by Mary McBride
“Huevos,” the cook said.
“Whatever,” Gideon replied. Then, after the cook had turned and shuffled away, he looked at Honey. “Do you speak Spanish?” he asked almost sheepishly. “What the hell did I just order?”
“Rattlesnake,” she snapped. “I hope you like it.”
He swallowed, hard, and drummed his fingers on the table. “Yeah. Oh, sure. How’s it fixed?”
“With onions usually. Or sourweed. Sometimes they mix in frogs’ eggs.” She shrugged. “It depends on the cook.”
Honey had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from giggling as she watched the outlaw wince and cast a quick, suspicious glance toward the kitchen at the back of the café.
“Pretty tasty, is it?” he asked. “You eat it often?”
Honey fashioned her sweetest smile. “Oh, my, yes. It’s considered quite a delicacy, even out here where rattlesnakes are so prevalent.”
The cook brought Honey’s coffee. “Algo más?” he asked Gideon, whose brow was furrowed now and whose voice cracked just slightly when he replied, “Huevos, huh?”
The Mexican smiled and bobbed his head affably. “Sí, señ or. Huevos.”
Gideon nodded and, with a soft sigh, lowered his worried gaze to the tabletop.
“No más, gracias,” Honey told the cook. When the man left, she sipped her coffee. Between sips, she smiled sunnily at her nervous breakfast companion.
Good, she thought. She didn’t mind making him uncomfortable one little bit. It pleased her enormously to watch Gideon Summerfield sweat. The man had been much too cool and controlled behind those ice gray eyes. He deserved a little spoofing, in Honey’s estimation. Then, quite suddenly, she remembered the night before, when he had turned to her in his sleep, pleading for warmth. So cold. So goddamn cold.
“Who’s Cora?” she asked him now.
His gaze shot up from the stained oilcloth that covered the table. “What?”
Honey managed a casual tone. “I asked you who Cora is.” She’d never seen such a surprised or bewildered expression on anyone’s face, which piqued her curiosity to the extreme. The man could barely put two words together when he tried to speak.
“What...? How do you...”
She sipped her coffee again, then shrugged indifferently as she set the cup back on the table. “It’s just that you mentioned her name in your sleep last night. I was merely wondering who she was.”
A muscle worked furiously in Gideon’s cheek and his teeth seemed clenched so tight, Honey despaired that he would even get a word out.
But he did.
Two words. A harsh, hard-bitten phrase.
“My wife.”
And now it was her turn to feel bewildered. Stunned, actually. His answer had struck her like a blow and sent her thoughts reeling. Why the fact that this man had a wife should have any impact at all on her feelings was a mystery to her. Honey drew in a sharp little breath. “Oh.”
He just sat there then, silent as a stone, staring out the window.
“Where...where is she? Cora. Mrs. Summerfield, I mean,” Honey inquired, her voice lower now, bereft of its former sunny lilt. “I don’t believe you’ve ever mentioned where you’re from.”
“Missouri.”
“Ah.”
Her comment met with a blank wall of silence, but Honey was determined to claw her way over it.
“Then she’s back there? In Missouri?” It wasn’t all that easy, she decided, posing questions to a stone. “Whereabouts? I know something of the state because my fath—” She broke off in the middle of the word, reminding herself that Gideon Summerfield wasn’t the only one at the table who had secrets. She had one or two of her own.
“I have some relatives—distant ones—who used to live in Westport. Near Kansas. On the border, isn’t it?”
He offered no comment, but nodded slightly, leading Honey to presume he had at least heard her. “Gideon,” she persisted, “I asked you where...”
“I don’t know,” he snarled, his steel gaze at last leaving the window and finding her face.
Her eyes widened. “You don’t know where your wife is?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I don’t understand that at all. It would seem to me...”
He raised a hand to silence her. “Look. She took off after I went to prison. End of marriage. End of story.”
Not by a long shot, Honey said to herself. “So you’re still married, then. Legally, I mean.”
“What difference does that make?”
