Drew (The Cowboys) (5 page)

“Joe handles the horses, but I never ride a horse I haven’t chosen.”

“No problem. I can’t wait until they see you come out with pistols blazing. You’ll have them jumping up and down with excitement. They won’t be able to take their eyes off you until you’re finished.”

He started describing the entrance as he envisioned it. Zeke entered enthusiastically into the discussion. Then Hawk was drawn in. Cole didn’t hog the discussion. He acted as if he appreciated what the boys had to say. He even asked Drew what she thought.

“I’m listening,” she said. “I’ll tell you when you’re done.”

She refused to show even the slightest bit of excitement or approval. She didn’t want him to think she wanted his interference, even though he did have a few good ideas. If he and the boys could come up with a plan she liked, she’d probably consider it. But she wasn’t making any promises, especially to a stranger who could drift away as quickly as he’d drifted in.

Still, she liked the idea of making her act more popular with the crowds. It would help her make more money, help her reach her goal more quickly. If she was perfectly honest with herself, she liked the possibility she might get more credit for her shooting ability. The Wild West Show was a great success. The audience loved the fights and chases and all the things the Wild West Show brought into town—without the problems prompted by
real
bullets and arrows.

But her performance entailed a level of skill most of the other parts of the show didn’t require. She’d tried not to be jealous of the popularity of Indian attacks and buffalo hunts, but she couldn’t help it. She didn’t want to steal anybody’s thunder. She just wanted a little of her own. If Cole Benton could give her that, she just might give him a few pointers on how to improve his shooting.

If she could just get rid of this dratted heartburn. If this was going to happen every time he was around her, she’d just have to give up the idea of being more popular. It wasn’t worth feeling like a fire had been kindled in her gut.

Chapter Three

Cole lay awake in his bed in the sleeping car. The noise of the wheels as they ran over the rails, the click as they crossed junctions, the swaying of the car, and the heat all combined to make it nearly impossible for him to relax. He’d spent more comfortable nights on the Texas prairie.

The mattress was too hard and lumpy, the bed too short for his height. Since he wasn’t in a closed compartment, he was bothered by people constantly moving up and down the aisles all night. That left him more than enough time to think about Drew.

He didn’t know anything about her except what Myrtle had told him. He had no way of knowing how much of that was the truth. There was no reason for Drew to be more honest with Myrtle than with anybody else, but it didn’t surprise him that both Myrtle and her husband thought very highly of the sharpshooter. It would be to her advantage to develop close relations with other members of the show. The more the old geezers liked her, the less likely they would be to believe she could be the leader of a group of very clever robbers.

All of the headliners had their own hotel rooms. They could come and go as they pleased without anyone knowing where they’d been or how long they’d been away. They only had to be present for the show itself. In Drew’s case, he intended to put an end to that. He planned to start practicing with her every day. He’d decided the best way to spend a lot of time with her, to probe her defenses, was to convince her to let him remake her act. She was very, very good. Incredible, in fact, but the act wasn’t exciting. She needed to turn herself into a performer as well as a marksman. She had to learn to touch the audience with her personality, not just her skill. Skill was a cold thing. A brilliant performer could be admired without being adored. He had to find some way for Drew to reach out to the audience, make it important to them that she hit every target, even when she wasn’t shooting against anyone.

Myrtle had said Drew had a strong mothering instinct. If so, that ought to do it. If she could convince the audience she cared about them, they would care about her. But maybe that mothering instinct was a hoax, camouflage so people wouldn’t see her real nature. He certainly hadn’t seen any signs she wanted to mother him. She’d been as cold as a West Texas blizzard.

She hadn’t tossed his ideas out the window, but he knew he couldn’t take credit for that. If her brothers, or whoever those men really were, hadn’t agreed with him, she would have ignored everything he’d said. He had to find a way to get around her dislike of him.

Or a way to change it into like.

That appealed to him more. Drew Townsend might not be the most clever thief in the country, but she was without a doubt the most attractive. Her face wouldn’t stop trains, but her body could empty them. That was something else he had to remember. She had to wear clothes that would take advantage of her spectacular figure.

Just the thought of her body clothed in a revealing outfit caused his body to harden. He’d have to watch that. She didn’t look the type to be amused by a man’s physical response to her attractions. Neither would it do him any good to let his libido overpower his brain. He didn’t think that was a possibility—he’d had too much experience controlling himself over the years—but even a brief lapse in control with this woman might be fatal.

Still, he couldn’t discount the possibility that a romance might be the best way to allay her suspicions and enable him to enter her inner circle. Female outlaws weren’t much different from other women. Even when they knew their lovers couldn’t be trusted, they tended to tell them everything they knew. He doubted Drew could be gotten around that easily, but it was something to keep in mind.

But pretending to be romantically interested in Drew bothered him. He knew he had to stop the robberies, that he had to do whatever was necessary to catch the thieves, but his conscience rebelled at pretending to love Drew when he didn’t. He didn’t know why that should bother him. He’d never felt guilty about lying to a crook before. Maybe it was because he felt she might be capable of real love.

She acted as cold as a sleet storm with him, but he had the feeling a hot fire burned somewhere deep inside her. Women weren’t like men in that respect. If a man seemed cold and hard, that was pretty much what he was like. He usually wasn’t anything worth redeeming. You might as well shoot him and save everybody a lot of trouble.

He’d met women who seemed cold and hard on the surface. But no matter what kind of front they tried to put up, they always had a soft inside. It didn’t mean they wouldn’t fill you full of holes if you did something they didn’t like. It just meant they’d be sorry afterwards.

Men changed loyalties easily. Women usually remained faithful for life.

