скачать книгу бесплатно
Willie glanced up, pushed her hat back on her head and met Gramps’s cockeyed grin with a puff that blew the stray wisps of hair off her forehead. “I don’t know who you’re talking about, Gramps.” She bent to retrieve another log.
“Same fella you’ve been grumblin’ about, Willie-girl. That English gent.”
Willie swatted at a mosquito and grimaced in reply.
“You’re cuttin’ enough wood for the whole damned town.”
“I’m mad.” She swung the ax high.
“Thought so.”
The log cracked into three pieces. “What’s he want?”
“Hard to tell.”
Willie flung the wood aside with a snort. “I’ll tell you what he wants. He wants to stir up trouble. Divide and conquer, like Pa used to say. He’s no better than the vigilantes. Just a fancy, dandified version. Instead of torches and threats, he uses that accent and his fine suit coat with the velvet cuffs and fancy fighting methods. He might not even be from England. He could be some out-of-work actor from New York sent by those men at the Union Pacific. If you ask me, I say he’s a fraud. At the very least he’s up to no good.”
“Could be.” Gramps tipped his broad-brimmed hat back on his head and leaned heavily on his cane. “Course, I never seen fightin’ like that. Reuben had to be carried out of the Silver Spur. I heard him mumblin’ somethin’ about forgettin’ about revenge for the time bein’.”
“See there?” Willie planted her hands on her hips, lips pursing with her mounting indignation. “His scheme is working already. Even Reuben’s ready to give up the fight. It didn’t take burning his house down. Just one kick to the side of his head.” She set her jaw and stared out into the woods that fringed her farm on three sides. The sun had just disappeared behind the mountains, throwing her land into sudden shadow. The air grew instantly cooler. “Maybe he’ll just move on.”
“Maybe he won’t.”
Willie glanced sharply at Gramps, recognizing the admonition in his weathered stare. At times he looked so much like her pa her heart squeezed in her chest. Like her pa, Gramps was fashioned of the long, rangy limbs, broad shoulders and proud carriage common to generations of Thornes. Her brothers had all inherited the same tall, wiry build, the dark, stern features, and all the blind determination and pride that went along with being a Thorne. And though Willie had been graced with an abundance of the Thorne arrogance and pride, only she bore the marks of a true McKenna: the heavy mass of copper gold hair and a body of such startling womanly proportions she could barely fit into the Levi’s and shirt she’d worn just a year before.
“Your mama ever say anythin’ to you about gettin’ more bees with honey than with vinegar?”
Willie gaped at Gramps. “You’re asking me to be friendly with that…that…”
“You sound like your pa, chock-full of damned fool’s pride.”
“Pa was no fool,” Willie retorted. “He stood up for what he believed in—his land, his family and his dream to make Prosperity Gulch a thriving town without the help of any double-crossing railroad that wanted him to pay for the privilege of the track coming through town. So they laid track through Deadwood Run and thought they’d kill off Prosperity Gulch by doing it. But they didn’t, not ten years ago, and not now.
“Pa had vision, Gramps. It was enough to rally several hundred people around his cause and keep Prosperity Gulch thriving. He never lost sight of that, no matter who tried to stop him. And he would never have turned coat and pasted on a smile for a man he didn’t trust just because doing so would have put money in his pocket or a meal on his table for a few more days. And neither will I, even if I have to dance every night with cowboys to do it.”
Gramps narrowed his eyes on the mountains to the west.
“If your pa had to do it over, he’d have kept his dreams to himself and your mama in her house in Illinois where she belonged. He wouldn’t have dragged her out into a wasteland a hundred miles from nowhere, and left her alone night and day while he worked in that mine. When the sickness came she didn’t have the spirit to fight it off. Not every dream should be chased.”
Willie’s gloved fingers tightened around the ax handle. Even now grief wrapped like invisible ropes around her and tightened, compressing her lungs in her chest. “I won’t give up on his dream, Gramps,” she said, her voice husky with emotion. “If I do, if Prosperity Gulch sells out to the railroad my pa fought for so long, he’ll have died for nothing, and my brothers with him.”
