Reluctant Enemies

by Vivian Vaughan

  The daughter of his father’s murderer, which proved the point. He had to get Joaquín cleared and his business with Charlie settled and get the hell out of New Mexico Territory.

  He could read the headlines now: HEIR OF PRESTIGIOUS PHILADELPHIA LAW FAMILY HUNG FOR CONSPIRING WITH NEW MEXICO’S FEMALE VERSION OF BILLY THE KID. Hell fire and damnation! He was even beginning to curse like her.

  What a woman! What a wild and crazy woman. She was everything his brain rejected…everything his heart desired. He stopped short of thinking about the myriad of magical things his body wanted from Miss Jake McCain.

  Instead he turned his attention to the problem of preventing the Haskels from lynching his client. Priscilla was right about the judge. He’d never go against the Haskels. Certainly not to side with someone new in town, someone who had no proof of Joaquín’s innocence, someone who had gone over to the enemy, as Oscar Haskel would surely have informed him by now.

  But if he couldn’t depend on Judge Sanders for help, who? Priscilla was right again. He couldn’t do this alone. The thought sent a chill down his spine.

  He could see himself sneaking into the darkened jail. Even if he could get the keys, even if he could arrange for the jail to be empty, even if the jailbreak were accomplished without fanfare, even if everything else worked, Joaquín would undoubtedly balk at leaving the safety of the jail in the company of a man employed by Faust & Haskel.

  An unfriendly cuss, Joaquín. And defensive. If he wouldn’t listen to Charlie or Priscilla, he certainly wouldn’t listen to a greenhorn like himself.

  Although Will had slept a couple of hours under a tree earlier in the day while Crockett kept watch, by the time he reached Santa Fé he was feeling the effects of his sleepless night. He’d ridden back to town at a slower gait than usual, his mind occupied with keeping Joaquín safe—and Priscilla out of his hair and off his mind. When he entered the dusty main street, the plaza was coming to life again after siesta. He left his horse at the livery, still pondering the question: To whom could he turn for help? It was beginning to look more and more like he was about to lose a client.

  Priscilla’s lovely face popped to mind. And he was about to let Priscilla down. Somehow that troubled him more than thoughts of losing Joaquín. And that, in turn, troubled him even more.

  He recalled her pensive expression when she related her fears of never measuring up to her mother. His heart ached for the little girl who had decided to become a cowboy in self-defense. She’d obviously done well by her decision. She was a damned fine cowhand, by all accounts.

  But what a lady she’d become, too! And dang his hide, he’d better free Joaquín and get out of New Mexico Territory before she realized he thought so.

  Will took the stairs at the back of the cantina more determined than ever to cut short his stay here. Shadows of cottonwood limbs danced over the worn wooden steps. Will had climbed halfway to the top before he noticed Jessie.

  She’d started down, but remained poised on the second step. Then it came to him. Jessie. Of course. That’s who could help.

  “Hey, Jess, I need to talk to you. Private.”

  “I know.”

  “Jorge returned safe and sound?”

  She nodded. “Wait for me in your room, Will.”

  Jessie, he thought. Yes, Jessie was the one person who might be able to help. She was friendly with the Haskels. And she’d already proved her loyalty to Charlie.

  Lost in plans, Will opened the door to his room. His brain skidded to a halt. “Hell fire and damnation! What’re you doin’ here?”

  Priscilla turned from the open set of French doors. She’d obviously watched him cross the plaza. Her smile was the smile of an angel, and heaven help him, but the sight of her answered his question for both of them. He swallowed against a suddenly dry throat.

  “How’d you get here so quick?”

  “I don’t mosey along when I have someplace to go, greenhorn.”

  Someplace to go. With a crazy leap his mind’s eye pictured the bed—off to his left, to her right, close, too damned close. “Damnit all, Priscilla. Get out of here.”

  But he didn’t move from where he stood in the doorway, and she stood stock still. The setting sun fanned its golden rays around her like she was one of those statues of the saints he’d seen in the cathedral across the plaza.

