Teresa Medeiros (37 page)

Billy shoved his chair back from the table again, lunging to his feet. “Oh, no, you don’t! In case you haven’t heard, I’ve hung up my guns for good. I’m not for hire. Not even by you.” He wheeled around and started for the door, determined to walk out of the cantina while he still could.

“I’ve already booked our first engagement.”

Drew’s casual announcement stopped Billy in his tracks. His nape prickled with dread. Worse than the dread was the emotion that tripped along at its heels. He’d grown comfortable with despair, but hope might just kill him.

“Where?” he whispered.

“London.”

Billy turned around and returned to the table, sliding into the chair as gingerly as if his bones were made of glass. Jesus, he needed a drink, he thought bitterly, locking his hands together to hide their trembling. He doubted he could even hold a gun without dropping it.

Forcing himself to look up and meet Drew’s kind blue eyes was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. It took him three tries just to swallow. “I know why you’re doing this.”

Drew beamed at him. “I thought you would. A man of your discerning palate must surely appreciate the charms of my Anne.”

Billy continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “And I thank you most kindly for your concern, but—” He stopped, scowling in bewilderment as Drew’s words sank in. “Anne? Anne Hastings? That dried-up old persimmon of a—”

“Watch your tongue, lad.” Drew held up a restraining hand. “I hasten to remind you that you are speaking of my future bride. She is no persimmon, but a ripe, luscious pomegranate, trembling with eagerness to fall into my waiting hand.”

Billy snorted. “The last time I saw her with you, she was trembling with rage, not eagerness.”

“Despite our past differences, she’s agreed to finance my little endeavor. I prefer to think of it as a sort of dowry. Although it may not have been readily apparent,” Drew assured him, “we have an understanding.”

“Oh, I understood perfectly. She despised you and wished you would die.”

“Be that as it may,” Drew admitted with an injured sniff, “I can assure you that she has been very tender toward me in our recent correspondence.”

Billy responded to that revelation with stony silence. If
Drew thought he was going to beg him for any pathetic scrap of news about Esmerelda, then he was wrong. Dead wrong.

Drew sat back in his chair, eyeing him shrewdly. “Anne made brief mention of her niece in her letter. If I’m not mistaken, there was talk of a suitor. An earl, I believe.”

Billy’s fingers began to drum on the table, losing their tremble.

Drew leaned forward as if to impart a particularly delicious snippet of gossip. “It seems the man once courted Esmerelda’s mother. Since the mother left him languishing at the altar over twenty-five years ago, he’s set his sights on the daughter. You might think a fifty-year-old man would be in his dotage, but Anne assures me he’s a handsome, virile fellow of quite notorious appetites, perfectly capable of satisfying his young bride and providing himself with an heir to—”

Billy lunged across the table, jerking Drew out of his chair by his flawlessly folded necktie. The guitar fell silent. The occupants of the cantina ceased their smoking, chattering, and dancing to gape in fascination. They’d never seen any sign of emotion from him more intense than a bored flicker of his eyelids.

If they were astonished by his violence, they were even more dumbfounded when, after holding the stranger’s gaze for a tense eternity, he gently lowered the man back into his chair, smoothed his necktie, and drawled, “So, when do we leave?”

When Billy found out who Drew had recruited to portray the notorious outlaw gang in his Wild West Extravaganza, he almost wished he’d gone ahead and choked him to death with his own necktie right there in that cantina.

“We even got Ma’s blessing, little brother,” Virgil told him, grinning from ear to ear as they boarded the iron-hulled steamer in New York. “She said we cain’t
be
outlaws no more, but she don’t mind us playin’ at it like we did when we was boys.” He lowered his voice to a mere shout as he leaned down and confided, “She told us to look after you, too. Said you ain’t got good sense when it comes to womenfolk.”

Billy rubbed his ringing ear. “I guess Ma’s right on that count. If I did, I wouldn’t be about to cross an ocean to win one I was fool enough to let get away in the first place.”

