Teresa Medeiros (24 page)

He sank back on the pillows, making a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a groan. “Damn lucky for us. Given your fondness for threatening to shoot anyone who doesn’t give you your way.”

Outraged, Esmerelda sat up. “I don’t threaten to shoot just
anyone
. Only Darlings.”

Her retort was answered by a gentle snore, leaving her to wonder if she’d dreamed the entire exchange.

Cocking her head to give Sadie a perplexed look,
she crept to her knees and peered over the side of the bed. Billy lay on his back, his mouth hanging open to reveal a line of endearingly uneven white teeth.

Esmerelda touched a trembling hand to his chest, taking care not to disturb his bandage. Beneath the crisp golden whorls of hair, his skin was cool, his breathing deep and even.

All the starch melted from Esmerelda’s spine. She buried her face in her hands, breathing a thank-you just as fervent, but no more coherent, than her earlier pleas to God had been. Words just seemed to fail her where this man was concerned.

A hand brushed her hair. She lifted her head to find Billy gazing at her again, a pained expression in his gray-green eyes. “Don’t cry, honey,” he whispered, dusting a tear from her cheek with his thumb. His eyes slowly fluttered shut before he murmured, “I never meant to make you cry.”

Billy slept through that day and half of the next. It was no longer the restless, fevered thrashing of a dying man, but the deep and natural slumber of a body seeking to recover from a grave insult. Even Sadie seemed to sense his improvement, for she left his side for the first time since the shooting, choosing instead to waddle after an indifferent Zoe.

When Esmerelda carried in the speckled tin basin to give him his bath the following afternoon, he was sprawled on his back with his head and shoulders propped on the pillows. His chest was exposed and one long leg dusted with wiry gold hair poked out from beneath the sheet. It wasn’t until water sloshed on her feet that Esmerelda realized she was gawking.

Don’t be lookin’ on his nakedness, gal. It ain’t fittin’
.

Although she had deliberately waited for Zoe to stomp
from the house to do her afternoon chores, trailed by a newly infatuated Sadie, Esmerelda’s cheeks still flushed hotly at the memory of his mother’s admonishment. An unfair warning indeed, she thought with an offended sniff, when she’d taken such careful pains to guard both Billy’s modesty and her own while she tended him. She’d kept her eyes closed and her face turned away for all but the most innocent of tasks.

Yet today as she approached his bed, she felt a curious stirring of trepidation. With the golden flush of health returning to his skin and the stubble along his jawline thickening to an outlaw’s beard, he looked larger, somehow, and overwhelmingly masculine.

Esmerelda set the basin on the stool beside the bed and dipped her cloth in the soapy water. The warm water trickled between her fingers as she gently sponged off Billy’s face and throat. She dipped the cloth again and ran it over his chest, taking care not to wet the clean bandage she’d wrapped around the broad expanse only that morning. The water beaded like morning dew in the crisp coils of chest hair below the bandage before trickling along the narrowing V to the taut plain of his belly.

As Esmerelda traced the trail with the cloth, sopping up the excess water, Billy shifted and moaned. She jerked back her hand, suffering a pang of contrition. The bath must be causing him more discomfort than she’d anticipated.

She gentled her touch to a mere caress, but he thrashed so violently she was forced to snatch at the sheet to keep it from sliding off of his lean hips.

Mopping her brow with her forearm, Esmerelda glanced toward the window and frowned. Although a fickle bevy of clouds flirted with the sun, the room seemed warmer than ever.

Growing more disgruntled by the second, she jerked
the sheet up over Billy’s chest before peeling it from his legs. Although she tried to wash them quickly, they were so long it seemed to take forever. His feet were just as long-boned and well-sculpted as the rest of him.

When Esmerelda was done, she gently drew up the sheet, covering him from throat to toe.

She dipped the cloth in the water agam, swallowing hard. This was the part she’d been dreading. When Billy had been caught in the grip of sickness and fever, bathing him as if he were a child had come naturally to her. After all, she had told herself sternly, it was no different from bathing her baby brother, which she’d been required to do quite often until he’d grown old enough to do it himself.

