And although it was ironic, Ethan found himself putting those simple homespun values high above his own pleasure. Because he didn’t deserve her.
Taking a deep breath of the hot, muggy air, Ethan consciously opened his fist, forcing himself to relax. He needed to leave. He’d already lingered far too long in the garret.
And yet…
Ethan closed his eyes, but the action only seemed to provide him with a clearer image of Lettie. For the past two nights, she’d gone to bed in a nightgown more severe and modest than his ancient Aunt Minnie’s. She’d forced Ethan to turn around while she’d climbed beneath the covers, the whole time unaware that he’d watched her progress in the mirror above her bureau. Despite the havoc to his own system, he’d noted the way the worn fabric of her nightdress draped against the curves of her breasts and tangled between her legs as she moved.
Ethan’s hand tightened into a fist. She was so inexperienced—too inexperienced, dammit! She didn’t even know the extent of her power over him. She didn’t realize that, because of her, he’d begun to hesitate in his course of action. He’d begun to… feel.
Groaning low in his throat at his inability to control his self-destructive tendencies, Ethan strode across the room toward the newspaper articles and daily reports he’d strewn across the bureau. Each day, Ethan had slipped out of the room long enough to steal the boarders’ newspapers and periodicals to apprise himself of the latest efforts to capture the thief. As the true Gentleman Bandit, Ethan had thought he would be able to find some clue, some tiny piece of information that would help him unravel the riddle of who was responsible.
So far, none of his information had managed to help.
So far, all he’d discovered was the heat of the garret and the restlessness of his own soul.
Unconsciously, Ethan found himself turning to stare at the garret door and wondering when Lettie would return. Damned if he knew why he found the little minx so fascinating. Perhaps it was her passion for life. Perhaps it was her wholesome, fresh-scrubbed features, or the sensuality that lingered deep in her nut-brown eyes.
Or maybe it was simply that, for the first time in nearly ten years, someone trusted him explicitly, without need of excuses or explanations.
Lettie took a deep breath and stepped through her bedroom door. Keeping her expression firm and void of all emotion, she climbed the steps and waited for Ethan to turn and look at her before saying, “You’ve got to go away. Now.”
Ethan’s eyes narrowed and he straightened from where he’d been peering out the side of the window. “Why?”
“I can’t hide you anymore. I’m tired of lying to my family.”
He advanced toward her, clearly not believing her reasons. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Lettie!”
“Just go! Get out of here. I don’t want you around anymore.”
He took another step.
“I don’t want to see you in my room every night. I don’t want to hear you sleeping just a few feet away. I don’t want to be worrying that you’ll be idiot enough to climb out on the roof”—her voice faltered—“o-or that you’ll be hurt, even killed. I won’t be responsible for that. I won’t!”
When her last cry emerged more like a sob, Ethan hesitated only a moment before drawing her into his arms. He wrapped his arms tightly around her, rocking her, comforting her. He’d never had anyone care for him this much before. Not in a long, long time.
Drawing back, he slipped a finger under her chin, forcing her to look at him. He noted the misery in her eyes, the tear-streaked features, and something cracked within him, melted.
“Aw, Lettie,” he whispered, more to himself than to her. His palms framed her face and he brushed his lips against her own, savoring their sweetness.
She sighed against him, nudging closer, and suddenly, what had begun as a simple expression of concern became a hungry embrace. Her arms slipped around his waist to hold him tightly, even as his own hands dipped and lifted her against him.
Damn, how he was beginning to want this woman. Need her. Her kindness was an addiction to him. Her spontaneity a delight. And when she kissed him, he felt reality spinning away, so that he almost believed in a future.
Pulling her tightly against him, he reveled in her embrace. When she moved closer still, he braced his feet apart, making room for her legs between his own. He gasped when her arms slipped up the contours of his back, her fingers seeming to search for something. There was a hungry desperation to her touch—almost as if she never thought she would see him again.
