Authors: Robin Gideon
“Don’t touch me,” she whispered. She tried to button her shirt, but her hands were trembling too much to ac
complish that simple task. She shoved the tails of her shirt
back into her Levi’s. “Go…please go…please leave me. This is all wrong.”
Pamela wanted to turn around
to look at Phantom. At last she would be able to see him
clearly, without the darkness and shadows that he kept to
maintain his secret identity. She wanted to look at him,
but she didn’t dare because, whenever she looked into his
eyes, she ended up in his arms, doing things that she’d hardly even thought of, things that certainly were terribly, sinfully wrong.
“You want me to leave?” he asked.
Without turning, Pamela nodded.
“Remember what I said about Jonathon Darwell. Don’t go
after him. If he catches you, he’ll kill you,” Phantom warned.
Pamela said nothing. She couldn’t think of Darwell at a time
like this.
She waited, wanting him to speak, wanting to make some sense out of what she’d just done.
“Phantom, will I ever see you again?” she asked.
Silence greeted her.
Pamela waited. Still she received no answer. Finally, she
turned around. Phantom was gone, disappearing from her life just as quickly and mysteriously as he’d entered it.
Chapter Six
It was midafternoon when Pamela awoke. She sat bolt up
right in bed, instantly awake yet thoroughly and com
pletely confused.
She recognized her familiar surroundings, the same
four walls that had constituted her bedroom for the past
six years. She was home, waking up in her own bedroom,
so everything should be just the same as it always had
been.
Except everything had changed.
No, that wasn’t quite right, and Pamela knew it. Everything
hadn’t changed—only
she
had.
“Oh, no,” she said in a soft voice. She put her hands to her face and fell back prone on the bed.
The Midnight Phantom.
It hadn’t been just a wildly exciting erotic dream. It was
reality, and now she had to live with the consequences
of what she’d done—or at least allowed to happen.
But what consequences were there?
Pamela removed her hands from her face and stared at the
rough-hewn timber ceiling of her bedroom. Only two peo
ple in all of Whitetail Creek knew what had happened the pre
vious night. It wasn’t likely the Midnight Phantom
would tell anyone, and she most certainly wasn’t going to breathe a word concerning that exchange. So what possi
ble consequences could there be?
Pamela closed her eyes, shutting troubling questions out
of her mind as she went backward in time to
when she’d been in Phantom’s arms.
He had called it destiny. He’d explained everything they’d done with one another as destiny, a preordained
event that could not be avoided any more than a person
could change the arrangement of the stars in the night
sky.
A slow, sensual smile spread across Pamela’s mouth. She had surprised herself. Rather, her body had surprised her
by reacting the way it had, so readily, almost greedily,
accepting the pleasure Phantom was willing to provide.
And maybe, just maybe the best part of all was the
fact that nobody would ever know what had happened in
that shadow-shrouded alley in Whitetail Creek. Pamela knew the
damage done to the reputations of girls who let men have
their way. They were
called scarlet women, and worse. Ironically, the reputations of the men involved rarely were damaged. In fact
sometimes they were enhanced, as though these men had
achieved some great victory.
To the high society crowd of Whitetail Creek, Pamela Bragg, if known at all, was just the sister of a local shootist
who made his living as a bounty hunter. Although a tom
boy and often disliked as a troublemaker, she did not
have the reputation of being loose with men. Despite her
behavior of last night and very early this morning, that
would remain unchanged, no better but certainly not
worse.
What time was it? Pamela looked at the small clock ticking
on the bedside table and groaned. It was nearly three in
the afternoon. She never stayed in bed this long.
But then, she’d never before spent the evening with the
Midnight Phantom.
Beneath the blanket, Pamela eased the skirt of her nightgown up past her knees and over her thighs. With her eyes closed, she could see the Phantom’s handsome, masked face as clearly as if he was in the bedroom with her.
I shouldn’t do this, she thought, but it didn’t stop her from reaching between her thighs. Very lightly, she brought the pads of her fingers to her clitoris. She caressed gently, using a circular motion with her middle two fingers.
She remembered how her body had blazed when the Phantom kissed her, and the memory brought slick cream to her entrance. Her middle finger slipped easily between her lips as her excitement heightened and images of the Midnight Phantom danced across the surface of her mind.
* * * *
She got out of bed, determined to put Phantom out of her
mind, at least until she got her chores done. The horses
had to be fed and, with any luck, she might be able to
scare up a jackrabbit along the windbreak trees. Her stom
ach was grumbling. It had been many hours since she’d
eaten.
