Wild Fire (Wild State) (8 page)

She had stared into the depths of her glass. “I’d rather trade the latter for the former,” she’d told him, and maybe, just maybe, she had been thinking of Ryan in that moment.

Now, possessing the latter in spades, Sadie attempted to lock up the corner of her heart convinced she and Ryan had unfinished business. By the time the town car stopped at the foot of the red carpet, her most beatific—and most professional—smile was firmly in place. Declan and Fiona allowed her to exit the vehicle first, and she began her slow trek down the line of press, paparazzi, and waiting fans.
 

It took more than half an hour to work through the sea of interviewers with oversized microphones and minuscule cameras, to smile and turn for the fashion police with the loud clicking of single-lens shutters and the bright flash of bulbs. Sadie was more than familiar with the routine, having made her first big movie at age twenty-one, and had quickly discovered she enjoyed red-carpet events such as these. Some actors never adapted to the seemingly shallow demands of fame, but she saw it as a trade-off for being able to do what she loved and not having to worry about her next paycheck.
 

Upon reaching the end of the line, she glanced toward the historic movie theater’s entrance—

—and nearly tripped over the hem of her gown to see Ryan
 
standing inside the first set of glass doors, watching her. Even from here, she could see the glint of green eyes, watching her every step bring her closer to where he waited.
 

“
No
,” she whispered, chastising her traitorous heart for leaping at the sight of him. The man had made it painfully clear that he had no interest in seeing what, if anything, existed between them now that they were older and wiser, and Sadie wasn’t willing to let her heart be trampled any more than it already had been.
 

Lifting her chin as she walked through the door held open by a uniformed theater usher, she did her best to pass him without meeting his gaze. She didn’t want to look into those irises of forest green and allow the deluge of memories to sway her from her course. No, she was stronger than that.

Age thirty. Crazy-rich. Badass actress with an Oscar nom under her belt. She
had
this, man.
 

“Sadie.”

God damn him, his rich baritone voice, and its charming American accent.
 

She was proud of herself for ignoring him, but he forced her to a halt when strong fingers wrapped around her wrist above the gold cuff and murmured, “Sadie, wait. Please.”

She could have tugged her hand free. He would let her go, if she told him to release her. But he was touching her, and tendrils of sensual heat wound around her arm, licking a path to her bare shoulder before spreading into her chest. Her pulse thudded in her ears as she stood, her back to his front, and waited as he asked of her.

His grip gentled, but he didn’t release her wrist, instead stepping closer until she felt the warmth of his body against her naked back, revealed by the cut of her dress. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your e-mails.” His mouth hovered over her ear, and she shivered at the accidental—because it must be accidental, mustn’t it?—brush of his lips over sensitive flesh. “Or your voice mails. Or your texts. I should’ve called you back.”

“It would have been ten years too late, anyway,” she hissed, surprised at the venom in her own voice. But venom masked the hurt, and she decided she was grateful for the anger that had sprung to life the moment he touched her.
 

She could almost feel his wince behind her. “Can we talk?”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing, Ryan?”

He shook his head as his body aligned with hers. “Somewhere private.”
 

She froze as intimate memories assailed her of waking up on Christmas morning just like this, his tall, rangy frame curved possessively over her much smaller one. Hating the effect his nearness had on her, the ache gathering in her chest and threatening to subsume her pounding heart, she turned abruptly and stared up at him.
 

He wasn’t exactly handsome, per se, but his face was compelling, with angular features and strong jaw. His nose was a little too long, and his lips slightly thinner than expected, given his wide mouth, but she remembered loving how the tip of that nose touched her cheek as they kissed, and how those lips shaped hers so perfectly that first time, and all the times thereafter.
 

His messy light-brown hair that so easily picked up streaks of sunlight when regularly exposed to it had been neatly combed for tonight’s premiere, the scruff that usually shaded his jaw shaved away, as well. All six feet and two inches of him had been stuffed into a slick designer suit of stark black and white, and he wore a rather formidable frown as he gazed down at her.

