Coming Up Roses (29 page)

“
If more parents named their kids awful
names, I’m sure more folks would,” he said.

“
Oh. Yes. Well, I’m sure that must have
something to do with it.” She eyed him curiously. “I must say, now
you have me intrigued, however. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to
tell me what the initials stand for, would you?”

He grinned. “I don’t mind at all. The H.
stands for my first name, and the L. stands for my middle
name.”

Rose huffed. “Thank you. That’s very
informative.”

“
Isn’t it?”

They’d reached her tent, and H.L. found he
was reluctant to let her go. He needed something more from her
before they parted for the night, although he wasn’t sure what.

Rose sighed heavily. “Thank God. I’m so
tired. I think I’m going to sleep all day tomorrow. Or today.” She
glanced up at the sky as if she expected to see dawn creeping over
the horizon.

It wasn’t. H.L. pulled out his pocket watch,
fumbling a bit because his bandages interfered with his movements,
flicked the case open, and squinted at the dial. “It’s almost
four.” Shoot, that was late.

“
My goodness. I can’t even remember the
last time I stayed awake this long.” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m
sure Annie will want to go to church, but it had better be an
evening service. I’m sure I won’t be up in time for a morning
one.”

“
Have you ever stayed up this late?”
H.L. asked with a broader grin, the notion of her being worried
about going to church having tickled him.

She didn’t grin back. “When my father was
sick, we took turns sitting up with him.”

Aw, hell, he would have had to go and stir up
sorry memories, wouldn’t he? H.L. gave himself a mental kick. In an
effort to make up for it, he said, “I think we really ought to
shake hands, Rose. After all, we did a good deed tonight, and we
ought to congratulate each other.”

Now she smiled. Thank God. “Of course. We did
do a good deed, didn’t we?” She held out her right hand. It was
small, delicate-looking. Nobody simply looking at it would ever
know it could handle a gun and a horse better than most other human
hands in the world.

H.L. took it in his big, bandaged one.
“Shoot, this isn’t working out the way I wanted it to.”

She looked confused. “It isn’t?”

“
No.” He wanted to touch her flesh, and
he couldn’t feel anything through all that blasted cotton batting.
“I have a better idea.”

Rose resisted a little when he started
reeling her in, but not enough to thwart him. His arms went around
her snugly, and he peered down at her. In the darkness of the
night, her eyes were large and luminous, and her expression
conveyed deep doubt and a modicum of consternation.

“
Mr. May,” she whispered.

“
H.L.,” he corrected her.

“
H.L.,” she repeated
obediently.

“
You’re a surprising woman, Rose
Gilhooley.”

“
I am?”

He nodded and leaned down to brush his lips
against hers. She gasped slightly, but didn’t wrench herself away
from him. In fact, her big eyes fluttered for a split second, then
closed. Ah. This was more like it. As gently as a butterfly
settling on a flower petal, H.L. covered her lips with his. He
brushed feathery soft kisses against her mouth for a moment, until
she sighed and seemed to melt in his arms.

A powerful surge of lust, combined with a
fierce sense of possessiveness, roared through H.L. He tightened
his arms around her small, soft body. Damn, she felt good. She felt
even better a moment later, when she began kissing him back.

Tentatively, shyly, her lips moved beneath
his. His triumph in that moment was ten times what his triumph at
pummeling Pegleg had been. He felt her hands, which had been
bunched into tight little fists, open and splay against his back.
He had too many clothes on to appreciate her touch fully, but he
liked it when she caressed him hesitantly.

“
You feel good, Rose. Very good.” he
whispered. Her damned Stetson was in his way, so he plucked it off
and dropped it on the ground beside them. Her hair fell down around
her shoulders, and he wanted to run his hands through it, but his
bandages got in the way. “Some day,” he murmured into her tousled
hair. “Someday, I’m going to feel your hair the way I want
to.”

Rose whispered, “Hmmm.”

