When the young banker had pointed out the Golden Slipper behind the opera house, which couldn’t have been more opposite to the Muleskinner’s if that had been the builder’s sole intention, he turned to Louisa while rubbing his palms together slowly, as though warming himself before a hot fire. “If you have no plans for this evening, I’d like to ask you out to dinner, Miss Bona . . . I mean, Louisa. We could dine right there in the Golden Slipper and then, perhaps, I could show you around town, start getting you acquainted with some of the good townsfolk of Juniper.”
Louisa’s eyes slid to Prophet. And then Miguel’s did, too, and he said quickly albeit insincerely, “Of course, you’d be more than welcome, too, Mr. Prophet. . . .”
“Balderdash!” Prophet said, feeling a little heavy-footed as he crossed the boardwalk and grabbed Mean and Ugly’s reins from the hitchrack. “You two younkers go out and enjoy yourselves. Me, I’ll probably finagle a meal out of Hell-Bringin’ Hiram and then fleece him at euchre.”
Miguel turned to Louisa, and the relief was evident in his warm, sparkling eyes. “Shall we say six thirty? That gives you ample time for a nap, if you wish.”
Louisa gave Prophet a fleeting, oblique glance.
“Six thirty would be fine, Miguel.” She smiled sweetly, without a trace of her usual irony. “I’ll be dressed and waiting downstairs.”
When Miguel had bid them both farewell and headed into the bank, Louisa swung up onto her pinto. Adjusting the reins in her hand, she glanced at Prophet and said sort of shyly and noncommittally, “He’s nice.”
“Damn nice fella.”
She narrowed an eye at Prophet, suddenly looking more girlish than he’d seen her since they’d first met on the bounty trail up in the Dakota-Minnesota country. “You sure you don’t mind, Lou?”
“Why would I mind? He’s a nice kid, and he’s your age. What’s more, he’s got money.”
She frowned as Prophet reined Mean and Ugly out away from the hitchrail. “You’re not jealous?”
“I didn’t say that.” He winked at her. “You go on over to the Golden Slipper. You’ll probably get a bath there in a golden tub or some such. Hell, they’ll probably even bring you up a sarsaparilla in a crystal goblet!”
“I’m not sure I like this, Lou.” She raised a hand to shade her eyes from the westering sun as she regarded him sadly, gravely. “I’m not sure I like this at all.”
“What’s not to like? A good town with a handsome suitor in it for you?” Prophet looked up and down the street. Not a sign of commotion anywhere. He had to admit, though, he felt as though a sharp stiletto blade was pricking the backside of his heart. He’d wanted change, and now it was happening.
He sighed and flapped his reins against his saddlebow. “Ah, hell, we gotta give it a chance, Louisa. Me—I’m gettin’ too damn old to be shootin’ you out of Mexican prisons.”
He left her sitting on her pinto, staring after him, as he gigged the hammer-headed dun through the afternoon traffic, slanting across the street toward the Muleskinner’s. He was so distracted, as was Louisa, that neither one saw the long-haired hombre with the eye patch staring at Prophet from a rain barrel a ways up the street, in the direction of the opera house, and lovingly caressing the hammer of the Sharps carbine resting across his lap with his thumb.
9
LOUISA PUT THE pinto around behind the opera house, weaving amongst the foot traffic comprised mostly of beefy workers carrying rough wooden planks of all shapes and sizes as well as buckets of paint through the ornate building’s double rear doors.
Louisa had never been inside such a place before. She hadn’t had time for that brand of foolishness when there were depraved men running free across the West looking to kill and maim and leave orphans such as herself in their blood-tinged wake. But she supposed, in a vague sort of way through the consternation she felt at parting with Lou, that they were building sets for the house’s next performance.
Lou . . .
She pulled the pinto up to the broad front porch of the Golden Slipper, which boasted a painted golden slipper on either side of the large shingle stretched across the porch and bearing the place’s name in large, cursive, black letters. The place was brick, with a mansard roof and upper-story balconies with wrought-iron rails twisted to form little golden slippers.
