Merline Lovelace (11 page)

“You can’t, or you won’t?”

“All right, I won’t. I’ve got some unfinished business to take care of first.”

“In Deadwood.” Suzanne’s breath caught. “You’re going to Deadwood to shoot it out with someone, aren’t you?”

He pulled inside himself, took himself to some place so distant he might have been a thousand miles away instead of just a few inches.

“Tell me,” she insisted fiercely.

“His name’s Charlie Dawes. I’ve been tracking him for three years. When I find him, I plan to put a bullet between his eyes.”

“Why? Is there a bounty on him?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then why are you hunting him? What did Dawes do to you?”

“To me?” His eyes were as flinty as the granite hills of Dakota Territory. “Nothing.”

Fists bunched, Jack kept his arms straight at his sides. He wouldn’t reach for her. Wouldn’t wipe that look of dawning dismay from her eyes.

He’d told her nothing but the truth. Charlie Dawes hadn’t done a damned thing to Jack. He’d stood there, laughing, when one of his friends had laid the butt of his pistol to the head of the struggling, shouting twelve-year-old. Jack had dropped like a stone. He never knew which of the four men had pumped a bullet into his father’s forehead, or
how many of them had savaged his mother before she choked on her own vomit.

Jack didn’t need to know. All four were dead men from the moment he’d piled the last shovelful of dirt on his parents’ graves.

Charlie Dawes was the last.

For a moment, only a moment, he let himself think about what came after he left Dawes lying in the street, ready for the undertaker. Once more, his glance went to Suzanne.

No! It couldn’t happen. He’d packed iron for so long, he wouldn’t know how to walk straight without the Colt tied to his thigh. Even after Dawes, he’d still be Black Jack Sloan. Men would still come looking to test their skill against his, and no woman would want to live with someone who always sat with his back to the wall. No woman like Suzanne, anyway.

When she tipped her chin and pushed her lips together in that disapproving way of hers, he braced himself. He figured he was about to hear his character read back to him in Suzanne’s own, ten-dollar words.

“I don’t believe you.”

He couldn’t have been more surprised if that twisting sea snake on the bed behind him had jumped up and taken a bite out of his butt.

“What don’t you believe? That I’m going to pump a bullet into Charlie Dawes’s skull? I am.”

She looked right into him, her eyes so brown and clear Jack had to fight to keep from flinching.

“I don’t believe you’ve been hunting a man for three years for no particular reason. This man might not have hurt you personally, but obviously he did wrong by someone you care about.”

Jack felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise straight up. In the space of a few days, this woman had come closer than anyone ever had to guessing at the spur that had dug so deep into his skin and driven him so relentlessly. The fact that she refused to believe he hunted Charlie Dawes in cold blood should have gratified him. Instead, it made him nervous and twitchy as an old dog dreaming new dreams.

“You believe whatever you want,” he said roughly.

“I will.”

He didn’t know if it was her quiet reply, the look in her eyes or the whiskey he’d downed earlier that got to him. Suddenly, he felt so tired his bones wanted to curl up.

“I’m going to grab some sleep for what’s left of the night. If you’re riding out with me come first light, you’d better do the same.”

Retrieving his hat and gun belt from the bedpost, he turned and strode toward the muslin curtain. A moment later, the door rattled shut behind him.

“I’m riding out with you,” Suzanne said softly. “I am most definitely riding out with you.”

J
ack woke up feeling as friendly as a grizzly with a broken tooth. The back of his skull pounded as if a blacksmith was in there, going at his business with hammer and tongs. Eyes closed, he grimaced at the clanging and cursed himself for tossing back more than the one or two whiskies he ordinarily downed.

Fragments of the previous night sifted through the hammering in his head. A scarred, pine plank bar. Blue smoke snaking through the saloon. The snick of cards turning over, one by one. The kid rushing across the yard to pump his arm. Suzanne…

He grunted, and the smithy inside his head took another swing at the anvil. Gritting his teeth, Jack squeezed his eyes tight and let the image of Suzanne all tangled up in red silk dance on his lids.