That thought finally pierced the sensual fog surrounding Ethan’s brain, and he grasped her wrists and tore free.
Their gazes met and clung.
“What happened?” Ethan said after a long moment of silence.
She shook her head and tried to draw away, but Ethan pulled her tightly against his hips. Vaguely, he heard a crackle of paper, and when she froze in his arms, he wondered what could have caused such an immediate reaction. Slowly, he drew back and slid his hand into the deep pockets of her apron.
“No!”
He grasped the paper and twisted away from her, striding to the opposite side of the room. Quickly, he flattened the paper.
Despite the singed portion of the note, the eight-sided star glared up at him with stark finality. Once again, Ethan didn’t need to be told what it meant.
“Where did you find this?” He turned to find her gazing at him with eyes that were huge and nut-brown in the dim light of the loft.
“Under the back porch, jammed into the latticework. The wind must have blown it there within the last few days.”
Ethan’s chest swelled as he dragged a deep measure of air into his lungs in an attempt to push his own fear at bay. Despite his efforts, he felt his stomach grow heavy and tense, as if a cold weight had been dropped inside.
Once more he glanced down at the letter. A deputy had been injured during the last robbery.
A deputy who wore an eight-pointed star.
“You realize what this is, don’t you?” he murmured, partly to himself. With the wounding of a deputy, the Council would be out for blood.
He glanced up to find Lettie staring at him with anguished eyes. “Yes,” she whispered.
His expression grew bitter, his voice low. “This is my death warrant.” His words seemed to echo in the room, the calm tone giving his statement more credence than if he had ranted and raved.
Lettie regarded him with blatant pain. “I’m so sorry. So sorry.”
His shoulders drew back, and he took another deep breath. “If you don’t mind, I’ll wait and leave tonight when it’s dark.”
Though she ached to see him go, she nodded. “I’ll see to it that you have some food and supplies. After sundown, I’ll take you to a whistle stop north of town. You can get a train to Chicago that way.”
He nodded, then stepped toward her, his hand lifting and cupping her cheek. She nudged against the simple gesture, and his thumb lifted to brush across her lips. “I’ll miss you, Lettie Gray,” he whispered. “You’ve been very kind. More than you had to be.”
“I haven’t been kind.” Her arms lifted to rest against his chest. Her fingers splayed wide, her thumbs brushed idly against the sensitive skin bared by the placket of his shirt. “I care for you, Ethan.”
“Don’t say that.” He drew her hands away from his chest. “I’m leaving, Lettie, and I won’t come back. Don’t bind yourself to me. Don’t say things best left unsaid. Don’t wish for things that could never be.” A bitter sound tore from his throat. “You know nothing about me, Lettie. I’ve spent a third of my life on the run, and now I’ll spend the rest of it looking over my shoulder.”
“I don’t care about that.”
He moved away from her, his eyes blazing. “You should care. Dammit, you should care a lot! I’m wrong for you, Lettie. I’m the kind of man you should never admit to knowing. I’m the kind of man who ruins little girls like you, then leaves them to pick up t
he pieces. I’m the kind—”
“Stop it!”
“What’s the matter, Lettie? Can’t you bear to hear the truth? I’m dishonest. I’m ruthless.”
“Stop!” She strode toward him, her own eyes blazing. “You aren’t any of those things. You may have made mistakes in the past, but the man I’ve seen in this garret is tender and gentle.”
He grasped her wrist, yanking her toward him. His features grew fierce in the dim light of the garret. His other hand clasped around her neck and he bent to kiss her with all the hunger and desperation that burned within him. But, to his surprise, she didn’t shrink away. Instead, she returned his kiss, measure for measure.
Drawing on what little control he had left, Ethan wrenched free and framed her face in his hands, forcing her to look at him. “Dammit, Lettie. Don’t paint pretty pictures around me. I’m not one of your poems that can be neatly pieced together. I’m flesh and blood.” His hands wrapped around her back, pulling her tightly against the cradle of his hips. “I take what I want and I give no quarter.”