For a moment, staring up at the imposing place and seeing a couple of women in frilly gowns and long, pastel-colored gloves and feathered picture hats spinning parasols on the porch while speaking in hushed tones, Louisa felt sick to her stomach. She didn’t belong in such opulence. Not alone, anyway, without Lou to temper the experience, to make it an adventure and something to laugh about rather than something she merely felt alienated from.
But the Golden Slipper certainly wasn’t a place for Prophet. He would fit in here about as well as a brush-tailed mustang stallion would blend in amongst the tight aisles of the haberdashery.
Just the image lightened her mood some, made it more bittersweet than sharply sad and lonely. She still wanted to turn tail and run back to Prophet and hole up with him at the Muleskinner’s—she’d grown accustomed to such low-heeled places—but her heart was just light enough now that she could not allow herself to make such a spectacle of herself. Besides, running back to him would be like running back to her old, bounty-hunting life, and on the trail up from Mexico she’d decided that Prophet was right—that life was no longer the life for her. She hated to admit it—and she wouldn’t admit it to anyone but herself, not even Lou—but she’d been defeated.
Montoya had defeated her.
He’d turned her into a frightened little creature wanting only to burrow and hide. She hadn’t even wanted to take the gold-guarding job but had offered herself only out of her innate defiance and to prove to herself that she still had a little sand left in her soul.
Quickly, to keep herself from thinking of that horrible time at the prison and conjuring the unbearable pain of it, not the least of which had been inflicted by the major’s cigars which he’d ground into her hips or the small of her back after he’d taken his goatish pleasure, she grabbed her rifle and saddlebags from off the pinto’s back.
She hurried up the Golden Slipper’s broad porch steps. Ignoring the puzzled frowns of the two picture-hatted, parasol-twirling ladies, who were no doubt sizing up the pretty though trail-worn blond sporting a pair of pearl-gripped Colts on her narrow hips, Louisa fairly threw herself into the dark, cool lobby.
The place was all dark wood and wine-red carpet with black and gold designs and heavy drapes tied back from tall windows. But Louisa wasted no time admiring the richly appointed digs. She quickly ordered a room from the mustachioed gent behind the long mahogany desk on the left, scribbling her name into the register. Hefting her rifle and saddlebags and heading for the broad stairs at the lobby’s rear, beyond the richly furnished saloon where a few impeccably dressed gentlemen quietly whiled away the afternoon, she informed the man, who scrutinized her with the usual male fascination, that she’d like a bath.
“Of course, miss.” From the corner of her eye, she watched him lean over the desk to watch her rump as she climbed the stairway, her saddlebags jostling down her back. “Two buckets of hot water or three?”
“Three. And a little alacrity, please,” Louisa ordered as she topped the stairs and turned to tramp along the balcony that encircled the entire second story, exposing all the doors facing a stove-sized, opal chandelier. She felt a peculiar need to assert herself here in this foreign environment. “After the bath, I’ll be napping before dinner.”
The desk clerk stared up at her from below, his round spectacles glinting in the afternoon light from the tall windows. “Uh . . . of course, Miss Bonaventure.”
She found her room and went in.
Louisa was cool as a mountain snow, but even she had to stand in the open doorway for a moment, lower jaw hanging slack, as she looked around at the finely appointed room. It was as large as a livery barn and furnished with a marble-topped oak washstand, marble-topped mirrored dresser, and a sprawling, canopied, four-poster bed. The carpet under her boots was so deep that her spurs caught in the weave; the first thing she did after she’d tossed her possibles on the bed was remove them and hang them on the brass hat rack, giving each an absent spin.
She was still looking around the room in awe when a light knock jerked her head to the door. It was a husky young man in a red velvet uniform, hefting a copper tub. Louisa let him in and, after he’d filled the tub with two buckets of cold water and three buckets of hot, Louisa told him she’d set the clothes she was wearing outside her door to be picked up for laundering.
When the young man left, she stripped and tossed everything except her hat and boots into the hall. Then, naked except for the tan felt hat snugged down on her wheat-colored curls—Prophet’s reluctance to remove his hat had rubbed off on her, she realized with a self-castigating chuff—she tossed the hat onto the bed and dipped a toe into the lightly steaming water.
