Teresa Medeiros (7 page)

It was only then that he realized Esmerelda had inched even closer to him. He swept his gaze across the parlor, seeing the women through her widened eyes—the spill of pale flesh over half-unlaced corsets, black lace garters peeping out from gaping wrappers, mussed sausage curls, ruby lips still swollen from the kisses of strangers.

Esmerelda’s affronted innocence should have amused him, but it made him feel something he hadn’t felt in a long time—shame. Although he enjoyed needling the prim Miss Fine, he should never have brought a lady to this place.

Since it was too late to rectify his mistake, he grabbed her hand and drew her toward the back stairwell. The abrupt movement had the opposite effect of what he’d intended. Every eye in the parlor turned to stare at them.

Billy scowled fiercely, hoping to discourage comment. When it came to teasing, the girls could be more merciless
than a bevy of older sisters. But his murderous expression was to no avail.

A sultry giggle sounded behind them, warning him that Maude had awakened from her nap. “She the gal that tried to shoot you, Billy? I do hope your aim is better than hers.”

Esther shook a finger at him. “Now, Billy, you know Miss Mellie said no more bringing home strays unless they sleep in the barn.”

Caroline gave one of Esther’s newly painted toenails a suggestive blow. “Oh, I dare say he’ll find a place for this one to sleep.”

The girls erupted into gales of laughter. Almost wishing he were the sort of man who
could
shoot a woman, Billy quickened his steps.

Dorothea winked at Esmerelda over her hand of cards. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. He may be in a rush now, but our Billy
always
takes his time when it counts the most.”

Foreign prickles of heat surged up the back of his neck. Fortunately, they’d already ducked into the shadows of the stairwell. When they reached the first landing, Esmerelda began to drag her feet. By the time they arrived at the top of the stairs, she was practically dead weight.

He drew her into the largest of the two attic rooms and slammed the door behind them as if they were being pursued by a cloud of harpies. Before he turned around, he braced himself to receive another well-deserved lecture on his morals. Or lack of them.

But when he faced his guest, he discovered that she’d backed halfway across the room. All the color had bled from her cheeks, revealing a faint sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

“Please …” she whispered. She backed into the bedpost, then flinched as if a monster had grabbed her from behind.

I sure hope your aim is better than hers
.

Our Billy always takes his time when it counts the most
.

As he gazed into her tear-glazed eyes, he realized exactly who she thought that monster was.

She actually believed he’d brought her to this place to … that he intended to punish her for nearly shooting him by …

He rested his hands on his hips, incredulous. “Just what kind of man do you think I am?”

Her convulsive swallow was answer enough.

Billy couldn’t have said why her reaction stung so deeply. People had believed the worst of him most of his life. Everyone knew bad blood ran in his veins. Darling blood. The same blood that was even now pooling hot and heavy in his groin and making him wish he was every bit as bad as she thought he was.

He had no defense except to do what he’d always done—try not to disappoint. Folding his arms over his chest, he drawled, “I realize you’re mine, Miss Fine, bought and paid for. But I don’t intend to take a pound of your pretty flesh as penance for your crime. There’s more flesh in this whorehouse than even a man of my voracious appetites requires. You must have a pretty inflated opinion of yourself if you think I’d spend fifteen dollars on you when I could have any one of those girls downstairs for a dollar.”

Esmerelda didn’t bluster or bristle as he’d hoped. She simply dragged off her bonnet, the tremble in her hands more pronounced than before. Her rapid blinking warned him that she was still dangerously near tears. Seeing her try so valiantly not to cry was almost worse than seeing her cry.

“Forgive me, Mr. Darling. It’s been a rather trying day. I thought—”

Billy had no use for her apologies. “When’s the last time you ate, Miss Fine?”

“This morning,” she replied, just a shade too hastily.

“Give me your reticule,” he said gruffly When she only clutched it tighter, he sighed. “I’m not going to rob you. I try to confine myself to stealing family heirlooms from little old ladies and candy from babies.”

She gave him a sullen glance along with the reticule, but allowed him to dump its contents on the bed. It yielded a pair of rumpled gloves and a single coin—a two-cent piece with
In God We Trust
inscribed on its bronze face.

She averted her eyes before confessing softly, “My money ran out in North Fork.”

North Fork. Three stagecoach stops before Calamity. A two-day journey.

Billy didn’t say a word. He simply spun on his heel and slammed his way from the room.

The slam of the door was still echoing in Esmerelda’s ears when she rushed across the room and twisted the brass knob. The door swung open easily beneath her touch. A husky ripple of feminine laughter drifted up the stairs from the parlor below.

She eased the door shut and sagged against the wall, feeling oddly defeated. If the door had been locked, she would have done everything in her power to escape from this room. But being granted her freedom only reminded her that she had nowhere left to go. She didn’t think she could bear to creep past those women again, with their sly eyes and mocking smiles. Billy was probably down there with them at that very moment, laughing at her pathetic assumption that a man like him would want to take
her
to his bed when he had all of those willing, and vastly more
Groaning, she buried her face in her hands. What had possessed her to make such an utter fool of herself?

She shuffled over and plopped down on the edge of the bed, truly seeing the room for the first time. It was sparsely furnished with a cedar bedstead, a wardrobe, a small table, and a battered bookcase. The exposed beams of the sloping ceiling gave the room an undeniable aura of coziness, as did the long-haired calico cat napping in the rocking chair by the recessed window.

Esmerelda frowned, baffled by the absence of mirrors on the ceiling, red velvet bed hangings, or any of the other sordid trappings her limited imagination had expected. The sheets weren’t woven of black satin, but plain cotton, worn and slightly scratchy to the touch. Seized by an odd impulse, she brought a handful of fabric to her nose, expecting it to be scented with the musky perfume of Billy’s most recent lover.

