Chasing Rainbows (43 page)

“I thought you were cleaned out.”

“I was, but the boss moved up our payday. The pay wagon’s coming through on Wednesday instead of next Friday. Our regular drivers quit, and there’s just one greenhorn kid dumb enough to take on the route. Boss thought if he mixed up the payday, it might give that poor kid a fightin’ chance to make it through Drifter’s Gap on his own.”

There it was. The trap neatly sprung, as relaxed and casual as if they had rehearsed it for days.

“Payday’s still a few days off,” Jake said. “Why don’t you come back then?”

“Are you saying my marker’s no good?”

Jake shrugged coolly. “It’s not my house. Why don’t you ask the lady?”

“All right.” Porter directed his gaze toward Annie. “What do you say, little lady? Will you accept my marker until Wednesday?”

Annie glanced up from the ledgers. “What?” she asked, her voice distracted. “Your marker? If it’s all right with Jake, I guess it’s all right with me.”

“Fine, then.” Porter clasped his hands together and smiled. “I’m in the mood for a little seven-card stud. Meet you inside, Moran.” With that, he turned and strode out of the lobby.

Jake let out his breath in a low rush as the tension he had held inside seemed to evaporate from his body. Annie had listened to — no, tolerated — the interruption of their conversation with such complete disinterest that Jake was certain he had been right all along. Annabel Lee Foster was not carrying information back to the Mundy boys. He’d stake his life on it.

Forty-eight hours later, he was glad he hadn’t actually made that bet.

Late Tuesday afternoon, one of Walter’s deputies delivered a message to Jake at the Bella Luna that proved him wrong.
Bait taken. Members of gang spotted near Drifter’s Gap, Looks like our friends are preparing to meet us tomorrow morning. Want to come along for the ride? W.

Tuesday morning, rabbits dug up Annie’s newly planted garden, two pies were burned to a crisp, a bucket of tar used for patching the roof spilled on the front porch, and the reverend’s wife dropped by for her first official social call. Despite the inconvenience the accidents caused, at least Annie was somewhat reassured by the knowledge that they were truly just accidents, with no maliciousness behind them. Snakeskin Garvey was gone for good.

Tuesday afternoon, Foster’s Hotel booked its first real group of guests. The stage from Albuquerque to Denver City lost a wheel just outside of town. The stage’s six passengers and two drivers straggled in tired, hungry, and cold. Annie immediately set about getting them fed and settled in. Tuesday night, four drunks showed up, firing their pistols and loudly demanding their favorite girls. She and Dora dispatched them with a few blasts from Dora’s buffalo gun, then spent thirty minutes calming their ruffled guests and coaxing them back to bed.

By the time Annie made it to her own bedchamber, it was nearly midnight. As she undressed and prepared for bed, she realized that she had forgotten Peyton VanEste once again. The poor man had been waiting for days for his interview, and she had repeatedly put him off. Tomorrow, she swore, sinking into bed. She would give him his interview tomorrow.

For the past few weeks, Annie had been too exhausted to dream, but that night, dreams came anyway, despite her fatigue. Almost as soon as her head hit the pillow, images of Pete and the gang sprang to life in her mind. She saw Pete as a young boy, running through snow-covered woods with a shotgun in his hands, blasting away at squirrels and rabbits. She dreamed of Diego teaching her the finer points of swearing in Spanish. She saw Pete and the boys, their bodies jerking under a fusillade of bullets as the men within the cargo train they were about to rob opened fire on them instead.

Although she had played that ghastly scene over and over in her mind, this time there was a twist. Instead of dying, Pete rose from the ground, his body bloodied and torn but not dead. He moved slowly toward her, his hands outstretched, his mouth gaping open with shock and pain.

Annie gasped and bolted upright, blinking into the darkness. To her horror, the nightmare didn’t end. In the hazy interval between dream and reality, the figure did not fade away. Instead the man silhouetted in her chamber doorway moved closer. At the foot of her bed, Cat transformed herself from a tightly curled ball of white fluff into a tiny but ferocious beast, her back arched, her fur standing straight up. She hissed and extended one sharp claw toward the intruder.

