Lawman (33 page)

"Not like this," she said.

"Then how?"

He watched her withdraw her hands and step
back, his expression filled with watchful regret. Because she'd
gone away from his arms? Or because she hadn't yet confided in
him?

"I can't think with your hands on me," she
murmured, turning her back to him while she stared at the fire's
glowing embers. "I can't think with you kissing me, and saying such
things to me!"

"Then I'll say nothing." Gabriel's voice
rumbled toward her, surrounding her with its beloved depth and
warmth and, amazingly, its affection. "As for the rest...if you
don't want me touching you, you'll have to leave me. Leave this
room, if you choose to, and I won't follow. But if you stay, I
can't promise not to touch you. I can't stop."

Awestruck, shaky, Megan faced him. "Do you
mean that?"

A rare, wonderful smile lit his face. "It's
stubborn you are, Meg. I've already told you that I always speak
the truth."

Her resistance weakened, melted partway
beneath the beautiful sincerity of Gabriel's smile. For as long as
she could remember, Megan had envisioned the moment when just such
an expression might be directed at her. Her imagination, blossoming
with the help of all her French novels and the tales Addie told her
of fair maidens and the knights who loved them, had conjured up
many versions of it.

None had filled her heart the way Gabriel's
did now.

Even as it gladdened her, it piqued her
curiosity about the man who had given it. She knew so little about
him.

"If I remember aright," Megan said, "I still
have two questions to claim." Thoughtfully, she folded her arms and
cupped her elbows in her palms, tapping her fingers against her arm
while she decided how best to phrase them. "And you have two truths
to give. I'll tell you about my mother—after you tell me this: How
did you come to be a Pinkerton agent?"

The fierce angles of his face hardened
beneath a shock—and a reluctance to speak—that was obvious. Shoving
his hand through his dark hair, Gabriel walked to the fireplace and
sat on his haunches beside the stack of mesquite logs piled there.
Like a man with nothing but leisure, he took his time over choosing
one for the fire.

"We have a bargain," she reminded, hurt that
he was still so unwilling to confide in her. "Two questions,
remember?"

"I didn't expect them to be about me."

"Perhaps the next one won't be."

"Fair enough." Keeping his face turned
toward the fire, Gabriel peeled away a strip of thin mesquite bark.
He snapped off a dried twig, and turned it between his fingers as
he spoke.

"I came to be a Pinkerton agent because I
was good at it, plain and simple," he said. "I worked my first case
when I was sixteen, and signed on as a field operative four years
later."

Megan waited. She imagined Gabriel Winter as
a youth, with his same dark hair and cocky smile. He'd possessed
that same sense of bravado all young men seemed to, she felt
sure—and the beginnings of the solid, implacable presence that was
so much a part of him now. He'd probably been not quite so tall,
not quite so muscular, but determined all the same. She pictured a
leaner, rangier Gabriel, saddling up to ride proudly with the
Pinkertons for the first time, and smiled over the image.

"Wasn't your family worried about you?" she
asked. "Sixteen seems awfully young."

"Not when you're doing the work of a man."
He looked up. "I didn't feel young then."

His expression suggested that maybe he never
had, and a surge of empathy twisted inside Megan. She wanted to go
to him, to hold him in her arms and comfort him as he had comforted
her. The steely set of Gabriel's jaw warned her to stay where she
was.

He snapped the twig in half, then threw both
ends into the fire's embers. "It's hard to feel young when you're
hunting your father down, night after night. Searching alleyways.
Looking down into the ragged faces you pass, knowing any one of
them could be him. Knowing you might be too late."

"Too late for what?"

Not answering, Gabriel added a log to the
fire, then wielded the poker to urge the embers into new flames.
When he returned the heavy iron to its place and turned to her at
last, his gaze had never seemed more startlingly blue. Or more
regretful.

"Did you know that if you stay up long
enough, you stop being tired?" he asked, tilting his mouth in an
odd smile. "When you leave exhaustion behind, the sounds around you
all blur, and everything passes more slowly, but the colors are
beautiful. They take on a new brilliance. It's incredible."