Looking at him stole the breath from her lungs, so her heart made the decision before her head could think better of it. “Where did you have in mind?”

Sliding his fingers past the bracelet, he linked their fingers in a move both familiar and not, and whispered, “Come with me.”

Return to the western frontier with this excerpt from
Wild Chase
, coming soon!

D
on’t scare her. She’s just a little girl.

Standing alone on the small, square station platform as a light snow drifted down, waiting for a plume of dark smoke to appear on the colorless eastern horizon, Alonzo Hood growled. The voice in his head—David’s voice—just wouldn’t leave him alone today.

It’s not her fault she is the way she is
.

“Of course it is, you fool.” Lon popped the collar of his black wool overcoat to shield his neck from the col. He knew all about Esther Beldonne, and that conniving Louisiana tart had made her own lawbreaking bed. Now he was going to make her lie in it.

David couldn’t have been blamed for his blind eye, however. Esther’s childhood had taken place far away from Danton House, in the wild, sin-rich city of New Orleans. David and Esther may have shared a mother, but after she met a criminally minded Cajun, that mother had wanted nothing to do with her husband and eight-year-old son.

What David had never understood, but Lon did, was that Esther had been faced with a choice between right and wrong, and she had chosen the latter. She had chosen the latter again and again and again. Lon had known exactly who his best friend’s younger half-sister was the moment he’d laid eyes on her six years ago, when she had lifted his Yale signet ring and his purse. The money he hadn’t cared about, but the ring….

Taking the ring had been her biggest mistake. Because there wasn’t a chance in hell Lon would ever forget its loss, or the party responsible. Which made her a target.

His target.

You promised you’d look out of her
.

Far in the distance, a tiny black cloud puffed up in the sky. The train was coming.
 

You promised, Lon
.

“Shut up,” he muttered at David’s chastising voice, at the very same moment the cheerfully rotund stationmaster stepped out onto the platform.
 

The older man’s smile faltered, and he cleared his throat and tapped the watch fob pinned to his waistcoat. “Ten minutes ’til arrival, Marshal.”

Lon managed a polite nod, pretending as though he hadn’t noticed the stationmaster’s gaze turn wary. It wasn’t the first time hearing David’s voice caused some strange looks to be directed Lon’s way. If this was a haunting, David was doing a damn poor job of it, his prodding voice more annoying than eerie.

If Lon could make his dead friend disappear, he would.

He stared down the tracks, waiting for the first sight of the engine. Or maybe he wouldn’t banish the voice. These conversations with David warmed the shadowed recesses where he’d secreted away his memories, casting them in a gentle glow and allowing him to revisit, at his leisure, a childhood that had been at times both lovely and harsh.

Days spent wandering through the designated safe areas of the Danton arms manufactory, nights spent peeking in nearby whorehouse windows. Lon would be hard-pressed to choose which memory he loved more, and each with David Danton at his side.

Except today, he wanted the voice gone, because he
had
promised to look after Esther. He’d promised almost a year ago, when he’d found David dying with cruel slowness from his war wounds in a makeshift hospital in Virginia, that he would do his best to keep Esther out of trouble.

Or rather, to keep her from getting into any more trouble. She and Cassius Redding—her partner and assumed lover—had cut quite a swath from Louisiana to the Carolinas and back again. Confidence schemes were the duo’s stock-in-trade, but over the past eighteen months, their crimes had escalated to outright theft with a side helping of assault and, in one very public instance, manslaughter. Every marshal in the country had the names Redding and Beldonne at the top of his most-wanted list.

Lon frowned, shifting his weight to keep warm as he watched the train chug closer and closer, the clang of its heavy steel mechanisms a rhythmic grunt in his ears. Three months ago, rumors had flown that Esther and Redding had parted ways, with Redding setting up shop for himself in the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter…and Esther vanishing. It bothered him, that sudden shift in dynamic, until he’d gotten the letter.

The
other
letter—not the one he’d received in the weeks following David’s death containing a note with Esther’s name scribbled in David’s messy handwriting across the heavy, embossed stationery. That particular letter he would deliver to her hands in good time…as soon as those hands were shackled in front of her.