He was hard as a rock, primed and ready, and
he knew he couldn’t take much more of this tantalizing embrace.
Fearing what he’d do if he prolonged the kiss, he reluctantly
pulled back from her. Rose, not understanding his motivation for
breaking the kiss, clung to him like a limpet. When he glanced down
and saw her dazed, confused expression, he felt guilty. Not very
guilty, but guilty nonetheless. She blinked up at him as if she
didn’t know what had just happened to her.

H.L. understood completely. He’d kissed lots
of women in his day, but he’d never become so involved in a kiss
that he’d feared for his sanity before this minute.

He had to be going nuts. There couldn’t be
another explanation for his sudden, overwhelming, all-consuming
desire to attach Rose Gilhooley to himself. Permanently. For damned
ever. Permanence as regards a woman to H.L. May had always seemed
akin to a life sentence in prison or eternity in hell or something
equally drastic and horrifying.

But permanence as concerned Rose Gilhooley
didn’t conjure up anything but bliss to his innards, which were
obviously suffering some sort of dementia. He needed space and
distance, and he needed them fast. Now. Instantly.

Gently, so as neither to scare nor to hurt
her, he pulled away and opened his mouth to say something.
Anything.

Nothing came out of his mouth, so he cleared
his throat. That helped his throat, but didn’t do anything to
unscramble his brains, which hadn’t yet formed a coherent sentence,
much less one that was appropriate to this circumstance.

After a moment of looking as if she’d been
hit by a bolt of lightning, Rose took a quick step back. She was
rocky on her feet and had to grab the flap of her tent to steady
herself. She lifted a hand to her lips, as if she didn’t understand
the sensations tingling there.

H.L. had to grit his teeth and steel himself
to keep from lunging after her and drawing her into his arms again.
He’d have stuck his hands in his pockets, only they wouldn’t fit
anymore. Thwarted, he put them behind his back. “I, ah, had better
be getting along, Rose. I still have to write that article.” A rock
jammed his throat, and he had to clear it out again. “My, ah,
editor’s a bear about schedules.”

“
Bear? A bear?”

“
I mean he’s touchy about
schedules.”

“
Ah. I thought you meant Bear. I
mean—”

“
I know what you mean.”

She blinked a few more times, opened and
closed her mouth twice, and said, “Oh. Yes. Of course. I see.” She
shut her eyes tight, took a deep breath, let it out, and opened her
eyes again. “Yes, well, I need to get some rest.”

“
Right. Me, too, but I have to write my
story first.”

“
Right. Of course.”

“
Well, then, I guess I’d better be
off.” Dammit, what was the matter with him tonight? He never had
trouble leaving a woman. He almost always felt vast relief when he
left one, in fact.

“
Yes. Of course.” Rose seemed to have
difficulty turning to enter her tent.

Suddenly filled with panic at the thought of
losing her, H.L. took a quick step forward before catching himself
and forcing himself to get a grip on his senses. Hell, if he didn’t
watch his step, he’d do something that would lose him his freedom
forever.

Whatever good his freedom had ever done
him.

“
Right,” he said in an effort to clear
his mind. “Right. Well, then, I’ll come by tomorrow afternoon, if
that’s all right. I—ah—want to interview you some more, if you
don’t mind.”

“
Interview me some more?” She appeared
puzzled and not altogether pleased.

“
Yeah, and I’ll be able to bring you a
copy of the early edition. You know, the paper that will come out
Monday morning. My first article about you will be in that
one.”

“
It will?”

“
Yes. I’ll document Bear’s rescue and
how you went about finding him, using your tracking skills, in
another article. Tomorrow will be an introduction.” Talking about
his job was easing him back into a sense of normality, thank God.
Feeling slightly more chipper, he went on, “So since I still want
to write a whole series, why don’t I take you out to supper, and
interview you some more then.”

“
Well, all right. If you need to, I
guess it’s all right.”

“
Right. Good. Then, that’s what I’ll
do.”

“
Fine, then.” It seemed to H.L. that it
took an effort for her to smile at him. “Thank you, then. Um,
thanks for helping me get Bear back. If it hadn’t been for you, I
don’t think I could have done it.”

