She twisted free of Mort’s hold and started hopping one-footed toward the melee, the need to rescue Jim spurring her on.
“Stop it! Leave him alone!” she hollered, red-faced with her efforts to get back into the closed circle of loud, drunk, cheering spectators. She tried to push her way through them, but they were having none of it, repelling her most determined efforts to break in. Mort caught her hopping up and down on the outskirts of the crowd and grabbed her around the waist, hauling her backward, her cast leaving a deep groove in the dirt.
“Come on, Mrs. Coyne,” he panted. “You heard Jim. He doesn’t want you witnessing this.”
A loud pained “uff” rose from the center of the crowd.
“Just wait over here and—”
“Wait for what?” Another cheer went up from the bloodthirsty crowd at the dull smack of flesh meeting flesh. “My husband to get torn apart? I have to stop this! Jim could get hurt!”
“Ma’am?” Mort blinked at her incredulously.
“You’ve got to help me stop this before Jim gets hurt!”
“
Jim
get hurt?”
“Yes! Are you deaf?”
“No, ma’am. But Ox’ll be the one who gets hurt. I mean, Ox is nasty, but he’s no champion like Jim. You didn’t know that?” His brow furrowed in perplexity.
“Champion of what?” She broke free of Mort’s grasp just as the wildly cheering crowd parted, and Jim Coyne, one sleeve ripped off, blood trickling from one corner of his mouth, hair curling riotously, walked calmly from their midst. Behind him, she could just make out a prone figure lying in the dirt.
She noted Jim’s rueful, apologetic expression, and tears started in her eyes.
“Let’s go home, Jim,” she said, securing his arm and leading him down the street.
Behind them, a thoughtful Mort James watched their departure.
“I made me twenty-seven bucks betting on Jim Coyne.” Merry appeared at Mort’s side, waving a handful of bills under the front of his nose. “What’s wrong with you, Mortie James? You weren’t fool enough to bet on Ox, were you?”
“No,” Mort said, gaze fixed on the flash of plaster appearing and disappearing beneath the belling swing of Mrs. Coyne’s skirts. “Miz Carmichael, wouldn’t you think it’s odd if a wife didn’t know her husband was the 1880 New York State Middleweight Boxing Champion?”
“Huh?” Merry said, searching her person for a place to stash her winnings, finally tucking it deep in her cleavage.
“Never mind,” Mort said.
Chapter Eight
“Take your shirt off.” Her tone brooked no argument, so he did as he was told and stripped off his shirt while she went into the bedroom to get her dratted old horse liniment.
“Come in here.”
He appeared in the doorframe , looking wary.
“I’ve spread a sheet on the bed. This stuff stains terribly and it stings at first. At least Juniper always twitches when I . . .” Her voice trailed off and as her gaze fell on his chest. “Sit down.”
He sat. She approached cautiously, warily, as though he were a suddenly unknown quantity and not a man with whom she’d shared five damnably blameless nights, and scooped out a little dollop of the oily-looking salve and placed the jar on the table before stepping between his splayed knees.
She swallowed, and his gaze fell on the movement with the intensity of a predator’s on its prey. Her skirts brushed his inner thighs.
Business. It was all business, she told herself sternly. Gingerly, she spread the ointment on his left shoulder near the yellowing bruises that Tommy and his pals had given him a few days before. He winced and she winced in empathetic reply. Then he rolled his shoulder into it, working the sore muscle.
“Stay still.” Her voice sounded a little breathy, even to her own ears, but she didn’t care. His chest was beautiful, dense, with long, sloping muscles tight beneath supple, bronzed skin. She flattened her palm on his pectoral and smoothed the warming oil across the bulging muscle, working it in with the heel of her hand and her fingertips, kneading the resilient flesh deeply, finding little knots of tension and easing them out. “This speeds up healing all kinds of injuries,” she murmured. “Cuts and scrapes and bruises.”
Her fingertip brushed across his flat nipple and returned, moving across his broad chest, back and forth, soothing, rubbing, stroking him.
Lord in heaven.
Though he sat absolutely still beneath her touch, the heat rushing up from her palm swirled through her entire body, making it hard to breathe. He was smooth and hard and warm, and she wanted to fondle and stroke and urge his virility into expression, to make the male in him answer the female in her, to touch her lips to his skin, test the heated temperature of his body with her tongue, move—
“Gilly.”