At the foot of her bed were the clothes she’d worn the
night before. Exhausted, she’d quickly removed them be
fore falling immediately to sleep. Now, she picked up the
chemise and looked at it, a little surprised that the places
where Phantom’s mouth had been were not still damp. The chemise, old and very thin, was the only one she owned,
and she wasn’t going to put it on until she’d washed it.
When she looked at her Levi’s, memories, luscious and embarrassing, made her blush crimson. She would wash her denims and drawers, too, she decided, symbolically ridding herself
of any evidence that she’d ever been near the Midnight
Phantom.
Feeling a little scandalous because she wore nothing
underneath, Pamela pulled on her old blue dress. She hadn’t
planned on today being laundry day, but she’d make it
one. She smiled to herself, aware that she was trying to
pretend that she’d intended on washing the clothes any
way.
She was glad now that her brother wasn’t home. If he
had been, then she’d have to go about pretending that noth
ing had changed. In fact, she’d never been very good at
lying to Jedediah, or at hiding the truth from him.
Once Pamela had the big kettle of laundry water boiling
outside, she checked the pockets of her Levi’s. In the back
right pocket she found nearly a thousand dollars. In the
left, she found an identical sum.
Never before had she come anywhere near having so
much money at one time. Pamela counted the money three
times, just to be sure it was all really there, right in her
hands, placed there by the Midnight Phantom, who could
just as easily have kept every dollar for himself.
So why had he given her all the money? In payment
for their time together? That didn’t seem very likely. Noth
ing about the Midnight Phantom made her think he would
have difficulty finding willing women. Though she was
a long way from being experienced in such matters, she
knew she’d had a much better time than he had. With very few exceptions, she’d never really touched him—at
least not like he’d touched her.
The more she thought about it, the more confused she became. After all the hours she’d spent with Phantom, she’d
learned a great deal about his skills and abilities—that he
could open a locked safe or unbutton a woman’s blouse with
the same ease—but almost nothing about why he’d chosen
to become the mysterious Midnight Phantom.
She tucked the money into the pocket of her faded dress
and, as she began washing her clothes, wondered whom she
should give the money to. Who of all his victims was the
most deserving of Jonathon Darwell’s money? Her mind
filled with appreciation for the Midnight Phantom who had
helped her plan to redistribute Darwell’s wealth to his victims
come true.
* * * *
“Good Lord, Garrett, would you mind concentrating?”
Paul Randolph asked, his brows furrowed in anger.
Garrett shot his older brother an angry look but kept his
rebuttal silent. As a skilled attorney, part of Garrett’s training informed him that, when guilt was irrefutable, it was
sometimes best to throw oneself on the mercy of the court.
In this case that court was the always-impressive head of
the Randolph ranch, Paul.
“Where were we?” Garrett asked
.
His thoughts had been wandering from the lengthy gov
ernment contract he held in his hands, and it was useless
to pretend otherwise.
“Page four, paragraph six,” Paul answered, his tone a
little softer now. “Garrett, is something wrong?”
“Not really. Just a woman,”
he said with what he hoped sounded like glib indifference, never once taking his eyes
off the contracts.
“It’s not like you to let thoughts of a woman interfere with your work. You haven’t gotten a girl in trouble, have you?” Paul
asked.
Garrett looked up from the contract. He smiled at Paul,
hearing the honest concern in his brother’s words. “No,
nothing so drastic as that. It’s just that a gorgeous girl
slipped right through my fingers, I’m afraid.
”
Paul made a face. “That’s not reason enough to interfere with your work.”
Hours later, after every sentence of every paragraph
had been read, reread, and analyzed carefully, Garrett at last
allowed himself the comfort of a glass of whiskey. It felt
good to sip the liquor and relax. It was a luxury he hadn’t had time for since he’d created his alter ego, the Midnight
Phantom, and accepted all the responsibilities that went
along with fighting Jonathon Darwell.
“Will she hurt you down the road, come election time?”
Paul asked, stretching out on the leather couch, his own
whiskey glass in hand. “We don’t need some dalliance
coming back to haunt you when you run for territorial
governor. Hell, there are some folks in town who think
you’ll only be wasting your time with taking on the job
of mayor of Whitetail Creek. They think you should shoot straight
for governor, go for it now while it’s still a territory and
not a state.”
Garrett issued a weary smile. “I haven’t run for
any
of
fice yet, and already your friends are trying to push me
up the ladder. How much am I going to owe these men once I become mayor, or governor, or whatever the hell
else I think about running for?”
“Not a thing, little brother. I wouldn’t sell you out like
that. You just be the best politician you can. That’s all they
can expect of you, and that’s all I expect of you.”
“Good, because that’s all I expect of myself.”
There was a pause as each brother settled on his own
thoughts. Then, with a sly, boyish grin, Paul asked, “So
what’s her name?”