Teresa Medeiros (18 page)

“Stay.” Her voice cracked, then faded to a whisper. “If you do, I’ll make it …”

His fingers froze in their task. His smile faded.

Esmerelda closed her eyes, unable to meet his wary gaze
while she bartered away the only thing of value left to her. “… worth your while.”

She might have imagined his helpless chuckle, but she didn’t imagine the tender brush of his lips against hers. “You already have, honey. You already have.”

The door slammed. The key turned. Esmerelda opened her eyes to find both Billy and his bowler gone. She rushed to the door and frantically twisted the knob. Just as she feared, he had locked it from the outside, leaving her a helpless captive.

Esmerelda pounded on the door, shouting until she was hoarse. When no one came running to rescue her, she realized that Billy must have peeled some more bills off that fat wad of cash he always carried and paid the hotel manager to ignore her cries.

She collapsed against the door, dizzied by frustration and fear. Dear Lord, what had she done? She might finally find Bartholomew, but at what cost?

She opened her mouth to shout again, then abruptly closed it. Her mama had always taught her that her voice was a precious instrument, never to be strained without good cause. A determined smile slowly curved her lips. Outwitting Billy Darling just might be the best cause of all.

As Billy strode down Main Street, the crowds shied away from him. A well-dressed gentleman wearing wire-rimmed spectacles crossed the street to avoid him, while a mother snatched her tiny daughter out of his path, whispering frantically in the little girl’s ear. Although he pretended indifference, Billy was only too aware of their desperate swerving and fearful glances.

He might be able to change his clothes, but he could do
nothing to disguise his gunslinger’s gait—that lazy roll of the hips that made it possible to flip aside the hem of his coat, draw his Colt, and fire before his opponent had time to make his final peace with God.

Nor could he dim the predatory gleam in his eye, a gleam that always sharpened whenever he sensed his prey was nearby. As he passed the brothel where he’d left his brothers, he tipped the bowler forward to shadow his face, praying they were too busy spending both their money and their seed to spare a glance out the window.

His nape prickled as he crossed the street, making him wonder if Winstead had men out there somewhere, watching his every move. The notion made him itch to boolt. He might carry the badge of a deputy U.S. marshal in the breast pocket of his vest, but outlaw blood still pulsed through his heart, tarnishing everything shiny and beautiful that he dared to touch.

Everything but Esmerelda. He had gone to that hotel room determined to take her to the bank with him. He’d been fully prepared to drag her if necessary and force her to witness the havoc she had wreaked with her schemes and her lies.

But the minute she’d flung open that door, a welcoming smile softening her prim lips, he had realized that he could no more deliberately endanger her life than he could draw his own pistol and put a bullet through her heart.

Billy inhaled a ragged breath, trying desperately to clear his head. The musky sweet fragrance of peaches still haunted him. It clung to his clothes and his skin everywhere he had touched Esmerelda, tempting him to turn around and march right back to that hotel room. To throw open the door, lock it from the inside, and spend the rest of the day and night making hot, delicious love to her.

He could still see her as she’d stood before him—her eyes pressed shut, the cinnamon lace of her lashes resting against her cheeks. A convulsive swallow had rippled down her graceful, white throat when she’d begged him to stay. She’d looked less like some calculating temptress than a sacrificial virgin. In that moment he had known it no longer mattered whether Bart Fine was her brother or her lover. He didn’t care if she’d had one man or a dozen. He didn’t have to be the first man she took to her bed. He only wanted to be the last.

It was that shocking realization that had driven him from the room. Esmerelda would never know what it had cost him to spurn her offer. To steal one last bittersweet taste of her lips before turning away and leaving her there. Because she’d been right about one thing. He was never coming back.