Honey sat a little straighter. “It doesn’t. I’m just curious.” It wasn’t a total lie. She was curious—intensely so. But she still didn’t know why it did indeed make a difference whether or not Gideon Summerfield was married.
“Well, don’t be,” he said just as the cook put a plate of scrambled eggs and fried peppers on the table in front of him.
“Huevos, señor,” the Mexican announced proudly.
Gideon glared at the plate, then extended the dark look to Honey. “Rattlesnake,” he muttered, shaking his head.
One corner of her mouth lifted in a grin. “I said I spoke Spanish. I didn’t say I spoke it well.” She picked up her fork and proceeded to taste the delectable, familiar food.
Gideon devoted his complete attention to his breakfast. Honey enjoyed their companionable silence until her appetite was satisfied. Her curiosity, however, remained ravenous.
“How long ago?” she asked, slanting her fork across her empty plate.
“How long ago what?”
“When you went to...you know...” Why, she wondered, was it so difficult for her to say the word? She already knew he was a criminal, for heaven’s sake. She’d met him at a bank robbery, hadn’t she?
Gideon put his fork down now like a man who’d just lost his appetite. “Prison,” he said. “That’s English, bright eyes. Not your blasted, misconstrued Spanish.”
“Prison.” She repeated it if only to prove that she could. The word, however, seemed to stick in her throat.
“Five years ago,” he added as he pulled the quill pick from his shirt pocket and settled it in the corner of his mouth.
“Why?”
“I got caught,” he answered bluntly. “Why else?”
“Robbing a bank?”
Gideon eased back in his chair, tipping it onto the two back legs. “More or less,” he replied, then worked the quill to the center of his lips, preventing further conversation.
He hadn’t been robbing the bank, he thought bleakly. Not that time anyway. For a year and for the first time in his life, he’d been on the right side of the law. He’d married Cora, more out of high hope than hot affection. He’d taken up tenant farming with something like a vengeance, planting oats and corn and wheat till his hands were blistered and his back nearly broken. When he wasn’t being a farmer, he was being a carpenter and a bricklayer, fixing up that down-and-out tenant property till it looked like a real home. All the while, he’d bowed and scraped to the local authorities till his forehead was nearly rubbed raw. Trying. Trying for once to do right.
Hell, he’d been living so clean he practically squeaked, when his cousin, Dwight Samuel, had shown up one afternoon at his little hardscrabble farm just east of Sugar Creek. Dwight had called it quits with Jesse and Frank, forming his own ragged gang of cutthroats and thieves. The trouble was he couldn’t trust a single one of them, and he needed a man to watch his back.
A fool was what Dwight had needed, Gideon thought now, and a fool was just what he’d found. Dwight had played on his sympathy. His cousin had played him like some kind of fiddle, to the tune of old times, past crimes committed in the name of the Confederate States of America and William Clarke Quantrill, old loyalties and long-lingering hates.
“Family,” Dwight had said finally. “I helped raise you, Gid. You owe me.”
A dubious debt, Gideon had thought. His cousins had raised him to ride fast, shoot straight and steal. Still, they had taken him in when there was
no one else to look out for him. And dubious or not, it was a debt.
He remembered Dwight laughing as they rode into Liberty the following day. “Hell,” his cousin had said, “this bank’s been robbed so many times, I expect they’ll just hand over the money right quick and breathe a sigh of relief to see us ride out.”
But they hadn’t. The bank had been robbed so many times they were bound and determined not to let it happen again. The tellers had been armed. Half the town had been on the alert. Gideon had been holding the horses outside when Dwight had come flying empty-handed out the door, gunsmoke billowing at his back.
“They’re all dead. Shot down like dogs,” he’d yelled. “Let’s get.”
Dwight had leapt on his horse, grabbing the reins from Gideon just as hot metal had torn through Gideon’s thigh, and then a bullet in the shoulder had pitched him into the dirt of the street.
“They get you?” his cousin had yelled down at him.
