v1.5
July 2007
1882
"Mr. Hunter, I would like to ask you to marry me."
Cole couldn't say a word, it was one of the few times in his life when he was actually speechless. There'd been many times when he'd chosen not to speak, but at those times a few thousand words had been racing around in his head and he'd simply refused to let them out. Not now, though.
It wasn't that he was shocked at a woman asking him to marry her. He didn't want to brag, but he'd had a few marriage proposals in his time. Well, so maybe they were more in the form of propositions and maybe they weren't from women who could be called respectable, but there had definitely been women who had mentioned the word "marriage."
What was shocking was that this woman was talking to him about marriage. This tiny creature was the type of woman who pretended that men like him didn't exist. She was one of those women who swept their skirts aside when he walked by. Maybe later they met him in the back of the barn after church, but they didn't talk of marriage with him, and they didn't ask him in for Sunday dinner.
But he could believe that this little thing would have trouble getting a man. There wasn't anything to recommend her. Except for a rather curvy front—and he'd certainly seen better—she was the type of woman you wouldn't notice even if she were sitting on your lap. Not pretty, not ugly, not even homely, just plain-faced. She had dull brown hair, not a lot of it, and it looked as though a dozen red-hot pokers couldn't make it curl. Plain brown eyes, plain little nose, plain, ordinary little mouth. No figure to speak of except for the nice round shape on top. No hips, no real curves at all.
And then there was her manner. Cole liked women who looked as though they'd be fun in bed and out of it. He liked a woman who could laugh and make him laugh, but this prim little creature hardly looked capable of pleasantries, much less humor. She looked like the teacher who would accept no excuse for not doing your homework. She looked like the lady who arranged the flowers for the church every Sunday, the woman you saw every day you were growing up but never thought to ask her name.
She didn't look married. She didn't look as though she'd ever had a man in her bed, a man snuggling against her for warmth. If she'd had a man, he probably wore a long white nightshirt and a cap and what they did they did solely for the procreation of the human race.
He took his time lighting a thin cigar to give himself some time to think—and to recover himself. He traveled so much and met so many people that he'd had to train himself to be a quick and accurate judge of both men and women. But so far, he wasn't making any headway with this one. When he was younger than his present thirty-eight years, he used to think that women like this one were dying for a man to warm them up. He'd learned that cold-looking women were, for the most part, cold women. Once he'd spent months working to seduce a plain, prim little woman rather like this one, all the while thinking that a dormant volcano lay under her tightly buttoned dress. But when he finally got her knickers off, she just lay there with her fists clenched and her teeth gritted. It was the one and only time in his life when he couldn't perform. After that, he decided it was easier to go after the women who looked as though they might welcome his advances.
So now here was one of these frigid, mousy little nothings, with her dress buttoned to her chin, her elbows held close to her body, and although he couldn't see them, he was sure her knees were locked together.
He was seated on one of those hard, upholstered chairs the landlady considered fashionable, taking his time lighting his cigar and watching her, waiting for her to make the next move. Of course she had so far made all the moves. She had written him that she wanted to hire his services for a very personal matter and she'd like to come to see him in Abilene.
From her letter—written on heavy vellum in a perfect hand—he'd guessed she was rich and she wanted him to kill some man who'd toyed with her affections. That's what women usually wrote to him about. If a man wanted to hire him, he generally wanted someone killed because of land or cattle or water rights or revenge or some such. But with women it was always love. Years ago, Cole had stopped trying to make both men and women believe he wasn't a hired killer. He was a peacemaker-for-hire. He felt that he was really a diplomat. He had a talent for settling disputes, and he used that talent to do what he could. It was true that sometimes people got killed during the talks, but Cole only defended himself. He never drew first.
"Please go on," he said when the mouse didn't continue. He'd offered her a seat, but she said she'd rather stand. Probably because that stiff back of hers wouldn't bend. And she'd insisted that the door to his room be left open six inches—so no one would get the wrong idea.
She cleared her throat. "I know what I must sound like and look like. I'm sure you think I am a lonely spinster in need of a man."
Cole had to work to keep from smiling since that is just what he thought. Was she now going to tell him that she didn't need a man? All she wanted was for him to find the neighbor's son, who had jilted her, and wipe him off the face of the earth.
"I try not to lie to myself," she said. "I have no illusions about my appearance and my appeal to men. I would, of course, like to have a husband and half a dozen children."
He did smile at that. At least she was honest about her need for an energetic man in her bed.
"But if I really were looking for a husband, a man to be a father to my children, I certainly wouldn't consider an aging gunslinger with no visible means of support and the beginnings of a paunch."
At that Cole sat up straighter in his chair and sucked in his stomach. It took some doing to keep from putting his hand on his stomach. Maybe he'd better stay away from his landlady's apple pie for a couple of days. "Would you mind telling me what you want?" Not that I would ever, ever take this job, he said to himself. What did she mean, "aging gunslinger"? Why he was as good with a gun right now as he had been twenty years ago! None of these youngsters today— He cut off his thoughts when she started speaking again.
"I'm not sure what to tell you first." She gave him a hard, scrutinizing look. "I was told you were the handsomest man in Texas."
Cole smiled again. "People talk a lot," he said modestly.
"Personally, I don't see it."
At that he paused with his cigar in midair.
"Maybe you were handsome some years back but now… Too much sun has turned your skin to leather, and you have a hard look about your eyes. It's my guess, Mr. Hunter, that you're a very selfish man."
For the second time that day, Cole was shocked into speechlessness. Then he tipped his head back and laughed. When he looked at the woman again, she wasn't so much as smiling. "All right, Miss…"
"Latham. Miss Latham."
"Ah, yes, Miss Latham," he said snidely, then was annoyed with himself. In fights, he'd faced men who'd said all manner of things about him and his ancestors and they hadn't been able to rile him, but this ordinary woman with her comments about his supposed paunch and whether or not he was selfish annoyed him. Who was she to talk? She was so nondescript that if you stood her against a sand dune you wouldn't be able to see where she started and the sand left off.
"You want to tell me what you want of me?" he asked. He knew he ought to tell her to get out of here, but he couldn't help being curious as to what she had to say. Great, he thought, a curious diplomat. He could get killed being curious.
"I have a sister who is one year older than I am."
She turned and walked toward the window, and when she walked there wasn't the slightest hint of the graceful sway of hips that men loved to look at. This woman walked as though she were made of wood—and she was just about that attractive to him.
"My sister is everything that I am not. My sister is beautiful."
She must have sensed Cole's thoughts because she started explaining. "I know that those who see me cannot believe I have a beautiful sister. They probably think that my idea of beauty is undeveloped."
Cole didn't say a word, but this was just what he was thinking. It wouldn't take much of a looker to be pretty beside this little creature. Of course with every unpleasant thing she said about him, she became even less attractive. He wondered how old she was. Not less than thirty was his guess. Much too old to attract any man now. She wouldn't get the half-dozen kids she wanted.
"Rowena is as beautiful as any woman who has ever lived. She's five feet seven, has thick auburn hair that curls all by itself. She has green eyes, thick lashes, a perfect nose, and full lips. She has a figure that has made men tremble. I know this because I have seen it happen more than once."
She took a deep breath. "More important than her beauty—to women at least—is that Rowena is a lovely person. She cares about other people. She does things for them, makes them care about themselves and others. She is a born leader." She sighed. "My sister has my mother's looks and personality. In other words, she has everything."
"You want me to shoot her for you?" Cole was making a joke, but the woman didn't laugh, making him wonder if she had any sense of humor at all.
"To take my sister from this life would harm the earth."
Cole coughed, nearly choking on the cigar smoke. He'd never heard anyone say anything like that before, yet she said it as though she truly meant it.
"My sister is a heroine. I mean that in the best sense. Like all heroines, she has no idea of her heroism. When she was twelve, she saw a fire in an orphanage, and without thought for her own safety she ran into the burning building and saved a roomful of children. She is beloved by everyone."
"Except you."
Miss Latham took another deep breath and sat down. "No, you're wrong. She is loved especially by me." When she expelled her breath he could see that she was shaking, but she concealed it very well. He suspected that she often hid her emotions. "It is difficult to explain how I feel about Rowena. I love her but sometimes I… I almost hate her." Her head came up in a gesture of pride. "Perhaps my problem is actually jealousy."
For several moments he watched her sit utterly still on her chair, and he was amazed to see that there was no betrayal of emotion on her face or in her body. No flicker of the eyes, no wringing of the hands. She sat perfectly still. She'd be a brilliant poker player.
Suddenly Cole knew he was in trouble because he could feel himself softening toward her. "What do you want me to do?" he asked more gruffly than he meant to.
"Six years ago my sister married a fabulous man. Tall, handsome, rich, intelligent. Jonathan is the man every woman dreams of marrying. They live in England on a beautiful estate and have two lovely children. Rowena is the type of woman whose servants would work for her even if she couldn't pay them."
"And what about you?"
For the first time, he saw the tiniest bit of a smile from her. "I overpay my servants and demand nothing from them, and still they steal the silver."
At that he laughed again. Maybe she did have a sense of humor after all.
"My problem stems from the fact that my sister loves me very much. She always has. At Christmas she used to sneak downstairs during the night and switch labels on packages because people tended to give me boring, utilitarian gifts while they gave Rowena things of beauty. Of course I would then end up with twenty-five yards of yellow silk embroidered with butterflies and she would get ten volumes on the life of Byron, so we'd both be unhappy. But she did it out of love for me."
"You like Byron?"
"I like books. And research. I am the sensible one while Rowena is the flamboyant one. When I see flames coming out of a building, I call for the fire department. I do not run toward flames; I run away from them."
Cole smiled. "I'm more like you."
"Oh, no, you're not," she said with some strength. "You, Mr. Hunter, are like Rowena."
The way she said that made it sound like the worst thing anyone had ever said about him. His first reaction was to defend himself. But defend himself from what? She had said nothing about her sister that wasn't highly complimentary.
"I have researched you rather thoroughly, Mr. Hunter, and you are as blindly heroic as my sister. You act first and then think about what you are doing. According to the sources I have consulted, you have settled at least two range wars with fewer deaths than anyone believed possible."
He knew he shouldn't, but he had to pay her back for her earlier remark. "No ma'am, I'm just what you see—an aging gunslinger."
"That's what you look like, and it's true that you have no future. Your usefulness will end when your eyesight fails. As far as I can tell, you have not managed to save any money from ail that you have made, mainly because you tend to work for little or nothing. On one hand you are heroic, and on the other you are a fool."
"You do know how to flatter a man, Miss Latham. I can't imagine why you don't have a husband and a dozen kids."
"I am immune to insults from men, so you might as well not try. I merely want to hire you for a job and that's all. After two weeks you may walk out of my life and never see me again."
"And what you want me to do is marry you?"
"Not actually marry me, just pretend to be my husband for the two weeks that my sister will be here in Texas visiting me."
"I'm curious, miss, why me? Don't you think that an aging gunslinger is the worst choice for a husband?" No matter that she'd said nice things to him, that one remark about his age got under his skin. And there was the thing about his eyesight. He could see as well today as when he was eighteen. Well, maybe newspaper print was smaller than it used to be, but— He made himself stop thinking. If she made another one of her belittling comments, he was going to strangle her.
"It's because of who you are that I want you. I want to… to impress my sister." In the first real emotion she'd shown yet, she threw up her hands in exasperation. "Who can understand love? I certainly don't. It seems to me that if you're going to marry a man, you should choose a man who would be a good provider, reliable, a caring father. But women don't seem to want men like that. Women want men who are dangerous, men who do really childish, stupid things like shoot people faster than they themselves can be shot. In short, Mr. Hunter, women want men like you."
Cole gave up trying to remember to smoke. He was so fascinated by her that a keg of dynamite couldn't have moved him. "I would impress your sister?" he asked softly.
"Oh, yes. You're just the type who would impress Rowena. You're rather like her Jonathan, except that he has used his… I'm not sure you would call it talent, but he's used his ability to frighten people and terrify them to make enormous amounts of money."
"Sounds like a real devil."
"He is. But that's what women seem to like. I don't mean that Jonathan is a bad person. I think he's generally considered a very good businessman. And he's compassionate in his way, just as you are, but he thinks that any means is justified, as long as everything goes his way in the end."
"And I am like that?" He could have bitten his tongue for asking, but he couldn't help himself.
"Yes. It really wasn't your business to settle those range wars, and I am amazed at the vanity it took on your part to think that you could settle them."
"But I did settle them," he couldn't help pointing out.
"Yes, there is that. You see, Jonathan goes about making money just the way you go about interfering in people's lives and killing them if they get in your way."
Cole felt as though he should apologize for having been born. "I am sorry to have displeased you, sorry that women like your sister think I'm worth something," he said sarcastically.
"Oh, that's all right," she said, taking his words seriously. "We all have our vanities. I am extremely vain in what I'm doing now. You see, my sister has only good intentions toward me, but she plans to come to Texas to find me a husband. She says that I am becoming a dried-up, sour…" She waved her hand in dismissal. "It doesn't matter what Rowena says. She says whatever comes to her mind."
"Unlike you, who are the very essence of tact and graciousness."
She gave him a hard look to see if he was joking, but she could see no humor in his eyes. "Rowena has decided to manage my life, and she will do so if I don't do something beforehand."
"I'm having difficulty understanding something. You say that you want a husband and kids, and obviously, with your charms, you're not going to find a man by yourself, so why don't you allow your sister to find one for you?"
"Because she will sweet-talk some man like you into marrying me."
Cole just sat there and blinked at her. It was difficult to think of oneself as the worst thing that could happen to a woman. There had been a few women who thought he was the best thing that could happen to them.
She let out a sigh. "I see that I'm not explaining myself thoroughly."
"It's probably my fault," Cole said sweetly. "All that gunpowder going off near my head has made me rather stupid over all the many, many years of my life. Please do explain everything to me."
"I do want a husband, and I plan to get one… eventually. But the man I want is not the sort that Rowena would want for me. I want a nice, plain man. I don't want a man like her Jonathan or like you. I don't want a man who is so handsome that I have to worry every night that he's out with other women."
Cole thought there was a compliment in there, but he wasn't sure where it was.
"I want a man I can depend on, someone who'll be there when I go to sleep and when I wake up. I want a man who will rock the baby when it's teething. I want a man who will nurse me when I'm ill. In other words I want a man who is grown up, an adult, a man who is man enough to know that there are ways of settling arguments that don't involve shooting someone."
Cole found himself squirming in his seat. He was developing a genuine dislike for this woman. "So why don't you get one of those sodbusters if that's what you want?" He couldn't believe it but his voice sounded petulant and maybe even jealous.
"Can you imagine what my sister's reaction would be if she came to visit and found me married to some short, bald man who knew more about books than guns? Rowena would feel even sorrier for me than she does already."
Suddenly she stood up, her fists clenched. "Mr. Hunter, you can't imagine what it was like growing up with a sister like Rowena. All my life I've been compared to her. If she had to be beautiful, I don't think it's fair that she's also talented. Rowena can do anything. She rides as though she's part of the horse. She can cook; she can dance; she speaks four languages. Rowena is absolutely divine. She used to stand up to our father with great defiance and he loved her all the more for it. When I tried to stand up to him he sent me to my room without supper."
She took a deep breath as if to calm herself. "So now my parents are dead, I live alone in an enormous, dreary old house, and my splendid sister is coming to Texas to find some man for me to marry. She says she's doing this out of love for me, but it's really out of pity. She feels sorry for me and thinks that I could never get a husband on my own, but she believes that she has enough charm to persuade a man to marry me."
She looked at him. "It's hardly been a year since my father died, and while he was alive I never had a chance to look for a husband. He said he'd lost one daughter to marriage and he was going to make damned sure he didn't lose another. I have every confidence that now that I am free I can get a husband, but not by next week when Rowena arrives. At least not a good husband. Those men take time to find and need careful consideration. Marriage is a very serious undertaking. And besides, even if I did greet Rowena with the type of man I want on my arm, she'd still feel sorry for me because I didn't have some swaggering, squint-eyed, hard-jawed, ruthless killer like her husband."
Cole couldn't help running his hand over his jaw. Was it hard? Was he ruthless? Did he swagger? Damn, but the woman was making him crazy. If he really were a ruthless killer, she'd be the first on his list to get rid of.
"So you want me to pretend to be married to you for two weeks in an effort to impress your beautiful sister?"
"Yes, exactly. I will pay you five thousand dollars for the two weeks, and during that time, of course, you will live in a comfortable house and be well fed."
She talked as though he usually lived in a cave and ate dirt and worms for dinner. Of course this boardinghouse could use a good cleaning and maybe the food did leave a lot to be desired. But one time in Saint Louis he'd lived in a splendid hotel and eaten… Well, that had been after a lucrative job, and he'd stayed there until the money ran out. Maybe her bald farmer would have done something sensible with the money.
"Well?" she asked, frowning impatiently.
"Miss Latham, I think that if I had to spend two weeks near you, I'd be hanged for murder—yours."
Even though he was watching her intently, she didn't betray any emotion—if she had any. "I guess that's settled, then. I wish you the best in your endeavors in the future, and I hope that you can continue to dodge bullets for many years. Good day, sir."
With that she left the room, closing the door behind her.
Cole walked to the cabinet against the wall and withdrew a bottle of whiskey and downed a healthy slug. What would little Miss Prim and Proper say to his drinking at this time of the morning? Probably just look down her boring little nose at him.
At the window, he held the curtain aside and watched her walk across the street. Not one man turned to watch her walk or even looked at her. She was the most undesirable woman he'd ever laid eyes on. Yet something about her got under his skin.
"Damn!" he said out loud. In a matter of minutes she had made him feel that his entire life was a failure. Him! Coleman Hunter, a man known throughout the Southwest as a man to be reckoned with, a man who could have his pick of any woman in the country.
He moved away from the window, and as he did so, he happened to see himself in the mirror over the bureau. Turning sideways, he stood a little straighter and sucked in his stomach. There wasn't any paunch. His stomach was as flat as the day he had his first gunfight. Angrily he grabbed his hat and left the room.
Two hours later he was sitting on the front porch of the sheriff's office whittling a stick into nothing. He was beginning to think the woman was a jinx. Ten minutes after he'd left his boardinghouse, a boy had come running to him with a telegram. His next job, for some rancher in Piano, had been canceled. The man had wanted someone to find and kill a bunch of rustlers, but he had telegraphed that a younger, less expensive man had already done the job for him.
This news had made Cole so angry he'd gone to Nina and told her he wanted her, and now. Nina had said that he had to wait his turn and he hadn't paid her for the last time. Since when had he had to pay for a woman? Women were dying to go to bed with him.
"Nina," he said, hating himself for doing it, "do you think I'm… well, you know… attractive?"
That had made her laugh. "What's wrong with you, Cole, honey? You fallin' for some girl that thinks you're old enough to be her father?"
That was probably the only insult Miss Latham had not given him, but now Nina had. First a dried-up old maid and now a prostitute. He thought he'd better get out of Abilene fast, before his hair turned gray and his teeth fell out.
"What's eatin' you?" asked the sheriff, who was now sitting next to him on the porch.
"Nothing's wrong with me," Cole snapped. "What makes you think anything is wrong with me?"
"I've rarely seen you awake this early, and when you do get up in the daylight it's usually to meet somebody in a shootout. How come you ain't over at the saloon like you usually are?"
"Is that what you think of me? Is that what you think I do with my life, shoot people and drink and gamble? If you think I'm such a wastrel, why haven't you arrested me? For that matter, if I'm such a killer, why haven't you hanged me?"
The sheriff looked at Cole in amusement. They had known each other for years, had ridden together many times, until the sheriff decided that he'd had enough of bedrolls and beans. He'd married a plump widow and produced two little boys who were everything to him. "Nina turn you down?"
"No, Nina didn't turn me down," Cole lied. "What is wrong with the people in the town that a man can't do something a little different now and then?"
"Somebody got to you today. Who was it? Any of Dalton's boys around that I don't know about?"
Cole didn't answer him because at that moment boring little Miss Latham stepped out of the hotel and started walking down the street toward the bank.
The sheriff was watching his longtime friend, trying to figure out what was wrong with him, when Cole's eyes suddenly changed. It was the look he usually reserved for cardsharps who might have an ace up their sleeves and for notorious gunmen who might draw at any second so they could say they'd killed Cole Hunter. The sheriff, to his disbelief, saw that Cole had fastened his gaze on a small, plain woman in a modest brown dress. Cole usually went for flashy women in red satin and black lace. He said he fought men for a living, so he didn't want to fight women; he wanted them to be easy.
"Who is she?" Cole asked belligerently, pointing his knife blade toward her.
