A Wanted Man (11 page)

His arms came around her. Her back was narrow, almost fragile, the line of her spine bumping against his palm, yet she twisted in his arms. Thin like a willow whip, misleadingly frail, tensile and limber and so much stronger than appearances promised.

He drew his hands around her sides, smoothing the fabric of her bodice beneath his palms. The fabric was silky, her body warm and elegantly lean. His thumbs brushed the side of her breasts, a gentle, barely there curve that yielded to the slightest pressure, and he heard her quick intake of breath. His own breath was gone—she’d stolen it from him, along with whatever sanity he’d once possessed.

He leaned forward, ready to push her back down to the ground. She took another quick sip of breath, a half hitch of surprise, and stiffened. Only briefly, but long enough to remind him who she was. Who
he
was.

He released her and sat back, rump on his heels, turning his head to one side so he didn’t have to look at her and see it: alarm or accusation or, worse yet, open, wonderful, irresistible desire. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, as a boxer might dab away blood. She’d bloodied him, all right, but in places where the wound was hidden, and the scars wouldn’t heal.

“Sam?” she asked, uncertainty breaking on his name. He felt her fingers tentatively brush his shoulder.

He should turn to her. She deserved some kind of support or consolation. What would a woman who’d never been kissed assume when the man who’d finally done so couldn’t bring himself to face her?

But he couldn’t.
Couldn’t
. If he caught one glimpse of those wide blue eyes, that lovely mouth, he would never find it in him to pull away again, her father and her future and his past be damned.

And it would ruin all of them.

“
Inappropriate
enough for you?” he forced out on a rasp.

“Almost,” she murmured.

D
esperate measures,
Lucy Bossidy thought as she rapped on the door to the train car that housed the men. It went against her grain to have to go to them for help. Laura was her responsibility and always had been.

The door opened. Mr. Peel stood in the doorway—
filled
the doorway, as only a man of his…bulk could. He was shirtless, a pair of loose tan pants slung low on his hips. Not lean hips, she noted—nothing about Hiram Peel could ever be called lean—but there was nothing soft about him, either. Surely in a man of that size there should be some extra flesh around the middle.

Not that she’d ever thought about his middle.

But he was solid. Smooth-chested. And apparently just out of bed, his brown hair spiked like a cock’s ruff.

“Yeah?” he asked.

She tore her eyes away, focusing on the iron-webbed lantern bolted beside the door. Dear Lord, what had gotten into her? Yes, it had been a shock when he’d opened the door barely dressed. Yes, it had been a long
time, more years than she’d cared to admit, since she’d been confronted with a bare male chest. But to ogle
Mr. Peel
, of all people…she’d heard tales of the prairie driving women to madness, though those stories had always held it was living isolated through the winter that spawned such insanity. Clearly the land worked much more quickly on her.

“May I help you?” she corrected.

“No, you can’t help me. Nice o’ you to ask, though.”

“No. I wasn’t asking you.” Her temples started to throb. Now
there
was the reaction Mr. Peel typically sparked in her. “I was instructing you. It is impolite to open a door to a visitor with merely a ‘yeah.’ ‘May I help you’ is a more appropriate response.”

“May…I…help…you,” he ground out.

“Not with that tone of voice,” she said, frowning in disapproval. “Not to mention that that’s hardly the appropriate attire in which to answer the door to a lady.”

“Oh, so you’re a lady now?”

Not really, she thought, the old hurt lifting its head unexpectedly, now merely an echo of what it once was, a wistful ache rather than the sharp slice of loss it had been.

But he didn’t know about that. No one did. “As far as you’re concerned, Mr. Peel, I most certainly am.”

“I was sleeping.”

“Sleeping? In the middle of the afternoon? You must have terribly taxing duties, Mr. Peel.”

“I’ve got the night shift tonight. Gotta be alert.”

“Always good to know you take your responsibilities so seriously,” she said, voice heavy with sarcasm. She flicked a glance at him. Still no shirt. The man had absolutely no manners at all.

She was an experienced woman. She should have
been able to stand there, unbothered, blithely unconcerned. If she’d been confronting anyone other than this annoyingly overgrown lummox, she was certain she could have.

“What do you want?” he asked.

Now
there
was a question. One she rarely dared to ask herself. “Is Mr. Hoxie here?”

“No. He’s out on one of those damned horses. Scouting the area, he said.”

“I didn’t know he could ride.”

“He’s on the back of a horse. The horse is moving. If you call that riding, he’s riding.”

