But here he was, sitting outside her house like some lovesick cowhand hot for the boss’s daughter. Of course, love had nothing to do with it. It was a physical thing between him and Sarah. It would eventually fade.
He hoped.
He was so close to having what he wanted. He couldn’t let anything get in his way now.
With a jerk of the reins, he turned his horse around and galloped off into the night.
Chapter Five
Bessie Beaumont had three big brothers, all ugly as sin and as devoted as lapdogs. Each brother had a shotgun and the skill to nail a squirrel at fifty paces.
And all three of them were on Donovan’s tail.
He ducked down the alley next to the barbershop and peered out to scan the terrain. His blood was thundering through his veins, and a particular exhilaration gripped him. It had been almost a year since he had played this game. He realized that he missed the sharp-witted challenge of the chase…even when he was the one being pursued.
The Beaumont brothers were questioning Ellie Pearson across the street. The three mountain men were all equally huge and equally unwashed. He couldn’t tell who was Beau, who was Buford and who was Ben, and he really didn’t want to get all that friendly with the family anyway. While the brothers were occupied, he slid around the corner and made for the door of the barbershop.
“There he is, Buford!” Bessie screeched from across the street. “Get him!”
Donovan cursed as he darted through the entrance, the whooping Beaumonts hot on his trail. Mort and Johnny, waiting for the barber, looked up, and Gabriel looked up from his shave as Donovan stood in the middle of the shop, glancing around for an exit.
“Hey there, Donovan,” Mort greeted him.
“Is there a back door?” Donovan demanded of Ned Gorman, who stood with the razor poised above Gabriel’s lathered face.
“Sure is,” Ned answered. “In the back.”
Donovan bolted for the back of the shop as the Beaumont brothers’ footsteps thundered on the wooden walkway outside.
“Get him, Ben!” Bessie wailed over the din. “You fetch me my husband right now, or I’m fixin' to cry and ruin my complexion for the weddin’!”
Donovan made it to the back room and found the door. He slipped through and clicked it shut behind him even as he heard Beau’s voice—or was it Ben’s?
“You seen a lowdown polecat come through here, barber? Now, Bessie, don’t cry….”
“I want my husband!” she whined.
Bessie Beaumont’s yowling rendition of feminine tears spurred on Donovan to the next building. He yanked open the door, shot inside and closed it with a barely audible scrape. He paused for a moment, listening, but the Beaumont boys were occupied next door with calming their distraught sister. He grinned, the thrill of the hunt still singing in his blood.
“Mr. Donovan? What are you doing?”
Her smooth, familiar voice kicked up the speed of his pulse. Thrumming with excitement, roiling in the juices of primitive instinct, Donovan turned and met Sarah’s inquiring, blue-eyed gaze.
Time seemed to slow. He watched her breasts rise and fall with her breathing. She trembled as his stare lingered there, and her eyes widened. Everything he’d felt last night came back with a vengeance, but now he didn’t care about the hows and whys.
“I saw you last night.” She jolted at the roughness of his tone, but he ignored her obvious trepidation and reached for her, capturing and holding her fluttering fingers with his. “I saw you standing there, so pretty in your nightdress, and I know you saw me.”
She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
“You saw me, Sarah.” He tugged her closer. “And you stood there and you showed yourself to me. And you wanted me.”
He lowered his head, claiming her mouth in a possessive kiss.
Sarah stiffened with shock as his mouth joined with hers, the attraction between them sizzling like grease on a griddle. She lifted her hands to his shoulders to push him away, but the warmth of his touch seduced her. The unbridled desire that drove him matched her own confusing emotions. Even as the voice of reason screamed not to give in to the danger, her lips parted beneath his, and she melted into his embrace.
It all seemed so simple, so basic. She closed her eyes in pleasure as the familiar fires licked at her, urging her closer to him. Her body had reacted the moment she saw him slip through the back door of the Chronicle. The way he moved mesmerized her. Swift. Stealthy. Soundless. Like a mountain cat stalking prey. There was a wild look in his eyes that set her heart to pounding, and her senses hummed, her body awakening with those traitorous longings that tortured her at night.
