Dancing With the Devil (4 page)

“So you sent me to stay with Cousin Margaret in Houston with the mind to sell the store out from under me.”

Colin’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t deny her accusation.

“It’s all right, Colin,” she said. “Our parents took a lifetime to build their good name, and I almost destroyed it overnight. I know you were just trying to protect me, and while I appreciate it, it didn’t help. It was my responsibility to make things right, not yours.”

“And you thought the best way to do that was to get married?”

She exhaled slowly. “Yes.”

Deacon and Colin spoke at the same time.

“To me.”

“To him.”

“Of course.” Honestly. This wasn’t nearly as complicated as these two were making it seem. “It only stood
to reason that marrying him would take some of the tarnish off our name.”

The two men glanced at each other, frowned, then turned back to Rhea as Deacon asked the dreaded question. “How, exactly, did we get married if I wasn’t there?”

“W-well,” she began. “It was easier than you’d think, actually. Cousin Margaret kept her parents’ marriage certificate in their family Bible. I simply copied it on to a new sheet of paper, changed the names and came home married.”

“To him.”

“Correct.”

“But he wasn’t there.”

“Correct.”

Colin’s frown deepened. “And the business you said he was finishing up in Houston?”

“There was no business,” she admitted. “I lied.”

“You lied.”

Fear gripped Rhea’s stomach and twisted it into a giant knot. “I needed to do something—and fast—or you were going to sell my store. Marriage seemed like the quickest way to save the store and our name.”

“But why not marry for real?” Colin asked tersely. “What were you thinking?”

Rhea clicked her tongue. How could men be so stupid? “For goodness sake, Colin, you were days away from selling the store to the Dietrichs! Do you honestly think I had time to go through a courtship?”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” he snarled. “There’s plenty of fellas here in Penance—surely to God you could have found
someone
crazy enough to marry you.”

A stifled snort came from Deacon’s direction, but Rhea ignored him. Despite what Colin insinuated, she
could have found plenty of men to marry if she had the time or inclination.

Heat crept up her neck and butterflies twitched in her stomach. “All my life, I watched Ma and Pa. They loved each other, Colin. Really and truly loved each other.”

Her brother’s jaw tightened ’til she thought the muscles would snap.

“I wanted that, too, and everyone in town knew it.”

Colin’s grunt left little room for doubt on what he thought of her romantic side. “You only saw what you wanted to see,” Colin ground out. “Their marriage wasn’t everything you think it was.”

“They loved each other, and that’s what’s important.” Rhea nodded. “I wasn’t about to marry a man I didn’t love, and after what happened with Deacon, the only way to salvage our name was to marry him.”

“So what are you saying? You love Deacon?”

She blinked rapidly, cursed the tightness in her throat and tried to forget Deacon was sitting right there. If her mouth was any dryer, she wouldn’t be able to swallow at all.

“After he left last summer,” she said, hoping neither man would notice she’d sidestepped the question, “Mrs. Foster made sure I knew everything people were saying about us, about how ‘scandalous’ our relationship was. I never expected him to set foot in this town again, so he was a safe risk.”

“A safe risk?” Colin came out of his chair like he’d been shot. “Do you hear what you’re saying?”

“It made perfect sense,” she retorted, then added more softly, “at the time.”

Why did Deacon keep grinning like that? Surely he didn’t want to be married to her any more than she wanted to be married to him—not for real, anyway. In her pretend world, it was the perfect arrangement.

“At the time,” Colin grunted, his fingers gripping the back of his chair tight enough to snap the spindles. “Let me get this straight,” he muttered. “You’re not legally married, yet you have a piece of paper that says you are.”

God help her. “Correct.”

“And you did this just so you could keep that stupid store?” Colin’s growl became increasingly louder with each word.

“You make it sound like I robbed a bank or something.”

“For God’s sake, Rhea—it’s forgery!” The vein in his neck pulsed dangerously fast.

“No, it’s not,” she said, wishing she didn’t sound so pathetically desperate. “No one got hurt from it, and it’s not as if I stole anything from anyone.”

“Except my freedom,” Deacon threw in.