Gramps looked hard at her with the unwavering, grizzled stare that probed right to her soul. “You never were half as selfish as your pa. Are you plannin’ to waste your youth tendin’ to an old man and choppin’ wood and chasin’ vigilantes out of town? Or are you waitin’ for Brant Masters and all his promises to come ridin’ down the lane in that black buggy of his?”
Willie stiffened, knowing by the glint in Gramps’s eyes that her cheeks had turned a traitorous red. Still, admitting naiveté was not something even an unselfish Thorne would find easy to do. “I’ve completely forgotten about him,” she said, a little too breezily. “Too busy, I guess.”
“Yep. We’re damned busy out here on the farm.” Gramps rested one bony elbow on a fence post and squinted at the farmhouse in the distance over an unsown field swaying with tall grass. “Not a boarder to be had since Brant last propped his shiny boots on your kitchen table and watched you scrub your floors. Yep. You’re too damned busy to remember all that”
Willie felt her shoulders droop and the fight seep out of her. Gramps saw too blasted much. Just like her pa always had.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
Willie glanced sharply at Gramps then turned, her gaze following Gramps’s. The weather-beaten house huddled among tall sycamores, all thrown into impenetrable shadow. Still, as her eyes strained into the darkness, Willie was almost certain a deeper shadow moved beside the house. Her fingers reached for her short-barreled Peacemaker stuffed into the back waistband of her Levi’s. “How many?”
“Just one. You won’t need your gun.”
Willie glanced at Gramps, even as she drew the Peacemaker into her hand and slipped her finger over the trigger. “You’d best go get the repeating rifle. We don’t know his business.”
“Put the gun away,” Gramps softly said.
“Put the gun away?”
“Yes.”
“Gramps—”
“Willie-girl, I think you got yourself a boarder.”
“A boarder—?” A sudden warmth spilled through her and brought a smile bursting from her lips. “How can you be sure?” She turned. The man had turned from the house and was leading his horse through the field of grass toward them. Her heart almost burst from her chest. “It’s Bran—” The name stuck in her throat and her heart plummeted. Chagrin flooded over her, followed by a deeply felt contempt for the part of her that still clung to feeble dreams spun by untrustworthy men.
As much as that part of her might wish otherwise, she didn’t recognize the stranger’s fluid gait, the breadth of his shoulders or the tall black hat he wore. His coat was long and tailored, with tails that flapped when he walked. He was so tall the grass that caught Willie thigh high reached only to his knees. His legs cleaved through the grass with an animalistic grace, so different from the rough-and-tumble pack of hard-fighting, hard-drinking brothers she’d shared her first eighteen years with.
Something began to stir in her the closer the stranger came, but it wasn’t fear. Though shadow hid his features, there was a disturbing familiarity about him. Something in the set of his shoulders, the way he moved.
“Oh, no,” she whispered, and lifted her gun.
The young man Sloan assumed was Willie looked up at him from under the shadow of his oversized hat and shoved his gun at him.
“Stop right there, fancy man.” A boy, not a man. The voice was pitched far too high and carried a huskiness common to pubescent youths. Sloan drew up short, realizing a youth’s inexperience and exuberance often got the better of good sense, particularly when that youth gripped a gun in his hand, a remarkably steady hand that bespoke of familiarity. Beside the boy, a rangy old man watched Sloan with an odd glint in his eye.
“Willie Thorne?” Sloan said.
“You got that right, fancy man.” A youth, certainly not a man, with hips and thighs still so rounded with baby fat his waist looked unusually narrow. Sloan deepened his gaze. Something wasn’t right. Youths were narrow chested, full stomached. This boy’s white shirt stretched taut where Sloan least expected it to, directly at midchest. Sloan stared at the fullness there and felt heavy heat fill his loins.
Beneath the shadow of the hat, full pink lips parted in a grim version of a smile. Sloan went instantly, uncomfortably rigid. No woman in his experience had ever looked so blatantly, arousingly female.
For an instant Sloan thought of his father’s Oriental manservant Azato, who had spent years developing mind-overbody principles in Sloan since the day he’d first come to Devlin Manor as part of the cargo his father had acquired on a voyage to the Orient when Sloan was only a boy. These principles demanded that Sloan resist all physical pain and all adversity in his effort to achieve the art of mystical self-defense. Without question, a master of these techniques should be able to resist a woman’s best efforts.
