Dancing With the Devil (2 page)

Scratches on his precious boots were too deep and worn to have been made today, even with the bullets flying. His fancy black suit—usually crisp, clean and pressed—seemed oddly faded—just slightly, mind you, but faded nonetheless. Even his shirt, always brilliantly white and starched stiff, appeared a shade duller.

On anyone else, it wouldn’t have seemed odd, but on Deacon…

Rhea frowned. Come to think of it, his eyes hadn’t been right, either. Normally a soft and laughing blue, they’d seemed a bit tired and darker when she’d stared into them down the barrel of her rifle.

Damn it.

With great reluctance, she set the safety on the rifle, laid it on the ground and moved around to Deacon’s head. She grabbed him under the arms and began to drag him toward the steps, cursing every time she tripped on the hem of her skirt.

Good grief, he was heavy! Inch by inch, she managed to heave him up the steps and in through the front door. A thick, dark streak of blood trailed down his arm, across the porch and over the floor behind him.

She straightened, took a deep breath and hoisted him, one end at a time, up onto her straw tick in the corner. If she had any strength left, she would have hauled him through to her brother’s room and up onto his bed, but her muscles screamed at the mere idea.

No, Deacon would be fine on her bed for now.

When she was certain he wouldn’t roll off, she darted back outside, retrieved the rifle and set it beside the door.

How on earth was she going to explain this? Women
just didn’t go about shooting their “husbands,” especially when those husbands were supposed to be dead already. Once Mr. Worth caught wind of this, he’d no doubt print it on the front page of his cursed paper.

SHERIFF’S SISTER SHOOTS DEAD HUSBAND.

Newspaper or not, she was in a heap of trouble.

Rhea dug around the kitchen area, gathering the sharpest of all the dull knives, the pot of lukewarm water from the stove and a clean sheet. After dumping the supplies on the floor next to the bed, she went back for one more thing: the last of Colin’s whiskey.

She gulped a large swallow, gagged against the burn and threw a silent curse at Deacon. Just seeing him again was enough to make her chug the rest of the bottle, but he needed it more than she did.

With fumbling fingers, she reached beneath his jacket, yanked his shirt from his waistband and began the arduous task of releasing the perfectly aligned buttons. It was bad enough she’d shot a hole through his precious silk sleeve; there’d be no telling what he’d do if she actually went so far as to cut the shirt away from his body or rip off a single one of those mother-of-pearl buttons.

Rhea rolled her eyes.
Vanity, thy name is Deacon.

When the shirt was finally opened, she took the jacket and shirt cuffs of his good sleeve and tried to drag them down his arm.

“This would be a whole lot easier if you would just bend your elbow a little,” she muttered.

She tugged, wiggled, heaved and jerked until his good arm finally pulled free of its sleeve. After another small pull from the whiskey bottle, she climbed up on the bed and positioned herself at his head. She lifted
him by the shoulders, mindful of his wound, then used her own shoulder to keep him up as she pulled his jacket and shirt from around his body. When they were free, she eased him back down and slipped the sleeves from his wounded arm.

She threw the shirt and jacket over the back of a chair, then turned back to her patient. A dusting of dark hair covered his bronzed chest, and for a startling moment, she wondered what it felt like. Would it be coarse like a beard, or soft and silky like the hair on his head?

“Ninny.” She scrubbed her hands over her face before turning her full attention to the wound itself. Fortunately, the bullet had missed the bone and sliced straight through the fleshy part of his upper arm, saving her the nasty job of trying to dig it out.

Unfortunately, it also meant the ragged wound was open and seeping blood onto the quilt.

Where was that hanky he’d used?

“Never mind,” she muttered as she shoved him, none too gently, until he lay half on his side, half on his stomach. The sight of his bare back froze the breath in her lungs.

From shoulder blade to hip, scars zigzagged across his skin in countless shapes and lengths. A few looked as though they’d been left by open cuts, while others—like the large one above his right hip—were unmistakably burn marks.

“What on earth…?” She ran her finger along the ragged edge of the large burn, where it puckered slightly, and then across the patch of skin that appeared stretched and thin. It looked as though…It couldn’t be…but it looked as though many of the marks were new scars over top of old ones.

