When The Heart Beckons (22 page)

For a split second she considered leaving
quickly, going to the hotel, and alerting Steele. But what would he
do? He’d come here, call Cobb out, and then what?

Possibly get himself killed.

Stark fear swept through her.
No
.
She couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t let Roy Steele risk his
life. Not here, not now. But it was what he did, a voice inside of
her argued, it was how he lived. It was why he had come in search
of Brett, to save him from Red Cobb, to fight Red Cobb in his
place.

But now that the moment was here, even to
save Brett, she couldn’t allow it to happen. Steele was fast, oh,
she knew he was fast, as quick and deadly as could be with his
Colt, but Red Cobb might be faster ... and then ...

She closed her eyes as a faintness washed
over her. No, she would have to handle this herself and somehow
keep Roy Steele from even knowing that Cobb was here in Silver
Junction.

She flinched as the gunfighter’s smooth hard
voice cracked like an oiled whip through the little office. “That’s
it, my friend. Send it now. I’ll wait.”

And the telegraph clerk bobbed his thin
balding head and bent swiftly over his machine.

Red Cobb turned lazily and saw her.

“Ma’am,” he said, and doffed his hat.

Annabel nodded. He was a square-jawed,
good-looking man, not quite as tall as Roy Steele, but younger,
cockier, with full lips and a snub nose, and deep-set eyes the
color of robin’s eggs. Something in his wide smile gave him a
boyish look, but there was nothing boyish in the way he was
regarding her at this moment.. Her skin crawled. The man was
stripping her buck naked right here in the telegraph office, and
with a haughty insolence that made her want to slap him.

Instead she gave him her most winsome smile,
and tried out a southern accent. “Well, sir, it surely is a nice
afternoon, isn’t it? And isn’t this the pleasantest little town?
Much nicer than some others I’ve been in recently. Why, my room
over at the hotel is ever so much prettier than the room I had in
Eagle Gulch!”

“Glad to hear it, ma’am,” he replied and
sauntered over to sit beside her, holding his hat in one smooth,
slender hand.

Repugnance filled her. He was handsome, he
was outwardly polite, and he smelled of soap and sticky hair
pomade, but there emanated from him somehow a stench of evil that
filled her with disgust. She had once thought Roy Steele cold and
immovable, but this man was of a far more despicable ilk. She
sensed cruelty in the wide false smile, and in those bright blue
eyes saw a love of death. It was all she could do not to shiver as
he turned those eyes upon her, but she managed to keep the smile
glued to her lips and kept on talking with the drawl familiar to
her since childhood.

“Maybe you can help me with something, if
you would,” she began, and hesitated prettily, waiting for his
consent.

“Sure, ma’am. Anything at all.”

He leaned in closer.

Annabel smiled dazzlingly into his eyes.
“Why, aren’t you sweet?” she exclaimed. “It’s so comforting to meet
a real gentleman!”

“How can I be of help?”

“Well, you see, I’m traveling with my aunt
and my fiancée, Mr. Everett ... er, Stevens, and we’re trying to
meet up with Everett’s dear friend, Mr. Brett McCallum ...”

His eyes glowed brighter at this and he sat
up straighter, but otherwise did not interrupt her, and Annabel
plunged on.

“... and Brett was supposed to meet us here,
but he left a message at the hotel that he had to go to Prescott
unexpectedly on some urgent business, and dear me, it is rather
tiresome to have to travel farther than one anticipated, but
Everett really must see Brett and so, I was wondering, could you
tell me how far Prescott is from Silver Junction? Should I perhaps
let Everett go on alone and wait for both of them to return here,
or is Prescott as amiable a town as Silver Junction ... at least by
western standards, which I’m afraid are not quite up to the
standards of the South, but ...”

She let her voice trail off wistfully, and
gave her shoulders a delicate little shrug as she gazed dreamily up
into Red Cobb’s intent face.

“Prescott isn’t more than fifty or sixty
miles west of here,” he said slowly. “And it’s a fine little town.
But are you sure your friend is there? I reckon you wouldn’t want
to go, all that way if you were by some chance mistaken.”