And right now she didn’t care about anything except that he keep touching her.
His big hands smoothed down her back, pressing her hard against him as he swept his tongue into the softness of her mouth. She opened to him, offering him everything, her own long-rejected passion exploding from her like the steam from a locomotive.
Anything could happen, and she wanted it to. Ignoring the tiny voice of morality that whispered through her mind, she grabbed fistfuls of his hair with both hands and kissed him with every ounce of passionate hunger that enslaved her.
A shriek rent the air. “Fetch me my husband now! I’m fixin’ to be Mrs. Donovan afore sundown!”
Sarah broke the kiss and stared at him. “What was that?”
“Damn.” He eyed her mouth with such carnal intent that she shuddered. “Bessie Beaumont. She wants to marry me.”
“What?”
“No time to explain.” He grabbed her hand and yanked her toward her desk. “I need you to hide me until the Beaumonts leave.”
She watched with amazement as he took off his hat, dropped to all fours and crawled beneath her desk. “Are you out of your mind?”
He stuck his head out and glared at her. “You listen here, sassy girl. The Beaumont boys are bound and determined to drag me to my own shotgun wedding unless you help me. And seeing as how it was you who got me into this fix, I reckon you can get me out of it. Now sit down.”
“You can’t blame me for this! The Beaumonts can’t even read.”
“Sit, Sarah.”
She gaped. “I can’t sit at my desk with you under there! It would be so…so…”
“Exciting? Arousing?” He grinned at her, every inch the rogue with his dark hair tumbling over his forehead and the single dimple creasing his cheek. “What’s the matter, sugar? Don’t you trust me?”
“I…I…”
The front door to the newspaper office swung open, and the Beaumont brothers squeezed through. Donovan ducked back under the desk.
“Afternoon, Miss Sarah,” Ben, the eldest, said. “We’re looking for Mr. Donovan on account of he’s gonna marry our sister this afternoon. Have you seen him?”
Sarah glanced from the shotguns the Beaumonts held to their slow-witted but determined expressions. With a graceful, casual movement, she slid into her chair and folded her hands atop her desk.
“I’m sorry, boys,” she said with a charming smile. “I haven’t seen him all day.”
The Beaumont brothers shuffled and shifted and scratched their heads, clearly at a loss.
“Are you sure you ain’t seen him, Miss Sarah?” Beau, the biggest of the lot, pushed back his dusty, battered hat. “We saw him run this way.”
“Mr. Donovan and I don’t exactly get along,” Sarah said.
“That’s not what I heard.” Bessie pushed past her brothers and stood with her hands on her pudgy hips, her scraggly red-brown hair falling in her eyes. Her over-endowed bosom heaved with outrage. Though her head barely reached her brother’s chest, Bessie glared at Sarah with all the fierceness of a grand Amazon princess.
Sarah raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know what you heard, Bessie—”
“I heard that you got your eye on my man, Miss Prim and Proper. And I’m here to tell ya that I don’t take kindly to no Jezebel sniffin’ around my husband.”
“See that you don’t,” Bessie huffed. “And don’t you be goin’ around callin’ him Donovan, you hear? His name is Mr. Donovan to you!”
“Mr. Donovan,” Sarah muttered as she felt her shoe slide from her foot.
“That’s right. And I’ll be Mrs. Donovan, soon as we find that…soon as we find my darling man.” Bessie smiled, revealing yellowed teeth in dire need of a scrubbing.
“You’ll tell us if you see him, won’t ya, Miss Sarah?” Buford asked.
Out of sight of the Beaumonts, one masculine finger slowly traced the sole of her stockinged foot from heel to toes. Heat streaked through her body and knocked every sensible thought from her head.
“Yes-s-s-s-s-s,” Sarah all but moaned.
“Thank you kindly, Miss Sarah,” Buford said as he and his brothers turned to leave.