“Sweet Mother of God.” Rhea exhaled slowly. What
could he have possibly done to deserve such punishment? The agony he must have suffered…

No
. She wouldn’t feel sorry for him. He didn’t deserve her pity, and he wouldn’t want it anyway. After a quick mental shake, she reached for the sheet, cut it in long even strips, then set them across his hip for easy access. While she’d been worrying over his other wounds, his newest one continued to bleed.

She tied a strip above the wound, then pressed a few others against both sides. When the bleeding slowed, she eased the pressure from the back of his shoulder and tipped the whiskey bottle over the wound.

She wet an end of one strip in the tepid water and did her best to clean the blood from around both sides of the wound before dousing the area with more whiskey and wrapping his shoulder with the remaining strips of sheet.

Curse her bad aim. And double-curse his poor reflexes. She hadn’t meant to actually hit him; but then again, she hadn’t expected him to move so slowly either.

She sat back on her haunches and let out an enormous gush of air. Now what?

Wait for him to recover? Or die? No, she wasn’t that lucky. If he’d been telling the truth, he had no powers, so where did that leave him?

It left him on her bed, that’s where. And not just lying there either, but
bleeding
there; one more mess for Rhea to clean up.

Typical Deacon. He always—

Ernest Miller burst in through the door, breathless, his hat askew and a huge stick in his hand. Rhea jumped back, knocking the empty whiskey bottle sideways, but she managed to grab it up before it smashed on the floor.

Ernest stumbled toward her, his gaze darting all around
until he noticed Deacon’s motionless form on the tick. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Rhea shook her head at the boy and set about gathering up the remaining supplies. “Who’s minding the store?”

“I locked it up,” he said, gasping over every word. “Folks said they heard shots…The sheriff’s out at the Dietrich place…” With shaky hands, he dropped the stick, adjusted his hat and gripped the back of a chair for support. “Who’s that?”

“He’s, um, he used to be a friend of Colin’s.” It wasn’t a lie—Deacon really had known her brother—but it wasn’t exactly the whole truth either. Any friendship they might have had was destroyed the last time Deacon had come to town.

Ernest bent at the waist, breathing hard. “And you shot him?”

Shooting Deacon obviously wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done; in fact, she’d just doubled the problems she already had. “He took me by surprise.”

Ernest slumped into a chair across from Deacon and eyed the bottle in Rhea’s hand. “Can I get something to drink?”

“There’s water out in the barrel.”

Without a second glance, Rhea set to cleaning up the blood trail on the floor. Ernest had no doubt run the two miles from the store, but she didn’t need his protection, she didn’t want his protection, and she thought she’d made that perfectly clear the last time he came to her rescue waving a makeshift weapon.

She watched out the small window as he walked toward the rain barrel and swallowed a dipper-full of water. A second later, it came shooting back out his nose and mouth, toppling him to his knees in a fit of choking gasps.

He caught her eye through the window and held up a hand to wave off her concern. She snorted softly. Oh, she was concerned alright—concerned he’d really hurt himself and she’d be forced to put him up in the bed next to Deacon.

Rhea sighed. It was going to be a helluva long day.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

D
eacon pried his eyes open, then squeezed them shut against the pain that shot up his shoulder. What the—?

Rhea
.

She’d shot him. Took her four shots, if he recalled correctly; but she’d finally hit him, and he’d gone down hard, without the least bit of style or finesse.

Damn it. Living without powers was going to be more difficult than he’d anticipated.

Voices outside, muffled by the squawking chickens, prodded him to sit up. One of the voices was Rhea’s, but he couldn’t make out the other. With a long inhale, he eased his body off the lump of porcupine quills Rhea called a bed and stood in the middle of the room, steadying himself against a chair back until he gained his balance.

Tight, even strips of cloth wrapped his shoulder and upper arm, but the rest of his upper body was bare. Deacon ground his teeth against a rising curse and set to finding his shirt.