“Forgery is forgery.” Colin reached for the shelf that usually housed his whiskey and found it wanting. “Dammit.”

“Deacon doesn’t care, do you?” She twisted in her chair to face him.

“Well…”

Colin didn’t let him finish. “And it wasn’t enough that you falsified a marriage, but then you went and falsified his death, too!”

“I had to. People kept asking where he was, and why he didn’t come to live here in Penance.” She shrugged. “I couldn’t very well tell them he’d been dragged back to H—”

“Houston,” Deacon interjected.

“Right,” she muttered. “Houston.” It was one thing for her to know who he truly was or where he’d been, but it was something else entirely for others to learn the truth.

“Dammit.” Colin slammed his hands down on the
tabletop and glared pointedly at Deacon. “You swear you didn’t know any of this?”

Deacon offered a half shrug. “Not a thing.”

Oooh, she’d like to slap that righteous smirk off his face.

“Colin, please.” She shot Deacon a warning look before turning to face her brother. “Nobody has to know.”

“
I
know!” The force of his yell rattled inside Rhea’s skull. “Damn it, Rhea,
I
know!”

Silence followed. The realization of what she’d done began to sink into Rhea’s brain. She hadn’t even thought about Colin when she’d jumped into this plan; all she’d been thinking about was keeping the store.

It was all she had left of her parents. It was all that mattered.

When the silence nearly swallowed her, Rhea stood and pushed her chair beneath the table.

“So what do we do?” she asked.

Colin shook his head in utter disbelief. “I have no idea.”

“It seems to me”—Deacon cleared his throat—“the easiest thing would be for us to marry for real.”

If she hadn’t been holding the back of her chair, Rhea would have fallen straight on her face.

“I…” She stopped, took a breath and kept her eyes fixed on Colin. “No.”

“Why not?” Both spoke in unison, each sounding just as affronted.

“Colin, please.” She lowered her voice, but there was no way to prevent Deacon from hearing. “There are things you don’t know about him.”

“Like what?”

She couldn’t tell him! For goodness sake, it was still unbelievable to her most of the time; she certainly couldn’t try to explain it to her brother. It only took the briefest
of glances at Deacon to know he was thinking the same thing.

Rhea cleared her throat and forced her voice into an impatient sigh. “He doesn’t love me, and after what he did…there’s no possible way I could ever trust him again.”

“Excuse me,” Deacon said, “but noth—”

Rhea spoke over him before Colin could pay him any mind. “There must be another way,” she said, desperation clawing its way out on every word.

“Like what?” he snipped.

“Why can’t we simply…continue this way?” she asked tentatively. “Nobody has to know any of this, and if Deacon leaves right away…”

“I’m not leaving.”

Colin cast a quick glance in Deacon’s direction. “You’re
staying
?”

“For a short while,” he said cautiously.

Rhea clicked her tongue. “How long is a ‘short while’?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Colin said. “Thanks to Ernest, half the town knows you’re back and that Rhea tried to blow your head off. The other half’ll know by sundown. So for the time being, until we can find a way out of this, you two are going to have to keep up the impression you’re married. And you’re going to have to come up with one helluva good story about how he came back from the dead.”

“Wait just a minute,” Deacon said, his hand raised. “Don’t I get any say in this?”

Colin’s expression turned hard as granite. “By all means,” he quipped. “Have your say. You can choose to spend the next little while doing right by my sister—the same woman you compromised and then humiliated by taking up with a whore at the saloon—or you can
choose to humiliate her further, and ruin any chance she has of living a normal life. Which will it be?”

Deacon didn’t answer right away, and it took every ounce of self-control Rhea could muster not to throttle him. What was there to think about? It wasn’t like she was asking him to love her for real—all she needed was for him to pretend.

They both knew he’d done it before, so surely it wouldn’t be too much work for him to do it again.

After a horribly long moment, Deacon pushed up slowly from the bed, took a second to find his balance and grinned.

“I’m happy to pretend if she is.” He tipped his head a little to the right. “What do you say, Rhea? Can you pretend to love me?”