Cole found himself feeling a little uneasy about that. Drew might be a thief and a crook—if so, she didn’t deserve the same consideration he would give another woman—but he didn’t want to engage her feelings. He wanted any possible relationship to remain on the purely physical level. That would probably suit her just as well.

He turned over in his narrow bunk. The occasional screech of the wheels as they rounded a curve went through him like a knife. He’d have to learn to sleep better if he wanted to be able to shoot well enough to push Drew to her limits.

He wondered how she was sleeping. He’d hoped they’d be in the same car, but he hadn’t been surprised when they’d put him in with the cowboys and some of the crew. Their snoring was enough to wake even a sound sleeper.

Drew didn’t look as though she ever had trouble sleeping. There was a freshness about her, a luminescence about her skin that made her seem young and virginal. She probably depended on that in her robberies. No red-blooded American male would suspect her of being a thief. The people in the banks, trains, and steamboats she robbed were probably too stunned to do anything but stare in disbelief until they’d been stripped of their gold and Drew’s gang had escaped without firing a shot.

If he had been one of the victims, he too would have been left standing with his mouth open, especially if she did something clever like shoot the cigar out of his mouth, or a pen off its stand on the desk. The robber always did something like that. The official opinion was that she did it to keep her victims so stunned, they wouldn’t offer any opposition when she made her get-away. That fitted, in perfectly with Cole’s opinion of women. They might be capable of committing almost any crime, but they stopped short of cold-blooded murder.

But something in his gut told him Drew was different. She seemed to have too much pride, to hold herself to a higher standard than she expected of people around her. Cole had known men and women like that. They would actually suffer before they would let themselves fall short of the expectations they’d set for themselves. He’d gotten that message from Drew almost from the beginning, but he’d discounted it because it ran counter to the information his captain had on the group that performed the robberies. She was the only woman who could do what the leader of the thieves had done.

It had to be Drew.

He experienced a sharp feeling of disappointment. He didn’t
want
her to be guilty. If she was, he didn’t want to be the one to catch her. He told himself not to be a fool. He had nothing to do with her being guilty. If he discovered it, arrested her, helped to convict her and send her to prison, he was only doing his job.

But something inside rebelled against this assignment. For the first time, he felt dirty, underhanded, like he was spying on an innocent person. She couldn’t be guilty. She acted too innocent.

How did he know that? Drew might be the best actress in the world. He’d just met her today. He didn’t consider himself a good actor, and he’d been able to pass himself off as an innocent bystander, a drifter who saw an opportunity to make money doing something easy. If he could do it, so could Drew.

But he didn’t want to believe she had.

Fisher’s Creek, Illinois

Drew did her best to quell the feeling of excitement. Cole’s idea for her entrance had certainly livened up the beginning of her act. Even the old people in the show had stopped to watch her practice. They had set up in a field about a mile from town. At the first sound of gunshots, a dozen milk cows grazing in a nearby field had lumbered out of sight.

“It would look better if we moved the targets farther away,” Cole said. “Could you still hit them?”

“Yes.”

“Be sure. Nothing would be worse than missing your targets on your entrance.”

“If I couldn’t hit a still target from a horse, I couldn’t call myself a sharpshooter.”

“From the saddle.”

“Yes.”

“Standing up?”

“Do you mean standing up
on the horse
?”

“While it’s moving.”

“I guess so. I mean, I haven’t done it in a long time.”

“Good. It’ll make an even better entrance.”

“Come on,” Zeke said. “I’ll hold the horse for you.”

Drew wasn’t so sure about this. “Doesn’t this get into the area of acrobatics?”

“Sure,” Cole said, “but that makes it more exciting. You’ll have to take off those boots. Your horse won’t appreciate your heels digging into him.”

Drew was losing control of her act. She had accepted the idea of making her entrance on horseback. She even liked it. But this business of standing up on a moving horse was something else.

“Why don’t you ride around the ring a few times,” Cole suggested.

Drew felt her spine stiffen. “You don’t think I can do it, do you?”

“You said it had been awhile. It’ll give you a chance to get the feel of it again.”

He didn’t fool her. He didn’t think she could do it. Well, she wasn’t sure either, but Cole Benton wasn’t going to make her look bad. She sat down and pulled off her boots.

“I haven’t tried a stunt like this in a long time,” she said to Zeke.

He laughed. “I remember you doing it just to prove you could.”

“I didn’t have to hit targets then.”

Zeke removed the saddle and the saddlecloth from the horse. She would have to ride bareback. She wouldn’t have anything to hold on to, not even the reins.

“Here, let me give you a hand up,” Zeke said.

Even though she’d been around Zeke for ten years, she kept forgetting how big and tall he was. He virtually lifted her off the ground and placed her on the horse. Using his hand to steady herself, she stood up on the broad haunches of the animal. She wouldn’t have any trouble getting a foothold, but standing up and shooting straight might be a different matter.

“Do you want me to walk him first?” Zeke asked.

She moved her feet about, testing her balance, waiting to see how the horse reacted to her weight. He acted as though he didn’t even know she was on his back. Her balance felt good, secure.

“Let him go,” she said. “Let’s see how much I remember.”

Hawk had picked out a horse trained to canter in a circle around a ring. As soon as it started forward, she remembered the feel of haunches rising and falling beneath her feet. She smiled at the familiar sensation, the ease with which she fell into the rhythm. She exulted in the sense of freedom, of lightness, of being detached from anything that kept her earthbound. She remembered the feeling she’d had when she first tried it, the excitement, the sense of accomplishment, that she could do anything she wanted to, as long as she was not afraid to try.