Instead, the sheet smelled of leather soap, and an indefinable spice that was so distinctly masculine she could not resist drawing in a deeper whiff. A jarring realization struck her. This room wasn’t just a trysting place for anonymous strangers. It was Billy Darling’s home.

The sheet slipped from her limp fingers. Disturbed by the intimacy of sitting in a man’s unmade bed, she bounded to her feet.

Utterly baffled, she wandered the room, pausing only to give the wary cat a distracted stroke. What manner of man would live in a brothel?

The room bore little evidence of a woman’s touch. She drew her fingertip through the thick layer of dust furring the top of the wardrobe before realizing she was being ridiculous. When Billy Darling invited a woman to his room, it probably wasn’t to dust his wardrobe or wax his
hardwood floor. The women residing in this establishment were more likely to rumple his sheets than wash and starch them.

A curious pang in her midsection almost spoiled her righteous indignation. She must be hungrier than she’d realized.

She was also wasting the perfect opportunity to search for clues regarding her brother’s murder. She doubted an accomplished rogue like Darling would be foolish enough to leave a trail of evidence, but she certainly wasn’t above a bit of snooping to make sure.

She dropped to her knees to peek beneath the bed, but found nothing more incriminating than a chubby basset hound who eyed her mournfully before returning to its nap. The bookcase, however, contained something she’d never thought to find—books. Unable to resist the lure of the printed word, Esmerelda drew one of the thin volumes from its cubbyhole, noting that it was free of the mantle of dust that had descended over the rest of the room.

A wistful ache tightened her throat when she realized it was a dime novel, cheaply bound in orange paperboard. The lurid cover showed a sketch of a man standing with his boot propped on the chest of a fallen outlaw, an oversized tin star pinned to his lapel. The lawman managed to look both noble and smug as he pursed his lips to blow on his smoking pistol.

“Eldon Nesbith, Fearless Texas Ranger,”
she murmured. She drew out another book.
“Micah Delancey, Scourge of the Outlaw Gangs.”
Then another.
“Haversham Deveraux, Pride of the Canadian Mounties?”

She was growing more puzzled by the moment. Why would Darling collect books about lawmen when he could be reading sensationalized epics glorifying the
bloody exploits of gunslingers like himself? She flipped to the novel’s frontpiece only to find his name etched there in a painstaking script utterly unlike the loose and lazy scrawl she would have expected. She traced the signature with her fingertip, so engrossed in the discovery that she didn’t hear the door swing open.

Her host stood in the doorway, a plate of beefsteak and potatoes in one hand. Accusation darkened his smoky eyes. Esmerelda felt herself blush as if she’d been caught rifling through his pants pockets after a torrid assignation.

He set the plate on the table, then strode over to her. She barely resisted the childish urge to hide the book behind her back. But he simply took it from her hand and tossed it back on the shelf.

“They belonged to the fellow that had the room before me.” His blunt gaze dared her to contradict him.

Esmerelda simply arched her eyebrows. Darling wasn’t nearly as good a liar as she’d expected him to be, but that didn’t make his conduct any less confusing. During her years teaching music, she’d encountered several children and a few parents who were deeply ashamed because they could not read. But she’d never met a man ashamed because he could.

Deliberately risking his wrath, she plucked the book back off the shelf. “These are precisely the sort of books my brother Bartholomew always wanted to write.” She thumbed through the flimsy pages, caught off guard by a crushing wave of heartache. “Even as a boy, he used to beg me to read him tales of the Wild West and the men who sought to tame it.”

Billy snorted. “Suicidal fools like George Armstrong Custer, no doubt.”

Sighing, she let the book fall shut. “I’m afraid my brother was more enamored of the seamier inhabitants of pioneer life—the gamblers, the outlaw gangs …”

“The gunslingers,” he provided, flashing her another of those devilish grins.

She chose to ignore his barb. Gently returning the book to the shelf, she said, “My parents died of cholera when I was twelve and Bartholomew was only six, but it was always their dream that my brother attend university. I managed to save up enough money for a full year’s tuition at Boston College.” Her halting explanation didn’t even begin to encompass the years of sacrifice, of doing without all but the barest necessities. Of surrendering her own dreams so Bartholomew might pursue his.

Darling backed up to lean against the bedpost. “So why isn’t this upstanding young man in college right now?”

She inclined her head. “We had a terrible quarrel. He promised that he would attend university, but only after he spent a year out west researching his first novel. I, of course, forbade him.”

Billy folded his arms over his chest, secretly amused to imagine this little slip of a girl forbidding him anything.

“When I awoke the next morning, the tuition money was gone and so was he.” She lifted her eyes to his. Their crystalline brown depths reflected both guilt and despair.

Fighting a treacherous urge to comfort her, he forced an indifferent shrug. “Maybe he just got tired of clinging to your skirts. Most men would rather get under a woman’s skirts than hide behind them.”

Her delicate jaw stiffened. “My brother wasn’t like most men.”

Noting her use of the past tense, he said, “So this would be the same brother I’m supposed to have killed.”

“It would.”

“You’re an enlightened woman from Boston, Miss Fine. I would think you wouldn’t be so hasty to convict a man without any evidence.”

“Oh, I have evidence, Mr. Darling. Irrefutable evidence.”

Billy narrowed his eyes. She probably thought he didn’t know what
irrefutable
meant.

She surprised him by unbuttoning her high collar and reaching into her ruched basque to draw forth a weathered envelope. Billy was tempted to stand on tiptoe to see just what else she might be hiding down there. Their hands brushed as he took the envelope from her, sending a shock of awareness through him and a shudder through her. A shudder of distaste, no doubt, he thought grimly. Her hands were cold, but the warmth of her bare skin still clung to the envelope.