Abilene was a good-sized town, but the sheriff prided himself on knowing who came and went. "Money." He bit off a chew of tobacco. "Her father was from the East, came out here and bought a few hundred acres of very pretty land up north, built the biggest house ever seen by most people, then sat down and waited. Most people thought he was crazy. Four years later the railroad came through and he sold them land for five times what he'd paid for it. He built a town, called it Latham after himself, then rented the buildings to people who wanted to work. A hard man. They say he throws out tenants if they're twenty-four hours late with the rent."
"Did," Cole said. "He died nearly a year ago."
"Oh? I hadn't heard," the sheriff said, letting Cole know that he'd like to hear more. But Cole had always accused him of being an old gossip and wasn't about to give him any information.
"What about his wife?" Cole asked.
"I heard he bought her too. He went back east for a few months and returned with her." The sheriff paused to smile. "I hear she was the most beautiful woman most men had ever seen. I talked to a cowboy that used to work for them, and he said there wasn't one man that could say a word when she was around. All of 'em just stood and stared at her."
"And she had a daughter who looked just like her," Cole said softly.
The sheriff chuckled. "Yeah, a real beauty, and then she had one that looked just like him. Must've been a real disappointment to them."
Cole wasn't sure whether he should defend the brat or not. Part of him thought he should, but then he thought of "aging gunslinger" and he didn't defend her. Next time some whippersnapper challenged him to a duel, he ought to sic Miss Latham on him. Her words could make him bleed more than Cole's bullets.
It was when he was whittling the fourth stick away to nothing that the commotion started. Right under the sleepy nose of the sheriff and the un watchful eye of Cole, four men had ridden up to the bank, pulled bandannas up over their faces, and proceeded to rob the bank. The first the sheriff knew of it was a gunshot, then a man staggering out, holding a bloody hand over his stomach.
Cole had never thought that a bank robbery was any of his business. First of all, he might find himself shooting at people he considered his friends, men he had shared campfires with, so he left do-gooding to men stupid enough to pin a badge on. Yesterday he would have sat where he was on the porch and watched while the sheriff jumped up and started running, his young deputy coming from inside the sheriff's office to run behind him.
But today something was different. Today the words She's in there echoed in his head. That didn't make sense, of course, because he had no interest in her. If it had been Nina or someone else he knew, that might have made sense; this did not.
He didn't take time to think. In spite of his imaginary paunch and his advancing age and his failing eyesight, he bolted over the hitching rail and took off running, a full twenty-five feet in front of the sheriff. He was like a snake, one minute lazy and still in the sun, and the next moment moving so quickly it was difficult to see him.
The robbers hadn't counted on a man with the reputation of Cole Hunter trying to prevent them from robbing the Abilene bank. They thought they'd have to deal with one fat sheriff and one green deputy and a lot of disinterested citizens. After all, it was a small bank, not of much interest to more than a dozen people. The thieves thought this heist would be easy, that they'd be in and out in a matter of minutes. But things had gone wrong from the first. One of the farmers had decided to play hero, and the youngest and most nervous of the robbers had been frightened into shooting him.
"Let's get out of here," one of the gang shouted, grabbing the saddlebags full of money and heading for the door. It was the last thing he ever did. Cole Hunter smashed the door open with his foot, then stood back to get away from the barrage of gunfire. When it had calmed down he went in, two guns blazing, and when the smoke had cleared, there were three dead men on the floor.
The fourth robber grabbed the nearest available person to use as a shield, and this happened to be Miss Latham.
"Put the guns down or she gets it in the head," the man said from behind his mask, holding his gun to the woman's head.
Cole was glad to see that she didn't look terrified. He didn't want to say anything to her to let the man know that he knew her; he didn't want to give him any advantages. When the sheriff and his deputy arrived, he motioned them to stay outside. "They're down," Cole said quietly, stooping to drop his guns, all the while keeping his eyes on the man as he began to make his way toward the door. There was another gun, a one-shot derringer in his belt. He could get to it and shoot, but he had to move Miss Latham out of the way. He wished he could think of a way to tell Miss Latham to pull away from the gunman.
"What are you doin' in this, Hunter?" the robber said. "You're usually on our side."
Yesterday Cole would have been pleased by that remark, would even have agreed with it, but today something was different. Maybe it was Miss Latham's eyes looking at him with absolute trust. She'd said he was a hero.
"Just happened by," he said, "and I needed a little excitement. A man's gotta roll with the punches, keep himself from getting bored."
The robber had smiling eyes over the mask. "I understand that," he said, still easing toward the door, pushing Miss Latham ahead of him.
Just when Cole was sure that his hint about "rolling" had not gotten through to Miss Latham, she bit the robber's arm, and when, in surprise, he released his hold on her, she dropped to the floor and rolled away. Cole drew his derringer and fired—but not before the robber did the same. His bullet hit Cole in the right forearm a split second after Cole's gun went off.
Cole leaned back against the bed, his eyes shut against the glare of the darkened room. It was difficult to believe, but his mood was worse than the pain in his head and belly, not to mention the throbbing in his right forearm. Yesterday he'd drunk a prodigious amount of whiskey because the doctor had spent what seemed like hours taking out that bastard's bullet. And when the doc was done, he'd informed Cole that the bullet had hit the bone, cracking it so severely that his arm would be out of commission for months, first in a cast and then more time as he regained the use of his shooting arm.
It had taken all of Cole's self-control not to rage in front of the doctor and the sheriff. Considering how drunk he was when he heard the news, he should have been given a medal for his restraint. All he'd been able to think of was the fact that he wouldn't be able to take on his next two jobs. One was easy: a rich man wanted to own more land so he'd hired Cole to persuade some little farmer that he and his family would be better off selling their few acres to the rich man. It was the kind of thing that Cole was good at, because all he had to do was talk and paint a splendid picture of land elsewhere. Usually, all it took was mentioning that there was the possibility of gold somewhere else and the overworked farmer was more than ready to leave his plow behind.
The second job was more difficult. A rancher was running some cattle through the territory of an enemy and he was hiring several men with guns to protect the cows and his wranglers.
So how could Cole do either job with his shooting arm in a cast? He couldn't go to the first rancher and tell him the truth: he could do the job without a gun. If that news spread, pretty soon the men would hire the local preacher to do the talking. If he wanted to keep getting clients, he had to make them believe that each job was dangerous and needed a man with a fast gun.
But now he would be laid up for months. And why? Because some snippet of a woman had said some things that had hurt his feelings, that was why. He felt about as old as a first grader, getting his first bad score on an arithmetic test. And that's what the skinny little Miss Latham reminded him of: his first teacher, an unhappy old buzzard who used to tell him and the other students that they were nothing and would never amount to anything. Miss Latham had made him feel that he had to prove himself to her and maybe to himself as well. She'd made him want to show her that he wasn't a criminal.
Right now questions were echoing in his head about whether he'd been shot because his eyesight was failing or because his reaction time was too slow—both problems due to his great age.
Shifting his position in the bed, trying to make his body comfortable even if his mind wasn't, he opened his eyes a crack, then almost gave a yelp of surprise. Standing silently by the bed in the darkened room, looking like a ghost, was Miss Latham.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded and his voice conveyed his conviction that everything was her fault, that he wouldn't be where he was now if it hadn't been for her.
"I came to offer my apologies," she said, her voice calm, not giving him any idea of what she was thinking. He was used to women who wept and threw themselves on him in anguish, saying things like "Help me. Help me." But this little fish was as cold as ice.
"And to offer my thanks," she said. "If you hadn't interfered I don't know what would have happened to me."
He was almost mollified by her statement and was about to mumble something nice when she said, "Of course if you hadn't barged into the bank, guns blazing, the robber would never have grabbed me. But I guess it's the thought that counts."
Cole put his head back against the pillow and rolled his eyes skyward. "It looks as though I'm going to spend some time in hell before I get there." He looked back at her. "Miss Latham, if you want to help me, why don't you show me your train ticket out of this town? I hope you are going somewhere very far away from me and I hope you go soon, because I still have a good arm and two legs left, and I'm afraid that you might make something bad happen to them."
She didn't seem to realize that he was being sarcastic because she said, "Excuse me," turned her back to him, pulled up her skirt, and removed a leather wallet from where it had been secreted in a hidden pocket, then turned back and handed it to him.
At first he didn't know what she had given him, and when he peered at it in the dim light, she went to the window and sent the shade flying upward. Cole had to bite down on a comment that his eyesight was perfectly all right, in spite of the fact that she'd said nothing about his inability to read in the dark room.
"What is this?" he asked sharply.
"My train ticket."
"I can see that, but this is to Waco, Texas, and just what is this devil's list?" To his disgust his voice rose on the last few words. Stuck to the top of the ticket was a list of every desperate, dangerous, cutthroat, rob-his-own-mother criminal it had ever been his misfortune to meet. In fact he'd shot one of them.
"What have you got to do with these men? And why is this ticket to Waco? Why aren't you going home to wherever it is you live?"
"I am going to Waco because I hope to find the Waco Kid there."
Cole started to speak, then collapsed and let his head fall back against the pillow. "Would you mind telling me what you want with a dog-eating killer like the Waco Kid?" But before she could answer, he turned to her, eyes blazing. "You don't mean to offer to marry him, do you?" he sputtered.
"Of course," she said calmly.
"Somebody ought to lock you up, you know that? Somebody ought to protect you from yourself. Do you know anything about the men on this list?"
"Since I received my sister's letter telling of her impending visit, I've had time to research only you, Mr. Hunter. In spite of the fear you seem to engender in some people, those you helped had only good words to say about you. I assumed there were others like you."
"You mean that you think that all gunslingers have a heart of gold?" He hadn't meant to say it quite like that, implying that he had a heart of gold, but he would be damned if he'd take his words back once they were out.
"I can't very well think that a man who makes his living with a gun has any heart at all. But that is between you and the Creator. You will have to answer to Him, not to me."
"Lady," Cole said through clenched teeth, "you can insult a man until he doesn't know which end of him is up. It's a good thing you weren't born a man or you wouldn't have lived past twenty. Now tell me what you're planning to do with this list of names."
"I hardly think that is any of your business, Mr. Hunter. All I owe you is an apology and… and this." She held out a little leather bag, and by the weight and clink of it, he knew it was full of gold coins. When he did not extend his hand to take the bag, she set it on the table beside the bed. "What has happened to you is my fault, and I like to pay my debts. I doubt that a man like you has saved anything for a rainy day, so the money will enable you to live until you are again able to shoot people. I cannot bear to think of you living on the street or in the forest because of me."
Once again she had rendered Cole speechless. It was true that he'd never saved a penny. Why should he when in his line of work he never knew whether he was going to be alive from one day to the next? Never mind that in the last year he had begun to get sick of sleeping on the ground and to yearn for a bed of his own. In fact, he'd recently started to want to own things, like a chair that fit his body. And maybe he'd like to have a place to keep more than the two shirts that were all he'd ever had in his life.
It didn't matter that what she was saying was the truth, he didn't want to hear it. "I can assure you, miss, that I can take care of myself." He knew that the best defense was to attack, so he held up her list of outlaws. If she'd worked at it, she couldn't have prepared a more horrible roster.
He pointed to the first name on the list. There was nastiness in his tone when he spoke. "This man shoots people in the back of the head. You let him in the house and he'll steal everything you own and leave you dead. This next one is in prison; this third one is dead." He moved his finger down the list. "This one: dead. Dead. Prison. Hanged. I killed this one yesterday in the bank." He raised his eyebrows in an I-told-you-so look. "This one is meaner 'n a snake. This one was shot six months ago for cheating at cards. No. No. Where did you get this list? Did you copy it from wanted posters?"
"For most of them I just asked some of the ladies in town who were the most exciting men they had ever met."
"Ladies?" he asked. "Do they by chance live in the house next door to the Golden Garter Saloon?"
"Yes, they do," she said seriously.
"Someone should protect you from yourself. Why don't you go home and let your sister choose a husband for you? Unless she drags a man off the gallows, she can't do worse than these men. You can't let any of these men into your rich house."
Slowly, with no expression on her face, she took the ticket and the list from him. "You are, of course, right. Besides, my sister would never believe that a man would marry me for any reason except money, so my search is rather useless anyway." She looked down at her hands, tugging at her gloves that helped cover every inch of her skin below the neck. On her head was perched the most awful little hat; it made him wonder if she'd found it in a missionary barrel.
"Oh, hell," he muttered under his breath. This bland little woman with a tongue that could slice steel was getting under his skin. "You're not so bad," he heard himself saying. "I'll bet that if you wore some bright colors and a hat with a blue feather in it you'd be pretty. Any man would be glad to have you. Why, I've seen women so ugly the birds fly away in horror, but they were married and had those six kids hanging on to their skirts."
She gave him a little half smile. "How very kind you are, Mr. Hunter, but I can't even buy a husband." Before he could say anything, her head came up. "Thank you so much for everything, sir. I appreciate it. I understand even better now why people love my sister so much. It is quite… thrilling to be on the receiving side of heroism. It makes a person feel valuable to have someone risk his life to save you." She had never sat down during this time, and, as before, she had left the door open the prescribed six inches. Now she walked to the door; then, her hand on the knob, she turned back toward him. As he watched, a look of surprise came over her face, and when it did, in that instant when she wasn't guarded, didn't have her features under iron control, she was almost pretty. Quickly, and giving in to an impulse that he was sure she rarely felt, much less obeyed, she walked back to the bed, bent forward and kissed his cheek. Then she was gone, as silently as she had come.
"Damn it to hell and back!" Cole swore under his breath, or at least he thought he swore quietly. In fact, his cussing was so loud and so lusty that his landlady opened the door and came into his room. She was a widow who had inherited the house on the death of her husband, and even though she had had many offers, she wanted nothing to do with another husband. She'd told Cole that she was happy having men to talk to but not having them kicking her in bed at night.
"What is wrong now?" she asked in that tone of a woman who had been married for a long time and had decided that there was little difference between children and men.
"Nothing I need any help with," he spat out, his back to her. He was completely embarrassed that he couldn't seem to button his shirt, much less his trousers, with his right arm in a cast and a sling. And on top of the awkwardness of using his left hand, it hurt like a son of a gun.
Immediately his landlady understood what his problem was, came around him, and began to fasten his clothing as though he were her son. Of course she had to stand on tiptoe to reach the top buttons, mainly because in an effort to keep his pride intact, Cole had lifted his chin and straightened his back as stiff as the barrel of a rifle.
Mrs. Harrison smiled indulgently up at him and thanked the Lord she had not remarried. "You remember that little girl who came to see you several days back? The one you rescued at the bank?"
"I'd hardly call her a girl."
"At my age I can call anyone a girl."
He doubted if Mrs. Harrison was forty-five, but she liked to pretend she was older: it gave her an excuse to offer to the many men who asked her—and her money—to marry them.
She gave him a motherly push to get him seated in a chair and then began to put his socks and boots on. Cole hated what she was doing, and he knew he could do it himself, but at the same time he rather liked this attention. Maybe he was getting old. He knew where this thought had come from, so when he spoke, his voice was sharp. "What about her?"
"Her sister came to town."
"Rowena?" he asked, startled and showing far too much curiosity.
"I guess that's her name. You know the whole family?"
"I don't know anything about them. And I don't care, either. They aren't my concern."
To his great annoyance, his gossipy landlady didn't say another word. Finally, Cole had to say something. "I hear she's a looker."
Mrs. Harrison tried to keep her mouth from twitching into a smile, letting Cole know that she knew he wanted to know everything. She didn't quite succeed, but they both pretended she was talking because she wanted to and he was listening to be polite.
"She is the most beautiful woman in the world. She has to be. You should see her. She got off the train today—from her own car, mind you!—and every man within a hundred feet stopped dead in his tracks. She is a stunner. And as nice as can be. When four men fought over who was going to carry her bags, you'd have thought that no man had ever offered to carry anything for her before, she was that gracious. Acted surprised, even. Of course a woman that beautiful didn't start out as an ugly duckling. It took her years to get that pretty, so you know she's had boys fighting to carry things for her all her life."
Cole wasn't sure why, but this overlong tribute to Rowena's beauty annoyed him. "Yes, yes, I'm sure she's beautiful, but how is Miss Latham? She wasn't hurt in the fracas, was she?"
"You mean did all those cowboys carryin' the bags trample her? They almost did, but the sheriff—"
"What was he doing there?"
"He came runnin' out to welcome this beautiful woman. You know, this is an awful thought, but if she had an inclination toward dishonesty, she could make a fortune. She could come into one end of a town, everybody'd rush to see her, and her partners could rob the other end of town blind and get away scot-free."
"Would you spare me your criminal plans? I wasn't asking about a herd of stupid cowboys who think any woman who's clean is beautiful, I was asking about Miss Latham and the bank robbery. You do remember that, don't you?"
"I don't know what you're getting so snippy about," she said, straightening up after pulling his second boot on. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "Unless you're sweet on that little Miss Latham."
"I'm not sweet on any woman. I was interested, that's all." But he knew that wasn't all. Damn it, he couldn't help it; he felt sorry for the little thing. What would it be like to be near a beauty like her sister? And what was that sister doing here in Abilene? Couldn't she leave her plain-faced little sister alone instead of following her around the country and showing everyone the great difference between the two of them?
"Are you all right?" his landlady asked.
"Of course I'm all right," he snapped, then fumbled with his watch as he tried to put it in his pocket and nearly dropped it. He fought a wave of pain when he caught it with the fingers of his injured right hand. "You should get back into bed."
"And you should mind your own business." She stiffened her back. She was used to men wanting to hear all the gossip in town, then pretending they had no interest in it, but Cole's bad temper was more than she cared to deal with. "Suit yourself," she said, her nose in the air.
Even as Cole raised his hand to knock on the door of the room the hotel euphemistically called the Presidential Suite, he felt as though he should run away. This was none of his business; he had nothing to do with the sharp-tongued Miss Latham and her pushy sister. It had been four hours since his landlady had told him of the arrival of the beautiful older sister of the plain Miss Latham, and during that time Cole had heard of little else from the townspeople. He'd heard how the elder sister was so sweet and kind, so unaware of her incredible beauty.
Yeah, Cole thought, like a buck is unaware of a hunter. Like one gunfighter is unaware of another gunfighter entering town.
When one had beauty, one was aware of it. As well he knew. Miss Latham had said he'd been called the handsomest man in Texas, a title which, according to her, he no longer deserved. At the time some newspaper writer, a girl not much better looking than Miss Latham, had called him that, he'd hated the title. But he hadn't been surprised by it. No one blessed with beauty is unaware of it. All your life heads turn, people do double takes on you. When Cole was a boy, girls and women had wanted to touch his black curly hair, and after he grew up, women had wanted to touch his body. Never in his life had he had trouble getting any woman he wanted.
Until this week, that is. First Miss Latham tells him he's… What was it she said? Hard-jawed? Squint-eyed?
Anyway, he told himself, that didn't matter. What mattered was that she had offered him cash for a job—an incredibly stupid job, but it was work. And now, with a busted arm and canceled contracts, he needed work. He had no intention of pretending to be married to her, but it did look as though she needed protection from a sister so greedy that she wasn't satisfied until she had the attention of every man, woman, and child in Abilene.
In the two days Mrs. Rowena Whatever-her-name-was had been in town, she seemed to have had some contact with everyone. Cole couldn't go into a store, a saloon, or even the cathouse without hearing about her. Nina had said she heard that Cole knew the younger sister. "You know," she'd said, "that washed-out little lady with the brown hair. Can you imagine the same woman giving birth to two daughters that different? No wonder she stopped after the second one." And Nina had wanted to know if Cole could find out how Rowena made her hair so glossy and soft-looking. "If that woman wanted to take up the profession, she could make millions," Nina said. "You ought to suggest it to her."
After a few hours of this Cole had had enough of the talented Mrs. Rowena. He seemed to be the only person in town who hadn't fallen for her. Maybe that was because he was the only person who understood her. Beauty was an odd thing. An ugly person and a beautiful one could perform the same bad deed, yet the ugly one would be judged much more harshly than the pretty one. He'd seen that happen time and again. He'd watched members of the same gang, caught in the same holdup, get sentences based on their looks. When he'd heard that ol' No-nose Wilson had finally been caught, he knew he had no chance of leniency. Wilson was hanged twenty-four hours after he was caught. But the good-looking Billy Whittier had three times conned pretty girls into helping him escape the wheels of justice.
So now this Rowena was charming, and conning, the entire town. And meanwhile she was plowing her meek little sister under. Well, perhaps "meek" wasn't the correct word to describe Miss Latham, but compared to the attention-hungry Rowena she was spineless.
Of course none of this explained why he was here at the door of Miss Latham's hotel room now. He wasn't really thinking of taking her job offer. What kind of job was it for a man to pretend anything? He had always prided himself on his honesty. So how could he even think of taking on a job that required nothing but lies? No guns, no diplomacy, just one lie on top of the other.
