Merline Lovelace (8 page)

“It’s something how you can prune up that,” he commented lazily, his gaze on her mouth.

“Indeed?”

“I expect you know damned well what it does to a man.”

“Do, please, enlighten me.”

She’d known before the words were out that she was playing with fire. She had no business standing here, bare as a skinned birch beneath the red silk. No business tossing barbs back and forth with Sloan, or cloaking dares in coy words and sissified looks.

She’d known, too, that he would take her up on the challenge. Her heart thumping, she watched him move a deliberate step forward.

“How about I show you instead?”

Reluctantly, Suzanne unpruned. Playing with fire was one thing. Letting this man burn her all to flinders was something else again.

“I don’t think that would be wise.”

“Stupid as hell,” he agreed, taking another step.

Always afterward, Suzanne would swear she
meant to call a halt to matters then and there. If she hadn’t tripped on her too-long wrapper as she hastily stepped back, she certainly would have.

But her foot trapped the hem. The gown gapped at the front and dragged at the back. Off balance, Suzanne made a grab for her neckline with one hand and for Jack’s sleeve with the other. He caught her with a quick arm around her waist and hauled her against him. To her consternation, her legs slid between his, and the damned wrapper parted clear up to her hips.

She looked up, flushed and horribly embarrassed. Her eyes met his. She felt him stiffen beneath her hand. His arm cut like a tight leather cinch around her waist. She couldn’t move, could barely breathe.

“Jack…”

She’d intended it as a protest. Even to her own ears it sounded more like a plea.

His mouth came down on hers. There was nothing gentle about the kiss, nothing tender in the way his muscles knotted and bunched under her fingers. The feelings of the past few days ripped free, and she heard the wild, primitive song of a full-blooded male.

Or maybe that was her own blood pounding in her ears. Suzanne didn’t know. At that moment, she didn’t care.

Her mouth opened under his. Wildly, wantonly,
she met the thrust of his tongue with hers. She’d never been kissed with such savage hunger, never answered with such unfettered delight. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she arched her body against his, wanting,
needing
to feel the rough contact of his belt and vest and shirt through the silk. When one of his hands went to her bottom and pressed her into his thigh, needles of pure sensation shot through her belly.

He held her tight against him, so tight they touched everywhere it was possible for a man and woman to touch. Her mouth, her breasts, her stomach, the aching, burning spot between her legs all felt the imprint of his hard flesh and roped muscles.

Suddenly, being held wasn’t enough. Being kissed didn’t satisfy the beast inside her. She wanted more. She wanted the panting, straining, sighing she’d heard from couples rolled up in buffalo skin the nights she’d spent with Bright Water in her father’s teepee. Wanted whatever it was that put such a soft, dreamy expression on her mother’s face when she came downstairs the morning after the colonel returned from a long patrol. Wanted what the Misses Merriweather had said no
real
lady ever wanted.

Prim, proper Suzanne Bonneaux—raised by a loving mother and devoted stepfather, petted by troopers at half a dozen different posts, sent back East for two years of polish and refinement,
courted by bankers’ sons and fresh-faced West Point graduates—wanted Jack Sloan naked. Or at least naked enough for her to run her fingers over his chest, his back, his arms. Naked enough for her to wrap her hot little hands around the ridge of hard flesh jutting against her belly.

She was so lost in the swirling, tumultuous sensations of his mouth and hands and thigh that the sound of the door opening barely registered on her consciousness.

It registered with Jack, however. He dropped her like an anvil. Whipped out his Colt. Spun around. Suzanne hit the floor at precisely the same second a startled shriek split the air.

“Ai ya!”

Ying Li stood frozen in the doorway, Suzanne’s supper tray in her hands. The sight of a long-barreled Colt pointed at her heart raised another screech.

“Bu! Bu! Woo ni lai!”

She turned and fled, scattering tin plates and cups as she went.

Sloan filled the air with a string of oaths. He was strung tight as a roll of baling wire when he turned back around. He went even tighter when he looked down at Suzanne.

Belatedly, she realized she was sprawled at his feet, legs wide, the red silk open from knee to
neck. Scuttling back like a frantic crab, she yanked the robe together.

With another curse, Sloan spun around and headed for the door.

