Nobody's Darling

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The moon dangled over the valley, a brittle cameo against the black velvet bodice of the sky. The shimmering pearl drained all the color from the sweeping plain of grama grass, leaving nothing but ash and silver in a skeletal tableau as beautiful as it was bleak. It also drained what little color was left from Billy’s cheeks, leaving them pallid and gaunt.

Esmerelda leaned over him, relieved to hear the faint whisper of his breath against her cheek. He hadn’t uttered a sound in several hours. She knew she should be thankful that he’d finally escaped the rough jostling of the buck-board by losing consciousness, but his unnatural stillness was somehow more frightening than all of his thrashing and groaning.

She pried the lid from the battered tin canteen and dribbled a few drops of water between his parched lips.

Although his eyelids never even fluttered, he roused enough to manage a half-hearted swallow. She dampened her handkerchief and dabbed at his brow, then splashed a handful of water on her own face, afraid the rocking of the wagon might lull her into a doze just as it had Sadie.

Last night Billy had watched over her. Tonight she would watch over him.

Reaching around to massage her aching neck, she tipped back her head to gaze at the stars. In all the years she’d spent in Boston, she’d never dreamed the sky could be so vast. Or so lonely.

But at least she wasn’t alone in her vigil. Enos drove the wagon while Sam, Virgil, and Jasper rode ahead of it, slouched low in their saddles. Esmerelda shook her head, bemused by the irony. Only twenty-four hours ago, she would have been terrified to have been left alone with the Darling gang. Now they were her only hope.

Virgil had already used his pocketknife to dig the bullet out of Billy’s chest. Only time would tell if it had pierced any of his essential organs. Muttering all the while about wasting perfectly good liquor, Jasper had poured a stream of rotgut whiskey into the angry wound. Billy’s inert form had twitched in agony. Esmerelda had forced herself not to turn away, one hand cupped over her mouth to muffle her guilt-stricken sobs.

They’d escaped Eulalie without incident. No one had even bothered to stop them. After all, there had been no money stolen from the Eulalie First National Bank, no crime committed. Except for the one committed against Billy by her brother. But Esmerelda couldn’t bear to think about Bartholomew right now.

The buckboard shimmied to a sudden halt.

“Enos, trot your bony ass over here!” bellowed Virgil from somewhere up ahead.

Enos swiveled around and shyly tipped his hat to her. “Pardon me, ma’am. I do believe my p-presence is required at yonder fork in the road.”

He hopped nimbly to the ground and went loping off into the night. Esmerelda climbed to her knees to look over the wagon seat. The four men were indeed gathered at a fork in the dirt road. They appeared to be arguing. She caught snatches of profanity and glimpses of wildly gesticulating arms.

Of course, it was Virgil who lost the ability to whisper first. "We ain’t got no choice, boys!” he roared. “He’ll die if we don’t!”

“But if we do, he’ll wish he had,” Jasper replied grimly.

Sam shot the wagon a furtive glance. Esmerelda tried to duck, but it was too late. She’d been spotted. Responding to Sam’s nudge, Virgil stretched out his colossal arms and gathered his brothers into a secretive huddle.

A few minutes later, Enos came trotting back to the wagon. As he bounded into the seat, Esmerelda asked, “What is it? Is there a town nearby? Your brother still needs a doctor, you know.”

Enos pulled his hat down low, shading his eyes from her probing gaze. “Don’t you worry yore p-p-pretty little head about a thing, ma’am. We ain’t g-gonna let him die.”

Then he slapped the reins on the mule’s back and tugged with all the strength in his wiry arms, turning the buckboard toward the left fork.

Despite her noble intentions, Esmerelda dozed off with Billy’s head cushioned by her lap. Some time later she awoke with a start. The wagon’s motion had frozen to eerie stillness. Billy’s pallor had deepened to an unhealthy flush. She gave his brow a tender stroke before carefully wiggling out from under him.

Sadie whimpered as Esmerelda climbed to her knees, knuckling her bleary eyes. Clouds had smothered the moon while she slept. A violent gust of wind scattered them across the sky like giant tumbleweeds.

Moonlight streamed down, revealing that the wagon had come to a halt at the foot of a deeply rutted dirt track that wound up a shallow slope. Billy’s brothers sat silent and motionless, gazing toward the top of that hill.

Unsettled by the dread in their expressions, Esmerelda followed suit. All she saw was a ramshackle barn and a rickety structure that looked more like a shack than a house silhouetted against the night sky. A crumbling stone chimney clung to one wall of the house like a withered vine. A sagging tin roof sheltered the narrow porch. A dead oak stood sentinel at the crest of the hill, its once-mighty trunk split into a jagged fork by some ruthless bolt of lightning. A melancholy air of abandonment hung over the entire place. If it had been a piece of music, Esmerelda thought with a faint shiver, it would have been played in D minor.

“Is this our destination?” she whispered to Enos’s back.

Enos nodded grimly.

Esmerelda didn’t know whether to be relieved or dismayed. But she did know she was growing impatient with their dawdling.

“Then let’s proceed, shall we?” she said briskly. “Your brother is in desperate need of a clean, warm bed and some fresh bandages.”

Virgil cleared his throat. Sam hemmed and hawed. Jasper fixed his hard-eyed gaze on the distant horizon, as if he’d like to be anywhere else in the world at that moment. Not one of them would meet her eyes.

Oddly enough, it was shy, timid Enos who finally worked up the courage to swivel around on the wagon bench and face her. He tugged off his hat, wringing its brim in his tense hands. “We c-cain’t go no farther, ma’am,” he said with genuine regret.

“What do you mean you can’t go any farther? Of course, you can go farther.” She pointed at the house. “All you have to do is drive this wagon to the top of that hill.”

Virgil clambered down from his horse. “Enos is right, honey. You’ll have to go on alone from here.”

“Alone?” Esmerelda echoed. She cast the house a dubious look. It was beginning to look more haunted by the second.

“Yeah, alone,” Jasper drawled, the mocking curl of his lip reminding her achingly of Billy. “We ain’t welcome here.”

That didn’t exactly surprise Esmerelda. She couldn’t imagine many places where the Darling gang would be welcome. “Just where exactly is here?” When they exchanged furtive glances instead of answering, she sighed with exasperation. “Surely you could at least accompany us to the door. Help me explain what happened to whoever lives here…?”

Although she continued to press, her desperate pleas fell on deaf ears. Virgil was already hefting Billy out of the buckboard and draping him stomach-down over his mare’s saddle. After a moment of consideration, he drew one of his own pistols and shoved it into Billy’s empty holster. Then, ignoring Esmerelda’s continued protests, he clamped his meaty hands around her waist and swung her out of the wagon. Enos reached into the bed of the wagon and tossed her trunk and violin case to the ground. Sadie jumped down, landing on all four paws with an offended “oomph.”

Virgil pressed the mare’s reins into Esmerelda’s hand. “Don’t you worry none, honey. Our Billy has always been lucky when it comes to cards, women, and gettin‘ shot up.”

“That was before he met me,” she said glumly. After all, she’d interrupted his poker game, scared a woman off his lap, and nearly shot him through the heart at their very first meeting.

As Virgil mounted his horse, Enos ducked his head and said, “G-g-good luck, ma’am.”

“She’ll need it,” Jasper added with a derisive snort.

Esmerelda studied the expectant expressions on their faces. She studied the reins in her hand. She studied the top of the hill. They plainly intended for her to climb that hill on her own, leading Billy’s horse behind her.

Billy’s ragged groan at that moment firmed Esmerelda’s resolve. If there was help for Billy in that house, then, by God, she was going there, even if the devil himself stepped out on the porch to greet her, pitchfork in hand.

Straightening her shoulders to a regal angle she was certain her grandfather would approve of, she began to march up the hill, thankful for Sadie’s stalwart presence at her side. She could feel Billy’s brothers silently watching her.

She’d just topped the hill when the first shotgun blast shattered the night.

Acting on pure instinct, Esmerelda grabbed Billy by the seat of his trousers and dragged him off the horse. She landed on top of him in the tall grass, covering his body with her own. From Billy’s brothers she heard a frantic jingling of harnesses and scattering hoofbeats that faded to distant echoes. So much for expecting any help from them. She lay with her eyes clenched shut, hardly daring to breathe. Even unconscious, the feel of Billy’s hard, lean body beneath hers gave her a sense of security in a world turned topsy-turvy.

“Who the hell goes there?” shouted someone in a hoarse rasp that could have been either male or female.

Esmerelda opened her eyes and nearly yelped aloud to find Billy staring up at her. Oh, Lord, she thought, her clumsy handling must have killed him. Then he blinked and she realized the fall had simply jarred him to consciousness.

“Ma?” he whispered.

“Oh, you poor dear,” Esmerelda muttered. “The fever must be making you delirious.” This hardly seemed the time to remind him that his mother was dead. After all, what could be the harm in offering him such a simple comfort in moments that might very well be his last?

“That’s right, darling,” she murmured, stroking his sweat-dampened hair. “Mama’s here.”

She even dared to press a maternal kiss to his cheek. When she lifted her head, Billy’s eyes were narrowed in a confounded squint. Esmerelda was taken aback. He was staring at her as if she’d lost her wits. She had almost convinced herself it was nothing more than a grimace of pain when he closed his hands around her waist and heaved her off of him with surprising strength.

. Billy straightened to his knees in the tall grass, then staggered to his feet, weaving heavily. “Ma?” he called out. “It’s Billy. I’m hurt, Ma. Real bad.” He stumbled a few feet toward the house before dropping back to his knees. “I need your help.” His voice faded to a mumble. “I need you.”

Esmerelda’s mind reeled. She would have sworn Billy had implied that his mother was dead, but she’d obviously been mistaken. She breathed a quick prayer, thankful to have found help for him.

The shotgun belched again, its fiery breath strong enough to ruffle Billy’s hair. “Get the hell off my land, boy, before I pump your belly full of buckshot.”

An eerie calm descended over Esmerelda. She scrambled to her feet and marched toward the house, jerking Billy’s pistol from his holster without breaking her stride.

He grabbed for her, but got only empty air. “Don’t beg on my behalf, woman,” he ground out between his clenched teeth. “I won’t have it.”

Esmerelda had no intention of begging. She marched right up to the porch steps, near enough to make out the amorphous figure standing in the shadow of one of the posts. She could also make out the flared muzzle pointed straight at her chest. But it was too late to do anything but pray that there was no such thing as a triple-barreled shotgun.

She jerked her head toward Billy. “Is William Darling your son?”

No answer. A curl of pipe smoke drifted into the night.

Esmerelda swung her arm up, aiming the pistol, and repeated her question.

The figure held its silence. Esmerelda’s arm began to cramp. Then came the voice—unmistakably female, unmistakably sullen. “I ain’t got no sons. They all died durin‘ the war.”

“I believe you’re mistaken, ma’am. Every single one of the Darling boys survived the war.”

Esmerelda sensed rather than saw the apathetic shrug. “What difference does it make? They’re dead to me.”

Esmerelda pointed at Billy, her voice rising in frustration. “That man is going to be dead to everyone if he doesn’t get a clean bed and some fresh bandages. Can you provide those, or would you rather help me dig his grave so I can bury him on your land?”

She sensed the woman’s attention shirting to Billy. Although he still knelt in the grass, there wasn’t an ounce of supplication in his posture. His hands were clenched into fists. His eyes glittered with a fierce pride that was nearly as dangerous as his fever. Moonlight made the bloodstains on his white shirt stand out in stark relief.

The woman shifted the pipe to the other side of her mouth. “Looks to me like he already dug his own grave.”

Esmerelda sighed. “It has been a very long, very trying day, and you, madam, have just succeeded in exhausting my patience. Now are you going to step aside and let me bring him in the house or am I going to have to shoot you?”

A tense pause was followed by a gravelly chuckle. “Why, I almost believe you would.”

In reply, Esmerelda drew back the hammer of the pistol.

Billy’s mother waited a long time, long enough for Esmerelda’s finger to tense on the trigger. But she finally lowered the shotgun, propping it up against one of the posts. When the woman stepped out of the shadows, Esmerelda stumbled backward.

Esmerelda had assumed the Darling boys had gotten their height from their father. She had been wrong. Billy’s mother was a giantess, standing at least six feet tall in her bare feet. The massive arms she folded over her chest were roped with muscle, giving Esmerelda the impression that she was no less sturdy or immovable than the trunk of the dead oak in the yard. She half expected to see roots twining from the woman’s scalp instead of an uncombed tangle of hair. Both her hair and the shapeless burlap dress she wore were faded to the same butternut hue as her sunbaked skin. Her face was nearly as broad as the rest of her, its blunt features carved by some clumsy whittler with a dull blade. It was impossible to imagine them having ever been wreathed in a smile or crumpled by grief.

“You can bring him in,” she said. “But you’ll have to tend to him yourself. "The pipe flared orange, illuminating a stern jaw and a rueful mouth that was a shade too familiar for Esmerelda’s comfort. “I ain’t patchin‘ him up just so he can run off and get his fool self shot all to hell again.”

A sudden rustling in the grass distracted them both.

Billy had vanished. A gurgling sound floated to their ears.

Esmerelda shot his mother a look of pure outrage. “Now see what you’ve done, you spiteful old hag! You waited too long and now he’s dying!”

Gathering her skirts, she raced to where Billy had collapsed and flung herself to her knees in the grass. She couldn’t bear to have come so far only to lose him now.

He lay on his back, one hand pressed to his bandage, the other clutching his side. His handsome features were contorted in agony.

Esmerelda cupped his face in her hands. “Breathe, Billy! Oh, please! You’ve got to try!”

He opened his eyes and sucked in a wheezing breath. That was when Esmerelda realized he wasn’t dying. He was laughing. Laughing so hard that tears were coursing from the corners of his eyes and rolling into his ears. Laughing although every hitch and shudder of his battered body must have been pure torment.

Esmerelda snatched her hands away from his face, embarrassed by her zeal and furious at him for frightening her so badly.

As he gazed up at her, his eyes glowing silver in the moonlight, his laughter faded to a soft chuckle. “I was just thinking”—he lifted a hand to her cheek, his touch strangely tender—“that you’re just the kind of girl I always wanted to bring home to meet my ma.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jaws dropped and eyes bulged as the private coach rolled into Calamity on a hazy Saturday afternoon.

Donley Ezell emerged from the cool shadows of his stable to gaze longingly at the six matched grays drawing the coach while old Granny Shively eyed the coachman in his scarlet livery and white powdered wig. Her wistful smile shaved ten years off her age, making her look a girlish ninety-seven.

“Why, he looks just like a beau who courted me when I was fifteen!” she exclaimed to her friend Maude.

“Look, Ma,” shouted a little girl, tugging her mother’s arm so hard she nearly dropped the bolt of calico she was carrying. The child pointed at the Wyndham coat of arms discreetly emblazoned in gold on the black lacquered door. “It must be the king of New Mexico!”

Inside the carriage, Anne let the curtain fall and slumped back in her seat, unable to decide which was more oppressive—the dust, the gloom, or the heat. “I do hope you’re satisfied, Reginald. We couldn’t have attracted any more attention had we arrived in a giant pumpkin drawn by six white mice.”

Her brother had long ago collapsed against the plush velvet squabs opposite her, his ivory linen shirt and fawn waistcoat wilted by the heat. Anne might have pitied him had he not been growing increasingly more petulant with every mile that separated him from the mist and meadows of his beloved England.

He mopped at his florid face and shiny pate with a monogrammed handkerchief, gasping for air like a beached cod. “It’s intolerable enough that no one in this uncivilized wilderness serves afternoon tea. You can’t expect me to sacrifice all of my creature comforts.”

Anne snapped open her fan, selfishly hoarding the breeze it generated. “We’ve lost precious hours loading this infernal coach onto the steamer, then the train. Hours that could have been better spent searching for Esmerelda.”

Reginald roused from his lethargy long enough to bang the brass tip of his cane on the floor of the coach. “I have no intention of transporting my only granddaughter back to England in some mule skinner’s wagon.”

Their gazes clashed, then they both looked away, neither of them willing to face the terrible fear that hung unspoken between them. What if they were too late? What if Esmerelda had already confronted the man she had described in her letter? The man who may very well have murdered her brother. Anne shuddered to imagine what such a cold-blooded villain might do to an innocent like her niece.

Unable to sit idle a moment longer, she wrestled Reginald’s cane out of his grip and tapped on the ceiling of the coach. Before the vehicle could creak to a halt, she had gathered her reticule and parasol and flung open the door.

“Where the devil are you going?” Reginald demanded, clutching at her sleeve with all the querulous urgency of a frightened child.

Moved by the pity that had eluded her earlier, she gently patted his hand. “While you secure our accommodations, I shall make inquiries of the local constable. Perhaps he has news of our Esmerelda.”

“Anne?” he called after her as the coachman appeared to help her down from the coach.

She turned, affecting an air of aristocratic hauteur to shield her from the impolite stares directed her way. “You’ll find her, won’t you?”

Anne simply touched two fingers to her lips, unwilling to make a promise she might not be able to keep.

Anne had been banging on the locked door of the sheriffs office for nearly five minutes when a grizzled old man sidled up next to her.

“Won’t do you no good,” he said. “The sheriff ain’t there.”

Anne wasn’t sure whether she should be more appalled by the man’s familiarity, his grammar, or the rank cloud of body odor surrounding him. She drew a scented handkerchief from her reticule and dabbed at her nose, hoping he wouldn’t take offense at her own rudeness.

“Then where might I find him?”

He pointed across the dusty street. “Over yonder at the saloon.”

The man was looking her up and down in a most curious manner. A manner that made her want to glance down and make sure the tiny row of mother-of-pearl buttons holding her camel-hair bodice closed over her breasts was still intact.

She started to brush past him, but he lurched directly into her path. “That there fancy stagecoach you climbed out of belong to you?”

Anne rolled her eyes, wondering just how long she was going to have to endure his abysmal manners. “It belongs to the duke of Wyndham.”

“That Mr. Wyndham must be a mighty rich feller.”

Anne’s sigh was a breath of frost. “Wyndham is his title, not his name. The proper form of address for my brother would be ‘Lord Wyndham’ or ‘His Grace’.”

“You mean to say His Graciousness ain’t yer husband?”

“I should say not. I’m unmarried.”

A radiant smile brightened the man’s dour face. Before Anne could question his odd behavior, he went scampering down the sidewalk, a definite hop in his step. “Elmer! Hey, Elmer! Ye’re not gonna believe this, but we got us another one!”

Although she was somewhat dismayed to find herself the lone woman in a seedy tavern, Anne marched boldly up to the only occupied table. “Pardon me, sirs. I am seeking the town constable.”