As he raised his hand to knock, he had a vision of what he'd see: little Miss Latham waiting hand and foot on her gorgeous, lazy, spoiled sister.
He was not prepared for the dream that opened the door. He had expected sophistication, a woman swathed in silk and lace, a face painted into perfection. Instead, his first sight of Rowena caught him off guard. Her face—her beautiful, exquisite face—was shiny clean, and all ten or so bushels of her auburn hair were pulled back into a fat braid that was draped over one shoulder. Huge eyes the color of a pond in the moonlight—not green, not gray—looked up at him with disarming innocence.
"Hello," she said in a soft voice that betrayed nothing except graciousness and gentle curiosity. A second later her face somehow became more radiant. "You are Mr. Hunter, the man who saved Dorie's life. Oh, you must come in. This is an honor. Please sit here. Dorie, do look who is here."
As yet, Cole hadn't said a word. He was ushered into the room and given the most comfortable chair. A table with an ashtray appeared next to him, then a glass of whiskey and a cigar, everything seeming to come from nowhere. Within minutes he felt as though this were his home and he had lived here in comfort always.
"How is your arm?" Rowena asked, leaning over him in solicitude. "The doctor says it will be a long while before you have full use of that arm again. It still amazes me that a man who had as much to lose as you did would risk his life to save someone he hardly knew. Never will I be able to thank you enough."
Cole found himself smiling into those startling eyes of hers and nearly drowning in them. When he spoke he sounded like a green boy. "It was nothing, really. Any man would have done it." He sipped the whiskey, knowing it was the best he'd ever tasted. Had she brought it from England with her? And the cigar was mild and flavorful. He had never been more comfortable in his life.
"Any man?" Rowena said, smiling. "You are as modest as you are talented and brave. Isn't he wonderful, Dorie?"
Rowena stepped back to allow Cole to see her sister, and he realized he had been so blinded by Rowena's beauty and gracious hospitality, not to mention her flattery, that he had not even seen Miss Latham. If he'd thought her drab before, now, next to her sister's radiance, she was difficult to see. But then, a peacock in full show would have been drab next to Rowena.
Miss Latham was half reclining on a couch, a bandaged foot extended in front of her, and the look on her face made Cole come to his senses. Miss Latham was smirking. She had an I-told-you-so expression on her face that brought him up short, made him look back at the way he had been swept off his feet by the lovely Rowena.
Cole opened his mouth to defend himself. Not that he had been accused, but the silent communication that had passed between him and Miss Latham was loud and clear.
Immediately Cole put the whiskey and the cigar down and sat up straight in his chair. "I came to see how Miss Latham was after her fright at the bank," he said. "I hope she is well." Even as he spoke, he was annoyed with himself for talking to Rowena. What was wrong with him? He'd seen beautiful women before, but then, there was something different about this woman. She seemed unaware of the effect she had on people. She looked as fresh as morning sunlight, as innocent as dew on grass, as sweet as—
"Rowena, I do believe you have another man in love with you," he heard Miss Latham say.
"How ridiculous you are, Dorie," Rowena said. "Mr. Hunter came to see you. Look, he can hardly take his eyes off you."
Some sense of reality was coming back to Cole, and as he looked from one woman to another, he saw that what Miss Latham had said was true: Rowena did love her sister very much. And it occurred to him that Rowena had no idea that her beloved sister was anything less than divinely beautiful. In fact, maybe Rowena saw everyone that way.
For just a second he exchanged a look with Miss Latham that asked that question, and he was rewarded with one of her rare tiny smiles. It was ridiculous, of course, but that little smile made him feel good. It made him feel part of something that no one else was. Rowena might be the one with the looks, but her colorless little sister was the one with the brains.
"Mrs.… I'm sorry, I don't know your name."
"It's Westlake, but please call me Rowena. I've heard so much about you that I feel I know you."
"Oh?" he asked archly. "Miss Latham has told you about me?" It made him feel good to have caught the younger sister in something. She was too self-assured for his taste, so it was nice to find out that she had been affected by him as much as he had by her.
"Why no," Rowena said in innocence. "Dorie hasn't said a word about you, or about what happened at the bank. I've heard everything from all the people in town."
At that Miss Latham gave him a little raised-eyebrow look that told him she knew what he was thinking.
Damnation, but that woman annoyed him! "Rowena, why are you here?" he asked, sounding like a controlling father. He had not meant to ask that. He had no connection with Miss Latham, nor any interest in her. He had toyed with the idea of taking her job offer, but he could now see that it wouldn't work, mainly because little Miss Latham made him think of nothing but murdering her.
Rowena laughed, and it was a very sweet sound—as he would have guessed it would be. "I've come to help my sister make up her mind," she said with disarming honesty. She had the ability to make a man feel that she trusted him and him alone. "Dorie can never make up her mind." She smiled at him in such a way that he could feel his socks melting. "You see, Mr. Hunter—"
"Cole," he said.
"How kind of you," she said, as though he had bestowed a great gift upon her. She continued. "There's a wonderful man in Latham—that's where we grew up and where Dorie still lives—who has been in love with my little sister for years, and I'm going to do my best to persuade her to see the light and marry him."
Cole glanced at Miss Latham, but she had her head down and was studying something on her skirt. Suddenly Cole realized that there was a bond between him and Miss Latham. Maybe it was slight, but he was pretty sure that what she had told him—about her life, about her sister, about how she felt about this beautiful woman who wanted to manage her life—was something she had never told another human being. Miss Latham had said that Cole was a hero. He knew he was no such thing, but right now he did feel… well, that maybe he could act as her guardian. Maybe he could stop Rowena's meddling, no matter that she had the best intentions in the world.
"If you don't mind my asking," Cole said, "what's this man you want her to marry like?"
"Alfred?" Rowena asked, her eyes sparkling. "He's a lovely man, very sweet. He's about five feet four. I know that's short, but not for Dorie; she's so little and petite herself, not a great cow like me who has to have a man over six feet. Dorie is so lucky that she can have any man. Alfred is about forty-three and—"
"Fifty-one," Miss Latham said, her voice flat, without emotion.
"Oh? Well, a few years won't matter. It's what's inside that counts, and Alfred is a jewel. And, also, he's already broken in, so to speak. He's been married and widowed twice, the poor dear, and has three children. Dorie just loves children, and there's certainly room for them in that big house Father left her. But more important than any of this is that Alfred is mad for her, follows her everywhere. They are so cute together."
"Like salt and pepper shakers," Miss Latham said with disgust.
"Dorie, really! Just because Alfred doesn't have a great deal of hair and has a few birth marks on his scalp does not make him resemble a pepper shaker."
Cole managed to hide his smile, but when he looked up at Miss Latham, he no longer felt like smiling. What to him was a joke was not a laughing matter to her. There was a reason he had never settled down, a reason he was unmarried at the age of thirty-eight. His own parents had hated each other. His mother had been in love with some dirt farmer, but her father had forced her to marry the man of his choice, and never had two people hated each other more than his parents did. He'd left home when he was twelve years old and never been back since. If his parents were still alive, he could bet they were still fighting with each other.
Now, looking at the luscious Rowena, he had no doubt that what Miss Latham had said was true, that she could charm any man into marrying a plain sister. If Rowena had this effect on Cole, he could imagine what effect she'd have on a short, bald man who had probably never had even a decent-looking woman look at him before. And no doubt this Rowena could make quiet little Miss Latham believe that she wanted to marry a man who reminded her of a pepper shaker.
He picked up his whiskey glass, took a sip, and when he looked back at the two sisters, it seemed to him that Rowena wasn't quite as beautiful as he'd thought at first. He was beginning to see her as a bit of a bully. And Miss Latham wasn't quite as plain as he'd thought. She was smart and could be funny when she wanted to be. She deserved better than a short, bald man who'd dump three kids on her then go off and spend her money.
Even as he opened his mouth, Cole couldn't believe he was going to say what he did. All he knew was that he couldn't let Miss Latham marry a man she didn't want to marry. A thousand images of his parents screaming at each other ran through his mind. No one deserved a life like that—especially the children. "Will you tell her, dear, or shall I?"
Miss Latham looked up at him, blinking in puzzlement, having no idea what he was talking about.
"The world is going to know soon enough. You can't keep it a secret forever," he said to her, his voice full of coaxing softness, the voice of a lover. He looked back up at Rowena and gave her his own sweet smile, the one that had made more than a few women's hearts flutter. "Your sister and I are engaged to be married."
Dorie sat up straighter on the sofa. "No, please, you don't have to do this."
Rowena looked from one to the other, at Cole's I-dare-you expression and at Dorie's face, now red with embarrassment. Rowena's lovely laugh filled the room. "Dorie darling, I'd been told he was a hero, but I had no idea how much of one. He is as chivalrous as a knight of old. He rescued you, and now he feels responsible for you."
She turned back to Cole. "But, really, Mr. Hunter, your concern for my sister need go no further. Just because you saved her life doesn't mean you have to be responsible for her forever. Now Dorie is my responsibility, just as she was our father's."
Maybe there was some chivalry in him because the hair on the back of his neck stood up at Rowena's words. She made Miss Latham sound like a broken-down old pet, beloved but useless. The truth was that Miss Latham was far from useless. She was as smart as a college girl. There wasn't a woman in a thousand who could have understood what he meant during that bank holdup when he used the word "roll." She had not only understood but had kept her head and figured out a way to distract the man, then moved as quickly as a darter fish. Now here was her sister speaking as though Miss Latham were something useless that needed to be gotten rid of as fast as possible.
"Please don't do—" Dorie began, but stopped when Cole came to his feet and in an instant was across the room to stand beside her.
He put his uninjured hand on her shoulder. "The truth is, Mrs. Westlake, your sister and I are in love, and we plan to get married. She's marrying me and no one else."
Dorie looked up at him with pleading eyes. "No, you can't do this. I was wrong to ask you." She turned to her sister. "Rowena, he's lying. Has any man ever fallen madly in love with me?"
She turned back to look up at Cole. "You don't have to do this. I shouldn't have said what I did. It was something I should have known couldn't have worked. Rowena, let me tell you what I did. I—"
Cole didn't know how to shut her up, but he had to make her stop talking. He couldn't bear to see her humiliate herself in front of her beautiful sister, whose expression said that she didn't believe for one minute that Cole had fallen for her plain little sister. Something about that look bothered Cole.
"I asked Mr. Hunter to—" Dorie began, her voice heavy, like a child admitting a lie, knowing that punishment was going to follow.
Without thought of what he was doing, Cole slipped his good arm under Miss Latham's shoulders and pulled her up to him. She was a tiny thing, small and fragile, weighing nothing. His objective was to stop her words, and short of putting his hand over her mouth, he didn't know how else to do that, so he kissed her. It wasn't a kiss of passion, not even a kiss he wanted; it was a kiss of expediency: hard, closed-mouthed, without affection.
Within seconds he broke from the kiss and turned to Rowena in defiance. "There, now, does that look like—"
Suddenly his face filled with wonder, and he broke off and turned to look down at the woman pressed to his side. She was still pulled against him, her feet off the floor, her body as limp as a doll's, and she was looking up at him, her huge eyes filled with surprise.
For a moment time didn't exist for Cole. He had no idea what had happened, but the kiss he had shared with this woman—if he could call that hard thing a kiss—was different from any other kiss he'd experienced. He had kissed hundreds of women in his life. In fact, he rather liked kissing and had never turned down an opportunity when offered to him, whether it was in a saloon or behind the church. But this kiss had been different.
As though Rowena weren't there, as though he and this woman he held were the only two people in the world, he turned back to her and kissed her for real.
He pulled her close to him and instantly found that she wasn't as scrawny as he'd thought, but nicely rounded, and he liked her small size. She was so tiny he thought he could wrap himself around her; she could dissolve inside him.
He kissed her gently at first, just tasting of her, of her freshness, of the purity of her. There was no doubt in his mind that he was the first man who had ever touched her, ever held her, ever put his lips on hers. Some part of his brain remembered that when he first met her she had been hostile and prickly, but he couldn't reconcile that woman with the soft one in his arms. She opened up to him in a way that no woman ever had before. And in her kiss was something he couldn't identify, something that he had never tasted before. If he didn't know better, he'd think it was love. But that wasn't possible. There was nothing between them.
There was pain in his arm in its sling, but he didn't feel it when he wrapped both arms around her, then used his good left hand to turn her head so he could taste her lips more deeply. He sucked on her bottom lip, gently drawing it into his own mouth, and he was sure he'd never tasted anything sweeter.
It was some minutes before he heard Rowena's voice. Judging by her tone, she had been trying to get his attention for some time.
Reluctantly, with difficulty, he turned to look at Rowena, seeing her in a haze, as though she were far away. He still held Dorie firmly in his arms, not willing to release her soft, pliant body. Besides, she was so limp she would have fallen if he'd released her.
"My goodness gracious," Rowena said, her voice full of astonishment. "I thought I was going to have to throw a bucket of cold water on you two." She was trying to make a joke, but it fell flat because she was facing two very confused people.
"Yes, well, I…" Cole began, stammering like a schoolboy. The body in his arms began to have some substance, and he knew he should release her, but he didn't want to. It was some minutes before he realized that Miss Latham had her hands on his shoulders and was pushing against him rather hard.
"Mr. Hunter," she was saying, "please release me."
When Cole's brain began to function again, all he could feel was embarrassment. "Yes, of course," he said, then dropped Miss Latham as though she were forbidden, causing her to fall back against the sofa with a thud. But he didn't reach down to help her. In fact he would have done most anything to keep from touching her again.
"I see that you two are in love," Rowena said. "I had no idea that was the case. Dorie, how could you keep such a thing from me? Why didn't you tell me? You let me believe that Mr. Hunter had no reason to save you from the robbers except that he was a man of great conscience, a man who cared about others, a man who—"
"A fool," Cole said, beginning to recover himself. Running his hand over his eyes, he surreptitiously looked at Miss Latham and saw that she was as stunned as he was. If nothing like this had happened to a man of his experience, he was sure nothing like this had happened to her.
"You know what I think you two should do?" Rowena said in the voice of one who had never faced an obstacle in her life. "I think you should get married right now. This minute."
Dorie was beginning to recover herself. "Rowena, that's ridiculous. Mr. Hunter—"
"Yes," Cole heard himself saying. "That would be fine."
Rowena took this statement in stride, not seeing the least problem with anything. "We shall go to the church this minute and—"
"No!" Dorie half shouted, and they both turned to look at her as she stood up, her fists at her sides.
"Dorie, your ankle!"
"Rowena, there is nothing wrong with my ankle except a bruise. One does not have to remain in bed for a bruise." She turned to Cole. "I apologize, Mr. Hunter, for my sister. She loves to manage other people's lives, and with her children and husband not here, she has only me and now you." She straightened her back and looked at him. "I know that you and I talked about… about certain things, but that was days ago. Now things are different."
"What is different?" he asked dryly.
Of course there was nothing different. In fact, everything was too real, and much too much the same. Rowena had come to Texas to get her boring little sister married, and she meant to do what needed to be done. Whether she married Dorie to a middle-aged bald man or to a gunslinger didn't seem to make much difference to her.
"Rowena," Dorie said softly, "could you leave us for a while? Mr. Hunter and I need to talk."
Rowena laughed in what Cole thought was a vulgar way. "I'm not sure I should leave you two lovebirds alone. At least not until after the wedding."
Cole was much too old to put up with a woman acting as though he were still in knee britches and needed a chaperon. He gave her the look that had made a few men decide not to draw on him.
"I… ah, I think I'll wait just outside," Rowena said, and skedaddled out the door.
Dorie spoke the minute her sister was out of the room. "Mr. Hunter, when you and I spoke several days ago, I made a fool of myself. When I was alone in Latham and I received a letter from my sister saying she was going to travel to America and then all the way to Texas to 'sort me out,' as she said, I'm afraid I panicked. When Rowena gets something in her head, she sees nothing else. She said she was sure that after Father died I'd stay in that house with my books and never get out to meet anyone, much less marry someone. Rowena also thinks that whatever makes her happy is what makes everyone happy. She loves being married, so she thinks I would, too."
"Marriage is the only acceptable way to get those six kids you want."
"Yes, well, at my age—nearly thirty—I'm a little old to start a family."
"So your sister was right and you do plan to bury yourself." As he was talking, he continued to look at her. It was hard to reconcile what he saw with what he had felt. She looked wooden, but she hadn't felt that way. Maybe he was getting senile. Maybe he should visit Nina more often. But right now, Nina's knowledge, her boredom, the way she talked at the wrong time—all that seemed dirty when compared to the freshness of Miss Latham.
"It isn't your business or my sister's what I do with my life!" Dorie snapped.
Cole knew she was right. He also knew he should walk out the door and never look back. But when had he ever done what he should do? He shouldn't have left home at twelve years old. He shouldn't have strapped on his first gun. If he hadn't tried to save this scrawny woman from the bank robbers he wouldn't be here now, wouldn't have kissed her, wouldn't have felt this way.
Also, there was something about this woman that intrigued him. Maybe he'd spent too much of his life around women of the wrong sort. Maybe ail "good" women were like her, if you got to know them, but he doubted it.
Maybe his problem was that she offered him a challenge, and a challenge was something he'd never been able to turn down. All anyone had to say to him was "Cole, you'll never be able to do that," and the hair on the back of his neck would stand up, and he would know that he had to do whatever his challenger had said he couldn't accomplish.
Miss Latham seemed to be reading his mind. She seemed to understand that he was beginning to think this was something he wanted to do. She took a deep breath, and when she released it, she gave him a look of great softness, a look that made Cole realize she was prettier than he'd first thought. "This is very kind of you, but now I must ask you to be reasonable. In light of what just happened, you must see that you and I cannot even pretend to be engaged. It is not possible."
Sometimes this woman made him feel downright dumb. He had no idea what she was talking about. All he knew was that he very much wanted to kiss her again. Had what happened between them been a fluke? Something that happened only once? "What is not possible? Why?"
"Our attraction to each other has changed everything. I had no idea there would be any magnetism between us. Men who are almost criminals are not men I find attractive. I can assure you that what I… we… felt was as much of a shock to me as it was to you. Considering this attraction, we could not possibly consider spending any time together for any reason. The probable results are too dreadful to contemplate."
Cole looked with longing toward the glass of whiskey on the table, but it was empty. At the moment he desperately needed a drink. What in the world was the woman talking about? "What results?"
She looked at him with great patience. "Mr. Hunter, I have admitted that all of this was a mistake. My mistake. I have told you that I panicked at the news of my sister's impending visit, and I tried to implement what I see now was a very naive scheme. I am sorry I ever started this, and I would like to end it."
"What results?" he repeated, still trying to figure out what she was talking about. He usually understood women; for that matter he usually understood the English language.
She gave a sigh as though she had to explain the simplest thing in the world. "When we… ah, kissed, there was a great deal of attraction between us. I had not thought there would be. I felt no such attraction between us the day I went to see you at your boardinghouse. It is all right to have a fake marriage with a man to whom one feels no attraction, but it is impossible with a man one wants to… to…"
When she saw that there was still no hint of understanding on his handsome face, she continued. "Children, Mr. Hunter," she snapped. "Children." She grimaced. "Perhaps a man like you doesn't understand that… that marital rights, so to speak, are not to be exercised for pleasure. What a man and woman do with each other creates children. Based on the feelings we had during our one and only kiss, I think that if we spent any prolonged time together, we would… we would, well, end up in bed together, and I'm afraid of creating a child with you. I cannot imagine a worse father than you—that is, if you stayed around, which I doubt. Either way, I don't want to raise a child alone, nor do I want my child to have a father who knows little more than how to cock a gun."
For a moment all Cole could do was blink at her. "Is there any whiskey here?" he asked hoarsely, then watched as she handed him the bottle. Unlike her sister, she didn't graciously pour it into a glass. She just handed him the bottle with a schoolteacher look on her face that said, See what I mean?
It wasn't easy, but Cole put the bottle down, then he followed it, sitting heavily on the chair and looking up at her. There was certainly nothing coy about her. She wasn't telling him that she hated him and didn't want to go to bed with him. She was telling him that she'd like nothing more than to jump into bed with him, but if they did that, they might make a child, and he would be a damned poor father. To his knowledge, no one had ever even considered his possibilities as a father. His worth as a fast gun had been considered, yes, and as a peacemaker, and at times as a lover, true, but not as the father to some kid who didn't exist.
Maybe he was getting old. This wasn't the way women used to act. He remembered women who couldn't think past the first buttons he loosened on their blouses. In the past if he'd kissed a woman and a current of lightning had run through them like the one that had run through him with this woman, neither of them would have thought past the next two hours. Uncontrollable. Without thought. Passion. Old-fashioned passion.
But not with plain little Miss Latham. With her there was no lack of control. She stepped back from passion and said she wanted it, but there were consequences she didn't want. She was, of course, quite sensible. The only other sensible women he had ever met had had no hunger, no fire in their veins. But she did. He had just felt it. Yet she was able to control it.