Esmerelda refused to be daunted by the task. Ignoring the treacherous quickening of her breath, she turned her face away, closed her eyes, and slid the cloth beneath the sheet.

Billy groaned. Esmerelda jerked her hand back and dared a glance at his face. It was still resting in angelic repose, his gilt-edged lashes betraying nary a flutter.

Battling a wretched fit of nerves that was making her heart pound and her ears buzz, she reached beneath the sheet again. As the cloth encountered the warmth of his flesh, she would have almost sworn there was something different about him today. Her hand continued its curious exploration. Her eyes widened in shock. Distinctly different.

Feeling utterly ridiculous and more than a little sinful, she lifted the sheet and stole a peek beneath.

“Find what you’re looking for, Duchess?”

Esmerelda froze at the sound of that unmistakable drawl. Her first instinct was to drop the sheet, spring away from the bed, and shove both hands behind her back as if she’d been caught sneaking them into the cookie jar.

Instead, she forced herself to calmly lower the sheet and meet Billy’s gaze. “I was looking for the washrag.”

Billy’s eyebrow arched. “The one in your hand?”

Esmerelda glanced down at the dripping rag, beset by a desperate urge to fling it at his face and run. “Oh,” she said, refusing to let her scalding blush spoil her dignity. “I could have sworn I’d dropped it.”

“And I could have sworn I’d died and gone straight to heaven.”

“As we’ve discussed in the past, Mr. Darling, I doubt that would be your final destination.”

Esmerelda busied herself with returning the rag to the
basin, but was unable to resist stealing a furtive glance at Billy from beneath her lashes. His recent vulnerability had made her forget just how dangerous he really was.

While she’d been distracted, he had propped his hands behind his head. The casual motion had caused the sheet she’d so painstakingly arranged to spill back down his chest, baring him to the waist. The heated glimmer in his eyes as they followed her every motion warned her that he wasn’t nearly as cool as he appeared. All he needed was his hat, a cigar clamped between his teeth, and a gun in his hand, and he would have looked just as forbidding as he had at their first meeting.

Since then she had learned there were emotions that could be more hazardous to a woman’s heart than a bullet from a Colt .45. She gasped with shock when Billy’s lean fingers shot out and closed around her wrist. At first she thought he meant to jerk her into the bed with him, but he simply turned her hand upward, using his thumb to probe her palm with a thoroughness that sent a wicked quiver of anticipation through her flesh.

“Nope. There’s no doubt about it,” he said. “Those weren’t the claws of an imp bathing my mortal flesh, but the hands of an angel. I must surely be heaven-bound after all.”

Their eyes met over her palm, hers wary and his knowing, as if he could discern her darkest secrets with nothing more than a mocking flicker of his lashes. She was so intent on denying what she learned of herself in those gray-green eyes that it took a minute for his words to sink in.

“You were awake?” she yelled, snatching her hand back.

He crossed his arms and shrugged, but his devilish smirk ruined the apologetic gesture. “Only since you washed behind my ears. And a mighty fine job you did of it, too.”

Esmerelda blanched to remember the tender care she’d
lavished upon him, the way her hands had betrayed her by lingering against the muscled contours of his chest, the taut plane of his belly, the rangy length of his calves and thighs. She also remembered the tortured groan he’d uttered when she’d first reached beneath the sheet with the washrag. She could scarcely bear to imagine what he must have thought when he’d felt her caressing him with such familiarity. Mortified, she closed her eyes and bit back a groan of her own.

Esmerelda’s blush made her look as fevered as Billy felt. His fever had nothing to do with his wound and everything to do with the delicious play of Esmerelda’s hands over his skin. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so vulnerable to a woman’s touch.

When he’d first woken to feel her hands on him, he’d lain frozen, wanting her to stop, yet terrified she would. Then the fever began creeping through his veins like hot molasses, coursing downward with each stroke of the rag, each cool brush of her fingertips against his burning flesh, until it had crystallized in his groin, leaving behind an ache as hard as it was sweet.