Bessie marched up to the desk just as the rascal underneath it slipped off Sarah’s other shoe and began to rub both her feet with warm, powerful fingers. His thumbs pressed into the arches, and his hands massaged and squeezed the tender flesh.
“I got my eye on you,” Bessie announced dramatically. She leaned on the desk and shook a finger in Sarah’s face. “You see to it you keep your distance from my husband.”
Lean hands slid up her calves and kneaded the muscles there. Sarah could only nod at Bessie’s warning, lest a moan of pleasure escape her lips instead of words.
“Come on, Bessie.” Ben took his sister by the arm. “Maybe he went by the saloon. We’ll find him.”
“You mind what I said,” Bessie warned just before her brothers pulled her out the door.
The second they were gone, Sarah shoved back her chair and stood, anger simmering along with passion through her veins. “They’re gone. You can go now.”
He clambered out from beneath the desk and got to his feet, watching her with smoldering dark eyes. “I figure I’m not in much of a hurry.”
The low timbre of his voice made her pulse skip, but the Beaumonts’ crudeness had reminded her of her resolve to resist the untamed side of herself. “If you hurry, you can slip out before they see you.”
“You trying to get rid of me, sassy girl?” He cocked his head to the side. “After the way you all but crawled up inside me before?”
“Get out.” She pointed a finger at the door. “Get out now.”
“You started this.” Anger tinged his voice and sent a warning that she rashly ignored.
“No, you started this, you with your precious list. I told you that you can’t choose a wife the way you would a brood mare, but you didn’t listen.”
“You’re the one who wrote the article that has every woman in Wyoming tracking me like a horse thief,” he retorted. “I can’t turn around anymore without finding some woman mooning after me or fainting in my path or even trying to seduce me!”
“You poor thing,” she sneered.
“You got mad when I told you that you weren’t the sort of woman I intend to marry. You wrote that article because of a temper tantrum!”
Sarah fisted her hands. “That’s right, you lowdown polecat. You told me straight to my face that I was good enough for you to take to bed, but not good enough to make your wife. I imagine the whole town told you about the scandal, and that made you think I was an easy mark.”
“I never thought you were an easy mark, and I never listen to gossip,” he snapped back. “I told you, I can’t marry a woman with a job. I need to marry a woman who will give all her attention to being a wife and mother. We both know that’s not you, Sarah, no matter how hot we get each other.”
“You said I’m not good enough to be your wife,” she repeated. “So I’ll thank you not to be putting your hands on me anymore.”
He stared at her for a long moment. “I never said you weren’t good enough, Sarah. You’re just not the right woman.”
“That’s almost the same thing.” Her chin jutted proudly as she met his stare.
“Fine.” He shoved his hat on his head, then handed her the shoes he held in his other hand. “I believe these are yours?”
She snatched them from him. “Out!”
“I’m going.” He started to the door, but paused and glanced at her over his shoulder. “I’ll be back, sweet Sarah. And we’ll see what’s what.”
Sarah snarled an unladylike curse and flung her shoes at the door that closed behind him.
Women. Who could understand them?
Donovan heard the two thuds against the door moments after he closed it, and he couldn’t help but grin. Her shoes, no doubt. Any other woman might indulge in a fit of maidenly tears, but his sassy girl had a temper like a tornado.
The grin slipped from his face. When had she become his Sassy?
He turned to head down to the saloon, where he’d left Matt and Amos—and stopped abruptly when a shotgun barrel jabbed into his gut. He lifted his gaze to Buford’s—or was it Beau’s? —beady-eyed face.
“Goin’ somewhere, Donovan?”
Donovan took a step back and came up against another shotgun that poked him in the kidney.
“Doesn’t look like it,” he said. His mind swiftly calculated the odds, even as he noted a dozen possible weak points. There were two of them—no, three, he corrected as the third brother walked up with Bessie in tow. And the girl wasn’t much of a fighter, but she sure was a heck of a screamer.