"Mr. Hunter, are you all right?"
No, he wanted to say. He wasn't all right. He had been all right before he met this woman, but now he was beginning to doubt everything in his life. He had to reassure himself that his life wasn't a waste. He was rootless. He had no home. He'd never had a home. Not that he'd ever wanted one, but if he had wanted one, he would have stayed in one place. And if he ever made a kid with a woman, he didn't think he'd be a worse father than the next man. In fact, he liked to think he had a few things to teach a child. And not just things about a gun. He'd learned a bit in his life, and maybe he'd like to pass those things on.
Suddenly it became important to him to make this woman realize that he was more than just a gunslinger. And a hero. If someone else had called him a hero, he would have been flattered, but Miss Latham had made "hero" sound like a mindless person who had no thought of the future consequences of his actions.
"How am I to support myself until my arm heals?"
She looked startled. "I have no idea. Would you like some money? I mean, it is my fault that you… Well, actually, it isn't entirely my fault, but I do feel somewhat responsible for your injury. I can give you a bank draft."
"I don't want charity. I want a job."
She gave the tiniest smile—about all she seemed capable of, he thought. "The very next time I want someone murdered I will be sure to hire you."
He had to admit that the woman got under his skin in a way that no one else ever had. "I do not murder people," he snapped.
"Certainly not with your arm as it is now." Her mouth tightened into a prim little line. "Mr. Hunter, I talked to you about your future days ago, before this happened, and at that time your future did not concern you. I even tried to warn you that something like this might happen."
Why did he feel as though he were being talked to by his mother? She used to say, "I told you this was going to happen. But, no, you wouldn't listen to me. You had to have your own way. You never listen to anyone."
Cole ran his hand over his eyes. If he murdered anyone, it would be this woman. Besides wanting to kill her, he wanted to prove to her that he was worth something. "Miss Latham, you offered me a job, and I accept that offer."
It was her turn to sit down. "No," she whispered, "this is a mistake."
He sensed that he was regaining some power. "Miss Latham, tell me, what do you do with your time?"
"I beg your pardon."
"Your time. What do you do with your time when you are at home in Latham? I can't see you as a sewing circle lady. I can't see you putting on garden parties and teas. What do you do in that town your father left you?"
It was her turn to look surprised. "I can see that you, too, have been doing some research."
Heaven help him but at a compliment from this scrawny little thing, he felt warmth flow through him. He had to get himself back under control as he waited for her answer.
"I am a landlord," she said, then paused, and he could see emotions play across her face. So she wasn't a perfect poker player after all. "My father left the town of Latham to me because Rowena had her rich husband." She paused. "My father did not think there was any possibility that I would find a husband, rich or not, so he left me a means of support. Anyway, Latham is a small town that wouldn't exist except for the railroad, but the few shops and houses there all belong to me."
"You are a rent collector?" He knew it was petty of him, but he wanted to make what she did sound trivial, just as she had made what he did sound worthless.
"And a roof fixer and a listener-to-reasons-why-the-rent-is-late, and just about everything else in that town. If I may give you some advice, Mr. Hunter, if anyone ever offers to give you a town, don't take it."
He laughed. "I'll remember that. No one's ever given me that advice before." For a moment he looked at her, sitting there with her hands folded in her lap. "It seems to me that you need a man for more reasons than just to get your sister off your back."
"Of course," she said, giving him that look that said he wasn't very smart. "I know that. I very much want a husband. I wish I had a man to take over the management of Latham. My father was a man who allowed no laxity in people. He was…" She seemed to search for the right word.
"A tyrant?"
"Exactly," she said, looking up at him, eyes sparkling rather prettily. "He was a dreadful tyrant. I loved him, but I was also terrified of him, as was everyone else. Except, of course, Rowena, but that's another story. My father said that neither of his daughters had any backbone, that we were too soft, but at least I wouldn't get married and turn the whole town over to some scoundrel who wanted only my money, as Rowena might do."
"Why not?" Cole asked, knowing it was a ridiculous question.
"My father said I was much too sensible to marry a scoundrel. He said I'd marry a sane and sensible man."
"So why not marry your pepper shaker?" he couldn't resist asking.
"Alfred would have no idea how to be firm with the tenants. I've tried to tell Rowena that Alfred works hard now only because he has to. If he had my money, he wouldn't lift a finger. Under his industrious exterior, he is a very lazy man. I want to find a man who works, one who can take over my father's tenants while I stay at home."
"You certainly have your life planned in detail."
"Of course. If one doesn't plan, one spends one's life drifting. That's all right in youth, but we are not always young."
Cole shifted uncomfortably on his seat. "If you don't mind, I'd like to ask you a personal question." He didn't wait for her permission. "Have you ever done anything that wasn't sensible?"
She didn't hesitate. "I asked a gunslinger to marry me."
Cole winced. For a moment he had nothing to say, so he reached inside his pocket and removed a thin cigar, but then he found it impossible to hold it and light it at the same time. Maybe it was his vanity, but he was used to women paying attention to him. Had he been in the room with any other female on earth, she would have fluttered about him and helped him light his cigar. But Miss Latham just sat there watching him, not offering anything.
Annoyed, he tossed the unlit cigar onto the table by the chair. "Miss Latham, you are right. You are right about everything. I'm beginning to feel that my days as a cold-blooded killer are drawing to a close." He hesitated to give her time to contradict him, but she didn't. "Why don't you and I make a deal? I'll help you if you help me."
"What do you mean?"
"You came to me a few days ago because you wanted to make your sister believe that you already had a husband so she'd leave you in peace to do your… research, I believe you called it."
He waited for her nod. "You want to finish your research on finding a suitable husband, a man who can help you collect your rents, stand up to the complaints of your tenants, and be a tender father to your children. Is that about right?"
"Yes."
"What I need is a place to live for a few months while my arm heals. Also, it might be nice to learn a trade."
"I see. But owning a town is hardly a trade."
"Maybe I could learn to run a saloon. Maybe after this is all over I could buy my own place and settle down."
"This isn't going to work."
"Why not?" he asked.
"Because of… you know. We'll never be able to stay apart for very long."
Cole couldn't believe what he was hearing. Maybe it was because of his looks, but he'd never really had to pursue a woman before. Women always came to him. Oh, they pretended that their encounters with him were accidents, but they weren't. All he had to do was enter a town and within hours several pretty girls would be placing themselves where he could see them. Now here was this runt of a woman—a woman who admitted that no man except one short, bald, spotty-headed man wanted her and then he probably wanted her only for her money—and she was saying that he—he, Coleman Hunter!—wouldn't be able to control himself if he spent much time around her.
"Trust me, Miss Latham," he said with heavy sarcasm, "I'll manage to control myself." Even if I have to visit a bordello seven nights a week, he thought. Really, the woman was too much! Her insinuation that he couldn't control himself around her was more than he could take. If nothing else, he wanted to prove to her how wrong she was.
"Knowing Rowena, she isn't going to leave Texas until she sees us married," she continued, unaware of Cole's thoughts. "If our false engagement lasts for four years, she will stay here and wait for four years. My sister might look soft and sweet, but she is forged iron inside."
"How could your father have thought his daughters were soft?" Cole mumbled.
Cole knew that in Miss Latham's eyes, his knowledge and skills were worthless, but his life had trained him to make quick decisions. And maybe her words and being shot had made him see things differently. Money aside, what was he going to do until his arm healed?
She might not want to go through with her original proposition but Cole had seen the way her eyes betrayed her feeling of guilt when his arm was mentioned. Never in his life had he felt anything but softness for a woman, but this one challenged him. Quickly he decided that he was going to use what he'd come to know about her. If she thought Rowena could be a bully, she'd never seen Cole Hunter in action.
"All right, Miss Latham, while there's no reason for you to feel responsibility for what has happened to my arm, the fact is that except for what you paid me the other day, all the money I have in the world is two dollars and twenty-five cents." This was the truth, but he had been worse off than this before, yet he'd always found someone to stake him in a poker game and he'd been able to win enough to live on. But she didn't need to know that.
"The way I see it is that you owe me."
"I have offered to pay you."
"And I've told you that I don't want charity. I want to learn a trade." About as much as he wanted bubonic plague. He could not see himself as a shopkeeper, even if the shop sold beer to drunks. "With you I see the chance of learning something that will help me in my later years. For the first time I see a way out of my life of degradation and death. I see the possibility of attaining respectability. I see a way to better myself and begin to live as others do. It is the first time I have been offered such a chance, and contrary to your opinion of me, I am not a fool. Miss Latham, I want to take that opportunity."
Cole thought perhaps he'd missed his calling in life. Maybe he should have been a preacher or a snake oil salesman. Or maybe a senator. Hell, he was so full of hot air he was good enough to be president.
Before she could say a word, he continued, unwilling to stop when he was winning. "I want to ask you something. How many men have you kissed?"
She blinked at him. "J… just you."
"Just as I thought. You seem to think there was something special between us, something different. Let me assure you that there was not. That feeling we experienced between us is the same with every kiss between a man and a woman. If you kissed your Mr. Pepper, you'd feel the same thing." She tried to conceal her disappointment, but he could see it in her face, and her look almost made him retract his lie. But he didn't.
"The problem seems to be that you think that if we spend any time together I will not be able to control myself and will die if I do not get you into bed with me. Nothing could be further from the truth."
He kept on, not allowing her to say a word. "Miss Latham, I offer you a business proposition: Marry me for six months and let me run your town during that time. At the end of the six months if I have done a satisfactory job, I want you to give me five thousand dollars. That will be my stake in whatever I want to do in life."
"Wouldn't it be much simpler just to hire you as a manager for collecting the rent?"
Damn, but the woman had a disconcerting way of seeing straight to the truth! He gave her a little smile. "Unless I'm more than a manager, your sister will have her way." He raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps I'll be invited to your wedding with Alfred. Will his children attend? By the way, how old are his children?"
"His sons are twenty-five, twenty-three, and twenty," she said.
Cole was so startled by this information that he couldn't speak for a moment. "Not exactly in their nappies, are they?" he said softly, thinking that this small woman wasn't at all what she had at first seemed. At their first meeting he had thought she needed no one, seemed able to take care of herself and half the world, but now he was beginning to get a clearer picture of what had driven her to ask a gunslinger to marry her.
Part of him knew it was the "hero" in him—he was beginning to hate that word—but he was starting to feel protective toward her. Her sister was trying to marry her off to a lazy man with three grown sons. All four of them would no doubt move into her house, take over her town, and spend her money.
He was tired of talking, tired of arguing. Quite suddenly he had a great deal of sympathy for Rowena. No wonder she was afraid to leave her defenseless sister alone in a large house at the mercy of every gold digger in the country. No wonder she was trying to force her to marry a man who could protect her. Rowena's mistake was in thinking this old man with grown sons was the one for the job.
"You're going to marry me, do you understand? You can bribe a judge to annul the marriage later if you want, but right now we need each other. You need protection from your well-meaning sister, and I need a place to hang my hat until I heal." By the time he had finished this speech, he had gripped her upper arms with his hands and lifted her half off the floor. His nose was close to hers. "And don't you say a word about kids or my killing people or anything else. I'll straighten out that town of yours. It sounds as if the tenants are taking advantage of you with their reluctance to pay rent."
"You're going to shoot them?" she asked breathlessly.
He released his grip on her so suddenly she almost fell. Did she work at making him angry or did she do it without thought? "Here," he said, his voice filled with anger as he began to unbuckle the gun belt at his waist. It hurt him more than a little. In fact, pain shot up his arm and he could feel his wound beginning to bleed as he tore it open, but he would have died before giving up his valiant gesture. He was dizzy with pain when he held the belt out to her like some primitive offering, but force of will kept him on his feet. "I am giving you my gun," he said. "I won't use it to collect the rent in your town, and if I try to touch you in any way, you have my permission to shoot me. Now do we have a deal?"
Silently, with great seriousness, she took the heavy gun belt from him. It seemed to take her a long time to make up her mind, but at last she said yes, and that was all.
Cole wasn't sure whether he should be happy or terrified, but he allowed neither emotion to show. "All right, then, shall we go? Your sister is waiting."
He bent his good arm for her to take. After only a second's hesitation she slipped her small hand onto his forearm and they started toward the door, Dorie carrying Cole's gun belt in her left hand, one end of it dragging the floor.
Dorie tried not to sit on the edge of her seat, but such control was difficult. Self-control had been her main concern over the last few days, but now it was almost impossible. She was sitting in the bedroom of Rowena's private railroad car—borrowed from some hopelessly besotted admirer—across a table from the stranger who was now her husband.
When she'd concocted this plan of pretending to be married to a gunslinger, it had seemed like a brilliant idea. She would at last shock everyone. She'd shock her sister who thought she knew everything about Dorie; she'd shock all of the people of Latham, who laughed at her for being an old maid. She almost wished her father were still alive so she could shock him too. But then she doubted if anything could shock Charles Latham. If Dorie had said she was going to marry a caterpillar, he wouldn't have been shocked; he just would have said no. If the president of the United States had wanted to marry Dorie, her father would have said no. He said he'd allowed one daughter to leave and he wasn't letting the other one go while he was alive.
So Dorie had grown up inside a house with a cold totalitarian, an overlord more than a father, a man who allowed only his opinion inside the house and outside in his private town. The only thing in the world that could soften him was Rowena's beauty.
Purposely, Charles Latham had married a plain-faced woman, saying he wanted a wife who would be faithful to him. Rowena always wondered if he'd said this to their mother, but then, Rowena lived in a cloud of daydreams and romance. Of course Charles Latham had told his frightened little wife that he'd married her because she could produce children and no other man would want her. Dorie wondered if her mother had willed herself to die after the birth of her second daughter. No doubt she had heard in detail how disappointed her husband was that she had given him only another daughter and not a son to carry on his name, so she'd decided to get out.
Her mother wasn't the only one whose life was ruled by Charles Latham's iron will. After her father died, Dorie found that she didn't actually know what to do with freedom. All her life she'd had her father telling her when to go to bed, when to get up, what to eat. Her life was planned and scheduled by him.
Of course she realized that her isolated life, spent almost totally in the company of her father, had made her a little… different. Rowena's incredible beauty had given her a life that was more like other people's. A woman who looked like Rowena didn't have to leave the house to meet people: people came to her. In spite of her father's attempts to isolate her, Rowena involved herself with other people, until at last Jonathan Westlake came and took her away forever.
But no one had sought Dorie out. No handsome young men had risked her father's wrath to knock on the front door and ask to see her. And if they had and her father had refused them, Dorie wasn't beautiful enough to make him change his mind.
So Rowena had left Latham six years ago; she had gotten away from their father, but Dorie had stayed. Dorie had stayed in that big, dark house, working as her father's housekeeper and secretary. In the evenings she had sat in the same room with him, never speaking, never seeking companionship, just sitting there. He said that two women had left him, and by damn the third one wasn't going to, so he rarely allowed Dorie out of his sight.
When he died, Dorie had difficulty feeling anything except relief. Perhaps she had loved him, but then, he had never allowed anything into his house that was as soft as love. Charles Latham believed in discipline in all things. Rowena once said that their father had probably kissed their mother only twice in her life—and that was back in the days when they still believed that kissing made babies.
During all those years with her father, suppressing every emotion, living in fear of him and his wrath, Dorie had thought of what she would do when she was free—she equated his death with her own freedom. She imagined wild things such as travel to foreign lands. She imagined suddenly having beauty like Rowena's and causing grown men to tremble at the lifting of her eyelashes.
What she did not imagine was being left with the burden of managing an entire town. People she had seen, if not known, all her life, seemed overnight to become nothing but an enormous open hand that asked her to fill it. She had to find the money to repair roofs, fix porches, clean drains. There seemed to be no end to the work that needed to be done.
And then, as if she didn't have enough trouble, Rowena sent a telegram saying she was arriving in a matter of days. And Rowena, dear sweet Rowena who couldn't keep her mouth shut about anything, had announced in her message that while she was there she intended to find a husband for her sister.
Of course the man in the telegraph office had shared this information with all of Latham and at least half of the people who came through town on the train. Dorie wouldn't be surprised if by now the entire population of San Francisco knew that her meddlesome sister planned to find her a husband.
Dorie loved her sister, but sometimes Rowena had no common sense. Did she think that Dorie was going to be thrilled when she read the telegram and say, "Oh, wonderful, my sister is going to marry me off to a man I don't even know"?
While Dorie was recovering from this shock and daily listening to the snickers and laughter of her tenants, young and old alike, her well-meaning sister sent another telegram asking her to please not marry Alfred before she got there.
So maybe her mention of Alfred was Dorie's fault. About two years ago, before their father's death, Rowena had written from her beautiful house in England that she was worried about her little sister, so she was going to return to America and find her a husband. This had horrified Dorie because she knew that if her father thought there was any possibility of losing his remaining daughter, he would make Dorie's life even more difficult than it was. After Rowena's defection—that was how Dorie thought of her marriage—their father had kept his younger daughter as nearly a prisoner as possible, but over the years his hold over her had lessened. Slowly Dorie had been allowed to walk in the fields behind the house and to sit by the river with a book in the afternoon. Her father had taken her along with him in his carriage when he went to collect the rent. In fact, with each month that passed after Rowena left, Dorie and her father had become more and more companionable. Not that they talked, but they were less like prisoner and guard than they had been.
But if Rowena had her way and returned to try to force their father to allow Dorie to marry, she knew her life would become a living hell. If she'd thought Rowena could have pulled it off and found a wonderful man for her to marry, Dorie would have been happy to allow her to do so. But Rowena's taste in men ran toward poets who wore ruffled shirts and said asinine things like "Life is a road few may travel." Things that made no sense to Dorie but made Rowena weak-kneed. Dorie had pointed out to Rowena a thousand times that she didn't have the wisdom to choose someone as strong and intelligent as Jonathan, that Jonathan had chosen her and then pursued her and followed her; in truth, he had besieged her until Rowena gave in to him out of weariness.
To protect herself, to keep from finding herself married to a man who drank sherry and wore a pinky ring, Dorie had begun writing letters to her sister saying she was planning to marry a man in Latham. Unfortunately she hadn't thought far enough ahead to make up a man. A fictional man could have been killed off in some romantic tragedy and Dorie could now be wearing black in mourning. Instead, she had written about a man she and Rowena had known all their lives: Alfred Smythe. At the time Dorie started the letters, Alfred's second wife had just died and as she and her father had driven by in the carriage, Alfred—whom Dorie considered to be as old as her father—had looked up at Dorie as though wondering if she could be number three.
Somehow everything had snowballed from there. To her great surprise, Dorie found that she had a talent for fiction, maybe because she wasn't actually living in life, so she could live on paper. She began to formulate a grand romance with Alfred. And the more she wrote, the more enthusiastic Rowena's responses became, so the more flamboyant Dorie's descriptions became. She began to glorify Alfred, to talk of his swaggering walk, of the danger of him. She told Rowena that Alfred appeared to be a mere shopkeeper, but the truth was that he was involved in something hazardous and daring. Since Dorie's knowledge of daring was limited to escaping her father's eye for one whole hour, she never really explained what Alfred was doing. Besides, hints were so much more exciting than reality.
But then Rowena got tired of waiting for a marriage announcement from Dorie, so she sent a letter saying she was coming to America to arrange the marriage. Dorie fired back a letter saying she and Alfred had parted company, so there was no need for Rowena to come. Rowena sent a telegram, which all of Latham saw, that said she was coming to find another husband for her brokenhearted sister.
It was after Rowena's second message that Dorie panicked. What was she going to do? In her own way, Rowena was as big a bully as their father. After all the letters of passion Dorie had sent to her sister, Rowena truly believed that Dorie actually loved that awful little Alfred Smythe, so Rowena had no guilty conscience for pushing Dorie into marriage.
The only thing Dorie could think to do was to marry someone else. And it had to be someone who would satisfy Rowena's romantic spirit and make her believe that Dorie had fallen for him so soon after her grand passion with Alfred.
Dorie wasn't her father's daughter for nothing. When she set out to get a husband, her first thought was to buy one—rather like buying a new pair of shoes. After all, her father had bought his wife. He'd gone back east, read the notices of bankruptcy in the papers, and befriended the first man he found with a daughter who was unattractive enough to never make him worry about another man's attentions. Then he paid off her father's debts and married her.
So Dorie thought she'd hire some man who was in need of money, but it had to be a man who was romantic enough to make her sister leave her alone. It had taken her days to come up with a list of appropriate men, and then by luck she had found that the blacksmith in Latham knew one of them, a man others thought of as a killer. But the blacksmith had told Dorie that Cole Hunter had the softest heart he'd ever seen. Cole didn't know this, and he was such a fast draw that no man was about to tell him, but Cole's soft heart was a big joke among real killers.