The two men dressed nearly identically in broad-brimmed hats, plaid shirts, and denim trousers, shot each other a nervous look over the dusty bandannas knotted around their necks.

“We ain’t got no constable, ma’am,” said one.

“But that there is Sheriff McGuire,” said the other, pointing to the man opposite them.

The sheriff’s gaze flicked briefly to her, then returned to his cards. “I’ll be right with you, madam. After this hand.”

Anne gaped at him, hardly able to believe that he’d dismissed her so coolly. Was Reginald right? Was everyone in this country an utter boor? She narrowed her eyes, studying the man more closely. If not for his sun-and wind-weathered face and fall of silver hair, she might have thought his broad-shouldered, lean-waisted form was in the full vigor of its youth. At least he didn’t dress like a savage. His shirt was bleached a blinding white and his paisley waistcoat was crisp enough to meet even Reginald’s exalted standards. A drooping mustache framed his full lips.

Anne looked away, oddly discomfited by the unbridled sensuality of that mouth. But after several more cards had been played, she decided she’d had just about enough of his indifference.

She pointedly cleared her throat. “I do so hate to interrupt your game, sheriff, but you must allow me to introduce myself. I am Anne Hastings, sister to the duke of Wyndham, and I’m looking for my niece—a young woman named Esmerelda Fine.”

He glanced up, arching one silvery eyebrow. “You’re not armed, are you?”

Taken aback by the peculiar query, she replied, “I should say not.”

“Good.” He grinned and winked at her. “Then I’ll just finish my hand.”

Growing more impatient by the second, Anne gritted her teeth and began to tap her foot on the plank floor.

Although he would have had her believe otherwise, Drew was keenly aware of the woman awaiting his pleasure. Aware of the tap-tap-tap of her dainty kid boot, the aristocratic flare of her delicate nostrils, the subtle floral scent of her perfume. He stole a look at her over his hand of cards. The soft gray hair peeping out from beneath her stylish bonnet was the exact color of a dove’s breast. Anne, he mused. The name suited her. It was both elegant and no-nonsense. She might even be a handsome woman if her lips weren’t puckered in such a haughty manner. They looked as if they were poised to suck a stick of sour candy.

Or be kissed.

Seal swore, jolting Drew out of his reverie. He dropped his gaze to the table to discover he’d just let Dauber best them both with a pair of fours. Ah, well, what did it matter? He had nothing of value in his own hand but a knave of hearts.

Feeling a bit like a knave himself, he tossed down the cards in disgust and retrieved his jacket from the back of the chair. As he came to his feet, Esmerelda Fine’s aunt took a hasty step backward.

Twirling one waxed tip of his mustache to hide his smile, Drew bowed and made a courtly gesture toward the door. “After you, madam.”

Anne lowered herself into the chair opposite the sheriff’s desk, then bounced back up with a startled “Oh!”

“Sorry about that,” he said, coming around the desk to rescue the yellow tabby she’d almost sat on. As he smoothed the cat’s rumpled fur, the beast gave Anne a decidedly malevolent look. “There, there,” he crooned. “My Miss Kitty is a wee bonny puss.”

“You’re Scottish,” Anne remarked, glancing nervously behind her this time before she sat.

“No, I’m American.” He set the cat on the floor; it went sauntering from the room, its tail still twitching with regal annoyance. “I had no choice but to flee the country of my birth as a lad when the king seized my father’s lands and gave them to some fat English sot who’d never set foot off his London estate. Oh, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.” His pleasant smile deepened, warning her that he wasn’t the least bit sorry and had every intention of offending her. “I can tell from your accent that you must be English.”

Her smile was equally pleasant. “That’s quite all right, sir. After all, it’s not as if I personally drove you off your land.” Her white-knuckled grip on the bone handle of her parasol warned him that she just might be capable of doing just that.

Drew settled himself behind his desk and rested his chin on his steepled fingers. “What can I do to assist you, Mrs…?” He stretched out the title to insulting lengths.

“Miss,” Anne corrected briskly, refusing to shy away from the truth, however stark.

“Ah, Miss Hastings,” he said, nodding smugly. “We have more in common than I realized. I, too, never chose to shackle myself with the chains from which there is no escape but death.” When she only gazed blankly at him, he leaned forward and confessed, “I never married.”

“Yes, well, I can certainly see why.” Her acid tone wiped the smile from his face. Before he could recover his poise, she reached into her reticule, drew out a silver locket, and snapped it open beneath his nose. “Have you seen this girl?”

Still eyeing her warily, Drew took the locket and studied the yellowing daguerreotype nestled within.

“She wouldn’t be a girl anymore, of course. She would be a young woman,” Anne hastened to explain. “But I thought perhaps you might recognize a hint of something familiar in her features, some nuance of her expression that might jar your memory.” She leaned forward in her chair, her icy veneer cracking to reveal the vulnerability beneath.

Drew recognized Esmerelda immediately. Her solemn eyes still held that poignant hint of wistfulness that gave her perfectly ordinary features the promise of extraordinary beauty.

He also recognized the plump, dark-eyed child in her arms. A child who had grown into a man who called himself Black Bart and, according to Thaddeus Winstead, U.S. Marshal, had traded playing with toy trains for robbing real ones. Drew leaned back in his chair to stroke his mustache. So Bartholomew Fine had a sister after all. What would Billy make of that? He stole a brief look at Anne Hastings. The one thing Billy never could tolerate, aside from a weeping woman, was a woman meddling in his business. And Winstead’s offer had made both Bartholomew and Esmerelda Fine his business.

Until Drew lifted his gaze to Anne’s hopeful eyes, he hadn’t realized how much he would hate lying to her. He sensed that she was not a woman to forgive easily. Or ever. Snapping the locket shut, he shoved it back across the desk at her.

“I’m sorry,” he said gently, and this time he meant it. “I’ve never seen your niece before.”

“Oh.” That single syllable was more a sigh than an exclamation. It took Anne Hastings a moment to gather both her composure and her belongings. She finally rose from the chair, giving him a rueful smile that was a weary echo of Esmerelda’s. “I’m quite sorry to have troubled you, Sheriff McGuire. Thank you for your time.”

Thinking only to be polite, Drew took the hand she offered. It was surprisingly soft, surprisingly white—a lady’s hand. As their eyes met—his troubled, hers startled— he couldn’t help but linger over it, tenderly caressing her knuckles with his thumb.

The door to his office flew open. Anne snatched her hand back, flushing like a fifteen-year-old caught allowing an indiscreet suitor to steal a kiss.

Oblivious to her discomfiture, Reginald came storming in, his bald pate pink with excitement. He was waving a sealed envelope as if it were a battle flag.

“We’re not too late, Anne. She was here! Our girl was here only three days ago!” He clutched the envelope to his chest. “Such a bold girl! Such a brave girl! It seems she fired a pistol at that dastardly outlaw and spent the afternoon confined in this very jail.”

Anne slowly swiveled her head to give the man seated behind the desk a look that should have melted the set of iron keys hanging on a peg behind the desk. Drew suddenly took it into his head to examine his well-manicured fingernails.

Reginald was beaming like an idiot. “She left me a letter at the hotel desk. Can you imagine that? A letter for me! A cold and unforgiving ogre of a man if ever there was one!”

He tried to open the missive, but his hands were trembling with fear and eagerness, just as they always did at the arrival of one of his granddaughter’s letters.

Growing impatient with his fumbling, Anne snapped, “For God’s sake, Reggie, give it here.”

He meekly obeyed, unaccustomed to being told what to do by his dutiful sister. Anne broke the seal with her fingernail and unfolded the letter.

“ ‘Lord Wyndham,” “ she read, already alarmed by the untidy scrawl that was so out of character for her painstaking niece.” ’It is with great trepidation and no little regret that I am writing to inform you that due to your enduring neglect and indifference, I have been forced to barter my virtue to a ruthless desperado.“”

The sheriff made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a laugh, but when Anne whipped her head around to give him another one of those basilisk’s glares, he choked it into a cough.

She returned her attention to the letter. “ ‘I trust you will suffer no distress on my behalf since you never have before. Ever your devoted granddaughter… Esmerelda Fine.”“

Anne stood in stunned silence, trying to absorb her niece’s message. Reginald gently took the letter from her hand and pressed it to his lips, closing his eyes.

Touched by the rare display of emotion, Anne squeezed his shoulder. “What is it, Reggie? Does she remind you of Lisbeth?”

“No.” He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and sniffled into it with fastidious care. When he opened his eyes, they were bright with unshed tears and brimming with tender affection. “She reminds me of me.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Zoe Darling was as good as her word. During the week that her son hovered in that misty netherworld between life and death, she never lifted a finger to nurse him.

Although she tended his mare without complaint, her only concession to Billy’s presence in her house came the very first night. After Esmerelda had gotten him settled in the wooden bedstead in the back bedroom with an anxious Sadie draped across his feet, she went to drag her trunk and violin case back to the house. When she returned, she found a worn nightshirt neatly folded on the floor outside Billy’s door. Esmerelda had fingered the faded cotton, wondering if it had once belonged to Billy’s father.

While Billy battled the twin demons of blood loss and fever, the two women shared the small house, never speaking and rarely exchanging so much as a glance. Loath to ask for help, Esmerelda soon learned to pump her own water from the well so she could wash out Billy’s sweat-soaked sheets and nightshirt. After only a few days of wringing them out with her bare hands before dragging them outside to dry, she began to understand how Zoe had developed the ropes of sinew in her mammoth arms.

Desperation made Esmerelda cunning. One afternoon she watched from the window of the timber-framed room that served as both kitchen and parlor while Zoe stalked a hapless chicken around the weed-choked yard. Several minutes later, the woman strode into the house and slapped the freshly plucked and dressed bird on the table.

While once she might have grimaced at such a spectacle, Esmerelda waited until Billy’s mother had lumbered back out the door, then swiped the naked bird and plopped it into a pot of water she’d already set to boiling. When Zoe’s shadow again darkened the stoop, Esmerelda was ladling steaming broth into a bowl for Billy and glibly humming beneath her breath. Snorting like an enraged bull, Zoe swung around and stomped back out to the yard to strangle another chicken for her own supper. Esmerelda suspected the woman would have rather crushed her own scrawny neck between those powerful fingers.

Twice, in the still, dark hours between midnight and dawn, while Esmerelda napped in the slat-backed rocker she’d drawn next to Billy’s bed, she drifted out of a fitful sleep to glimpse a shadow at the bedroom door. From her place at Billys feet, Sadie would lift her head to gaze solemnly at the door. Before Esmerelda could blink the fog of sleep from her eyes, the shadow was gone, convincing her that she must have been dreaming. Surely it would be impossible for a woman of Zoe’s size to move so quietly.

After six days of unconsciousness, Billy took a turn for the worse.

As darkness fell on that humid August night, his fever began to climb. Although the heat in the room was stifling, his teeth chattered as if he were buried in a snowdrift. He couldn’t even unclench them long enough to swallow the drops of water Esmerelda struggled to spoon down his throat. As his shivering worsened, she piled all the quilts she could find on him, but his long limbs soon began to thrash and hurl them away.

He finally settled into an unnatural stillness more terrifying than anything that had gone before. Fighting despair, Esmerelda smoothed his damp hair from his brow. His skin was so hot it seemed to scorch her palm.

Esmerelda knew what death looked like. She knew the waxen cast of its skin and the arduous rhythm of its breath. She knew the bitter taste it left in your mouth when it had passed by, taking those you loved against their will and yours.

A fragile thread of hope wound through her despair. She had sent death begging once before when God had answered her tearful pleas by sparing Bartholomew’s life. Perhaps she could do it again. Clutching Billy’s limp hand in hers, she sank to her knees beside the bed and buried her brow against the bedclothes.

Prayers had always flowed easily from Esmerelda’s lips, but this time eloquence deserted her. She would have gladly bargained with God, but wasn’t sure she had anything of worth left to offer him. After several moments of agonizing silence, she could manage nothing more than a clumsy, whispered, “Please, God… oh, please…”

A hand fell on her shoulder. She slowly turned her head, believing for a dazed moment that her prayer had been answered. But the fingers curled around her collarbone weren’t lean and tanned, but broad and spatulate, the nails cracked and seamed with dirt.

In Zoe Darling’s other hand was a Bible, its black binding creased with age. “Go on and take it,” the woman said, nodding toward the bed. “It’s his.”

Esmerelda reluctantly untangled her fingers from Billy’s and took the book. To her surprise, his mother sank into the rocking chair. The floor creaked beneath her weight as she began to rock. Esmerelda gazed up at her through a blur of unshed tears.

“Billy was the first Darlin‘ who ever learnt himself to read.” Although the woman’s voice was matter-of-fact, Esmerelda would have almost sworn she glimpsed a trace of tenderness on those rough-hewn features. “When we lived in Missoura, he used to carve whistles and trade them to passing peddlers for books. But his brothers always laughed at him. They said readin’ was for girls. They used to steal his books when he weren’t around and burn ‘em in the old cistern behind the house.”

A bittersweet pang tightened Esmerelda’s throat. She remembered Billy’s peculiar behavior when she had discovered his stash of books back at the brothel, books painstakingly inscribed with his name. He had even gone so far as to deny owning them, as if a love of reading were something to be ashamed of.

Zoe nodded. “It was my idea to give him the family Bible. My Jasper was always mean as a baby cottonmouth, but even he knew better than to burn the Good Book.”

Esmerelda opened the Bible and gently ruffled through the pages. They were so thin and fragile as to be almost transparent. She could see Billy as a boy, the burnished gold of his hair gleaming in the candlelight as he inclined his head and patiently sounded out the words on these pages. Stricken by the image, she let the book fall shut in her lap.

Zoe Darling rose from the rocking chair, towering over her. “I thought it might give him comfort to hear some of those old stories again. He was always partial to Daniel in the den of them mountain lions and that King David feller who shot that giant right betwixt the eyes.”

As Zoe moved toward the bed, Esmerelda held her breath. The woman stretched out her hand, leaving it hovering over her son’s cheek. Her fingers slowly unfurled like the petals of some homely wildflower that hadn’t felt the touch of the sun for a very long time. But before her calloused fingertips could brush his burning skin, she closed them into a rigid fist.

“When he left here,” she said softly, "I knew there was a grave out there somewhere with his name already on it.” She swung around to give Esmerelda a probing look. “Do you know what they used to carve on the crosses durin‘ the war if a boy’s face had been blown clean off by a cannonball or there just weren’t no one left alive after a battle who knew his name?”

Esmerelda shook her head.

Zoe’s eyes were dark and bitter. "'Somebody's Darlin‘.“”

Somebody’s Darling. Esmerelda shivered to imagine Billy lying there in one of those shallow graves—nameless and mourned only by those who would never know how, when, or where he fell.

“But he didn’t end up in that grave,” she said fiercely. “And he’s not going to now.”

Zoe gazed at her with blunt pity. “You his wife?”

Fighting an absurd longing to nod, Esmerelda whispered, “No. I’m…” Hits friend? His employer? The bane of his existence? Since only the latter seemed appropriate, Esmerelda simply trailed off into silence.

Zoe Darling shook a finger at her. “Then don’t be lookin‘ on his nakedness, gal. It ain’t fittin’.”

An incredulous sob of laughter escaped Esmerelda. Then, moving as soundlessly as she’d come, the woman was gone, leaving Esmerelda alone with her son.

She sat there on the floor for a long time, hugging the tattered book to her breast and listening to the labored sighs of Billy’s breathing. Despite her bold words, her pious and practical nature urged her to return to her knees and pray that God would forgive the sins of William Darling and give his restless soul a gentle passage into heaven.

Esmerelda rose to her knees. She hesitated for a moment, then crawled into the bed next to Billy, dislodging a disgruntled Sadie. Gingerly resting her head on his shoulder, she opened the Bible to the Book of Daniel and began to read.

When Esmerelda opened her eyes the next morning to find Billy gazing into them, it startled her so badly she shrieked and rolled right out of the bed, landing on an equally startled Sadie.

She was still lying on her back and clutching her pounding heart when Billy’s head appeared over the side of the bed. A lock of hair dangled in his narrowed eyes. “Did you really call my ma a spiteful old hag?”

Esmerelda winced at the memory. “I’m afraid so,” she croaked, hoarse from reading aloud to him until she’d fallen into an exhausted slumber near dawn. “I’ve always been afflicted with a sharp temper. That’s precisely why I struggle to guard it with such care.”

He sank back on the pillows, making a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a groan. “Damn lucky for us. Given your fondness for threatening to shoot anyone who doesn’t give you your way.”

Outraged, Esmerelda sat up. “I don’t threaten to shoot just anyone. Only Darlings.”

Her retort was answered by a gentle snore, leaving her to wonder if she’d dreamed the entire exchange.

Cocking her head to give Sadie a perplexed look, she crept to her knees and peered over the side of the bed. Billy lay on his back, his mouth hanging open to reveal a line of endearingly uneven white teeth.

Esmerelda touched a trembling hand to his chest, taking care not to disturb his bandage. Beneath the crisp golden whorls of hair, his skin was cool, his breathing deep and even.

All the starch melted from Esmerelda’s spine. She buried her face in her hands, breathing a thank-you just as fervent, but no more coherent, than her earlier pleas to God had been. Words just seemed to fail her where this man was concerned.

A hand brushed her hair. She lifted her head to find Billy gazing at her again, a pained expression in his gray-green eyes. “Don’t cry, honey,” he whispered, dusting a tear from her cheek with his thumb. His eyes slowly fluttered shut before he murmured, “I never meant to make you cry.”

Billy slept through that day and half of the next. It was no longer the restless, fevered thrashing of a dying man, but the deep and natural slumber of a body seeking to recover from a grave insult. Even Sadie seemed to sense his improvement, for she left his side for the first time since the shooting, choosing instead to waddle after an indifferent Zoe.

When Esmerelda carried in the speckled tin basin to give him his bath the following afternoon, he was sprawled on his back with his head and shoulders propped on the pillows. His chest was exposed and one long leg dusted with wiry gold hair poked out from beneath the sheet. It wasn’t until water sloshed on her feet that Esmerelda realized she was gawking.

Don’t be lookin‘ on his nakedness, gal. It ain’t fittin’.

Although she had deliberately waited for Zoe to stomp from the house to do her afternoon chores, trailed by a newly infatuated Sadie, Esmerelda’s cheeks still flushed hotly at the memory of his mother’s admonishment. An unfair warning indeed, she thought with an offended sniff, when she’d taken such careful pains to guard both Billy’s modesty and her own while she tended him. She’d kept her eyes closed and her face turned away for all but the most innocent of tasks.