If Rhea had been the one to tend him, she would have seen…everything. A sick feeling pitted his stomach. Being shot was one thing, the physical agony
his father had repeatedly laced across his back was yet another; both were manageable.

But if Rhea looked at him with so much as an ounce of pity…

Where the hell was his shirt?

He lifted blankets, stooped to look under the table and on the seat of both chairs, each movement shooting new pain up and down his arm. The cabin was too small to hide anything, so where had she put it?

“You need to go back to the store.” Rhea’s voice, low and tight, floated through the crack under the door. “We can’t afford to be closed in the middle of the day.”

He strained to hear the rest of the conversation outside, but their voices were too low. If he could just find his—

“To hell with it.” Pushing open the door to Colin’s room, he grabbed the first shirt he could find. It was a horrible scrap of plain blue cotton, worn at the elbows and missing the first two buttons, but at least it would cover him. He eased his injured arm in first, then the other, buttoning it as he walked toward the door.

The cotton scraped against his skin like gravel. How did humans wear such fabric every day?

“You can’t stay here alone with him,” the second voice said. “It ain’t right.”

“What do you think is going to happen?” Rhea snapped. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I shot him—”

“Hell of a shot, too.” Deacon grinned over a wince as he stepped out onto the small porch.

Rhea blanched as she stood up from the bucket she’d been bent over and flicked out a twisted piece of laundry. His white silk shirt.

“You’re fine.” She rolled her eyes, but not before he saw the flash of concern she tried to hide. “The bullet barely nicked you.”

His shoulder throbbed, his head began to spin slowly and his stomach pitched, but still he laughed right out loud. She could pretend she wasn’t worried about his arm as much as she wanted. He’d seen the truth in her eyes.

Her false bravado was exactly the kind of thing that made Deacon enjoy her all the more. Beneath his horrible cotton shirt, each of his scars prickled sharply, forcing him to remember how much each small enjoyment had cost him.

The young man Rhea employed at her store stood nearby, his hat clutched between his hands, his wheat-blond hair matted with sweat. Though they’d never been formally introduced, Deacon knew who he was from Rhea’s past descriptions.

Deacon made his way down the first step just as the boy stepped toward him, his hand extended. “Ernest Miller.”

Deacon frowned at the boy’s hand and moved down the remaining steps with a steadiness he didn’t feel. Humans—they always had to touch each other for some reason. He, on the other hand, had no inclination to touch any of them—except Rhea, of course. Her, he couldn’t touch enough.

With a sigh of resignation, he shook the boy’s hand quickly, then let it drop. “I’m Deacon.”

Rhea’s entire body stiffened. Her jaw tightened and her chest heaved in three deep breaths.

“
Deacon
?” A flicker of confused disbelief passed over the boy’s face. “You mean…but you’re dead.”

“Dead?” Deacon repeated, staring him down. “Clearly you can see that is not the case.”

Rhea cleared her throat loudly, keeping her gaze as far away from Deacon as she could. “Please, Ernest. Go back to the store. Now.”

“But he’s your
husband
…he’s been dead for months.” He blinked faster than anyone Deacon had ever seen. “And now he’s alive again…and you
shot
him?”

“Ernest!” Rhea barked. “Just go back to the store. And if you see Colin, please tell him to come home.”

From somewhere inside the pathetic excuse of a building they used as a barn, a cow bawled loud and long while the chickens continued to squawk inside their pen.

Ernest opened his mouth to protest Rhea’s orders, seemed to reconsider a moment, then closed it. It was a decision Deacon almost applauded. Rhea wasn’t one to lose an argument, and the poor young Ernest looked as though he’d learned that lesson the hard way.

Mumbling beneath his breath, Ernest smoothed his hair back, clapped on his hat and walked away. The afternoon sun chased after him in long waves of dry heat, making his image shimmer as he marched down the road, out of sight.

Deacon waited until Rhea’s shaky hands had hung his shirt on the line.

“So,” he said, chuckling at her discomfort. “Would you care to explain how I came to miss my own wedding? And my funeral.”

“I don’t—” she blustered, then stopped. Color spread up her throat and over her cheeks. “You’re such a…a…”