The Law and Miss Penny (28 page)

He hung his head. "I... guess so."

Tubbs noticed that the kid's lip was trembling, and he decided against informing him about the newest amendment to the plan: the fact that he'd decided to take the princess out right along with the marshal. Even though he hadn't found a damn thing in her room to tie her to Slater or the marshal's office, he didn't like the way the odds were stacked. Just the fact that it looked as if the woman was in cahoots with Slater was good enough for Tubbs.

Getting rid of her would be a simple task if he could get Artemis's full cooperation. First the marshal, then the girl. One, two, over the side and into the gorge. Robbing the train was a chancy enough proposition without taking any unnecessary risks. And leaving Princess Tanacoa, or whoever in the hell she was, alive was too much of a gamble.

He grinned at the kid. "How does the plan sound so far, Artemis?"

He looked up at Tubbs, then back down at his lap. He was far from happy over the idea of taking Cain out, but much too frightened of Tubbs and his brother to allow his doubts to show. It was a struggle, but Artemis smiled as he said, "Sounds good. Anything else you want me to do?"

Relaxing a little, Tubbs said, "Now that you mention it, there is. Once the marshal's gone over the side, I want you to go back to where he was sitting and tell the princess that he wants to see her. Send her out to me. I'll still be waiting on the step."

Artemis gasped. "You ain't gonna take her out too, are you?"

"No, kid, of course not. I just want to have a little talk with her. Understand?"

Pretty sure that he did understand, Artemis faked a coughing fit to cover a sudden attack of the shivers. He wasn't real smart, he knew, and he wasn't real good at figuring, reading, and sometimes just plain thinking. But when he did know something, he knew it. Period. And right now, he knew without a doubt that Tubbs planned to murder his two best friends in the world. Murder them, and then sit back and laugh about it the next time the gang gathered around a campfire.

Tubbs slapped the kid's back, thinking he was coughing because he'd swallowed wrong. "You'd best get on down to the depot now. I imagine that 'Brother Law' is wondering why in hell you aren't down there helping him load up the medicine show."

* * *

If Tubbs wasn't right about another thing, he was right about that. When Artemis strolled into the train yard, he saw that Cain had enlisted the aid of a couple of railroad men to load the supply cart onto a flatbed car.

"Need any help?" he asked.

"I sure do—it's about time you showed up." Cain studied the young man, noticing how pinched and drawn he looked, particularly around the mouth. "Are you feeling all right this morning?"

"Oh, sure. It just took me a while to get packed up, is all." He held up a tattered valise. "What should I do with this?"

Cain took it and tossed it inside the medicine wagon. "Get on up with the mules. I'll secure the door, and when I holler, you can start things rolling up the ramp." As Cain reached for the door, Mariah suddenly came up from behind him.

"Morning," she said, setting her dog inside on the floor of the wagon. "Just give me a minute to pour a bowl of water for Daisy, and then you can lock up."

Feeling nervous and awkward, the exact same way he'd been feeling around Mariah since their trip to the hot springs, Cain stepped back out of her way. They'd been polite strangers for the last two days, friendly and smiling, but wary and distant beneath the surface. God, how he missed being with the real Mariah, laughing with her... touching her. Cain wanted to rip off her proper little homespun velvet traveling suit, peel open the royal purple jersey, and reclaim the woman inside. Maybe even, he thought with a surprising recklessness, stake a claim to her heart.

Mariah closed the door and fastened the catch. "There," she said, turning to face Cain. "She ought to be just fine for the next five hours."

"Maybe she will, but I won't be. Will you?" Before she could answer, he took Mariah's hand and led her around to the side of the medicine wagon. There, where their privacy was far from ensured, but fewer prying eyes could find them, Cain reached up and adjusted the bonnet he'd bought for her until it set at the naughty little tilt he adored. "I think it's time we had another little talk, princess. Now, before we board that train."

Mariah shook off the little tremors his touch sent through her and forced herself to instead remember their last discussion. "It won't do any good to talk about the past, Cain, and I can't allow myself to think of the future. It wouldn't be fair to either of us."