  But she wasn’t a saint, and neither was he, and what he was thinking would see him in hell.

  “I’m going with you, Will. Jessie’s agreed to help us. She’s gone to take care of a few matters. As soon as she gets back—”

  “What’s wrong with your hearing?” he snapped. Striding toward her, his only intention was to get her out of harm’s way, even if it meant setting her bodily on her horse and sending her back to Spanish Creek. “Out. Out you go.”

  “When I told Jessie our plan, she agreed, Will. There’s no other way.”

  He took hold of her shoulders. “We don’t have a plan—”

  For some reason, she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Jessie agreed—” He found himself whispering back.

  “I’m not doing it, Priscilla.”

  “There’s no other way.” She looked up at him with eyes as doleful as any he’d ever seen. His hands tightened on her shoulders.

  “Please, Will. We can’t let them kill Joaquín. What if…I mean, if the gossip turns out to be true, they’re right. It would break Pa. Help me, Will.”

  At some point he stopped listening to her words and heard only her voice, her pleading, her vulnerability. And he knew he would do whatever it took to set her world aright…

  Before he tore it apart for good.

  It wasn’t her begging that got him, Will reasoned. He couldn’t abide women who used feminine wiles to get their way. But Priscilla McCain wouldn’t know a feminine wile if it slapped her in the face. When Priscilla stooped to begging, it would be for something important—like a man’s life. A man who could well be her brother.

  He looked away…for his own good. And for hers. But his palms began to move over her silk shirt. He felt her skin warm beneath his touch. He tried not to look at her again, for to do so would be to surrender, but he wasn’t that strong a man. Unable to stop himself, he pulled her to him. Their lips met with an eagerness born of fear—the fear of never holding each other again.

  He pulled her closer. She came readily. Her hands skimmed his neck, spiraling shafts of fire down his spine, directly to the source. He groaned.

  His lips opened, his tongue delved, and he knew if he had a hundred years with this woman, it wouldn’t be enough. He felt her flip his hat to the floor. He felt her fingers weave through his hair; he pulled her body to his.

  Only then did his hands leave her shoulders. Tugging her shirt loose, he ran his palms inside, up her ribs, feeling the lace that had been but a hint through the pale silkiness of her shirt. He recalled what Jessie had said.

  Holding her around the rib cage, he pushed her back and stared into her liquid blue eyes. His thumbs traced half circles beneath her breasts. Her eyes registered a mixture of surprise and passion. A heady combination.

  “No corset, Miss Priss?”

  She grinned. Under other circumstances, it might have been considered a sickly grin. But he recognized it. Her muscles were so tight with pent-up passion she could hardly move. He recognized it, because he felt the same way.

  His hands moved up and forward. He palmed her breasts, felt her nipples push against him, separated by a thin layer of lace. He felt his own body probe for relief. He knew she could feel it against her belly.

  He wondered what she thought about it. Her reaction was to pull his head forward, his lips to hers. Her lips moved urgently over his; her breasts pressed into his palms. Her supple body melted against him.

  He dropped his hands. They caught on her gun butts. His brain made an about face. Abruptly, he released her and stepped back. She looked at him, her eyes alight with confusion and passion.

  “Damnation, Priscilla. Thi
s is getting out of hand.”

  The way she looked away, he could tell she misunderstood. Pulling her face back to his, he kissed her forehead. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s just—Your mama’s right.”

  “You don’t like—”

  “Liking has nothing to do with it.” His eyes devoured her swollen, red lips. “I like it better than just about anything I’ve ever done.”

  “Then—”

  In desperation he moved around her. Standing in the open French doors, he gripped a doorframe in each hand and stared between his arms into the ancient plaza, while ancient emotions raged inside him. Passion, and something much softer and more dangerous, vied with a hatred he had lived with all his life.

  He felt her hand, placed gently on his back, just above his belt. “I know how hard this is, Will. I know how much the law means to you.”

  Damnation, she misread everything. No, he misrepresented everything.

  “But it’s the only way to save Joaquín.”

