Deborah Camp (26 page)

“You coulda knocked me over with a feather when I saw your picture on a ‘Wanted’ poster,” she told him, giggling when he lost his balance and sat back in the dirt. “It was all I could do not to spill the beans right in front of Boone.”

“ ‘Wanted’ poster … where?” His voice was curiously flat.

“In the bank. Boone took me inside there Saturday so’s I could see where he worked. The reward money is mighty tempting.”

“And you were hoping to collect, right?”

“I was thinking about it. Jewel says it’s your brother they want.”

“You didn’t discuss this with your suitor, did you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Good.” He wrapped his arms loosely around his bent
knees and looked up at her. “What else did Jewel tell you?”

Cassie let the seconds stretch to the breaking point. She liked holding all the cards. To have him hanging on her every word and her every expression was heavenly.

“Don’t tease!” His voice boomed like thunder, and he sprang to his feet. Dirt rose in a cloud that settled over his bare feet. “What else did she tell you?” he demanded, placing his hands on his lean waist and thrusting his face close to hers.

Cassie inched back a little, relinquishing some of her advantage. She could tell by the stern set of his mouth and the bright flush of his cheeks that he was expecting the worst. She knew before she spoke that he was prepared for her next revelation.

“Jewel’s your mama.”

His gaze sharpened and the color drained from his face. He stuffed his hands into the pockets and turned away.

“Damn.” It was softly spoken, almost anticlimactic. “So she told you,”.he said after a few moments. “I guess you’re angry at us for lying to you.”

“Yes. Friends aren’t s’posed to lie to each other.” She glanced up at the clear sky and fanned her warm face with one hand. “But there’s no use crying over spilt milk. That’s what Pa always says … said.” Her fanning hand slowed to a motionless, limp-wristed droop, and her whole body seemed to sag as if her spirit had suddenly deserted her. She blinked rapidly, then took a deep breath to clear her head. “I’m going in. I gotta change outta my town clothes before I ruin ’em.”

Cassie started around to the front of the house and Rook fell into step beside her.

“I guess she explained it all to you,” Rook said, following her up the steps and into the dark house. “She told you about our father and how Blackie’s taking after him?”

“She told me enough.” Cassie moved swiftly across the planked floor and into her bedroom. She closed the door before he could ask any more questions.

Rook straddled one of the straight-backed chairs and rested his chin on his crossed arms. “Dubbin should have
married her,” he said, raising his voice so that Cassie could hear him in the bedroom. “Jewel always made up a million excuses for him treating her so badly, but he should have married her … or at least offered. I always wondered if he loved her at all. I know she was crazy about him.”

“Loved him like a rock,” Cassie whispered to herself on the other side of the door.

“I guess she told you about my sister. Peggy’s her name. She’s married. She was a schoolteacher before that.” He bent his head to one said, resting his cheek against his arms and staring at the irregularly planked door. He could see movement through the cracks as Cassie went about taking off her “town dress” and putting on one of her drab, dark skirts and shirts. That she dressed in dark clothes in his presence while donning bright colors for Boone Rutledge irritated Rook no end.

“What else did she say?” he asked.

“Nothing much.”

Rook glared at the door. Why was Cassie being so cagey? How much or how little did she know?

“Cassie?”

“Yes?”

“Are you going to turn me over to the sheriff?”

“ ’Course not. I wouldn’t do that to Jewel.”

His brows rose and fell in resignation. “That’s good of you,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“Get in here! I know you’re dressed by now. Why are you hiding from me?”

The door swung open and she stood framed in its rectangle, a portrait in gray and brown. Her hair had been tamed into a tight braid that hung over one shoulder. A censorious frown was directed at him before she strode purposefully to the cook stove.

“I’m not hiding from you,” she said, snatching up some potatoes and a knife. “I gotta get supper started.”

When he remained silent but watchful, Cassie glanced furtively over her shoulder. His gaze was hooded and somber, giving her the distinct impression that he was tired of
her display of bravado and was preparing to put an end to it.

“She said Blackie shot you.” Cassie spun around to face him but leaned back against the sideboard and held onto its edge so tightly that her knuckles showed white. “Why did your brother shoot you in the back? What were you running away from? Did you get tired of robbing banks?”