“You didn’t take me.”
Her murmured words hung in the air, shivering, quiet.
Neither of them moved. Neither dared breathe.
Then Ethan’s chest lifted in a shuddering sigh. “Dammit, Lettie. Don’t do this. Just let me go.”
Her hands lifted, forcing him to look at her. “I care for you, Ethan McGuire.” When he tried to interrupt, she broke in: “No, I do, and whether or not you hear the words, the feelings inside of me aren’t going to disappear.” Her hands pushed the hair away from his brow. The dark strands spilled like rain through her fingers, soft and smooth.
After long minutes of silence, Ethan looked up. Lettie’s heart ached at the expressions mirrored in his eyes: pride, determination.
And loneliness. Always the loneliness.
Perhaps Lettie was starved for some sort of companionship. Perhaps, as her mother was wont to say, she couldn’t resist siding with an underdog or nurturing strays, but suddenly she couldn’t let Ethan leave like this. Not alone.
She grasped his wrist, her grip almost desperate. “Let me come with you, at least part of the way. I know all of the back roads.”
“No.”
“But I could help you!”
He tensed. “No, Lettie,” he repeated more firmly.
“Why not?”
His shoulders drew back in a proud line. “Because you’re wholesome and good.”
“You make me sound like a loaf of bread,” she retorted in disgust.
“Dammit, Lettie, I’m a wanted man!”
“And I already know that fact.” Her gaze grew earnest. “Please. Let me come with you.”
After a moment’s hesitation, he drew away. Lettie knew by the stiffness that eased into his shoulders what Ethan’s answer would be. He thought she was painting rainbows again, believing things that were more fantasy than truth.
“No.”
Her hands dropped to her sides. A heavy mantle of sadness cloaked her so that she could barely breathe.
“I’ll miss you, Lettie Gray.” And she knew his admission cost him a great deal.
Her throat grew tight. “I’ll miss you, too, Ethan McGuire.”
The boardinghouse lay dark and sleeping, heavy with the night, as Lettie and Ethan crept down the back stairs. Lettie glanced back at him and her eyes stroked Ethan’s form with regret. He’d changed from his chambray shirt to one of Mr. Goldsmith’s dark workshirts, and the fabric billowed around him in ghostly excess, giving him the appearance of some pirate or—
Or the Highwayman.
She felt a twinge of nostalgia at the idea and resisted the urge to drink in his appearance like a person condemned to a lifetime without fresh spring water.
Once at the kitchen door, she touched his arm.
“You remember the directions I gave you?”
He nodded. “Follow the creek north until I reach the fourth bend, then head due west until I reach the tracks. Move northeast along the tracks for about five miles to the first whistle stop.”
She nodded. “Make sure you raise the red flag. Two passenger trains will pass through before dawn. If you don’t arrive in time for one of those, wait until tomorrow morning, otherwise you’ll be boarding a train that stopped in Madison, and someone may recognize your description.”
He nodded, slipping his revolver into the holster of the gun belt that was once again strapped to his hips.
“You have the food I gave you?”
“Yes.”
“And the water?”
“Yes.”
Her hand lingered just above his elbow, absorbing the warmth of his skin, the firm muscles of his arm.
“You’ll be careful?”
He nodded, his eyes gleaming in the darkness. Though they still held a hard cast, there was a certain tenderness in their depths that made their goodbyes seem that much more difficult.
He seemed to hesitate, battling with some inner demon before he said, “And you, Lettie? Will you be careful?”
Her head cocked. “Of what?”
His hand reached out to cup her cheek. “Of helping strange men and hiding them in your bedroom.”
She tried to smile—she really did—but the task was near to impossible with the way her heart seemed to he within her chest like a crushed piece of china, brittle and aching.
“You’d better go.”
His thumb rubbed against her cheek. “I won’t forget you, Lettie girl.”
Her smile grew sad. “You will. You’ll go back to your home and discover yourself littered with beautiful women with jet-black hair and glittering black eyes. And you’ll forget me. Plain little Lettie.”