She was still dancing when knuckles rapped
sharply against the door. Wincing, he pried his sandpapery lids open and stared up at the tattered playbill tacked to the wooden ceiling. The faded paper announced a special performance of
The Miner’s Daughter,
a melodrama featuring Professor Jonathan Busbee and the sweetheart of the professor’s traveling troop, Miss Kathleen Rose O’Bannyon. It took him a moment or two to associate Kathleen with the hurdie who’d died a few months back of a bleeding lung.

“Jack?”

Suzanne pushed the door open. Shards of blinding white light stabbed into his eyes. With another curse, he threw his left arm over his face.

“Mother Featherlegs said you’d bunked down in here. I came to see if you’re still alive.”

His lips pulled back in a snarl. “I’m not.”

“Oh, dear. Feeling the whiskey, are you?”

The last thing he wanted at this moment was sympathy, particularly from the woman who’d landed him in hell and left him there to fry.

“You don’t want to know what I’m feeling right now.”

Her little
tch-tch
had him grinding his teeth.

“Well, I’m sorry you’re not quite yourself, but it’s after seven. You said you wanted to ride out at first light.”

“I’ll ride out when I’m ready. Go away.”

“I had our horses saddled and brought around, but we need to talk about…”

“Go away.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake! Do stop snarling at me like that. It’s most annoying.”

Bringing down his arm, he shoved off the thin straw mattress. While he waited for the room to stop spinning, two thoughts speared into his brain. The first was that he needed to take a piss something fierce. The second was that the woman standing just inside the door looked a sight different from the fine, feathered miss he’d first run his eyes over aboard the stage.

Her hair hung halfway down her back in a thick braid, with soft, fine tendrils curling seductively about her face. The blue skirt and short blue jacket were the same, if considerably wrinkled, but her dainty shoes had given way to the oversize black boots she’d acquired at Ten Mile Station, and she now wore a sensible calico shirtwaist instead of the frilly, high-necked white blouse. The feathered hat had disappeared completely, replaced by a no-nonsense gray felt slouch with a broad brim and a rawhide thong at the throat. She carried what looked like a canvas duster over one arm, the kind cowboys wore on the range to keep the wind and rain at bay.

She must have borrowed the new items…or bought them with one of her damned promissory
notes, Jack thought sourly. At the rate she was going, she’d leave a trail of paper from Ten Mile Station clear to the Cheyenne River.

“If you’re done growling,” she said with the patience a mother might show a fractious child, “we need to discuss a few matters.”

“At this moment, all I care about is filling a slop bucket and then my belly.”

She gave a long, fluttery sigh. “Very well. I’ll leave you to take care of the first while I confer with Mother Featherlegs about the second. I’ll wait for you in the saloon.”

“You can wait until hell freezes over,” Jack retorted, but the door had already closed.

It wasn’t until he’d splashed water over his face, stomped into his boots and buckled on his gun belt that he admitted the truth. He wasn’t ready to face Suzanne. Not with his head aching, his belly grumbling, and the memory of her soft, creamy breasts still burning like a brand into his palms.

He should have taken her, he thought savagely. Last night, when she was so hot and eager, he should have ignored all that nonsense about installments, ignored his suspicions that she’d thrown her hand, and taken her. Maybe that would have opened her eyes, or at least rid them of some of the crazy notions swirling around in her head.

He’d warned her, dammit. More than once. Last night, he’d told her flat out what he was, how he
lived. She didn’t want him. Not deep down. She couldn’t.

He wouldn’t let her.

Thoughtfully, Suzanne eyed the man who pushed through the door of the saloon. He wore the look of a sore-mouthed horse with the bit between his teeth. He was ready to bolt, and at the least provocation, he would.

“There’s biscuits and cold beef,” she said calmly, nodding to the plate waiting for him on one of the rickety tables. “Matt and I have already eaten. He’s almost finished loading up, by the way.”

A sourdough biscuit hovered in the air halfway to Sloan’s mouth. “Loading what up?”