An ache made practically intolerable by the curious stroke of her hand, the adorably naughty glance she’d stolen beneath the sheet.

He’d interrupted that shy peek not to embarrass her, but to keep from humiliating himself. Something he feared he still might do when his first clear look at her gave his heart a painful jolt.

“What happened to you, honey? You look like hell.”

Esmerelda opened her eyes to discover that Billy’s teasing grin had darkened to a scowl. She touched a hand to her bedraggled hair. She’d been too busy ogling him to give much thought to her own appearance. But beneath his probing scrutiny, she became painfully aware of the unflattering
shadows beneath her eyes; the wrinkled dress she’d handwashed, wrung out, and donned while it was still damp; the sweaty tendrils of hair clinging to her temples.

Billy wasn’t frowning at her face, but her body. He stretched out a hand, cradling her waist as if they were about to embark on a formal waltz. “Why, I can feel your ribs. You’re nothing but skin and bones.”

Esmerelda shrugged, touched by his dismay. “I suppose I’ve been too busy spooning broth down your throat to steal more than a few sips for myself.”

His expression grew even more troubled. “How long?”

“Eight days.”

He collapsed on the pillows, cutting her a sulky glance. “I haven’t forgotten that it could have been you lying here in this bed with a bullet in your back. There was no call for you to go throwing yourself in front of that no-count brother of yours. I was only going to wing him.”

“Where? In the heart?”

Billy’s heavy-lidded glare darkened. “In the trigger finger.”

Esmerelda arched an eyebrow skeptically, knowing even as she did so that he was probably capable of shooting a hangnail off Bartholomew’s thumb without so much as skinning his knuckle. She felt compelled to defend her brother. “Despite your low opinion of him, my brother is not ‘no-count.’ He’s simply callow, misguided—”

“Greedy, spoiled, dangerous.”

“I raised him the best I could,” Esmerelda cried, stung. “He lacked for nothing!”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Billy replied softly.

Esmerelda turned her back on the bed, his compassion more damning than condemnation. Perhaps it was time to find out just how deep his own betrayal ran. Gazing at the wall without blinking, she asked him the question that had
haunted her ever since Bartholomew had flung the accusation in his face. “Did that crooked marshal pay you to kill my brother?”

“No.”

Esmerelda whirled around, prepared to forgive all. But the steely light in Billy’s eyes stopped her.

“He paid me to kill your lover.”

“How much?” she whispered when she could.

“One thousand dollars. Five hundred in advance. Five hundred when the job was done. He also promised amnesty for me and my brothers and a job as a deputy U.S. marshal.”

Esmerelda was forced to sink down on the foot of the bed or risk falling down. A despairing little hiccup of a laugh escaped her. “At least no one can accuse you of selling yourself cheap. Given the marshal’s generosity, you must have found my offer fairly pathetic.”

Billy reached out and ran a finger down her arm in a slow, tantalizing motion that set the pulse in her throat fluttering. “Oh, there was nothing pathetic about what you offered me.”

Esmerelda swallowed hard, hypnotized by the hungry glitter in his eyes. No man had ever looked at her that way before. She didn’t know whether to be frightened or flattered. Or perhaps a little bit of both.

He’d left her with no choice but to deliberately misunderstand him. She stood, edging out of his reach. “You’re absolutely right. I’m certain that my grandfather would consider Winstead’s offer a paltry sum compared to the riches he’ll be prepared to bestow upon the man who finds his grandson.”

“Ah, yes. Your grandpappy. The duke.” Although Billy’s expression was bland, Esmerelda sensed he was mocking her.

It made her want to catch him in a few exaggerations of
his own. She narrowed her eyes at him. “According to your reputation, Mr. Darling, when you want somebody dead, they have a tendency to get that way. Yet you let my brother leave that bank alive. Even
after
he shot you.”