The Law and Miss Penny (7 page)

"Mariah..." His voice was tight, guarded.

Her hands fell quickly to her sides, and when she looked up, she found herself caught in his speculative gaze in the mirror.

"What were you doing to me just now?" he asked, still staring at her reflection.

"I, ah... was just making sure your injuries have all healed. Your shoulders were kind of banged up, you know. I wanted to make sure you're as well as you're letting on, that's all."

Cain frowned, then returned the mirror to its original position and picked up his razor.

"No, wait." Mariah said as he touched the keen-edged instrument to his cheek. "Let me."

"Thanks for the offer, little cousin, but I'm really quite able to handle this chore myself."

"I'm sure you are, but I think we ought to try something different with you." She took the razor from his hand. "Ever wear a beard before?"

He thought hard for a minute, and then sighed. "I don't know."

"It doesn't matter. I think Brother Law should, and I know just the kind of beard that would be perfect for him." She glanced around the area, and then motioned for Cain to follow her to a nearby boulder. "Sit a spell," she said, pointing to the rock. "I'm going to transform you into the kind of fellah even the devil himself would believe in."

Cain grumbled but straddled the boulder and offered her his lathered chin. Holding her at arm's length, he warned, "I may not know a lot about who I was or what kind of man I used to be, but I do know this—if you should happen to cut me, you'll wish you'd left me on the side of the road to fend for myself."

After slowly moistening her lips, Mariah lowered her eyelids to half-mast and pinned him with a purposely smoky gaze. "Why, Cousin Cain, darling. I could never do a thing like that to you. You're much too important to me."

As he glimpsed into the depths of those incredibly beautiful eyes, feeling things he knew he had no right to feel, Cain suddenly couldn't be sure if it was genuine concern or a touch of insanity that was staring back at him. A sliver of fear poked at his chest, a sensation he was certain he'd rarely, if ever, experienced when dealing with men, much less women. "Maybe—" He cleared his throat, surprised to find that he could hardly talk. "Maybe I ought to just go ahead and do this myself."

"Don't be silly." Then, without another word, she gripped his chin to steady his jaw and neck, and drew the razor up the length of his throat.

As she worked, with the scent of sandalwood and of Cain himself swirling around her, Mariah became aware of the sting of sexual desire once again. This time, actual heat, not warmth, mushroomed inside of her, spreading even to her extremities. Her hands moved over the planes of his face, slipping and sliding through the rich aromatic cream, tracing the high ridges of his cheekbones, then slithering down to the chiseled hollows below.

She imagined exploring the rest of his body this way, and a little shiver coursed up her spine, bringing with it another burst of heat. Why nowhim of all people? He was supposed to be feeling this way about her. And besides, shouldn't the attraction a woman felt for a man be more selective than this, more logical somehow? She glanced into Cain's eyes, pleased to find him studying her with at least as much intensity. Maybe, she thought with a modicum of surprise, logic didn't have a damn thing to do with it.
,
she wondered, and with

Cain held very still as she worked, acutely aware she was holding a razor near his throat. There was something reckless about her, and she still had a kind of crazed look in her eye. Had she noticed the desire he was feeling for her and decided to do something about her depraved cousin once and for all? He gulped, moving his Adam's apple, making it an easy target for her razor, and thought about pushing her away. That's when she leaned in closer, shaving beneath his nostrils, and all thoughts of escaping her touch evaporated as her two slender braids dangled against his bare chest, sweeping him like a pair of miniature brooms.

Cain glanced up, worried that she'd noticed yet another inappropriate reaction from him, and caught her gaze, along with the faint scent of cinnamon. Her breathing was rapid, certainly more rapid than he would have expected, and the violet color of her eyes had darkened almost to indigo blue. She looked as if she was flushed with excitement, maybe even a little...

No. That couldn't be the cause of her high color and all-around glow. They were cousins. What kind of a man was he to even think such a thing? She straightened abruptly then, breaking eye contact with him, and marched over to the tree, where he'd left a strip of toweling. When she returned and began to clean the remaining lather off of his skin, her breathing had slowed and her eyes were their usual color again. Had he imagined what he thought he'd seen?