Annie’s eyes darted around the room for her guns, only to realize that she had tucked them neatly away into a dresser drawer. The figure moved closer. “Pete?” she whispered, clutching her sheet tightly against her chest. The name was torn from her throat as terror welled up within her.

“Sorry to disappoint you, darlin’.”

“Jake.” Annie let out her breath in a rush and let the sheet slip through her fingers.

“You were expecting someone else?” he drawled.

She shook her head, trying to banish the fragments of her dream from her mind. “I thought you were Pete.”

“Really? I thought Pete was dead.”

“He was. He is.” Annie gave a feeble laugh. “It was a nightmare, that’s all. I thought you were Pete’s ghost.”

“Ah. The ghost of Pete Mundy. Funny how he keeps haunting us.” Jake moved farther into the room and closed the door behind him. “I wonder how many more times we’ll have to kill him before he has the courtesy to remain dead.”

A full moon hung in the sky, filling the room with silver beams of light. Annie studied Jake in the shadowy darkness. He was attired in his fancy gambling duds. He wore a finely tailored black jacket, slim black pants, and a snowy-white linen shirt. A pang of yearning and nostalgia tore through her at the sight of him. Even his expression seemed oddly compelling. She saw desire, regret, compassion, and resolve etched on his finely chiseled, beautiful features..

“Bad night at the saloon?”

“Not particularly.” He moved forward, unbuckled his gun belt, and set his guns on her small nightstand. Then he stepped closer to her, stopping only inches away from her bed. Annie looked up into his face, flustered and excited, dwarfed by his presence.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Taking off my guns.”

“I can see that. I meant, what are you doing here?”

“Do you want me to leave, Annie?” His voice flowed over her skin like satin, sending a shiver of longing and expectation along her spine.

“That depends,” she replied breathlessly. “What are your intentions, Jake?”

He smiled in that lazy way of his. “My intentions? Why, they’re as black as my soul, darlin’.”

The bedsprings groaned, and the feather mattress sank beneath his weight as he sat down beside her. He took off his hat and tossed it on the table with his guns, then slipped off his boots. He turned to her, studying her intently. Annie felt suddenly self-conscious beneath the heat of his gaze. She was sleepy-eyed, her hair loose and slipping around her shoulders. She was dressed in nothing but a soft cotton camisole and a pair of lacy drawers.

He reached for her and gently smoothed her hair back over her shoulders. “You’re wearing that perfume I gave you, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I like it.”

“So do I.”

“How does Pete like it?”

Annie stiffened. “I told you, that was just a dream.”

“Of course.” A sardonic smile touched his lips. He reached forward and fingered the pink satin strap of her camisole. “This is quite pretty, Annie.”

“Thank you. You gave it to me.”

He stopped her words by brushing his fingers gently along the column of her throat. “You have such a lovely neck, darlin’. So pure and white, so delicate. The rope scars have nearly faded now. It would be a shame to mar it again.”

Annie pulled back, frowning. “What are you talking about, Jake?”

“Just reminding you what happened the last time you were involved with the gang.”

“I don’t need a reminder.”

Jake met her gaze, his eyes as cold and hard as steel. “Good.”

She tilted her chin, anger beginning to churn inside her. “Why are you here, Jake?” she demanded.

Silence. Endless, undying silence. Finally, “Because I wasn’t strong enough to stay away any longer.”

Jake’s words tore through her. It was exactly what she had dreamed of hearing — an open admission that he was as incapable of ignoring what was between them as she was. Jake Moran was driven by the same demons, the same yearning, the same desire.

“I’m glad,” she said.

His gaze burned into hers. He brought his hand toward her once again, this time to lightly stroke her cheek. “’I was a child and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea; but we loved with a love which was more than love — I and my Annabel Lee.’”

She knew he was only reciting the lines and not referring directly to her. But her pulse surged nonetheless, thrilled at hearing the words. For one brief moment, she let herself imagine that perhaps, in some deep, remote corner of his heart, Jake Moran might feel for her the way she felt for him. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” she ventured shakily. “The poem, I mean.”

He continued, with a look of almost perverse satisfaction, “‘The angels, not half so happy in heaven, went envying her and me — Yes! — that was the reason (as all men know, in this kingdom by the sea) that the wind came out of the cloud by night, chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.’”

