Midnight Lover (21 page)

"I already know you're the watchin' kind, Car-o-line," he drawled, a sardonic grin upon his handsome face. "Think you're going to get yourself one hell of an education tonight."

"There is nothing you could possibly teach me."

"Don't be too sure about that." He opened two more buttons and his flat belly was revealed. "I been told I'm a damn good teacher."

She pulled the sheet up over her chin and glared at him. "You're going to look quite foolish when you go marching out of here in your union suit."

"Not payin' attention, Car-o-line. There's nothin' under these trousers but me." He unbuttoned the rest of his fly and held the two edges together between thumb and forefinger.

"You wouldn't dare," she breathed. "The hell I wouldn't."

He pulled his hand away. Caroline buried her face in her pillow before she had a chance to be shamed by his brazen display.

"Get out! Take your clothes and leave my room this instant!"

But, of course he didn't listen. The mattress dipped and next thing she knew she was sharing the bed with a naked and smug Jesse Reardon.

He patted a spot just inches away from his sheet-covered hip. "Scoot on over, darlin'. I think it's time we got to know each other better."

With a strangled scream she leaped from the bed and stood up, breasts heaving beneath the thin cotton of her nightdress, and she glared down at him. "You are the most vile, reprehensible, disgusting excuse for a human being that it has ever been my misfortune to know. You are a miscreant, Jesse Reardon, a mistake upon the face of this earth. You are not fit to shine the shoes of the lowliest of God's creatures and it shames me to be breathing the same air you breathe."

He stretched broadly then clasped his hands behind his head. "That mean you ain't comin' back to bed, darlin'?"

Caroline knew in her deepest soul that had she access to a gun, she would have gladly fired a round of silver bullets into the black heart of Jesse Reardon.

"You win this game, Mr. Reardon," she said, head held high, "but the match will belong to me."

She slammed the door behind her and his laughter followed as she stormed down the narrow hallway to Abby's room.

"Miss Caroline!" Abby exclaimed as Caroline crawled into the narrow bed next to her confused young maid. "Would it be thunderin' outside again?"

"Yes," Caroline said, praying God would forgive the white lie for her fear of thunderstorms was long-standing and quite real. "Do you mind terribly? It's only for tonight."

But Abby had already drifted back to sleep, leaving Caroline alone with her murderous thoughts and the dark and violent pounding of her heart.

#

Come morning, she was still angry—both with herself and with Reardon—and she found it impossible to settle down to breakfast. The tea tasted pale and watery and the apple muffins Abby'd baked the day before stuck in her throat like saw dust.

Upstairs Jesse Reardon slept the sleep of the victorious and she wondered how a man of such violent and aggressive tendencies had managed to live to manhood without being shot dead. It simply wasn't fair that her father lay dead and buried in his grave while that...that outlaw snored peacefully in her very bed.

Thank the good Lord Abby had shepherded their boarders up to the attic to allocate storage space for the household goods each girl had brought with her to Silver Spur in anticipation of making a brilliant and romantic match, for Caroline had no idea how she was going to explain Reardon's presence in the Crazy Arrow—much less in her very room.

"Mornin', Car-o-line."

She started inwardly at the sound of that lazy, honeyed voice but stubbornly refused to allow him the pleasure of knowing he'd taken her by surprise. Men like Reardon had enough advantages at their command when it came to life; she would not hand him another. Taking a deep breath, she turned to face him.

"Surely it's not a good morning if it finds you still in residence here, Mr. Reardon."

He leaned against the door jamb, arms crossed over his broad chest. "I kind of thought you'd be less prickly in the daylight."

"I have the odd habit of disliking intruders, Mr. Reardon," she said, her voice even. "If that makes me appear prickly, as you put it, then so be it."

"Men don't like gals with sharp tongues," he observed in that irritatingly lazy drawl of his.

"Perhaps their tongues would be less sharp were the men less simple-minded."

"Ain't going to find yourself a husband talkin' like that, Car-o-line."

"How fortunate for me, since I am not in pursuit of one."

"Every gal needs a man."

"Not I, Mr. Reardon." She'd seen the folly of the married state up close, thanks to her father Aaron, and she had little faith that she would fare any better at the institution than he had.

Reardon stepped closer until she caught the scent of soap and sun upon his tanned skin. The mixture was powerful, heady, and were it not a sign of weakness, she would have taken a step backward in an attempt to escape his powerful magnetism.

"If you'd had the guts to stake your claim last night, you might be thinkin' different this morning," he said, his breath warm against her cheek. "I've been told I have a way with a woman's—"

"You arrogant swine!" She raised her hand to slap him but he caught her wrist between his thumb and forefinger and held her fast.

"I wouldn't start a game I was bound to lose, darlin'."

"You have tried my patience once too often." Anger ripped away her facade of self-control. "If I were a man I would gladly call you out!"

"If you were a man, I would have killed you the day you rode into town and saved myself a passel of headaches."

"Damn you! You should count your lucky stars that I haven't a knife on my person, for I'd like nothing more than to plunge it into your back!" He had the gall to laugh in the face of her outrage. "I'm not dumb enough to turn my back on you, Car-o-line." He pulled her closer until her breasts touched the front of his fringed leather vest. "Face to face is the best way to deal with a filly like you."

"I want you out of here!"

"Took the words right out of my own mouth, Car-o-line. Stage ain't due back 'til the end of the week but I'm sure we can find you a place to light until then."

"I've found a place, Mr. Reardon, and I intend to stay."

"Seems like we got ourselves a real problem."

"Give up this foolish claim on the Crazy Arrow and the mine and our problem could be solved."

His grip on her wrist tightened and she could feel the heat from his body.

