Heaven with a Gun (6 page)

“Yes.”

He held up both hands, waggling his fingers invitingly. “Could you elaborate?”

“I was engaged once.”

“Yeah? What happened? Is he why you started rob—on your life of crime?”

“Oh, no. He was a fine, honest man. That was the problem. I just couldn’t see explaining my, er, career choice to him. He was very ethical.”

“Ethical men. God love ’em,” Jim muttered with such commiseration that she concluded a few had interfered in his past. “Why didn’t you just quit thieving?”

She was telling too much. Her desire to tell him the truth, to have another person know her, to discover if he’d recoil, sneer, or even accept what she was, fought with her need for safety. Not her own but her family’s. The latter impulse won.

“He was poor. Poor as dirt,” she said.

Jim immediately noted the change in her tone. A savvy, hard note had entered it. She’s put on the Lightning Lil mask, he thought.

“Poor and honest,” she continued flippantly. “Salt of the earth. A saint among men, but with no earthly possessions to call his own.”

“Saints can be like that,” Jim said sardonically, unhappily aware that somewhere in the last minutes he’d lost Gilly to the Lil role, and he strongly suspected Gilly was the real woman, the woman he wanted to . . . write about. Damn it.

“But, by the time I met Francis—his name was Francis.”

“As in Assisi.”

“Yes.” She gave him her three-cornered smile. “By the time I met Francis, I was too far gone on the road to ruin. My hand was on the whip and I couldn’t find the brakes. I had grown accustomed to the wicked ways of the flesh, the material prizes in Satan’s carnival.”

Some prizes, Jim thought. Her dress had to have been reworked at least three times.

“I didn’t want to give them up.”

“So that was that.”

“Yup.” She held out her hand, studied her nails, and peeped at him out of the corner of her eye.

He tilted his head back and stared upward, as though petitioning the ceiling for patience. The light hit his jaw and illuminated the white line marking it. “Let’s go on to another question.”

“Sure. How’d you get that scar? The one on your chin.”

“A fight.”

“Fight?”

“Yeah. This Swede had a bruising right uppercut that—” He stopped suddenly, took the two long steps separating them and loomed over her, exasperation evident in every line of his big body. “Lady, will you please answer my questions?”

“Yes, Mr. Coyne.” She folded her hands primly in her lap.

“Don’t call me Mr. Coyne. It makes me feel older than I already am, and right now that’s about as old as anyone in this territory.”

She grinned. He was fine. Mature and seasoned and luscious, but she couldn’t help teasing him. “That old . . . Jim?”

He almost smiled back. “I think there’s a sequoia out there that might have a few months on me.”

She burst into laughter, and he responded with that full, dazzling smile, leaning over her a little as he did so. She could feel his warm breath, taste it, flavored with some sort of minty tooth cleanser.

“You,” he said softly, “are the prettiest outlaw I’ve ever met.”

His low, intimate tone washed over her like a physical stroke. His eyes were so close she could see the little copper flecks that danced near the pupil of his blue eyes. It unbalanced her. Caught her off guard. “Pshaw,” she responded breathlessly. “You haven’t met any outlaws.”

“I come from New York, darlin’. The last census listed outlaw as the second-most-common occupation in the city.” He straightened with what appeared to be reluctance.

“And the first?”

“Politician.”

She laughed again, and he watched her in obvious enjoyment until some sudden, unwelcome thought shuttered his expression, leaving formal pleasantness where there had been intimacy.

“I need to telegraph my editor in New York that I’m on a story,” he said. “Let’s go. On the way we can get something to eat.”

Chapter Six

What the hell were those women doing, Jim wondered. The Carmichael twins had practically run up the walkway, shouldered their way past Jim and Gilly, and were now lying in wait a few yards ahead. One of them slouched against the rail, panting, color splotching her chubby white cheeks. The other held up Mudruk’s exterior wall, her breasts jostled around the framework of her bodice like poached eggs on toast.

“Hey!” one of them—Merry?—panted. “You . . . must be . . . Jim’s . . . wife.”

“Tall, ain’t ya?” the other said, eyes insolently tracing each long inch of Gilly’s form. Jim had the mental image of a spark touching off the fuse on a powder keg.