Billy almost forgave Drew for hiring his brothers when
he saw the beautiful female who would be sharing his cabin for the next week and a half.

Sadie greeted him with a deep-throated “Woof,” her entire lower half jiggling with excitement as she bounded across the cabin.

“There’s my girl!” He squatted to ruffle her gray-flecked coat, laughing and groaning as his efforts to dodge her long, sloppy tongue proved to be in vain.

Billy doubted he could expect as enthusiastic a greeting from Esmerelda, especially not after he’d led her to believe she’d been nothing more to him than a lusty tumble between the sheets. But he would do whatever he had to do to convince her otherwise, even if it took him the rest of his life.

As the voyage got under way, the other passengers tended to give them a wide berth. Billy supposed he couldn’t blame them, what with Virgil’s bellowing, Jasper’s shameless flirting with every woman under the age of seventy-five, and Enos spending all night groaning in his bunk and all day hanging over the rail, his sallow complexion bleached to seafoam green. Drew had hired a dozen or so out-of-work cowboys, including Dauber and Seal, to portray settlers in his extravaganza. Their nightly poker games had an alarming tendency to degenerate into shouted bouts of name-calling and drunken fistfights.

Billy might even have been guilty of contributing to the other passengers’ alarm by spending hours standing at the stern of the ship and firing at nickel slugs Drew tossed high into the air. He made it a point to miss one every now and then, just to put their minds at ease. They still shied away, wives clutching their husbands and mothers clutching their daughters, when Drew tried to press his freshly printed fliers into their shaking hands, urging them to come visit his exhibition while they were in London.

One morning Billy came whistling his way up one of the narrow gangways. Since it was so cold he could see every note hanging in the air on a breath of fog, he didn’t think anything peculiar when a figure approached, swaddled in a topcoat and scarf. The man was muffled all the way up to his eyes, which he quickly averted when Billy accidentally bumped into him.

“Sorry, partner,” Billy drawled, tipping his hat.

Still whistling, he continued up the gangway for a few more steps, then halted, caught off guard by the sudden tingling of his nape. He swung around, but the other passenger had vanished. He shook his head and rubbed away the uneasy prickle, attributing it to fancy. He was probably safer on this boat than he’d ever been in Calamity with a price on his head.

Billy emerged into the winter sunshine to find the troupe’s sole wild Indian already on deck. Crazy Joe was so enamored of the Savage Red Man costume Drew had commissioned for him that he insisted on wearing it day and night, despite the frigid temperatures. He might have looked more menacing in his war paint and loincloth if he hadn’t also been sporting a dapper bowler and giving Samuel a haircut.

Sam perched on a wooden barrel. He kept his hand clamped over his good ear and visibly cringed at each decisive snip of the scissors.

Recalling the time his brother had poured sorghum in his hair while he was sleeping, Billy exchanged a wink with Joe, then leaned over and whispered, “I’d hold still if I were you. He’s more likely to take your scalp than your ear.”

Leaving his brother squirming worse than before, Billy started for the bow of the ship. He soon passed a pallid, hollow-eyed Enos, returning from yet another visit to the rail.

Recalling the time Enos had held him down and forced him to eat a june bug, Billy jerked a thumb toward the hold. “They’ve got quite a fine spread down there this morning. Eggs and bacon and biscuits and flapjacks and …”

Shooting him a black look, Enos gripped his stomach and went stumbling back toward the rail.

Billy grinned. Virgil might complain about the boredom and Jasper about the deplorable lack of whores, but he found everything about the journey invigorating—the rhythmic chug of the ship’s engine, the pitching of the boat when they hit restless seas, the icy spray striking his face when he stood at the bow as he did now.

He had to admit his jubilation might have less to do with the journey than with the woman waiting for him at the end of it. He caught his hat before a blast of icy wind could tear it away. The cold couldn’t touch him, not with the thrill of the hunt warming his blood.