"His blood's too warm," the blacksmith said. "He really hates killing anybody."
Since Dorie wanted to ask him to pretend to be married to her, this was good news.
She'd found the man in Abilene, and he had not been what she had expected. What was worse, he seemed to dislike her rather heartily. But that didn't surprise Dorie. She had never been successful with men. Not that she'd had any experience, but when Rowena still lived in Latham, Dorie had met a few of the boys-almost-men who came to visit her gorgeous sister. And each and every encounter had been a disaster.
Rowena would say, "Dorie, you are not to tell Charles Pembroke that he has the intelligence of a carrot and the grace of an elephant in ballet slippers."
For a while Dorie had tried to keep her mouth shut and watch—and learn, but Rowena began to make her ill. Rowena oohed and aahed over each and every male creature she met, no matter how stupid or repulsive. It didn't seem honest to Dorie, and above all, Dorie loved honesty.
Eventually, of course, Rowena got married and had two beautiful children, and Dorie lived alone in a big, dark house and gave money to people. She still couldn't understand why men liked lies better than the truth, but they seemed to.
As for Mr. Hunter, she couldn't figure him out at all. He had made sense to her when she first went to mm and told him the truth. Like all the other men, he seemed to hate her honesty. Dorie knew that Rowena would have lied to him and flattered him and he would have been eating out of her hand. But Dorie had told him the truth and he'd made it clear that he couldn't stand her.
Unfortunately this hurt Dorie, because much to her disbelief, she rather liked him. She had no idea why she liked him, but she did. Maybe it was that heroic aspect of him. The truth was that when he saved her from the bank robbers, she had felt, well, rather like the heroine in the type of novel her father refused to allow in the house.
But Mr. Hunter had not felt the same way she did. When she went to his room to apologize for whatever it was that she had said to make him so angry the first time, she had succeeded only in making him furious.
But then he had shown up at her hotel room and told her she was to marry him. Maybe he thought Rowena was part of marriage to Dorie. That was the only thing that made sense to her. He had disliked her rather heartily when she alone was involved, but he wanted to marry her after he saw Rowena.
Oh, well, what did it matter anyway? The arrangement was only temporary; in six months he'd be gone. He'd have his five thousand dollars, and Dorie would be back where she'd started. She wasn't fool enough to believe any of his talk about wanting to learn a trade; she knew all he wanted was the money—and maybe a chance at Rowena, but then, all men seemed to want that. It was a perfect arrangement.
Now, sitting across the tiny table from him, the big bed looming behind them, a wedding ring—courtesy of Rowena —weighing down her finger, Dorie pushed her food about on her plate. It was a moment before she was aware that Mr. Hunter was saying something.
"I beg your pardon," she said, looking up at him.
"I said that if you want to get yourself a husband—a real one, that is—you ought to try to be more, well, charming."
Dorie could only blink at him. Charming. It was a word she had heard connected with Rowena's name and with witches' spells but not much else.
Ever since that cold little farce that was called a wedding, Cole had been asking himself what in the world he had done. He'd never thought of himself as a romantic, but that quick, boring ceremony, with the preacher anxious to get back to his dinner, was not his idea of a wedding. Wasn't a woman supposed to want flowers and a pretty dress? Weren't women supposed to be sentimental about weddings and such? Wasn't the man supposed to act as though that sort of stuff didn't matter to him, but secretly he rather liked the smell of flowers and the sight of a bride dripping lace?
Since the wedding she hadn't said a word, had just let that bossy sister of hers manage everything. After a few hours around Rowena, Cole was beginning to realize that under that coaxing, honey-coated exterior of hers was a core of steel. She had complimented Cole so much that, had he believed her, he would have thought he was the smartest, bravest, best-looking man on the planet. But while she was flattering him, she was making sure her little sister got married. She told Dorie where the wedding was going to be, where Dorie was going to spend her honeymoon, and when the couple would return to Latham. Rowena arranged the wedding supper and ordered Dorie's clothes packed and readied for the trip. It was at the end of the ceremony when Rowena said, "You may kiss him now, Dorie," that Cole had put his foot down.
"She's my wife now," he said quietly but in a voice he'd used to tell men that he believed they were cheating at cards. One good thing about Rowena was that she seemed to know when to back down. Graciously she stopped giving orders and stepped aside, smiling happily, pleased that she had arranged everything.
So now he was alone with a stranger who was and was not his wife, and he had a sudden urge to get to know her better. Was she as hard as she'd seemed the first time he met her, or was she as soft as she sometimes seemed? Was she calculating or innocent? Did she mean to wound with that tongue of hers or did she just not know any better?
"I'm afraid I don't know how to be charming," she said, not looking up from her food. "I leave the charm to my sister."
After today he knew that in order to wade through Rowena's "charm" one needed very tall boots. As Cole looked at the top of his wife's head, he realized that he'd never really seen her smile. Did she smile? What would she look like if she did smile?
He sat up straight in his chair, like a schoolteacher. "Attention, Miss Latham—er, Mrs. Hunter," he corrected himself and found that he rather liked the sound of that name. "We are now going to have a lesson in charm."
She looked up at him in surprise.
"Now, answer me this: If you find yourself alone with a man and you want to engage that man in conversation, what do you say?"
The look on her face told him she was taking this very seriously. "What does he do?"
"He doesn't do anything. In most of the world it is up to the woman to be the social one. The man is to be the strong silent type, and the woman is to try to draw him out."
"Oh," Dorie said. This was something she'd never heard before, but it explained some things she'd never been able to understand. "I mean, what does the man do for a living? To support himself. Perhaps there is conversation in that."
"Good point. The man is a farmer."
"Well, then, I would ask him how his crops are doing."
"Mmmm," Cole said. "That might be all right for a man who's old enough to be your father, but what about a young, good-looking man, someone with broad shoulders?"
A little sparkle of humor came into Dorie's eyes. "Just exactly how broad are this man's shoulders?"
Cole didn't smile. Holding out his hands, he said, "Oh, about this wide. No, this wide."
Dorie's eyes sparkled more. "Mr. Hunter, no man has shoulders that broad."
For a moment Cole looked defensive as he looked from his outstretched hands to his own shoulders and saw that he had his hands apart exactly the width of his own shoulders. When he opened his mouth to point out that his shoulders were indeed that broad, he looked at her eyes and saw that she had been teasing him. Well, well, he thought, I'll get her back for that.
"On second thought, this man you're sitting next to is a renowned peacemaker."
"Peacemaker? Do you mean a gunslinger? A killer?"
Cole's face was very serious. "Mrs. Hunter, would you please listen to the assignment? The lesson is in charm, and so far you haven't convinced me you know the meaning of the word."
"Oh, yes, I do. It means lying."
That threw Cole for a loop. "Charm means lying?"
"Rowena practices charm by lying."
"Please give me a demonstration."
Dorie started to say that she couldn't possibly show him what she meant by Rowena's lying, but then she realized she had spent a lot of time watching her sister. She should be able to pretend to be Rowena.
Her elbows on the table, she leaned across her plate so her face was close to his and batted her lashes at him. "Oh, Mr. Hunter, I've heard so much about you. I've heard of your wisdom, how you settle disputes and save entire towns single-handedly. My goodness but you are an important man! I do hope you don't mind my staring. It's just that I've been looking for a sapphire just the color of your eyes, and I can't find that deep a shade of blue anywhere. Perhaps the next time I visit my jeweler you'll come with me so I can show the man just what I mean."
Dorie leaned back from the table, her arms crossed over her bosom.
For a moment Cole couldn't speak. She had been making fun of him and of her sister, of course, but, dame it anyway, he liked hearing what she'd just said. He had an almost uncontrollable urge to pick up the knife and look at his eyes in it.
What made him control himself was the look in her eyes that said she knew just what he was thinking. That's two for her, he thought.
"Lies," he said. "They are terrible. You know that men lie too, don't you?"
"Not to Rowena. They don't have to. What can they make up about her beauty that is a lie?"
"True charm contains no lies."
"Ha! Rowena is an expert at charm, yet all she does is lie."
"Then it is not true charm. What wins the men's hearts is her beauty. But what will happen to her when her beauty fades? No man is going to fall for her lies when they come from lips that are no longer beautiful." He could see he had her interest now. Obviously she liked lies that sounded as though they were true.
"Here, let me show you what real charm is. Give me your hand."
She kept her hand where it was, folded close to her body. "If you tell me lots of really dumb lies about my magnificent beauty, I won't like it."
"Could you give me credit for a little sense? Now, give me your hand!" Damn, but the woman got to him. He was sure there wasn't another woman on the earth who would refuse a lesson in seduction. Especially when the man trying to seduce her was her husband.
Gently he took her hand in his. With another woman he might have worried about scaring her, but he wondered if anything scared this little creature. Holding her hand, he raised it to his face but didn't kiss it. Instead, he pressed the back of her hand against his cheek. "You know what I like about you, Mrs. Hunter?" He didn't wait for her answer. "I like your honesty. All my life I've heard compliments. Men have been too afraid of me to say much of anything that wasn't nice, and women have so much liked the look of me that they purred when they were near me." At the word "purr" he rolled his r in a soft, silky way that made Dorie's eyes widen.
"It is refreshing to meet a woman who is honest with me, who tells me that I have things to learn. And it is invigorating to have my mind challenged. You make me want to work hard around you; you make me want to show you that I can do the work, even though you think I can't."
He brought her hand to his lips and began to kiss her knuckles one by one. "As for beauty, there is a sparkle about you that your sister cannot match. She is a rose, full blown, lush, and showy, but you are a violet, sweet and shy, gentle but strong. Yours is not the kind of beauty that a person sees merely by looking. Your beauty is gentler. One has to search for it, and it is therefore worth much more."
Dorie sat still, her eyes widening with every word he said. Little prickles of feeling ran from her hand up her arm, then spread throughout her body.
Abruptly he released her hand. "There," he said. "That's what I meant. Charm without lies."
Dorie had to shake her head to clear it. "Charming lies. That's what I think," she said.
"And what do you think is the truth?"
"You think I am a pest and a nuisance. I am, however, a rich pest, and you need money."
Cole didn't know when he had ever felt more insulted. She was saying that he had married her for money and money alone, which of course wasn't true. He had married her because… Damn it! He wasn't exactly sure why he had married her, but it wasn't only for money. A man who married for money was… was… What was that word? A gigolo, that's what. He didn't mind being called a killer, but he wasn't going to be thought of as a man who took advantage of women.
Abruptly he stood up. "Let's get something straight right now. I married you because you needed protection, and you're paying me for that protection. I'm a bodyguard of sorts for you. When my arm is healed and your sister is out of the country, we'll shake hands and part company and that'll be the end of it. Agreed?"
"Of course," she said calmly, her eyes clear, showing no emotion at all.
"Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to bed. It's been a long day."
At that her eyes widened just enough that he knew what she was thinking.
Not knowing exactly why he was so angry, he grabbed two carpetbags from where they were set against one wall and plopped them down in the center of the bed, creating a wall between the two sides. Maybe his anger was caused by the fact that all his life he'd had to fight women off and now suddenly this mousy little thing was acting as though he'd turned into a satyr, something vile and repulsive. She disliked him so much that she was reluctant even to give him her hand across the dinner table.
"There," he said nastily, nodding toward the divided bed.
"Does that suit your sense of propriety? I don't know why you persist in thinking I'm a deflowerer of reluctant virgins, but I can assure you that I'm not."
"I didn't mean—" she began, but he cut her off.
"Just go to bed. I won't bother you, so you can stop looking so worried."
"I wasn't worried," she said quietly, then moved behind the pretty little screen that stood in the corner beside the bed and began to undress. Rowena had talked to Dorie alone after Cole announced that he and Dorie were getting married. Rowena had said a lot of nonsense about not being frightened and had told Dorie to do her best to make Mr. Hunter feel as though he were the smart one. "This is important to a man," Rowena had said. "It is necessary to a man." Dorie had no idea what her sister was talking about.
"Damnation!" she heard Cole say, then the little tinkling sound of a button hitting what sounded like the porcelain washbasin.
Peeping around the screen, she saw Cole frowning in concentration as he tried to undress himself, his incapacitated arm making the task very difficult. A hero, she thought, a man who wouldn't ask for help.
Wearing an enormous white nightgown that covered her from neck to toes, she walked around the screen and went to him. Immediately she saw that he meant to tell her he could certainly undress himself, but here at last Dorie felt competent. For the last year of his life her father had been an invalid, and she had been the only one he would allow to take care of him. She was used to dressing and undressing a full-grown man.
"Here, let me," she said in an efficient voice, and within a few moments she had divested Cole of his clothing down to his long cotton underwear. She was unaware that he was smiling down at her in amusement and some disbelief.
She was also unaware of the way he was looking at her thick hair tucked into an innocent braid. During the day she kept her hair pulled tightly and astonishingly neatly against her head, not a strand out of place. But now it looked soft and there were little curls about her face. And oddly enough, her prim nightgown was almost provocative. He was used to seeing women in black or red lace, not pure, clean, virginal white. Seeing her completely hidden the way she was made him wonder what was under her clothes far more than see-through silk did.
When he was in his underwear, she pulled back the covers of the bed and half pushed him down onto the bed. Then, as though she'd done it a thousand times—which she had—she tucked the covers around him, gave him a quick, perfunctory kiss on the forehead, turned away, blew out the lamp by the bed, and started toward the door.
She had her hand on the doorknob when she realized where she was and what she had just done. With astonishment on her face, she turned back to look at him. Cole had his good arm folded behind his head and was grinning broadly at her.
Spontaneously they burst into laughter.
"Don't I get a bedtime story?" Cole asked, making Dorie turn red.
"My father—" she began to explain, but then she laughed and said, "What kind of bedtime story do you want? One about bank robbers and showdowns at noon?"
"Would my friends be in it?"
That made her laugh more. "If it's about criminals, it would have to be about your friends, wouldn't it?"
He gave a half frown, half smile. "You make it sound as though if I were sent to prison it would be a family reunion."
"I suspect the closest you'd ever get to church would be the cemetery," she said. She meant to make a joke, but it fell flat as there was too much truth in what she'd said. Neither she nor Cole wanted to think how near he lived to death.
A lamp was burning by her side of the bed, and now that she had come to her senses and realized she wasn't in her father's house and this man wasn't her invalided father, she went to her side of the bed. Refusing to even glance at the heavy bags he had placed down the middle of the bed, she pulled back the cover, blew out the lamp, and slipped into bed, her back to him. It was a while before she spoke. "Were your parents nice?"
"No." He hesitated. "What about yours? Did you like that tyrant of a father of yours?"
"I never thought about it. I guess I did. He was the only parent I ever knew."
"So now the only family you have is your sister?"
"Yes. And she lives across a continent and an ocean." She paused. "And she has a husband and two children."
"Which means that you're alone." She didn't answer, and he didn't expect her to. The train was moving, and it was loud, but it was a noise that seemed to envelop the two of them. Cole thought the scene was almost intimate, with the two of them in bed together but not touching each other. He had never spent an entire night in bed with a woman before; he had always made it a rule to finish his business with her then get out. He'd found that after sex with a woman a man's senses were dulled and he was easy prey for any culprit who wanted to prove himself by killing Cole Hunter. This was a new experience for him, being with a woman for something other than sex. He turned over, bent his arm, and put his head on his hand. "Are you sleepy? I mean, if you are, I'll…"
She rolled over to look at him. Even in the little bit of moonlight coming in through the curtains, her eyes were bright and alive. "I'm not sleepy at all. Do you want to talk?"
This was ridiculous of course. He was a man of action, not words. Oh, he could talk all right, when it was necessary. He often used words to settle a dispute rather than resorting to guns, though he wasn't one for idle conversation. But right now he was too keyed up to sleep. Maybe it was the fact that a woman who was forbidden to him was lying next to him. Maybe it was that he had done an incredible thing today—he'd gotten married. Or maybe it was that he was beginning to like this woman. Heaven only knew why. She wasn't anything like his idea of what a woman should be, but so far he didn't feel like jumping into bed with her as fast as possible, then leaving immediately afterward.
"What's your name? I know your sister calls you Dorie, but today in church the preacher called you something else."
"Apollodoria. It's Greek, or at least that's what my father said. He also said it was a ridiculous name, but it was my mother's dying wish so he gave me the name."
He leaned back on the bed, one arm behind his head. "Apollodoria. I like that. I'm glad your father agreed to it."
"Our cook said my mother swore she'd haunt him if he didn't name me what she wished. My father wasn't superstitious, but he was never a man to take chances."
Cole laughed. She had a way of making even awful things sound funny. "Tell me about this town you own. The one that made you advise me against taking a town for a gift."
"Latham is tiny. Only a couple of hundred people, but considering the way the population is increasing, I think people are doing something with their Sunday afternoons besides resting."
Again Cole laughed and waited for her to continue.
What in the world could inspire a person more than approval? Dorie thought. All those years with her father she had kept quiet. He had hated what he called her impertinent comments. He'd just wanted her to be there, and until the last year of his life he'd never expected her to do anything, just sit near him where he could see her. In order to escape the incredible boredom of her life, she had become an observer of people, watching them, trying to figure them out, filling in blanks with her own imagination.
Every day she had gone with her father in his carriage and had sat perfectly still while he talked to his tenants and said no to whatever they asked from him. She had kept what she observed to herself.
But now here was a man who was laughing with delight at her observations.
"Latham is a peaceful town. Very few problems, actually. I'm sure you'll find it a dull place. We have a Fourth of July picnic. Everyone belongs to the church. Last year the most interesting thing that happened was that Mrs. Sheren's hat blew off just as everyone was leaving church. The hat flew across the river, hit Mr. Lester's bull in the head, and stuck on the bull's left horn. The funny part was that Mr. Lester had brought that bull all the way from Montana and had bragged that it was the meanest, fiercest animal in Texas. Maybe it was, but it sure didn't look mean wearing a pretty straw bonnet trimmed with cherries and wisteria leaves."
Cole didn't say a word, just kept smiling into the darkness and enjoying being entertained. She could spin a good yarn. She told about the shops and the boardinghouse and the passengers from the train.
But as he listened he realized that none of her stories included her. They were all told from the point of view of an observer. It was as though she had been sitting behind a window, watching life happen. She never complained, never even hinted that her life had been one of isolation, spent with a father who had no love or approval to give his younger daughter, but Cole heard what she didn't say.
Whatever he had been about to say was startled from him as the engineer applied the brakes and the train began a lurching stop. Had they not been in the bed, they might have fallen. Too bad, he thought. If they had fallen, she might have landed in his arms. For all her annoying qualities, she brought out the protector in him.
For several moments there was a squeal of brakes and the pull of the train as it came to a reluctant halt. At one mighty jerk, Cole instinctively put out his uninjured hand and grabbed Dorie's shoulder to keep her from rolling off the bed. When one of the carpetbags between them went sliding and threatened to hit her in the head, Cole tossed it to the floor.
When the train finally halted, he found himself hovering over her as though to protect her from arrows and bullets. "You mind if I kiss you good night?" he heard himself asking. If he'd been thirty-eight a few days ago, he was now about twelve years old and sparking a girl under an apple tree.
"I… I guess that would be all right," she whispered back.
"Sure," he said, telling himself he was ridiculous for being this excited. He'd kissed lots of women. Of course none of them had been his wife, he reminded himself.
With an expert kick, he shoved the remaining carpetbag toward the foot of the bed, where it dropped onto the floor. Then, when there was no barrier between them, slowly he bent over her to press his lips on hers. He had lied extravagantly when he told her that the kiss they had previously experienced was nothing unusual. That kiss had haunted him ever since it had happened. In truth, he had thought of little else.
The second his lips touched hers, he knew the first kiss had been no fluke. The strength, the depth of feeling, flooded him. It was as though he'd never kissed another woman, never felt what it meant to touch a female.
Drawing back from her, he looked down into her eyes, saw they were full of wonder. For a moment he didn't know what she was thinking, whether she had liked his soft, gentle kiss or not, but then she put her hand up and touched his hair at the temple. Never in his life had a touch inflamed him as much as this one did.
"Ah, Dorie," he said, then pulled her on top of him as he rolled back to his side of the bed. He cursed his inability to hold her with both his arms, but he hugged her as close as possible with his one arm. And Dorie didn't need too much holding as she rolled on top of him, turning her face as she began to kiss him more deeply. She's very smart, he thought. She learns quickly.
Just as he was about to show her what his tongue could do, a shot came through the window, loudly shattering the glass, and hit the bed on Dorie's side. Had it come a minute earlier it would have entered Dorie's heart.
"Hunter! You in there?"
At the first explosion, Cole had wrapped his arm around Dorie and rolled off the bed, protecting her body with his as they hit the floor. As he fell, he had grabbed his gun from the side table. Now, holding her to him, he whispered, "Are you all right?"
