Lawman (16 page)

"Take my hand. Or I won't show you," Megan
countered.

"You're being unreasonable."

"So are you."

He rubbed his fingers against his hat brim.
Thinking, she guessed. Then Gabriel said, "This isn't worth arguing
over."

"Then do it." She nodded toward her
outstretched hand. "If it's as meaningless as you say, it shouldn't
bother you to touch me."

His answering stare would have sent a lesser
woman under the table to hide. Luckily, Megan counted herself
well-fortified against it, so she stared right back and waited for
his reply.

"It doesn't bother me to touch you," he said
bluntly.

Was that disappointment she felt? Surely
not.

Until he pounded his opinion home by adding,
"I could touch you all day. All night." Gabriel lowered his voice
and slowly, in a tone fraught with meaning, murmured, "
All
over
."

Obviously she'd misread him, if he could
taunt her with his indifference to her this way. "Fine, fine!"
Megan burst out, not needing any more reminders of all the ways a
man might find her lacking. "I understand."

Before she could surrender to common sense
and take her arm from the table, Gabriel's large, warm hand slid
over hers. With an assurance born of having her all but beg him to
hold her, he threaded their fingers together and glared up at
her.

"Happy?" he asked.

Slightly bedazzled by the sight of their
joined hands, Megan looked up, too. She'd bested him! At least in
this small way. As long as she could pile up victories, hope still
remained of helping her father.

"Because you
look
downright smug,"
Gabriel went on, his features hardening into what she took for
suspicion...and a goodly amount of poor sportsmanship, in Megan's
opinion.

She shook her head, hoping to rattle her
good sense back in place. "Happy? Almost. Move your chair a little
closer."

He raised his eyebrows. "Are you always this
demanding?"

A gusty sigh escaped her. "Are you always
this molasses slow? At this pace, I'm surprised your suspects don't
pass on from old age before you ever catch up with them."

Stone-faced, Gabriel inched his chair
closer. She supposed that counted as cooperation when dealing with
someone like him.

Turning her wrist so her hand lay on top,
she drew a deep breath. She looked at the angular lines of his
profile, sent up a quick wish that she was doing the right thing in
confiding in him, and then began.

"When you were a little boy," Megan said,
"did you ever go someplace special with your folks? Someplace you
could never have got to alone, where things were different than
anywhere you'd ever been?"

She stopped to look at him, awaiting his
answer. While she'd been talking, Megan saw, he'd turned their
hands so his lay on top. Wanting the upper hand, of course—even
literally. How typically Pinkerton of him.

Now, he shrugged.

Undaunted, she went on. "Well, I did. And
Hop Kee's was the place I'd go to. Every year, when it was time to
pay taxes on the stage station, my father would bring me to town
with him." A faint smile crossed her face at the memory. "My mother
used to say it was the only time things at the station were really
clean, when my papa and me were both gone."

Gabriel smiled, too. He stroked his thumb
over the back of her hand. "She sounds like my mother."

"I doubt it," Megan said flatly. Her mother
had been unlike anyone she'd ever heard of—at least, so far as she
knew. And what recollections she had of Emmaline Kearney's playful
nature had turned bitter long ago, with the remembrance of what had
followed them.

"Anyway," she went on, "one year things were
especially hard. Nothing was...nothing was going right at the
station, and I couldn't wait to get to the
presidio
and
forget those troubles for a while."

It was the year her mama had left, but the
last thing Megan intended was to tell him that.

"And you came here?" he asked.

Blessedly, she felt her smile return. She
nodded. "Yes. The
Celestial Kitchen
was new then, and Mr.
Kee had just come to Tucson. I'd never met a Chinaman before. When
I saw the paper lanterns and the statues and the gilded mirrors
from outside, I begged my papa to bring me in."

Gabriel's hand squeezed hers, offering more
comfort than she would have expected. "I'll bet he couldn't refuse
you much, either." His grin widened, as though his compliment held
a keen-edged finish. "You probably jawed at him until he agreed.
Poor man."