He frowned so deeply his dark brows formed a bridge across his eyes. “Is that what you think? You think I rode with him?” He looked away in disgust when she gave a little shrug. “It’s no use talking to you. No matter what I say, you always think the worst of me.”

“I don’t think much of you at all,” Cassie snapped. “I got better things to dwell on.”

“Methinks she protests too much,” he said with a chuckle threading through his voice.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means that I think you think of me more than you’d ever admit.”

“I do not! I hardly—”

“I think of you more and more lately. Especially at night when I can hear the creak of your bed and the rustle of your sheets.”

Cassie’s heart seemed to rise to her throat, and she whirled around so he couldn’t see her red face. The knowledge that he listened to such things during the night was unsettling, especially since she’d listened to him too: his soft snoring or the whisper of his feet on the floor when he got up for a drink or to relieve himself. How strange that they both spent their nights in blind vigils. She bent her head and tried to become engrossed in peeling the potatoes.

“After midnight, when everything’s still,” he said, speaking quietly as he enjoyed the sight of the gentle swell of her hips beneath her loose skirt. “That’s when my thoughts about you are strongest. When my heart beats so loudly it keeps me awake and I’m certain you can hear it too, that’s when I think of how your hair is as pale as moonlight and your eyes are the color of bluebells. I close my eyes and imagine that I’m your sheet and I’m covering you from top to—”

“Stop!” Cassie stared in horror at his hand as it traced a sensuous curve in the air. She swallowed and made a gulping sound that embarrassed her. “I hate it when you talk dirty!”

“Dirty?” He ran his hand through his midnight hair, mussing it even more. “Lying on top of you was anything but—”

“Hush up, I said!” She turned her back on him and sliced the potatoes with jerky movements. “I won’t have you talking like that in my house.”

“You don’t want me to lie, do you?”

“I don’t want to hear such talk.”

“Jewel told you I wasn’t married, didn’t she?”

Cassie stiffened and her throat became dry.

“I know she did,” he continued. “That’s why you’re all fidgety and you don’t want to talk to me about what Jewel told you.” He stood up and went to stand beside her so that he could see her face. “The fact that I’m not married smoothes out a wrinkle in what happened that night, doesn’t it?”

Cassie nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

“I don’t have any children either.”

She nodded again.

“I was going to set things straight, but I kept telling myself that it might be better to let you think that I—”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” Cassie said, finally finding her voice again.

“It doesn’t?” he asked, craning his head forward to peer inquisitively into her face.

“No.”

“It made a difference before,” he reminded her. “You felt that you couldn’t be with me again because you couldn’t forget my wife. Well, now you don’t have worry about that.”

“I’m not worried one way or the other,” she said with a toss of her head that sent her pigtail flying over her shoulder. “Nothing’s going to happen between us again.”

“Why not?”

She glanced sideways at him. “Because I don’t want anything else to happen.” She swallowed hard but couldn’t
make herself speak from the heart and tell him she was afraid of being loved and left. “You might be a cutthroat like your brother, for all I know.”

He slammed the flat of his hand against the wooden sideboard and Cassie nearly jumped out of her skin.

“Horseshit! You know I’m not a cutthroat!”

“I don’t know anything about you!”

“You know that I make your knees go weak. That’s enough to know.”

“Weak—” She pressed her lips together in a prim line. “If I’m weak-kneed around you it’s because you make me sick!”

“Cassie, Cassie,” he chanted with a shake of his head. “Now who’s lying?”

Her gaze fell on the empty bucket, and she grabbed it and pushed it into his chest.

“Make yourself useful and fill that up,” she ordered, then turned back to her potatoes.

“Do you really want me to leave you alone?”

“Yes,” she said, almost hissing it.

Finally, after what seemed like an hour, he sighed and went outside. Snatching the chance that her hard-won privacy gave her to quiet her turbulent emotions, Cassie flung back her head and closed her eyes. After a few minutes she had calmed down enough to finish cooking supper.