H.L.’s cynical side reared up at once. “Yeah?
You surprise me, Rose. I thought you could do anything.” He wanted
to smack himself when he saw her lips press together and the
stunned look evaporate completely from her face. Her eyes
flashed.

“
Of course, I’m sure I could have done
it without your help, but not as quickly.” She lifted the flap of
her tent with a snap. “Good night, Mr. May. I mean, H.L.” She
ducked under the flap, entered her tent, and let the flap
drop.

H.L. experienced a moment of total
bereavement when she was lost to his sight. Muttering a soft, “Damn
it all to hell,” he turned and slouched off, kicking at clots of
dirt that he couldn’t see as he went. He had the cabbie take him to
the
Globe
office, where he
let himself in with his key and wrote his story. This one
documented Bear’s rescue, and i would appear in Thursday’s paper.
It was a great story, dammit, and he’d been a goddamned hero in
it.

So why did he feel so rotten?

H.L. decided it was probably best not to try
to find an answer to that one until after he got some sleep. By
that time, and with luck, his heart would have stopped whacking
away at his ribcage every time he remembered kissing Rose.

# # #

Rose felt unsteady and lightheaded when she
entered her tent. Good heavens, H.L. May had kissed her. Worse,
she’d kissed him back.

Annie would be horrified.

For that matter, Rose was horrified. She
collapsed onto her bed, pressed her hands to her cheeks, and
uttered a low moan.

Well, this proved a point, at any rate. Annie
was right. H.L. May, whose professed interest in her was only
business, was a snake in the grass underneath. What’s more, even
knowing what she knew, having been lectured endlessly by Annie
about the perfidies of men, Rose had fallen for his lures, hook,
line, and sinker.

The truly appalling aspect of the situation
was that Rose would love to rush outside, holler at H.L. to come
back, haul him into her tent, and tell him to kiss her some more.
Lifting her head and staring into the blackness surrounding her,
she wondered if her character had been damaged by entering into a
life that might be considered show business. She’d heard show
business was bad for a person’s morals.

Yet the colonel did such a good job of
keeping an eye on his cast and crew, especially Rose and Annie, who
were the only two white women traveling with the Wild West. He’d
been especially careful of Rose, who didn’t have a husband to see
to her welfare, as Annie did.

So much for good intentions, thought Rose
glumly. In spite of the colonel’s best efforts on her behalf, Rose
had managed to find someone to seduce her. She wished like thunder
that being seduced by H.L. May didn’t sound like such a good
idea.

However would she face him in the
morning—rather, this afternoon? It occurred to her that, if he
arrived at the Wild West encampment in time, she could invite him
to attend the evening church service with Annie and herself. That
would give him a tangible, if false, impression of her moral fiber
and character. But he didn’t have to know that inviting him to
church didn’t appeal to her innermost self as much as inviting him
into her tent did. That would remain her secret. She wouldn’t even
tell Annie.

“
Bother. Rose Gilhooley, you’re
pathetic.”

On that unhappy note, Rose fumbled for a
match on her night table, which consisted of one of the trunks in
which she packed her costumes, and struck it against the striker
she kept next to a kerosene lamp. She lit the lamp, and yawned
deeply before she stood to remove her clothes and climb into her
nightgown.

As she undressed, her brain kept slipping
back to the kiss she’d shared with H.L. May. She wished it
wouldn’t, but was too exhausted to exert any control over it. Rose
had never been kissed before except by Freddie, and that didn’t
count, because he was her brother and his kisses had been little
pecks on the cheek when she’d brought in something extra-special
for supper. He’d actually pecked her cheek twice when she’d brought
home two antelopes.

H.L.’s kiss had meant something entirely
different. It meant he considered her a desirable woman, and it had
thrilled Rose to her very core. It also frightened her an equal
amount, since it meant she was vulnerable to him and his wicked
ways.

Were his ways wicked? Annie would say so.
Annie had much more experience of the world than Rose did. Probably
Annie was right about it, but that made Rose feel bad, and she
hoped she was wrong.