Heaven with a Gun (4 page)

Funny, she was usually much better at separating Gillian from Lil, knowing exactly what people thought of her outlaw side. The country’s poor opinion of Lightning Lil had never before seemed too high a price to pay for the success of her masquerade. “I’m just hungry,” she said. “I haven’t had anything to eat since last evening.”

He was immediately repentant. “Chrissake, why didn’t you say something? I’m sorry. Listen, my rent doesn’t include meals, but there’s a couple bars that serve food in the evening. Let me help you up.” He pulled her from the chair and balanced her against the wall as he retrieved her crutch and bonnet. Clumsily, beguilingly, he perched the chip-straw construction on her head and tied a bow beneath her chin.

She couldn’t remember ever being the recipient of a man’s tender touch. It was intoxicating. His strong, callused fingers brushed her throat, leaving her lightheaded. He wet his lips. She stared. He dragged a deep breath through his nostrils, as though preparing for some physical endurance trial and, before she knew what he was about, picked her up, crutch and all.

“I can walk.”

“Not down those stairs, you can’t.”

“I could try.”

“You’d just break your other leg.”

Lord, he felt so massive and safe and strong, and it had been so very long since she’d felt protected, let alone valued. She didn’t argue further, so he started out the door and headed down the stairs. She turned her head and closed her eyes so he couldn’t see her giving herself over to the guilty pleasure of being held. Beneath her ear, his heart beat strongly and his day-old beard rasped agreeably on her temple. He paused, bouncing her in his arms to readjust her weight, an inadvertent demonstration of his strength that sent her pulse racing.

“Mr. Coyne, who is that woman?” a strident voice from below demanded. “I’ll have no sinful goings-on in my house, sir!”

Gilly’s eyes snapped open and she found herself staring down into the upturned visage of a red-faced termagant of indeterminate age. It took Gilly a second to realize that they’d reached the bottom of the stairs and weren’t still several steps above the woman—she was that tiny. And angry. Her little face was puckered in on itself like a half-gnawed week-old apple. Little graying curls framed her face like mold on cheese.

“Ah, Mrs. Osby. This is . . . my wife.”

Jim made no attempt to set her down.

“Wife?” the little woman exclaimed, all color leaching out of her face except for a thin crimson testimony to her use of lip salve. Obviously, Mrs. Osby didn’t want Jim Coyne to have a wife. She stomped her foot. “You didn’t . . . You never said nothing about no wife joining you!”

“Her arrival was unexpected.”

The woman scowled. For a second, romantic disappointment contended with greed. Greed won. “That’ll bring your room rate up two dollars more a week.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And there’ll be no extra linens or towels.”

“No, ma’am.”

“No drinking.”

“Of course not.” Amazingly he managed to say this with a straight face. He started by the landlady.

But Mrs. Osby wasn’t done with Jim yet. She put her little taloned hands on her hips, peering intently at Gilly. She sniffed. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mr. Coyne. A man your age with such a young girl.”

“I thought to give her the advantage of a mature man’s guidance.” Gilly saw the spark of humor in his eyes.

“Well,” Mrs. Osby began, “I say an old goat and—”

Gilly had had enough. She linked her hands behind Jim’s neck, combing her fingers through the crisp, clean curls. “Can Big Daddy Jimmums take Baby Pookums to eat now? Baby’s hungry.”

“How old are you, child?” Mrs. Osby demanded.

“Oh, I’m much older than I look,” Gilly said sweetly, all the while fondling Jim’s throat and the nape of his neck. “I’ll be seventeen next month.”

“Barely legal!” Mrs. Osby’s brows locked into a deep V above her nose. She stared purposefully at where Jim’s hand lay so close Gilly’s breast. “Mind you, no noise past ten o’clock!”

Jim’s nostrils flared, just a fraction. Then one side of his mouth suddenly crooked up in a devil’s grin and by God if the man didn’t have dimples—long, deep dimples. “Now, Mrs. Osby, don’t tell me you expect to police that?”

Mrs. Osby’s mouth dropped open and she gaped for air like a beached fish. With a sharp snap of starched muslin, she fled down the narrow hallway.

Jim looked down into her bemused eyes and grinned again. She shivered. Dimples and a roguish sense of humor. She could be in real trouble here.

