Once an Outlaw (9 page)

But Emily never had an opportunity to see what happened when she descended upon Clint Barclay and Berty Miller. Someone tapped her shoulder, and she discovered that the sea of women had somehow parted. She gazed up at the scrubbed, eager face of an impossibly tall young cowboy in a red shirt.

“Wondered if I could have this dance, ma’am?”

She was swept forward into a rousing do-si-do before she knew it, and barely had time to learn that the cowboy’s name was Fred Baker—then a sleek man in the elegant garb of a gambler invited her to waltz, followed by a stream of other partners. She caught sight of Lester near one of the refreshment tables, then lost him in the whirl of shifting colors and heart-thumping fiddle music. At last she was so breathless she retreated from the dance floor in search of a glass of lemonade, and it was at the refreshment table that Pete found her, sipping lemonade with several cowboys surrounding her, making flirtatious
conversation and awaiting the opportunity to ask her for a dance.

“Yahoo!” He grabbed the glass of lemonade from her, sloshing some over the side as he set it down, then spun her around. “I won fifty dollars! How ’bout that, little sis?”

Emily gasped dizzily as he finally stopped spinning her, and she grinned at him as the cowboys retreated, casting dark looks at Pete.

“Good for you. Now we can buy more stock.”

“Stock! How about all of us taking a trip to Denver, staying in a fancy hotel, going out for a big gut-busting dinner—”

“Pete!”

“Come on, Em, we all deserve some fun. This ranching is hard work.” He grinned. “See that fancy gambler over there?”

He was pointing to the gambler she’d waltzed with. “Name’s Lee Tarleton—he won five hundred dollars. Wish I’d done that, but fifty’s better than nothing. Where’s Lester?”

Pete scanned the room for their cousin. “Got to tell him my good news.”

“I haven’t seen him in a while. Oh, look, he’s
dancing!”

Lester was plodding across the dance floor with a woman she recognized as one of the saloon girls who’d been eating apples on the balcony her first day in town.

“Well, good for him. Reckon I’ll find
me
a girl to dance with too!” Pete started off toward a knot of young women sitting near the lobby staircase, then turned back. “You all right, Em? That sheriff hasn’t bothered you, has he?”

Bothered her? Clint Barclay hadn’t even noticed her
presence. She might as well be sitting at home sewing curtains or scrubbing floors for all he knew. Or cared.

“No one’s bothered me. But, Pete, maybe you should let me hold on to your winnings—”

He was already gone, though, charging toward the group of young women, and as Emily watched he selected the prettiest one in the flounciest pink dress she’d ever seen and swept her off to join the throng of dancers.

She turned back to retrieve her glass of lemonade and suddenly had the eerie sensation that she was being watched. Looking over her shoulder, she realized that her instinct was true.

She
was
being watched. By a man standing less than ten feet away, holding an empty shot glass of whiskey, wiping a hand across his mouth.

Slim Jenks
.

As she met his eyes, he gave a sneering smile, set his shot glass on a table behind him, and advanced straight toward her.

ATCHING
S
LIM
J
ENKS HEAD TOWARD
Emily Spoon like a snake slithering toward a mouse, Clint swore under his breath.

“I beg your pardon, Clint?” Tammy Sue Wells, the daughter of one of Lonesome’s ranchers, seized his arm as he took one determined step away from her. “Wait a minute, honey,” she exclaimed in dismay, “where’re you going?”

“You’ll have to excuse me, Tammy Sue, there’s something I have to do.”

But another lilting feminine voice intruded before he could take another step.
“There
you are, Clint.” Berty Miller pounced on him and hooked her arm through his, slanting him a dazzling smile. “I know you said you have to work tonight and keep an eye on things with all these strangers in town for the poker tournament and all, but we haven’t even had a chance for more than one teensy dance yet—”

“Later, Berty.” He yanked his arm free without even glancing at her and stalked toward Jenks.

Tammy Sue and Berty eyed each other, then both let out sighs of frustration at exactly the same moment. They
looked to see where the object of their attention had gone off to in such a hurry.

But to their surprise, he wasn’t walking toward another woman at all. He was headed straight toward that new wrangler from the WW Ranch, and from the expression on the sheriff’s face, it wasn’t going to be a pleasant conversation.

“I wouldn’t go another step nearer the lady if I were you.” The steel in Clint’s voice halted Slim Jenks in his tracks, only a few feet from where Emily Spoon held her ground.

Clint allowed himself one brief glance at her. He had to give her credit. She was standing straight and tall, regal as a princess—no running or dodging for her. Not that she’d need to—he was damned if he’d let the son-of-a-bitch close to her again—but she hadn’t even tried to flee.

