A Wanted Man (10 page)

Finally, he sat down, on the other side of the blanket, as if putting as much space between them as possible while still appearing polite. She would have been offended if there wasn’t such a wary glint in his eyes.

But why should he be wary of her?

She propped her sketch pad in her lap, drew a long, sweeping line across it. “Where are you from originally?”

“Does it matter?”

“I suppose not.” Charcoal rasped across the page, a bare whisper beneath the hiss of the wind.

“Ohio.” It was ridiculous, he decided, not to tell her immediately. He was so accustomed to keeping to himself, to automatically withholding any information,
all
information, in case it might expose a vulnerability that his opponent could exploit. But what could it hurt to tell her? He was bordering on rude, and he knew it. His mother would have been ashamed of him. “Near Columbus.”

“There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” She bent her head, her mouth puckering up in concentration. She wore that expression often, and it never failed to make him want to press his mouth against hers.

“No.” And maybe, he thought, the conversation would distract him from things he shouldn’t be dwelling on. Like the way the sunlight brought out the faintest glimmer of copper in her plain brown hair. “You?”

“I was born in New York. But I’ve lived most of my life in Newport.”

“I’ve heard it’s beautiful there.”

Her eyes went soft and hazy as she glanced up from the page and looked over the broad, even sweep of the land, the spear of red rock thrusting abruptly up from the flats.

He could bring that softness, that wonder, into her eyes. It would be a lucky man who had the right to do so.

“Yes. It is. But so is this.” She turned back to him. “Do you still have family there?”

“No.” The word clogged in his throat, and he had to swallow hard to continue. Odd, because the hurt didn’t usually rise that quickly; he didn’t let it. But there was something about her, and the sympathy that welled into those soft blue eyes like springwater, that made it surge afresh. “Not anymore.”

Oh, what Laura wouldn’t give to follow up on that one. But pain flashed through the midnight of his eyes. He wouldn’t want to share that with her. Not yet, she thought, then amended, probably not ever. And it would be wrong of her to push it merely to satisfy her rampant curiosity. For it was not as if there could ever be anything more between them than this.

“So…how many men have you killed?”

It had the desired effect. His head snapped back, the pain transplanted by surprise.

“What?”

“You’re a hired gun, right? Mr. Hoxie says you’re quite fearsome.”

“I’ve lost count,” he said flatly. It was not unusual for Sam to meet women who were titillated by his reputation, attracted to the supposed danger he represented. He just hadn’t suspected she was one of them.

“I see.” Her stomach dropped. She hadn’t really expected him to answer and had asked only as a distraction.

He’d killed men
. She supposed she’d known it from the first but had never really felt the impact of it. As far as she knew, none of her small circle of family and friends had ever taken the life of another human being. To think that they had would have appalled her.
Did
appall her. And it only served to point out how wide and unbridgeable the distance was between them, the difference in their lives so large they might have inhabited separate worlds.

“You look so shocked.” He chucked her beneath the chin like one might a child, friendly, ostensibly asexual. And yet that instant of contact lodged in her mind.
He touched me again, bare skin to bare skin.

Very few men unrelated to her had ever touched her, and those, circumspect and correct, with properly gloved hands at a party her mother arranged and supervised.

Dear heavens, but it was long past time.

“I was in the war,” he said. “It’s hard to keep count when there are bodies all around, and you’re terrified as hell one of ’em is going to be your own. Tallying ’em up is the last of your worries.”

“The war?”

She was finally beginning to read him, she realized. The moments he showed the least emotion, when his lids were pulled low over those near-black eyes and his mouth was tight, harshly inexpressive, was when things roiled beneath the surface, threatening to quickly break through.

He nodded. “Though I must admit I wasn’t in battle that much.”

“You must be a
lot
older than you look,” she said without thinking, and could have clapped her hands over her mouth for her lack of tact. But she had thought him no more than a few years older than she.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “I was young when I joined up. Just sixteen.”

“Sixteen?” Their cook’s, Mrs. Pratt’s, son was sixteen, fuzzy-cheeked, narrow-shouldered, and prone to awkward giggling fits anytime a maid wandered by. She could not conceive of him raising a gun against another person, another person raising one against him.