Still, looking at the amply proportioned Willie Thorne, Sloan couldn’t help but wonder if even Azato would have given as much thought to being mighty if women the world over began to pour themselves into men’s trousers and skimpy shirts.
The girl took several steps toward him, braced her boots wide and leveled the gun at his chest “Get the hell off my land, mister.”
Sloan’s gaze shot past her to the pile of split wood and the ax protruding out of a stump. It looked as if it had been solidly plunged there by a strong hand. The bearded old man looked incapable of lifting the ax, much less his cane. The farmhouse had been deserted when Sloan had peeked through one lacedraped window. Only two cups sat on a table freshly cleared of dinner plates. She obviously lived alone with the old man. Alone, she tended to the farm, split the wood, mended the fences.
Admiration stirred in Sloan, despite the beleaguered look of the place. And in that instant she embodied struggle and triumph, desire and adversity, every paradox he’d hoped to find on his journey. He wished she’d take off her hat so he could see her eyes and her hair. “I’m looking for accommodations, Miss—”
The gun jerked. “Don’t—move,” she said slowly, taking another step. “And don’t try any of those fancy fighting maneuvers. I’m a quicker shot than Reuben Grimes. And a hell of a lot more accurate. I could shoot that stickpin right out of your collar.” She thrust her chin at him, a slightly clefted, determined chin. Her lips pursed with disdain, and then he knew. He should have known the moment he spotted her across the field of grass simply by the peculiar reaction she stirred in him.
Gertie. Willie. Something didn’t fit. Without question, she was at home here on this run-down farm, in her trousers and boots, ax in hand and dirt up to her elbows. At the saloon, he’d sensed a helplessness in her, a distinct undercurrent of discomfort despite her best efforts to show otherwise.
Sloan had seen enough adversity in his life to know that desperation led many down a path that they wouldn’t typically choose. All desperate people had a price, one Sloan was not above finding, particularly if it would keep her out of the saloon and away from cowboys with itchy hands.
“What do you want for a room?” he asked, reaching into his trouser pocket and withdrawing the fat wad of bills he’d won on the train. He thumbed off several bills and glanced up at her. She was staring at his hand with such intensity he could almost hear her tallying all that his money would buy: the paint for the house, a new fence, even a plow to turn this field of grass into wheat or corn. Perhaps something as simple as food. Or a dress that fit her properly.
The old man narrowed his eyes. Sloan didn’t blame them for not trusting him. But only a fool would refuse help when in such need.
“Put your money away, fancy man. I’ve no rooms to let you.”
Sloan heard his teeth click. Bloody impertinent female. Quickly he recalled the price of meals and lodging in New York, at the grand and luxurious American Hotel. And then he doubled it. “Fifty dollars a day for a room and the pleasure of your company at meals.”
The gun wavered. Her skin grew unearthly pale. She tipped back her hat and blinked at him with eyes as wide and fathomless as the sea beyond Cornwall’s far western headlands. “You’re bribing me,” she said, her voice chilled. “You can’t do that.”
“Seventy-five,” he said softly. “Do you cook, Willie?”
“Better than her mama could,” the old man muttered under his breath.
Willie shot him a look that would have stopped an army.
The old man merely shrugged. “Your mama was a fine cook, Willie-girl. Like I always say, a skillet and a pail of grease are the essentials to any recipe.”
Willie let out a wheezing breath. “State your business, fancy man.”
“Sloan,” he said, tipping up one corner of his mouth. Pocketing his money, he extended a black-gloved hand over the top of the gun. “Sloan Devlin, late of Cornwall, England.”
She barely extended her fingers when Sloan leaned forward and enveloped her small hand in his. Her eyes briefly widened, deepening in color.
He expected to feel nothing through the fine leather of his gloves. After all, he’d spent his youth pounding his fists into tree trunks day after day to thickly callus his hands against pain or feeling. And yet he could feel the warmth of her, the pulse of her, the vital, womanly essence of her seeping through calluses and leather and skin. He relinquished it at the first tug of her fingers.
“I’ve come to see the elephant,” Sloan said.