Gideon only remembered raising a bloody hand. “Pull me up. I can ride.”
Dwight’s horse’s hooves had danced perilously close to Gideon’s head as the robber had peered down at him. “Hell. You’re dead, too. Sorry, cousin,” he’d said, then slashed his heels into the horse and was gone.
A feminine voice cut through Gideon’s reverie now. He looked at the woman across the table, almost surprised to find her there, startled to discover himself alive and breathing.
“Which was it?” she asked him now, her eyes brilliant with curiosity. “More or less?”
“More,” he said, thinking it had been more than he’d ever bargained for. Enough to land him in the state penitentiary when he recovered from his wounds.
Her head tilted fetchingly. She raised a hopeful eyebrow. “It wasn’t a case of mistaken identity or anything like that, was it?”
Gideon laughed in spite of himself. She was so young, so unspoiled. He appreciated her innocence and her willingness to believe in his, even though he wasn’t worthy of it. “I was guilty, Ed,” he said.
Her optimistic expression slackened a moment, hope withering in the harsh glare of fact. “Oh,” she said.
He grinned. “Disappointed?”
She shook her head vehemently.
“Yes, you are,” he said with a sigh. “You’re like most females. You want to make a man better than he is. Change his past to suit your own sweet notions. If you can’t change his past, then you set out to change his future.” He slanted back in his chair and crossed his arms, eyeing her with amusement.
But she didn’t appear to be amused, either by his views on the opposite sex or by his evasions. “Is that what Cora tried to do?” she snapped.
A bitter laugh broke from Gideon’s throat. “Hardly. Cora had enough trouble with her own past to waste her time worrying about mine.”
“Did she rob banks, too?”
“She was a whore.” The words came out more harshly than he intended, causing the little bank teller to flinch and drag in her lower lip. Gideon leaned forward. “Forget about Cora, will you? She took off five years ago, and I haven’t given her a second’s thought since then.”
“Yes, you have.” Her voice was quiet and firm. “You turned to her for warmth and for comfort last night in your sleep.”
He probably had, Gideon thought mournfully. But he wasn’t going to admit it to this little girl just to satisfy her overblown female curiosity. “What I turned to,” he growled, “was a woman in my bed. Any woman.”
“You spoke her name,” she insisted. “You said—”
Gideon shoved back his chair. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what I said. All right? Will you just stop?” He stood up and dug some bills out of his pocket, then tossed them on the table. “Come on.”
Honey rose slowly to her feet, shoulders stiff, chin tilted. “Where are we going?”
“To catch the ten o’clock train.” Gideon slung his arm around her and propelled her out of the café before she could respond.
The tracks ran north and south at the edge of the little town, and by the time Gideon had pushed, pulled and bullied Honey in that direction, the locomotive was already getting up a thundering head of steam. He clamped his hands around her waist and lifted her onto the platform of the last car, then vaulted up behind her.
Honey, who had been muttering under her breath all the way from the café, shook the red-and-black flounces of her short skirt now. “I can’t ride on a train dressed like this. What’ll people think?”
The look that Gideon gave her was a clear indication of what he was thinking. His lips were poised somewhere between a smile and a leer. His gray eyes sparked over her bodice as he stepped closer to her, forcing Honey to edge backward until her shoulders were pressed against the rear door of the train. Honey felt like a spring lamb in the grim shadow of a famished wolf. When she opened her mouth to protest his nearness, she could only squeak.
“They’ll think you’re beautiful, bright eyes,” Gideon said. He lowered his head to kiss her, doing what he had wanted to do from the first minute he’d laid eyes on her in the bank, allowing himself this taste of heaven now, knowing this was all he would ever have of her. And while his mouth claimed hers, Gideon slid his arms around her and worked his fingers into the red satin sash at the back of her waist.
Stunned by the warm assault, Honey’s first instinct was to push him away, but when her hands made contact with the hard press of his chest, when his heartbeat surged against her open palm, when he breathed, “Kiss me back, darlin’” against her rigid lips, she was lost. Almost against her will, she found herself relaxing in his embrace. And, as if they had a will of their own, her lips parted in invitation to his warm, seeking tongue.