“Jack! Wait!” She had no idea what she’d say to him, only that she couldn’t let him walk out like this. “Where are you going?”

“To drink myself blind.”

S
haking, Suzanne crawled into Mother Featherlegs’s massive bed. The straw ticking rustled as she fanned her still-damp hair across the pillow and stretched out under the watchful stare of the carved wooden temple dog.

Now that the wild pounding in her blood had diminished to a stuttering throb, she couldn’t believe how close she’d come to throwing all caution and common sense to the wind.

If Ying Li hadn’t appeared when she did…

If Sloan had slammed the door shut instead of stalking out…

If Suzanne had shed the thin silk…

Her face flamed in the darkness. Sloan had seen her naked, or as close to it as didn’t count. She should be writhing in shame, boiling in a stew of embarrassment. Instead, she felt the most absurd, the most
stinging
disappointment.

Flinging an arm across her eyes, she lectured herself sternly. He was a gunman, for pity’s sake! A shootist! If half the stories written about him were true, he’d mowed down more men than Mr. Gatling’s repeating gun, which was finally proving itself so effective within army ranks.

The lecture failed dismally to achieve its objective. As much as she tried to quell her riotous emotions, Suzanne couldn’t block the searing wish that Jack had ripped off that gaudy dressing gown and tumbled her into a bed with sea serpents and dragons and Chinese characters picked out in gold.

Groaning, she rolled over and punched the pillow. With her next breath, she regretted the move. Odors rose in waves, lavender and straw and something she strongly suspected was a residue from Mother Featherlegs’s customers.

She flopped onto her back once more and exchanged glares with the temple dog. It was, she decided, going to be a long night. A very long night, indeed.

Not thirty yards away, Matt unknowingly echoed her sentiments. The way his head whirled, he was sure he wouldn’t live to see morning. The beer Jack had paid for sloshed in his belly as he squinted up at the sliver of new moon riding at a cockeyed angle. The stars fuzzed, sharpened, fuzzed again.

He had to relieve himself so bad he hurt, but the tilting moon made him almost too dizzy to stand. Propping a hand against the saloon wall to steady himself, he fumbled with the flap of his trousers.

“Aah.”

Sagging with relief, he shot his stream into the night.

“Mah-mah no like customers piss on wall.”

The voice came out of the darkness. Matt jerked around, spraying as he went.

“Cripes!”

A tiny creature glided out of the shadows. Mortified, he tried to cut off the stream, but he’d downed too much beer. He was forced to stand there, arcing full and long, while the girl observed the process. Face burning, he finally stuffed himself back into his trousers.

“You shouldn’t watch a man attending to nature.”

She lifted her shoulders. “All same, no matter.”

All the same? Embarrassed as he was, Matt’s masculine pride reared its head. He was a touch clumsy, sure, but he was big. Bigger than most, anyway. Not that he could argue the point with this slip of a girl.

“What are you doing out here in the dark?”

“Mah-mah send me. Say you want fuckee-fuck.”

Matt’s eyes bugged. “I want…what?”

Frowning, she made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and poked at it with the first finger of her other hand. The gesture was so graphic that his eyes bulged again.

“Mah-mah say I do dragon dance with you chop chop, pay for dishes and missee’s supper, all broke.”

His head whirling, Matt couldn’t make sense of one word in three. He was still trying to interpret the singsong phrases when she stepped forward and reached for the trouser flap he’d buttoned all askew. The press of her palm against his pole sent him jumping back so hard and fast his shoulders slammed against the wall.

The girl’s forehead creased. “You not want Ying Li?”

She looked worried, almost frightened. Hastily, Matt tried to reassure her. “Yes, sure I want you, but…”

“You want, I do.”

Her determined little fingers went to work on his buttons.

“Not…not here!” he choked out, half embarrassed and wholly aroused.

“All right, come come.” She heaved a long-suffering sigh. “All same, no matter.”

Taking his hand, she led him like a bull with a ring through his nose toward one of the smaller sod huts.

It had turned out to be a real bitch of a night.

Jack rolled one of Mother Featherlegs’s cigars around in his mouth, welcoming the bitter juice that spurted onto his tongue. He needed something, anything, to kill the taste of Suzanne.