She nodded and he was glad to see there was no hysteria in her eyes and, better yet, no questions. She looked at him as though awaiting his orders and planning to obey him. In that moment he thought maybe he loved her. What man wouldn't love a woman who could take orders?
"Stay down and I'll find out who it is," he said.
She did as he told her, making herself very small as she stayed near the wall of the train.
Cautiously, Cole went toward the window on the far side of the train and peeped out. There was a full moon, and he could easily see four riders. The one in the front, sitting astride a big bay, his silhouette showing his exaggerated nonchalance, as though he hadn't a care in the world, was a man not easily mistaken or forgotten.
Dropping to the floor in a sitting position, Cole leaned back against the wall and cursed rather colorfully under his breath.
"I've never heard most of those words before," Dorie said softly, startling Cole so much that he aimed his gun at her and had it cocked before he realized what he was doing.
Dorie had snaked her way to him under the bed and when she looked at him only her face could be seen peeking out from under the bedspread that hung down to the floor. At the sound of the hammer of Cole's gun being drawn back, she disappeared under the bed again. When she knew she was safe from being shot, she again peeped out at him. "Who is it?" she whispered.
"Winotka Ford." Cole drew his head back against the wall of the train. "I'd heard he was dead. Otherwise I never would have gotten on a train like this." Anger, anger at himself, was flooding him. "How could I have been so stupid!" He looked back at her. "That was his younger brother I killed in the bank holdup. I should have known Ford would come looking for me, but as I said, Id heard he was dead. Maybe I heard that half of Texas wished he were dead."
Shots shattered the silence of the night. "Come on out here, Hunter, and meet your Maker. I'm gonna watch you die."
"What are we going to do?" Dorie asked, looking up at Cole as though she knew he could solve any problem in the world.
She's giving me the hero look again, Cole thought. At least I'll die knowing someone thought I was something more than a two-bit gunslinger.
"We are going to do nothing," he said. "You are going to stay in here while I go out and fight Ford."
"Hunter!" came the shout from outside.
"All right," Cole shouted out the window. "Keep your shirt on. I gotta get dressed. A man has a right to die with his boots on." As he stood up, he looked at Dorie "Help me get dressed."
She came out from under the bed in a quick, agile movement, then gathered up his clothes and began helping him put them on over his long underwear. "I hope I'm not being nosy, but how do you plan to draw a gun if you can't even button your shirt?"
"I'll draw with my left hand."
"Ah, yes. Ambidextrous."
Cole didn't bother to try to figure out what that meant. "Give me my shirt."
Dorie turned away from him, then swiftly grabbed her hairbrush and, turning abruptly, threw it at him. Cole made a grab for the brush with his left hand but missed, and it noisily went clattering to the floor.
"Are you as good with a gun with your left hand as you are at catching things?"
"Shut up and help me with my boots," he ordered, then when she was helping him into them, he began to talk to her in a quiet, calm voice. "I don't know if he knows about you or not. I doubt if he cares. His problem is with me, not you."
She was on her knees in front of him, pulling his boot on, and suddenly a great sadness engulfed him. He had seemed so close to having what he'd never thought a man like him could have. He'd never thought of having a wife and maybe a few kids, but now he realized that maybe that was the reason he'd agreed to marry this little woman who was so clean and fresh. He was smart enough to know that never again would he have a chance at someone like her. Never again in his life would a virginal woman come to him and offer him a life different from the one he had always known.
But now that chance was gone. He had no doubt that these were his last minutes alive. Winotka Ford, with a Cheyenne mother and an American father, was a vicious bastard. He'd never loved his brother, whom Cole had killed, but then, he'd never needed an excuse to call someone out in the middle of the night and kill him. Revenge was as good an excuse as any. Ford wasn't interested in a fair fight. He wouldn't face a man in the middle of a street and see who was the fastest draw. Ford liked to stop stagecoaches and kill everyone on board just for the sport of it.
Now the best Cole could hope for was to protect Dorie. Bending toward her, he put his hand under her chin and looked into her eyes. "The minute I go out that door, I want you to go through the opposite door and mingle with the other passengers. Do you understand me? No matter what you hear outside, stay on the train, and don't let Ford know you have any connection with me."
Suddenly Cole felt sick to his stomach. If Ford killed him, what would keep that killer from boarding the train and plundering it? Even if Ford didn't know that Dorie had any connection with him, he would see that she was young and vulnerable. And pretty, he thought, with her hair hanging down her back in a thick braid, with the soft ruffle of her nightgown about her neck and the way she was looking up at him. He was seeing what he would lose.
Quickly, with great fervor, he kissed her, and when he drew away from her, he was almost dizzy from the kiss. "I'll see you later, all right?" he said, pretending that he'd be back, but then he said, "Tell your sister to take care of you and that I said you deserve more of a man than Mr. Pepper."
He wanted her to smile at him, but she didn't. Her eyes were huge, and he knew that if he stayed another minute he'd drown in them, and in that minute he was sure he was going to die. What had kept him alive all these years was the fact that he didn't care whether he lived or died. But right now he did care. He cared very much.
"Hunter, you got ten seconds and then I'm comin' in."
"Take care of yourself, Apollodoria," Cole whispered, then straightened up and went to the back door of the train car.
"You took long enough," Ford said when Cole emerged onto the platform at the back of the train.
Cole stood still, waiting for the man to make the first move. Cole's only chance for survival was to drop to the floor of the platform at the first movement from any of the four men and start shooting. That way maybe he could get three of them before he was killed. At least that would be three fewer to possibly hurt Dorie. He'd take Ford first, and then maybe his men would scatter, or maybe the cowards on the train, who had to be watching from every window, would help.
One moment Cole's heart was in his throat, for he knew that he was seeing his last minutes of life, and the next he didn't know what had happened. Dorie rushed out of the train, her small body nearly hidden in a flurry of ruffles and the voluminous skirt of her nightgown. She had loosened her hair and allowed it to spring out from her head—and spring was just what it did. He had thought her hair was straight and could see now why she kept it pulled back so severely. Taming her hair was akin to taming a wild horse just off the plains. It billowed about her head like a honey-colored cloud. And damn it, he thought, she looked just like an angel. Never in his life had he felt so protective of another human as he felt of this one.
The moment he saw her he knew that something was horribly wrong. Had one of Ford's men already boarded the train? Had someone touched her? He started to take a step toward her, started to bark out an order, but she didn't give him a chance to say a word before she launched into a screech of agony.
"You can't kill him until he gives me back the gold he stole from my sister and me. He's the only one who knows where it is."
"Dorie!" Cole said sharply and tried to reach for her while not taking his eyes off the four men sitting astride their horses and watching him.
Dorie shrank away from Cole, with exaggerated horror, as though she might instantly die from some vile disease if he touched her.
In spite of himself, Cole frowned at her movement and the horror on her face.
"Don't you come near me! I'd rather die than be touched by you." She looked up at the man on the big bay. "Oh, Mr. Ford, you can't imagine how horrible he is. He uses me!"
Dorie had the attention of Cole and the four outlaws as well as that of the cowardly passengers who were looking out the windows, watching while staying behind the protection of the steel train.
As Dorie started down the platform, Cole made a lunge for the back of her nightgown, but she eluded him.
"Mr. Ford, you look like a man who would help a lady," she said.
Winotka Ford had cheekbones you could cut beef with, a five-inch-long scar ran down one of them, his hair hung to his shoulders and hadn't been washed since the last time he crossed a river, and his eyes were so cold he frightened rattlers. He didn't look as though he could or would help anyone.
"This man, this horrible man, killed your brother so he could kidnap me. He knew I was rich, richer than anything he had ever dreamed of. He knew my father had millions in gold bars hidden in his house. He knew this and used this information against me. I thought he was my friend; I thought he was a good person after he rescued me from the holdup. I… I married him."
Ford looked up at Cole, still standing on the platform, still ready to draw. If Cole moved to try to get Dorie away from the men, he'd lose his vantage point, and with his right hand useless, he wouldn't be able to hold her out of the way of flying bullets. He was a prisoner of place.
"You marry yourself some rich girl, Hunter?" Ford asked, his voice snide and insinuating. He liked to toy with people before he killed them.
Dorie did the answering. "He married me, then forced my sister to give him fifty thousand dollars in gold, which he hid. I don't know where. I don't know anything anymore. He can't keep his hands off of me long enough for me to think."
"Dorie!" Cole said, and to his horror there was hurt in his voice. He hadn't touched her, had treated her with nothing but respect. How could he go to his grave with these last words between them? Had his few kisses disgusted her this much?
Dorie ignored him. "Make him tell me where he hid the gold, and then you can kill him. Or maybe I will pull the trigger. I'd like to see him dead after the way he's treated me."
In an instant Cole saw what she was doing and he was disgusted with himself for not having seen it earlier. He had been so blinded by her words about marrying him, that he had completely missed what she was saying about the gold. He looked up at Ford. "There is no gold," he said calmly. "I have no gold hidden anywhere."
"Liar!" Dorie screamed at him, then spit for emphasis.
Cole hated to admit it, but that gesture shocked him. Where'd she learn to do such a vulgar thing?
Ford began to laugh—an ugly sound because it wasn't something he did very often. His laughter sounded like the wheel of a wagon that had been rusted by the weather for a couple of years and now was trying to roll without being greased.
"Who am I supposed to believe, you or this little lady?"
"Don't believe him. He does nothing but lie!" Dorie yelled. "He lied to my sister and to me. He lies to everyone. He got shot, and he couldn't earn any money killing people anymore, so he sweet-talked me into marrying him, then forced my sister to give him all the gold she had. He was taking me back to Latham to get the rest of it. I think he means to kill me and burn my daddy's house down. I think—"
"Shut up!" Cole shouted at her, effectively making her instantly stop talking. He turned to Ford. "She's trying to save my life. There is no gold; she has no gold anywhere. She's as poor as a squatter. Your beef is with me, not her. Dorie, walk down to the far end of the train and stay out of this."
"Ha!" she said. "I'd rather die than do one more thing you tell me to do. You can't imagine the horrible things he's made me do. Disgusting things that no lady should have to live through." She ran to Ford, put her hands on his stirrup straps and looked up at him with pleading eyes. "I'm not poor. If I were poor I wouldn't be traveling in a private train car, would I? I'm not trying to save his life. I hate him. He's taken so much from me, and I want it back. Get him to tell me where he's hidden the gold. Then you can kill him. I care nothing about him. Nothing."
Cole could see that Ford was beginning to listen to her. "Gold" was the only word someone like Ford heard, and maybe he also heard the hint of something dirty and sinister in what Dorie was suggesting Cole had done to her.
As for Cole, he had difficulty controlling his anger at her words. Had she deceived him from the beginning? Was she something different from what she seemed? How did she know about "disgusting things," things no lady should have to endure? Where had she learned of such things?
"Watkins!" Ford snapped. "Give Hunter and the little… lady"—he sneered the word—"your horse. We'll go back to camp and figure this out."
For a moment Cole thought about shooting as many of them as he could. But he knew he'd end up dead, and then who would look out for Dorie? She'd just told these lying scum that she was rich, and she'd made them look at her as something sexual. These men would all want to know what Cole had done to her that was dirty; they'd want the details and want to repeat the experience. "She's lying," he said, but he could see that his words made no difference. What words could he say that could compete with the words "gold" and "sex"?
"We'll figure that out later," Ford said. "Now get on the horse."
"Let her get dressed," Cole said, playing for time. Maybe a bolt of lightning would strike Ford and his men. Maybe the cavalry would ride up and save them. Maybe those yellow-livered passengers watching them would step forward and help. And maybe Winotka Ford was going to repent within the next two seconds. Sure.
"I don't want to ride with him," Dorie said, shrinking back toward the rear of Ford's horse, her arms folded protectively over her chest as though trying to ward off Cole's blows.
"She can ride with me," one of the men said, leering at her.
"No, give her to Hunter, she likes him so much," Ford said, his eyes easy to read even in the moonlight. He was going to enjoy seeing Dorie sitting so close to a man she hated. Misery in anyone gave him great pleasure. When he was the cause of that misery, his pleasure was combined with power and he was doubly pleased.
"Get down here before I shoot parts of you off," Ford said to Cole. "And no changing clothes. We go now."
Cole had never before been in such a bind. But then, he'd never before been responsible for another human being. In all his life he'd had only himself to take care of and look after. If he'd been killed, his death wouldn't have meant anything to anyone; no one would have noticed that he was missing from the earth. But now things were different. If he was killed tonight, something dreadful would happen to another human being, a person he had come to care about. He knew they had not married for the right reasons, but he had sworn to stay with her, to look after her until death did them part.
Of course death wasn't too far away, because within a few minutes he was going to wring her neck.
Fifteen minutes later he was mounted on a horse, Dorie ensconced in front of him, her big nightgown flapping about his legs, her feet encased in thin bedroom slippers. She was leaning back against him, his arms around her, holding the reins. For ten minutes, while they were riding, he had been telling her what he thought of her stupidity.
"You should have stayed where you were. If you'd done what I told you—"
"You would probably be dead now," she said, yawning and leaning back against him.
In spite of himself—she did have a talent for bringing out the very worst in him—he said, "You'd better not get too close to me or I might do disgusting things to you."
"Such as what?" she asked, sounding rather like a scientist who intended to take notes on the behavior patterns of another civilization.
"I have no idea. You were the one telling the world that I couldn't keep my hands off of you. Damn you, Dorie! You've gotten us into a real mess. You and I both know there's no gold. Why didn't you let me fight it out with him?"
"Because I didn't want you to die," she said simply.
For a moment he was mollified. Part of him was, of course, glad that he wasn't dead, but he wished with all his heart that she were somewhere safe instead of at the mercy of a conscienceless outlaw.
"Why did you have to tell Ford—and everyone else within earshot—all that about how I… how I…"
"How you couldn't keep your hands off me?"
His pride didn't want to ask for her answer, but right now every feeling he'd ever had was bruised and confused. "Yes," he whispered.
"My father never let me do anything I wanted to do. Rowena said he could be very contrary, but I think he was just plain mean. If I wanted to read a book, he made me go out in the carriage with him. If I said it was a beautiful day and I was looking forward to going out, you can be sure we'd stay in, probably in one room. I thought that maybe your outlaw was as mean as my father. If I'd said I wanted to stay with you, he would have done everything in his power to keep us apart, so I did what I learned to do with my father: I told him I wanted to do the opposite—get away from you." She snuggled a bit against his chest. "It looks as though it worked."
All his life Cole had thought women were the weaker sex. They needed protection. But this woman was making him rethink what he'd believed to be true. Impulsively he bent his head and kissed her neck a couple of times.
"Stop it!" she screamed. "Keep your slimy hands off me! I hate you! Don't touch me!"
Ahead of them they could hear Winotka Ford chuckling. He'd probably laughed more tonight than he had in the last ten years together.
"You don't have to overdo it," Cole said, hurt in spite of himself.
"Yes, I must or he won't get any enjoyment out of this."
Maybe it was that unfamiliar protective instinct she'd aroused in him, but he didn't like to think that she had ever known anyone who was even remotely like Winotka Ford. He would have preferred to think she'd had a father who indulged her with pretty dresses and lollipops on Sunday afternoons. But he was beginning to realize that her affluent childhood was as lonely as his poor one had been.
He shook himself, telling himself to stop being so melodramatic. Right now his major concern was to get both of them out of the jam Dorie had got them into. Had he been alone, he would have tried to shoot his way out of this mess, never mind that his shooting arm was in a sling. But now he had to take care of Dorie.
It wasn't pleasant to remember, but he tried to think back to what she had told Ford. It seemed that he, Cole, was supposed to have fifty grand that only he knew the whereabouts of. So that meant Ford could do anything to Cole short of killing him to find out where Cole had stashed the gold. Also, he seemed to remember that Dorie had said there was more gold in her house in Latham.
"Do you have any gold hidden in your father's house?"
"None," she said sleepily. "Why?"
He tightened his arm around her in a warning gesture.
"Oh, that," she said, remembering what she had told that dreadful, dirty man. "I wanted him to have a reason not to kill me, so I told him I knew where there was money hidden. But there is no hidden money. My father put everything in trust in a bank in Philadelphia. I am given the smallest amount possible every month."
"Listen to me," Cole said, leaning forward so his mouth was almost on her ear. "I want you to help me get us out of this mess. I'll keep telling Ford that you have money and I'm after it. I'll tell him it's the only reason I care about you."
"Is it?" she asked.
"Is it what?"
She knew he understood what she was asking, so she didn't bother to answer him. Obviously he didn't want to tell her what she wanted to know.
Cole didn't want to say anything to make her think about love. Women in love did stupid things. True, they were blindly loyal to a man no matter what a piece of horse manure he was, but they often jeopardized their own lives in the process. "I want the five grand you promised me and that's it. After I get that I may never want to see the state of Texas again." He couldn't lie well enough to say that he never wanted to see her again, but that's what he meant to hint at. If she thought he didn't care about her, she'd be more obedient when the time came.
"What am I to do?" she asked dully.
He wouldn't let himself feel anything at her tone. "I'll make Ford realize that he can't get any of the gold without me and that I can't get it without you. I'll tell him that you lied when you said you didn't like my touching you." There was some pride in his voice when he said this. "I'll say that I've been sweet-talking you so you'll trust me and tell me how to get at the money. Only a husband can get the money, and that's why I married you. You have to sign some papers."
When she didn't say anything he leaned forward to look at her. "Are you asleep?"
"No. So this means that you're going to be, well, courting me? Lots of hand kissing, that sort of thing? You're going to try to coax me into signing papers, is that right?"
He hadn't thought that far ahead, but that was probably the right idea. "Yes. Do you have anything against that?"
"Why don't you just hold a gun to my head and threaten to kill me if I don't sign?"
No flies on this little lady. "Maybe your father worried that you were an idiot when it came to men, so he stipulated in his will that you had to sign the papers in front of witnesses."
"You could hold my sister and not release her until after I sign the papers."
He smiled into the darkness. She certainly kept a man on his toes. "Your sister is on her way back to England, remember? You know, you could drive a man to drink." He took a breath. "I don't think Ford has a clever mind like yours. I'll just tell him that I, your husband, have to persuade you to sign the money over to me. We have to be there together so that Ford's men can't tie me to a pole and beat me half to death. Does that answer your questions?"
"Does it answer your outlaw friend's questions?"
At that Cole almost laughed out loud. Instead, he buried his face in her neck. "Do you think you can pretend you like me?"
"Haven't I already proven that I'm a great actress?" she said, making Cole move away from her neck. He wasn't sure, but he thought she had just said something terrible to him.
"Put your head back and get some sleep. Give that devious little mind of yours a rest. We'll probably stop for a few hours before daylight, but try to sleep before then."
She snuggled back against him, but she didn't go to sleep. Instead, she felt his strong chest against her back, one arm encircling her, the other pressed against her side so that the palm of his hand was against her ribs. His chin was near her forehead, and she could feel his breath in the cool night air. Rubbing against her small thighs were his larger ones, hard from years in a saddle, muscular from commanding wayward horses to his will.
Dorie knew she should be terrified at what was happening. She knew she should be worried and frightened, shaking even. But the truth was, part of her didn't care what happened tomorrow. All she could think of was now. The last few days had been the best of her life. All her life she had lived by logic. She had planned everything down to the finest detail. She had studied her father as if he were a textbook for a course she had to pass, and she'd taught herself how to deal with him. She learned his schedule, his philosophy of life—"get all that you can"—and his habits. Using her brain, she had adapted to him.
She had found Cole Hunter through logic. She had chosen him based on things she'd heard and read, and especially based on her need for a man to do a particular job.
But Dorie had learned that while her father acted in a predictable manner, other people didn't. Cole Hunter hadn't done anything the way she'd thought he would. When she'd presented him with her marriage proposal he became angry, but Dorie had expected that: she always made men angry. What she hadn't expected was his growing softness toward her.
And she was coming to like that softness. She liked the way he sometimes looked at her. Oddly enough, what seemed to please him the most was what had made her father the most angry: her impertinent remarks. Her father had hated it when Dorie said or did anything clever, something he hadn't thought of himself. Her father needed to believe that all women were stupid—then he felt justified in every petty, despicable thing he did to either of his daughters.
Closing her eyes, she leaned her full weight back against Cole, and he seemed to close around her, protecting her, keeping her safe from all harm.
"Let me have her."
Dorie came awake slowly, aware that the horse had stopped and Cole was pushing her into an upright position. Standing to her left, his arms eagerly upraised, was one of the dreadful men who rode with the outlaw who was trying to kill her husband. Since she wasn't fully awake, Dorie hadn't had time to remember the story she'd told the men; she had temporarily forgotten that she'd said she hated Cole Hunter. She reacted instinctively to the sight of the awful man holding up his arms for her: she turned and wrapped her arms around Cole's neck and held on tight.