She struggled out of her sensuous torpor. Slowly, her gaze refocused. He was regarding her strangely, his head cocked to one side. The curls at the nape of his neck hung in damp ringlets that she wanted to—
“Darlin’.”
“Hmm?”
“There aren’t any cuts or bruises there.”
“What?” Her voice was hazy, unfocused. She could look into his eyes for hours, locked in their blue embrace. . . .
“I wasn’t injured there.”
“Oh? Oh!” She broke eye contact with a jolt. She glanced down. Her hand was on his left breast; fingers spread wide, barely denting the muscle beneath. There wasn’t a mark on him.
Embarrassment rippled in a molten current through her, steaming her cheeks with color. She wheeled.
“Gil!”
She stopped, counted to ten, and dared a glance back over her shoulder. He sat where she’d left him, hands clenched into fists on top of his knees, head bowed slightly, lips parted, and eyes riveted on the floorboards.
“We have a business arrangement.” He looked up at her, tension in his voice, in his hard face. “Don’t we? Isn’t that what this is?”
She wanted to say no, to deny it. To deny the past she hadn’t asked for and the future she didn’t want. But that wouldn’t be fair to him. She didn’t want him despising her more than he already would. “Yes. It’s business.”
“Then keep up your part of the bargain. Tell me.”
“What?” she asked in confusion.
“Tell me the truth. Why are you a thief?” It was a demand, an urgent imperative.
He couldn’t have made himself any more clear. He had her heart, but he didn’t want that. He wanted her story, and even that must be on his terms. She wouldn’t give it to him. It was the one thing she had left. Her identity.
“Sure.” Her voice was clipped and hard. She swung around. “Where should I begin?” She flopped down sideways in the upholstered chair, swinging her cast nonchalantly over the arm, petticoats playing peekaboo with him. “I suppose birth would be too early?” He didn’t comment. Just sat watching her, his flesh rimed by the soft light, beautiful and unreachable. She pulled the tortoiseshell combs from her hair and shook her head, tilting it back so the unbound tresses fell to the ground. “Okay. I’m the daughter of an outlaw queen. I guess that makes me an outlaw princess, don’t it?” She let loose a coarse chuckle.
“Outlaw princess.”
“Yup. A hard-riding, hard-shooting woman who takes what she wants when she wants it. No questions asked, no answers given.”
“Really?” His tone dripped doubt. “I suppose you’re the James brothers’ lost sister too.”
“Sister? Hell, I hope not. You don’t do with a sister the things me and the James boys have done. Shouldn’t you be writing this down?”
“Had a lot of lovers, have you?” he sounded only mildly interested. Damn him!
She tilted her head far back and kicked her loose leg toward the ceiling, laughing harshly. “Lovers? I’ve had more lovers than a Gatling has shells. But my chamber’s empty now, and I’m lookin’—” She heard his chair clatter to the ground, his boot heels hard on the floor. She turned her head and found herself staring at his wool-clad thigh. She didn’t look up any further.
“Yeah?” she sneered.
“Gilly,” his voice was low and hard, “you are full of shit.”
His words acted like a prod. She lurched upright, furious and miserable. “Oh, yeah?”
“I’ve never heard such crap. Give me a little credit. Just a little. I do this for a living, ferret out the grain of honesty in the lies. You haven’t given me anything but lies.”
“How would you even know?” she demanded. “And so what anyway? So what if they’re lies, each and every one of them? Who cares if Lightning Lil is a whore or a minister’s daughter? Who cares what I am or what I do or why I do it, as long as you get your story and your readers believe it? Who gives a damn?”
He didn’t touch her. He didn’t have to. The look he gave her felt like a slap, it was so rife with disappointment and disgust. He shook his head.
“Maybe I do, Gilly. Maybe I do.”
Before she could frame a retort, he was gone.
Chapter Nine
It was late afternoon. Bruised and battered clouds piled up on the horizon, and a cutting wind skittered along the streets, harrying most of the townspeople inside. Jim stalked the abandoned plank walk, cursing himself. Gilly had touched more than his skin last night. Her hand had moved over his flesh and he’d been branded by an urge so powerful, he’d had to clench his fists to keep from hauling her into his arms and taking what she so sweetly offered.
He hadn’t. Because as much as he’d wanted to expose each creamy inch of her, he wanted even more to expose the mute soul of her, to touch her as deeply, as intimately as a man and a woman can. In short, he’d wanted to make love to her . . . not to have sex with the stranger she insisted on remaining.