Rhea’s fingers itched for the Winchester. One more shot—that was all she’d need.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

D
eacon sat in the gloom of the tiny cabin, staring at the closed door. It had been hours since Rhea had shut it behind her and walked back to town, yet her presence lingered all around him. And just when his mind started accepting the fact she wasn’t even thinking about him the same way, Ernest arrived with a bottle of laudanum from her.

So why didn’t he sleep? He’d downed enough of the damned tincture to set an elephant on its rear, yet here he was, wide awake, trying his damnedest
not
to think about being married to Rhea.

He cursed aloud and banged his head back against the wall. What the hell was wrong with him? His life had been ticking along just fine until that blasted day when he’d met Colin and his firecracker of a sister. Next thing he knew, Rhea had kicked his whole world sideways.

Nothing had been right since.

A slow smile spread across his mouth. Rhea had done more than kick things sideways; she’d given him a reason to keep coming back. She wasn’t afraid of anything, least of all him, and she’d just as soon shoot him than cower or bend to his will. His throbbing shoulder was ample proof of that.
He squeezed his eyes shut, listening to the sounds of early morning creeping between the cracks in the cabin walls.

The air in the room shifted slightly, and Deacon heaved a long sigh. He should have expected her.

Not Rhea.

Kit
.

“I hate when you do that,” he grumbled, opening one eye at a time to find his younger sister standing over him.

“Yet you didn’t think twice about doing the same thing to Lucille.”

The mere mention of their other sister made Deacon groan and chuckle at the same time. He couldn’t deny what Kit said; he used to pop in on Lucille all the time, and she’d hated it just as much as he did now.

“Where’s this ‘Colin’?”

“In the other room.”

“And the woman?”

“She’s spending the night in town.”

With a quick snap of her fingers, Kit sent a flame dancing against the lamp’s wick. Deacon squinted through the light, then stared open mouthed at his sister.

“What are you wearing?” he gaped.

His sister’s whole face lit up. “Wonderful, isn’t it? I wish I’d done this years ago.”

Kit’s red hair grew wild around her head, her cat-green eyes took in everything around her and her mouth was set in its usual smirk. The lower half of her body was clothed not in a skirt or dress—as it certainly should have been—but in men’s trousers.

Denim trousers!

And to make it worse, she was wearing a faded flannel shirt, every bit as ugly as the ones Colin had hanging on the nail in his room.

Her feet were stuffed into brown leather boots, and a red-checked bandana hung half out of her front pocket. If Deacon didn’t know better, he’d swear she was a regular old cowhand.

“You can’t be serious,” he said. It was bad enough he’d been forced to borrow one of Colin’s shirts, but to wear such things willingly…ugh.

“Oh yes, I am.” She lifted her hands in the air and turned in a slow pirouette. “I’m never wearing a corset again.”

Deacon shook his head slowly. Typical Kit—she did what she wanted, when she wanted, and to hell with everyone else.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stretched out the kinks. “I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that you’re here.”

“No,” she said, “I suppose it shouldn’t.”

A slow breath seeped out of Deacon’s lungs. Even though his father had kicked him out of Hell, Deacon knew better than to think he was actually free.

“Here.” Kit reached into the pocket of her denim pants, pulled out a huge wad of paper bills and dumped it on the table. “You look like you could use a trip to the nearest clothier, Mr. Vanity.”

“Honestly, Kit, if I didn’t know better,” he said, “I might think you were being charitable.”

“And if I didn’t know better,” she retorted, “I might think you were planning on staying here with the humans.”

“That’s why he sent you?” Deacon eyed his sister carefully. “To make sure I don’t get too comfortable here?”

Kit shrugged indifferently.

“I’m not Lucille,” he grumbled. “I have absolutely no hope or expectation of ever being free, so you’re wasting your time.”

“That’s all right.” Kit tipped her head to the right a little and smiled brightly. “It would seem I have plenty of time to waste.”

She twisted one of the chairs away from the table and plunked herself down. “Besides, I had to see for myself what all the fuss was about. Did you really let that woman shoot you?”

“I didn’t
let
her do anything,” he groused. “But without any powers…”