"Could say the same to you, darlin'."

"I will never relinquish what belongs to me."

"I don't like losin', Car-o-line. Only happened once and it left a real bitter taste in my mouth."

"Well, isn't that too bad, Jesse Reardon," she said, finally breaking free of his hold. "Isn't that just too bad."

"Gal like you should be horsewhipped."

"Gelding would be too good for you."

"Your daddy should've taken a strap to you."

"Your mother should have reconsidered starting a family."

"Would he be givin' you trouble, miss?"

Both Caroline and Reardon started at the intrusion. There in the doorway stood Abby and the new residents of the Crazy Arrow.

Abby wielded her broomstick high. "If he be givin' you trouble, I'd be happy to shoo him out the door for you."

Caroline hesitated. How one earth was she going to tell Abby the latest development?

"You goin' to tell her, Car-o-line, or you givin' the honor to me?" Reardon's voice betrayed his amusement and she wished she could hit him over the head with the broom Abby carried.

"Mind your own business!" she snapped then turned back to Abby and the girls. "There seems to be no easy way to explain this, ladies, but I'm afraid Mr. Reardon will be staying with us."

The collective gasp of horror from the assembled females was almost more than Caroline could bear.

"Good Lord! I haven't announced the end of the world," she said defensively. "Mr. Reardon and I have been disputing the ownership of the Crazy Arrow—"

"And the mine," he broke in.

"—and the mine," she continued, fury filling her breast, "and he has decided to move onto the premises until such time as the circuit judge can rule in my favor."

"Slick, Car-o-line. You sure do take after your daddy."

She ignored him. The truly difficult part was telling them he had commandeered her spacious bedroom.

"And where would you be restin' your head each night?" Abby asked Reardon, raising the broom in defiance.

Reardon looked toward Caroline.

"And where would I be resting my head each night?" he asked her, his voice low and shockingly intimate.

The image of him last night, naked under the sheet and altogether too male for comfort, flashed through Caroline's brain. Well, there was no hope for it. Abby would know the truth soon enough when Caroline moved all of her possessions from the big sunny bedroom and into the pitiful closet at the end of the hall.

She cleared her throat. "Mr. Reardon will be staying in—"

"In the room at the end of the hall," he said, his voice bland as baby food.

Caroline frankly stared at him, her jaw agape. "There's no bed in the room at the end of the hall."

He shrugged. "Bring me up a cot from the cellar. Don't need much more than that."

"You heard him, Abby," Caroline snapped. "See to it."

Mumbling under her breath, Abby headed back down to the cellar with the other girls close behind.

"You goin' to thank me, Car-o-line?" Reardon asked the moment Abby and the others disappeared.

"For what? For trying to take my property from under my very nose?"

"For savin' your pretty face in front of all those spinsters you sold a bill of goods to last night." His grin widened. "Wouldn't look real good for their ringleader to be sharin' a bedroll with one of the enemy, would it?"

Her face flamed with anger and embarrassment. "And it wouldn't look good for the leader of the Single Man's Protection League to be making his home in a hotel for women, now would it, Mr. Reardon?"

"That's where you're wrong, darlin'. This is a blow for all the men you gals have done wrong. Silver Spur is a man's town. Always was, always will be. We're just settin' the record straight."

"You may have a room in this hotel but that's the only piece of the Crazy Arrow you'll ever lay claim to, Mr. Reardon. This establishment belonged to my father and now it belongs to me and there is nothing on heaven or earth that you can do, short of murder, to take it from me."

His eyes narrowed. "Don't tempt me, Car-o-line. A bullet would tidy this situation up real fast now, wouldn't it?"

He would do it, she thought as she took his measure with her eyes. He would snuff out her life as easily as another man would squash a spider beneath his bootheel. In the blink of an eye she would be consigned to a place on Cemetery Hill with only a wooden cross and a forlorn bouquet of daisies to mark her grave.

If she were to survive until the circuit judge came next week, Reardon must not know the way he made her feel. Straightening her shoulders, she met his eyes. "From this night forward, I intend to sleep with a revolver under my pillow, Mr. Reardon, and I shall not hesitate to use it. The door to my bedroom will be locked tight."

"Put a hundred damn locks on your door if you want, Car-o-line," he said in a voice of liquid fire, "but don't expect any of them to keep me out—not if I decide to put my gun to your pretty little head after all."

"I hate you," she whispered fiercely. "I wish you were dead!"

"Then that makes us even," he said with a laugh, "because I'm wishin' the same thing for you."

Her breath came hard. Her pulse pounded in her ears and at the base of her throat as adrenaline sang through her veins. Never in her life had she been so purely, totally furious with another human being.

And never in her life had she been so magnificently alive.

Chapter 1
2

"Three cheers for Reardon!" Big Red Morgan raised the cry later that morning as Jesse strode through the swinging doors into the gambling parlor.

"You done it, Jesse," said Sam Markham, his rugged face split wide by his first smile in weeks. "Damned if you didn't win 'em all back over to your side."

"How'd she take sharin' a bedroll?" called out Three Toe Taylor as the crowd of men erupted into hurrahs. "Bet the gal's packin' her trunk and cryin' for her poor dead mama."

A tiny muscle in Jesse's jaw twitched and for some unaccountable reason he found himself thinking how good it would feel to knock that shit-eating grin off of Morton's face.

For the first time since the fire of '72 that had spelled an end to the glory days of Silver Spur, he felt some hope for the future. Damn if it didn't hurt like hell to say so, but the beautiful easterner was sharp as a man when it came to seeing life the way it really was. Except for Jade, he'd never met a filly who understood anything more about the future than the color of the curtains they wanted for their parlors.