“Fella at the bank brought this over. He figured I’d see you before you made a trip over there.” The sheriff delivered the bad news in the form of a telegram from the Fort Worth sheriff. “Payment to Beauregard voided. Prisoner released.”
Miri felt ill. She’d devoted all summer to the hunt, passing on a lot of easier quarry for the bigger prize Jackson offered. Worse yet, she’d invested funds in the butler’s disguise. Instead of being flush with money at year’s end, she was nearly broke with no way to recoup her loss other than immediately hitting the trail again.
“Let me take a look at what’s in your stack of posters, Sheriff Potter.” She hid her distress, playing it off as just another one of the ups and downs of bounty hunting.
But he steered her to a chair and handed her a cup of coffee. She wanted to howl in disbelief. She pulled out the promissory note and read it again. Everything had been fine up to the time she’d left.
There had been no doubt in her mind that she’d nabbed the right man. Her prisoner was the counterfeiter. Now he was loose again. She sighed and set the cup down.
Hiram picked it up and put it back in her hand. “One night won’t make a difference,” he told her. It would and they both knew it. Jackson would be long gone and wearing a new identity when he surfaced again.
“I guess I have some repairs I could do.” She had a crumpled white shirt with a button missing. “Might you have some thread and a needle?”
Hiram seemed glad she was staying and hustled to get the sewing tools. “I’ve only got this white spool of thread,” he apologized.
“Guess my luck is improving already because that’s just what I need.” She smiled gamely, glad he didn’t ask what had happened to the button.
“The jail’s empty and no one’s using the cots. Stay here tonight if you want. Unless someone has a prisoner to deliver, and that’s not likely, you should be undisturbed until morning. If someone wants me, I’ll be at the hotel.”
He gave her the cell keys and left. She barred the door and removed the layers of clothing she wore, using the pail of water in the corner to wash up before she brushed off Calvin’s Hutchinson suit and sewed on the button Deacon had cut from the shirt.
“There, good as new,” she told it and patted the front. Maybe she could sell the suit at a dry-goods store. It had cost too much to let it lay fallow.
She washed the white shirt, trying not to remember why she loved it and why it was practical to sell it with the suit. By the time she’d hung up her laundry, Miri was bone tired. She’d been on strict mental alert for weeks. Her time at the Pleasure Dome had been particularly difficult since Calvin had been a new identity for her to master.
She sighed. At least the role of Calvin had been a change. She’d studied the clerk at Osgood’s when she’d purchased her suit and copied his accent and mannerisms. It had worked and voila, she had another character in her repertoire.
Miri’s knack for mimicking voices and such came in real handy. She admitted that she’d played Beauregard so often, had she not caught a glimpse of Deacon McCallister occasionally, the unused feminine part of her would have dried up and blown away on the Texas wind.
Pensively Miri brushed the snarls from her hair, thinking about what she’d done with the other bounty hunter. A wry grin twisted her lips.
I tricked him into having carnal relations with me, that’s what I did.
Shame scorched her cheeks as she admitted that without chicanery she’d never have gotten to experience his touch.
Well then, I’m glad I cheated,
she thought grimly. Growing up half wild and on her own the way she had, she’d kept her eye out for males of interest, figuring that someday she’d find one who suited her. When she’d clapped eyes on the red-haired bounty hunter the first time she’d darn near swooned.
Wearing the shirt she’d earlier stolen from him, Miri lay down on the cot. All day she’d focused on work, waiting for bedtime to savor her previous night’s experience. Now that she could, her mind tiptoed around the events, not sure which to explore first.
He said my skin felt like silk.
She snorted at that idea, holding her rough, calloused hand in front of her eyes as evidence of Deacon’s mistake.
Miri closed her eyes and slid her hands under his shirt and up her ribs to cup her breasts. Her lips curved in a smile, remembering the way Deacon’s chest hair had tickled her nipples. They ached, sore from his lusty attentions.