Once he apprehended Fine, he had no intention of turning him over to Esmerelda. Given Winstead’s desperation to be rid of the outlaw, he’d most likely hunt them both down before they could get out of New Mexico. Billy’s jaw hardened along with his resolve, sending a grizzled miner scurrying out of his path. He’d decided to risk both Esmerelda’s and Winstead’s wrath by turning Fine over to Elliot Courtney, the U.S. marshal in Albuquerque. Countney still owed him for bringing in a notorious horse thief last fall and could at least be counted on to guarantee Fine a fair trial.

Which was more than Billy could expect. Winstead was not the sort to forgive or forget. As soon as he learned of Billy’s betrayal, there would be a price on his head even higher than the one he carried now. Winstead was also likely to add those four words that were such sweet music to every bounty hunter’s ears—
Wanted: Dead or Alive
. Billy would have no choice but to spend the rest of his life on the run or flee to Mexico with his brothers.

Like the specter of that grim future, the shadow of the Eulalie First National Bank fell across his path. Billy paused to purchase a newspaper from a freckled boy, studying the imposing two-story brick structure from the corner of his eye. The bank boasted two narrow side doors and one main door, through which a steady stream of newly prosperous customers passed.

He tucked the newspaper beneath his arm and entered the bank, holding the door open for a stooped, white-haired woman who shuffled past, leaning heavily on her cane. If Fine came in as Winstead had warned, with a belly full of sass and a blaze of gunfire, Billy was going to have to take him down fast or risk some innocent bystander getting shot.

He strolled over and sank down in a leather wing chair that offered him an unobstructed view of all three doors. One of the tellers perched behind the brass bars of his cage shot him a nervous glance, but a genteel smile and a reassuring wink seemed to set the young man at ease. If Winstead had done what he’d promised, the teller must suspect that Billy was the deputy sent to protect the shipment of treasury gold languishing in the bank’s vault.

Opening the newspaper to hide his scrutiny of the doors, Billy waited.

He had learned quickly that a bounty hunter need possess only one virtue—patience. The patience to sit motionless on his mare with cold rain dripping from the brim of his slouch hat until a drunken horse thief came stumbling out of a saloon. The patience to keep smiling while he lost hand after hand of poker to a man suspected of bashing his wife to death with a frying pan and burying her poor, broken body in the vegetable garden. The patience to peruse a newspaper in a sunny bank lobby, knowing his presence there would cost him dreams he’d never even known
he had until he had gazed into Esmerelda’s sparkling maple eyes.

But this was one job that didn’t require as much patience as he’d anticipated. The afternoon sun slanting through the bank’s frosted glass windows had barely begun to shift angles when Billy’s nape began to tingle. He stiffened. The newspaper slid from his lap to the floor.

That reliable indicator of danger was followed by the thunder of hoofbeats, cries of alarm, and a frantic commotion in the street outside the bank.

Billy eased aside his coat to rest his hand on the butt of his pistol. He slipped his other hand into his breast pocket to give the badge a brief caress. It would be the first and last time he would ever have the right to use it.

As the left side door burst open and four men with drawn pistols rushed into the bank, a woman screamed and Billy came to his feet.

“Everybody down!” he shouted. “On the floor!”

The customers obeyed, responding instinctively to the authority in his voice. Even the old woman’s screams subsided to panicked sniffles.

Instead of rushing to the tellers’ windows as everyone expected, the intruders stumbled to a halt a few feet from Billy.

The skinniest of the four, whose marked absence of a hat revealed that he only had one ear poking out from his tousled, straw-colored hair, pointed an accusing finger at Billy. “See! I ain’t no dummy after all. I told you it was him that went strollin’ by the whorehouse jest as purty as you please.”

Billy rolled his eyes, wondering why he couldn’t have been born into the James family or the Younger family or hell, even the Borgia family.

It didn’t alarm him that Virgil’s suspenders were unhooked
and dangling over his massive barrel chest or that Enos’s red drawers were peeking out of his half-unbuttoned pants. But the sight of the persnickety Jasper with his hair ruffled and rouge smudging his shirt did send a faint shiver of foreboding through him.