“Surprising Jim never mentioned he had a wife.” Terry—it had to be Terry—said. “But maybe then it ain’t so surprising.” Her slow perusal noted and dismissed each one of Gilly’s attributes.

The three women stared at one another for a dozen heartbeats.

“Well, Jim’s a man,” Gilly finally said. “What man that you know would acknowledge ties to an absent woman? ’Specially when there’s two such pretty ones around?”

Whatever powder keg had been ignited was abruptly diffused. Merry and Terry giggled like ten- year-olds in pigtails, patting hair and adjusting their bodices. “True enough, honey. True enough.”

Jim stared in open mystification. Another of those bizarre female alchemy things had happened. The women were grinning, all antipathy gone.

“Mr. Coyne!” Mort James came loping down the street, waving his hand. He got to the rail and easily vaulted over it, landing in front of the little gathering. Jim’s mood soured. It had been a good decade since he’d vaulted anything through sheer enthusiasm. “Mr. Coyne, you gotta introduce me to your wife. I mean, you will, won’t you, please?”

The boy snatched his hat off his head and slapped it against his thigh, raising a small cloud of dust. Gilly turned on her smile. The boy turned bright red.

They stared at each other, youth recognizing youth, and Jim felt every gray hair in his head.

“Ah, Gil—darlin’,” he said, catching himself before he called her Gilly, “this is Mort James, editor of the local newspaper. Mort, my wife.” The word wife came easily, too easily, bringing an unexpected swell of possessiveness with it.

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

Gilly sashayed up to the boy. Real close, much closer than a married woman approached a man, and laid her lace-clad fingers on his arm. Her expression was rapt and utterly feminine.

“I do so admire a man with a brain. So few of your gender ever take the time to think before they speak, let alone have the sense to write something down. But then, you men are such decisive creatures.” Her playful tone robbed the words of their sting, but Jim had the profound sense that they were meant for him.

“Thank you.” Mort gulped.

“I’d love to read your work.” She was practically purring.

“I’d like you to read me, er, my articles, ma’am.” Mort had turned beet-red.

What the hell was the boy thinking about to make him blush like that? It better not be—

“Course, I’m not the journalist. Your husband is,” Mort went on, and Jim relaxed slightly.

“Oh, no one’s the man Jim is. In any way.”

Heat raced like a grease fire up his neck and into his face. Now she had him doing it. Merry guffawed and Terry snorted with laughter, tears spilling out of her eyes. Jim grabbed Gilly’s arm and spun her around. Pulling her close, he half-lifted, half-hauled her along the plank sidewalk, her cast making an erratic staccato as they went.

“See what I mean?” Gilly threw back over her shoulder at Mort, Merry, and Terry.

“Do I ever, honey!” Merry crowed.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jim demanded when they were out of earshot.

The look she threw him could have iced hot ashes. “Repairing the damage you did.”

“What damage?”

“You nearly called me Gilly in front of that boy. And he’s a reporter! I saw him looking at my cast. He was working things out right there. I could practically see the ideas forming. I just gave him something else to think about, is all.”

She was truly upset. In spite of the sarcastic sting in her words, her eyes betrayed honest fear. It dawned on Jim, perhaps truly for the first time, that if she were caught they would be sending her to prison. For years. Her golden hair would turn gray, her whisper-soft skin would toughen into leather, the laughter in her eyes would die.

He gripped her shoulders. She felt agile and graceful beneath his touch. “I’m sorry I worried you. I’ll be more careful from now on. But the fact is, I didn’t call you Gilly. And the subject matter you have that boy sweating over right now is going to occupy his every waking thought not only for the next few days but the next few months.”

“Do you think so?” She gazed up into his eyes, worry and something else—something intimate— shimmering in their depths.

He glanced over his shoulder at Mort, who was staring at him with a look of hot-blooded masculine envy.

“Darlin’, I’d bet the bank on it.”

*

Jim held back the curtain in one fist and leaned his forehead against the window, exasperated and resigned. “So you decided to avenge your father’s wrongful imprisonment by going after the business associates who’d framed him?”