He scrubbed his hand over his face, seeming
passing weary right now, and then twisted his lips with an irony it
pained her to see.

"Those colors were the best part of those
days, days when my mother sent me out to find my father. She would
beg me to bring him home—with luck, before sunrise struck. She
didn't want our neighbors to look up from their morning newspapers
and see Timothy Winter singing his way home from the opium dens
across town."

Opium
. Had his father been an addict,
then? Her image of Gabriel as a brash youth blurred, merging with
another, more hurtful reality. A boy wandering alone in the worst
parts of town, growing increasingly desperate as dawn streaked over
the slumped, drug-rotten bodies of the men whose faces he hadn't
yet examined. A boy expecting to find his father among them.

"Oh, Gabriel...."

His face harsh, he turned again toward the
fire. "You didn't want my pity. I don't want yours, either.
Sometimes it took till the city was waking, but I never went home
empty-handed.
I always found him
."

Just as he'd always found his Pinkerton
suspects, Megan realized. Just as he'd always brought in his man,
and meant to bring in her father, as well. She hadn't known
Gabriel's past was threaded so deeply into the man he was today.
Knowing it now only made her all the sadder.

"Your mother must have been very grateful to
you," she said softly. "Not even fully grown, yet you protected
your whole family."

Gabriel stared at her, suspicion evident in
his hard-set face. He said nothing.

"It was brave, Gabriel," she went on,
feeling tears tug at her voice. "It was an act of love."

"It was—" His voice caught, then
strengthened. "It was what I was good at. Nothing more. Because of
it, I met Tom McMarlin, and I hired on with the Pinkertons a few
years later, and my life went forward past the damned stink of
opium pipes and the hollow-eyed ghosts who held them."

"It was the path to a position to you?"

He nodded, stubbornly.

"It was more," Megan insisted, unable to
stand apart from him any longer. She went to the hearth rug and
knelt beside him, taking his big hands in hers with twice the
urgency with which he'd held her before. "So much more! It was your
way of taking care of your family—even your father—when they needed
you."

Shaking his head slightly, he began to pull
away, sliding the callous-roughened length of his hands through
hers. Megan tightened her grasp, looking at him more closely. He
would not retreat from her now. He would not. With a lurch of
emotion as painful as any she'd experienced, she recognized the
expression on his shadowy face.

Shame.

Sweet heaven, how she'd felt it herself.

Before she could speak, Gabriel drew a
breath and spoke quickly. Harshly. "McMarlin was working on a case
involving a man who visited some of the same places my father did.
Another addict, and a cracksman. I was at that den so often. Nobody
noticed me listening to him make plans to sell his boodle around
town. Nobody saw me pass on the information to McMarlin. Nobody
could pinpoint me when the Pinkertons slapped the hoister in irons
a week later and finished their case."

He stared into the fire. "Nobody was
surprised when I signed on with the agency a few years later, after
my father had passed away."

After his mother had needed his constant
help no longer, Megan thought. Even then, he had put his family
first.

She stroked his knuckles with her thumb,
willing him to look at her again. He did not. "Nobody could blame
you for caring for the people you love, Gabriel. It's nothing to be
ashamed of."

His fingers twisted, clamping hard on hers.
"You asked me how I became an agent." Suddenly, his gaze bored into
hers, and she wished mightily to call back her earlier desire to
have him look at her. "That's what I'm telling you."

"But I can hear so much more!" Her heart
near to overflowing with understanding, and with a kind of aching
gladness that he'd felt close enough to share his past with her,
Megan worked her hand free and caressed his cheek. "You have a
loyalty that's bone-deep, Gabriel. You were good at finding your
father because you needed to do it. For him. For your mother. Even
for you."

"No. I found him because I was good at it,"
he insisted, his voice deepened and gritty. "I kept disgrace off my
family's necks. I learned how, and I did it. Night after night. It
taught me well—and then it trapped me."

"Trapped you?"