“It’s probably just as well,” she said. She would be far more comfortable dealing with Erastus, who under normal circumstances could be relied upon to be at least somewhat reasonable. However, his ridiculous hero worship of Mr. Duncan made his reaction unpredictable in this particular case. Mr. Peel was the only other person in their little troupe who hadn’t fallen under Sam’s spell, which put them, for a brief period at least, on the same side. “I need to talk to you.”

He leaned against the doorframe and raised one eyebrow. “Talk away.”

“It’s about Mr. Duncan.”

“Christ. Not you, too.” He crossed his arms before his chest. Muscle bulged. “Okay, I understand that Miss Hamilton’s vulnerable to beauty. It’s in her nature. And Hoxie’s susceptible to fame. He can’t help it. But you—thought you had at least a little sense.”

“Why, Mr. Peel, if that’s not the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.” She fluttered her eyelashes at him. “No, that’s not it. Laura went out to work with him today, and—”

“Don’t know why you let her do that,” he said.
“Aren’t you supposed to be chaperonin’? Lettin’ the child gallivant around the country with a guy like that with nothing more than a paintbrush for protection wasn’t the brightest idea you ever had.”

It stung. Stung even more because she knew he was right. “I let her go out with
you
.”

He shot her a look of heavy disgust. “As if I’d be interested in a girl,” he said. “Much less in Miss Hamilton. She’s practically my—” he cast around for the right word “—niece.”

A girl? She remembered when Mr. Hamilton had hired Hiram in the first place. He’d been a big, bumbling, angry youth, seventeen at the most, which made him at least a few years younger than her, as close to Laura’s age as her own.

“I know,” she admitted. “I was just…I was concerned that, if I didn’t allow her to go out with him as I did the rest of you, well, forbidden fruit and all that.” She frowned, regretting that decision anew. “Obviously I was wrong.”

“All fruit’s forbidden to Miss Hamilton,” he said. “The Baron’s made sure of it.”

And there, thought Lucy, was the crux of the problem. “You’re right. I miscalculated. I believed they would not go far, and I did not want her to think I did not trust her.”

He straightened in surprise. “Never thought I’d hear you admit you were wrong.”

“Yes, well, don’t get fond of hearing it. It won’t happen again.” Back to the important matter. “She came back flushed.”

“So? She flushes easily. Skin’s so damn white it colors up soon as the temperature goes north of eighty.”

“It wasn’t the heat,” she said. “At least, it wasn’t the sun.”

“I know you’re fond of jumping to conclusions, but this is a big one.”

“No conclusions,” she said. “Suspicions. Oh, I’m not saying anything irreversible happened. Not yet. But something did. And I want to ensure nothing else does.”

He ran his tongue over his teeth, pondering, and nodded. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. Then stepped back and shut the door in her face.

“You see that fence?” Sam asked her. “That’s the boundary of the Silver Spur.”

“There?” She put down the pencil she’d been using to sketch the scene in front of her: the lift of the foothills and the mountains beyond, bristling with a wild tangle of sage and bunchgrass, studded with Joshua trees and gnarled junipers, a classically untamed Western landscape, contrasted with the precise, constricting geometry of the fence that slashed horizontally across the bottom of the scene. “Are you sure? I thought we were some distance away yet.” They’d detached from the train on a long-abandoned side rail in Utah that morning when the landscape caught her eye.

“Hmm. Pretty sure.” He squinted. “We’re on the back side. Silver Creek is at the northwest corner of Crocker’s land. The spur line that runs to the mines takes off from there.”

“How do you know this land’s his?”

He shrugged. “It’s the fence. Nobody out here much bothers with one. Cattle’s always been allowed to graze free. But Crocker’s never been one to share.”

“Now,
why
do you know that?”

She looked so pretty, gussied up in lace and a straw-brimmed hat fluttering with pale blue ribbons. But then, she’d looked pretty every day of the last twenty-three; since that interlude when he’d forgotten all the very good reasons to keep their relationship carefully bounded and, instead, surrendered to the insistent press of need, he’d had a much harder time ignoring it. “I did some work around here once. Hard to do anything in this part of the country without learnin’ about Crocker.”

“For him? Or for the other side?”

“For whoever paid me the most,” he said noncommittally.

“Hmm.” Laura leaned forward and quickly sketched the burning globe of the sun. Not likely that it would end up in the final work, but she had to capture it while she could, a great white-hot ball far more potent than the benevolent golden one that beamed down on Sea Haven.

To eyes accustomed to the deep and vibrant green of the Northeastern summer, Utah wore restrained colors. The colors were there: gray in the sage, green in the juniper, a tiny burst of three-pointed white from a Sego lily, the rusty copper of the ground itself. But the landscape was anything but lush, and it took a while to become sensitive to it, to discern the beauty and life in the subtle shades of dun.

“So?” she asked. “How’s our spy doing?”