His hard gaze centered itself on Jenks once more as the wrangler spun around to face him. “Stay out of this, Barclay. I’m warning you.”

“You got that wrong, Jenks.” Clint kept his tone low so that people strolling and chatting all around them couldn’t hear or notice anything out of the way. “I’m warning
you
. If I catch you so much as breathing too close to Miss Spoon, I’m going to lock you up. You got that?”

People drifted past them, headed toward the refreshment table or the dance floor, laughing, talking. But Jenks and Clint might have been alone at high noon on a deserted street for all the notice they took of their festive surroundings.

“Hell, Sheriff—she’s a Spoon,” Jenks sneered. “You don’t want her kind in this town any more than I do. So what do you care if I have myself some fun with that little piece of—?”

Clint hit him in the jaw. Jenks flew sideways, stumbling into Parnell Smith, who managed to shield Margaret just in time. As Jenks went sprawling across the floor, a gasp went up from the crowd and everyone stopped what he was doing to stare.

Hell
. Clint took a deep breath, angry at himself. He hadn’t planned on doing that. It was his job to keep the peace at the dance, not to disrupt it. He didn’t know why he’d lost his temper with Jenks—it wasn’t like him to lose control—but there was no going back now.

He glanced at Emily Spoon. She’d gone as pale as the white linen gracing the table behind her. And she was staring at him as if she’d never seen him before.

But then, everyone was staring at him. Including Jenks, who was holding his jaw and not even trying yet to get up from the floor.

“Sorry, folks.” Clint raised his voice so everyone could hear, relieved that despite the anger still pumping through him, he sounded cool and steady. “Nothing to worry about. Go on back to having a good time.”

He grabbed Jenks by the back of his shirt and hauled him to his feet. “You—
out,”
he said in a soft, deadly tone.

As he started to escort the wrangler to the door of the hotel, he glanced around for Emily Spoon.

She was gone.

“Don’t say one more word,” he warned Jenks as they crossed the lobby and Clint shoved him outside onto the hotel’s moon-silvered porch. The wrangler spun around and glared at him, his eyes alight with anger, but Clint continued without giving him a chance to speak.

“Next time you won’t get off so easy. I’m beginning to think Pete Spoon was telling the truth when he said you started that fight at the saloon.”

“You’d believe that no-good thieving outlaw over me?”
Jenks demanded. He clenched his fists. “He’s the one you ought to be throwing out of this dance.”

“You’re the one who wanted to start trouble with the lady.”

“Damn it, Barclay, I told you. She’s no lady—”

He broke off and backed up a pace as Clint seized him by the shirt collar.

“That’s enough, Jenks.” Somehow Clint kept his fury leashed, his voice deliberate. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get your sorry hide out of my sight.
Now
.”

He stood on the porch, tension gripping every muscle in his body as he watched Jenks stomp away down the street to where his horse was tethered. In the light of the half-moon he waited until the WW wrangler had ridden past the edge of town.

Then he lit up a cigarillo and leaned against the porch post, smoking and letting the chilly night air help cool his anger.

He couldn’t help wondering why Slim Jenks had it in so bad for the Spoons. It now seemed likely that what Pete Spoon had said about him stepping in between Jenks and Florry in the saloon was true. But even if Jenks did have a grudge against Pete, why should he pick on Emily?

His eyes narrowed in the darkness, and he took a drag on the cigarillo. Nothing should surprise him anymore, he reflected. He’d seen more than his share of ugliness, brutality, and petty cruelty in his travels across the West—had come up against men who were evil, some who were just greedy, and others plain vindictive and mean-spirited. Jenks seemed to fall into the latter category. Clint doubted that the man would let go of his grudge, and for some reason he didn’t understand, the thought of Emily Spoon being the target made his gut clench.

He shouldn’t have to worry about her, he told himself—she had her damned uncle and her brother and her cousin to look after her. But he was remembering the half-scared, half-defiant expression on her beautiful face when Jenks had come toward her tonight.

And he was remembering something else. The way she’d looked in that dress. Like a dark gorgeous rose, elegant and soft, Clint thought, a muscle tightening in his jaw as he saw her in his mind’s eye. She might have been an heiress, a pampered cultured little flower fresh from the drawing rooms of New York—and not a girl from an outlaw family who tried to pick off strangers with a shotgun.