Rook opened his eyes to a gray night and was surprised that he had actually dozed off. The last thing he remembered was telling himself that he wouldn’t sleep a wink until he stopped thinking of Cassie, stopped wondering how much she knew, what she thought of him, what she and Jewel had talked about. He didn’t like being in the dark, and he couldn’t figure out why she was being so damned evasive other than the dreary fact that she didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust
herself
around him, he amended. At supper she had talked like a magpie, discussing every subject imaginable except Jewel and Rook and her trip into town. After supper she’d gone to her bedroom saying she had to “read the Bible—I been neglecting it.”

Now, hours after turning in for the night, Rook was
suddenly wide awake. He grinned crookedly and flung aside the thin sheet that covered him as the night settled into a deeper shade of gray. If only he’d met her under different circumstances. No, he thought. He liked the memory of their meeting. Cassie with whip and shotgun in hand, ordering him about in a voice that shook with fear. He’d always remember her that way. A hellcat, spitting and hissing, pretending to be afraid of nothing.

Lord knew they had that in common, he mused ruefully as his thoughts turned back to himself and the events that had brought him here. The night Blackie had accused him of “preaching brotherly love while you rassled in the hay with my woman” came back to him with shuddering clarity. Damn Annabelle for not speaking up! All she had to do was confess that she’d damn near thrown herself on Rook and Blackie would’ve backed off. But no. Annabelle had pushed a fist against her curvy lips and waited for the sparks to fly. Little bitch. Of course, he reasoned with a measure of self-recrimination, he could have spurned Annabelle’s advances instead of taking her up on them. But he hadn’t stolen Blackie’s girl; he’d just borrowed her for a couple of hours.

Knowing all too well the symptoms of Blackie’s maniacal disposition, Rook had tried to slip away after everyone was bedded down, but Blackie, like so many of the criminally insane, had a sixth sense and knew human nature inside and out. He’d lain in wait for Rook and shot him from behind, not to show himself as a coward but to show Rook as one. After all, anyone who tucked his tail under and ran deserved to get his comeuppance in the back, where the yellow streak made a fine target.

The memory of Annabelle insinuated itself; dark, thick, flowing hair and slanting green eyes that held a glint of madness. She said she was a mix of Gypsy and Cherokee. For sure, she was one wild woman. She thrived on danger. Blackie was perfect for her because Annabelle never knew from one moment to the next if Blackie was going to shoot her or bed her. Besides lust, she shared lunacy with him.

“A perfect couple,” Rook whispered as he sat on the cot in Cassie’s cabin, remembering. He shivered as his
skin recalled the scrape of Annabelle’s fingernails down his back and the pinch of her teeth on his earlobe and shoulder. Being with her had been like mating with a she-wolf—wild, scary, and unnatural.

Shame at the memory grew in him until it drove him from the narrow cot and outside into the misty moonlight. If he’d thought with his head instead of that other, physical part of him, he wouldn’t have become involved with Blackie and Annabelle. Being between two crazy people was like being between a rock and a hard place. He’d gone to Blackie to talk sense to him and had ended up acting like a goddamned idiot, making matters worse than they’d been before.

Lost in self-torment and disturbing memories, he strolled around to the back of the cabin but drew back in the inky shadows when he was suddenly confronted with the sight of Cassie rising from the old tub like Venus from the sea. His hand went automatically to that part of him that reacted to her like a divining rod. He fought back a moan as a sheet of sticky perspiration covered him.

“God almighty,” he whispered to himself, his eyes drinking in the sight of high, firm breasts and long, slim legs. Shadow and moonlight caressed her body and tangled in her silky hair. Her movements were unhurried as she extended a languid arm. Tapered fingers grasped a cotton nightgown and pulled it toward her white nakedness.

Rook closed his eyes, feeling sick and desperate, and forced himself away from her and back inside the cabin. He sat at the table, head in his hands, breathing raggedly as if he’d run a mile. The lower part of him throbbed and grew until he felt possessed by his own passion.

The outside door opened and she tiptoed across the threshold. The thin nightgown stuck to her wet body in folds and wrinkles. Her eyes widened when she saw him and her mouth formed a startled O before her fluttering hand covered it. Her eyes shone and seemed to give off sparks of light as a nervous little laugh escaped her.