Trying to look as casual and unruffled as possible, certainly far more than she felt, Mariah backed away from the lawman and studied the results of her efforts. She'd shaved him clean except for a strip of beard an inch and a half wide which ran from ear to ear, outlining the shape of his strong, angular jaw. Cleaned up, his eyes sparkling with vitality, Cain didn't look quite as harsh or cruel as he once had. In fact, if she were honest with herself, now that she'd taken a good look at him, she'd have to say that he wasn't a bad-looking man. But of course, she couldn't say it. And never would.

Aware suddenly that her cheeks were burning—and worse, that Cain had watched them catch fire—Mariah said, "I think that shave will do you just fine. Have a look and see if you don't agree." She handed Cain the mirror she'd picked up with the toweling and rambled on while he examined his reflection. "I tried to make your beard look a little like the one Abraham Lincoln used to wear, you know? It looks real honest-like. I'm thinking once we get you the proper clothing, folks are just naturally going to feel pretty much the same way about you as they did him. Like it?"

He shrugged, far more interested in—and confused by—her. "It'll do, I suppose."

"Good." Mariah lifted the hem of her skirt and turned toward the slope. "We'll be pulling out as soon as you're dressed and ready to go. Get a move on." Then, her cheeks still burning, she started up the hill.

Cain watched her as she walked away, unable to tear his gaze from the rounded outline of her bottom. Oh, she was wearing a proper enough skirt all right, but the way her hips swayed left room for doubt as to whether she'd donned enough petticoats and bloomers or whatever in the hell it was she ought to have been wearing by way of underpinnings. More disturbing than that—he couldn't seem to stop himself from staring at her or imagining the woman beneath that proper clothing.

What the hell kind of a man was he, anyway? It seemed to him that he must have been a moral kind of fellah, or thoughts such as the ones he was having wouldn't have disturbed him so. But still, if he was so damn principled, how could he be having these feelings at all? Desire hadn't just tickled his loins at the thought of Mariah naked under that skirt, it had licked him from within, painfully swelling him beyond simple arousal. Lord, if he was this depraved now, what kind of a man had he once been? The woman was his cousin
,
for heaven's sake.

Maybe, he thought, desperate for a reasonable explanation, the fever in his mind had taken control over his body as well. Or maybe more than his memory had been scrambled in the accident, maybe his very soul had been lost in the bargain. Cain didn't know. He only knew one, utterly appalling thing for sure right then. He'd been hard almost since the first moment her sensuous fingers had touched his shoulder.

* * *

Better than one hundred miles from the Penny encampment, most of the Doolittle Gang was settling in for the night at the ruins of an ancient Indian village. Gang leader and elder brother Billy Doolittle had discovered the dwellings the year before on an advance scouting trip of the area. Located just below the sheer, overhanging cliffs of a towering mesa some thirty miles west of Durango, the series of little "cave pueblos" made a perfect, nearly inaccessible hideout.

Billy leaned in close to the fire pit and flipped the venison steaks over to the other side, ducking as the lard he'd used to sweeten the skillet popped and sizzled all around him. He glanced up at his brother, Artemis, and said, "How you coming with them biscuits, dreamy-eyes?"

Although Artemis hated the name, any nickname in fact, he grinned at his older brother and continued pounding his fists into the sticky dough. "Can't tell for sure, Billy. You know I ain't got much know-how when it comes to cooking, but I think they could use some more flour."

"There's that word again:
think.
What have I told you about that, Artie-boy? If'n I wanted you to go thinking on your own, I'd have told you to do it."

"Sorry."

"I'll just bet you are." Billy stacked the steaks, one on top of another to make room in the skillet for the biscuits, and then snatched the bowl out of his brother's hands. As he spooned the dough into the hot grease, he sighed and said, "I guess you went and forgot about that cowlick sticking straight up on the top of your head, huh, boy?"