She’d never thought of her breasts as anything but a nuisance. Caressing them as if for the first time, Miri admitted she was almost proud of the plump mounds now that she knew Deacon like them.
He kissed and suckled
’
em somethin’ fierce.
Miri caught one stiff bud between finger and thumb and squeezed the pebbled end, wincing at the pain that was both good and bad. Hastily she wet her finger before circling the taut peak with liquid heat. Remembering the feel of his mouth, her back arched and she thrust her breasts high as if reaching for his pleasure again.
Dammit, I’m lying on the jail cot aching with want for him all over again.
Miri groaned, the sound a reminder of the previous night’s grunts and moans and sighs.
She’d thought having her way with Deacon once would end her silly yearnings. Instead, she curled in misery, staring at the bars on the window and knowing that she’d had her taste and it wouldn’t happen again.
He wanted me.
She knew he had from the way his manhood had stood stiff and ready.
The idea excited her so much her hand clenched as if closing around his engorged erection.
Her other hand drifted to her belly, feeling again the pressure of his hard body rubbing against hers. Need clawed in her chest, making it difficult to breathe as she pictured their naked lengths tangled together. Thinking about the night before was a mistake. Heat coiled in her womb and her nerves tightened against frustrated desire.
She relented and tried to ease her torment. Tentatively she slid a finger down the crease separating the lips of her sex. Her feminine folds were drenched in liquid at the thought of having Deacon McCallister again. She cupped one of her breasts, pinching the nipple until a whimper of pleasure escaped her lips.
She rotated her finger, pressing on the nubbin of nerves at her apex and sending tingles of sensation skittering up her spine. Her womb flexed, silently asking to be filled again. Her ministrations weren’t enough. She rubbed the sensitive knot the way Deacon had and squeezed her nipple even harder.
Miri pictured her hands sliding through Deacon’s pelt as he leaned above her. She tucked her chin beneath the shirt collar, burying her nose in the fabric to add his scent to her memory, wishing she could preserve the smell forever.
He put his hand under my rump and lifted me.
Her hips came off the cot and followed the bliss her fingers offered. Her pelvis strained upward, thrusting against her own hand until her body clenched and shuddered in release. Collapsed, sweaty and sated after the experience, she felt foolish. Embarrassed at her actions, Miri fell back on a Beauregard story.
“I ’spect that was what the nuns warned us fellers about.” She snorted at her own joke. Though remembering made her grin, she had to be her own audience since she had no one to share the memory with.
At one of the stops on her way to Texas, she’d been playing a male when she attended a Louisiana school run by nuns. The good women had herded the schoolboys to a meeting with the priest and Miri, dressed as Beau, had been included when the nuns instituted the roundup. The priest had explained to the boys that touching their male organs for any reason but pissing was wrong.
He’d stared at them all real hard and said if they’d been frigging themselves, when they went to confession they needed to apologize to God and not do it anymore.
The nuns had been more direct. They’d claimed when boys touched themselves for pleasure, hair grew on their palms. Silly as Miri had thought that warning, after her current experience with carnal pleasure, she checked her hands for signs of fur.
By the slant of the moon, she could tell it was well past midnight and she was still awake, wasting her time whining. She was hungry and she wanted coffee. There wasn’t any food to be had, but Hiram had coffee beans in a can.
She swung to her feet and went to the bucket, washing before smoothing the wrinkles from Deacon’s shirt.
“Damn,” she muttered, staring at the dirty water and weighed the pros and cons of going to the town well for clean.
Might as well lock up here, drop the key to the jail off at the hotel where Hiram is staying and be on my way.
But another part of her was so bone-weary she felt incapable of moving from the sheriff’s office back to the outlaw trail.
A loud hammering on the door interrupted her indecision. Miri tucked her hair up high before pulling on her shaggy brown wig. Quickly she donned her buckskin pants and let Deacon’s shirttails hang long as she padded to the door, unbarring it and swinging it open. And there he was.