Dizzy now, and trembling down to her toes, Honey dimly realized she wasn’t breathing. When she wrenched her mouth away to take in a great gasp of air, Gideon didn’t release her. And he didn’t stop kissing her, only now those kisses were burning across her cheeks, along her jawline and down the length of her neck. When his lips brushed over the exposed swell of her breasts and his tongue blazed a sizzling trail in the crevice between them, Honey sucked in another gulp of air.
Gideon moaned softly against her wet mouth. “Ah, Ed. Lord, honey, I wish...” He drew in a breath, filling his lungs with the sweet scent of her, while reminding himself that wishes were useless things for a man like him. If wishes were wings, the jails would be empty and the sky would darken with convicts.
He raised his head, studying her dazed expression, reveling in the flush of color his kiss had brought to her pretty face. He couldn’t imagine ever wanting a woman more than he wanted this one, now, this minute. “I wish...” he began, then fell silent at the choked sound of his own voice.
Her huge, luminous eyes glowed with a strange mixture of desire and curiosity and fear. Her lips glistened from his kiss. “What?” she whispered. Her sweet breath riffled against his cheek. “What do you wish, Gideon?”
He merely shook his head with his arms still around her, their gazes locked.
Honey could feel his hands moving along the back of her dress, tugging at the sash. For a moment she thought he was going to undress her, and to her own bewildered amazement, she found herself yielding to those hands, to the will of this man who seemed to paralyze her own will while he drugged her senses.
There was a deafening rumble then, followed by the long ear-splitting blast of a steam whistle. The train jolted forward. And Honey was jolted to her senses.
“Stop that,” she snapped. She stiffened in his embrace. “Get away from me.”
Gideon stepped back. He eased his arms from around her, widening his stance and locking his knees to absorb the swaying motion of the train as it began to slowly pick up speed. He smiled down at her now, then bent for one last taste of her lips.
“It would have been a little bit of heaven, Edwina Cassidy. You and me.” He sighed, and then his face hardened. “Well, hell. You take care of yourself now. So long, bright eyes.”
He gave a
brief glance to the ground that was beginning to blur beneath the moving train, then took another step away from her and launched himself over the metal rail of the platform.
Wide-eyed, too stunned to react, Honey saw him land on bent knees between the rails, then watched as he straightened up, grinned devilishly and blew her a kiss.
“Gideon,” she yelled. He was leaving her! The thought hit her like a lightning bolt. And like the inevitable thunderclap came the realization that he was getting away with the money.
Like hell he was, Honey thought. If he could jump from a moving train and land like a damn cat, then so could she. But when she took a step toward the railing, something promptly jerked her back.
Honey reached both hands frantically behind her for a moment, then shook her fists toward the outlaw’s receding form.
“Damn you, Gideon Summerfield, you no-good, lying, snake-tongued thief!” she screamed.
The whole time the desperado had been kissing her senseless, he had also been tying her sash to the rear door of the train.
Chapter Five
Gideon paused in the lobby of the hotel, his eyes lingering on the batwing doors of the saloon at the back. It was early afternoon, but already he could hear the chink of bottles against glasses, the slap of cards, the rough harmony of male curses and throaty female laughter. The tightness in his gut pulled in another notch. Too easy, he thought. It would be too easy to push through the doors, down the liquor to put out the fire that was burning in him, take a woman upstairs to douse the other flames.
He wished...
Forget it!
With a brittle curse, he headed for the stairs, took them two at a time, then slammed the door of his room behind him. Before him there, on the bed, all prim and pressed, were the little bank teller’s clothes. The dress was laid out—its skirt fluffed out and the sleeves set primly at each side—as if waiting for Edwina Cassidy to take shape inside. He focused on the pristine white lace of the dainty underclothes carefully folded there, ready to be lifted and fleshed out. Gideon’s mouth went dry.
