you to be Lucifer himself,” Bliss admitted.
The stranger's features hardened. “Some would say I am.”
Bliss shivered.
“I'm scaring you again,” he said, his lips pressed flat in disgust. “I'll take you home.”
“Oh, no! I can't go home. I have to see Miss Devlin.”
“Miss Devlin?”
“My teacher. Her house is down this path a little way. Please, I'll be all right. You can let me go now.”
The stranger pursed his liin thought, then marched off with her in his arms in the opposite direction from Miss Devlin's house.
“Really, I'll be fine,” Bliss said. “I—”
“Be still.”
Bliss shut her mouth and kept it shut while the cowboy set her down and mounted a black-and-white paint gelding she hadn't noticed before. He reached down and grabbed her under the arms and lifted her as easy as you please into his lap.
“I think I'll make sure for my own peace of mind that you reach this ‘Miss Devlin' in one piece.”
Miss Devlin sat bolt upright in bed when she heard someone pounding on her door. She didn't even stop to put on a robe or slippers, simply dropped the volume of Greek plays she was reading and ran to throw open the door. Bliss Davis stood on her threshold. The girl's torn blouse was grass-stained and fresh blood smeared her striped cambric skirt.
“My God, Bliss! What happened?”
The young woman threw herself into Miss Devlin's arms, babbling incoherently about Hadley and cowboys and some devil dressed all in black. “Oh, Miss Devlin, it was horrible. I was nearly . . . I was almost . . . Oh, Miss Devlin, you have to help me.”
Miss Devlin felt Bliss trembling and her wrath grew for whoever had been so cruel as to molest the poor child. She settled Bliss on the brocade Victorian sofa in her parlor, unconsciously straightening the lace doily that protected the arm when Bliss knocked it askew. It was then she sensed the presence of someone else in the room.
Miss Devlin turned around and looked up—a surprise in itself since she was so tall—into the probing eyes of a man she had no doubt was Bliss's “devil dressed all in black.”
His face was masked by shadows, yet she saw a jutting chin (a sure sign of stubbornness), a blade of nose, sharp cheekbones, and dark, predatory eyes. It was the face of a hunter. Yet there was the look about him of the hunted—cautious, wary. From his challenging stance, however, she was certain he was the kind more inclined to fight than to flee.
Her heart was pounding, yet it wasn't fear she felt. He took another step inside the room, and the lamplight brought his face into definition. Upon a second, closer look she thought, he likes to win, and probably does; he likes to be right and probably is; and lastly, because she found his dark eyes and black, collar-length hair so compellingly attractive, she thought, he's used to being fawned over by women, and they probably do.
As a teacher, Miss Devlin knew there was always an exception to every rule. And in this man's case, she was it.
“Miss Devlin, I presume.”
The sound of his voice, deep and melodious and touched with a hint of humor, shiver. She wasn't quite sure of the source of his levity, until she noticed his gaze lazily raking her from head to foot. It was only then she realized that her titian hair was haphazardly tucked up inside a quaint, lace-edged sleeping cap. She was also barefoot and dressed in no more than a plain cream-colored flannel nightshift which, mercifully, was roomy enough to completely disguise the feminine figure beneath it. To make her dishabille complete, she was still wearing her reading spectacles!
Despite her best efforts to prevent it, Miss Devlin felt a blush rising up her neck. By the time it had stained her cheekbones she possessed the appalling knowledge that if she didn't say something soon, the stranger would somehow divine her confused feelings.
“I'm Miss Devlin” was all she could manage. To her dismay, the voice she heard was throaty, almost seductive. There was nothing the least bit schoolmarmish about it.
“Somehow you're not what I expected,” he replie
d.
The grin that split his face gave Miss Devlin the goad she needed to get hold of herself. He certainly wasn't admiring her beauty; more likely he was ridiculing her appearance. Stunned at how totally she had succumbed to the mystery surrounding this dark stranger—who was openly laughing at her—Miss Devlin sought to gain control of the situation by taking the offensive.
“I don't allow guns in my house,” she said in an icy voice.
The stranger looked down at the Colt .45 tied low on his right leg and then back up at Miss Devlin. “My gun goes where I go,” he answered in equally daunting tones.
“Guns kill people,” she said.
“Yes, they do,” he agreed.
“I abhor violence.”
“I'm a peaceful man.”
Miss Devlin's mouth puckered. She arched her neck and looked down her nose at the gunman through her reading spectacles. It was a pose guaranteed to cow even the most argumentative man into submission. And to a point, it worked.
“I don't go looking for trouble,” the stranger amended.
“But somehow trouble always finds you,” Miss Devlin retorted, angry, but not sure why. “I've always suspected men like you wear guns in a futile effort to disguise your hebetudinous natures. And now I'm sure of it.”
The word hebetudinous rolled off Miss Devlin's tongue with all the ostentation of the wise preaching to the foolish. It wouldn't be the first time she had called a man stupid to his face with a word he couldn't understand. She was certain hebetudinous, spoken with just the right note of condescension, was exactly what she needed to put this dark-eyed stranger in his place.
To her amazemen the gunman retorted, “I've always suspected women like you use big words when they know they're in the wrong. And now I'm sure of it.”
“Why you vainglorious, supercilious—”
“Use all the big words you want. Because I'm not the least bit hebetudinous, ma'am. Pardon me, that's Miss Devlin, isn't it?”
She retreated.
He advanced.
