Schulze, Dallas (19 page)

She realized immediately that she’d said the wrong thing.

Bishop’s crooked grin confirmed it for her. “I don’t mind a bit.
Want me to hold a towel for you?” he offered obligingly.

Lila closed her eyes for a moment, her teeth grinding together. It
was a wonder the water didn’t start to boil around her. But it didn’t. In fact,
it was rapidly going from tepid to downright chilly. She opened her eyes and
looked at him. His elbow rested on his knee as he leaned toward her, and he didn’t
look as if he had any intention of going anywhere. With his hat tipped back,
the faintest hint of a smile visible beneath his dark mustache, and his blue
eyes gleaming with amusement—at her expense!—he was wickedly attractive. Damn
him.

“What I want is for you to go away and allow me to get dressed in
privacy,” she said, her tone stiff with annoyance.

“I guess that would be the gentlemanly thing to do, wouldn’t it?”
Bishop drawled.

“Yes, it would.”

There was a moment’s taut silence while their eyes warred with one
another. She couldn’t force him to do as she asked, and he knew it. Legally
and, some would say, morally, he had every right to stay where he was and watch
her rise stark naked from her bath. Lila’s stomach clenched at the thought. She
told herself it was anger and resentment, but she couldn’t deny a tiny thread
of dark excitement at the thought of standing naked before him.

“Don’t take too long,” Bishop said, just when she thought he was
never going to speak again. He straightened, dropping his foot from the edge of
the tub, and disappeared around the other side of the screen, leaving Lila
sitting in her cold bath, telling herself that what she felt was relief, not
disappointment.

He was a fool, Bishop told himself as he listened to the splashing
sounds coming from behind the screen as Lila left her bath. A damned fool, he
amended as she whisked the soft linen towel from where it had been draped
across the screen. He should have scooped her out of that tub and carried her
to the bed and put an end to this waiting once and for all. She’d been hiding
behind the children long enough.

“Where
are
the children?” he asked.

“Bridget Sunday is looking after them this afternoon,” Lila’s
voice came from behind the screen. “She has children their age. They’ve invited
us to have dinner with them this evening. I told them we’d be delighted to join
them.”

“At the minister’s house?” Bishop considered that idea. He had a
nodding acquaintance with Joseph Sunday and his family, but he’d certainly
never pictured himself sitting down to dinner with the man. He’d generally
found it more comfortable to keep a bit of distance between himself and men of
the cloth. They had a nasty tendency to want to lecture him on the error of his
ways. “Is that where you disappeared to this afternoon?”

“I didn’t disappear. I met Bridget at Fitch’s and she suggested
that the children and I spend the afternoon with her family. We’ve become quite
good friends.” Lila’s voice was a bit breathless, as if she were busy doing
something that took a bit of effort. Drying herself perhaps? The thought of her
running a linen towel over her soft skin made Bishop’s mouth go dry, and it
took him a moment to hear the rest of what she said. “They’re nice people and I
think it’s a chance for the children to make friends. According to Gavin, that
wasn’t something their grandmother encouraged. She actually told them that she
didn’t want to risk them coming into contact with someone who might bring out
their bad blood.”

The anger in her voice made his mouth twist in a half smile even
as he felt a renewed pang of guilt for having left Gavin and Angel in his
mother-in-law’s not-so-tender care.

“I told them, if they were going to worry about bad blood, it
should be hers,” Lila said, sounding defiant and just a little guilty. “I
probably shouldn’t have spoken ill of her but, really, any woman who would tell
two innocent children such absolute rot doesn’t deserve to have them respect
her. I’m just sorry I won’t have the opportunity to tell her so to her face.”

Bishop found himself more than a little sorry too. That would have
been something to see. He had a feeling that Louise would have found she’d met
her match in Lila Adams McKenzie.

“You’ve been very good with the children,” he said slowly. The
acknowledgment was overdue.