Yet today as she approached his bed, she felt a curious stirring of trepidation. With the golden flush of health returning to his skin and the stubble along his jawline thickening to an outlaw’s beard, he looked larger, somehow, and overwhelmingly masculine.

Esmerelda set the basin on the stool beside the bed and dipped her cloth in the soapy water. The warm water trickled between her fingers as she gently sponged off Billy’s face and throat. She dipped the cloth again and ran it over his chest, taking care not to wet the clean bandage she’d wrapped around the broad expanse only that morning. The water beaded like morning dew in the crisp coils of chest hair below the bandage before trickling along the narrowing V to the taut plain of his belly.

As Esmerelda traced the trail with the cloth, sopping up the excess water, Billy shifted and moaned. She jerked back her hand, suffering a pang of contrition. The bath must be causing him more discomfort than she’d anticipated.

She gentled her touch to a mere caress, but he thrashed so violently she was forced to snatch at the sheet to keep it from sliding off of his lean hips.

Mopping her brow with her forearm, Esmerelda glanced toward the window and frowned. Although a fickle bevy of clouds flirted with the sun, the room seemed warmer than ever.

Growing more disgruntled by the second, she jerked the sheet up over Billy’s chest before peeling it from his legs. Although she tried to wash them quickly, they were so long it seemed to take forever. His feet were just as long-boned and well-sculpted as the rest of him.

When Esmerelda was done, she gently drew up the sheet, covering him from throat to toe.

She dipped the cloth in the water again, swallowing hard. This was the part she’d been dreading. When Billy had been caught in the grip of sickness and fever, bathing him as if he were a child had come naturally to her. After all, she had told herself sternly, it was no different from bathing her baby brother, which she’d been required to do quite often until he’d grown old enough to do it himself.

Esmerelda refused to be daunted by the task. Ignoring the treacherous quickening of her breath, she turned her face away, closed her eyes, and slid the cloth beneath the sheet.

Billy groaned. Esmerelda jerked her hand back and dared a glance at his face. It was still resting in angelic repose, his gilt-edged lashes betraying nary a flutter.

Battling a wretched fit of nerves that was making her heart pound and her ears buzz, she reached beneath the sheet again. As the cloth encountered the warmth of his flesh, she would have almost sworn there was something different about him today. Her hand continued its curious exploration. Her eyes widened in shock. Distinctly different.

Feeling utterly ridiculous and more than a little sinful, she lifted the sheet and stole a peek beneath.

“Find what you’re looking for, Duchess?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Esmerelda froze at the sound of that unmistakable drawl. Her first instinct was to drop the sheet, spring away from the bed, and shove both hands behind her back as if she’d been caught sneaking them into the cookie jar.

Instead, she forced herself to calmly lower the sheet and meet Billy’s gaze. “I was looking for the washrag.”

Billy’s eyebrow arched. “The one in your hand?”

Esmerelda glanced down at the dripping rag, beset by a desperate urge to fling it at his face and run. “Oh,” she said, refusing to let her scalding blush spoil her dignity. “I could have sworn I’d dropped it.”

“And I could have sworn I’d died and gone straight to heaven.”

“As we’ve discussed in the past, Mr. Darling, I doubt that would be your final destination.”

Esmerelda busied herself with returning the rag to the basin, but was unable to resist stealing a furtive glance at Billy from beneath her lashes. His recent vulnerability had made her forget just how dangerous he really was.

While she’d been distracted, he had propped his hands behind his head. The casual motion had caused the sheet she’d so painstakingly arranged to spill back down his chest, baring him to the waist. The heated glimmer in his eyes as they followed her every motion warned her that he wasn’t nearly as cool as he appeared. All he needed was his hat, a cigar clamped between his teeth, and a gun in his hand, and he would have looked just as forbidding as he had at their first meeting.

Since then she had learned there were emotions that could be more hazardous to a woman’s heart than a bullet from a Colt.45. She gasped with shock when Billy’s lean fingers shot out and closed around her wrist. At first she thought he meant to jerk her into the bed with him, but he simply turned her hand upward, using his thumb to probe her palm with a thoroughness that sent a wicked quiver of anticipation through her flesh.

“Nope. There’s no doubt about it,” he said. “Those weren’t the claws of an imp bathing my mortal flesh, but the hands of an angel. I must surely be heaven-bound after all.”

Their eyes met over her palm, hers wary and his knowing, as if he could discern her darkest secrets with nothing more than a mocking flicker of his lashes. She was so intent on denying what she learned of herself in those gray-green eyes that it took a minute for his words to sink in.

“You were awake?” she yelled, snatching her hand back.

He crossed his arms and shrugged, but his devilish smirk ruined the apologetic gesture. “Only since you washed behind my ears. And a mighty fine job you did of it, too.”

Esmerelda blanched to remember the tender care she’d lavished upon him, the way her hands had betrayed her by lingering against the muscled contours of his chest, the taut plane of his belly, the rangy length of his calves and thighs. She also remembered the tortured groan he’d uttered when she’d first reached beneath the sheet with the washrag. She could scarcely bear to imagine what he must have thought when he’d felt her caressing him with such familiarity. Mortified, she closed her eyes and bit back a groan of her own.

Esmerelda’s blush made her look as fevered as Billy felt. His fever had nothing to do with his wound and everything to do with the delicious play of Esmerelda’s hands over his skin. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so vulnerable to a woman’s touch.

When he’d first woken to feel her hands on him, he’d lain frozen, wanting her to stop, yet terrified she would. Then the fever began creeping through his veins like hot molasses, coursing downward with each stroke of the rag, each cool brush of her fingertips against his burning flesh, until it had crystallized in his groin, leaving behind an ache as hard as it was sweet.

An ache made practically intolerable by the curious stroke of her hand, the adorably naughty glance she’d stolen beneath the sheet.

He’d interrupted that shy peek not to embarrass her, but to keep from humiliating himself. Something he feared he still might do when his first clear look at her gave his heart a painful jolt.

“What happened to you, honey? You look like hell.”

Esmerelda opened her eyes to discover that Billy’s teasing grin had darkened to a scowl. She touched a hand to her bedraggled hair. She’d been too busy ogling him to give much thought to her own appearance. But beneath his probing scrutiny, she became painfully aware of the unflattering shadows beneath her eyes; the wrinkled dress she’d handwashed, wrung out, and donned while it was still damp; the sweaty tendrils of hair clinging to her temples.

Billy wasn’t frowning at her face, but her body. He stretched out a hand, cradling her waist as if they were about to embark on a formal waltz. “Why, I can feel your ribs. You’re nothing but skin and bones.”

Esmerelda shrugged, touched by his dismay. “I suppose I’ve been too busy spooning broth down your throat to steal more than a few sips for myself.”

His expression grew even more troubled. “How long?”

“Eight days.”

He collapsed on the pillows, cutting her a sulky glance. “I haven’t forgotten that it could have been you lying here in this bed with a bullet in your back. There was no call for you to go throwing yourself in front of that no-count brother of yours. I was only going to wing him.”

“Where? In the heart?”

Billy’s heavy-lidded glare darkened. “In the trigger finger.”

Esmerelda arched an eyebrow skeptically, knowing even as she did so that he was probably capable of shooting a hangnail off Bartholomew’s thumb without so much as skinning his knuckle. She felt compelled to defend her brother. “Despite your low opinion of him, my brother is not ‘no-count.' He’s simply callow, misguided—“

“Greedy, spoiled, dangerous.”

“I raised him the best I could,” Esmerelda cried, stung. “He lacked for nothing!”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Billy replied softly.

Esmerelda turned her back on the bed, his compassion more damning than condemnation. Perhaps it was time to find out just how deep his own betrayal ran. Gazing at the wall without blinking, she asked him the question that had haunted her ever since Bartholomew had flung the accusation in his face. “Did that crooked marshal pay you to k my brother?”

“No.”

Esmerelda whirled around, prepared to forgive all. Bi the steely light in Billy’s eyes stopped her.

“He paid me to kill your lover.”

“How much?” she whispered when she could.

“One thousand dollars. Five hundred in advance. Five hundred when the job was done. He also promised amnesty for me and my brothers and a job as a deputy U.S. marshal.

Esmerelda was forced to sink down on the foot of tl bed or risk falling down. A despairing little hiccup of laugh escaped her. “At least no one can accuse you of selling yourself cheap. Given the marshal’s generosity, y‹ must have found my offer fairly pathetic.”

Billy reached out and ran a finger down her arm in slow, tantalizing motion that set the pulse in her throat fluttering. “Oh, there was nothing pathetic about what you offered me.”

Esmerelda swallowed hard, hypnotized by the hung glitter in his eyes. No man had ever looked at her that w before. She didn’t know whether to be frightened or flattered. Or perhaps a little bit of both.

He’d left her with no choice but to deliberately misunderstand him. She stood, edging out of his reach. “You‘ absolutely right. I’m certain that my grandfather would consider Winstead’s offer a paltry sum compared to all riches he’ll be prepared to bestow upon the man who find his grandson.”

“Ah, yes. Your grandpappy. The duke.” Although Bill; expression was bland, Esmerelda sensed he was mocking her.

It made her want to catch him in a few exaggerations of his own. She narrowed her eyes at him. “According to your reputation, Mr. Darling, when you want somebody dead, they have a tendency to get that way. Yet you let my brother leave that bank alive. Even after he shot you.”

Her aim struck true. Scowling, Billy pointed a finger at her. “Before you go thinking that I never intended to kill him at all, you might as well know that there was a moment there in that bank, before I realized Bart really was your brother, when I just might have done it.”

“But you didn’t,” she replied softly. When he averted his eyes instead of answering, she shifted her gaze to the window. “Bartholomew’s still out there somewhere. And so is that crooked marshal who wants him dead.”

Billy nodded grimly. “As soon as I’m able, I intend to rectify that.”

“Yes, but who will you be working for? Me?” She hesitated for a beat, knowing she might be risking more than just her brother’s life. “Or Winstead?”

He gazed at her in stony silence for a moment before replying. “Your brother’s dealings with Winstead convinced me the Yankee bastard can’t be trusted. But as you were so kind to assure me back at that bank,” his voice melted into a drawl, making her feel all hot and silky inside, “you always pay your debts.”

Esmerelda saw reflected in his shuttered eyes the wanton kiss she’d pressed upon him in that desperate moment. So much for her hope that he’d been too delirious with shock and pain to remember her reckless promise. Irrationally furious at him for calling her bluff, she whirled around and started for the door.

“Duchess?”

“Yes?” She stiffly turned back, trying to decide whether to accept his apology or let him stew in his regrets for a while.

“You weren’t quite done with my bath, were you, honey?” Blinking innocently, Billy fished the washrag out of the basin and held it out to her. “I was kind of hoping you could take up where you left off.”

The frigid sweetness of Esmerelda’s smile should have warned him, but Billy was too mesmerized by her eager approach to pay attention to his tingling nape. “Why, you’re absolutely right, Mr. Darling. How thoughtless of me.” She picked up the basin, cradling it tenderly in her hands. “I forgot to rinse you off.”

Maidenly modesty be damned, Esmerelda whipped back the sheet and dumped the entire basin of cooling water in his lap. As she marched from the room, slamming the door behind her, Billy’s roar of outrage mingled with his howls of laughter.

“Just you wait! I’ll get you for that, gal! I swear I will!”‘ he shouted after her.

Esmerelda sagged against the door, smothering a helpless sob of laughter with her hand. “That’s just what I’m afraid of,” she whispered.

To Esmerelda’s relief, Billy seemed to have regained enough strength to bathe and feed himself. She peeked in on him later that afternoon to find his sheets draped over the windowsill to dry and Billy standing in front of a tarnished mirror, shaving himself with a bone-handled razor. Although he still had to flatten one hand against the wall to brace himself, the look he gave her in the mirror was potent enough to send her scurrying from the room.

That night Esmerelda slept wrapped in a quilt on the floor of the main room instead of in the rocker next to Billy’s bed. She awoke the next morning to the tantalizing aroma of rising biscuits and sizzling bacon. Her stomach growled with delight, heralding the triumphant return of her appetite. With the tattered quilt still wrapped around her nightgown, she stumbled toward the table.

She knuckled her bleary eyes only to discover to her amazement that it was Billy presiding over the cast-iron stove and Zoe hunkered down over the table. Sadie crouched at the woman’s feet, her big, brown eyes moist and hopeful.

Billy wore nothing but his trousers and a snowy-white bandage. The sight of the muscles rippling in his lean back as he flipped an egg with deft precision made Esmerelda’s mouth go dry with a thirst she feared wouldn’t be satisfied even if she drank the entire pitcher of frothy milk perched on the table.

As she watched, he slapped the egg on a plate, then slid the plate in front of his mother.

Zoe wrinkled her nose as if he’d spit in the biscuit batter and seasoned the bacon with a sprinkle of arsenic instead of pepper. She set the plate on the floor. Sadie shoved her nose into the feast, her tail thumping against the table leg in utter bliss.

Without missing a beat, Billy slid another plate in front of Esmerelda. Sunny yellow eggs, soft in the middle and perfectly browned around the edges, bacon fried into crispy curlicues, plump golden biscuits. She let out a blissful sigh. There had been mornings in her life when she would have sold her braid for such a feast. She flashed Billy a grateful smile, but he’d already turned back to the stove.

“Mornin‘, gal,” Zoe boomed in a voice that would have made even Virgil cringe.

Caught off guard, Esmerelda nearly choked on her biscuit. “G-g-good morning, Mrs. Darling.”

“Now, there’s no need in us bein‘ so formal ’round here.” Zoe reached across the table and gave her hand a maternal pat. “You can just call me Ma.”

Esmerelda gaped down at the massive brown paw that had engulfed her hand. It took her a dazed moment to realize that the woman wasn’t being kind to her because she’d been seized by a sudden fit of Christian charity, but to spite her son. From the wry twist of Billy’s lips as he set his own plate on the table and straddled the chair across from her, Esmerelda knew that he realized it, too.

Zoe’s smile was even more intimidating than her scowl. Before she could squeak out a reply, Esmerelda had to drain half a glass of milk to wash down the lump of biscuit still stuck in her throat. “That’s very generous of you, ma’am. My own mother died when I was only a little girl.”

Esmerelda tried not to cower as Zoe captured a corner of the quilt in her ham-handed fist and reached over to dab away Esmerelda’s milk mustache. “I’ve often wished I had me a daughter instead of a passel o‘ no-count sons. A daughter might marry someday, but she’ll always remain loyal to her ma.” Zoe shook her head in wistful regret. “Every woman should have a daughter. At least when a daughter has younguns of her own, she can understand the grievous pain her ma suffered through to birth and raise her.”

Thinking of Bartholomew, Esmerelda offered Billy’s mother a sad little smile. “Perhaps your suffering isn’t as unappreciated as you fear.”

Zoe cast the top of Billy’s head a black look. “My boys never ‘predated nothin’ they couldn’t eat, steal, or fu—”

Billy stopped shoveling in forkfuls of egg long enough to clear his throat and give his mother a level look.

She subsided with an audible “haarumph.” Esmerelda picked up her fork, tucking a wayward strand of hair behind her ear with her other hand.

“Hell, gal, there’s no need to eat with your hair all hangin‘ in your face that way.”

Before she could protest, Zoe had shuffled over to retrieve a faded ribbon from her sewing box. Esmerelda tensed as Zoe gathered her hair, expecting to be yanked bald, but the woman’s large hands were surprisingly gentle. As Zoe tied the ribbon in a clumsy bow at her nape, Esmerelda glanced up to see a flicker of something in Billy’s eyes.

“There now. Ain’t that nice?” Zoe said, stepping back to admire her handiwork.

“Why, thank you, ma’am, er, I mean Mrs… um,” Esmerelda had to clear her throat twice before managing to bleat, “Ma.”

Billy grinned and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “Since there’s no need in us being so formal around here, Mrs. Darling, can I call you Ma, too?”

Zoe scowled. Grabbing an ax off the wall, she went stomping out the door like some sort of Norse berserker in search of some hapless livestock to slay. Sadie loped after her, her long ears flapping in the morning breeze.

Billy returned to his breakfast as if the entire incident had never happened.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” Esmerelda asked. “To hear your mother speak so unkindly?”

“She’s entitled,” he said, biting off a chunk of biscuit and chewing with relish. “Besides, that’s the most I’ve heard her say in fourteen years.” He chased the biscuit with a gulp of milk. Esmerelda couldn’t help but notice how his tongue snaked out to lick away the froth of cream on his upper lip. “When I told her I was heading back to Missouri to join up with Bloody Bill and the rest of the boys, she didn’t say a word. Since I was the only one to come out to New Mexico with her to see her settled, I guess she’d taken it into her head that I’d be staying. When I walked out that door, she didn’t pitch a fit or even ask me not to go.” He shook his head ruefully. “I’d have felt better if she’d have hauled off and walloped me one. But I guess she’d done al the crying and begging she was going to do back in Missouri the night they hanged Pa.” He ducked his head to snap off a bite of bacon, but not before Esmerelda saw the shadow move through his eyes. “I never could abide; woman’s tears. I had to go after them. They made my ma cry.”

“You were there,” she breathed, stunned. “The nigh your father died.”

He gave a curt nod. “I wasn’t no more than a scrawny kid of thirteen, but I tried to stop them anyway. The soldiers held me back. By the time they left and I cut him down, it was too late.”

Such simple words. Such a vivid scene. Even with he: eyes squeezed shut, Esmerelda could still see it.

“I knew then that if I’d have had a gun in my hand, I could have stopped them. That’s when I vowed never to be without one again.”

Esmerelda could not let the icy glint in his eyes gc unchallenged. “If you’d have had a gun in your hand, they’d have probably shot you dead and your mother would have spent the past fourteen years mourning you as well as your father.”

“I reckon she did that anyway.” After a moment, he went on. “I can’t really blame her for taking my leaving sc hard. I was her last hope. She always dreamed of us boy making something better of ourselves than dirt farmer: or outlaws. Her favorite brother was a lawman back in Springfield.”

The keen attention Billy suddenly devoted to his breakfast betrayed more than he intended.

“She must have loved you very much,” Esmerelda said softly.

He flashed her a sheepish grin. “Jasper was right, you know. Ma always was partial to me. Hell, I’m lucky the boys didn’t toss me down a well and sell me to some passing Midianites.”

It was Esmerelda’s turn to blink innocently at him. “Now, Mr. Darling, where would a self-professed heathen such as yourself learn such a story?”

“Must have stumbled on it somewhere,” he mumbled, taking another hearty bite of biscuit.