Winotka Ford was not brilliant, but he was smart enough to know a problem when he saw one. He didn't like being played for a fool. Leaning on his saddle horn, he glared at Cole in the moonlight. "What's goin' on?" he said in a low, threatening voice.
Cole tried to act as though nothing unusual had happened. "I've had hours to talk to her." When Ford still glared at him, Cole shrugged. "Maybe you have trouble attracting women, but give me three hours alone with a woman and I can talk her into anything." With that, he dismounted and reached up with his good arm to help Dorie down.
It was a full minute before Ford and his men understood what Cole had said. What else could they do but agree with him? Which man was going to step forward and admit that he was unable to talk a woman into anything? The men had demanded and threatened, blackmailed and given orders, but none of them had ever tried words of endearment. They had never used words that would make a woman voluntarily put her arms around their necks and relax her body against theirs.
Cole wished he could carry Dorie away from these gaping, suspicious men, but with one arm useless, he couldn't. And he missed the power his gun on his hip gave him; he missed the strength it gave him in protecting her. The only weapons he could rely on now were his size, his reputation, and his ability to freeze men with a look.
Only a couple of hours remained before dawn, and Ford had decreed that the horses needed a rest, so they were to bed down for a while. Trying to establish some independence, Cole put his saddle as far away from the others as he dared. He didn't want them to think he'd be so stupid as to try to escape while the others slept. Of course he would have tried if he hadn't had Dorie with him, but he would not do anything that might endanger her life.
One of the men made a campfire, put a coffee pot over the fire, and fried some bacon. When Dorie came back from a few minutes' privacy among the trees, he handed her a steaming cup of coffee so vile she coughed and spat it out.
"Drink it. It'll warm you," he said softly, his big body shielding her from the view of the others squatting around the campfire. So far Ford and his men hadn't had much time to think about what had happened, but maybe now they would. Ford had planned to kill Cole Hunter, a notorious gunslinger, knowing that he would never be prosecuted. All Ford had to do was say it was a fair fight, produce a few witnesses, and he'd be free. Cole's past would keep people from thinking it was anything but a fight, fair or otherwise. But instead of murdering a man, Ford now had to deal with two hostages. Never mind that Cole was the first one to kidnap her, he was her husband. If anything happened to her, it would be Ford who got into trouble. So all he had to say about it was that she'd better be worth the trouble he was putting himself to.
"Drink that coffee and eat this," Cole said, holding out a piece of tough bacon.
Dutifully, Dorie tried to chew the bacon and drink the coffee. It wasn't that she wasn't hungry, it was just that the food tasted like old shoe leather and water out of a rusty can. However, it was hot and Cole wanted her to eat, so eat she did.
Cole looked at her, a smudge of dirt on her cheek, standing in the moonlight wearing a nightgown that had once been pristine but was now ragged and filthy, and he had an attack of guilty conscience. He had gotten her into this. If she'd never met him she'd be safe now, not in danger of dying at any moment. Looking at her, he made a vow that even if he died trying, he was going to get her out of this.
Ford set a man on guard, partly to keep an eye on Cole and partly to watch for bounty hunters who might want the rewards on the outlaws' heads. The rest of the men stretched out on blankets and were asleep in seconds.
Cole motioned to Dorie to take the bed he'd made for her, giving her all the comfort he could provide in the outdoors. But Dorie refused to lie down on the relative comfort of the blankets while he tried to sleep on the bare ground a few inches away. "I won't take the only bed," she whispered to him. The man on guard was unabashedly watching the two of them, and something about the way his eyes glittered even in the darkness made Dorie's skin crawl.
"You need to get some sleep," Cole said, exasperated.
"You'll freeze without a blanket. The fire is ten feet away."
"I'm used to sleeping outdoors," he snapped back at her.
"Then that's all the more reason why you should have the blankets and the saddle for your pillow. I'm used to a feather bed and clean white sheets. Now you should have the better place to sleep."
He was beginning to realize that she was so stubborn that they might be there all night arguing and he wanted to get as much sleep as possible. Heaven only knew what the next few days had in store for them.
"All right, then," he said, meaning to settle the matter, "we'll just have to sleep together." Knowing she'd refuse and he'd end up sleeping on the ground, he stretched out on the blanket, then held up his good arm in invitation to her. He thought she'd give him a long list of reasons why they couldn't sleep together, but she didn't so much as hesitate. Quickly, and with what seemed to be great willingness, she moved into his arms, expertly fitting her body to his, her head on his arm, and slid one firm thigh between his.
"Oh, Lord," Cole whispered in silent prayer. Never in his life had a female body felt so good to him. Every woman he'd ever had had been either illicit or illegal. If the woman he was in bed with wasn't a prostitute, then she was someone's sister or wife, or in some way belonged to another man. But this one belonged to him. Maybe not forever and maybe not for the right reasons, but at least she did belong to him for the moment. Perhaps it was ridiculous, since it was so unreal and so temporary, but the thought that he had a right to hold her made her feel better to him.
He'd thought she was tiny, but she wasn't. She was exactly the right size, fitting into the curves of his body as though the two of them had been made for each other. She snuggled against his chest, making Cole's heart beat wildly.
Either she was as innocent as a newborn child or she was the most wanton little trollop on the earth, he thought. Whatever she was, Cole knew that had anyone at that moment tried to make him release her, he would have killed the person.
As for Dorie, she had never in her life felt anything as good as being near Cole. It wasn't only that she was a virgin, it was also that she had missed out on a lifetime of sensory pleasure that a person should receive. There had been no childhood hugs for Dorie. Her mother had been alive to cuddle and caress her elder daughter, but she had died at Dorie's birth. Her father had decided that even the most ordinary display of affection constituted "spoiling," so he'd forbidden even the most cursory of caresses to be given to his children. Rowena's sweet nature had invited forbidden caresses from everyone, but little Dorie, with her quiet ways and her cool eyes that were the image of her father's, made people think twice before they risked punishment to touch her. As a result, Dorie had gone through life without the caresses that other children received as a matter of course. People said that little Miss Dorie was self-sufficient and needed no one else, when the truth was the opposite. She'd wanted to climb onto a person's lap, as she saw Rowena do, but she hadn't known instinctively how to tease and make an adult want to hold her, she'd never even figured out how to ask.
Cole Hunter was the only person besides Rowena who'd dared to risk coming near that seemingly cool exterior. And Cole was seeing what Rowena had known forever, that Dorie's coolness was only a defense to hide from the world what she needed so much.
When Cole held her, he seemed to unleash something buried deep inside Dorie: the need to feel a heart beating against her own, her breath mingling with another human being's, her skin against his skin.
When Cole pulled her into his arms she knew it was for warmth and protection, but there was something about his big body against hers that felt so very good, so very right. She wanted to slide inside him, to somehow get closer to him than she already was.
Her heart began to beat harder, as though it were beating more powerfully, more deeply within her chest. She could not only hear his heart against her cheek, she could also feel it. She wanted to be closer to him, but the fabric of his shirt was separating them. To her mind the fabric was as thick and impenetrable as leather.
She was aware of the shock in his voice when he said, "What are you doing?" but it didn't stop her from unfastening his shirt and putting her cheek against his skin. When she told him that the buttons hurt her cheek it was the truth. Even the weave of the cotton was hurting her skin, hurting her heart.
As Dorie pulled his shirt away and nestled her face against his bare chest, Cole rolled his eyes skyward and said a few oaths under his breath.
Smiling, happier than she'd ever been in her life, Dorie moved her cheek against his chest, and when her lips touched his skin, without thought, she kissed him.
"Stop it!" he commanded, grabbing her shoulders and holding her away from him. His voice was fierce as he conveyed his anger without resorting to shouting.
Dorie blinked at him, for a moment not at all aware of what she had done or why she had done such a forbidden thing as to kiss this man's bare chest.
"I… I apologize, Mr. Hunter," she said when it dawned on her what she had done and why he was angry. Obviously he did not want her touching him more than was necessary. She stiffened in his arms, in less than a second changing from soft and pliable to unbendable. "I have no idea what came over me. Mr. Hunter, I—"
"Leave it!" he snapped because she'd started to close his shirt and button it up.
"But I—"
He shoved her head back down before she could say another word.
But Dorie wouldn't remain still. She was probably tired, but at the same time she'd never felt so full of energy in her life. Part of her brain was saying she should be a lady, but another part of her asked why a ladylike manner should matter when she was likely to be dead within twenty-four hours. When that awful man Ford found out there was no gold at her house she didn't think he'd laugh and say, "That was a good joke on me," and let them go. He'd probably shoot both of them in the head and never think twice about it. When she was dead, would they carve on her tombstone, "She was a lady to the very end."
"Is it wonderful?" she asked Cole.
"Is what wonderful?" he growled, trying to sound as though she were keeping him from sleep.
If Dorie hadn't had her ear pressed against his chest so that she could feel and hear that his heart was pounding much too hard for him to sleep, she would have been thwarted in her talk. But she knew he was no closer to sleep than she was.
"Lovemaking," she whispered. "Is it very nice?"
When he said nothing, she continued. "Rowena will tell me nothing about it. I mean, I know about the… process, but I don't know exactly how it feels. Rowena says a husband has to teach his wife everything she needs to know, but I never thought I'd get one. A husband, I mean." She hesitated, then continued quickly. "Now, it's not that I think you really are my husband. I know you're not. It's just that the way things are now I may never get another one, and so I thought I'd ask you."
She waited for a while, and he took so long to answer that she thought he wasn't going to.
"Yes, it's nice," he said at last. "But I think it could be better."
That made her start to pull back her head to look at him, but he immediately pushed her head back down. He didn't seem to want a square inch of her to move away from him. "You shouldn't ask me about lovemaking. I only know about fornication. What experience I've had has been quick and over as soon as possible before someone comes after you with a shotgun or somebody else wants the bed."
"But surely…"
"Maybe there have been a few good times, but I've always wondered what it would be like to be with a woman who was mine and mine alone." He lowered his voice. "With a woman who had never belonged to another man. A woman who was never going to belong to anyone except me."
"I have never… had another man," she said softly.
"I know. And that's why you deserve better than an aging gunslinger."
"Oh," she said. "Do you mean you're too old to—"
She wasn't sure whether she'd said the exactly wrong thing or exactly the right thing, but he put his hand on the back of her head and tipped her head up to kiss her. It was a kiss such as she'd dreamed of. In those days of sitting silently by her father, she had imagined what it would be like to be as beautiful as Rowena and have some handsome man come to her and kiss her with tenderness and passion.
He turned her head to one side and deepened the kiss, and when his hand slipped down her side to cup her breast, Dorie didn't even think of pulling away from him. To look at her as she had been a few weeks ago, a man would have guessed she'd take a riding crop to any man who dared touch her, but when Cole touched her, her body seemed to open to his. She moved so her hips were pressed against his, sliding her leg higher between his, and when she moved her thigh, she felt his groan against her lips.
When he pulled away from her, Dorie tried to pull him back, but he pushed her head back down so her lips were far away from his.
"Mr. Hunter, may I call you Cole?"
"No," he said sharply. "It's better this way. Listen to me, Dorie, and listen to me hard. I'm not what you seem to believe I am. I'm not your damned hero. I'm what you said I was the first time you met me: an aging gunslinger. I don't know how I happened to live this long—an accident of nature, I guess. You were right; most of us are dead by the time we reach our thirties. Right now I'm living on borrowed time. I shouldn't be alive now, and I'm sure I haven't much time left."
"But—"
"No!" he said sharply. "I can see it and feel it." As he said the words he couldn't help but run his hand down her back, feeling the curve of her body. He couldn't resist cupping her round buttocks and pressing her closer to him. Nor could he help the groan that escaped him. He would die before he told her that she was the most desirable female he'd ever seen, that he'd rather have a night with her than with any other woman, even a woman twice as beautiful as that sister of hers.
"We have to stay together until I can get you out of this, but after that, you go back to your world and I to mine. We aren't the same kind of people. We come from two different places."
"Maybe we are the same kind of people but we were simply born in different places. Maybe you'd have been different if you'd been my father's son."
"Probably hanged for murder for killing the bastard," he said under his breath.
Dorie smiled. She knew he disliked her father because her father had been unkind to her.
Smiling contentedly, she snuggled against him. "I like you," she said. "I like you very much. You're a good man."
She had no idea that her words startled him. Several women had told him they loved him, but never had a woman told him that she liked him or that he was a good person. And yet somehow, when Dorie said the words, he almost believed them.
He held her close to him, feeling her warmth and the purity of her. It was odd, but when she was near he felt like a good person. All the gunfights in his life seemed to have happened to someone else. And when Dorie looked up at him he felt as if he could do anything.
"I'll get you out of this, sweetheart," he whispered.
She didn't answer because she was asleep. She trusted him so much that she had fallen asleep in his arms. Cole knew that he'd die before he allowed anything or anyone to harm her.
"I'm not going," Dorie said, standing beside the horse she and Cole were riding, her arms folded across her chest, her eyes straight ahead. "I won't do it and that's that. You can shoot me or not, but I will not do it!"
Cole decided that every good thought he'd ever had about Dorie, about women in general, was the devil's work. Only the devil could have made him have good thoughts about a creature as stubborn, not to mention stupid, as this one.
When Ford got over his shock—few men and no women had ever told him no—he pulled his gun out of his holster. That was when Cole came off his horse and put his body between Dorie and the bullet that might come her way.
I must be calm, he told himself. I must reason with her, try to persuade her. Women like sweet words. "Damn you!" were the first words out of his mouth, words said with his teeth clenched together. "Don't you realize the seriousness of this? You could be killed. You could—"
"I won't tell him where the gold is even if he kills me," Dorie said, not even looking at Cole. Her mouth was set in a line so rigid it could have been used for a buckboard seat.
"Dorie," he began, then said, "What the hell," put his arm around her waist, and started to forcibly put her on the horse.
She was little, true, but she was fierce, and he had the use of only one arm. When he tried to pick her up, she fought him by flailing her arms and legs, then by making her body rigid, then by pushing at him with both her arms and her legs.
Within seconds they were in what seemed to be an equal contest of muscle against stubbornness.
It was the rusty old laugh of Ford that made Cole drop her in order to try to get a better grip on her.
"Let her go," Ford said.
Immediately Cole set Dorie on the ground and put his body between hers and Ford's. "You're not going to hurt her," he said, his eyes glittering.
Ford snorted. "Hunter, I think maybe you two lied about not likin' each other."
At those words, Cole felt a chill run up his spine. If Ford found out they had lied about this, he'd figure out they'd lied about other things, too. He'd soon realize that there was no reason to keep them alive.
Right now he thought he could cheerfully strangle Dorie. For days he'd been thinking that for the first time in his life he'd met a woman who had some sense. But then this morning she'd shown that she was the… well, the most female of females. That was the worst thing he could think to call her. She hadn't a brain in her head.
This morning, after a mere two hours of sleep, they'd been told to mount their horses. They'd ridden hard for three hours until they came to a ridge overlooking a little town that seemed to consist mostly of opportunities for sin. There had once been a reason for the town, but that had died out so long ago that no one remembered, or cared, why the village was there. But in the dying embers of the town's life, after the people who wanted to earn a living had left, the gamblers and murderers had moved in. Now it was nothing but a place for men—or women—to lose their money or their lives. It was, of course, Winotka Ford's home base, the only place on earth where he felt safe.
They lingered atop the ridge overlooking the few broken-down buildings long enough to make sure that there was no sheriff's posse there, no soldiers, no one who might give them trouble.
It was while she and Cole, still mounted on their horse, were looking down into the town that Dorie spoke. "Are we going down there?"
"Yes," Cole said, trying to think how he could get out of the place. He had no money for bribes; he couldn't shoot his way out. Once they got in, how were they going to get out?
"I can't go into town wearing a nightgown," Dorie said, sounding as if she might cry.
"No one will notice," he said in dismissal, wondering if there were any people he knew in town. If there were, he hoped he hadn't killed any of their relatives.
"You don't understand," Dorie said. "I can't do this."
Why was she bothering him about things that didn't matter? "Dorie, you have been traveling across the state of Texas for two days wearing nothing but a nightgown. What difference will a few more hours make? We'll get you something to wear when we ride into town." He had no idea what he was going to use for money to buy her a dress, but he couldn't say that to her.
"No," she said, her voice sounding desperate. "No one has seen me until now. If I go into town there will be women there."
He gave her a look that told her he thought she was crazy. "You have been wearing your nightgown in front of men. Isn't that worse than being seen by women?"
Why were men so stupid? she wondered. How in the world did their mothers teach them to tie their shoes when they had no brains? She gave him a look of great patience. "Men like to see women in nightgowns. Even in my limited experience I know that." Her tone asked why he didn't know that. "Women laugh at other women riding into town wearing nothing but a dirty nightgown."
Cole's jaw dropped in astonishment. "Four dangerous men are ready to kill you and you're worried about women laughing at you?"
She crossed her arms over her chest. "It's a matter of dignity."
"This is a matter of life and death." He ran his hand over his face. Had any man ever understood a woman? "Take a look at that place down there," he said, looking over her shoulder at the town below them. Only about eight buildings were still standing. A couple of them were burned-out shells, and one looked as though the roof had been blown off. Signs hung at precarious angles; boardwalks had long sections missing. Even while they watched, three men started shooting at each other and within seconds one of them was dead. The rest of the people milling about didn't so much as pause in what they were doing at this very usual sight of bloodshed. A man who looked to be the undertaker dragged the dead man out of the street.
"We're about to ride into that and you're concerned about being seen in a nightgown?" He grinned at the back of her head. "Afraid they won't let you into the local ladies' society if you're seen improperly attired?"
Obviously, Cole was not understanding her at all. With one lithe motion, she slipped off the horse and told him she was not going to enter the town wearing only her nightgown. Nothing he said persuaded her to reconsider.
"Dorie," he said with exaggerated patience, "you're wearing more clothes now than any other woman in town. You're not indecently exposed."
She wasn't going to answer him because even to her she wasn't making sense. But she did know that she could not ride into that odd little town wearing about fifteen yards of nearly white cotton.
"Dorie, you—" Cole began.
"Go get her a dress," Ford said, looking at one of his men and motioning with his gun toward the town.
At that, Cole exchanged a look with Ford that was age-old. It said that no man had or ever would understand a woman and there was no use trying.
Dorie, glad to be off the horse, went to the only bit of shade in the area, under a piñon tree, and sat down, smoothing the folds of her nightgown about her in a way that would befit the lady she knew she was.
Cole threw up his good arm in a gesture of helplessness, then took the canteen from the horse and went to her to offer her water. He didn't dare say a word to her for fear that he might completely lose his temper. If she was this stubborn over something trivial, would she refuse to do what she must when they tried to escape?
After a while he stretched out on the grass behind her, put his hat over his face, and promptly went to sleep, not waking until he heard the thunder of a horse riding toward them. Automatically he reached for his gun, then winced in pain when his injured arm hurt and his gun wasn't there.
"I got it," one of Ford's men was saying, his voice as eager as a boy's. No doubt this was the first—and if Cole had his way, his last—time to buy a dress for a lady. The man had dismounted and was talking to Ford, his face looking as happy as though he'd just completed his first bank job. "It ain't hardly been worn. I got it from Ellie 'cause she's the only one in town that's little like this one. Ellie didn't want to give it up, but I told her it was for you so she did. She said she didn't want no blood on it, though." Proudly he held up a pile of dark red velvet and a canvas bag of underwear. "It come all the way from Paris," he said.
Cole gave a laugh of derision. "Paris, Tennessee?" he asked, looking at the dress the man was holding up. It was a dress for a prostitute: very little above the waist, then sleek over the hips, with an exaggerated bustle to emphasize a woman's backside curves. "Take it back," he said. "She won't wear it."
"Oh, yes, I will," Dorie said, stepping forward and grabbing the dress from the man's grubby hands.
"You will not!" Cole said indignantly. "There's nothing to the top half of that thing. You'll be… You'll be exposed."
"You sound worse than the preacher in Willoughby."
That threw Cole for a loop. "Willoughby?"
"Where I live, where the gold is," she said pointedly.
Cole was annoyed about the dress, but he was downright angry that she had made such a statement and he hadn't caught on right away. This girl was getting out of hand. "You're not going to wear that dress," he said, snatching it from her.
"Yes, I am." She tried to take it from him, but he held it behind his back.
She started to grab it, but when he held it out of her reach, she turned her back on him and folded her arms over her chest. "If I can't wear that dress, I won't go into town and no one will ever get any gold."
Cole had never in his life dealt with a problem like this one. Because of his good looks, he'd never had trouble persuading a woman to say yes to him. But then, he'd never been stupid enough to forbid a woman to do something she obviously wanted to do.