“Yup. ’Bout what you are now, hmm?”

She laughed. “Is that a clever way of asking my age without having to rudely come right out with it?” She brushed a few more careless lines across the page. “You don’t have to be tactful about it, you know. I’m twenty-five.”

There. That should be enough to put paid to any stray thoughts about her. “A veritable child.”

She laughed. “Nearly a spinster, and you know it.”

“Then that would make me decrepit. You’re a dozen years younger than I.”

She shrugged, as if those years between them were no more substantial than if they were twelve days instead. “Far be it from me to suggest such a thing.”

“Not to mention,” he went on, “that there are years and there are years. Some of mine probably count for twice some of yours.”

“Like dog years?”

He couldn’t help but smile at her. Oh, she was not for him. She was too young, not only in age but in experience, sheltered and pampered and protected. She was an heiress, one born to privilege, raised to enjoy it, schooled to continue it.

But that did notmean he could not…enjoy her, did it? Take pleasure in her company? For all of his years, all his experiences, this was a new one. He could not re
call enjoying a woman out of bed. Though he had to admit he’d given very few that chance.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” she said. “I nearly died once. That must count for a few extra years at least.” Her hand stilled over the pad, her expression pensive. “I may have been sheltered, but sometimes I feel very much older than I am.”

Oh, he did not want this commonality with her, the two of them having both confronted their mortality and survived. He did not want them to be alike, for her to seem possible, within his reach in any way. He was using her for a brief time, then she would go back to her pretty, jeweled world, and he would be alone again. Which was precisely how he preferred it.

“What happened?” The words came out of his mouth before he could stop them. He never asked about others unless it furthered his ends. He had no curiosity; it had been ground out of him. So why did he want to know about her?

It had to be her fault. The rampant curiosity that simmered so strongly in her had become contagious.

“Rheumatic fever,” she said. “I was ten. It…” She touched her chest, lightly, as if it still held some echoes of long-ago pain. “It…damaged my heart.”

Hell. No wonder she looked so fragile, so pale. No wonder her family protected her so carefully. “What in damnation are you doing out here?”

She waved off his concern. “It was a long time ago. It took years to recover fully, and a few more before my family believed it, but I’m perfectly fine now.”

Heart damage. It pounded behind his temples, a drum that couldn’t be stopped. “Like hell.”

No doctors,
he thought.
No hospitals within a day’s ride. Are her parents insane?
Could they not at least
have sent a nurse with her? If she had…a fit, a seizure, an attack, whatever she was prone to, he wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do.

He’d watched enough people die. You could see the life in them go out, that instant when they changed from a human to a mere collection of flesh and bone and skin. He could not, would not, watch her light extinguish.

“I’m fine.” Laura set her sketch pad aside, scooted closer, and dared to touch him briefly on the arm before she caught herself and pulled her hand away. He was solid beneath the thin cotton of his shirtsleeve, warm as sunshine, and she wished very much she could have let her hand remain. “Truly, I am.” She was half-touched by his panic, half-irritated. She’d had her fill of people worrying over her. “It was years ago.
Years
. Five different doctors declared me fit before my father would even consider this trip.”

Sam figured Leland Hamilton would kill him if he ever discovered that Sam had used her. But it would be slowly and tortuously, if he ever suspected the way Sam
thought
about her. And Sam wouldn’t have blamed him a bit.

But she’d touched him, and he could still feel the imprint of her hand, the light, sweet weight of female contact. He had to think about something else. Anything else. “Can I see what you drew?”

Her eyes widened. “No!”

She looked panicked. And guilty. He really hadn’t been all that interested, just looking for distraction, but now he really wanted to see what was on that pad.

“Why not?”

“It’s…” She snatched up the pad and clutched it to her chest like a mother protecting a child. “I’m not
happy with it. Too rough. Not…finished. Later. I’ll show you later. When I get it right.”

“You didn’t object to my looking in Kearney, and you were far from finished with that.”

“No. I didn’t.” She swallowed hard. “But that was just a landscape. People are different. They’re…sensitive when it comes to their portraits.”