Esmerelda knew exactly where he’d stumbled on it— between the cracked leather binding of that ancient family Bible. But if she pressed, she knew he would deny it. Just as he had denied owning all those books celebrating the courageous exploits of famous lawmen. Just as he would deny how natural that deputy U.S. marshal’s badge had looked in his hand.

“Ma used to save me the choicest morsels of everything she cooked.” He chuckled. “I used to plague her something fierce on baking day. She’d pretend to get all riled and shoo me out of the kitchen with her apron, but when I snuck back in, there’d be that bowl just sitting there unguarded on the table, waiting to be licked. Yeah,” he said softly. “She loved me.”

How could she not?

The thought rose unbidden to Esmerelda’s mind, ringing so clear that for a moment she was terrified she’d spoken it aloud.

How could Zoe Darling not love a sunny-haired child with a hunger for learning so sharp he risked humiliation and physical torment to satisfy it? How could she not love a slender, handsome boy clever enough to use his wits to survive the brutish bullying of his brothers? How could she not love a boy who’d seen and done things no boy should ever have to see or do, yet had grown into a man so tenderhearted that he hadn’t hesitated to champion a sad-eyed, flea-bitten basset hound whose hunting days were long over?

How could she not love him?

Time dwindled to nothing more significant than the dreamy waltz of dust motes around Billy’s head as Esmerelda realized that she was no longer talking about Zoe.

She stood up abruptly, nearly overturning her chair.

Billy frowned at her. “What’s wrong, honey? You’re white as a bedsheet.” He sniffed gingerly at his empty glass “Was the milk curdled?”

Esmerelda shoved the chair aside, making a dreadful racket, and began to back out of the room. “Uh, no. This milk was just fine. Something else must have disagreed with me.”

Something tall and lanky with a lazy grin and deceptively sleepy eyes that were even now narrowing to seek th thread of truth within her clumsily stitched quilt of lies.

Esmerelda turned to leave, but the blanket coiled around her ankles. Billy lurched around the table and caught he arm to steady her, his casual touch scorching her skin. She gazed up into his smoky green eyes with a helpless mixture of wonder and despair. He was too late. Not even his gun slinger’s reflexes could stop her from falling. She’d already fallen.

Hard.

And it had knocked the breath clear out of her.

Wrenching her arm from Billy’s grasp, Esmerelda fled the room as if Zoe Darling and a horde of ax-wielding giantesses were thundering at her heels.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Death was stalking Bartholomew Fine.

Dressed all in black, he camped outside the canyon cave where Bartholomew had been hiding since fleeing the bank in Eulalie. He was more handsome than Bart had imagined—a smooth-talker with a lazy drawl and a ready grin. A constant companion and a pleasant conversationalist. Although his manner was friendly, Bart would never have thought to address him by his first name, but respectfully referred to him as Mister.

Mr. Death wore his gunbelt low on his hips. A broad-brimmed slouch hat shadowed his face. Bartholomew lived in fear of the inevitable moment when he would reach up with one graceful finger and tip it back, revealing the hellfire in his eyes.

Whenever he could no longer bear the suspense, he would turn his face away from the mouth of the cave and take another long swig from the whiskey bottle. He’d never been much of a drinker, yet empty bottles Uttered the cavern floor around him. Although he would have died before admitting it to the men who had so briefly called him leader, the taste of alcohol made him a little sick. But not as sick as the prospect of facing the specter lurking outside that cave stone-cold sober.

He spent his days huddled against the cavern wall, paralyzed by his own fear. He’d shuffled into a dank corner of the cave to pee one morning only to come face-to-face with his own reflection in the fragment of mirror he’d used to trim his beard when the cave had been his gang’s hideout. He’d recoiled with a high-pitched yelp, barely recognizing the feral creature gawking back at him with its wild, red-rimmed eyes and bushy beard. He’d buried that face in his hands and stumbled back to the wall, Mr. Death’s laughter ringing in his ears.

Night was the worst. Although the chill that came creeping out of the desert after the sun sank was enough to make a man’s fingers and toes tingle and ache, Mr. Death never lit a fire. He preferred the cold.

Bartholomew would fight sleep, his exhausted body twitching with the effort, but his eyes would always betray him by drifting shut, leaving him alone in the darkness.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw blood. Welling from the blackened edges of a fresh wound. Pooling on the floor. Soaking the chaste white of his sister’s gloves. But worse than the blood was the look in Esmerelda’s eyes, a look he almost hadn’t recognized the first time he saw it because it had been so foreign to him. Shame.

His sister—who had glowed with pride every time he trotted home from school with a clumsily written story clutched in his plump fist; who had fussed and crowed over even his most humble efforts at badly rhymed poetry; who had held him while he wept out his disappointment, her own eyes burning with indignation, when a less talented classmate had won the annual essay contest sponsored by the Gazette—was ashamed of him.

One night, after he’d been cowering in the cave for over a week, his tortured imagination devised a new ending for his disjointed dreams. An ending in which it was Esmerelda who lay sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood, shot through the heart by his own hand.

Bartholomew started from sleep, his heart pounding, his shirt drenched with sweat. His lapse of consciousness had given Mr. Death the opportunity to creep a little closer. So close Bart could almost hear the rasp of his breathing in the darkness.

Bartholomew’s cheeks were wet with tears. He swiped at his upper lip like the snot-nosed kid he used to be. Only this time Esmerelda wasn’t there to offer him her handkerchief and gently remind him to blow.

Dropping his head into his hands, he wondered how everything could have gone so wrong so fast. When he’d created Black Bart, he’d only intended him to be a character, the immoral yet charming hero of his very first novel. Using part of the money Esmerelda had set aside for his college education, he had outfitted himself with a sharp suit of clothes and a shiny new Colt. He’d soothed the sting of his conscience by promising himself that the royalties from his first novel would double that money, perhaps even quadruple it. He would return to Esmerelda in triumph, an acclaimed author with enough money to lavish upon them both.

Garbed in his handsome new costume, he’d taken to frequenting saloons and gambling halls. He’d scripted his dialogue as he went along, then hurried back to his hotel room before dawn to carefully record his impressions on the crisp pages of his journal.

He’d soon learned that playing a role could be a heady experience. Women who wouldn’t have looked twice at a plump, bashful young man studying at Boston College to be a teacher or law clerk began to lean over Black Bart’s shoulder and whisper in his ear which card to play. He found the ripe musk of their perfume and the deliberate press of their breasts against his back more intoxicating than any shot of bourbon. By the time the last card was played and they took his hand to draw him up the stairs, he was already too drunk with desire to resist.

His reputation had been born there, in the darkness, between the sheets, with those velvet-soft hands ushering him into manhood. He’d swear them to secrecy, then speak in a voice still hoarse with spent passion of trains he had robbed, women he had loved, men he had killed. He would rise from their rumpled beds, buckling on his gunbelt with sure and steady hands before leaning over to give them a kiss so hot and fierce they always believed it might very well be his last. As soon as he was gone, they would seek out their sister whores. It was their hushed whispers and shivers of fearful delight that had helped him weave his own legend.

Soon men began to be drawn to him as well. Desperate men. Lazy men. Greedy men. Men like Flavil Snorton, who hoped only to be in his company when he blew open his next safe or demanded the halt of another stagecoach. Basking in their respect and adoration, Bartholomew had felt himself slowly disappearing into the skin of his creation without ever once committing an actual crime.

He was abiding quite comfortably in that skin the night Thaddeus Winstead had ambled into the Santa Fe saloon where Black Bart was holding court over a game of poker. So comfortably that he’d let Bart do all the talking while Bartholomew Fine looked on with his mouth hanging open, mute with shock at his character’s audacity.

Sadly enough, Black Bart, with his shiny guns that had never been fired and his slick veneer of sophistication, had been naive enough to believe in honor among thieves. He’d never dreamed that Winstead would use him, then betray him. After all those months of gleefully pretending to be a fugitive from the law, Bartholomew suddenly found himself trapped in the role he had created.

He’d suspected Eulalie was nothing but an ambush from the beginning, but the worshipful glint in the eyes of his men had driven him to take the bait. He’d even deluded himself into believing he could outwit Winstead now that he knew the rules of engagement. Until he’d charged into that bank and come face to face with Mr. Death.

Bartholomew shuddered.

If the creature lurking outside the cave tipped back his hat, Bartholomew knew it was that face he would see. Grim, resolute, ruthless enough to make Black Bart look like nothing more than some city cartoonist’s ineptly drawn caricature of a gunslinger. If Mr. Death chose to deepen their acquaintance, Bartholomew would be forced to gaze into the smoke green eyes of the man he had murdered in cold blood. Only this time, William Darling wouldn’t demand the surrender of his freedom, but his soul.

Bartholomew groped for the whiskey bottle nestled between his legs. It was his last bottle and less than half of it remained. The amber liquid glimmered like fool’s gold in the moonlight, brighter even than the bags and bars of treasury gold that lined the back wall of the cave. Fool’s gold indeed. Only he was the fool.

Tomorrow he would be forced to battle his demons with his senses undulled by liquor.

But not yet. Not tonight.

Bringing the bottle to his lips, he drained it in one long, thirsty gulp.

“I’m sorry, Esme,” he whispered as the bitter heat scorched its way down his throat and settled in the pit of his belly. “I only wanted to make you proud.”

Without bothering to wipe away the tears trickling down his cheeks or the whiskey dribbling down his chin, he slumped to his side and into a mercifully dreamless stupor.

Bartholomew woke to the glorious warmth of sunshine streaming across his face. He slowly pried open his eyes, squinting against the incandescent brilliance.

The mouth of the cave was empty. Mr. Death was gone.

He scrambled to a sitting position, hardly able to believe his good fortune. A disbelieving bark of laughter escaped his lungs.

Then died as he heard the shuffle of boots behind him. Right behind him. He clenched his teeth against a shudder of terror so keen he could actually feel the hair on his scalp begin to lift.

It seemed Mr. Death had come to call while he’d been sleeping.

Bartholomew reached for his gun, remembering too late that he’d flung the hateful thing away after fleeing the bank. Too physically and emotionally exhausted to elude his destiny any longer, he slowly turned to find himself gazing at four pairs of dusty boots.

He blinked in a vain attempt to clear his vision. He’d heard of drunks seeing double, but he’d never heard of one seeing quadruple. He was still trying to puzzle it out when a massive hand swooped down, seized him by the collar, and lifted him clear off the ground, bringing him eye to eye with a golden-haired giant.

“Howdy, son,” the giant boomed, an amiable grin breaking through his sandy beard. His three companions watched with polite indifference as the giant shook him this way and that, like some gargantuan mastiff worrying a bone. “We hate to disturb your nap, but I do believe you just might be the miserable little sonofabitch who shot my baby brother.”

The giant’s grasp on his collar was decidedly mortal, as was the stale blast of his cigar-tainted breath. His face was curiously familiar, but lacked the ruthless cast of Mr. Deaths.

Bartholomew went limp in the man’s grip, so relieved he would have gladly confessed to shooting Lincoln himself.

Until he saw the braided noose swinging from the man’s other hand.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Esmerelda Fine’s accounts always balanced. If she came up even a penny off, short or over, she would spend half the night poring over the books by candlelight until the tidy little numbers inscribed in their neatly drawn columns began to blur before her aching eyes. She used the same meticulous care in her cooking, refusing to even consider substituting a dash of this for a pinch of that. When a piece of music was set in front of her, she played note for note what was written on the page, ignoring the yearning of her hands to ripple and soar in a flight of fancy.

Yet suddenly two and two equaled eleven, her dash of salt had been replaced by a bucket of sugar, and her heart was playing all the wrong notes, arranging them in a melody too compelling to resist.

With a fitful sigh, Esmerelda rolled herself out of her quilt and sat up. She cast the loft a long-suffering look, surprised her heart’s song wasn’t being drowned out by the rumble of Zoe’s snoring. The sound was enough to make the walls quake and the rafters tremble. How odd, she thought, that she had never once heard it when Billy had been so desperately ill.

Flickering moonbeams sifted through the open door, beckoning her into the night. Perhaps if she escaped the stifling heat of the house for a little while, she might be able to clear her head of the cotton batting that had filled it since sharing breakfast with Billy. Leaving the quilt in a dejected puddle, she padded across the floor and slipped onto the porch.

A puff of wind too forceful to be called a breeze stroked her brow and plucked at her unbound hair. The rising wind was scented by a hint of rain, faint enough to be nothing more than another unfulfilled promise. Clouds came billowing in from the west, casting a mighty shadow across the vast sweep of land.

Esmerelda wrapped an arm around one of the porch posts, searching the night with restless eyes. She had hoped to find peace out here, but the reckless abandon of the wind stirred something deep within her—something wild and dangerous that had been fettered for too long.

It made her want to take her mother’s violin out of its case and saw madly at the strings. It made her want to laugh because she, Esmerelda Fine, a woman who had always prided herself on her stern practicality, had been foolish enough to fall in love with a man who was not only a gunslinger, but an avowed bachelor. It made her want to burst into tears.

She might have given in to that last urge if her sensitive nostrils hadn’t detected a whiff of smoke. She whirled around, clapping a hand over her galloping heart.

“You do delight in sneaking up on me, don’t you?” she accused.

Billy stepped out of the shadows of the yard, a lit cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth. “Since I was here first, it could be argued that you snuck up on me.”

Painfully aware that Billy, shirtless and barefoot in the faltering moonlight, just might be more than she could bear at the moment, Esmerelda dropped her scowl to his cigar. “You really shouldn’t be smoking right now. Where did you get that?”

“Ma’s private stash.” His mouth curved into a rueful grin. “I knew there’d be hell to pay if I made off with her pipe tobacco or her snuff.” He flicked the glowing stub into the darkness before arching one tawny eyebrow at her. “There. You satisfied?”

Having recently learned that she never would be, Esmerelda snapped, “Nor should you be out here without a shirt. What if you catch a chill?”

The downward flick of his gaze warned her that she’d succeeded in doing nothing but drawing attention to her own attire. Or lack of it. The wind licked hungrily at her nightgown, cupping the threadbare muslin to her breasts. Her first instinct was to fold her arms protectively over her chest, but the challenging glint in Billy’s eyes kept her standing straight and proud, her hands clenched into fists at her sides.

“Not much danger of that, now, is there?” he said softly. He took a step toward her, his grin softening into a quizzical half smile. “You keep nagging me, honey, I just might think you care.”

His words struck a raw nerve. “Then you’d be sorely mistaken. I just don’t want you lolling about in bed when you could be out looking for my brother. I hired a tracker, not some glory-seeking gunslinger.”

She expected him to snap right back at her and would have felt better if he had, but he simply nodded. “You’re absolutely right, Miss Fine. A man in my weakened condition shouldn’t be partaking of tobacco or the night air.”

He started for the porch. Esmerelda was still gaping with surprise at his amiable surrender when he hesitated and began to sway. She scrambled down the rotting steps to grab him. Stricken with guilt at her shrewish behavior, she searched his features for any hint of returning pallor.

As quick as that, in a move more graceful than any waltz, Billy reversed their positions, wrapping his arms around her.

Thrown off balance by the return of his wiry strength, she glared up at him. “You, sir, are a rascal.”

“And you, ma’am, are entirely too gullible.”

“Your mother—” she protested, squirming frantically.

“Works like an ox and sleeps like the dead.”

As if to underscore his words, a blissful snore came floating out of the darkened house.

Billy’s stern frown was softened by the hint of a dimple in his cheek. “I warned you back at the bank that I might have to arrest you. And as I recall, you promised to surrender yourself into my custody.”

His teasing words took all the fight out of her.

Horrified to realize she might yet burst into tears, Esmerelda turned her face away and whispered, “Don’t trifle with me. It’s too unkind.”

Billy’s grip gentled. He cupped her chin in his palm, coaxing her into meeting his gaze. His eyes were as sober as her own. “Ah, but trifling with you, Duchess, would be such a pleasure.” As if to prove his words, he lowered his head to graze her temple, inhaling deeply. “Did I ever tell you what my favorite kind of pie is?”

As he brought his lips to bear against the downy softness of her cheek, languor melted through Esmerelda’s bones in a sensation so delicious that she no longer struggled to escape, but simply to stay on her feet.

“Ummmm… apple?” she ventured, swallowing hard.

He shook his head. His mouth followed the curve of her cheekbone down and around to the tingling shell of her ear. “Not blueberry either. Oh, I like apple and blueberry just fine, but the one kind of pie I never could resist was…” Catching her earlobe between his teeth, he whispered, “peach.”

She gasped as his heated breath sent a ribbon of anticipation curling deep into her womb.

“Whenever Ma baked a peach pie, I’d swipe it off the windowsill as soon as she set it out to cool. I knew she’d have cut me a piece if I’d have asked real nice, but nothing whets a man’s appetite more than forbidden”—his lips just barely grazed the corner of her mouth, tantalizing a dreamy sigh from her parted lips—“fruit.”

By the time Billy’s mouth covered hers, Esmerelda was nearly dizzy with anticipation. So dizzy that she didn’t stop to think of the consequences when she parted her lips for him, offering up a delicacy moist and luscious enough to tempt the sweet tooth of any man.

As Billy sank his tongue into her, his growl didn’t come from his stomach, but his throat. The primal sound was tinged with raw hunger. When Esmerelda had first wandered onto the porch, stealing a few kisses from a pretty girl in the moonlight had seemed a harmless enough pursuit. But he’d forgotten just how dangerous Esmerelda could be. Beneath her prickly exterior lay the vulnerable innocence of a woman, tender and sweet and ripe for the plucking.

His fierce desire to do just that only served to remind him that he was still a Darling at heart. He’d never learned how to court a woman who couldn’t be bought.

For a brief moment, he almost regretted that she hadn’t been Fine’s woman instead of his sister. Everything would have been so much more simple between them. She would know what he wanted and he would know what she needed and he wouldn’t be standing there in the weeds, rigid with desire and giving her a kiss he had no business giving a virgin.

He was so distracted by the unspoken promises of her mouth that he barely felt the first raindrops strike his back. Rain was a rare and marvelous thing in New Mexico, but not nearly as rare or marvelous as the yielding softness of Esmerelda in his arms.

A sharp clap of thunder heralded the arrival of a genuine downpour. They clung to each other as the rain washed over them, neither wanting to be the first to break away. But when Billy felt a violent shiver wrack Esmerelda’s delicate frame, he drew back, gently chafing her shoulders.

“Come out to the barn with me,” he blurted out.

At least she didn’t slap him right off. She simply blinked up at him, her eyes dark with uncertainty. She couldn’t know how delicious she looked with that worn-out old nightgown plastered to her breasts and her lips still glistening from his kiss. Billy barely resisted the urge to drop to his knees and beg.

“I swear on my pa’s grave that I won’t compromise you,” he vowed, brushing a raindrop from her silky lashes. “I just want to hold you… touch you.”