Artemis dropped his chin to his chest. "I ain't forgot."

"Then maybe you forgot why it's there." When the kid didn't comment, he offered a reminder. "It's your own personal dunce cap, a kind of natural signal that lets the rest of us normal folks in on the fact that you ain't quite all there. A built-in dunce cap for a dunce." He laughed, and then as he thought about it, laughed some more.

Artemis laughed, too, as always, wanting desperately to fit in with the gang, even at his own expense. Besides, Billy was right about the cowlick. It did look like a dunce cap, and he was a little bit slow. Not that Artemis had been born with any kind of abnormality, including the cowlick. His wheat-brown hair, straight as string, had always combed down nice, even without the benefit of Pa's bear grease. Until the accident, anyway.

It had happened on the day of his eighth birthday when he went out to give the Doolittles' best brood mare, Irish, a little extra feed. He'd dumped a generous portion of flax and grain mixed with sweet molasses into her crib, and then started to return to the house. That was when he noticed a spot of blood on her right rear fetlock. He had bent down to pick her hoof up from the bedding straw, but it wasn't until he came to that he remembered that Irish didn't allow anyone to touch her while she was eating.

The result of that error was a crescent-shaped scar about the size of a horseshoe near the crown at the back of his head; a stubborn cowlick which rose up from the peak of that crescent like a flag; and a mind that wasn't endowed with nearly as much common sense as it would have been otherwise. Hence the nicknames: "Artie-boy," "dreamy-eyes," "dummy," on occasion; and of course, continual references to the "dunce cap" shaft of hair.

The names hurt, especially coming from his last living brother, but he always laughed along with him, sometimes louder than anyone else. If he didn't laugh, Artemis was afraid, one day he'd lose control and do the one thing he really wanted to do. And that was cry.

A gang member named Tate, who was sitting at the edge of the cliff, brought a spyglass to his eye. "Rider coming in," he said loud enough for all to hear. "It's Tubbs."

"Well, it's about time." Billy turned the biscuits and then covered the pan with a huge, oversized lid. "I'm so hungry I could eat a skunk. Wave him over."

Artemis perked up immediately. Of all the gang members, including his own brother, Tubbs was the one he liked best. Although he couldn't exactly say that the man was nice to him, Tubbs was the only one who never made jokes about his shortcomings, and usually didn't even laugh when the others did. He was the best friend Artemis had ever had.

After Tubbs left his horse, as well as the stray sorrel he'd come across in Mancos Valley, in the care of another member of the six-man gang, Shorty, he hiked up to the site of the ruins. He strolled into camp, tossed a sack of supplies in through the open doorway of one of the block dwellings, and pulled a bottle of whiskey from the inside of his shirt.

"Fill me a cup, would you, Billy?" he said, handing the bottle to his leader. "It's been a long day. In fact, fill one for everyone. I picked up a piece of bad news."

William Doolittle didn't take orders from anyone, but something about this desperado always set his hairs on end and gave him pause. Tubbs had ridden with the gang for just three months now, and had participated in only one job, some three weeks ago: relieving the Texas Exchange in Durango of the meager contents of its safe.

It wasn't as if the man didn't have his strong points. He did his work quickly, quietly, and well. He wasn't squeamish about using his guns, or turning them on lawmen, boys, and if the occasion warranted it, women. And, as an extra plus, the man knew how to listen, rarely shooting off his mouth unless he had something really important to say.

Other than the annoying habit Tubbs had of staring at the ugly craters left behind on Billy's face from a vicious case of chicken pox, Billy really couldn't point a finger at anything the man did that was out of line. But Tubbs gave him the creeps anyway.

Anxious to hear what he had to say, Billy poured the whiskey into two tin cups, leaving the bottle to the others to fend for themselves. "Tate, Cletus. Get on over here," he called.

As the men took their places around the fire, Artemis shuffled up behind, grinning broadly and looking closer to thirteen than his eighteen years of age. "You want me here too, don't you, Billy?"