The others can’t hold a candle to her
. The thought flashed into his head suddenly. Carla, Berty, Tammy Sue—and all the rest of the women who for some reason he couldn’t understand were throwing themselves at him as if he were the last man on earth—none of them could hold a candle to that black-haired spitfire who’d ducked out of the dance after he’d hit Jenks and knocked him to the floor.

He wondered where the hell she’d disappeared to.

The sounds of a scuffle around the corner made him stamp out his cigarillo and sprint toward the fray. In the alley he found two old-timers fighting over a bottle of red-eye. He hauled them apart.

“Break it up!”

“I had it first, Sheriff.”

“He’s lying—it’s mine. Gimme that bottle!”

Clint stepped between them, pushing the two men farther apart. “Get a move on. Both of you.”

He really didn’t want to lock up any drunks tonight, at least not yet. The night was too young. There were too many strangers in town. Between the poker tournament
and the dance, the town was overflowing with gamblers, miners, high-spirited cowboys, drifters, men of all ages and stripe from near and far.

Both of Lonesome’s jail cells could be full up by morning.

He sent the drunks off with no more than a stern look and a warning, and headed back toward the hotel. And that’s when he saw a slender woman in a rose gown standing in the shadows of the hotel porch. She was leaning against one of the porch columns, gazing up at the moon, while from within the hotel came the raucous sounds of laughter and foot-stomping and fiddle music.

She whirled at the sound of his footsteps and looked as startled as a fawn caught in the open by a wolf.

“Don’t look so scared. I’m not going to eat you.” For one moment, Clint thought she was going to dash back inside the hotel, but then he saw her square her shoulders, stand up straighter, and hold her ground, just as she’d done with Jenks.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Sheriff,” she said with admirable cool. “I don’t scare that easily.”

“Reckon I noticed.”

“What does that mean?”

He came up the porch steps and paused only a foot from her. Close enough to see the rise and fall of her breasts beneath that pretty rose gown. Close enough to see the moonlight reflected in those fascinating silver eyes.

“You didn’t run from Slim Jenks tonight when he came after you in there. And considering what that lizard did the other day—”

“I’d rather forget about the other day!”

He nodded, suddenly annoyed at himself. “Can’t say I blame you. Sorry, it was thoughtless of me to bring it up.”

She was regarding him warily, suspicious even of his apology. Clint wasn’t used to a woman looking at him like that—like he was the enemy. Most people who looked at him that way were hardened men—criminals, gunfighters, common bullies, and the like. What did she think he was going to do to her?

Well, after the way we met that first night outside the cabin, and those arguments in the jail, what else do you expect?
he asked himself reasonably. It was just as well. He had no call to be getting to know her, and when you came right down to it, he had nothing to say to her.

She was Jed Spoon’s niece. And for all he knew, she was privy to whatever the old buzzard might be planning—
if
he was planning. Clint would’ve laid odds he was.

“If you’ll excuse me …” Emily turned toward the door, but for some reason Clint couldn’t explain, he stepped swiftly into her path and eased her gently back into the shadows.

“One more thing.”

“If you want to know where my brother or my cousin is—”

“I don’t. I want to know about you, Miss Spoon.”

“Me?” Emily stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

The moon played softly over her exquisite skin and fine-boned features. Clint felt a wave of heat surge in his blood. What the hell was he saying to her? Why did he feel the need to make conversation with a woman who obviously wanted nothing to do with him?

“I just want to know—if you’re all right. I never got to ask you the other day—did Jenks hurt you?”

“Not as bad as I hurt him.”

He laughed then—he couldn’t help it.

“You’re right. He wasn’t even in any shape to put up a fight by the time I got there.”

Emily swallowed.
That smile
. It was devastating to a woman. It transformed that stern, handsome face—made this rugged man even more intensely appealing, if that were possible.

Which is just plain unfair
, she thought, her heart thudding wildly in her chest as those storm-blue eyes lingered on hers.

She ought to go in. At once. There was nothing she wished to say to him. Nothing she could think of, anyway, with him looking so tall and large and sinfully handsome in the moonlight, his eyes keen and warm on hers. She felt an absurd urge to grab his string tie and use it to draw him close to her.

When I ought to be considering strangling him with it
.

And yet… there was something she knew she should say to him. Not that she wanted to, but her sense of honor demanded it be said.

“I… I suppose I should thank you for stepping in when you did the other day. In the alley with Jenks, I mean. And tonight.” She took a deep breath, speaking each word reluctantly. “I really didn’t want to have a scene at the dance—”

“Just when you’re starting to get to know folks.”

Her eyes flew to his face. He understood. “Yes. I was having a lovely time until then.”