Esmerelda’s breath caught in a tremulous sigh. She could hardly believe she was actually pondering Billy’s bold proposal. But there was something so tender in his touch, so earnest in his eyes. It tempted her to trust him with both her virtue and her heart. Tempted her to believe that William Darling was a man of his word.

It was that hope, however foolish, that prompted her shy nod.

As if afraid she would change her mind, Billy wasted no time in scooping her up in his arms. She curled both arms around his neck and buried her face against his breastbone, taking care not to disturb his bandage. He covered the distance between house and barn in long, urgent strides. As he shoved open the door with his foot, the animals within greeted them with curious whickers and a plaintive lowing. Leaving the barn door half-open to beckon in the brilliant flashes of lightning and gusts of wind, he deposited Esmerelda on a bed of clean hay.

He followed her down, cupping her face between his hands with fierce tenderness. Rain beat like a sonata against the tin roof, indistinguishable from the painful stammer of Esmerelda’s heartbeat.

“If you don’t want me to,” he whispered hoarsely. “I swear I won’t lay a finger on you.”

“Well, maybe…” Esmerelda swallowed hard, wondering just what manner of wanton spirit had possessed her. “…just one?”

A thoughtful grin spread across his face before he reached up to tip an imaginary hat. “Very well, ma’am. I aim to oblige.”

Oblige her Billy did, using a single fingertip to gently trace the arch of her brow, the flare of her cheekbones, the delicate bridge of her nose, until she had no more pride left than Sadie rolling to her back to beg for a belly scratch. Esmerelda had always lavished hugs and fond caresses on Bartholomew, but since he’d grown too big for such embarrassing displays, there had been no one to hug or caress her. She hadn’t realized how starved for affection she was until that very moment.

Her hunger sharpened as Billy used the calloused pad of his finger to explore the softness of her lips. After a moment of such delicious torment, they instinctively parted and closed around his finger, drawing him into her mouth. He let out a tortured groan of his own.

He laved her tingling lips with honey from her own kiss until they were primed for more of his kisses—a hot, wet feast for the senses that left Esmerelda so sated with delight she barely felt that same sly finger loosening the sodden ties at the throat of her nightgown.

The caress of his breath against her naked shoulder gave her a start of panic. She struggled to sit up. “Billy!”

“Mmmm?” he murmured, stroking the sensitive skin over her fluted collarbone.

Even as she pushed at him, Esmerelda knew she wasn’t playing fair. After all, she was the one who had set the rules of this game, a game at which Billy was already proving himself to be a master. A game she was no longer sure she wanted to win.

Fisting her hands in his damp hair, she forced him to meet her gaze. “You won’t cheat, will you?”

“I make it a habit never to cheat at cards.”

“We’re not playing cards,” she reminded him.

His wink was pure devilment. “Then you’ll just have to take your chances, won’t you?”

Esmerelda despised games of chance, but something told her that if she didn’t take a chance on this man tonight, she might very well regret it for the rest of her staid, lonely life. She’d long ago resigned herself to spending her life without a man, but spending this one night without Billy seemed intolerable.

So she sank back on that sweet-smelling bed of hay and surrendered herself into his custody. He hooked his finger in the bodice of her gown and tenderly peeled the wet fabric from her skin.

When a flicker of lightning limned her naked breasts in quicksilver, she might have cringed with embarrassment if he hadn’t breathed a reverent sigh into her ear. “Peaches, angel. The prettiest ones I’ve ever seen.”

Indeed, the breasts she had always considered so woefully inadequate seemed to swell and ripen beneath his touch. He kissed her softly on the mouth while that deft, wise finger of his traced ever-narrowing circles around the tender globes. He resisted the greedy thrust of her nipples for so long that when his finger finally brushed one of the aching buds, as if by chance, Esmerelda cried out at the raw wonder of it.

He captured her cry with his lips, flicking first one distended nipple, then the other. Tremors of pleasure cascaded through her, forcing her to clamp her legs together against a rush of yearning. It was almost as if he’d touched her somewhere else—somewhere dark, lush, and forbidden.

Esmerelda had struggled not to feel for thirteen years, but beneath Billy’s skillful coaxing, her dormant senses came alive with a vengeance. She could smell the sharp musk of his own desire, taste the mellow hint of tobacco on his tongue, hear every nuance of his husky drawl as he murmured that it sure would be nice if she’d let him put his mouth everywhere she was letting him put his finger.

Esmerelda didn’t really grasp the shocking implications of that proposal until she felt his finger slowly inching up beneath her gown. Even through the modest cotton of her drawers, it felt like a live fuse winding its way between her trembling thighs toward the narrow slit in the fabric. The explosion was inevitable. The instant his fingertip brushed that soft thatch of hair, her legs simply fell apart, yielding all to his touch.

She must have whimpered. She must have moaned.

“Shhhh, sweetheart,” he murmured, “I can’t hurt you with just one finger, can I?”

It wasn’t pain Esmerelda was worried about, but pleasure. A pleasure so thick and sweet it seemed to dribble through her veins like wild honey, melting her resistance to his will. Billy might not mean to hurt her, but he was breaking her heart with nothing more than the tender probing of his fingertip.

She gasped into his mouth as he fondled her passion-engorged flesh, the grace of his gunslinger’s hands serving them both well. He sought the taut bud nestled within her silky folds, stroking and rubbing until she was panting with delight. Only then did he dip his long, blunt finger into the nectar welling from her throbbing core.

“Peaches and cream,” he groaned against her lips, making her shudder with primal longing.

To Esmerelda’s dismay, she discovered that Billy was a man of his word. Although she arched her back, desperately trying to press herself into his palm, he prolonged her delicious torment by using only his calloused fingertip to tease her into a frenzy of ecstasy.

“Please,” she choked out, burying her burning face in the crook of his throat. “I’m throwing myself on the mercy of the court.”

“No mercy,” he breathed into her ear before deliberately splintering her into a thousand glittering shards.

Esmerelda cried out her astonishment as all the pleasure she’d denied herself for the past thirteen years seemed to swell through her body in one devastating surge that left her limp and trembling in its wake.

She lay steeped in a haze of wonder until the ragged rasp of Billy’s breathing coaxed her eyes open. He was no longer holding her, but sat a few inches away with his elbows propped on his knees and one of those long-boned wrists of his gripped in his other hand. His knuckles were stark white.

The rain had stopped and a shaft of moonlight pierced the musty gloom, illuminating the raw beauty of his profile. A muscle beat beneath the taut skin of his jaw. Esmerelda glanced down, seeing herself as he must see her—a wanton stranger with her breasts bared to the kiss of the moonlight, her nightgown twisted around her waist, her legs sprawled apart in reckless invitation. Shame flooded her as she realized just how generous he’d been and how selfish he’d allowed her to be.

She scrambled to a sitting position, jerking her bodice up and her gowntail down. “Oh, Lord, Billy, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“Hush,” he said harshly, still not looking at her. “You don’t owe me anything. Especially not an apology.”

He looked so rigid that she was afraid he might shatter if she dared to touch him. But she dared anyway, running her fingertips over the day’s growth of golden bristle that shadowed his jaw.

He caught her wrist with the grace of a striking rattler, then turned her hand to press a rough kiss to her palm. Before she could recover from her breathless shock, he swept her up in his arms and started for the barn door.

“Where are you taking me?” she blurted out, struggling to clutch her bodice to her breasts and cling to his neck at the same time.

Billy’s eyes narrowed in a mean-eyed squint that sent a primitive shiver rippling down Esmerelda’s spine. “To bed.”

Billy spent the longest night of his life watching Esmerelda sleep in his bed without him.

As the rosy blush of dawn crept across her cheeks, he sat in the old rocker with his bare feet propped on the edge of the straw mattress. Somewhere outside, a lone rooster warbled a plaintive how-do-you-do. A board directly over his head let out a mighty creak, warning him that Zoe was already awake and stirring.

Esmerelda looked so beautiful lying there on the narrow bedstead he’d slept in as a boy, with her hair spilled across the quilt his ma had stitched, that Billy had to rock backward every now and then just to catch his breath. Having her there was like having one of his more vivid boyhood fantasies fulfilled. He could still remember lying on that bed alone, gazing out his window at the Missouri moon and dreaming of a girl just like her. The kind of girl a Darling could only dream of having.

But he was no longer a boy. And Esmerelda was a woman grown. He wanted her badly. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, but he wanted her anyway. The only thing that stopped him from taking her was knowing that if he went back on his word now, he would be no better than Jasper or Bart Fine or any of the other meanspirited sons-of-bitches who believed they could steal what they wanted without ever once having to pay a price.

There had been a moment last night, when Esmerelda had lain vulnerable and trembling in his arms, her naked breasts still flushed from her first taste of bliss, when he would have paid any price to climb between those milky thighs of hers—even his soul. Billy dropped his head into his hands, wondering if he’d ever again taste anything as sweet as the rain on Esmerelda’s skin.

At first he thought the rumble of distant thunder was only the taunt of his memory. But that was before the first gunshot rang out, shattering the morning calm.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Winstead!” Billy hissed before springing out of the rocker and scrambling for the open window.

That first shot was followed by a torrent of hoofbeats and a gleeful barrage of gunfire. Billy pressed his back to the wall and stole a cautious peek out the window, half expecting to be gunned down by a spray of bullets.

When he saw who was making the racket and why, he almost wished he had been. He groaned aloud before biting off one of his more descriptive oaths. He nearly jumped out of his skin when it was greeted by a scandalized gasp.

“Why, William Darling!” Esmerelda cried, sitting bolt upright in the bed. “I know that chair isn’t very comfortable and you tend to be grumpy in the morning, but you ought to be ashamed of yourself for using that kind of gutter language in front of a lady.”

Billy reached behind him and snatched the burlap curtains together, wishing he’d thought to slam the window when he had the chance. At least he no longer had to worry about a stray bullet striking either of them. “Oh, I am, honey. Deeply ashamed. Now, you just go right back to sleep and I’ll get Ma to wash out my mouth with some of her strongest lye soap.”

Esmerelda yawned, the tumble of her hair making her look deliciously rumpled. Billy suffered a sharp pang of regret. He should have crawled into that bed with her when he’d had the chance. If she got a gander at what was outside that window, he might never get another one.

“What’s that dreadful noise?” she asked, knuckling her eyes.

“It’s probably just Ma shooting her some breakfast. You know Ma. When she gets a hankering for chicken gizzards, there’s no dissuading her.”

Esmerelda lowered her hands. “Your mother shoots chickens?”

For once in his life, Billys glib tongue failed him. He strode toward the bed. “There’s really no need for you to rise this early. Why don’t you let me tuck you back in?”

He jerked the quilt out from under her and threw it over her head, hoping it would muffle the worst of the din. It barely succeeded in muffling her outraged protests. She finally managed to bat it away, but before she could do more than sputter in indignation, the gunfire ceased and a male voice boomed like cannonshot, making them both jump.

“Hey, little brother! You alive in there?”

Billy winced at that familiar bellow. A bellow even Esmerelda couldn’t fail to recognize. He closed his eyes briefly and cleared his throat before calling out, “Yeah, Virg, I’m alive.”

“Well, come join the party, then,” his oldest brother roared in an invitation too jovial to resist. “There’s a young feller out here who’d like to have a word with you. Turns out he’s mighty sorry for shootin‘ you up like he did. He’d like to make peace with both you and his Maker before we string him up from this here oak.”

Esmerelda went pale, then white. Their gazes locked for a frantic moment before she went bounding out of the bed and Billy went bounding over it, both racing for the gunbelt draped over the doorknob. Despite his well-honed reflexes, Esmerelda got there first.

She wrapped her fingers around the butt of the pistol. He wrapped his fingers around hers. They wrestled over the weapon, neither willing to be the first to let go.

“If you put another bullet in me,” he muttered through clenched teeth, desperately trying to steer the barrel of the weapon away from all four of their bare feet, “I’m not going to be quite so inclined to overlook it.”

“Then let go!” she demanded, straining against his relentless grip.

He did.

Esmerelda was so surprised, she stumbled against the wardrobe and nearly fell. From her triumphant look, Billy knew that she’d failed to take one thing into account. He still stood between her and the door.

He asserted his squatter’s claim by leaning against it and folding his arms over his chest. “I can take the gun from you by force, but I’d rather you give it to me.”

“They’re going to hang him,” she wailed softly. “They’re going to hang my baby brother.”

“No, they’re not.” He held out his hand. It was as steady as it had ever been without a gun in it. “For once in your life, woman, you’re going to have to trust somebody besides yourself.”

Although Esmerelda’s face was still ashen, her eyes glittered with pride. A pride she had clung to without complaint or compromise ever since her parents had left a lonely, frightened twelve-year-old to fend for herself and her little brother. Billy held his breath. If she relaxed her white-knuckled grip on the gun, she would be offering him a gift even more precious than the generous liberties she’d allowed him in the barn.

When she lifted the pistol, pointing the barrel square at his chest, disappointment stabbed him. Then she turned the weapon and gently laid it, butt-first, into his palm. Ignoring the gun, he cupped her nape in his other hand and drew her to him for a kiss.

“You’ll never regret it,” he murmured into her hair. “I swear it.”

After Billy had snatched up his gunbelt and gone, Esmerelda slumped against the wardrobe, unable to determine if she was more dazed by his promise or his kiss. Both had been brief, fierce, and unbearably sweet.

She might have lingered there all morning if Virgil’s roar hadn’t rattled the windowpanes, startling her back to sanity. “I hate to start the party without you, son, but this tenderfoot’s fancy necktie ain’t gonna hold forever.”

“Bartholomew,” Esmerelda whispered, besieged by a fresh wave of horror.

She threw open the door and raced into the parlor, forgetting about her revealing attire. She skidded to a halt, shocked to discover Zoe Darling perched on a cane-backed rocker by the hearth, rocking and puffing on her pipe as if a lynching wasn’t about to occur practically in her own front yard. Sadie slept on the rag rug at her feet, blissfully snoring.

Esmerelda dropped to her knees beside the chair and gazed up into the woman’s stoic face. “Ma?” The word came easily to her tongue for the first time. “You need to fetch your shotgun. It really won’t do to send Billy out there all alone. In case you haven’t noticed, your sons have a tendency to be…” reckless? bloodthirsty? as vicious as a pack of rabid coyotes? “um… high-spirited.”

“The boy’s old enough to fight his own battles.” Zoe took another laconic puff off the pipe, refusing to meet Esmerelda’s eyes. “He proved that fourteen years ago when he up and ran off.”

“But he almost died only a few days ago. He still hasn’t regained his full strength.”

Zoe cut her eyes toward Esmerelda, taking in her disheveled hair, rumpled nightgown, and bare feet. Her mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Looks to me like he has.”

Esmerelda blushed to the roots of her hair. She climbed stiffly to her feet. “Very well, Mrs. Darling. But since you’ve decided to harden your heart against a thirteen-year-old boy who ran off to avenge his father’s death, you might want to know that he didn’t do it for himself. He did it for you. Because they made you cry.”

Zoe’s chin might have quivered just the tiniest bit, but Esmerelda wasn’t inclined to comfort her. Straightening her shoulders as if they were draped with a duchess’s ermine-trimmed mantle instead of an old, faded nightgown, she marched across the room and slammed her way out the door.

When Esmerelda caught her first glimpse of Bartholomew, her bravado deserted her. She had to wrap one arm around a porch post to keep from staggering to her knees.

He sat astride a dun gelding at the crest of the hill, his hands bound behind his back and a noose draped around his neck. The other end of the rope had already been knotted over a jagged branch of the dead oak so that every time the horse shifted this way or that, it pulled his neck taut. It wasn’t the vivid bruises on her brother’s face but the defeated slope of his shoulders and the utter lack of hope in his expression that frightened Esmerelda more than anything.

Sam and Enos watched the proceedings from the back of the same wagon Billy had rented from the livery in Calamity, while Jasper gripped the reins of Bartholomew’s horse in his gloved hand. Even from that distance, there was no mistaking the nasty gleam in his eye.

Billy was already striding toward Virgil, who stood with hands on hips and feet planted wide, like some jolly giant appointed to greet the Lilliputians.

“It’s good to see you back on your feet, little brother,” he boomed. “Since I’ve elected myself president of this here hemp committee, I’d like to say a few words before we commence with the—”

“Cut him down, Virg,” Billy commanded.

Virgil’s face fell. He cupped a hand around his ear. “Say again. I don’t think I heard you right.”

Billy raised the pistol and kept walking. “I said cut him down.”

Enos and Sam exchanged a perplexed glance. Virgil took a step backward, his nervous gaze flicking to the weapon in his brother’s hand. “Hell, Billy, I loaned you that iron. You ain’t gonna shoot me with my own gun, are you?”

Billy stopped, cocking the pistol. “Only if I have to.”

Virgil gazed into his brother’s steely eyes for a long minute before flaring his nostrils in a snort of disgust. “Cut him down, Jasper.”

“Like hell I will.”

Billy swung the pistol toward Jasper.

A lazy grin spread over Jasper’s face. Esmerelda was struck anew by what a handsome man he might have been had his soul not been so ugly. “You ain’t gonna shoot me, are you, little brother? Cause if you shoot me, I just might drop these reins. And if I drop these reins, Mr. Fine-and-Dandy here is goin‘ on the last ride he’ll ever take.”

“Don’t!” Esmerelda hoarsely cried.

Although she’d vowed to trust Billy, she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She plunged down from the porch and went racing toward her brother. She might have made it if Billy hadn’t shot out an arm, caught her around the waist, and gathered her against him. She could feel his heart beating strong and steady against her back.

“Be still, sweetheart,” he murmured in her ear, his voice as smooth as oiled leather. “You don’t want to spook the horse, do you?”

“N-n-no,” she replied, her teeth chattering with helpless fury.

He lifted his head to look Jasper straight in the eye. “This isn’t your quarrel,” he said mildly. “I’m the one the boy shot.”

“We’re blood kin,” Jasper replied. “You wrong one of us, you wrong us all. Then you pay the price.”

Virgil, Sam, and Enos nodded their agreement.

Billy gave Bartholomew a thorough once-over. “Looks to me like this boy’s already done enough paying. Those wouldn’t be your fist prints on his face, now, would they, Jasper? I always said you could whip any man as long as he had his hands tied behind his back.”

“Why, you rotten little—”Jasper started for him, but his death grip on the reins brought him up short.

The horse pranced sideways, straining Bartholomew’s neck to an impossible angle; Bartholomew didn’t make a sound, but Esmerelda whimpered aloud.