“Well, I declare, of course, I’m not
mistaken,” she exclaimed with a little trilling laugh, letting a
bit of hauteur creep into her voice. “Everett has the note Brett
left, and of course he showed it to me and Aunt Mae, and it said
Brett would meet us in Prescott and the sooner the better, unless
we cared to wait for him to return here, and it is all most
mysterious, you know, but Everett will only say that he is certain
we will understand everything when we see Brett, and of course,
Everett knows best,”

She fluttered her eyelashes. “I believe he’s
finished.”

“What?” The gunfighter regarded her blankly.
“Who?”

“The clerk.” Annabel inclined her head
toward the bespectacled little man who had risen from behind his
counter and was waiting nervously for the gunfighter to notice him.
“I believe he wants you to pay him now.”

Red Cobb nodded, glanced swiftly at the
clerk, and then swiveled his head back to stare into her eyes once
more. “Yes, indeed,” he muttered. “If you’ll excuse me, ma’am, for
only a moment ...”

Annabel tried to keep from fidgeting with
the clasp of her reticule as she waited for him to finish his
business with the clerk. When he turned back to her, she met his
gaze with a guileless smile.

“So you think Aunt Mae and I should make the
journey with Everett to find Brett?” she inquired.

“Yes, by all means.”

“Then we shall.” She beamed. “Thank you so
very much, sir, for your kind help and advice.”

“My pleasure, Miss ...”

“Rainsford. Miss Elizabeth Rainsford,” she
informed him blithely, recalling the name of one of Brett’s many
female companions in St. Louis. “But don’t let me keep you any
longer. You’ve been too kind already.”

“A pleasure, ma’am. A most distinct
pleasure.” He regarded her for another moment, a speculative gleam
in his eyes, then he turned abruptly toward the door. “Good luck to
you, Miss Rainsford.”

“And good luck to you,” she gushed sweetly.
And may you rot in hell
.

She was trembling by the time she rose to
approach the telegraph clerk, but she managed to speak smoothly
enough. “I wish to send a wire to the following address. It’s the
Stevenson Detective Agency, and if you breathe one word of this
message to anyone in this town I will personally bring Mr. Roy
Steele in here to shoot you dead. Is that understood?”

The clerk gaped at her.

“And also, I need to know to whom Mr. Cobb
sent
his
wire a few moments ago.”

“But I can’t tell you that ...”

“Oh, yes, you can! If you don’t want Roy
Steele to come in here and ask you himself, you’d
better
tell me! Well, what are you waiting for? Come on, my good man, this
is a matter of life and death!” Annabel banged her fist on the
countertop and the clerk jumped as if she’d struck him.

“Y-yes, ma’am.” He referred to a sheaf of
papers before him. “He sent the wire to Mr. Lucas Johnson. At the
Empire Hotel in St. Louis.” Hastily, the clerk seized a sheet of
writing paper and a pencil in shaking fingers. “G-go right ahead,
ma’am.”

* * *

Cobb went straight up to his room on the
second story of the Tin Horn Hotel and reread the telegraph message
that he’d received earlier that day. So, a woman investigator was
searching for Brett McCallum.
Damned interesting. And
easy
. Remembering the sugary sweetness on Miss Elizabeth
Rainsford’s pretty, lying face, he grinned.
Honey, my mama
didn’t raise no fools. Why, beating you to Master Brett will be as
easy as pissing in bed
.

On the other hand
, Cobb realized,
prowling the room with light, eager footsteps, his mind racing,
there’s another possibility that might be a heap more fun. And
it won’t delay McCallum’s death by much. So why the hell
not?

His booming laughter could he heard up and
down the hall, echoing clear through to the rafters.

When he calmed down, he lit himself a
cigarillo, grabbed his gear, and headed out to the Silver Streak
brothel on the outskirts of town. Just in case the little
investigator tried to check up on him to see if he’d bought her
story, he’d leave straight from Mattie’s place in the morning. And
make sure that anyone who asked questions about him reached a dead
end.

Cobb was pleased with the cigarillo, and
with his own little plan. This job would be over right soon now,
and he’d managed to figure out how to give himself a fine little
bonus. Just the thought of it, and of that pretty red-haired
investigator, put him in the mood to celebrate.

* * *

Pearly lavender dusk limned the distant
mountaintops as Annabel made her way back to the hotel. Her mind
spun with various questions and possibilities. Who in the world was
this Lucas Johnson, and why had he hired Red Cobb to kill
Brett?