Miss Devlin stared in disbelief at the look on his face. She could have sworn he was actually leering at her.
Eden was shaken and hard-pressed not to show it. This stranger simply ignored the verbal no trespassing signs she had posted all around her. Under the circumstances she wasn't sure how to handle him—assuming he could be handled. Maybe conciliation was the better route. She decided to give it a try.
“Perhaps I was too hasty in my condemnation of you. I—”
“I wear a gun because I need it for my work,” he continued inexorably. “And I use it only when I have no other choice.”
Miss Devlin had been too concerned with the stranger's intimidating presence to concentrate on what he was saying. All at once it sank in. “My God! You're a hired gun?”
The stranger shrugged. “It's how I make my living.”
“Surely no one asked you to come to Sweetwater.”
The stranger remained silent, and Eden felt an awful sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She wasn't aware that her hand gripped her gown in front, bunching the soft material so her full breasts were outlined for the stranger's frankly interested gaze.
“Who hired you?” she demanded.
He raised a brow but didn't answer.
“We don't need anyone bringing trouble here,” Miss Devlin said, unaware of the pleading tone in her voice or the two flags of color burning in her cheeks.
“Trouble is where you find it,” he replied curtly. The stranger abruptly shifted his body away from Miss Devlin toward the bookcase along one wall.
Miss Devlin had no explanation for his sudden defection from the argument at hand, but she was grateful for the respite that allowed her to compose herself—which was when she realized that the way she was clutching her gown had outlined her breasts, right down to the nipples, for the gunman's perusal. She did her best to rearrange the nightshift into its former shapelessness, but nothing she did could conceal the fact she had a respectable bosom.
Feel at a distinct disadvantage, she decided discretion was the better part of valor. She would save her arguments for another time and place. It was past time to get this stranger out of her house. When she cleared her throat, the gunman turned his dark eyes back on her.
“As I was saying,” Miss Devlin began. “We don't want any trouble here in Sweetwater. So I think it's best—”
“After what happened to this girl tonight I'd judge there's already trouble in this valley. I'm here to take care of it.”
“We don't need you here,” Miss Devlin snapped, her gray eyes flashing. She stepped around behind the sofa—which seemed a safer distance from the stranger—and slipped a protective arm around Bliss's shoulder. “So you can turn right around tonight and go back where you came from before some other young woman is subjected to the same disgraceful treatment as this poor girl.”
“I won't take blame for what happened to the girl.”
“I'm sure you don't like taking blame for the kind of rowdy behavior cowboys like yourself impose on others, drinking—”
“Oh, no, Miss Devlin,” Bliss interrupted. “This man saved me from the drunken cowboys. In fact, he shot one of them.”
Miss Devlin mashed her lips together and glared at the stranger. There was an intense struggle going on between her good sense and her redheaded temper, and she thought it best to keep her mouth shut until she could say something nice, since she was in the presence of one of her pupils. The returning glint of humor in the gunslinger's eyes proved to be more than she could bear.
“Bliss, go in my bedroom and shut the door,” she ordered.
“But Miss Devlin—”
“Go!”
The unaccustomed stridency in Miss Devlin's voice sent Bliss scampering to the bedroom. The instant the door shut behind her pupil, Miss Devlin confronted the gunslinger. “However nobly you may have acted tonight I know your kind too well to believe—”
Her eyes widened as he vaulted over the sofa as though it wasn't there. Suddenly they were face-to-face.
“And I know your kind, Miss Devlin,” the gunslinger said in a silky voice.
He stepped forward.
She stepped back.
Miss Devlin opened her mouth to tell him to stay away from her, but nothing came out. She fought the urge to cross her arms over her bosom. He was standing so close now she could feel his breath on her face.
“Like I said, Miss Devlin. I know your kind.”
His voice was low, and so seductive she was prepared for anything but what he said next.
“You're a straitlaced, stiff-necked, stuffy old spinster who lives her life through the experiences of others and—”
“How dare you!”
“Too close to the mark for comfort, Miss Devlin?” the gunslinger goaded.
Miss Devlin's open palm hit the gunslinger's face with a resounding thwack. Eden recoiled in surprise at what she'd done. She had never struck another human being in her life, and the fact she should resort to violence, when her supposed objection to the man was that he solved people's problems in a violent way, caused her face to whiten with mortification. And yet, to her utter horror, she found it impossible to utter the words of apology she knew were necessary.
“Get out of my house,” she grated in a voice that was a mere whisper.
“I thought there might be more to you than met the eye,” he said, rubbing his cheek. “You know, you should learn to control that educated tongue of yours. It's likely to get you into trouble someday.” With a wink and a roguish grin he turned on his heel, spurs jangling, and strolled out the door.
“Oh, you—” Miss Devlin couldn't think of an epithet harsh enough for the scoundrel who had just sauntered away from her. She was used to having the last word, but since nothing (decen
t) came to mind, she settled for slamming the door hard enough after him to leave the windows rattling.
Miss Devlin looked down at her hands and realized they were trembling. What a horrible, despicable man! He was sure to cause trouble in Sweetwater. Why, that stranger—whoever he was—had already shot a man. Then he had sauntered in and out of her home, insulting her and threatening her, and—and never even told her his name!
She thought of the awful things he had said about her. Imagine calling her a straitlaced, stiff-necked, stuffy old spinster. She was no such thing! Well, perhaps at twenty-nine she must own up to the spinster part, but she was none of the others.
Sweetwater Seduction Page 3