Megan narrowed her eyes at him. "I have half
a mind to poke you in the ribs for that remark, agent Winter.
Didn't anyone ever teach you how to listen to a story?"

"No. I never cared much for fairy
tales."

"Not even as a boy?" She paused, thought
over what she knew of him so far, and said, "Never mind. I don't
think I need to know anything quite that sad in the middle of a
perfectly nice evening."

"Ignoring the truth doesn't make it any less
real."

He took his hand away, leaving her missing
the soothing rasp of his thumb on the back of her hand. Sharply
aware of how much she'd enjoyed having him touch her, Megan folded
her hands in her lap and did her best to forget the sensation.

What else could she do? It was beyond
foolish to want closeness this much, especially with a man like
Gabriel. Beyond reason, when she knew perfectly well no one could
be relied upon to keep that closeness alive.

After a moment, he propped his elbow on the
table, put his head in his hand, and asked, "Did your father bring
you here, like you asked?"

His interested gaze invited her to go on
with her story. Somehow, the hardness that had appeared in his
expression over the notion of sharing fairy tales had disappeared,
too.
An interrogation technique, probably
.
Honed at the
side of Allan Pinkerton himself
. She ought to be wary, Megan
knew. But looking at the man across the table from her, she found
it hard to muster the defenses she needed.

It was funny how the tension between them
could rise and fall like this. Sparring with Gabriel Winter was
like trying to swim upstream in an
arroyo
. However much you
thought you were getting where you wanted to go, however hard you
kicked and fought and swam, you still wound up at the same bend in
the stream you'd started from.

Why hadn't the Pinkerton agency sent her a
man as placid as the waters of Silver Lake to deal with? Instead,
she had this man who seemed peaceful on the outside...but on the
inside, had all the tranquility of river water over rocks.

She gazed up at him, determined not to
betray her struggles. "No, he didn't bring me here that day. There
was a load of lumber to be brought to the station, or wagon wheels,
or something—I'm not quite sure. Whatever it was, we had to head
straight back home without stopping."

Megan remembered jouncing over the miles of
road between Tucson and Kearney station, bawling so hard she'd
nearly gotten her seven-year-old self tumbled out of their
buckboard wagon in her inattention. Her father had snatched her
back by the ruffle on her best Sunday dress, and set her beside him
again without a word of rebuke. He'd given her his handkerchief to
wipe her tears with instead—and looked as though he'd wanted to use
it himself.

She hadn't understood the reasons for his
sadness then. Now she did, and felt all the sorrier for it.

"You must have been disappointed," Gabriel
remarked.

Megan glanced away from his sympathetic
expression. Her tale had turned hard enough to tell, without his
pity to cope with, too. "I was fit to be tied. For weeks I needled
him, trying to make papa go back into town and visit the
Celestial Kitchen
. I wanted to see it on the inside, and I
wasn't going to quit until I did."

"Imagine that. You not quitting."

Sitting a little straighter, she fluttered
her fan toward him. "Laugh all you want. It worked. My father
brought me here only a few weeks later, and we've been coming here
every year on tax day ever since."

His expression turned contemplative, as
though he'd guessed there was more to the story—but wasn't sure
what it was. After a few minutes, Gabriel asked, "Were you
satisfied, once you got inside?"

"No."

He laughed. "No? All that caterwauling for
nothing?"

"Not exactly." Mimicking him, Megan propped
her elbow on the table, then leaned her head against the palm of
her hand. "You see, one of the station hands had a book.
The
Celestial Atlas
, it was called, and it had the most wondrous
pictures of constellations in it." She paused, remembering the
striking images of the Gemini twins, the crab, Cassiopeia, and all
the others, drawn in bold white against a night-sky black paper
background. "I must have looked at that book for hours. I would
have slept with it beneath my pillow, if I could have, but Addie
wouldn't let me."

"Your station's cook."

It wasn't a question. Chilled to recall the
many things Gabriel most likely knew about her family, Megan raised
her head and got on with finishing her story. Either this would
work, or it wouldn't. Either this would remind him of the goodness
in the world, or not. She had to try.