“I’m not.” Now he
had
to see it. What had she done, drawn him naked?

“They all say that.”

“All right,” he agreed cheerfully, and waited for her to relax.

She did. He lunged.

She jerked, tumbling back against the blanket. He was sprawled across her, the sketch pad crushed between them, the only barrier preventing full contact.

It was a blatantly sexual position, a woman pinned beneath a man who wanted her. He’d dreamed of this a dozen times, had resisted the pull of her hundreds more.

And now there she was. Beneath him. And she wasn’t protesting a bit.

H
e couldn’t have said how long they stayed like that. It might have been a second, might have been a day. Longer, for all the clarity with which he knew he’d remember it.

She did not feel as fragile beneath him as he would have expected. His legs fell naturally between hers, in the hammock made by her layers of skirts. Damned sketch pad; the edge bit into the inside of one biceps, and its flat surface was the only thing that kept him from resting on the slight, delectable curve of her chest.

One of his hands lay on her shoulder; it fit naturally on that smooth curve, the heavy silk of her bodice impossibly fine, softer than anything he’d touched in his life, warm from her skin. And he knew that if he but moved his hand a few inches, slid it up to the elegant, exposed column of her neck, he’d stroke something even softer, finer.

Her eyes were wide. How could anything be so blue? A sky, a sapphire, a mountain lake, all would envy that color.

There was nothing remarkable about her features. What made the distinction between beauty and plain? Did only a fraction of an inch make so much difference? What convention got to dictate such things?

He knew that some would call her ordinary. But, right at that moment, he knew that he would rather gaze at her than anyone or anything else. And that, he thought, was the most frightening truth he’d confronted in years.

Her mouth…her mouth was amazing. Somewhere in his head he understood it was no different than any other woman’s mouth. Lips, teeth, tongue. All the same parts, all the same functions. But the curve of it fascinated him, the rosy blush of color, the way the corners turned up as if she were always on the verge of a smile.

Her lips parted, her breath coming out in a stunned
whoosh.
He felt it brush him, moist, warm, sweet-scented.

If he kissed her, he thought, she wouldn’t stop him. And God knew that once he started he wouldn’t be able to stop himself.

“Sam?”

“Sorry,” he said, and pushed up with his arms—away from her, away from heaven, away from the road to hell.

He sat back. She curled up slowly, her brows drawn together, her lips compressed into as close as she’d ever come to a frown. She looked dazed, uncertain, and damn, it was his fault. He’d remained on top of her too long—he shouldn’t have been there at all, and should have sprung away with apologies and polite recriminations the instant he realized where he’d fallen. But he hadn’t, because he’d been too drawn to her. Because he’d felt more alive in that second, on her, than at any moment since he’d marched off to war.

But she’d no experience with men. That was per
fectly obvious. No experience with
life
. With anything, really, but a world as perfectly constructed and artificial as the ones she’d painted, and the fact that it had once included a sickroom didn’t change that. She couldn’t be counted on to keep brief, physical contact in its proper place any more than…well, than he could, he admitted to himself.

He had to divert them both.

The sketch pad lay forgotten beside her. He snatched it up.

He hadn’t expected much. He didn’t have the face for portraits, and she hadn’t been working on it terribly long. But he hadn’t expected
this
, either.

“Um. Laura?”

Her cheeks glowing—oh, if only he’d put that color there another way—she grabbed the pad from his hand with such force that the momentum almost toppled her backward.

“I know you said your initial sketches were rough, but really, even so, my hair’s not
that
bad—”

“It’s not you.” She ripped the page off the pad and tore it into a dozen pieces. “I was sketching that tree.”

“The tree,” he said neutrally. “It’s that much prettier than me?”

“It’s a very nice tree,” she allowed. “But that’s not why I drew it.”

She had her head down. He could see the clean line of her part, the smooth, shining swoop of her hair into a neat roll at her neck. Brown hair; there should be a better name for that color. It sounded so ordinary,
brown
. And yet there were a hundred gradations in it, cool and pale, rich, and dark.

“I never draw people,” she admitted at last.

“Never?”