“Whoa, there,” Billy crooned, as much to Jasper and Esmerelda as to the jittery horse. “I only meant to suggest that since the boy’s insult to my person turned out to be nothing more than a flesh wound, hanging might be a mite harsh.”

Remembering how valiantly Billy had fought for his life only a few days before, Esmerelda's heart welled with tenderness.

“What would you rather do?” Jasper asked, sneering with contempt. “Whip out that shiny little badge of yours and arrest him?”

Billy cocked his head to one side as if he was genuinely pondering the situation. “Considering that there’s been no real harm done, I might be willing to accept a sincere apology.” He turned to Enos and Sam, appealing first to his less bloodthirsty siblings. “How about it, boys? If the lady’s brother says he’s sorry, would you vote to cut him down?”

Billy gave her a sharp squeeze. Esmerelda responded to his cue by batting her eyelashes in Enos and Sam’s direction. “I’d be eternally in your debt.”

Sam scratched his head. “Huh?”

“She’d be much obliged,” Billy translated.

The two men exchanged a glance, then Enos shyly nodded. “She does play a m-m-mighty purty fiddle.”

“Virg?” Billy asked.

Virgil tore off his hat and slapped it against his thigh. “Aw, what the hell. Though I think it’s a dadburned shame to ruin a perfectly good lynchin‘.”

“Jasper?”

Although he refused to meet his brothers eyes, Jasper’s shoulders twitched in a sullen shrug that would have to be answer enough.

Billy’s attention shifted to Bartholomew. Esmerelda didn’t have to see Billy’s eyes to know they’d narrowed in unspoken warning. She held her breath as her brother straightened his head the best he could, swallowing against the strangling tension of the rope. He glanced briefly at Billy, then defiantly shifted his gaze to Esmerelda.

“I never meant to hurt you,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

As Esmerelda gazed into his tear-glazed eyes, she knew he truly was. Perhaps for the first time in his life. A sob caught in her throat as her heart surged with love and pride. She had her brother back. The one who’d slipped his little hand into hers each Sunday afternoon when they went to put flowers on their parents’ graves. The one who’d written startlingly eloquent poems about his mama playing her violin with the other angels in heaven. The one who had wrapped his chubby arms around her waist whenever he sensed she was tired or lonely or afraid.

She didn’t understand the reason for the terrible resignation in those eyes until Jasper hooted. “You’re sorry, all right! A sorrier sonofabitch I never saw.” Before any of them could react, he let go of the reins, smacked the horse on the rump, and shouted, “Yee-haw!”

Esmerelda screamed. Flinging her aside, Billy dropped to one knee and fired six times in rapid succession, cocking the hammer and squeezing the trigger so fast his hand was nothing more than a blur.

He might have severed the rope. He might have saved Bartholomew’s life. But he didn’t have to. For at that precise moment, a mighty shotgun blast struck the oak, shattering the rotten wood and sending the branch and Bartholomew sprawling to the ground in a cloud of dust.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Esmerelda’s ears were still ringing when Zoe Darling came swaggering down from the porch with Sadie marching along behind her. The flared muzzle of her shotgun was still smoking, as was the pipe clamped between her teeth.

Her long strides carried her right past where Billy still knelt in the dirt; past Virgil, who looked as if he was quaking in his boots; and past Jasper, who paled as if he’d seen a ghost.

She didn’t stop until she reached Bartholomew. He blinked up in astonishment at the massive Amazon towering over him, shotgun in hand.

“You all right, son?” she asked.

He slowly sat up, massaging the angry rope burns that had seared his throat. “I think so,” he rasped. He had to swallow several times, his bruised Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, before he could squeak out, “Th-th-thank you, ma’am, for saving my life.”

Esmerelda beamed with pride. At least he hadn’t forgotten his manners.

Zoe gave him a kindly smile. “Consider it my pleasure. I never did care much for public lynchins‘. Especially in my own front yard.”

As she swung around, her smile darkened to a thunderous scowl. She took a long draw on the pipe, sending smoke roiling from her nostrils. Jasper flinched. Virgil began to tiptoe toward his horse. Esmerelda groped for Billy’s hand.

But the first blast of Zoe’s wrath was directed at the two men huddled together on the seat of the wagon. “Git down from there this instant, you yellow-bellied curs.”

Enos and Sam exchanged a fearful glance, then scrambled down from the wagon as if afraid their mother just might empty that second barrel into their hides.

She shook a finger in their sallow faces. “I ought to tan your sorry behinds for bein‘ a party to mischief such as this.”

“But, Ma,” they whined in unison. “Virgil made us do it.”

“And you!” She turned on Virgil, freezing him just as he was reaching for the bridle of his horse. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Why, you’re the oldest! Just what kind of example have you been settin‘ for these poor, feebleminded children?”

Virgil ducked his head and kicked at the dirt like a chastened six-year-old. “I’m sorry, Ma. I’ll do better next time.” He shot her a hopeful look from beneath his sandy brows. “Honest, I will!”

Esmerelda shook her head, utterly bemused. Who would have thought one cranky old woman could reduce the infamous Darling gang to sniveling shame?

Seemingly satisfied with Virgil’s promise, Zoe strode over to Jasper. He stared straight ahead, as sulky and defiant as ever. Until his mother reached up and smacked his hat clean off his head.

“You know better than to leave your hat on in your ma’s presence. Didn’t I teach you better manners than that?”

“Yeah, I reckon you did,” he drawled.

“It’s ‘Yes, ma’am,”“ she corrected sternly.

“Yes, ma’am,” he meekly echoed, his bottom lip starting to quiver.

Esmerelda might have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t just tried to murder her brother in cold blood.

Zoe settled her shotgun in the crook of her arm and surveyed the lot of them. It was apparent from their hangdog expressions that they were just waiting for her to order them off her land.

She shook her head in exasperation. “It looks like you haven’t had a decent bath or meal between the four of you in fourteen years. Git inside and I’ll boil you some water and rustle you up some grub.”

Their faces brightened, making them look less like vicious outlaws and more like prodigal sons, glad to be home after a long stint of wallowing with the pigs.

“Don’t you sass me none, either. I can still lick every one of you if I have to, and don’t think I cain’t.” As they filed past with Zoe herding them along like some ill-tempered sheepdog, Esmerelda realized that Billy had not been included in the invitation.

He was already climbing to his feet and holstering his pistol, his face unreadable. Esmerelda might have thrown herself into his arms then and there if a hoarse cough hadn’t reminded her that she had a prodigal of her own to welcome home.

She scrambled over to Bartholomew, dropping to her knees beside him. He gave her a look of such abject shame that she couldn’t resist opening her arms to him. Instead of ducking out of her embrace as he had so many times in the recent past, he wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his face in her bosom, his shoulders heaving with emotion.

While Esmerelda was stroking Bartholomew’s hair and crooning words of comfort, Billy turned his head to squint at the horizon. The man was her brother, for God’s sake. There was no need for him to feel such an ugly stab of jealousy. But Esmerelda’s gentle murmur and the nagging cadence of his ma’s voice telling Virgil to take off those filthy boots of his before he tracked up her clean dirt floor made him feel as if he were the only man alive on that windswept plateau.

To escape the sting of the wind, Billy moseyed on over to the buckboard and peered into the back. He whistled beneath his breath as he got his first clear look at its cargo.

Bart must have sensed his sardonic glance. Hastily extracting himself from his sister’s arms, he scrambled to his feet, giving his nose a surreptitious swipe. He and Billy eyed each other warily.

Bart finally nodded toward the bandage wrapped around Billy’s shoulder. “I really am sorry about that. I never shot anyone before.” A faint shudder raked him. “It’s not an experience I would care to repeat.”

Billy simply nodded. “I’ll live.” He jerked a thumb toward the back of the wagon. “But you might not, if we don’t figure out what to do with this.”

“The treasury gold?” Bart stole a nervous glance at the house before lowering his voice to a stage whisper. “I think your brothers are planning to keep it for themselves.”

Billy shook his head. “I’m afraid that just won’t do.”

Bart brightened. “You think I should keep it?”

Billy rolled his eyes and shook his head again. Esmerelda climbed to her feet, her nightgown whipping in the wind. Billy wished he was wearing a shirt he could take off and wrap around her.

She gave the wagon a despairing look. “Oh, Bartholomew, what were you thinking?”

Billy noted that this time Bart didn’t stammer an excuse or hang his head. He met his sister’s gaze dead-on. “I was thinking what a pitiful excuse for a man I’d been. I was thinking about how I let you sacrifice everything for me, including your own childhood. I was thinking that even if I went to college like you wanted me to, it would be years before I could afford to buy you the things you deserved.” He caught her by the shoulders. “Don’t you know that it drove me half-wild with shame to see you wearing Mama’s mended dresses while you taught those spoiled little merchant’s daughters in their Worth gowns and diamond pinkie rings?”

Tears glistened in Esmerelda’s eyes. “But I never wanted Worth gowns and diamond pinkie rings! All I ever wanted was children of my own and a decent man to love.”

Billy flinched. Her words cut to the bone. Decent wasn’t a word he’d ever heard used to describe a Darling. Decent was some store clerk or lawyer coming home from the office every day with his leather satchel tucked beneath his arm. Decent was Esmerelda greeting her husband at the door with a tender kiss, her apron smelling of fresh-baked peach pie. Decent was a batch of laughing, brown-eyed children gathered around a piano while Esmerelda sang shrill Christmas carols. The image made him feel funny—sad and mean all at the same time.

Half afraid of just what else he might hear, Billy gruffly interrupted. “What’s done is done. There’s no point in arguing about it. I can drop off the gold at the bank in Eulalie for safekeeping on my way back to Calamity. I’ll telegraph the marshal in Albuquerque and let him know it’s there. He’s a good man. He’ll see to it that Winstead doesn’t prey on any more tenderfoots like young Brat here.“

Their own quarrel forgotten, brother and sister both swung toward him and said in unison, “Bart!”

He simply shrugged.

“Isn’t that wonderful?” Esmerelda exclaimed. “Mr. Dar”—she slanted him a shy glance, plainly deciding that the delicious intimacies they’d shared at least entitled her to call him by his Christian name—“Billy will return die gold and you’ll be free to return home.”

Bart stiffened. “I’m afraid I won’t be returning to Boston.”

“Why, of course you will! It’s where you belong.”

Billy cleared his throat. This was the moment he’d been dreading. “Your brother’s right. He can’t go back. At least not yet. I can look after myself and you, but until Winstead and his men are behind bars, he won’t be safe.”

Bartholomew clasped his sister’s shoulders again, more gently this time. “You can’t keep me in short pants forever, Esme. It’s time for me to make my own way in the world.”

“But what about Boston College? Mama and Papa always dreamed you’d attend university and become a journalist like Papa.”

“Mama and Papa are dead,” he said softly. “I have my own dreams now. I don’t want to spend my life writing editorials and obituaries for people to read over their morning coffee. I want to write stories that come from my own imagination. I want to make people laugh and cry. I want to make them dream.”

“But where will you go?”

He looked toward the far horizon, the twinkle in his eye sharpening to a dreamer’s glint. “I always thought South America would be a lovely place to write my first novel.” He chuckled dryly. “I’ve certainly had ample inspiration in the past few months.”

Billy reached into the pocket of his trousers and drew out a wad of money. Instead of peeling off a few bills, he handed Bart the entire thing. “Winstead paid me this to kill you. It seems only fitting that you should use it to start a new life.”

“I’m in your debt, sir,” Bart replied, offering him his hand. “I won’t forget it.”

As they shook hands, man-to-man for the first time, Esmerelda stood blinking in bewilderment, as if everything was happening too fast for her to comprehend. Billy felt a twinge of pity. He knew exactly how it felt to be the one left standing outside when the door slammed.

Hoping to earn her some time to get used to the idea of losing her brother a second time, he nodded toward the house. “I’m sure Ma would be glad to fix you something to eat before you go. She seems to have taken quite a shine to you.”

Shooting the house another fearful glance, Bart reached up to massage his throat. “I believe I’ll just be on my way. I’ve got a long trip ahead of me. I can stop for supplies at the next town.” He turned to Esmerelda, drawing her limp body in for a swift, hard hug. She hung like a rag doll in his embrace. “I’ll write you, Esme, just as soon as I get settled.”

It wasn’t until he was striding toward the dun gelding that stood grazing on a sparse patch of grama grass halfway down the hill that she snapped out of her daze.

“Bartholomew Fine, you get back here this instant!”

He paused for a nearly imperceptible second, then resumed walking.

“Don’t you turn your back on me while I’m talking. I won’t tolerate such impertinence!“ Her voice broke on a quavering note.

Her brother was already throwing one leg over the saddle and turning the horse south.

Esmerelda caught Billy’s arm in an imploring grip, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I just found him. I can’t lose him again! Please, Billy, you have to stop him!”

He caught her shoulders in a grip as fierce as her own. “I’d shoot him in the leg if I believed you both wouldn’t hate me and each other for it later.”

“I don’t want you to shoot him. I just want you to talk some sense into the boy!”

He deliberately gentled both his grip and his voice. “He’s not a boy any longer, Esmerelda. He’s a man.”

Sobbing with frustration, she wrenched herself out of his grasp and went tearing down the hill. Bart had already kicked the horse into a canter. Soon he would be nothing but a puff of dust on the horizon.

Esmerelda must have realized it, too, for halfway down the hill, she stumbled to her knees, her shoulders crumpling in defeat.

Although Billy ached to go to her, he’d had plenty of practice biding his time. He leaned against the buckboard until the sun began to climb in the crisp blue sky. Until even the puff of dust had been scattered by the wind.

Only then did he start down the hillside. The brittle grasses crackled beneath his bare feet, warning Esmerelda of his approach.

She sat with one leg drawn up to her stomach, her mouth pressed to her knee. Her tears had dried to dusty streaks on her cheeks. Billy yearned to draw her into his arms, but she looked too brittle—as if one touch might scatter her on the wind as well.

He sank down on the hillside as near as he dared, leaned back on one elbow, and tucked a hollow blade of grass between his teeth. She surprised him by speaking first.

“Bartholomew’s little heart was broken when Mama and Papa died. I tried to make it up to him, but I guess I never did.”

Billy frowned, pained by her choice of words. “Hell, Esmerelda, you didn’t kill them.”

She turned to look him straight in the eye. “Oh, but I did.”

When she returned her gaze to the empty horizon, Billy could only stare at the bleak curl of her mouth. “I once had a friend named Rebecca. I was always a little shy and I didn’t make friends easily, so Becky was very precious to me. One evening, I overheard Mama and Papa whispering that she was sick. I begged them to let me go visit her. Mama turned white and Papa, who had never once raised his voice to me, shouted that I was to do no such thing and I must go to my room immediately.

“I ran up the stairs, crying. I rarely disobeyed, you see. I was a very good girl.” She slanted him a mocking smile, giving him a glimpse of the mischievous little girl she would have liked to have been. “But this time I managed to convince myself that my parents were just being selfish and mean. I knew I could make Becky feel better if I could only see her. I made her some roses out of yellow tissue paper.”

Billy knew what was coming next. He couldn’t begin to number the muggy summer nights back in Missouri when he’d crept out his window, shed his drawers, and plunged butt-naked into the icy cold waters of a nearby spring.

“I waited until they were all asleep,” Esmerelda continued, “then I slipped down the back staircase and out of the house, clutching my pathetic little bouquet. When I got to Becky’s house, I could tell there was something terribly wrong. Although it must have been near midnight, every lamp in the house was burning. I could see strangers milling about the parlor. Becky’s mother was crying, and her father was sitting with his face buried in his hands. Before I could duck, he lifted his head and looked right at the window. He didn’t look at me.“ She shivered. ”He looked through me.

“I ran, then, as fast as I could, to the back of the house where Becky’s bedroom was. I could see her through the French windows, laid out on her bed in her prettiest nightgown. An old woman I’d never seen before was napping in a chair in the corner.”

Billy had to clench his hands into fists to keep from reaching for her.

“I slipped into the room and crept toward the bed. Becky was always so pink and jolly. It scared me to see her lying there so still and pale. Then I felt ashamed for being afraid. So I reached up, ever so gently, and touched her cheek. Her skin was like ice. I must have made a sound because the woman in the rocking chair came awake with a start.

“”How did you get in here?“ she shouted. ”Get away from her, you wicked little girl!“

“She frightened me so badly that I dropped the flowers, jumped out the window, and ran all the way home. I threw myself into my bed without even bothering to take off my shoes and pulled the blanket over my head. It took hours for my teeth to stop chattering.” Esmerelda sighed. “I found out later that Becky had died earlier that afternoon. Of cholera.”

Billy lowered his head. He might have been able to stand it if Esmerelda had cried. But her eyes were as dry and barren as a desert that has survived centuries without even the hope of rain.

“I never told Mama and Papa what I’d done. Not even when they lay wracked by chills and soaked in their own sweat. Not when their lips cracked and blood trickled from the corners of their mouths. I nursed them the best I could. No one else would come near the house until the disease had run its course and they were dead.” Her words were edged with all the bitterness and self-loathing that had been festering beneath her composed exterior for thirteen years. “I never suffered so much as a sniffle.”

But she’d been suffering ever since, Billy thought. Suffering because a single moment of willful disobedience had left her spirit crushed like paper flowers beneath the indifferent heel of fate. She’d atoned for her sin by sacrificing her every dream and desire and becoming both mother and father to Bartholomew. Now that he was gone for good, Billy supposed, she wasn’t sure who she was supposed to be.

He rolled the tube of grass between his fingers, choosing his words with deliberate care. “When I was riding with Quantrill and Anderson, we lost more men to disease than we did to Yankee bullets—dysentery, typhoid, influenza… cholera. Almost every one of those sicknesses was spread through contaminated food or drinking water. I don’t believe you could have given your parents cholera by touching a dead girl’s cheek. They most likely just drank from the same -water supply as your friend.”

Esmerelda’s gaze was fierce, as if she wanted desperately to believe him, but wouldn’t allow herself. “You might assume that, but can you prove it? Can you swear with absolute certainty that I didn’t invite that monster into my parents’ house?”

Billy wanted to say yes, but knew she wouldn’t believe him anyway. He reached over to stroke her hair. “You were a child, sweetheart. With a child’s generous heart. Even if your parents had known what you’d done, do you really think they would have blamed you or wanted you to spend the rest of your life blaming yourself?”

Shaking off his caress, Esmerelda sprang to her feet, fury glittering in her dark eyes. “If I won’t accept God’s forgiveness, what makes you think I’d accept yours?”

Growing more wary, Billy climbed to his feet to face her.

She stiffened, looking exactly like the woman who had marched into that saloon and pointed her derringer at his heart. “Since you sent my brother on his merry way with your blessing and Winstead’s money, it seems I’ll no longer be requiring either your pity or your services. You’re dismissed, Mr. Darling.”