In the guise of a yawn, Sam stretched and twisted, glancing back to where their chaperone—Mr. Hoxie that day—crouched behind the stocky bulk of a stunted bush.

“If he can get out of bed tomorrow after squatting like that all morning,” Sam said, “he’s a better man than I.”

“Are we ever going to have a moment alone again?” She smiled at him. Maybe a bit flirtatiously, but if you couldn’t flirt with a man who’d kissed you so hard and well until it curled your toes and kept you up at night, whom could you flirt with?

If a woman had to wait until she was twenty-five for her first kiss, at least she’d picked someone who knew how to do it right.

And it wasn’t as if he’d been immune. It had taken him a full two minutes to get his breath back, she remembered smugly.

“Nope,” he said, too cheerfully for her taste. Shouldn’t he be unhappy about the fact that, since that lovely afternoon, they hadn’t gone anywhere without Hiram, Mr. Hoxie, or Mrs. Bossidy trailing behind, trying valiantly, and failing miserably, to stay out of sight?

She certainly regretted their presence. He’d remained circumspectly distant from her ever since, a perfect guard, day after day. One would think the impact of their kiss would have muted over that time, softened in her memory. And yet it only grew and sharpened, as if the time from it gave her the space to separate each moment and sink into the sensation each one offered, until that brief interlude took up more space in her mind. She had only to see him, to think of him, and that
feeling
swept back, precise and immediate, no different than if he touched her in truth instead of merely in her memory and imagination.

And yet it seemed to have had no impact on him. Nothing in his manner, his speech, his respectful and careful and seemingly impersonal guarding of her gave away that he even remembered what had happened between them. Except once, two days ago, as she’d sketched a gorgeous sunset as they’d crossed the
Bear River near the Wyoming border, and she’d looked up to find him close, so completely focused on her that the world fell away. He’d touched her only briefly, a shivering brush of his fingers beneath her ear, along her neck, interrupted almost immediately by Mrs. Bossidy’s timely—though it was most
untimely
, in Laura’s opinion—call to dinner. She could still feel it, the warmth, the rasp of the callus of his fingers against her tender skin, the direct line he took down, and around, to where the lace of her neckline halted his exploration.

“Did she say anything to you?” he asked. “Two nights ago. When I touched you—”

“No.” She shook her head. “If she’d really
seen
anything, if they knew that you’d so much as brushed one finger against mine, Mr. Hoxie’d be right here, sitting between us, rather than over there hiding in the foliage. No, she only suspects. That’s why they’re being so sneaky, hoping to catch us in the act.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

She edged a bit closer to him. His jaw tightened, his eyes narrowed. There was far more fun than she’d ever suspected in exercising her feminine wiles. She leaned his way, he swallowed hard, and she smiled. So much power in it. “So they can tell my father what terrible advantage you’re taking of me and get rid of you once and for all.”

“They could tell him that anyway.”

“Lie, Mr. Duncan?” she said in mock horror. “Would you do such a thing to gain an advantage?”

“I’d do
anything
to gain an advantage,” he said, his voice deep and even.

“Are you warning me off?”

“Yes.” He debated even bringing it up; they’d
avoided the topic quite nicely for weeks. And yet it was still
there
between them, big and bold and clearly in the way. In fact, it seemed to be gaining power in the memory. Perhaps, if they talked of it, they could put it behind them once and for all. “I should never have kissed you.”

“Why not?”

“You’re all wrong for me,” he said carefully. “More importantly, I’m all wrong for you. What good could come of it?”

“What good?” she asked, her temper rising. “How about that we
enjoyed
it? Isn’t that good?”

“It’s not that simple, and you know it.”

“Why can’t it be?” Foolish man. “Sam, do you think that I’m so naïve that I must tangle up a simple, lovely kiss with all sorts of emotions and plans? Don’t worry, Sam. I’m not planning to marry you.”

“What?”
Why the hell not?
Was the first thing that sprang to his mind. And Lord, wasn’t that by far the biggest jolt of stupidity he’d indulged in for many a day? Since he obviously could not look at her and think clearly, he swung his gaze around, as if he were on guard in truth, and then—“What the hell is that?”

On a long slope perhaps three hundred yards away, a man pelted down the hillside, heading straight for them. He ran wildly, looking behind him as he chugged through the tangled brush and past the spiky tufts of bunchgrass.

“Sam?” Laura climbed to her feet, rose to her toes for a better view. Beside her Sam jumped up as well, edging sideways to put the bulk of his body between her and the approaching figure.

The man stumbled, going down hard, his arms flailing like a loose-limbed doll as he tumbled twice down
the hill, coming to rest against a large, reddish rock that thrust crookedly from the crumbled slope.