Lila had been tying the belt of her robe but her fingers abruptly
fumbled in the simple task. There was something approaching warmth in his
voice, something she hadn’t heard much of in their brief acquaintance. The
sound of it melted the last traces of her anger at the way he’d intruded on her
bath. It was difficult to stay angry with him when he was thanking her.

“If I let... circumstances affect my behavior toward them, I’d be
no better than their grandmother.” She finished belting her robe and patted her
hand over her hair to make sure it was still confined in the loose knot on top
of her head. She would have preferred to be fully dressed before facing him
again, but her clothes were on the other side of the screen and she didn’t
think it wise to ask Bishop to leave the room so this would just have to do.
The robe covered everything her dress would have done, she told herself.

“They’re very nice children,” she said as she came around the
screen. “It isn’t hard to be—good heavens, what on earth are you doing with
those?”

Bishop had been standing to one side of the window, watching the
activity on the street below. He responded to the shock in Lila’s voice more
than her words, spinning away from the window to see what was the matter. He
scanned the room quickly but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing but
her standing next to the screen looking at him as if he’d suddenly grown horns
and a tail.

“What’s wrong?” he snapped.

“Those things.” She pointed an accusing finger at him. “Why are
you wearing them.”

“My guns?” Bishop asked incredulously. His right hand dropped to
the butt of the Colt .38 he wore on his hip. “Is that what you’re talking
about?”

“Yes. Why are you wearing them?”

“I usually wear them.”

“I’ve never seen you do so,” she said flatly. She gave the weapons
a look of acute distaste.

That didn’t seem possible. The Colts were as much a part of what
he wore as his boots and his hat. But when Bishop thought about it, he realized
that she probably hadn’t seen him with his guns on. He always took them off
before taking her and the children down to dinner, and, apart from that one
meal each day, they’d barely set eyes on each other. But even if this was the
first time she’d seen
him
wearing guns, that didn’t mean it was the
first time she’d seen
anyone
wearing them.

“Most of the men in Paris wear guns,” he said.

“I had noticed that and I thought it was extraordinary that you
allowed them to do so.”

“Allowed them?” Bishop’s brows rose.

“Yes, allowed them.” She jerked her belt tighter with a quick,
nervous gesture. “You’re the sheriff. Why don’t you tell them they can’t go
around wearing guns?”

“I could, I suppose,” he said slowly. “Of course, I’d probably
find myself on the wrong side of a lynching party.”

“You can’t be serious!” Lila’s eyes widened in disbelief. Her
shocked reaction reminded Bishop of why he’d come here in the first place and
rekindled the anger he’d felt when he hadn’t been able to find her earlier.

“This isn’t Pennsylvania. Things are different here.”

“I don’t believe they’re so different that grown men need to arm
themselves in order to walk down the street.”

“Whether they need to or not, there’s no law that says they can’t,
and it would be more than my life is worth to try and tell them otherwise,” he
said bluntly. “This is Colorado, and the people walking the streets out there
aren’t the shopkeepers and businessmen you used to know in Beaton.”

“I don’t see that they’re all that different.” Lila restrained the
urge to sniff in disbelief. She’d heard so much about how “different” things
were in the west, first from Douglas and Susan and now from Bishop. But as far
as she could see, other than being dustier and somewhat less endowed with
cultural amenities, Paris wasn’t all that different from Beaton. People were
much the same, no matter what part of the country you were in. “Mr. Fitch
doesn’t seem that different than Mr. Miller who ran the mercantile in Beaton.”

Bishop saw the stubborn set of her chin and knew she still didn’t
understand. “What do you think your Mr. Miller would do if two men tried to rob
his store? Give them what they wanted and then call for the law to deal with
them?”

“I can’t speak for Mr. Miller but it seems a reasonable reaction,”
Lila said stiffly.