He shook his head. “You’re wrong—I won’t forget you.” For once, she saw the enigmatic mask crack, and his expression grew gentle. “And you’re not plain. When you smile, no other woman could hold a candle to you.”
His large hand reached out to stroke her hair. The soft strands caught against his calloused palms with a delicious friction. “You’re the prettiest woman I know, Lettie. You have hair the color of rich earth, eyes the color of a new fawn’s…” He paused, reaching to lay his palm over her chest just below her left collarbone. “And you’re pretty inside, where it counts. You have a heart bigger than life itself, but, more importantly, you’re not afraid to show it.”
He leaned close, brushing his lips against her own.
“Goodbye, Lettie,” he murmured against her mouth.
“Bye.”
He hesitated, then drew her close, wrapping his arms around her waist and burying his head into the hollow of her shoulder.
Lettie embraced him as tightly as she could, trying to imprint the last possible ounce of sensation into her head forever so that she would never forget this moment, never forget the brush of his beard-roughened jaw against her neck, never forget the strength of his arms, the scent of his skin.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he set her back on her feet. He tipped her chin with a crooked finger and pressed a single kiss against her lips, a kiss so gentle and exquisite that Lettie thought she might shatter into a thousand pieces when he drew away.
“Goodbye, Lettie.”
She couldn’t trust herself to answer, so she nodded instead.
Ethan reached to open the door, and a taunting breeze teased at her skirts. Slowly drawing away from her, he slipped outside with the decisiveness of a man who knew just what he had to do and shut the door behind him.
Lettie stepped forward, pressing her hands against the glass. Numbly, she watched as Ethan crept down the back porch, heading in the direction of the creek. Within moments, he had melted into the darkness.
A heaving sigh shuddered through her body, and with it came the pain she had tried to push away. She’d only known him a little while, yet he had filled her days and nights with wild imaginings, chasing away the tedium and allowing herself to believe she could be anything she wanted to be: a great poet, a grande dame of literature…
A woman loved.
But as the house echoed dully about her, Lettie realized that her dreams were as far removed from reality as her dreams of the Highwayman. She was locked into her present pattern of work and duty as surely as if she were a part of the property. Her mother could not run the boardinghouse alone, and it was up to Lettie to help her. And Lettie had lived too long with the word responsibility hanging over her head to treat her duties lightly now.
Yet it was Ethan who had recognized that fact and forced her to stay.
Pressing more tightly against the window, Lettie tried to shield the glass from the faint light of the lamp in the hall, hoping she could catch one glimpse—just one more peek—of the man she’d once mistaken for her Highwayman.
But, like his namesake, he’d vanished into the darkness taking everything but her memories… and leaving no trace that he had ever really been there at all.
Ethan moved as noiselessly as he could through the darkness. Not long after he’d slipped away from the house, his heart began to pound so hard in his chest he could scarcely breathe. He’d felt this way before. Years before, after he’d become embroiled in crime in order to survive, he’d learned to love the exhilaration of the chase, the match of wits. Yet now, there was a difference. Now his stomach churned and his breathing rasped in his throat. Despite all he’d done—and the hell he deserved for doing it—Ethan didn’t want to die.
Without warning, the thunder of hooves split the heavy night air and Ethan dove to his stomach, trying to find cover in the brush. Distantly he heard voices.
“…meet up with the posse riding out of Harrisburg. We’ll need every man available, but leave Rusty and a few men on duty in case the thief doubles back toward Madison.”
Ethan grew still; his hands curled into the dust. Another set of hooves pounded on the ground, coming within yards of where he lay, then rumbling by. The unknown horseman drew to a halt, and Ethan chanced a quick look, lifting his head so that he could see through the brush.
“What’s all the ruckus, Jacob?”
For the first time Ethan noted the man in the center who firmly held the reins of his gelding as it skittishly danced from side to side.
Silken Dreams Page 14