"Yes. Anyway, after so long looking at that
Celestial Atlas
book, I was plumb certain there would be
stars in here—" Feeling wistful, she waved her hands in the air to
illustrate. "—everywhere. Just like magic."

"No. Just like the book."

Giving him a sharp-eyed look, Megan nodded.
"Just like the book," she agreed. What had made her hope he would
understand the magic, the whimsy, she'd once dreamed of finding? "I
was too young to know that sometimes 'celestial' meant a particular
thing had come from China—"

"—and not necessarily the heavens."

"Yes."

He sat back in his chair. "Too bad you got
the Chinaman's version of heaven, instead of a little girl's."

"That was exactly what I thought, at the
time." With a start, Megan realized he
did
comprehend part
of what she'd been hoping for, after all. Surprise uncurled inside
her, taking shape someplace beside those shivery feelings his kiss
had caused before. "But I was wrong."

Gabriel quirked his eyebrow, then absently
leaned forward and picked up one of the empty porcelain rice bowls
from their table's center. He turned it in his hands, staring down
at it while he listened to her speak.

"Wrong in what way?" he asked.

"Wrong in not believing the
Celestial
Kitchen
could be what I wanted. Wrong in not believing that
someone loved me well enough to make it come true, somehow."

He didn't understand. She could see it in
the lazy progress the delicate bowl still made from hand to hand,
in the casual bend of his head as he watched it move. Maybe no one
had ever tried stealing the heavens for Gabriel, and that was what
lent that wintery cast to his heart.

She went on: "But my father
did
love
me well enough. On the second time I came here, he and Hop Kee
explained to me that we had dined at the wrong table the time
before—and they brought me right here to this table instead."

Thumping her palms atop the smooth linen
tablecloth between them, Megan issued him her most challenging
look.

He, being a Pinkerton man—and too
mule-headed for his own good—only frowned. "So?"

"So this is where the heavens and China come
together. And seeing it was what made me decide to always believe
first—no matter how wrong everything might seem to be.
Look
."

She reached to touch his shoulder, gesturing
with her other hand toward the ceiling. Postponing the revelation
for herself, she watched Gabriel closely as he turned his face
upward.

The reflection of the stars cast a glow on
his image. Only cut-tin, and hand-fashioned at that, they sparkled
from the ceiling directly above their table and no other. They
gleamed in quantities too numerous for a little girl to count, and
brought the celestial wonder she'd yearned for straight to a
bachelor Chinaman's restaurant in the heart of the Tucson
presidio
.

"My papa cut out every one of them himself,"
Megan told Gabriel, "and he and Mr. Kee nailed them up just in time
for my second visit here. They brought the heavens down to meet
me."

Memories of the awe she'd felt on that
long-ago day returned, and Megan made no attempt to hold them back.
The tears they brought to her eyes were needful ones, no matter how
bittersweet they felt today.

Across the table, Gabriel's watery image
only looked upward, filled with a stillness she hadn't glimpsed
before. It was impossible to tell if he felt the same magic she
had.

"There are eighty-nine of them."
Surreptitiously, she dabbed the tears from her eyes and sniffed. "I
learned to count right in this chair, squinting up at my stars
until I'd summed up every one."

Her papa had sworn she'd turn herself
stone-blind before learning to tally such high numbers all by
herself. But Megan had known better. And just as long as Joseph
Kearney had stayed across from her at the table, with his pipe and
his cherry tobacco and his copy of the
Weekly Arizonan
,
she'd had the courage to keep trying. And she'd succeeded in the
end.

Just as she intended to triumph over Gabriel
Winter.

Surely he couldn't remain unmoved in the
face of all this. Smiling to herself, Megan transferred her gaze
from the tin stars overhead to Gabriel.

"So you see? All I needed was a little
faith, all along." She laid aside her fan, wishing he would say
something, anything, that would reveal how her China heavens had
affected him. "And now I have it. Whenever I start to feel my faith
in life waver, I come here to Hop Kee's. Somehow just seeing all
those stars again sets everything a little bit straighter."