The whiskey hadn’t helped. He’d poured enough rotgut down his gullet to drop a fair-size mule. Between that and the cigar, every nerve in his mouth and tongue ought to be dead. Still he could taste her.

And see her. Nothing short of a shotgun blast between the eyes was going to blow away the image of Suzanne Bonneaux sprawled at his feet.

Jack stared blindly at the smoke swirling through the saloon. All he could see were long, curved legs, rounded hips and the tuft of curly brown hair between her thighs. His teeth ground together so hard the cigar shredded in his mouth.

“Hell!”

He spit the tobacco into a dented brass cuspidor crusted with brown leavings and reached for his glass. The whiskey burned a fresh scar inside his throat as he watched one of the hurdies swing her way through the crowd in his direction.

“Want to take a turn on the boards?”

Dark rings of sweat stained her dress at each armpit and her face paint had caked into the creases on her cheeks and forehead, but she didn’t
look bad. Not bad at all. In fact, Jack told himself savagely, she looked to be just the kind of woman he should take a turn with.

The kind who didn’t tie a man up in knots. The kind whose lips didn’t pucker up all prim and disapproving. Hell, this woman’s mouth could probably pleasure a man in ways
Miss
Suzanne Bonneaux couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Unless someone taught her.

The thought slammed into him, tightened his fist around the glass. He brought both down on the pine plank with a violence that widened the hurdie’s eyes.

“Yeah,” he growled, breathing hard through his nostrils, “I’ll take a turn on the boards.”

A series of loud thumps jerked Suzanne from sleep. She started up, blinking in the darkness, felt a small shriek rise up in her throat at the menacing figure bent over her. She fell back, gasping with relief when she realized it was the carved wooden temple dog.

“Miss Suzanne?” Another thump rattled the front door. “Miss Suzanne, you in there?”

“Matt? Is that you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good heavens!” Shoving her hair out of her eyes, Suzanne jumped out of bed. Alarm laced
through her as she yanked the red silk dressing gown together and ran for the door.

Had she overslept? Was it almost dawn? Had Sloan already ridden out? She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised after last night, but that didn’t make the possibility that he’d left her behind any easier to swallow.

She should be relieved she didn’t have to face him again. Should be happy she wouldn’t have to pretend she hadn’t practically dragged him down to the floor. Instead, the mere idea that he might have deserted her made her so furious she yanked open the door.

“Is he gone?”

Matt looked at her stupidly.

“Sloan. Did he ride out already?”

“Don’t think so.” His forehead creased. “It’s just an hour or two past midnight. Last I saw, he was pouring something wet down his throat.”

He wasn’t the only one, she realized. Matt’s breath carried such a potent flavoring of yeast and hops that Suzanne’s eyes watered. Resisting the urge to flap her hand in front of her face to dispel the pungent waves, she regarded him more closely.

“Are you drunk?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Dragging his hat from his crop of marigold curls, he crushed it between his fists. “Drunk as two wheelbarrows.”

She clutched the red silk together, fighting a gig
gle. He looked so solemn, so ridiculously pie-faced.

“So you availed yourself of Sloan’s largesse, after all?”

“His what?”

“You used the money Jack left with Mother Featherlegs to treat yourself to a few rounds of beer?”

“Not just beer.”

His expression swung from mortification to glee and back again so swiftly Suzanne could barely tell one from the other.

“The Chinee girl, Ying Li, she, er… We sorta, uh…became acquainted.”

Suzanne lost all inclination to laugh. Damn Jack Sloan, anyway! This was his fault. He shouldn’t have thrown out greenbacks like some gun-toting Midas. With a toss of her head, she dismissed as completely irrelevant the fact that Sloan’s largesse had paid for her bath as well as Matt’s debauchery.

“Did you wake me just to tell me you and Ying Li—” she couldn’t quite hold back a sniff “—became acquainted?”

Matt blinked again, as if trying to remember just why he
had
hammered on the door. When his reasoning finally came back, it poured out in a rush.

“It ain’t right, Miss Suzanne. She’s no bigger than a kitten and near ’bout as helpless. Her pa done sold her and she can’t leave till she pays back
what Mother Featherlegs give for her. Her and the bed,” he amended, shooting a fierce glare in the direction of the saloon owner’s prized possession. “We can’t leave her here.”