At least she had been able to alert Mr.
Stevenson so that he could investigate Johnson—and inform Ross
McCallum what she’d discovered. It wasn’t a bad piece of work, but
she didn’t have time to congratulate herself. She was too busy
wondering if Cobb had already left for Prescott, or if he was
waiting until morning. The latter notion chilled her to the bone.
At all costs she must keep Roy Steele from crossing paths with Cobb
tonight. If she had indeed succeeded in throwing Cobb off Brett’s
trail, there might never be occasion for the two men to meet.
They’d never have to find out who was faster, who would remain
standing, breathing, while the other one died in the street. She
and Steele would locate Brett while Cobb was on a wild-goose chase
in Prescott, and by the time the gunfighter realized what had
happened they could all be headed out of New Mexico, and she and
Brett could be on their way home—with Red Cobb too far behind to
catch them.

“Been waiting for you. Where’ve you
been?”

Annabel stared guiltily at Roy Steele as he
rose from the single chair in the lobby to greet her. Dear Lord, he
looked handsome. She was struck once again by the rugged charisma
of his good looks, by a powerfully virile masculine beauty that had
much less to do with perfect, even features than it had to do with
iron strength and hard experience. A combination of competence and
tough resourcefulness was reflected in the rough, handsome planes
of his face. Why, it burned right out of his onyx eyes, seeming to
graze her with a lightning-bolt slash of fire. Clad in a. light
blue linen shirt and dark trousers which accentuated his powerful
physique, with his gun belt as always slung low across his lean
hips, he looked arrogantly nonchalant, but ready for anything—even
a duel with Red Cobb. She quaked beneath his piercing eyes,
convinced that Steele could see straight through to her soul if he
wanted to, and that was most disconcerting, especially under the
circumstances.

“I ... I was ... just ...”

He frowned as the bright flush stole into
her cheeks.
You were just up to no good
, he decided for
himself, and wondered what the hell she’d been doing now.

You’ve got a real sneaky side to you,
Miss Annabel Brannigan, which I don’t much like
. In fact he
hated it because it meant he couldn’t trust her. And he’d had his
trust betrayed enough in the past to last a lifetime. But he did
like the way she looked in that dress. Sweet, fresh, lovely as a
mountain flower, and she smelled like flowers too. Lilacs, maybe
...

He jerked himself back from the pleasant
stupor of her looks and scent. The lady was about to tell him a
lie, a whopper. He knew by the way she was moistening her lips
...

“I had a sudden urge to buy myself a bonnet
to match this dress.” There was that winning smile and that pretty
shrug of those slender shoulders of hers. “The one I had was quite
crushed in my carpetbag—I believe Aunt Gertie’s diary was pressed
down upon it, and the flowers were ruined. Brett does love me in
bonnets with ribbons and flowers.”

“So where is it?” he asked, just for the
hell of it.

“What?”

“The bonnet.”

“Oh. I couldn’t find one.” She rushed on.
“There isn’t a millinery in town ...” She prayed this was true.
“And the mercantile had nothing like what I had in mind—you know
how sometimes one pictures a certain item and nothing else will do
...”

“Right.” He took her arm. “Let’s eat.”

“Oh, no, we can’t.”

There were a half a dozen people eating in
the Last Chance dining room, and the smell of boiled ham and roast
venison and some kind of rich soup filled the air with an aroma
which made her stomach ache. She was famished, and no doubt Steele
was too. It had been considerate of him to wait for her, and he had
cleaned himself up immaculately, too, she noted, eyeing his fresh
shave and neatly brushed black hair, and the shine on his boots,
but if they ate down here in the dining room, Red Cobb just might
walk in that door for his evening meal, and then all of her careful
plans would be ruined. And Roy Steele would surely end up outside
in the street, facing Cobb, going for his gun ...

She grabbed his shirtfront. “I must talk to
you. Alone. Privately. In my room.”

He studied the voluptuous curve of her
parted lips. She was so close to him that the lilac scent of her
filled his nostrils with sweetness. “Ahuh. Can’t it wait until
after supper?”

“No, it can’t. It’s urgent, Steele. Private.
We’ll order a tray sent up and eat there.” Her eyes lit and glowed
more gray than green as she offered forth this suggestion. “Wait
here. I’ll arrange everything.”