  He felt her close beside him, so close her breath blew softly against his shoulder.

  At length he turned. Her hand slid off his back, and he reached for it. Taking both her hands, he held them, while he walked her backward, seating her in the chair. He knelt before her. “I thought about it all the way to town,” he admitted. “I couldn’t come up with another way, either. But I decided to talk to Jessie. The way she feels about your family, I’m sure she’ll help. Maybe she has enough influence with Newt to save Joaquín.”

  Priscilla tipped her chin in an expression he’d come to recognize as one of defiance. “I looked over the jail on my way in. We can—”

  Will gritted his teeth to gain control before he continued. “Hold it right there, cowboy. There’s no we in this party. How many times do I have to tell you? It’s me. All the way. Me.”

  “You can’t do this alone.”

  “I may not do it at all.”

  “You don’t listen very well, either.” Her voice was soft, dangerous. He looked down at their clasped hands and tried to grip his runaway emotions.

  “There’s no other way, Will. It has to be done, and you need my help, because you don’t know the country.”

  “I’m not a complete washout,” he snapped. “Even if I were foolish enough to break him out of jail—or try to—I can find my way to Spanish Creek.”

  “We can’t take him to Spanish Creek,” she cried.

  That brought his head up. He held her startled gaze. He knew what was coming.

  “I told you about stupid ideas, greenhorn.” But she smiled when she said it, and he looked quickly away. “We can’t draw the Haskels to Spanish Creek. Mama’s there. And Pa isn’t well enough to fend them off. Uncle Crockett wouldn’t—”

  “Hell, Sherman’s army wouldn’t be enough to fend them off, if we…if I…” Will’s words stumbled to a halt. Priscilla grinned. She didn’t say “I told you so.” He wasn’t even sure she thought it.

  Priscilla wasn’t like that. But she was pleased as Punch that he’d slipped. Lordy, if this woman wasn’t a pain. Cocksure of herself. He glared back at her, but all he felt was passion, pure and undiluted.

  “So, Miss Jake McCain, where does an ol’ outlaw like yourself take a man once she’s broken him out of jail?”

  She laughed. He fought the urge to kiss her. Rising abruptly, he turned to the open doors. “That wasn’t meant as a compliment. Hell, I can’t even insult you.”

  “You didn’t try very hard.”

  He looked down at her, shaking his head. “Most folks I know would be highly offended to be called an outlaw.”

  “Like Pa says, if a man knows his own worth, it doesn’t make any difference what others call him.”

  Will pursed his lips to suppress a grin.

  “Besides, I know you didn’t mean it.”

  Will averted his gaze.

  “You’re just a little aggravated with me for being right.”

  “You’re not right,” he whispered on a sigh. Fortunately Miss Jake McCain was still naive in the ways of passion. He wished she were as incapable of stirring his.

  “We’ll take him to Victorio,” she was saying.

  The idea was disconcerting. “They’d never allow—”

  “They trust Pa,” she interrupted. “We’ll be perfectly safe.”

  “Sure. Perfectly safe. I’ve heard what Apaches do to white men. They may never allow me to leave, but we’ll be perfectly safe.”

  She came up behind him while he spoke, laying a hand on his arm in a way that jangled his already jangled nerve endings. When he spoke, his tone was intentionally gruff.

  “I told you there isn’t a we in this charade.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  She said it with such conviction that he didn’t question her meaning. Her meaning didn’t matter. He took her in his arms before he could steel himself against such foolishness. And although he closed his lids against her sparkling blue eyes, her voice sang merrily through his senses.

  “You need me, Will Radnor.”

  Lordy, did he ever.

  Eight

  Before Jessie returned, Will managed to come up with one final argument to counter Priscilla’s outrageous proposal and her own involvement in it—an argument he figured was a foolproof way to convince her, if not of the folly of her plan, at least to return to the ranch and leave Joaquín’s welfare in his hands.

  “You intend to ride off into the night and leave Spanish Creek to Charlie?” he quizzed. “You know as well as I do, the Haskels will head straight for the ranch the instant Joaquín turns up missing.” If they don’t hound us out of town, he worried. “Charlie’ll need you.”