The thought of listening to her caterwauling until death parted them was enough to make a man long for a bullet in the brain.
“Ya got him!” Bessie breathed with admiration.
“Sure did.” The Beaumont behind him shoved him hard with the shotgun, making Donovan wince. “Anything for you, Bessie. You know that.”
“Let’s go get the preacher and get you married up afore sundown,” another brother suggested. He glared at Donovan. “And you’d better make my sister the happiest woman in Wyoming Territory, you got that, Donovan?”
Donovan nodded, his fingers curling into his palms. He could take them. He knew he could. Easily. He had fought and won in worse situations. But the Beaumont brothers weren’t the brightest fellows he’d ever encountered, and they were likely to start firing at anything that moved if he made a break for it. And that meant that innocent people might get hurt.
He could let them take him over the to church, which stood apart from the main buildings of the town. Then he would take them down and make his escape. His body tensed, poised for the slightest opportunity.
He wasn’t about to marry Bessie Beaumont, shotguns and brothers be damned. But neither would he be responsible for the deaths of innocent people.
Never again.
Sarah worried her bottom lip between her teeth. She had peeked out the window of her office to watch Donovan walk away only to witness his capture instead. And now she was torn.
She glanced over at the Winchester rifle that hung on the wall. She knew how to use it. As a woman who often worked alone late at night, she had felt it a wise precaution to have some means of protecting herself. Burr was a quiet town for the most part, and when the sheriff had died nearly two years ago, they hadn’t even bothered to replace him. But a woman could never be too careful, as she had learned three years before.
She felt her throat close up and willed away the painful memories. Donovan was in danger. There were three of them, and though Donovan himself was a tall man, the Beaumont brothers all topped him by at least three or four inches and outweighed him by fifty pounds. She had no doubt that one-on-one, he could handle himself. But three-to-one odds stretched the limits of any man’s ability.
She had to help him.
Her mind whirled as she hurried to the wall and lifted down the rifle. She hated guns. Hated the coldness of the metal that felt like death in her hands.
But angry as she was at
Donovan for his arrogance, and at herself for responding to his kiss, she couldn’t let the man die.
She walked to the door and opened it. The Beaumonts had made it as far as Doc Mercer’s, and they were obviously bringing Donovan to the church.
Her hands were steady as she checked to be sure the weapon was still loaded. But her mind screamed in protest. She hated guns. A gun had killed her father. And she had sworn that day, bent over her father’s body with his blood staining her hands, that she would never again love a man who lived by the gun. The thrill of danger that lured such a man exacted too great a cost on those around him.
She raised the rifle and sighted down the barrel, aiming at one of the Beaumont’s gun hands. She would not kill a man, but she would darned well slow him down.
“Boss!” Waving, Amos hurried past.
Sarah lowered the rifle.
“Boss, wait!” Matt was hot on Amos’s heels.
“Bessie!” A wiry young man with a prominent Adam’s apple hurried after both of them.
Sarah blinked in surprise. What was Homer Beasty doing here?
Bessie stopped and whirled, staring at the young man. “Homer?”
“Bessie.” Homer stopped and took her hands in his. “Bessie, say it isn’t so. Tell me you’re not going to marry this…this…”
“Am so.” Bessie sniffed and gave Homer a look. “A girl’s got to get a husband any way she can.”
“Well, I won’t have it!” Homer stood straight as a fence post and glared at Donovan. “I love you, Bessie, and I’ll fight for you if I have to.”
“Oh, Homer.” Bessie sighed, obviously undone by his declaration.
“You.” Homer pointed a thin finger at Donovan. “Defend yourself!”
He rushed his rival. Sarah waited, expecting Donovan to win the skirmish with little effort. Instead, Homer got him on the chin with a left hook that sent Donovan sprawling.
“Homer!” Eyes wide with admiration, Bessie hurried to the young man’s side and attached herself to his elbow. “My goodness, I never realized how strong you are!”
Donovan's Bed: The Calhoun Sisters, Book 1 Page 6