Instinctively he turned to the other men, but to his disgust he saw that they were watching as though he and Dorie were traveling players putting on a show just for their entertainment. Even Ford, trimming his nails with a knife big enough to skin buffalo, seemed to be in no hurry for the argument to be settled.
"Dorie, you must listen to reason," Cole said, taking a step toward her.
She turned on him. "What is wrong with me wearing that dress? Do you think that town carries a selection of dresses for women to wear to church? And besides, what business is it of yours?"
Already angry, Cole found that that statement made him even more furious. "I don't want the whole town looking at you!" he shouted. "You're my wife!"
To his disbelief, Dorie's face dissolved into a smile. He seemed to have pleased her very much. "Give me the dress," she said softly, holding out her hand.
How could something as small as she was drive a man so close to the edge of insanity? Or maybe it wasn't insanity but tears of frustration that were flooding his mind. He wasn't a fool; he knew when he was defeated. He'd never get her on the horse wearing that nightgown, nor would he be able to buy her a respectable dress.
With resignation on his face he handed her the dress, and Dorie went behind the nearest boulder to put it on.
Once out of his sight she was elated at the feel of the velvet. She had wanted something decent to wear, but this was much, much better than what she'd expected to get. This was the kind of dress a woman dreamed of wearing, a dress that would make men notice her. It was the kind of dress she'd never been allowed to wear in her father's house. He had always inspected her, making sure her hair was pulled back tightly, that every inch of her skin was covered. He got angry when she didn't wear gloves to cover her hands from the sight of men.
She stripped off the virginal nightgown and began the long, intricate process of dressing from the skin out: chemise, drawers with pink bows at the knee, pretty black stockings with only one tear in them, lacy garters, a corset that her father would have considered indecent—black satin with pink ribbon at the edges—corset cover, two petticoats, both edged with eyelet, and finally the dress. Holding her breath, she slipped the velvet over her head.
The gown was dark red velvet, but running vertically, every six inches or so, were inset stripes of crimson satin. When the dress floated over Dorie's head, she knew it was going to fit. And fit it did. She would, of course, have to give up breathing to make her waist fit the dress, but what did a little thing like breathing matter? The bodice of the dress was indeed half missing, cut so low that her breasts nearly spilled over the top. And even to Dorie herself, the dark red against her ivory skin, untouched by sun in all her life, was a rather pleasant contrast.
To her delight, the dress fastened in the front with what seemed to be a few hundred hooks and eyes. She didn't have any idea why the fastening, usually in the back, was in the front, but it did occur to her that the dress was much easier to get in and out of this way—which was, of course, the reason for the front closure.
When the pretty little shoes were on her feet, she stepped out from behind the rock and looked into the faces of four speechless men.
And her heart soared.
How many thousands of times had she seen Rowena enter a room and the men turn to stone? Every voice had gone silent, and women as well as men had stared. She had even seen large groups of children stop moving at the sight of her beautiful sister.
But never had such a thing happened to Dorie. She could have ridden into a room on a white elephant behind a brass band, and no one would have noticed. At least that was what she'd always thought.
"Do I look all right?" she said in a shy tone of voice she'd heard Rowena use all her life. She, as well as everyone else, had always thought Rowena was modest—as in "Isn't she adorable? She's so beautiful, but she has no idea she is. Just like everyone else, she asks if she looks all right." At that moment Dorie understood how nice her sister really was. Rowena didn't need to ask how she looked; people's eyes were mirrors, they told her how wonderful she looked. When she asked if she was presentable Rowena was trying to put people at ease so they weren't completely in awe of her beauty. She was letting people believe that she had no idea that she was breathtaking.
So now, for the first time in her life, Dorie was getting to play this very enjoyable game. "Isn't anyone going to say anything?" she asked with all the innocence of a four-year-old in her first party dress. But the difference was that Dorie wasn't four years old.
Cole couldn't move; he just stood there and stared at her. She wasn't beautiful in the way her sister was, but Dorie was, in her way, more arresting. Her hair, released from its bondage and subjected to long hours of wind and sun, floated around her head like a cloud, soft, full, and alluring. Her little heart-shaped face was a combination of innocence and great intelligence. The sparkle in her eyes was not from sunlight but from that prodigious brain that churned day and night. A pretty mouth, small but full-lipped, curved above a determined chin, and below that…
Cole's hands tightened into fists. He was not a possessive man. He'd never owned anything in his life and never wanted to. He'd certainly never regarded another human being as his property. But now Dorie was, well, making him think that what she was showing to these other men was his—and she was showing it in public before he got to see it in private.
When he'd first met her, he'd thought she had no figure. A nice bosom, yes, but what he was seeing now was a great deal more than "nice." She had a long, graceful neck that was made to be swathed in diamonds, then shoulders of perfect shape and slope. Everything poured down to beautiful breasts that mounded exquisitely above the velvet that narrowed into a tiny waist.
If he could have used one word to describe her, it would have been "elegant." She'd put on a dress that would have made any other woman look like a tart, but Dorie managed to look as though she were about to have tea with the queen. He wasn't sure how she'd done it, but maybe all those books she'd read were reflected in her eyes. Maybe it was the way she carried herself. Maybe it was that she knew she wasn't a hussy so she didn't allow others to see her as one.
On the other hand, maybe all that creamy skin was blinding him so he couldn't think clearly.
"Isn't anyone going to say anything?" Dorie asked, wanting to stand there with the men gaping at her for about a year or two. However, she longed to hear a few words that no man had ever before thrown her way—words like "beautiful."
"exquisite," and "divine." Actually, plain ol' "pretty" might have served well for a start.
Cole knew too well what she wanted, and he was damned if he'd give it to her. At least not in front of these slavering men. Hadn't he heard that in some countries men made their women wear veils that covered them from head to toe? The men of that country were very wise.
Within seconds, Cole had removed the blanket from the back of his horse and was trying to drape it about her shoulders.
"Really, Mr. Hunter, it's much too hot for a cape," Dorie said, sliding away from him while looking innocently over her shoulder.
When the men around them began to chuckle, Cole was sure that if he hadn't wanted to kill them before, he did now.
"Could someone help me mount?" Dorie asked in her best southern belle tone, fluttering her eyelashes. "I think this velvet is just toooo heavy." She didn't say the words, "too heavy for little ol' me," but they were there.
Amazingly, considering he had the use of only one arm, Cole managed to swoop her off the ground and slam her into the saddle so hard her teeth jarred. Dorie didn't so much as lose her smile.
Nor did she lose her smile during the thirty minutes it took to ride down to the town, during which time Cole lectured her nonstop. He talked to her "for her own good" about the way she was displaying herself, making a public spectacle of herself. He even said the sun was going to ruin her complexion. He talked to her about the way men were going to think of her. When he said, "What would your father say?" Dorie began to laugh. Never in her life had she inspired jealousy in anyone, and she had to admit that it felt rather nice to have a man like Cole Hunter jealous because other men were looking at her.
"What will the men in town think when they see me?" she asked softly, leaning back against him.
"That you are a woman of the streets," he answered quickly.
"If you saw me, what would you think?" she asked before he could continue assassinating her morals.
Cole started to tell her that he'd think she was for sale, but he couldn't. No matter what Dorie was wearing, there was still a look-but-don't-touch attitude haloing her.
"I would think you were beautiful. I would think you were an angel come to life," he said softly as he kissed her bare shoulder.
That was more than enough for her. "I love you," she whispered, meaning the words with all her soul.
Cole paused in kissing her shoulder, but he didn't answer. He couldn't allow himself to say what he felt. A woman as clean and as good as Dorie deserved more in life than an aging gunslinger. She deserved the best there was. And right now he wished he were a man who deserved her.
Cole's mind was taken away from Dorie when Ford rode past them and said, "You know, Hunter, you two are so damned entertainin' I'm gonna hate killin' you if I find you've played me for a fool. I don't like card cheats and I don't like liars."
As he rode away, Dorie said, "But I'll bet he likes lizards, because his mother must have been one."
Cole didn't answer her.
"Dorie," Cole said, his lips near her ear, trying his best to ignore the fact that the upper half of her body was nearly bare. "I want you to listen to me and listen well. You understand me?"
She nodded, knowing that he was planning to tell her something awful.
"I found out what they plan to do with us."
She knew it must be serious or he wouldn't have waited until they were nearly at the town before saying anything to her.
"We're not going to stay in town. It seems that a man who hates Ford"—he stopped to make a sound that said, Is there any other kind?—"an old enemy of his is in town, and Ford doesn't want to see him. I thought we'd have a chance if we were surrounded by other people, but that's not to be. Ford plans to get supplies and some beer and head out into the hills. I think he means to make us tell him where the gold is or we don't leave the hills alive."
His arm tightened around her waist. "I'm going to try to get Ford to take me into the saloon with him, and while I'm there I'll create a diversion and try to get a gun. When I have the gun I'll come back to the street and steal a horse and ride out south. I want you to stay on the horse, and when you hear the distraction, I want you to ride north. If I don't come out of the saloon or if you hear shots, you're to ride north as hard and as fast as you can. Don't even look back. Understand?"
"Where do we meet?"
He took a breath. "We don't." When she tried to look back at him he wouldn't let her. "Dorie, we've done what we set out to do. I was able to keep your sister from forcing you to marry Mr. Pepper, but you can see that there can be nothing else between us. I have too many enemies."
Dorie knew that he was worried about her, and he was choosing to give up everything in life so she could be safe. The town was close now, and she had only a few minutes to make the most important decision of her life. "Do you love me?" she asked.
"That has nothing to do with—"
"Do you love me?" she demanded.
"Yes," he said, "but what I feel means nothing. It will mean less than nothing if you're dead."
She turned in the saddle to look at him. "If you could, would you like to live in Latham with me? Help me manage the town?"
Smiling, he kissed her nose. "I'd like nothing better than to have my own bed, my own house, my own…" He looked at her hair, at her lips, at her eyes, knowing he was probably seeing her for the last time. If he didn't get killed within the next hour, he'd ride away one direction and send her off in another. It would be difficult but he would never allow himself to visit her in her peaceful little town. She deserved better than to be hooked for life to an "aging gunslinger."
"Dorie," he said, and put his hand on the back of her neck to turn her face to kiss him. A good-bye kiss.
But she turned away and wouldn't kiss him.
In spite of his good intentions, anger ran through Cole. Maybe she wouldn't kiss him because she was seeing him as he truly was: the one who had gotten them into this mess. Maybe the mention of her precious town had made her realize what he was and who she was.
When they entered the town, Cole's jaw was set into a hard line. He would do what he could to get her out unharmed and that would be all that was between them.
Dorie refused to kiss Cole because she felt as though it would be saying good-bye. And she was not going to say good-bye after she'd spent a lifetime trying to find a man like him. She loved him and she meant to keep him. Alive.
Of course she had no idea how to go about preventing him from getting shot on her account, but she hoped she'd think of something.
The first thing that went wrong with Cole's hastily concocted plan was that Ford said they both had to go into the saloon with him. She knew Cole wanted one of Ford's men to stay outside and guard her, but Ford didn't want the group to be separated. In this he was wise, but Dorie doubted the wisdom of stopping for a bottle or two of whiskey while trying to hold a man like Cole Hunter prisoner.
Racing through her head was the fact that Cole planned to create a diversion. What did that mean to a man with his background? Perhaps he'd start a fight, and in the ensuing tussle Dorie was supposed to run out the door, jump on a horse, and be long gone by the time the men realized she was missing. Was that what he thought of her as a person? She'd told him she loved him. Did he think she loved him only when things were going well and that when they got bad she'd run away?
For a moment after they entered the saloon, Dorie was too sun-dazzled to see much, but as her eyes cleared, she saw even less. There seemed to be a lot of smoke, and judging by the smell, at least as much beer had been spilled as had been drunk. There were men everywhere, but they weren't men who looked as though they attended church on Sundays. They held their cards or their drinks while looking about the room as though every person was an enemy.
There were some women too, slouched about the room, their eyes dead. Dorie had heard of such "bad" women and had always thought they were dangerous and fatally alluring. She thought such women must know a great deal about the secrets of men, but the women in this saloon just looked dirty and tired. She had a feeling that what they'd like best in all the world was a tub full of hot water, a bar of scented soap, and a good night's sleep.
All in all, the saloon was a disappointment to her. Where was the danger and the intrigue? This place was just full of tired, bored-looking people.
She was so absorbed in her observations that she almost failed to see Cole pretend to trip while his hand reached out for a gun that was snugly tucked away in one card player's holster. All the man had to do was shift his position and Cole would be caught stealing. Dorie didn't think the man frowning over his cards looked as though he'd be forgiving if he caught Cole.
Dorie didn't think about what she was doing before she did it. All she could think of were the words "create a diversion." Cole needed to make sure that the attention of the people of the saloon, Ford and his men included, was focused on something other than him so he could steal a gun. He needed the people in the saloon less alert than they were.
One minute Dorie was being shoved along in front of the fattest of Ford's men and the next she'd opened her mouth and begun to sing. She'd sung in church, but that was all, so she didn't know too many songs that were suitable for a saloon. But she did know a little tune about a singing bird, and she thought maybe the men would like that.
On second thought she doubted if anyone in the saloon was a connoisseur of music and was very particular about what he heard.
When the entire roomful of people came to a halt to stare at her, a few notes choked in her throat. Unlike the choirmaster in Latham, no one complained. Instead, they all seemed to be looking at the top of her dress—or rather at the missing top of her dress.
Dorie put her hand to her throat and continued to sing.
"Dorie!" Cole hissed. He took a step toward her, but she eluded him, hoping he wouldn't spend too much precious time trying to get her to do what he wanted her to do. She'd had her fill of doing what men wanted her to do. Doing what men wanted a woman to do made for a very dull life, and besides, she had learned something in the last few weeks. She had obeyed her father, and he had therefore imprisoned her and demanded that she do even more. Rowena had disobeyed their father and had been given love and freedom. Now Dorie had disobeyed Mr. Hunter at every turn and, by golly, he was in love with her. When she got out of this mess she was going to think about this whole philosophy some more, even though already she could tell that it made no sense. Meanwhile, she planned to disobey Mr. Hunter so much that he'd probably end up kissing her feet—or anywhere he wanted to kiss, she thought.
Since all eyes were on her, Dorie walked away from Ford's men and no one tried to hold her back. After three choruses of the bird song, she went into a little tune she'd heard the grocer's wife singing.
Within minutes, she knew she was losing her audience, but so far, Cole had done nothing but stand in one spot and glower at her. He wasn't any nearer to getting a gun or horses or anything else. And it seemed that the men in the saloon were once again more interested in their cards than in yet another half-robed woman singing. When men killed other men on a daily basis, it took a lot to hold their interest.
Dorie didn't think about what she was doing; she just did it. Her one objective was to get the men to focus their attention on her and away from Cole. One minute she was standing at the back of the saloon singing and the next she had climbed up on a stool, stepped onto the bar, and begun to walk down the long, scarred mahogany expanse, now singing much louder. Looking out over the audience she could see that Cole had finally come to his senses and was searching for a gun.
Meanwhile Dorie had begun to enjoy herself. Maybe it was just that she'd been confined to too small a space for too long. Maybe it was years of sitting unnoticed while her older sister got the attention of every man. Or maybe it was just nice to have men look at her. She didn't know what it was, but she began to have fun.
First she began to repeat her song about the bird, but this time she sang it as though the little bird tweeting away in its tree had a different meaning than originally intended. And then she saw Cole reach toward a table for a few of the coins from a pile and one of the players was about to see him. To keep the man's interest on her, Dorie lifted her skirt to reveal her ankle.
The response of the men was so wholehearted that she pulled her skirt a little higher. What a fuss, she thought, over something as ordinary as an ankle.
Someone began playing a piano, and in spite of the fact that a few keys had been shot away, the sound it made was rather festive. Dorie became more interested in what she was beginning to think of as a dance. She moved to the far end of the bar, but she did not just walk; she strutted, her hips swaying, as she'd seen Rowena do many times. When Dorie got to the far end, she looked at the men in the saloon over her left shoulder. Then, slowly, she slipped that shoulder strap down a little farther on her arm.
When Cole left the saloon she was so afraid Ford would see that he had gone that she began to unfasten the front of her dress one hook at a time, moving very slowly, so slowly that the men began to bang their beer mugs on the dirty old tables.
She wasn't really worried until she got down to the last hook and eye and still there was no sign of Cole. He wouldn't leave her to the mercy of these barbarians, would he? He wasn't so disgusted with her that he never wanted to see her again, was he? He would come back for her, wouldn't he?
Slowly the dress slipped off her hips into a puddle on the bar and immediately one of the women grabbed it; Dorie assumed she was Ellie, the owner of the gown. That left Dorie with no dress, just her underwear.
Petticoats came next, and still there was no sign of Cole. Corset cover came off and was grabbed instantly by the woman standing at her feet, as though she were some odd lady's maid.
"Could I have something to drink?" Dorie mumbled to the man behind the bar, but he paid no attention to her words. His eyes, like those of all the men in the saloon, were on what was coming off next. What had she been hoping for anyway? Buttermilk?
She was fumbling with the front latches of the corset when Cole, atop a big chestnut horse, three men behind him, stormed through the saloon doors. Never in her life had she been so glad to see anyone.
There was general chaos within seconds, caused by the entry of four men on horseback into the saloon—it was Dorie's opinion that the animals could only improve the smell of the place—and also caused by the disappointment of the men at the interruption of Dorie's performance.
Dorie didn't have to guess at Cole's mood. After riding up to the bar, amid a fistfight with several guns going off, he didn't look into her face, but grabbed her about the waist, slung her face down across his horse, and rode out of the saloon.
"I should have left you there," Cole was saying. They were in bed together, or rather in a berth on a train together, headed toward Latham. He had been lecturing her for three days now. Dorie wondered if it was a record. But he had stopped complaining about her long enough to make love to her at every possible opportunity since they'd escaped Winotka Ford and his men. Only once had Dorie offered the opinion that she had helped. According to Cole, this was not so. If she'd done what he'd told her, he would have rescued them even sooner.
Dorie just said, "Yes, dear," and snuggled up to him for more kisses.
After he had taken a gun and some money from the gamblers in the saloon, he had run outside, found the men who wanted to kill Ford, and brought them back to the saloon with him. Cole had figured they could all fight it out amongst themselves.
Of course he told Dorie that the big part of the problem was her performing that lewd, indecent dance of hers. While taking off her clothes!
He never so much as gave Dorie a chance to defend herself, but after a while she realized how very jealous he was, and she didn't want to defend herself. Many times in her life she had inspired anger in men but never jealousy, and she found she rather liked it. She also realized that Cole was worried because he thought maybe she liked undulating and taking her clothes off in front of all those men. She wanted to defend herself, tell him that she had done it for him, that she hated the way the men looked at her, but he never gave her a chance. And later, when she did have a chance, she thought perhaps a little mystery was better than knowing everything.
The first time she'd gotten him to stop telling her what an awful thing she'd done by showing him how she would have finished her performance in the saloon. By then he had bought her a dress that was half again too big for her and that covered every inch of her, as well as a hat as big around as a barrel so even her face was hidden from the view of others. Without ceasing his tirade on how she'd disobeyed him and put herself in jeopardy, he checked them into a hotel as man and wife. Once inside, Dorie began to peel off her clothes, layer by layer. Cole sat down on a chair and didn't say a word after the first three buttons of her dress came unfastened.
So now they were on their way to Latham, snuggled together in the train berth.
"Dorie, did you enjoy performing for those men?" he asked.
She didn't answer, but kissed him instead. She never planned to tell him the truth.
"All right," he said, but she could see that her silence annoyed him. "Don't tell me. Instead, tell me about this town of yours. Is it anything like that place of Ford's?"
Dorie didn't like his patronizing tone, which implied that Latham ran itself, which was not the case. "It's not easy managing an entire town," she said. "I already told you that Mr. Wexler won't pay his rent."
"Why not?" he asked, yawning.
"Because all the women in town love him. No, no, don't look at me like that. Mr. Wexler is an ugly little man, but he manufactures a tonic that all the women in town love. Personally, I don't like it. It makes me very sleepy, but the men give it to their wives because they say it makes the women say yes, which I have learned is something that a man loves to hear a woman say. Anyway, Mr. Wexler won't pay his rent, and whenever I try to evict him, the entire town wants to tie me to a stake and set me on fire. I really don't know what to do. And why are you laughing?"
Still laughing, Cole began to nuzzle her neck. "You know, I used to think that good people were different from bad people, but I've learned that they just put different labels on their bottles." He kissed her a few times. "Apollodoria, my love, when I first met you I thought you needed no one. I thought you were sufficient unto yourself. But with every passing minute, I find there's a great need for me in your life."
"Ha!" she said. "I saved you in that dirty little town. If it hadn't been for me…"
"Mmmm?"
She didn't say another word.