His gaze burned her, filled with an anguish
she'd never expected. "Like the shackles I always carry. This work
is all I've ever been suited for. All I've ever known. And it came
from a damnably poor part of me."

"Listen to me." Fiercely, Megan cupped his
face in her hands. She stared into his unyielding features and
wished she could push a bit of her belief into him. "Whatever your
father was," she said, "it did not lessen you to help him. Dear
God, I should know that well enough myself! And if you're trapped
in your work as an agent, then leave it behind. Walk away, and be
happy."

"Ahhh, Meg."

With red-rimmed eyes, Gabriel seemed to
drink in the sight of her. His hands raised to her shoulders,
stroking gently. She had the odd sense his caress was not the kind
of beginning she'd felt before, but rather a goodbye. The notion
filled her with panic.

"Once I thought I could walk away from the
Pinkertons. Make a new life. I meant for this to be my last case."
He shook his head, then briefly closed his eyes. "It will be my
last case. But the life I wanted is not what I thought it was. And
when this case is over, the future I need will be lost to me.
Forever."

Inexplicably, Gabriel eased her closer. He
touched his lips to hers in a kiss so heartbreakingly sweet, she
wondered at its cause. Then, with a sound of frustration, he thrust
himself away from her.

"The future is never lost if you want it bad
enough!" Megan cried stubbornly. "It's always there, waiting for
you to take it. All you have to do is believe."

A strangled laugh escaped him. Gabriel shook
his head, letting the firelight play over his face. She glimpsed
the sheen of tears in his eyes when he moved, and felt her heart
near stop with surprise.

"No amount of believing is enough to make
this right," he said. "In this, cut-tin stars can't make it so.
Neither can you."

"I can. Hard work and determination can get
me whatever I want. It always has in the past."

"It won't this time." His tone was final.
Bleak. "You want something that's not yours to take."

What did he think she wanted? The means to
end the case against her papa? Suddenly, it seemed likely to Megan
that she could have it—or at least that she might persuade the
Pinkerton man to give up his search. He'd already told her how he
wanted to put his work behind him. Would it hurt to encourage
Gabriel to stop working as an operative now, rather than later?

A chill swept through her at the realization
of what she contemplated. It would be ruthless, to be sure, to use
Gabriel's unhappiness with his work as the means to keep her papa
free.

Doubtless, it might also prove
effective.

Megan bit her lip and gazed across the
whisper of space dividing them. In the stillness of their shared
room, Gabriel seemed suddenly quieter than before. It was almost as
though he'd guessed the trap his revelations might lead him to—and
had decided to end them now. If she was to act, she had to do it
quickly.

She lay her hand on his, her thoughts filled
with urgings to do what she must, to make the Pinkerton man stop
his search by whatever means she could. Loyalty to her papa
demanded it. The security of her dressmaker's shop dream nigh
required it. And yet...as Megan looked into his rugged face and his
unaccountably despairing expression, she found that she could
not.

From someplace inside her, she found the
strength to hold the balance she'd struck for just a little longer.
The will to follow her heart and take a chance on the wintery man
who had laid claim to it.

The faith to believe there might still be
another path to choose.

"My future is at risk here, as well," Megan
said, thinking both of her father and her own dreams of independent
security. "You don't know by how much."

"I do know." Gabriel looked up. At the same
time, his hand squeezed hers gently. "I know it will hurt you to
have your father taken. I'm sorry for it. If I could change
it—"

"You could! Just give—"

"No. If it wasn't me, t'would be another
operative to find him, Meg. There are many on this case."

Curious, however morbid it was to be so, she
asked, "Is there a great reward, then? For the return of the ten
thousand dollars taken from the express?"

He shrugged. "There may be. As Pinkerton
agents, my men aren't allowed to claim it. Neither am I. But
there's a powerful client to be satisfied at the end of it, and the
agency's reputation to uphold."

Not to mention Gabriel's own
reputation
, Megan knew.

"It's the reason I was sent here at all,"
Gabriel went on. "The client wasn't happy with McMarlin's work on
the case, and demanded more."