This time his prey wasn’t some bootlegger or horse thief, but a woman’s heart—sweet and stubborn and dear. The only bounty he desired was to be found in her loving arms. Billy gripped the rail and leaned forward, almost as if he could urge the steamer to chug harder and cut faster through the vast plain of sea that separated them.

Esmerelda stood in front of the cheval glass in her bedroom, admiring the stranger in the mirror. She wore a pink-coral skirt trimmed with three flounces. An overskirt of Brussels lace had been gathered in the back and tied with grosgrain ribbons. A basque corsage secured by a mother-of-pearl brooch bared the creamy slope of her shoulders. A string of pearls twined through her hair, which had been looped and coiled by her lady’s maid into a tremendously flattering cascade of curls.

She wore Lisbeth’s locket around her neck. The delicate
chain weighed upon her skin as if it had been forged from iron.

She was finally the beauty she’d always secretly yearned to be, but the elegant creature gazing back at her from the cheval glass bore no resemblance to the strong-willed, tart-tongued girl who had crossed half a continent to seek justice for her brother. Nor even a passing likeness to the passionate woman who had given herself freely and without regret to the man she loved—the man who had invited her to share his life as well as his bed, then betrayed her.

No longer able to stand the sight of her reflection, Esmerelda went to her dressing table and groped for a bottle of
eau de cologne
. She brought the smooth glass stopper to her throat, closing her eyes as Billy whispered,
Did I ever tell you what my favorite kind of pie is?

Just the memory of his smoky drawl was enough to send a shiver of desire through her. Sickened by the cloying floral scent of the perfume, Esmerelda set it aside and reached for the homely brown bottle of peach extract wedged behind a fat beadwork pincushion.

She was putting a defiant dab behind each ear when a knock sounded on the door. She bit back a groan. She was growing incredibly weary of the frantic round of social engagements her grandfather had pressed upon her in the two months since Christmas. Even more grueling than the engagements were the suitable companions he’d chosen for her, all simpering young ladies of eligible age from noble families. She supposed she should be thankful they were at least old enough to be let out of the nursery without their nannies. If her grandfather truly had his way, he’d probably be pushing her around the walks of Hyde Park in a giant pram.

She’d privately christened her new acquaintances “the Belles,” since they all seemed to be named Isabelle, Annabel, or in one timid creature’s case, simply Belle.
Although they smiled and simpered whenever she was in their company, Esmerelda knew that they regarded her with a mixture of pity and horror, holding her up as an example of the terrible fate that could befall any one of them who failed to make a suitable match before her twentieth birthday.

She could only imagine their delighted shock if they discovered their chaste new companion had been compromised by a scoundrel like Billy Darling.

With a wicked smile still playing around her lips, she swung open the door. “So what’s it to be tonight?” she asked her waiting aunt. “An opera? A supper party? A musicale hosted by one of the Belles?”

Anne brushed past her, her color higher than usual. “I believe you’ll find tonight’s diversion quite unique.”

She gave her aunt a pleading look. “Couldn’t I just feign a nasty headache and stay home in bed reading one of those deliciously wicked romantic novels? After all, I only have a few more days to rest up for the masquerade ball Grandpapa is giving in my honor.”

When Anne behaved as if she hadn’t spoken, Esmerelda frowned. No, she hadn’t been mistaken. Her aunt, a woman without a bone of vanity in her trim, spare body, was actually craning her neck to steal a glimpse of herself in the cheval glass. As Esmerelda watched, she even dared to twine a spit curl around her little finger. The iron-gray ringlet escaped with an impertinent bounce.

Esmerelda cleared her throat.

Anne jumped, her nerves of iron crumbling to rust before her niece’s amused eyes. “Come, dear,” she said, plucking a mantle of braided cashmere out of the wardrobe and draping it over Esmerelda’s shoulders. “The earl’s carriage is already downstairs waiting for us.”