Chapter Four

Why on earth would a rose-growing, Latin-spouting girl become a thief? He simply couldn’t believe it was for the money. She didn’t seem to have that much. For the thrills? He could imagine that, but it still didn’t quite fit. She looked too tired for a thrill seeker, and there was a certain wistfulness about her mouth in her few unguarded moments.

Jim hadn’t pumped her for information during dinner. He simply enjoyed her conversation, and even though she carefully steered talk away from any personal information, he learned a lot more about her than she realized. Gilly wasn’t the sort of woman to keep an opinion to herself.

She thought the Brooklyn Bridge currently under construction was a “monument to graft,” an opinion with which he coincidentally agreed; ergo, she kept herself apprised of New York newspapers. She thought that baseball was a fad, an opinion with which he definitely disagreed; ergo, she was completely uninformed about sports. She thought that a person “had to accept whatever destination the path they walk leads them to,” an opinion he didn’t know whether he agreed with or not; ergo, the essence of her still eluded him.

And finally, he knew that if nothing else, her mouth should be outlawed.

For the last twenty minutes, he hadn’t been able to concentrate. He had barely touched his own plate of steak and eggs, simply because after every few bites she cleaned the corners of her mouth with the tip of her tongue. And because when her clean white teeth bit through a crisp apple peel, her bottom lip dragged provocatively against the smooth skin of the fruit. And because when she chewed, her mouth moved and he wanted it moving on him.

“Something wrong with your dinner?” She pointed her fork at the half pound of steak remaining on his plate.

“No. It was fine. Just fine.”

She took a sip of milk, leaving behind a narrow little white mustache above her upper lip, which she licked clean with a flourish of her pink tongue. He closed his eyes and begged for strength.

“It would be a shame to let it go to waste. Good meat. Mind if I . . .”

“No. No,” he said, glad for the distraction. “Be my guest. Go right ahead.”

Happily, she speared the steak and began sawing into it. She ate with such enthusiasm that he wondered if maybe she wasn’t a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, a kid who’d never gotten enough to eat. Poor child.

The thought blackened his mood. If she was sixteen, then she really was a child, and he was lusting after a girl young enough to be his daughter. “Sixteen,” he muttered.

“Sixteen what?” she asked, fork half-raised to her sinful-looking mouth.

Maybe she was real close to seventeen. . . . Eighteen years wasn’t so very—Christ! What the hell was he thinking?

“When’s your birthday?” he demanded. “You know, you don’t look all that young to me. I would have put your age around twenty-one. For your own sake, when you’re finally caught—and you will be— don’t try pulling any ‘shucks, I’m just a kid. I didn’t know better’ defense. It won’t work. You look old enough to know better.”

“Thank you for the advice, Mr. Coyne, but there are two minor points I’d like to make: One, I don’t intend to get caught, and two, I’m not sixteen. I’m twenty-seven.”

“Huh?”

She laughed. “I’ve always looked young for my years. Granted, not that young—and it isn’t very gentlemanly of you to point it out even if it’s true— but when that woman started in on you I just couldn’t help myself.”

He relaxed in relief, extraordinary and unaccountable. “You have a diabolical sense of humor.”

She smiled, flattered.

Could she be twenty-seven, or was that just another in her string of endless lies? HNah, he believed her. For all her trust and vitality, there was a touch of weariness in her gaze, a tensile maturity in the set of her throat and shoulders, the brand of experience in her humor.

“Jim!” The thunk between his shoulder blades announced Vance Calhoun’s arrival. Jim offered up thanks that his mouth hadn’t been full. He turned, looking straight up at the undercarriage of Margaret Calhoun’s bosom. He stumbled to his feet.

Margaret gazed at him with cool amusement. She was a handsome, sharp-featured woman with a bosom worth noting and a possessive, nearly predatory air. He could see her in the role of Lightning Lil far more easily than he could the woman across from him.

“I heard your wife had arrived in town, Jim,” Vance said, hauling out a chair next to Gilly’s and dropping into it. “I told Margaret we had to come and meet her. Stuck way out here like this, Margaret gets starved for the company of women of her own class.”

“Mrs. Calhoun, my wife . . . er, Mrs. Coyne,” Jim said. “Mrs. Coyne, Mrs. Vance Calhoun.”

“Come now, James,” Margaret said. “I’m certain your bride and I shall become close friends. What do you call her?”

Jim swallowed. His brain seized up as he searched for a name, any name.

“Darling,” said Gilly softly. “Jim calls me ‘darling.’”