“Ying Li’s belongings.”

“Well, hell. Is she coming with us?”

“Yes, of course. Don’t you remember? We talked about it last night?”

“We talked about a lot of things last night, most of them not worth repeating.”

He was spoiling for a fight, she guessed. Still wound as tight as she was after their tussle in Mother Featherlegs’s bed. He’d taken time to scrape off his bristles and had obtained a clean, button-over black shirt from someone—one of the saloon’s customers, she supposed. His hair glistened wet and dark under his hat. With his red
dened eyes and tight jaw, he looked lean and mean and too dangerous for anyone with half a brain in their head to cross.

Just the thought made Suzanne’s pulse jump. Deliberately, she assumed her primmest manner, knowing it would set his teeth on edge. “Shall I see if Mother Featherlegs has any ammonia? The post surgeon used to mix fifteen grains of ammonia dissolved in water with two teaspoons of spirit of hartshorn to dose the troopers. It generally cured them of the after-effects of inebriation.”

It made them sick as dogs first, of course, but after they finished puking up their guts, they were usually judged fit to return to duty.

Sloan must have experienced a similarly drastic remedy in the past. Shooting her a look of acute dislike, he declined the offer in what she considered particularly uncivil terms.

She left him slogging down a mug of black coffee and went outside. Behind the charred remains of the way station, the red rock buttes rose against a dull gray sky. The morning air carried a promise of rain and none of yesterday’s sweltering heat, thank goodness. Enjoying the way the breeze lifted the tendrils escaping the fat braid hanging down her back, Suzanne turned her attention to her traveling companion.

Mathias, she decided, looked even worse after his night of debauchery than Jack. Red-eyed and
green-gilled, he tugged at the ropes attaching the bundle containing Ying Li’s few possessions to his saddle. Ying Li sat on the wooden steps, her hands tucked into her sleeves. Impassively, she watched his progress. Nothing in her expression indicated any particular excitement about the change in her situation.

“I’ll go get another saddle blanket and fold it up for you to sit on,” Matt told her. “So you kin hold on to me.”

“All same…”

“I know, I know. No matter.”

He walked away, muttering. Sensing that the young lovers were already experiencing some difficulties, Suzanne tucked her skirts under her and joined Ying Li on the step.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t convince Mother Featherlegs to part with the bed she bought from your father.”

She studied the girl’s broad, flat face, fighting a tug of pity for a childhood lost and a future that seemed to hold so little promise.

“Are you sure you want to go with us? I could make arrangements to send you back to your family.”

“Matt Butts say he go, I go, all same together.”

“I see.”

“You see?” She gave Suzanne a puzzled glance. “Ying Li no see. Matt Butts say Ying Li’s
cheeks make shame like lamp. If Ying Li make him shame, why he want we go, all same, together?”

“I’m sure I don’t… Oh!”

Belatedly, Suzanne recalled her attempt to help Matt with his courting. Obviously, he’d tried out the lines from
Romeo and Juliet
on Ying Li.

Poor Becky.

“I believe he might have been quoting Shakespeare to you. Praising you. Telling you that you’re beautiful.”

“Ying Li? Beautiful?” She gave a delicate snort. “Matt Butts drunk, only want fuckee-fuck.”

“Yes, well… He’s not drunk this morning.”

“Matt Butts like fuckee-fuck,” the girl said simply. “Last night, this morning, all same.”

And that, Suzanne thought ruefully, summed up the situation with devastating accuracy. Not only did Matt appear to have discovered the pleasures of the flesh, his overdeveloped sense of chivalry could very well stretch his passionate encounter with Ying Li into a lifelong commitment.

For a moment, she felt almost envious. One tumble, just one, and the Chinese girl had made a conquest. Suzanne still couldn’t get Jack to admit that she raised anything more on him than… How did he phrase it? An itch that needed scratching.