No, Lon’s letter was from a Pinkerton agent named J.P. Owens, whom old Danton had hired to stalk his estranged wife’s illegitimate daughter after Esther had allegedly shown up at Danton House in Connecticut last month and stolen…something. According to Frederick Danton’s statement, included in Owens’s letter, Esther had attacked a housemaid during the theft, bruising the girl’s face and splitting her lip.

Esther wouldn’t do that.

Frankly, Lon had his own doubts about the veracity of Danton’s claim, even without David’s voice in his head. Hiding behind those happier memories of autumn days spent playing hooky with David were the remembered instances of what Danton had done when he found out about his son skipping school. The beatings, the twisted words of filth and violence spewing from Danton’s mouth as he wielded the belt—all while Lon had been forced to stand there, shoulders held by the Danton family’s oversized butler, and watch while the closest thing he had to a brother endured the pain in stoic silence.

“It’s your mission to keep him on a righteous path, Alonzo,” Danton would say in between lashes, manic eyes never leaving his son’s thin, coltish frame. “Half of him is Satan’s spawn, and he’ll always be tempted to do things he shouldn’t.”

Thwack
.

“It’s your job, Alonzo, to rein in his demons.”

Thwack
.

“Or prepare to see your friend suffer as the gates of hell open wide for him. But not at my hand.”

Thwack. Thwack
.

“I do this for David’s own good. For yours too, Alonzo.”

In those moments, Lon had sought David’s gaze, needing reassurance and offering it in return, and David—the brave, stupid boy—would simply roll his eyes.

No, Danton was not a rational man, but the agent currently in his employ didn’t seem to care—or perhaps Owens didn’t know his employer’s malevolent streak. The letter was dated less than a week ago from Chicago, and felt like a volatile explosive where it rested in Lon’s jacket pocket. His gloved hand hovered over his chest, over the letter, before falling back to his side. The only line that mattered today was one he’d already memorized.

EB in Iowa City via rail on Thurs, then to board stage. Final destination: Denver.

Ester was heading to Denver City. Lon’s territory.
 

He wanted to know why.

Because of the Pinkerton’s letter, Lon was now waiting for a train in the snow, staring out over the vast sameness of the Iowa plains. The train neared, the
clank-groan-hiss
of the powerful machine an echo of the labor it had likely taken to build it. A single passenger car hooked behind the engine and coal wagon, windows reflecting the gleaming, gray-white emptiness of the winter sky. Freight cars followed, dull and dirt-streaked, coupled one after the other until Lon glimpsed the caboose with its green-painted roof and flapping yellow flag bringing up the rear.

Lon tugged his gloves higher over his wrists as freezing air and maddened snowflakes swirled around him, blasted into a frenzy by the slow, screeching stop of the train pulling parallel with the platform. The tops of his ears stung, and he knew his cheeks looked as chapped and red as they felt, but he wasn’t about to go inside the station house. Not when
she
was moments away from stepping off that train and into his custody.

Don’t scare her
.
 

He scoffed at David’s voice. Lon was the furthest thing from scary…except when he needed to be.

You threatened to tan her backside the one and only time you met her
.

“She stole my ring.” His hands flexed in the confines of his gloves as his gaze narrowed on the shadowed forms moving behind the windows of the passenger car.

I offered to reimburse you for it
.

David had sheepishly dug in his coat pocket for the thick roll of paper bills he always carried with him. “Don’t know why she didn’t just pick
my
pocket,” he’d murmured with a fond grin, eyes trained on the winding alleyway down which Esther had disappeared. “Sorry, Hood.”

Lon had been too furious to respond, unable to see whatever humor in the situation his friend had. He’d shoved away the proffered money, stalking back to their hotel in the Garden District and leaving David to chase his half-sister through the treacherous pits of the Quarter, if he so chose.

Hours later, when David had returned to the hotel, he’d sat at the end of Lon’s bed with a somber expression, hands folded between his knees. “I can’t fix her, you know.”