“Deacon,” she managed to drawl without stammering. “Kinda early in the day for a visit.” Her spirits moments before had been lower than a dog’s belly, but suddenly they soared. She felt her lips curve into a playful grin that turned into a scowl when he glared at her.
“I figured I’d find you here,” he growled.
“I’m playing deputy for Hiram tonight. What’s it to you?” She opened the door and then, suddenly aware that she was bareheaded and revealing way too much of Beau’s features, she grabbed her hat off Hiram’s desk and clapped it on her head.
She needn’t have worried. He wasn’t looking at her. He’d crossed to where she’d left Calvin’s butlering suit. And he was staring at the half-dry ruffled shirt hanging beside it.
It was difficult keeping her expression innocent since the last time he’d seen the shirt, she’d been wearing it and other than that had been naked.
“Hiram’s at the hotel,” she volunteered. “I’ll go get him.” She was still sock footed and planned to flee sans boots. She hadn’t made it through the door when Deacon stopped her.
“Hold up there. I need to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Any coffee makings?” He walked away from the suit and looked around hopefully.
“What do you want to talk to me about?”
“First off, thanks again for saving my life.” Her smile hadn’t completely formed when he added, “Second, what in hell are you doing risking your friend’s life? Twice now you’ve sent her into danger. Dammit, Beauregard, do you have any idea what could have happened to her in Pettigrew’s camp?”
“She earned her share of the payout same as you. I don’t think my business with Miri is any business of yours. As a matter of fact, she was helping me catch another wanted when she ran into you.”
“Ned Jackson.”
“Yep. So how do you know about him?”
“Suppose I could tell you where to find him again?”
Miri felt the blood in her veins chill. Deacon’s smug expression didn’t bode well. Outrage swelled in her chest.
“If you know where he is, then you got him out of the Fort Worth jail. Why would you do that? He’s worth fifteen hundred dollars to me.”
“He’s worth a hell of a lot more than that if we can find the plates being used to print the fake money. I’ve talked to the government men. Jackson’s small potatoes compared to the real quarry.”
Miri grabbed the bucket, glad to get out of the office and away from Deacon. She had to resist the temptation to hit him in the head with the pail. She took her time at the town pump, reminding herself that in spite of his arrogance and high-handed manner, he’d done her more than one favor.
Criminy. I saved his life. That ought to count for something.
Plus, he was the man who had become her lover even if he didn’t know it.
Deacon lounged in the sheriff’s office doorway, and she could feel his gaze on her when she returned with the water. Her pulse fluttered wildly.
Ketchum trotted up and butted her free hand so she would scratch his head. She quit what she was doing, set the bucket on the boardwalk and grabbed her wolf around the neck.
“You mangy beast, did you check on Possum this morning?” Ketchum rumbled a mock growl before licking her chin. She rubbed her face against his fur, scratched behind his ears and then stood.
“Better rest up for the hunt, buddy. Thanks to the no-account thieving varmint blocking the sheriff’s door, we’ll be on the trail again today.”
Done with his morning greeting, Ketchum disappeared into the alley, leaving Miri alone in the shadow but for Deacon. He stood in the doorway watching her.
“How old are you, kid?”
“Old enough to recognize shenanigans when I see ’em,” she answered, warming up to her complaint. Now that Deacon was here, her distress had been replaced with a mix of anger and relief. “I left my prisoner locked up in the Fort Worth jail for the US marshal to certify. Sheriff Tully turned Ned loose. Now you claim you know where Ned is, which means you stole my catch and stashed him somewhere. Some things appear to be a mite out of kilter in this picture.”
Miri stopped in front of him, waiting for him to move rather than squeeze by him in the narrow doorway. Aside from Hiram, he was one of the few people significantly taller than her. She knew her disguise was good from the front and back, but from the top she wasn’t so confident. Nor up close if she had to brush against him to get by.