He’d certainly tried his best to reduce the hunger that gripped them both to crude, vulgar terms, she
thought wryly. Last night, he’d infuriated her. This morning, she could freely admit that what she felt for Black Jack Sloan
was
crude. And vulgar. And so wildly, gloriously exciting that she was determined to see where it would take them.

Not just to a quick roll in the straw. The need was sharper than that, the hunger went deeper. With everything that was female in her, Suzanne needed more. Wanted more. Much more.

Jack Sloan didn’t know it yet, but his days as a gunfighter were numbered.

She wasn’t sure when she’d decided that. Sometime between their first, shattering kiss and the moment she’d picked up the deck of cards, she supposed. She’d known exactly what she was doing when she accepted the stakes, then proposed paying him the interest in installments.

An expression her family would have instantly recognized settled over her face.
Mulish,
her mother termed it. Her brother, Sam, called it something considerably less polite. Propping her chin on her hands, Suzanne contemplated the charred ruins of the way station across the street.

Jack would take some convincing to hang up his gun. He’d made his feelings plain last night. He’d also made it plain that he had business in Deadwood. Serious business, from the sound of it. Serious enough that someone was going to die. Either
this Charlie Dawes he’d talked about or Jack himself.

A shiver rippled down Suzanne’s spine. If her own business wasn’t so urgent, she’d…she’d…

Do what? Go to Deadwood with him? Put herself between him and the quarry he’d been hunting for three years?

Suzanne wasn’t naive. She knew that some men went so bad they deserved hanging or a firing squad. From the little Jack had let drop, she suspected this Charlie Dawes might be one of those men. It was the fact that she wasn’t sure that bothered her, and made her realize how little she really knew about the hunter who stalked Dawes.

“Where’s the kid?”

The bad-tempered growl brought her and Ying Li around. Jack towered over them, squinting in the gray morning light.

“Matt went to get a blanket for Ying Li to ride on,” Suzanne replied. “He’s taking her up behind him.”

“Hell, he can hardly stay in the saddle himself!”

“Yes, I know, but…”

His bloodshot eyes went to Ying Li, then cut back to Suzanne. “I’m not riding easy. If either one of those two falls off their horse, they’ll have to climb back on and catch up. They’re not my responsibility.”

“I know.”

“You, either.”

“I know.”

There was nothing that tied them to each other except the fire they raised under each other’s skin. Nothing!

“Damned fool.”

He stomped past, leaving Suzanne to wonder if he was referring to her or Matt or himself.

Surprisingly, neither Matt nor Ying Li parted company with their horse. They even managed to keep up, although Jack was forced to slow the pace considerably, which didn’t help his foul temper.

By late morning, the rolling, grassy plains had dropped behind. Ahead loomed the Black Hills of Dakota Territory. It was easy to see where the hills got their name. Blankets of blue spruce and dark, verdant pine covered the slopes, filling the air with the scent of sap and spongy, decaying vegetation.

The road split a few hours out of Rawhide Buttes. The left fork cut a zigzag path north through the wooded hills to Cold Springs, then on to Deadwood Gulch. The right fork wandered more easterly, through lush meadows shadowed by high granite peaks, toward Fort Meade and the Dakota Badlands beyond.

Jack didn’t glance at the hand-scrawled sign pointing to Cold Springs, but a scowl settled like
a thundercloud on his face. Wisely, Suzanne made no comment. The detour to Fort Meade would take him a good half day out of his way. He’d have to ride another half day back to pick up the road to Deadwood. Five more hours, she thought. Six at the most…if the weather cooperated.

Clouds had piled up in gray, cottony layers, but the wet held off and the going remained easy. Everywhere Suzanne looked, she saw splashes of color: spotted joe-pye weed with its cluster of pink flowers atop the tall purple stem; white and pink primroses fluttering like silk hankies amid the lush grasses; and wild indigo, so deep and true a blue that the flowers looked like lapis beads strung through the meadows.

Every so often they’d spot smoke curling in the distance or pass an isolated cabin. Twice, they exchanged greetings with travelers riding south. For the most part, though, they had the hills, meadows and small, perfect lakes to themselves.