She shook her head and sunlight gleamed across the crown. Oh yes, he remembered vaguely, he was supposed to be getting her out of the sun. Good thing he wasn’t her bodyguard in truth. He’d never failed at any job he’d undertaken in his entire life, but she was in danger—from
him
—every instant she spent in his company.

“Why?”

She lifted her head, shrugging carelessly, as if it didn’t matter. But her mouth trembled. “I’m no good at it.”

“I remember the panorama I saw. It was…” Oh, damn, he was so bad at this. Comforting words, speeches designed to uplift or inspire. He’d never cared enough. “There were people in it.”

She smiled. But it was small and pained, not the warm and easy one she usually gave so freely. “Figures. Impressions, roughly blocked-in passersby. No need for detail there. Those weren’t individuals. They were just a crowd.”

“I could almost hear the streetcars, smell the stench from the river. Your talent…all right, I admit it. I don’t know a damn thing about art. But I refuse to believe that someone who can paint that so beautifully couldn’t paint
anything
well.”

“One would think so, wouldn’t one?” She still held a fistful of paper fragments. She lifted her hand and opened, let the bits flutter down like oversized snow-flakes. “I’ve tried. And tried. I didn’t like failing at it, you know. There were so many things I couldn’t do as a child. Couldn’t run, couldn’t swim. Couldn’t even sing, though I couldn’t attribute that to my illness.” Once piece clung to her damp palm, and she shook it off. It drifted down. “But painting—painting I could always
do, as soon as I got strong enough again to hold a brush.”

Her empty hand fell to her lap, joining the clutter of paper scraps. “But not that. Landscapes are about faithfully recording what’s there. In my case, copying the photos, adding in the impressions of others. But painting people…if you only record the features, you might as well be painting a doll. Portraits are about emotion, about
life
.” Her voice deepened, with a ragged edge as if she’d recovered from a cold. “The panoramas are easy.”

There was nothing about the painting he’d viewed that seemed
easy
. The amount of detail made his head spin. Even the physical effort involved; he had a hard time imagining that a woman as small as she could painstakingly brush paint over a canvas that huge. He pictured her on a ladder, the canvas towering over her, dwarfing her, a task so large as to seem Sisyphean. How much could she cover in a day? There had to be many times when she would step back and look at the small patch she’d just completed, compare it to the great empty swaths of white, and wonder if she’d ever fill it all up.

He wrapped his hand around her arm, halfway between her elbow and shoulder, his middle finger easily meeting his thumb.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking your biceps. There must be about three billion brushstrokes in one of those things. Your right arm should be stronger than mine.”

“No danger of that.” She laughed, as he’d intended, and he thought:
Look at that. I made her laugh even though she was sad.
It seemed an accomplishment greater than surviving prison. “And besides, it’s my left.”

Her left. She was left-handed. Had he known that about her? Yes. He knew…

He knew more about her than he cared to admit. He
had spent the better part of the last twenty years
not
knowing people, and the fact that Griff was missing only reinforced in a vicious way why he’d chosen a solitary path.

For if you did not know someone, you could not miss them. Everyone he’d ever truly known, he’d lost, in the space of two years. His brother, his parents, anyone with any claim to friend…all but Griff, until now.

He needed her for entrée to the Silver Spur. And that was
all
he needed her for, all he’d allow himself to need her for.

For a moment he indulged himself, dreaming of what it would be like if she were another kind of woman. He would take her to bed in a heartbeat—he wouldn’t
need
her, not even then, but want her, oh yes.

But then he wanted her already, ferociously so, in a way he’d never wanted another woman. Because if he’d ever begun to want too much, he left. Ran away like the coward he obviously was rather than take a chance on it growing into something more.

But he couldn’t run away from her. Not yet.

And she was not another kind of woman. She was the most
not that kind of woman
he’d ever met. Her father would ensure she remained that way. He regretted it, but he did not begrudge her father that. Were Laura his daughter, and had he the resources and power of Leland Hamilton, he would have done the same—if he ever allowed her out of the house at all.

“Why’d you ask me to sit if you had no intention of drawing me?” he asked, as much for diversion as any real curiosity.