Annie shook her head. “It doesn’t have to end that way.”

“Really? It does every time I’ve read it.”

“You’re always so dark. Like it’s all gonna end.”

He lifted his hand and softly, almost reverently, brushed his fingers along the length of her collarbone. “Because it always does, darlin’.”

Her breath caught in her throat. He had come to tell her good-bye. Annie stared at him in blank disbelief, letting his words sink in. She had heard about being heartbroken. She had even spent some time imagining what it must feel like. She expected a sharp, piercing ache in her chest — but the truth of the matter was, her heart felt just fine. What she noticed was a funny, sick feeling in her stomach; her lungs felt suddenly closed off, and a loud roar filled her ears. Then a gradual, almost soothing numbness spread through her limbs. She thought she might start to shake or cry, but she did neither one. Instead she just sat there like someone had picked her up and put her in a gray, foggy mist, where nothing would ever be the same again.

Somehow she managed to speak. “It doesn’t have to end at all.”

A small, sad smile curved Jake’s lips. “Everything ends.”

Annie couldn’t hold back the torrent of words and emotions that flooded through her. “Maybe you could stay, Jake. Together we could make a go of this place, I just know it. We’ll build this into a grand hotel, the grandest in the territory. You’re already making money in the saloon. It’ll just take a few more months, like you said earlier. We can make it work, I know we can.” She took a deep breath, then continued urgently, “I know I shouldn’t ask it of you, I know it ain’t ladylike and proper, but the hell with what’s ladylike and proper. I want you to stay, Jake.”

His gaze drifted over her like smoke. “It’s not that easy.”

“Nothing worth having ever comes easy. I’m not a good woman, Jake. If I was, I wouldn’t be here. But I am strong, and so are you. If we walk away from each other now, I don’t know which of us will regret it more. I’m willing to make mistakes — Lord knows I’ve already made plenty. But I won’t live my life with regrets.”

She shook her head, frantically searching for the right words. “I can’t define what was between us, but sometimes, when you touched me, it felt like there was magic in the world. It felt like God himself was smiling down on us, giving us a gift that was rarer than gold. There are people who live their lives wishing for ten minutes of what we had. Seems to me it would be a mighty fool thing to throw all that away.”

He studied her for a long, unending minute. “You don’t make it easy for a man to walk away from you.”

“Good, because I’m not trying to.”

Jake lifted a stray strand of hair off her neck and played with it between his fingers, then he met her eyes with his. “My brave, stubborn little Annabel Lee. I don’t know you at all, do I?”

“I’m not that complicated.”

“Oh, yes you are, darlin’, yes you are.”

“I don’t feel complicated,” she whispered hoarsely. “I feel naked when I’m near you, Jake. Like you can see right through me. I feel more exposed and vulnerable than I ever have in my life.”

“Do you know how I feel?”

Her eyes locked on his. “Show me.”

Jake let out a sound that was half moan, half growl. “Jesus, Annie.” He drew her tightly to him and reverently ran his fingers through the shiny gold tresses of her hair. Then he leaned forward and pressed his lips to the hollow of her neck. He kissed her lips, her hair, her mouth, her breasts, and her face.

But despite the urgency that seemed to overtake both of them, Annie couldn’t help but feel that something was missing. They were strangers in spite of their intimacy. Their passion seemed tinged with unspoken anger, and Jake kept himself a little apart. At first, she despaired, afraid that the walls that had grown between them had become too thick to penetrate. Then she determined to break through his resistance, as he had once broken through hers. She pressed herself against him, touching his body the way she wanted to touch his heart. She ran her hands over the hard, corded muscles of his chest, across his stomach, and down his thighs. She caressed, she kissed, she suckled and stroked, using every weapon at her disposal to break through whatever it was that kept them apart.

Finally the ice that had surrounded Jake’s heart started to melt. He responded to her the way he had in the past, wholeheartedly and aggressively, loving her the way she was loving him. They couldn’t get enough of each other that night. Their bodies crashed together in an explosion of passion and need. It was as though some dark, foreboding presence hung over them, threatening to sweep them away. They struggled against it with their mouths, their tongues, their bodies.