  She cocked her head, as though she were the cutest thing this side of heaven, and Will was pretty sure she was. “I’m not the stupid member of this team.”

  He grinned in spite of himself.

  “I’ve done some planning, too, greenhorn.”

  “On something other than how to turn me into an outlaw?”

  “You won’t be an outlaw.”

  “I beg to differ. Breaking the law puts a man on the outside of it, hence he becomes an outlaw.”

  “The Haskels are breaking the law,” she explained in exaggerated tones. “We’re helping right things. Pa says laws are made to serve man, not man to serve laws.”

  Her statement broke the spell she had woven around his brain, for Will had heard those words before, at least a thousand times. He’d learned them from the same source he supposed Charlie had—from his grandfather in the offices of Radnor & Radnor, formerly Radnor, Radnor, & Kane in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. And that realization unsettled Will. For with it came another, even more unwelcome possibility: Could he be falling in love with Charlie McCain’s daughter?

  If that were happening, Lord help them both, for their shared past was so horrendous no amount of time or depth of feeling could erase it. If that were happening, his only recourse would be to distance himself from this woman.

  “We have an outlaw on our side,” she was saying.

  “Bully for us.”

  “Don’t go gettin’ cantankerous, Will. I’ll be there to protect you.”

  “Thanks a lot. Who’re you teaming me up with now, Billy the Kid?”

  “Someone even better. Someone who knows my parents. I thought of him on the way to town. There’s this outlaw—I think he’s a bank robber, or maybe his specialty is robbing stages, I’m not sure. No one talks about him much. But I remember Pa saying that Bart would never refuse to help them.”

  “Bart who?”

  She shrugged. “Jessie knows.” Her eyes danced. “She’s gone to send him a telegram even as we speak.”

  “A telegram? This is getting more bizarre by the minute, How do you send a telegram to an outlaw?”

  “I told you, Will. I don’t know the details. I only know what I know.”

  “Which isn’t a hell of a lot.”

  “It’s enough. Jessie swears she knows how to c
ontact Bart. She thought it was a good idea.”

  “She would,” Will mumbled.

  “By the time the Haskels gather their wits and get to the ranch, Bart will be there to help Pa and Uncle Crockett. Jessie said he’ll probably bring some friends.”

  “Probably isn’t good enough.”

  “Don’t worry so much. Bart will come. Jessie said he vowed to come to Mama’s aid—I suppose she meant Mama’s and Pa’s aid—no matter where or when. It concerns something that happened before I was born—in California, Jessie said. Funny, I’m finding out more things about my parents all the time. I didn’t know they’d ever been to California.”

  Delighting in her prattle, Will’s brain cleared when she mentioned California, at least enough for him to recall the newspaper clipping that had alerted him to Charlie McCain. Absently, he sank to the same chair where he’d seated Priscilla earlier. California. Now he remembered. Three people were mentioned in that article. Kate, Charlie, and another man. Bart, the outlaw? Likely. By that time, Charlie had been on the run for a while, himself. He would have had plenty of time to take up with other outlaws.

  “That’s not much to go on,” he commented. “What else do you know about it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Yet, you’re willing to leave your mother and father in the Haskels’ line of fire and go traipsing off across the country—”

  She cocked her head again, stopping his words with thoughts run amuck. “I wouldn’t leave Spanish Creek undefended for anything in the world, but if the gossip is true, Joaquín’s death would devastate Pa. And even if it isn’t true, we can’t let them murder him.” She changed suddenly, from serious to cocky. “I’m coming with you. I can’t let some greenhorn lawyer break a man who might be my brother out of jail and head straight for the enemy’s camp and…and get them both killed.”

  Her concern was touching. He didn’t tell her so. Instead, he rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. At her touch, he flinched.

  She knelt before him, as he had done before her earlier, and she took his hands, completely unnerving him, oblivious to the fact, he knew. “Bart will come. Jessie says he owes my parents a debt that can never be repaid.”