“You double-crossin’ sonofabitch!” Virgil roared, the sheer volume of his voice enough to send the old woman cowering in the corner into a fresh fit of hysterics.

“Somebody slap her before she gets us all killed.” The disembodied voice floated out from one of the teller’s cages. The threat was enough to stifle the woman in mid-shriek.

“What’d you do this time, Billy?” Virgil bellowed. “Pay them whores to distract us? You too dadburned greedy to share all that treasury gold with your own flesh and blood?”

Billy raised one hand in a pacifying gesture, but kept the other fixed firmly on his gun. “Rein in those wild horses of yours, Virg. It’s not what you think.”

“I told you the bastard was selfish,” Jasper purred, caressing the hammer of his pistol with his thumb. “That’s what comes of bein’ coddled by Ma all those years.”

Virgil’s ham-handed fist came swinging toward Billy. Billy’s gun was half out of its holster when Virgil clapped him on the shoulder, a dazzling grin breaking over his broad face. “First you go and get yourself wanted for murder and now this. By God, son, I ain’t never been so proud. You just might have Darlin’ blood flowin’ through those veins of yours after all!”

Billy choked out a strained laugh, but he was saved from replying by the fresh thunder of hoofbeats outside the bank. Four more men came rushing through the opposite side door, dusty bandannas tied across the bridges of their noses to mask their features.

They skidded to a halt, their whoops and hollers fading as they gaped in dumb surprise at the Darling gang. The Darling gang gaped back, their own jaws slack with shock.

Billy might have been tempted to duck out and let them shoot it out amongst themselves if the main door of the bank hadn’t swung open at that precise moment to admit a petite brunette wearing pristine white gloves and a squashed bonnet.

Esmerelda stormed through the door, tugging a reluctant Sadie along behind her on a scarlet cord that had once been an elegant bellpull at the Silver Lining Hotel.

She marched right up to Billy, completely oblivious to the drama unfolding around them. He lunged forward, making a desperate but futile attempt to put his body between her heaving bosom and all eight pistols trained upon it.

She shook one white-gloved finger at him, as if he were some hapless piano student who had struck an off-key note during a recital. “There you are, you shameless deserter! I suppose you thought you were protecting me by locking me in my room like a child. Well, I’ll have you know this is 1878, not 1778. Women are no longer content to languish in the parlor while you arrogant men march into battle on their behalf.” She tilted her patrician nose in the air, looking even more smug than Jasper. “You’re probably wondering how I escaped your clever little trap. As soon as I realized that you must have bribed the hotel manager to ignore my cries for assistance, I stopped screaming and started singing. All it took was twelve verses of ‘Soldiers of Christ, Arise’ and the poor man was begging me to leave his establishment before the rest of his guests did. Even after I quit singing, poor Sadie here wouldn’t stop howling, so he evicted her, too.”

The hound settled back on her haunches and cast Billy a reproachful look, as if to chide him for going off and leaving her in the care of a tone-deaf lunatic.

Standing on tiptoe, Esmerelda tried to peer around his shoulder. He feinted right, then left, frantically trying to block her vision.

She shot him a perplexed look. “What on earth are you doing? Have you had any luck finding …?”

Her fingers uncurled. The leash slipped from her hand. Tears flooded her eyes, making them shine with a regard so hopelessly tender it made Billy ache to be the man she was looking at.

“Bartholomew?” she whispered.

Billy swung around to glare at the man behind him. There could be no mistaking the mischief sparkling in the black eyes above the scarlet bandanna.

“Esme?” the man croaked, those same eyes rapidly losing their sparkle and widening in horror.

Billy groaned aloud, knowing that he’d just lost his last chance of getting out of that bank without killing somebody.

“Bartholomew?” Esmerelda echoed, her vision blurred by tears. The shimmering haze surrounding her brother only deepened her conviction that she must be dreaming.