“Six months ago, two miners came down out of the hills.” Bishop
spoke rapidly, hoping to make her understand. “They hadn’t made the big strike
they thought they deserved and they were feeling a little out of sorts. They
did some drinking at the Lucky Dragon and decided they’d probably just missed
hitting the mother lode. One more try and they’d strike it rich. Only problem
was, they didn’t have any money for supplies. I guess it must have seemed like
a good idea to rob Fitch’s. They could get the supplies they needed and
disappear back up into the mountains. Either they didn’t know Fitch sleeps in a
back room at the store or they figured one skinny old man wouldn’t cause them
much trouble.”

Interested despite herself, Lila prompted him when he paused.
“What happened? Mr. Fitch wasn’t hurt, was he?”

“Fitch wasn’t hurt. He came at them with a sawed-off shotgun. One
of them lost the use of an arm. We buried the other one.”

“That nice old man?” Lila gaped at him in shock. The story was all
the more shocking for its flat delivery. She wouldn’t have thought the tall,
thin storekeeper capable of anything more violent than swatting a fly. “When I
took the children to his store today, he was so nice.”

“That ‘nice old man’ was trapping beaver in these mountains long
before either of us was born,” Bishop told her. “He was at the first American
Rendezvous in ’25. Not long after that, he took a Crow wife and lived with her
people for a few years. When she died, he went to work for the army as a scout.
And when he got tired of that, he did a little mining before deciding to settle
down and run a store.”

“Mr. Fitch?” Lila’s voice rose high on a note of disbelief. She
simply couldn’t connect what he’d just told her with the man she’d met.

“Quite a few people in this town could tell similar stories,”
Bishop told her. “Folks don’t come west because they’re settled, stay-at-home
types. More than a few of them were known by another name; some have a price on
their heads in other parts of the country. Most are good enough people but not
all of them, not by a long shot. This town isn’t like the places you know. If
it was, they wouldn’t have hired someone like me to keep the peace. I don’t
want you disappearing again the way you did this afternoon.”

“I didn’t disappear,” Lila snapped. She was shaken by what he’d
told her, but that didn’t mean she was going to let him dictate to her. “I was
at the minister’s house. I hardly think I was in danger there. Unless you’re
about to tell me that he’s really a wanted killer in three states or is
secretly head of a murderous gang of rustlers.”

Despite himself, Bishop felt his mouth quirk at the testy edge to
her voice. One of the things he admired about her was her spirit. She’d tackle
hell with a hand bucket if it suited her. Maybe he had overreacted a bit when
he’d realized that he didn’t know where she was. This wasn’t Pennsylvania but
it wasn’t exactly San Francisco’s Barbary Coast either. He just wasn’t used to
having anyone to worry about besides himself. Finding himself abruptly a family
man again might have made him a little touchy.

Besides, it was hard to hold on to his anger when she was standing
there wrapped in nothing but a robe. The sapphire-colored silk covered her from
her throat to the delicate arch of her feet. She would hardly have been more
modestly covered if she’d been fully dressed. But there was no chemise beneath
the heavy silk, no layers of petticoats and drawers—nothing between his hands
and her soft skin but that one layer of fabric.

“As far as I know, Joseph Sunday isn’t wanted for anything,” he
said absently, trying to pull his attention back to the conversation.

“That’s certainly a relief,” Lila said with heavy sarcasm.

“That’s not the point.” His eyes drifted to where the fabric of
her robe clung to the full curves of her breasts. He could see the peaks of her
nipples pushing against the dark silk, and he suddenly remembered the pebble
hardness of them pressed into his palms.

“Just what is the point, then?” she asked impatiently.

Damned if he could remember. Damned if he could think of anything
but the fact the she was standing in front of him wearing next to nothing. But
she was looking at him impatiently, waiting for his response.

“The point is that things are different here,” he said, aware that
it wasn’t exactly the commanding finish he’d originally envisioned.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” She gave him a slightly puzzled look, as
if the conversation hadn’t gone the way she’d expected. “Did you burst into my
room just to tell me that?”