Taken aback by his fervor, Suzanne blinked. “Does Ying Li want to leave?”

“She keeps muttering some gibberish about it all making no difference. But it ain’t right,” he said again.

“No, it isn’t, but I don’t exactly see what you wish me to do about it.”

“Write one of them promissory notes for her, like you did for the supplies at Ten Mile Station.”

“I, er…”

“I’ll pay you back soon’s I’m able.” His jaw set. “I ain’t leavin’ without her.”

“Oh, dear.”

Suzanne could foresee all sorts of complications, not the least of which was explaining to Jack Sloan how their small party had suddenly expanded to include Ying Li.

“I’ll write out a promise of payment if Mother Featherlegs will accept it. But do you think you should take Ying Li along with you?” She cleared her throat delicately. “Won’t your Becky think it rather odd if she hears about it?”

The stubborn set to Matt’s face became downright mulish.

“She’d probably just toss her head and say the
only way I could get a woman was to buy her. That may be so, but Ying Li didn’t laugh at me. Not once, even when I, uh, near ’bout embarrassed myself the worst way a man can embarrass himself with a woman.”

“I understand,” Suzanne said hastily. “Really, I do. It’s just… Well…”

Well what? She’d felt the prick of her own conscience earlier, when the saloon owner had told her the conditions of Ying Li’s purchase. And again, when the girl had described her duties.

Matt was right. They couldn’t leave her here. Not if she truly wanted to leave.

Determining Ying Li’s exact wishes in the matter turned out to be a laborious exercise. When questioned, the girl returned the same answer every time.

All same, no matter.

Once, only once, did Suzanne catch a gleam of hope, swiftly quenched, in her downcast eyes. Sighing, she swallowed her own doubts and sent the oddly mismatched pair out with a promise to see what she could do.

Since her blouse and undergarments were still damp from their washing, she wrapped the scarlet robe firmly around her waist and tucked it into her skirt. Without a corset or chemise to contain her silhouette, her breasts jutted all too prominently
against the thin silk. Her little blue serge half jacket looked ridiculous over the robe, but at least it provided a modicum of modesty.

The best she could do with her hair was drag a comb through the damp tangles and tie it back with a bit of ribbon from her chemise. Thrusting her bare feet into the borrowed boots, she clumped out in search of Mother Featherlegs.

A raucous chorus of “My Darling Clementine” boomed from the saloon. The noise assaulted her as she picked her way across the yard. Once inside, the din rose up to roar in her ears like a jungle beast. Wheezing notes pumped out of the hand organ. Boots stomped puffs of sawdust from the floor. Hands slapped against tabletops. Skirts flying, curls bouncing, the hurdies whirled around the boards with their chosen partners.

One of whom, Suzanne noted, was Jack Sloan.

Like the others crowding the dance floor, Jack circled and swayed to the lively beat. Unlike the others, he moved with a grace that made even the sweat-stained woman in his arms appear as elegant as one of the ballerinas who performed at the Philadelphia Opera House.

Damn the man, anyway!

Her mouth drawn into a tight, firm line, Suzanne stepped into the saloon. As before, her presence produced a dramatic effect.

One by one, the patrons stopped their pounding,
stomping, and singing to gawk at her. The dancers slowed. The music died.

Suzanne wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t experienced a fierce, feminine satisfaction at the stir she caused.

“Please, gentlemen,” she said in her airiest manner. “Don’t let me interrupt your entertainment.”

Only after she was halfway across the room did her satisfaction take on a tinge of unease. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly what caused her disquiet. Maybe the realization that the whiskey fumes rising on the smoke-filled air were heavier than they’d been when she’d walked into the saloon this afternoon. Or that men watching her every step did so with an unnerving intensity.

Including Sloan.

A muscle twitched in the side of his jaw. He looked anything but pleased to see her. Releasing his partner, he planted himself directly in Suzanne’s path.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

The low growl brought her chin up.

“To speak to Mother Featherlegs. Not, I might add, that it’s any of your business.”

“It is if you want to ride out of here with me tomorrow. Look around you. Half the men in here are so liquored up they wouldn’t know their own mothers. The other half probably never did. Sober,
they wouldn’t so much as spit in your presence. Drunk…”