He was falling in love with her.
The realization brought no surprise, only a frightening sensation of imminent loss that teased him with terrible potential. He found the telegraph office and went inside. Behind the desk, the clerk grinned. “Whoa. I haven’t had this many telegrams in one day never! First Mortie last night, back and forth to New York, and now you.”
“Mortie’s been pestering his New York friend again?”
“Yup. About you.” The clerk waggled his brows. “Bein’ very cagey about phrasing his questions too.”
“You’d think the kid would have better ways of wasting his money.” Jim picked up a pencil and scribbled a note.
“Oh, and I got a telegram from New York for you too,” the clerk added.
Just what he needed, his ass hauled over the coals for failing to submit his exclusive interview with the “Outlaw Princess.” He shook his head at the memory of Gilly’s outrageous claim regarding lovers. How did she ever think she was going to pull that one off? He was thirty-six years old and he’d known more experienced women than she’d probably ever meet.
“Here you are,” the clerk said, handing him the telegram. Sure enough, it was a terse demand for his story, the one he’d promised when he’d first arrived and come up with the great inspiration of how to get an exclusive interview with the notorious Lightning Lil. Maybe he shouldn’t have all but guaranteed his editor that he’d find her. Too damn bad. His editor wasn’t going to get an award-winning, circulation- doubling story from him. At least not one about Lightning Lil.
He quickly scribbled out message:
NO LIL. STOP. NO THRILLS. STOP. SORRY I RAISED FALSE HOPES. STOP. PURSUING DIFFERENT STORY. STOP. WILL SEND MORE WHEN I HAVE IT. STOP. HAVING A GOOD TIME. STOP.
WISH YOU WERE HERE. STOP. JIM.
The one thing that had kept Gilly safe was her anonymity. If he wrote that story it wouldn’t take the people in Far Enough ten minutes to realize who he’d been calling “Darlin’” for the past week. They’d be the first eyewitnesses to the fact that Lightning Lil had hair the color of polished ashwood, a luscious smile, and a voice like sherbet—rich, cool, and creamy. They’d know she looked twenty and laughed easily, that her eyes sparkled like black diamonds, and that even wearing a cast she moved with liquid grace. She’d be caught inside a week.
He finished writing his telegram and handed it to the clerk.
“Boy, howdy,” the man said, perusing the paper. “This is a long one. Pretty near as long as young Mort’s. Not nearly so interesting though.” He dangled the invitation to query hopefully.
“Oh?” Jim prompted, more out of habit than anything else. After all, there was nothing for him to do but go back to the room and stare at the door that separated him from Gilly. He’d knocked once, just before noon. She’d pled a headache.
“Fool boy sent for a federal marshal.”
Jim stopped breathing.
“Yup. Old Mortie thinks he knows where Lightning Lil is.”
His heart skipped a beat. “Really? And where’s that?”
“Oh, he wasn’t tellin’ me. Ain’t gonna share the reward with no one, he says. Needs new typeface, he says. Pleased as a two-peckered dog, that boy is. I say he’s full of crap. But hell, if a U.S. marshal wants to waste his time on Mortie James’s wild-goose chase, fine.”
“He’s coming here?” Jim asked, his thoughts racing. Gilly had been right after all. The boy was more a reporter than Jim had given him credit for. Damn him.
“Yup. Be here day after tomorrow.” He finished counting the lines on Jim’s message. “That’ll be two dollars twelve cents, Mr. Coyne.”
*
“The stage leaves at five o’clock in the morning.” Jim yanked the last of her dresses from the armoire and flung them on the bed. “We’ll leave at four and head a few miles out of town. I’ll wave the coach down and you’ll get on it. I’ll be back in town before anyone wakes up.”
“They’ll know.” Her face was as pale as moonlight, and her eyes were black as a starless sky.
“No.” He shook his head. “I’ll just stay in my room for a couple of days. They’ll think what they’ve been thinking all along. That you and I can’t get enough of each other.”
Now fire bloomed in her cheeks. He ignored it.
“When the marshal shows up in a few days, I’ll tell him we had a spat and you went back to New York.”
“Mort knows.”
“Mort knows nothing,” he ground out, clearing the toiletries, the ivory comb, the lilac water, and the old horse liniment from atop the walnut bureau.
“I don’t even know this New York friend of his. As far as anyone knows we married just before I left there.”