Teresa Medeiros (36 page)

“A Stradivarius?” she whispered, giving her grandfather a helpless look. “For me?”

He poured himself a glass of port and lifted it, his eyes shining with pride and pleasure. “To my granddaughter, who brought music back into this house and into my heart.”

He sipped his port while she took up the bow and tucked the instrument under her chin. It nestled there, responding to her tuning as if to a lover’s touch.

Seduced by its flawless pitch, Esmerelda closed her eyes and drew the bow across the strings, expecting to hear the bright, brittle notes of Mozart or Vivaldi. She was as stunned as her grandfather and aunt when the plaintive strains of “Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier” filled the room.
Her melancholy touch turned the folk song into a lament, making the strings sob with a passion she had felt only in Billy’s arms and would never feel again. When her eyes drifted open at the end of the piece, they were wet with tears.

Unable to bear her grandfather’s shaken expression or the wry sympathy in her aunt’s eyes, Esmerelda mumbled an apology and fled the room, still clutching the violin.

When Esmerelda had gone, her grandfather sank into a brocaded armchair, looking his age for the first time since bringing his granddaughter home.

Anne paced back and forth in front of the hearth, the swish of her skirts echoing her frustration. “What in God’s name were you thinking, Reginald? You can’t keep hoping to buy the girl happiness.”

He pounded his fist on the arm of the chair. “And why not?”

“Because she has a broken heart, not a skinned knee! It won’t be mended by shiny baubles or a pony or even a priceless instrument.”

His temper subsided, but the calculating look that spread over his face unnerved Anne more than his despair. “You’re absolutely right,” he said softly. “There’s only one cure for a broken heart.”

He bounded up from his chair and started for his study, so agitated he forgot his cane. Anne followed, wondering what mischief he was up to now.

“Perhaps the child is simply lonely,” he ventured, limping over to his mahogany desk. “After all, I have been very selfish these past few months, wanting to keep her all to myself.” Sinking into his brass-studded chair, he shuffled through the thick stack of cards and crumpled sheets of stationery on his leather blotter. “Why, just look at all the invitations I’ve turned down on her behalf. Ah!” he
exclaimed, plucking an ivory card edged in gilt from the pile. “Here’s one from the earl of St. Cyr requesting a theater engagement after the first of the year.” Dipping the nearest available pen into a bottle of ink, he began to scribble a reply on the back of the card. “I shall accept posthaste and you, my dear, will act as her chaperone.”

“St. Cyr?” Anne echoed, torn between horror and amusement. “You can’t be serious. He’s twice Esmerelda’s age and a notorious lech.”

Reginald waved away her objections. “That’s because he’s been nursing a broken heart for twenty-six years. The poor fellow never married after Lisbeth abandoned him at the altar, you know. And he’s been very eager to meet her daughter. I’m sure he’ll find the resemblance as striking as I do.”

Anne narrowed her eyes. “Are you trying to play matchmaker again, Reggie? You drove Lisbeth away with your efforts. I should hope you wouldn’t make the same mistake with her daughter.”

Reggie blinked up at her, looking as innocent as a bald cherub. “I simply want to introduce my granddaughter to society and find her a suitable husband. Surely you can’t object to that?”

Knowing it would be useless to try, Anne left her brother to his machinations and started up the stairs. She paused outside the door of Esmerelda’s chamber, her hand poised to knock. Perhaps if she’d heard broken sobs coming from inside the room, she would have dared to intrude upon her niece’s privacy. But she found it impossible to shatter the fragile silence.

When she arrived at her own sitting room, she went straight to her delicate rosewood writing desk and drew forth a sheet of stationery. She sat gazing into space for a long time, nibbling thoughtfully on the feather of her quill
pen. She had accused Reggie of being a shameless matchmaker, yet the scheme she was contemplating was more audacious than his. And more dangerous. It might even put her own well-guarded heart in jeopardy.

Unsettled by the girlish thumping of that organ, she took a steadying breath before dipping her pen in the ink and committing both her salutation and her niece’s fate to paper.