Color rose into her cheeks, a quick bright wash of rose-pink. Oh, but that pale, clear skin—invalid pale,
he reminded himself because maybe, if he thought of her as ill, he’d stop thinking of her beneath him—revealed her emotions as quickly and easily as if she’d painted them on a sign.

“Because I wanted you to join me,” she admitted.

She was honest. He had to give her that. But what reason would she ever have had to guard her thoughts? She’d been surrounded her whole life only by people who had her best interests at heart. Unlike Sam, she’d never learned to shield every single thought, even those that seemed completely innocuous, in case they might give someone else an advantage.

“We should be getting back. Mrs. Bossidy will be on a rescue mission soon.”

“I suppose so.” She’d drawn her knees up, one arm wrapped around them as she plucked at a thread on the blanket. “Sam? Were you going to kiss me?”

“I—” Damn her straightforward honesty. He’d almost—
almost
—managed to wrangle his inconvenient urges under control. But those words out of her mouth immediately roused his desire again, placed it front and center, unignorable, damn near irresistible. “I wasn’t
going
to kiss you, no,” he told her. Which wasn’t a lie, though certainly a careful shading of the truth.

“All right then.” She lifted her head and looked at him directly. “Were you
thinking
about kissing me?”

He was famous for his ability to shield his thoughts. And she’d seen right through his sidestepping as if it were glass.

“I was thinking about it,” he admitted. “
Thinking.
A man can’t get in trouble for thinking.” Though Sam was starting to feel like he could. “It’s
doing
that runs a man into danger.”

She took a deep breath. “I think you should do it.”

“Excuse me?” he croaked.

“I think you should do it.”

“I—”

She glared at him, heat and anger and so damn appealing he would have grabbed her right then if shock hadn’t kept him frozen. “And don’t you
dare
tell me I don’t know what I’m saying because I’ll hit you, I swear,” she said fiercely.

“Why?” he asked quietly.

All the fight whooshed out of her.

“Because I’m twenty-five years old, and I’ve never been kissed,” she told him.

It wasn’t a surprise. It was still regrettable. A woman like Laura
should
be kissed, often and well. “That doesn’t mean it has to be me. It
shouldn’t
be me.”

“I don’t intend to be alone the rest of my life.” Her hands rested loose in her lap. Bits of hair pulled free of its neat knot. Loose tendrils, the color lighter when released from the mass of it, drifted about her jaw, sunlight glimmering through the fine strands. Emotion shimmered in her eyes, and it all twisted up inside him.

It cost him to hold back, and he knew he couldn’t do it much longer. And yet he couldn’t stop her from talking. Her words sank into him, sweet-painful darts of possibility.

“When this trip is over, I’ll go home, and I’ll allow my father to introduce me to…someone. Someone of his choosing, who will no doubt be kind and cultured and eminently suitable.” She was composed as she said it, completely matter-of-fact, as if it had never once occurred to her that there should be more to the man she gave herself to than his
appropriateness
. As if she’d never considered there could be anything else for her.

Sam could conjure the scene so easily: a man comfortable in a suit and a drawing room, respectful, devoted. Not a man with blood on his hands and darkness in his soul.

His hands flexed, his vision hazed.

“But once in her life,” she continued softly, “every woman should be kissed by someone
inappropriate
.”

Damn.

He swooped. Hard and fast, his mouth coming on hers with fierce, unerring speed, so sudden she startled, emitted a yelp of shock quickly swallowed up in his kiss.

Her fists were at his chest, crushed between them. Pushing him away? And then her hands opened, the burn of her palm flat against him through the thin cotton of his shirt. Her fingers curled, grabbing fistfuls of his shirt, twisting to pull him closer though he was already as close as he could be.

Oh, she should have been sweet. Tentative, unskilled, uncertain.

Instead she was bold. Demanding and wild, her mouth hot as fire beneath his. Greedy, pulling him close, tilting her head to fit her mouth more firmly against his.

Her mouth opened. Of her own accord, or because he’d nudged her lips wide? He didn’t know. They kissed as if they’d done so a hundred times, like lovers who’d been apart for too long and were finally, at last, together once more, who didn’t know if this would be the last and so were determined to wring every drop of pleasure from it no matter the price.