Billy had thought being shot in the chest hurt, but that pain was nothing but a sting compared to this. He actually glanced down at his bandage, expecting to find it stained with fresh blood.

Snatching up the dusty skirts of her nightgown as if they were the train of a velvet robe, Esmerelda went marching up the hill toward the house. The only sound he heard through the ringing in his ears was the door slamming in his face one last time.

When Billy returned to the house later that afternoon, he found Esmerelda seated on her trunk by the front door with her gloved hands folded primly in her lap. She’d donned the rumpled traveling costume she’d worn at their very first meeting, wound her hair into a knot so tight she was darn near cross-eyed, and slapped that godawful bonnet over the whole mess. She would have looked no less approachable had she been wearing a full suit of armor.

“If you’re waiting for a stagecoach,” he drawled, leaning against the doorframe, “you’d best be prepared to sit a spell.”

She lifted her face to him. Scrubbed free of tearstains, it was as pale and stiff as a piece of porcelain. “I was hoping you would escort me back to Calamity so I could catch the stagecoach there.” Her voice dripped honeyed scorn. “I would think it would be the very least you could do.”

He gave her his nastiest smile. “Oh, I could do a lot less than that. But I won’t.”

He straightened to find his entire family staring at him as if he were some snarling wolf who’d wandered into their midst. Jasper was polishing his boots while Virgil and his ma sat smoking companionably by the hearth. Sam was hunched over the table, picking over the crumbs of an apple pie, and Enos, still wearing his wrinkled red drawers, was submerged up to his bony knees in a round wooden tub.

Billy swept them a look so black it raised even Jasper’s eyebrows. “I’m taking that treasury gold to the bank in Eulalie and wiring its rightful owners. I won’t tolerate any argument on the matter.”

“You won’t get any from us,” Virgil said heartily, casting his mother a timid glance. “Ma taught us better than that. ”Thou shalt not steal.“ Right, Ma?”

Zoe rocked and nodded, taking a particularly self-righteous puff on her pipe. Sadie blinked up at her, drooling in adoration.

Billy strode into the bedroom, emerging a few minutes later wearing his boots and the same shirt he’d arrived in. While he’d been unconscious, Esmerelda had managed to mend the bullet tear and scrub most of the bloodstains out of it. He didn’t care to think about what an effort that must have taken.

She was waiting for him on the porch, having already made her farewells. His stride didn’t slow until he’d almost reached the open door.

“Come, Sadie,” he commanded, swinging around and patting his thigh.

The hound hesitated, shooting his mother a questioning glance.

Billy squatted and stretched out his hand. “Sadie, come!” The words came out sharper than he intended. Sadie cowered against his mother’s skirts.

Billy dropped his head and raked a hand through his hair. Hell, he thought, if Sadie turned on him, too, he might just break down and cry right there in front of God and everybody.

Zoe gently nudged the dog with her toe. “Git on with you, you old mutt. One crotchety old bitch around here is enough.”

Taking that as a blessing, Sadie came waddling over, giving Billy’s hand an affectionate snuffle with her cold, wet nose. Billy scratched behind her ears, absurdly grateful for her loyalty.

When he straightened, his brothers were all waiting to clap him on the back and wish him well. A dripping Enos elbowed Samuel aside so he could stutter a goodbye while Virgil pressed some of his own cigars on him. Even Jasper managed a grudging handshake. Billy glanced at his mother. She looked away.

He figured he ought to be getting used to women not speaking to him. Although he had to admit it was going to be mighty nice to get back to Miss Mellie’s. The women there had never minded speaking to him. And they’d made it perfectly clear they wouldn’t mind doing anything else to him if he were so inclined. It was only his strict code of gallantry that had kept him from taking advantage of their hospitality while he resided under their roof. A gallantry he was rapidly beginning to reconsider.

While he saddled his mare and hitched up the mule to the buckboard, Esmerelda stood on the steps, impatiently tapping her foot. He heaved her trunk and violin case into the bed of the wagon, tempted to throw her over his shoulder and do the same with her. Ignoring his outstretched hand, she clambered stiffly onto the seat and gathered the reins in her gloved hands. Sadie bounded up beside her, her tongue lolling out in excitement.

Billy wasted no time in urging his mare into a trot. He refused to give Esmerelda the satisfaction of glancing back to see if she was following. The strident jingle of the harness told him she was. They were nearly to the bottom of the hill when he heard the door creak open behind them.

He almost fell off his horse when his ma’s shout rang out. “You take care, boy, you hear? And you take care of that gal, too. The good Lord knows she cain’t take care of herself. Standin‘ off a Darling with a shotgun! Why, that child ain’t got the sense of a boll weevil. You look after her, you hear!”

Billy’s throat tightened. He wanted to wheel his horse around. But he knew if he did, his mother would just go right back into the house and shut the door.

So he kept riding.

“And you look after my boy, gal! Don’t go lettin‘ him get his fool self shot up again. And don’t go breakin’ his heart or you’ll answer to me.”

Billy turned in the saddle to give Esmerelda a long, hard look. He would have almost sworn he saw a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes.

Wheeling north, he spurred his horse into a canter, riding hard until the wind had swallowed even the echo of his mother’s voice.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Billy and Esmerelda arrived in Calamity just after eleven o’clock the next night with Billy driving the wagon, Esmerelda asleep in the back, and Sadie wearing the bonnet. The stolen treasury gold had been deposited in a vault at the Eulalie First National Bank to await the arrival of Elliot Courtney and his deputies. Courtney had vowed to see Winstead brought to justice. As soon as he could find him, that is. It seemed the good marshal had up and vanished right after Black Bart’s disastrous raid on the Eulalie bank. That news had Billy searching every shadow and keeping his hand poised near his pistol.

But it didn’t account for the tension that had been coiling tighter in his gut with each revolution of the wagon’s wheels. A tension that had nothing to do with Winstead and everything to do with the woman curled up in the bed of the wagon.

“Whoa, girl,” he called out softly, drawing the mule to a halt in front of the livery stable. He noticed with a nicker of curiosity that a lamp still burned in Drew’s office.

The streets of Calamity slumbered beneath an overripe peach of a moon. A faint ripple of music and laughter drifted out from the saloon. The lighted windows of Miss Mellie’s beckoned him home.

Home, Billy thought, closing his eyes briefly. A place where pleasure changed hands as carelessly as money, neither bringing lasting satisfaction. His jaw hardened. Maybe that was the most a man like him could ever expect.

He swung around to study his sleeping cargo. With the rosy petals of her lips slightly parted and her gloved hands folded beneath her cheek like a pair of angel’s wings, she looked so sweet, so vulnerable…

Billy reached back and gave her bottom a sharp swat.

“Ow!” Esmerelda sprang up, rubbing the offended territory.

Billy suspected she would have lit into him, but good, if she hadn’t been distracted by the sight of Sadie. The bags beneath the basset hound’s soulful eyes made her look just like old Granny Shively on a good day.

Esmerelda pointed. “May I be so bold as to inquire why that dog is wearing my bonnet?”

Billy shrugged. “The desert nights are chilly. Her ears looked cold.”

“And mine didn’t?”

He swept her a calculating glance. “Not any colder than the rest of you.”

Grinding out an inarticulate sound, Esmerelda scrambled over the side of the buckboard, nearly falling when it turned out her foot had also been asleep. Still muttering beneath her breath, she hopped up and down, massaging it through her boot.

Billy struck a match and lit a cigar, watching her performance with detached amusement. She tried to drag her trunk out of the wagon, but the awkward angle made it nearly impossible.

After it tumbled back into the bed for the third time, she arched an eyebrow in his direction. “Would you mind…?”

“Oh, but I’m afraid I would, Duchess.” He puffed out a smoke ring that would have done his ma proud. “I’ve been dismissed, you see. I no longer work for you.”

She breathed a theatrical sigh. “If I’d have known you were going to be so contrary, I’d have asked Jasper to escort me.”

Billy snorted. “He’d have had those fancy drawers of yours around your ankles before you got out of sight of the house.”

Her startled gaze searched his face. When she didn’t find any trace of amusement there, she ducked her head back into the wagon bed, cheeks aflame. After several false starts, she managed to wrestle both trunk and violin case to the ground.

Still panting with exertion, she jerked her jacket straight and adjusted her bustle with both hands. Billy cocked an eyebrow. It wasn’t the lace collar buttoned primly to her chin or even the unspoken challenge of the tiny row of buttons edging her sleeves that made his loins surge with heat.

It was those ridiculous gloves.

Billy wanted to peel them off with his teeth. To tenderly nip the tip of each finger until she cried out for the kind of mercy only he could provide.

It was somehow fitting that she woke him from his dangerous daydream by jerking them past her wrists, as if to deny him even a glimpse of her creamy flesh.

She tucked the violin case under her arm and hefted the trunk by its handle, staggering slightly. “Thank you ever so much for all your assistance, Mr. Darling. I should have been utterly bereft without you.” She delivered this scathing speech gazing just past him instead of at him.

Then she turned and started down the street toward the hotel, wobbling beneath the weight of the trunk.

Billy’s mouth fell open.

She was actually going to do it.

She was actually going to flounce right out of his life as if she’d never laid in his arms, wracked by tremors of pleasure. As if she’d never offered up her lips for a delicious openmouthed kiss. As if she’d never marched into that saloon and taken his heart into her custody.

Billy Darling had finally met an adversary he couldn’t cuss, shoot, or toss into jail. It was that realization that brought his simmering temper to a boil.

He was a Darling, after all.

Maybe it was high time he started acting like one.

He bounded out of the wagon, landing smack-dab in the middle of the street. He took a long draw off the cigar, then flicked the glowing stub into the night. His fingers instinctively flexed over his gunbelt, as if preparing for a shoot-out to the death.

“Miss Fine?” he called out.

Esmerelda stopped walking, but didn’t turn around.

“Take off your gloves.”

He was actually going to do it.

He was actually going to let her just walk right out of his life without swearing at her, shooting her in the back, or threatening to have her thrown into jail.

Esmerelda briefly considered dropping the trunk on her toes. But she was afraid she might break them.

“Miss Fine?”

Miss Fine. Not honey, or sweetheart, or even Duchess.

Despite Billy’s cool tone, Esmerelda’s heart surged with relief at the thought that he was going to finally beg her forgiveness for letting Bartholomew go. Perhaps once he did, she would be able to put aside her own wounded pride and tell him she was sorry for all the mean things she had said to him. He would surely forgive her once she explained that she hadn’t had a lot of experience with apologizing, since she was rarely wrong.

“Take off your gloves.”

Esmerelda dropped both the trunk and the violin case, narrowly missing her toes. She slowly turned, her relief fading when she saw the stranger standing in the middle of the street.

His arms weren’t outstretched in welcome, but hung loosely at his sides. Despite the casual posture, the tension in his lean, graceful fingers was unmistakable. His lips were faintly pursed, as if poised to blow on the barrel of a smoking pistol.

She realized that he wasn’t a stranger at all. He was the man from the Wanted poster she’d kept tucked beneath her pillow all those long, lonely weeks. She had both hated and feared him, yet he’d still managed to saunter his way into her dreams night after night—hot, feverish dreams that had made her moan in her sleep and kick away the covers.

He was Billy Darling, part legend and all man, wanted by the law and, in her most secret heart, by her as well. He’d been dangerous when she’d wanted him, but now that she loved him, he might very well prove deadly.

He hooked his thumbs in his gunbelt, his stance so nonchalant and free of threat that Esmerelda thought he just might draw his gun and shoot her. He had her in his sights all right, but the devastating charm of his smile warned her that he had a much more diabolical fate in mind.

“Pardon?” she croaked.

“I was only suggesting that you might wish to remove your gloves. You can leave them on if you like.” His smile took on a wicked slant as he confided, “I have heard tell of cowboys who never take off their hats.”

Esmerelda drifted toward him, unable to resist the hypnotic allure of that smile. “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

Billy’s grin faded, leaving his jaw as stern as she’d ever seen it. “What I am saying, Miss Fine, is that the time has come for you and me to settle up. I’m not running a charitable institution here. We had a deal.” He jerked a thumb toward the wagon. “Sadie here was a witness to it.”

Stirred by the sound of her name, Sadie let out a damning “Woof.”

Esmerelda’s heart was beginning to skip every other beat. “I haven’t forgotten our deal,” she insisted, although, in fact, she had. “Why, as soon as my grandfather arrives—”

“Ah, the duke!” Billy drawled. “That noble chap who’s supposed to come swooping out of the clouds in his fancy carriage drawn by six white unicorns, toss me a handful of diamonds and rubies, and sweep you, his beloved granddaughter, into his arms.”

Esmerelda glared at him. His sarcastic description was just a shade too close to some of her more ridiculous girlhood fantasies. “I’m almost certain he doesn’t own any unicorns.”

“Then there’s only one problem.” Billy took a step toward her, but she forced herself to stand her ground, her nose quivering like a cornered rabbit’s. “I don’t see him anywhere around here. Do you?”

Stalling for time, Esmerelda looked frantically around. A cheery light nickered in the window of the sheriff’s office, but the street was deserted. “Nor do I see my brother,” she reminded him.

Billy shrugged. “I hired on to find him, not keep him.”

She couldn’t argue with that. Billy might have given Bartholomew the means and encouragement to go, but in the end, her brother had left of his own accord.

Drawing in an unsteady breath, she tilted her head to study him. He might look every inch the notorious gun-slinger, but beneath that rugged exterior, he was still her Billy. The man who had stood off his own brothers at gunpoint to protect her. The man who had tried to convince her that she hadn’t murdered her parents with a single willful act. The man who had pleasured her without a thought for his own satisfaction, then tucked her into his bed as tenderly as a child.

Flooded by a tide of belated remorse, she clutched his arm. “Oh, Billy, I said some terrible things back at the ranch. I don’t blame you for being angry.”

“Mr. Darling,” he corrected, gently removing her hand from his sleeve. At her disbelieving look, he winked and whispered, “Until we get this matter settled, sweetheart, it might be best to keep our association formal.”

Her mouth and hand were still hanging open when his face recovered its grave demeanor. “Serving in your employ, Miss Fine, has turned out to be a far more costly endeavor than I anticipated. I lost the reward Winstead promised me, and until the scalawag is apprehended, I’ll have to spend every minute of every day and night looking over my shoulder. If Elliot Courtney can’t convince the judge to grant me amnesty for returning the treasury gold, I may even have to hightail it to Mexico for a while. The way I see it, I at least deserve to be compensated for all my trouble.” His expression softened as he reached to cup her cheek in his palm, much as he had that day in his attic room. “After all, you are a woman of your word.”

Esmerelda might have forgotten their bargain, but she hadn’t forgotten what a consummate poker player Billy was rumored to be. He was obviously intent on playing for high stakes, and it was in that spirit of risk that she decided to take her biggest gamble.

“You’re absolutely right, Mr. Darling,” she said softly, allowing every ounce of regard she felt for him to shine from her eyes. “I would never dream of cheating you of what is rightfully yours. Especially not when I promised you”—she twined one hand around his nape and drew him down until their breath mingled and her lips were flush against his—“payment… in… full.”

In the instant before he called her bluff, she was rewarded by a brief flicker of surprise in his eyes. Then he was ravishing her mouth in a kiss so sweet, so impossibly tender, it might have been their very first. He wrapped his arms around her, lifting her clean off her feet so that all the swells and hollows of their bodies meshed in perfect accord. By the time he lowered her, Esmerelda was dizzy with delight and flushed with triumph.

Sighing in utter rapture, she rested her cheek against his chest and waited for him to murmur all those tender promises she’d been longing to hear.

He grabbed her by the hand and began to march down the street.

“Wait a minute! Where are we going?” Esmerelda had to trot to keep up with his long strides. She cast a frantic glance over her shoulder. Sadie yawned beneath the drooping brim of the bonnet before turning around three times and settling down on the buckboard seat for a nap. “My trunk! My clothes!”

“You won’t be needing them tonight.”

That resolute prediction sent a shivery pulse of anticipation down Esmerelda’s spine. Too late, she remembered the hazards of showing her cards too soon. Billy might not cheat, but he never stayed in the game unless he was sure he held the winning hand. She had little time to repent her mistake, for without warning, the door of the brothel loomed out of the darkness before them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

When the door of Miss Mellie’s Boardinghouse for Young Ladies of Good Reputation burst open, Horace Stumpelmeyer, the town banker, sprang to his feet, dumping the corset-clad young lady he’d paid for the privilege of cuddling on his lap to the Oriental rug.

He smoothed back his thinning hair and straightened his spectacles for a better look at the interloper and the rather dazed young woman stumbling along behind him.

Without breaking his stride, Billy planted a hand on his chest and pushed him back into the chair. “Don’t get up on my account, Horace.”

Dorothea pounced back into the man’s lap like a sleek cat, gleefully kicking her slippered feet. “Welcome home, Billy,” she crooned. “It’s been mighty dull around here without you.”

As if to agree, a glum Dauber leaned against the mantel, nursing a glass of whiskey. Billy plucked the glass from his hand, drained it dry, then handed it back before reaching into his pocket and nipping him a silver dollar. “Out in front of the livery stable, you’ll find a mare, a mule, and a hound wearing a real ugly little hat.”

“It was quite a lovely bonnet until you stomped all over it and gave it to your dog!” Esmerelda protested.

Billy ignored her. “See to it that they’re tended to.”

“But what about me?” she wailed.

“I‘ll tend to you,” Billy promised, giving her an evil wink.

Dauber gaped at them both in openmouthed astonishment. “Well, I will be darned. Does Drew know you’re—”

“Go on with you!” Billy barked. “If you already had a dollar, you’d be upstairs with one of the girls instead of down here crying in your whiskey.”

Conceding to his friend’s wisdom, Dauber tipped his hat to Esmerelda, then went barreling out the door. With Esmerelda still tripping along behind him, Billy started for the stairs. Caroline and Esther were just slinking down them, leading one of the Zimmerman boys by his calloused paws. The man’s glazed expression and rumpled blond curls proclaimed yet another satisfied customer.

The girls blocked Billy’s path, stealing a worried glance at the woman behind him. “Honey, there’s something you should know before you take her up there,” Caroline said.

Billy’s smile was so tender it made even their jaded hearts flutter. “I’m much obliged for your concern, ladies, but there’s really nothing you can tell me that I haven’t already figured out for myself.”

Nodding politely, he brushed past them, pausing only long enough to whisper something in Zimmerman’s ear. Betrayed by his fair complexion, the man blushed violently and fumbled for the gaping fly of his overalls.