She seemed unimpressed, and her voice rang with contempt. “That’s what all the English folk said when they came and shot the buffalo. Now there’s nothing for them to shoot. Who sent you? Union Pacific? Kansas Pacific? A couple years back some fancy English gent was following the Kansas Pacific’s survey parties, drawing pictures. Maybe you’re one of them. Or are you Denver Pacific?”
“I came by rail,” he replied, “and shared several games of poker with some fellows from the Union Pacific. But that’s the extent of my association with the railroad.”
Her eyes narrowed, as if she gave the idea of believing him some consideration. “You’re a gambler.”
His laugh rumbled from his chest. “Not on my luckiest day.”
“You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”
“I’m a writer.”
“They pay writers good where you come from.”
“No true writer writes for money.” “Then why do it?”
“I want to make a difference.”
“Have you?”
“Not yet. At least not enough. I suppose that’s why I’m here.”
“To stir up trouble.”
“I prefer to walk away from trouble.”
“Good. The road back there leads all the way to Denver. Just point your nose west and start walking.” She headed for her ax. For an instant, Sloan found himself staring at her backside. Women as lushly formed as Willie should have been legally banned from wearing men’s trousers.
An odd compulsion to throw her over his shoulder swept over him. He took a step, tugged his dozing excuse for a horse behind him, then drew up as she swung the ax in an arc that stirred the air right in front of him. She’d set her jaw with grim determination. Sleek muscles strained in her bare forearms. A grunt came from her lips when the ax plunged into the log.
Sloan felt the tension mounting inside him. “How many nights will you spend in the Silver Spur to earn anything close to what I’m offering you for a single night’s accommodations? A week? A month? All I’ll ask from you is a smile every morning.”
The ax whistled through the air, again keeping him at a good distance. Wood chips sprayed into the air.
“I don’t trust strange men with velvet cuffs and shiny-toed shoes, Devlin.”
Ah, the broken heart finally betrayed itself. So the thief of her heart hadn’t been a cowboy. A gambler, perhaps?
Sloan glanced at the old man. “Is she typically this difficult?”
The old man spat into the ground. “Yep. I keep tellin’ her she’d best get more likable if she’s ever gonna find herself a husband.”
“Reasonable would suffice for now,” Sloan said, watching the color creep up from her neck and up under the brim of her hat.
Willie plunged the ax blade into the stump, whirled and advanced on Sloan with hands braced on her hips and green eyes blazing. “Eighty-five a night, one week in advance, nonrefundable. Meals, bed and outhouse privileges included.”
“That’s reasonable.” Sloan pulled out the money and peeled off twelve crisp one-hundred dollar bills. “I’ll pay for two weeks of services—” Just as she reached out to snatch the bills, he lifted them beyond her fingertips. She arched up after it, her eyes darting to his, and in them he saw desperation and blind hope all twisted up with pride. “And the pleasure of your company, of course,” he murmured, startlingly aware of her in the most base physical sense. She stood just inches below him, emanating a womanly warmth, smelling of grass and mountains and freshly chopped wood.
Her brows quivered. “Whatever that means. I live here.” Lightning quick she plucked the bills from his hand and, without counting them, tucked them inside the open neck of her shirt.
Sloan’s mouth went instantly dry.
Again she turned to retrieve her ax but Sloan was much quicker this time, reaching around her and taking up the ax.
She angled her eyes at him and pursed her lips. “Give me that, Devlin, before you hurt yourself.”
With one arm, Sloan lifted a log onto the stump. Bracing his legs, he glanced sideways at her and tossed her his horse’s reins. “Stand back.”
She didn’t move. “I don’t need your help, Devlin. I don’t need any man.”
“No,” he murmured, looking directly into her eyes. “I don’t believe you do. Now that we both understand that, stand back.”
“I don’t—”
Sloan swung the ax. Willie jumped back just as the ax plunged through the log, shattering it into five pieces. Sloan looked at Willie. She stared at the ax blade buried five inches deep in the stump then slowly looked up at Sloan. Her lips parted. Color bloomed into her cheeks. She looked like a rose bursting open beneath the sun.
“I—I’ll take your horse to the barn,” she said.
“Thank you.”