"I'm not interested in the past or the future right now. All I care about, Mariah, is you, and here, and now. I've missed you so much." His arms ached to hold her, to reach out and crush her to his chest, but for propriety's sake, Cain kept his hands at his sides. His fists were closed tight, rigid with self- restraint. "I just about went crazy hoping you would come to my room last night. When you didn't show, I thought about breaking down the door to your room."

She shivered as a response blossomed in her heart, then tickled her spine and ran all the way down to her toes. "But I thought... after what you said on the way to Trimble Springs, I didn't think you wanted me to come around anymore."

"Oh, I wanted you, princess." Fighting the almost unbearable urge to drag her into his arms, Cain's knuckles went white with the exertion. "And I want you still. Do you have any idea how much?"

"Want, yes," she said, her breathing shallower, faster. "But wanting and having are two different things. What about that someone you remembered as we talked? I know you were thinking about her. I could see her in your eyes."

The urge to comfort her was almost as acute as the urge to claim her, but Cain did neither as he waited for a small group of travelers to pass by. When he spoke again, his voice was low, cracking with emotion. "There is no other woman for me but you. If there were"—he thumped his chest—"I'd know it in here."

"Who was she, Cain?" Mariah persisted, wanting to believe him, knowing he would dodge the issue if she let him. "Who did you remember?"

"I don't know." Cain wanted it to be the truth so badly. He didn't want to know the name of the woman in his mind, or where she might have fit into his past life. He only wanted Mariah. "I've done little but try to call up the memory of a wife or sweetheart the past two days, and I just can't do it. I really don't know who that woman was, but she can't have been too important in my life, or I'd have remembered who she was by now. I just know that's true. I want you to know it, too."

There was something more. Mariah knew Cain well enough to sense that there was something more, but the relief that he would be hers again, for at least a few more days and nights, was so sweet.

She looked into Cain's intense green eyes and the world seemed to grind to a halt. The clouds froze in the sky, birds forgot to sing, and even the steady
hiss, hiss, hiss
of the nearby locomotive faded to a faint buzz. There was only Mariah and Cain.

He had yet to put so much as one finger on her, but Mariah could almost feel his touch, taste his kiss as he stared down at her mouth with abject longing. Her bosom heaving with frustration, Mariah absently moistened her lips in an effort to relieve the sudden aching there. It only made her want him more. So much more, that she now found herself thinking of shaming her family's good name by throwing herself into Cain's arms in a public train yard. She actually took a step toward him, but then she heard Zack's voice calling her. The voice of reason.

"Mariah? Over here."

Bright spots of color stained her cheeks as she realized what she'd been thinking of doing, and she turned toward the depot in time to see her father round the corner.

"We need your help, baby," Zack said, panting as he limped up to meet her. "Go join your ma on the train. She's trying to hang on to a pair of them fancy new 'conversation' seats for the four of us, and you know her—she's a mite timid when it comes to standing her ground with strangers. She's in car three thirty-four."

With a final glance at Cain, one that held as much promise as longing, she said, "I'm on my way."

As it turned out, Mariah's help hadn't been needed. Oda had done just fine hanging on to the seats. Sitting two abreast, the women faced the north and Silverton, while the men, after they boarded the train, sat opposite them, riding backwards.

The seats were bench style, comfortable enough, but situated so close together that the men had to sit with their legs apart to afford enough room for the knees of the ladies. Zack just popped the hinge on his wooden leg, giving Oda plenty of room to stretch her stubby legs, but Cain, being thick of thigh, had a harder time making room for Mariah's knees between his legs without bringing them into contact with his body. A difficult task, but one he enjoyed immensely.

Once the whistle blew and locomotives got under way—one forward, one aft—Zack did most of the talking, centering on the topic most near and dear to his heart: ways to make the medicine show better and more profitable.

"And I was thinking," he said, "that we ought to get a little more use out of Artemis. I'll bet he could play as many as five instruments at one time if we was to figure out a way to get everything attached to him."