Dear Sir …

Some called him one bad hombre. Some called him a loco gringo. But no one dared to call him by his name. It was almost as if they believed uttering it, even in a whisper, would invoke the demon sleeping in his eyes—eyes that to them appeared the steely gray of the sky at dawn without even a trace of green.

The men feared him. The whores wanted him. The men cut a broad swath around him while the whores cast him longing looks with their sultry dark eyes, their expressions smoldering with lust and resentment. They weren’t accustomed to being pushed out of any man’s lap, especially not when they were offering their precious wares for free.

He materialized in the Mexican cantina every day around noon, the nubby wool of his poncho swaying as he made his way to the table no one else dared claim. He would sit for hours, listening to the indolent strumming of
the guitarist, a glass of whiskey dangling from his lean fingers. As darkness fell, deepening the shadows beneath the brim of his hat, he would trade the glass for a bottle.

In the beginning, men approached him. Mexican men. American men. European men. Powerful men whose meaty fingers flashed diamonds and rubies while their tongues spilled promises and lies. He sent them all away, cursing beneath their fetid breath because he could not be bought for any amount of greenbacks or pesos or gold. His gun was no longer for hire. For the first time since he was thirteen years old, it belonged to him alone.

He always sat facing the door. The men whispered that it was to guard his back. That someday a man with a bigger gun than his would come swaggering through that door and blow him away. The whores whispered that he expected death, perhaps even desired it, the way a man desires a beautiful woman he knows will prove his ruin.

One sultry Saturday night, Billy sat with his back to the wall—drinking, smoking, and dreaming, as he always did, that Esmerelda would come walking through that door just like she had in Calamity. Hell, this time he would beg her to shoot him, if only to plug the hole in his heart with lead so his blood would stop seeping out one drop at a time. It was taking him too damn long to die that way.

One of the whores, a black-haired beauty with lush red lips and a reputation for using them in ways that could make a grown man beg, sashayed through the drunken crowd. She leaned over and planted her palms on Billy’s table, practically begging him to look down her loose-fitting blouse at her naked breasts. Not wanting to be impolite, he obliged her.

“There’s a man at the bar,” she said. “A gringo. Looking for you.”

Billy didn’t even bother to glance at the bar. He simply
shifted his cigar to the corner of his mouth. “Tell him I’m not here. And if I was, I wouldn’t want to see him.”

She nodded, having known that would be his answer. “Another bottle?” she offered, touching her fingertip to the mouth of the empty one still gripped in his hand.

He slanted her a wry glance. She knew the answer to that question, too. She was only asking it as an excuse to linger. Her fall of raven hair tickled his nose as she reached across him to take the bottle from his hand.

“The whiskey can’t make you forget her,” she purred, her tongue flicking out to trace his ear, “but I could.” Beneath the table, her other hand began to creep up his thigh.

Billy caught it a fingers-breadth from his crotch, surveying her with dark amusement.
“Muchas gracias, señorita
, but I never draw my gun unless I plan to use it.”

Tossing back her hair, she went flouncing back to the bar, her lips puckered in a full-fledged pout.

Billy went back to nursing his cigar. He could hardly blame her for her mistake. It was a common enough assumption. But he wasn’t drinking to forget. The whiskey could do little more than take the edge off his longing—a longing so keen that when he rolled off his cot every morning, recoiling from the merciless blaze of sunshine, he could only drop his throbbing head into his hands and pray for darkness.

He had the rest of his life to forget. To forget the sweet generosity of Esmerelda’s body opening to enfold him. To forget her fearless bravado the night she’d stood down his mother on his behalf. To forget the stricken look in her eyes when he had so callously declined to marry her.

He had the rest of his life to remember. To remember the tender smile that had softened her prim lips the day she’d thrown open that hotel room door in Eulalie. To remember the taste of her mouth and the feel of her flesh beneath his hands. To remember how she had felt in his
arms and to imagine how she would feel in the arms of another man.