Margaret’s head swiveled, like a snake watching a particularly colorful bird. The corners of her lips lifted. “How utterly charming,” she murmured. “But I can hardly call you ‘darling’ too.”

Gilly didn’t respond; her attention turned to Vance who, having seized her hand, was patting it. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Coyne.” No, the bastard was stroking it. “You’ll certainly be a fine addition to the female population.”

“Thank you,” Gilly said in an odd, hushed voice. She made no move to retrieve her hand from Vance’s clasp. “Won’t you join us? We were just finishing dinner.”

“Uh, darlin’,” Jim said, “I don’t think—”

“Isn’t that sweet, dear?” Margaret cut in, studiously avoiding the sight of her husband playing with Gilly’s hand. “James wants to be alone with his bride. Kind of Mrs. Coyne as it is to invite us, we mustn’t impose on their reunion, Vance.”

“Course not.” Vance released Gilly’s hand but continuing his slow perusal of her person.

“I’ll tell you what,” Margaret said. “Come to our little soiree Saturday evening. Just a few of the best people this town has to offer. Though the best is hardly good enough. Eight o’clock, shall we say?”

“We’d be delighted,” Gilly said before Jim could refuse.

“Come, Vance. Let’s leave the lovebirds alone. Only look at how anxious James is to have us gone.”

As soon as they’d left, Jim sat down. “Want to explain that?”

“What?” Gilly had already begun shoveling another forkful of meat into her mouth and was chomping away in evident pleasure. She looked like a cat that had just been stroked. Which she had.

“You sure you didn’t get hit in the head by that bullet? The less you and I are together in public, the better. It isn’t going to take a real bright person to figure out that you and I are not man and wife. That was stupid, Gilly—”

“Hush!” she frowned. “I told you not to call me that in public.”

“Okay, darlin’," he ground out. “But you better start penning your apologies to Mrs. Calhoun tonight.”

“I’m going to that party,” she said firmly, fright underlying the determination in her face. Why would missing a party frighten her? “I’m going with or without you. If you think I’m going to sit alone with you in that little two-by-four room for two weeks, clomping outside twice a day to eat, you are wrong. Dead wrong.”

*

She held her breath, praying she wouldn’t have to go to the Calhouns’ alone, knowing she would if she must. She simply had to go to that party. She was so close to finishing things. Each year she seemed less a part of one world, but no more a part of the other. She wanted her identity back. She wanted an end to dusty trails, rifle reports, and the acrid scent of gunpowder. She wanted an end to leaving empty classrooms, coming home to an empty house and an empty life.

“Is that a threat?” Jim asked coldly.

His question stunned her. “What?”

“You’re supposed to be pretty good with a pistol and more than a little ruthless. I’m asking you point-blank: Are you threatening me?” A tic had replaced his dimple, and his face had gone still and tense, his eyes and mouth, hard.

What did he think she was capable of doing?

The answer was obvious: anything. And why shouldn’t he?

Once again, she’d made the same mistake. For a short hour, she’d tricked herself into believing she was simply a woman enjoying the company of a gentleman. But Jim wasn’t her beau and she wasn’t his lady, and he, at least, hadn’t mistaken their dinner for anything more than the act of feeding the body. She was pathetic.

She stood up, her vision swimming in the sudden sting of tears. She refused to shed them. “I’m not going to answer that, Mr. Coyne. I’m going back to the boarding house now. You can stay here or come along to ensure I don’t lay a trap for you.” Her attempted mockery failed, sounded brittle.

Before he could answer, she picked up her crutch and moved away, whacking her cast into the spring- loaded door and stepping out into the cold night air, leaving Jim and might-have-beens behind.

Outside, the main street teemed with lurid sound and motion. Men staggered and tripped on the boardwalk, hollered from the alleys, and raced their horses down the center of town. Bright, garish light spilled from the open doors of saloons, mingling with the jangling of an off-key player piano and the cacophony of drunken singers. This was her world. Or, at least, Lil’s.

Taking a deep breath, Gilly started the long, awkward walk back to the boardinghouse. Jim Coyne thought she could be violent. Good. That’s what she wanted people to think. That’s what had kept her safe: the perception that she was capable of any violence. But it did hurt, deep inside where she thought she’d killed every romantic notion. She’d thought for a short, wonderful hour that he saw her,
Gilly
, that in a deep instinctive way he knew her, knew she couldn’t hurt anyone.