She stepped into the tub and stood there for a moment, calf-deep, and pinned her hair into a loose bun behind her head, thinking absently as she looked around the room lit by two tall windows over which heavy purple curtains glowed that she might be able to get accustomed to comfort, after all.
As she sank down in the tub, she found herself thinking about Miguel Encina. She felt a tingling throughout her body, thinking about him, and as she sank back against the tub, extending her legs as far as she could, she realized that she had been quite taken with the young banker.
What girl wouldn’t be?
She supposed she’d seen other handsome young men over the past few years, but she hadn’t considered any for suitors because she’d been partnered up with Lou for more than just bounty hunting. She wasn’t exactly sure what Lou meant to her, though she knew she loved him and had always enjoyed having his big arms wrapped around her in their joined blanket rolls.
But she’d always known that Lou would never make a husband.
One, he just wasn’t the marrying kind. Two, he couldn’t be faithful if he were riding a golden, fleece-lined cloud with Mary Magdalene herself. And, because Louisa had been more intent on hunting killers down and either hauling their wretched hides to the nearest law or killing them bloody, she’d never been too concerned about that.
She herself had fallen into the arms of others, though nowhere near the number of others Lou had. But now that she’d found herself warming up to this idea of settling down in a peaceful place like Juniper, she found herself cozying up to the idea of Miguel Encina.
He was right handsome, and those warm brown eyes seemed to probe right through to her core. Most men as handsome as him were rakes, and when they looked at a girl they were wondering what she’d look like naked. But Louisa’s female sixth sense, which was as stout as hammered steel, told her that Miguel wanted more than just a tumble. He honestly seemed to want to get to know her better, to discover her soul and, in so doing, expose his own soul to her. There was nothing more appealing in a man than that.
Again, a shadow passed behind her eyes, and she stopped scrubbing her raised thigh with the lavender-scented soap that the bellboy had brought and scowled at the window in front of her.
Lou already knew her soul, and she knew his. . . .
A sound in the hall instantly scoured her mind of all thought. She glanced quickly at her shell belt and the filled holsters draped over the chair she’d positioned to the right of the tub. Then she swiveled her head to peer over her other shoulder. Under the door, a thin shadow moved. There was a faint rasp, like that of a spur rowel catching on carpet.
Louisa dropped the soap. It hit the water with a plop. Her hands tingled as she kept her gaze on the charcoal shadow that had stopped outside her door.
Beyond the door, the desk clerk’s voice echoed up from downstairs. “Um . . . excuse there, but . . .”
The shadow disappeared from under the door. Louisa’s heartbeat quickened as the shadow appeared once more. There was a loud boom as the door burst open.
Louisa threw herself over the tub’s right side, splashing soapy water in all directions, and continued over the chair beside her but not before she’d filled both her practiced hands with her pearl-gripped .45s. From the corner of her right eye, she watched two men blow into the room. As she hit the floor and rolled, she glimpsed the sharp flashes of the four bellowing guns in the men’s hands, heard the sharp pings and pops of the lead storm crashing into the copper, water-filled tub.
Belly down on the carpeted floor between the tub and the bed, Louisa angled both her pearl-gripped six-shooters at the big men standing obscured behind the wafting of their own powder smoke and the flashes of their pistols and returned fire.
Louisa’s Colts leaped and roared in her small, strong fists, her eyes unblinking and hard, her tender upper lip slightly curled in cold, clean fury. Both men were just turning their wailing guns toward her when her .45 rounds began drilling into them, beating dust from their leather vests and blowing their dusters out behind them as the men themselves stumbled back, screaming, hats tumbling off their shoulders.
Louisa emptied her Colts into both men until they’d both been punched out the door, leaving behind only lazily drifting smoke and spilled blood on the carpet and walls near where they’d been standing. Water gurgled from the holes they’d pumped into the washtub, turning the carpet around it dark and soggy.
Tossing away the empty Colts, Louisa sprang to her bare feet and grabbed her Winchester carbine off the bed. She strode into the hall, looking around, seeing nothing but more smoke and spent shells. The carpet in front of her room was torn, and blood was smeared across the balcony’s scrolled rail.
Louisa racked a cartridge into the carbine’s breech and, holding the rifle up high across her jostling breasts, strode forward. She peered over the rail and into the lobby below.