The whiskey bottle appeared in front of him. Billy groped for it without lifting his eyes, tossing a bill across the table. It came floating back at him through the smoky air, drifting like a leaf on the wind.

“Keep your money, lad. Tonight, I’m buying.”

Startled out of his shell of indifference for the first time in months, Billy looked up to find Sheriff Andrew McGuire standing over his table.

“Good God, William, you look like hell,” Drew said, sliding into the chair opposite him. Despite the heat, he looked as crisp as a newly minted two-dollar greenback in his double-breasted waistcoat, shiny knee boots, and broad-brimmed white Stetson.

Billy stroked his unshaven jaw, eyeing his friend warily. “Did you come all the way to Mexico just to insult me?”

“If you must know, I came to make you a proposition.”

“Sorry, Drew. I haven’t been without a woman that long.”

Billy reached for the fresh bottle of whiskey only to discover that a plate of steaming food had appeared in its place—pinto beans and something with a savory aroma wrapped in a corn tortilla. Its mysterious arrival confounded him nearly as much as the startling awareness that he was hungry. Maybe even ravenous, he admitted, shoveling a spoonful of beans into his mouth.

Drew watched him eat with the amused tolerance of a king presiding over a beggar’s feast, holding his tongue until the plate had been scraped clean.

Billy darted him a suspicious look. “I thought you were going to buy me a drink.”

“So I was,” Drew admitted, snapping his fingers in the direction of the bar.

The raven-haired whore swaggered over, smug now as she swished her hips in Billy’s face and thumped an earthenware flask down on the table. Billy took a long, thirsty gulp, then spat the bulk of it on the cantina floor, shooting Drew an accusing glare. “It’s water!”

“Aye, it is. If you want anything stronger, you’ll have to crawl over to the bar on your belly and get it yourself.”

Billy surged to his feet, despising Drew for pitying him when no other man would have dared, despising himself for deserving it. His pride was the only thing that prevented him from staggering. “Go to hell. I don’t need your charity.”

“Sit down, William,” Drew said mildly.

“And if I don’t,” he snarled, “what are you going to do, sheriff? Arrest me?”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to leave that unenviable task to someone else. I am no longer acting as sheriff of Calamity. I have officially resigned my post.”

His precarious balance unable to withstand the blow, Billy sank back into the chair. He gestured to the tin star twinkling merrily on Drew’s vest. “Then why are you still wearing your badge?”

“Because I have abdicated the job, but absconded with the title.” He leaned back in his chair, twirling the silky tip of his right mustache. “As you well know, it has long been a dream of mine to leave behind the dangerous vocation of law enforcement. Hence was born the notion of”—he paused for dramatic effect, his eloquent hands painting a banner in the air over the table—“ ‘Sheriff Andrew McGuire’s Wild West Extravaganza.’ ”

Billy leaned across the table and sniffed his breath. “Maybe you should have switched to water a little sooner.”

Drew sighed. “I should like to claim credit for the idea, but its genesis came out of a recent conversation I had with
a Mr. William Cody, who was starring in a theatrical melodrama penned by Ned Buntline.”

Billy was familiar with Buntline. He’d written most of the dime novels that still sat on the bookshelves in Miss Mellie’s attic. Remembering how much he’d enjoyed those books, he felt a pang of regret for leaving them behind.

“According to Mr. Cody,” Drew continued, “all you would need to launch such an endeavor are some horses, guns, cowboys and settlers, wild Indians—”

“You don’t know any wild Indians,” Billy pointed out.

“Of course I do. There’s Crazy Joe Cloudminder right there in Calamity.”

“Joe’s a barber!”

“Then I’m sure he can wield a tomahawk just as skillfully as he can a razor.” Drew leaned his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers beneath his chin, studying Billy with an intensity that made him itch to bolt. “All I lack now is a sharpshooter. Oh, say, someone who could hit a dime in midair or shoot a playing card in half at a hundred and twenty feet.”