“Yes.” If he looked at her, he’d see the way the sunlight brushed platinum gilding among her pale hair, be forced to confront the unusual tension that had crept into her lovely face during the morning. So he didn’t look. Because he already knew all about tension. For four days now, he’d hauled her up and down those stairs. Each trip became a harder lesson in self-control. Each climb lasted interminably long and not nearly long enough. Every time she clung to him he was more loath to let her go. Each time he glanced down he found her face tilted up toward his, an unreadable expression in her dark eyes.

They had a business arrangement. Nothing else.

He dug his fingertips in on either side of the bridge of his nose, concentrating on the small pain. “And there’s one man left out there who has yet to pay the wages of his sins?”

“That’s right. One more and I can retire.”

“Right.” His mouth curled. “Say, you don’t by any chance use all your stolen money to fund orphanages and old-folks’ homes, do you?”

“Not all of it,” she returned calmly. “I’m buying my father a ranch once he gets out of the penitentiary.”

“And your saintly father isn’t going to wonder where you got the money?”

“Investments.” She smiled smugly. “I told him I’ve had the luck of the devil on the stock market.”

Jim snorted. “Well, they’re getting better, at any rate.”

“Excuse me?”

He turned around, focused his gaze somewhere above her left shoulder. “Robin Hood with a twist. Just enough nobility to foment the country’s popular concept of womanhood, just enough greed to suggest realism. If you don’t come up with a better one, I’ll use it.”

“Oh, thank you,” she said. Despite her mocking tone, he couldn’t help notice disappointment cross her face. Did she think he was so gullible he’d buy anything as long as it was half-credible? “I’m so glad you finally approve of something I’ve said,” she went on, and then brightened. “Does that mean we can stop for the day? I have to get ready for the Calhouns’ party tonight.”

All day there’d been an air of suppressed excitement about her. He thought he understood. She probably didn’t get the opportunity to go to many parties. She certainly wasn’t attending any galas during what he had come to think of as her “thief phase,” and a spinster—even a lovely one—wouldn’t be invited to many dinner parties.

“Go ahead and get ready.”

She didn’t need further encouragement, but rose and hobbled into the bedroom. Jim looked over his interview notes. He couldn’t discern much from among the weird concoctions she dreamed up. Almost impossible to tell what truth was buried in there. And discovering the truth about Gilly was becoming more and more important to him.

He had no idea why. He should be happy to cull the more dramatic and colorful bits and piece together one helluva good story. The readers would love it; his editor would love it; and, most important, he’d be chugging out of Far Enough inside a week of its submission.

But Gilly had become more important than leaving Far Enough. Or she’d been that important from the first. He drowned that thought, forcing himself to think like a journalist. He wanted to know why she’d become a thief, what and who was important to her, what her future held.

The thought of the future pricked uncomfortably and made him shift his shoulders as though distributing an uneven burden. He needed to get out of here, he decided, while he still had a future.

Chapter Seven

Vance Calhoun owned the only brick house in Far Enough. Its brand-spanking-new Gothic Revivalist bulk splayed over half the length of a street, and its private stable yard took up the rest. In spite of the modern architecture and the white-gloved Negro man taking hats and coats in the doorway, there was no mistaking Far Enough for Chicago.

Close by, the lowing of thousands of cows— steers—set up a deep, melancholy counterpoint to the raucous sound of human voices spilling from the Calhouns’ house. A dog started barking and a chicken squawked as women tittered and ranchers guffawed.

At the front door, the servant bowed them in. “I’m really looking forward to this,” Gilly whispered, turning from Jim and letting her shawl slide from her shoulders into his waiting hands.

“Well, at least one of us—” Jim stopped.

Apparently Gilly’s dressmaker had used up all the sapphire-color fabric in the gown’s voluminous skirt, because the damn thing didn’t have a top. Or much of one. A ten-inch-wide swath of material acted as a bodice, and from his present position Jim could see a great deal of the lovely back that swath didn’t do a damn thing to cover.

He’d never seen anything as provocative as Gilly’s naked back.

Her shoulders, unfashionably straight and all too fashionably naked, spanned the delicate plumb line of her spine. Her skin was honey-tinted and silky and smooth, young muscle moving beneath its surface. She looked healthy and lithe and bewilderingly female.