Desperate to find something to take her mind off the way Cain was looking at her, Mariah leapt into the conversation. "Artemis does a pretty fair job of bringing them in with just the banjo and harmonica going at the same time. Are you sure you want to try and turn him into a one-man band? It doesn't take much to get that poor kid rattled, you know."

Zack glanced ahead two rows of seats to where the young man sat. Artemis was twisting and turning, peering out of one window and then another, craning his neck in every direction so as not to miss anything, and just generally looking like he'd never been on a train before. Zack's smile was warm as he realized that he'd gradually come to think of the young man as a part of the family—in a way, as the son he and Oda never had.

"Maybe you're right, baby," he said. "I'll ask Artemis whether he wants to add any more instruments, and leave the decision up to him. I expect I ought to ask him if he even wants to go on with us. It's possible he won't stay past Silverton, now that I think on it. Might be that he's got family around these parts."

Cain, who'd been intent on Mariah and the way she swayed with the gentle rhythm of the train as it slowly gathered steam, forced his attention to Zack. "I don't know about any other family, but Artemis has mentioned a brother Billy to me." As he recalled the incident in the outfitter's store, something else struck him. "I don't think it'd bother Artemis too much to leave that part of his family behind, but the name sure sounds familiar to me. Did I have a brother Billy, too, by any chance?"

Mariah and her father exchanged glances, and Zack, the patriarch, took the responsibility of yet another lie. "Ah, no, Cain, I'm afraid not. You were an only child... just like our Mariah." He gave her a warm smile, and then went on with his plans for the show. "I've been thinking about changing your part, too, baby. We've about wore little ole Princess Tanacoa to the ground."

"I thought I was doing just fine." Mariah glanced at Oda, seeking a little support, and noticed that her mother had fallen asleep.

"It ain't that you can't do the job," Zack said. "I was just thinking maybe we ought to try something new, maybe an act like that Princess Lotus Blossom and her blasted Tiger Fat cure. Why, she reels in the suckers with that spiel faster than she can count the money."

"And she's as crooked as Daisy's hind legs, too—don't forget that." Mariah looked at Cain, which was a mistake. His expression had hardly changed since their talk at the depot, and was still incendiary enough to melt the buttons on her bodice. She clasped her knees together tightly, careful not to brush against his legs, and quietly said to her father, "I think one Princess Lotus Blossom is quite enough."

"But that's just my point, baby. Don't you see?" Zack was far too caught up in the creation of a new show to notice that his wife was softly snoring, or that his daughter and Cain were so intent on each other, he might as well have been playing to an empty hall. He went on, his enthusiasm increasing as he visualized the new act.

"Why, there must be hundreds of Kickapoo Indian shows, maybe even thousands." He lowered his voice. "And each one of them has an Indian princess or a medicine man. Ah, but if we was to dress Mariah up in a Chinese mandarin robe, put her hair in one long braid down her back and maybe add some silk veils—you know, kinda wrap her up like a cocoon—why, she could just as well be a princess from China as a Kickapoo Indian." He tapped his index finger against his forehead. "Ayuh. That and a grease stick with a little more of a yellow cast to it, and I believe it'd work at that. What do you say?" He elbowed Cain in the ribs. "Can't you see Mariah done up that way?"

He certainly could, but Cain doubted he and Zack were picturing the same "princess." His Mariah was naked, her body shimmering through gossamer scarves as silken as her skin. At the image, desire flared in him, and Cain dropped his arms in his lap, hoping the gesture would hide his growing ardor, if not cool it. Through a throat so tight it barely allowed the passage of air, he said, "Sounds like it might bring 'em in all right. What do you think, princess?"

Taken off guard—for she, too, had been distracted with other thoughts—Mariah accidentally brushed her knee against the inside of Cain's thigh. The train chattered over a rough section of track, vibrating her body from head to toe, and Mariah forgot what they'd been talking about. "Ah, whatever Zack decides will be best for the show. I never question his judgment."