Billy and Esmerelda had almost reached the second-story landing when Miss Mellie herself emerged from the kitchen, bearing a tray of fresh whiskeys. “William!” she shouted, the cry betraying more alarm than surprise.

Billy swung around, blowing out a long-suffering sigh. “Yes, ma’am?”

When Mellie saw whose hand he was clinging to with such possessive fervor, she bobbed as if she were on the verge of curtsying. Or fainting. Her voice quivered with false cheer. “I hadn’t realized that you’d returned. Won’t you and your lady friend join us for a drink?”

“Why, that would be lovely! I’m parched,” Esmerelda exclaimed, trotting back down three steps before Billy’s implacable grip on her hand brought her up short.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to decline that generous offer, Miss Mellie. My lady friend and I have reached the end of a long, difficult journey and were looking forward to a little privacy.” His amiable grin darkened. He swept a mean-eyed squint across the parlor. “As a matter of fact, I just might have to shoot anyone who disturbs us before dawn.”

They all stood in a frozen tableau until Billy and Esmerelda had vanished into the shadows of the second landing.

It wasn’t until a door somewhere in the upper reaches of the house banged shut that Dorothea dared to let out a long, low whistle. “I’ve never seen that boy quite so riled. Do you think he’ll beat her?”

Miss Mellie cast the rafters a glance, her broad, kindly face crinkled in a frown. “I don’t care how riled he is, our Billy would never raise his hand to a woman. His ma, God bless her gentle soul, taught him better manners than that.”

“From the glint in his eye,” Esther said, arching an immaculately plucked eyebrow, “it ain’t his hand he’s lookin‘ to raise.”

Caroline sighed wistfully. “He sure is cute when he’s mad.” Her lips pursed in a jealous pout. “How come those uppity gals have all the luck?”

While Dorothea raked her long fingernails through his hair, Horace plucked one of the shot glasses off Mellie’s tray, his hand betraying a faint tremble. “Don’t you think we should at least alert the sheriff?”

Mellie sank down on his other knee, tossing back a whiskey of her own. “You heard him, Horace. Anyone who disturbs that boy before dawn is just begging for trouble. And Lord knows, the sheriff’s already got enough trouble for one man.”

Esmerelda stood with her back pressed to the door of Billy’s cozy attic room while he lit an oil lamp, folded back the quilt on the bed, and drew off his boots.

He raked her with a bold gaze as his deft hands moved to unbuckle his gunbelt. “You can take off those gloves of yours any time, Miss Fine.”

Her instincts told her she ought to be as afraid of him as she’d been the first time they’d faced each other in this room. But for once, Esmerelda was listening to her heart.

“I think it would be best if I left them on,” she said gently. The gunbelt slipped unheeded from his hand. “Don’t look so dismayed, Mr. Darling. After all, it was your suggestion that we keep our association formal.”

His scowl deepened. “But, honey, I—”

She held up a silencing finger. “In keeping with the spirit of our bargain, I’m sure you’ll agree it would be best if we allowed no endearments, no kisses, no caresses.”

“No caresses?” The heightened color beneath his cheekbones might have been a blush in a less worldly man. “You mean you just want me to…?”

In reply, Esmerelda leaned against the door and delicately averted her face, slanting him a demure look from beneath her lashes. “You may commence.”

His heated gaze flicked up and down her before he patted the inviting softness of the bed. “Don’t you think we’d be more comfortable over here?”

“Most certainly,” she admitted with a regretful sigh. “But I fear reclining might put us on far too familiar terms for a mere business transaction.”

As Billy sauntered toward her, the speculative gleam in his eyes made her wonder if she’d overplayed her hand. She wasn’t sure she could stop herself from squealing in alarm if he gathered her skirt and petticoats and tossed them over her head.

But he simply leaned down, without touching her, and murmured, “Can I at least take your hair down… ma’am?”

Esmerelda closed her eyes and swallowed, the whiskey-scented warmth of his breath melting her resolve. “Well, I suppose removing a few hairpins wouldn’t hurt. Sir,” she hastened to add.

He stood with his lips a whisper away from hers while his ringers sifted through her hair—searching for, plucking out, and discarding pins until her silky mane came tumbling around their faces. Her nipples stiffened against the thin silk faille of her basque, straining toward the remembered delight of his touch. Glittering so near to her own, his heavy-lidded eyes looked very green indeed.

He splayed one hand against the door behind her, cocking his knee so that the slightest move in any direction would situate it firmly between her thighs. “I still think you ought to take off those fancy gloves. I’d hate to wrinkle them, sweetheart.”

“Miss Fine,” she breathlessly corrected, touching a finger to his parted lips.

He startled her by catching the fingertip of her glove between his teeth and tugging, peeling the supple kid from her smooth skin in one deft motion.

Before she could protest, he had captured her hand in his own. “No endearments, angel,” he murmured, the smoky timbre of his voice sending a restless shiver through her. He stroked the inside of her wrist with his thumb, making the pulse that beat just beneath her delicate skin flutter with anticipation. “No caresses.” He brought her naked palm to his mouth. “No kisses.” As he touched the tip of his tongue to the center of her palm, Esmerelda closed her eyes, biting back a moan.

When she opened them, Billy’s eyes had darkened with need. Esmerelda knew then that the game was done. His trump hadn’t turned out to be his superior strength or even his seductive charms, but the unspoken question in his eyes. A question he was giving her every right to answer with a resounding no, even if it made him crazy.

Unable to resist his grudging gallantry, Esmerelda curled her hand around his nape and pressed her lips to his, inviting him to collect his winnings. As their tongues touched, tasted, then entwined, he groaned into her mouth, the sound nearly as intoxicating as the whiskey on his breath.

Billy cupped her face between his hands and kissed her until the roaring in her ears drowned out the voice of reason she had heeded her entire life. She could not have pinpointed the moment when her own want became need and need desperation. She only knew that suddenly she was jerking off her other glove, tugging his shirt open, raking her fingernails though the crisp coils of his chest hair. When she inadvertently grazed his bandage, it took an extraordinary act of will to drag her mouth away from his.

“Your wound?” she whispered, gasping as he lowered his mouth to her throat, tearing at the tiny buttons of her bodice with his teeth.

“I don’t need a nurse,” he rasped. “I need a woman. I need you.”

As if to prove his words, he cupped his hands around the backs of her legs—lifting her, spreading her, pressing her to the door, pressing himself to the tender mound between her thighs. Esmerelda gasped at the shivery pulse of need spawned by his shameless demand. She might be an innocent, but she wasn’t a fool. She knew what he wanted to do to her just as surely as she knew she was going to let him.

“This is wrong,” she moaned, licking the smooth golden skin over his collarbone. He tasted wonderful— sweet and salty and masculine all at the same time.

“I know,” he muttered, sending the last of her poor beleaguered buttons plinking to the floor.

“We’re n-not even married.”

“I’ll marry you in the morning,” he growled, sinking his teeth into her freshly bared throat.

For a timeless moment, Esmerelda forgot to blink, forgot to breathe. “Was that a proposal?” she croaked, craning her neck in a vain attempt to see his face.

“No. Hell, I don’t know.” Curling one muscled arm beneath her hips to hold her in place, he used his other hand to tug down her chemise, then slowly lifted his gaze from her breasts to her face, looking nearly as stunned as she did. “Yeah, I reckon it was.”

“But you told me you weren’t looking for a wife.”

“I wasn’t,” he replied, bending to flick her nipple with the tip of his tongue.

She squirmed with delight as he suckled her, gently at first, then hard enough to make her womb contract with longing. Coiling her fingers in his hair, she struggled to remember the words he’d uttered her first day in Calamity. “Are you saying,” she bit off between broken gasps, “that you’d marry me just so you can poke me without paying?”

“Oh, I’ll pay” he said grimly. “You’ll have a lifetime to see that I do.”

“No!” Before those skillful lips of his could close around her other breast, sapping her of strength, Esmerelda wrenched herself from his arms and staggered halfway across the room. She clutched her bodice together as if it were the tatters of her pride.

Jasper would have followed, laughing cruelly at her pitiful attempts at resistance before he bore her back on the bed. Billy could only face her, breathing hard, his shirt hanging open and his hands resting on his lean hips.

“If that don’t beat all!” he exclaimed.“ After three months of living in a brothel, I thought I understood women. Then you had to come to Calamity!” He raked a hand through his hair, leaving it as wild as the look in his eyes. “Let me get this straight—you were going to let me take you to bed a minute ago, but now that I’ve offered to do right by you, you don’t want me.”

Esmerelda could set her chin to keep it from quivering, but she could do nothing to stop the tears from trickling down her cheeks. “Of course I want you. But I have my pride, Mr. Darling. And I could never let a man marry me simply because he wants to take me to bed.”

At the sight of her tears, the last trace of anger fled Billy’s face, leaving it raw with vulnerability. He took one step toward her, then when she didn’t bolt, dared another. His voice deepened to a hoarse rasp. “Would you want a man to marry you because he couldn’t live another day without you? Because he aches so hard every time he looks at you, he’s afraid he might just up and die?” Billy stretched out his hand, brushing a single tear from her cheek as if it were a droplet of dew. “Would you want a man to marry you because he loved you?”

Rendered mute by the despairing tenderness in his eyes, Esmerelda could only nod.

Billy set his jaw, looking no less grim than he had before. “Hell, Horace is right downstairs. If that’s what you want, I’ll marry you now.”

She frowned in confusion. “I thought Mr. Stumpelmeyer was a banker.”

“He is. He’s also mayor, postmaster, and justice of the peace.” Looking even more determined than he had when he’d dragged her into the room, Billy grabbed her hand and started for the door. Esmerelda hung back, laughing through her tears.

When he swung around, looking utterly baffled, she shook her head and said, “You don’t have to marry me tonight, Billy. Morning will come soon enough.”

He scooped her up in his arms, his eyes going smoky with promise. “Oh, no, angel. Morning will come too soon.”

As Billy laid her back on the bed and began to gently unhook, unlace, and undress her, Esmerelda sighed her agreement. She was stirred beyond measure when those legendary hands of his trembled against her bare flesh. Being naked in Billy’s bed, in Billy’s arms, was a naughty delight she couldn’t have conceived of in her wildest dreams.

When she’d been old enough to dream about being in a man’s bed and young enough to believe those dreams might still come true, she had envisioned some faceless husband clumsily shoving her nightgown up to her waist. She had imagined him climbing on top of her, his breathing harsh in the darkness, and quickly dispensing with the mysterious act that was to be his pleasure and her duty.

She had never imagined a man like Billy Darling straddling her naked body, his golden grace even more striking in the pool of lamplight. Her breath quickened as he shrugged out of his shirt and reached for the buttons of his trousers. Although her first instinct was to burrow beneath the quilt to smother a shriek of nervous laughter, curiosity kept her riveted. Her mouth went dry when the fabric parted to reveal that his arousal was just as long and golden as the rest of him.

She stretched out her hand, daring only to brush her fingertips across its velvety tip in a butterfly’s caress.

“Find what you’re looking for, Duchess?” he drawled, deliberately echoing the words he’d said to her during his bath at the ranch. Only this time his jibe was punctuated by a hoarse groan.

Esmerelda snatched her hand back, mortified by her boldness. “Am I hurting you?”

He recaptured her hand and folded her fingers firmly around him. “You’re killing me.”

Encouraged by his rapturous expression, she tenderly traced the length and thickness of him before giving him a wide-eyed look. “And Virgil dares to call you his little brother?”

Although his teeth were gritted, Billy still managed a cocky grin. “Why do you think Jasper was always so darned jealous of me?”

Sobering, Esmerelda reached up to gently cup his face between her hands. “Because you were everything fine and decent that he never tried to be.”

A strange expression crossed Billy’s face—half pleasure, half pain. “And you, Duchess,” he said, lowering himself into her arms, “are everything I ever wanted.” Kicking away his trousers, he pressed his mouth to her ear. “Remember in the barn that night, when I told you it sure would be nice if you’d let me put my mouth everywhere you let me touch you?”

How could she forget? A delicious shudder raked her, born of both memory and anticipation. But no amount of anticipation could prepare her for the tender shock of Billy’s lips gliding down her body, leaving a trail of pleasure wherever they went. He cupped her buttocks in his hands and lifted her to his mouth, drinking from her forbidden sweetness like a man who’d been wandering in the desert all his life and had suddenly come upon a fresh spring bubbling out of the sand.

She whimpered a protest, moaned a denial, but her instinctive shyness melted beneath the hot, sweet flame of his tongue flickering over her. She tugged helplessly at the wheaten silk of his hair as ripples of delight fanned out from her womb to engulf her entire being. She might have been able to endure that exquisite torture if he hadn’t begun to probe her throbbing core with one of those long, large-knuckled fingers of his. She cried out, pulsing to rapture against his mouth.

When Esmerelda drifted back down to earth, Billy was there, softly kissing her mouth while he laved his rigid length in the rich cream he’d coaxed from her pleasure-sated body. The sensation sent delicious little aftershocks through her. So delicious that she almost didn’t notice when he stopped rubbing against her and started easing his way into her.

He must have felt her stiffen. He must have heard her squeak.

Holding his body in ruthless check, he peered down into her face. She forced a smile, hoping he would mistake her agonized whimper for one of pleasure.

“What are you doing, sweetheart?” He looked even more distressed than she felt.

“I’m not crying,” she blurted out, bravely trying to sniffle back a sniffle. “I know how you hate to see me cry.”

“Does it hurt?” he gently asked.

She nodded, chewing on her lower lip in an effort not to burst into tears.

“Well, then you just go ahead and bawl all you want, honey, and I’ll see what I can do to make it nicer for you.”

As he’d proved in the past, Billy was a man of his word. Esmerelda barely had time to work up a heartfelt sob before the stabbing pain began to give way to languid pleasure.

“Better?” he murmured, burying his face in her hair.

“Oh, much,” she gasped.

He took that as his cue to lengthen and deepen his rhythmic strokes, sending waves of delight shuddering through her. She’d been astonished by the pleasure he’d given her before, but there was something even more miraculous about being joined with the man she loved. She was soft where he was hard. Giving where he was driven to take. As his strokes quickened to furious thrusts that seemed to fill her to overflowing, she wrapped her arms and legs around him, clinging for dear life. When his body went rigid and he tore himself from her with one last mighty groan, the tears that came spilling from her eyes were tears of joy.

Esmerelda sat in the rocking chair, cradled on Billy’s lap. He’d wrapped the quilt around them both, enfolding them in a cozy cocoon. The soothing motion of the rocker created an exquisite friction between their naked, sweat-dampened bodies.

By the waning light of the moon, Billy looked troubled, like a man who’d suddenly discovered he had something to lose.

Esmerelda longed to make him smile again. She ran her fingertips along his jaw, hoping to soften its stern set. “You always call me ‘honey’ or ‘sweetheart’ or ‘angel',” she whispered, ”but you never call me ’darling.“”

He slanted her a wry look. “Maybe I was just waiting until I could call you Mrs. Darling.”

Warmed by his unspoken promise, she gave him a tender kiss and rubbed her breasts against his chest. The coarse coils of his chest hair made her nipples throb and tingle. She moaned a faint protest when he gently resituated her on his lap, turning her so that she faced away from him. He used his big hands to drape her legs over his own splayed thighs, leaving her utterly vulnerable to his touch.

Esmerelda melted into a puddle of delight when those clever fingers of his parted the dewy petals of her body, seeking the tender bud nestled within their folds. She turned her head, blindly seeking the sustenance of his mouth. He rewarded her with a taste of his tongue, then eased her hair aside and began to scatter damp kisses on her nape and throat.

As the tender flick of his fingertip sent molten pleasure cascading through her veins, she became keenly aware of the demanding weight of his arousal pressing against the cleft of her buttocks.

The very next time the chair rocked up, then down, he slid into her, just as neat as you please.

Unprepared for the shock of being so deliciously impaled, Esmerelda nearly swooned. Groaning his own delight, Billy rocked himself deeper into her with each rhythmic rise and fall of the chair.

Not sure just how much pleasure she could endure without dying, she whimpered an entreaty, urging him to go faster. But he kept up his leisurely pace, stroking her inside and out, until she was sobbing with rapture. Dark shudders of ecstasy wracked her body and soul, leaving her limp in his arms.

Only then did he take his own pleasure. When he was done, he lifted her in his arms like a child and carried her to the bed, where they fell into an exhausted slumber, their bodies nested together like two spoons in a cupboard drawer.

When Esmerelda awoke again, Billy was already inside of her. She slipped out of one delectable dream into another, a dream where Billy kept one arm wrapped tightly around her waist, all the while gliding in and out of her in long, honeyed strokes. Esmerelda arched against him, purring with pleasure. When he could no longer contain the driving rhythm of his thrusts, he urged her over to her stomach and rode her the rest of the way home.

Morning came too soon.

Sunlight filtered through the window beneath the attic eaves, bathing the bed in warmth. Esmerelda tried to resist its gentle persuasion, longing only to rock the day away in the sweet cradle of Billy’s arms. When she finally pried open her eyes, it was to discover that she was sprawled on top of him with her head pillowed on his chest and her thighs straddling his lean hips. From the devilish light in the eyes sparkling so near to hers and the persistent nudge of his body, she gathered that waking up and staying that way hadn’t been a problem for him.

“Mornin‘, Duchess,” he drawled, greeting her just as he had that long-ago morning at the hotel.

“Mornin‘, cowboy,” she replied. She could not resist a diffident sniff. “If you’re ready to hit the trail, just leave your silver dollar on the bureau on your way out.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Just one dollar? By my accounting, I owe you at least three, along with a fifty-dollar gold piece for…” He pressed his mouth to her ear, whispering something that made her both giggle and squirm. She could hardly believe herself that the haughty Miss Esmerelda Fine from Boston had dared something so deliciously bawdy.

It seemed that loving Billy had made a hoyden of her. A hoyden who delighted in the faint whisker burn on her chin, the moist tenderness between her legs. She ran her tongue over her kiss-swollen lips before pressing them to Billy’s. He cupped her rump in his hands, holding her astride the instinctive buck of his hips and making her moan with anticipation.

The inviting sound was drowned out by masculine shouting, feminine squealing, and the thunder of footsteps on the stairs.

Billy rolled her off of him, instantly alert. He listened for a second, his brow creased in a frown. Then, throwing the quilt over her, he bounded out of the bed.

“Stay here, sweetheart,” he commanded, jerking on his trousers. “One of the girls must have a rowdy customer.”

Before he could get them buttoned, the door flew open, leaving Billy standing behind it.

Squealing in alarm, Esmerelda snatched the quilt up to her chin. The man who stood in the doorway didn’t look the least bit rowdy. He certainly didn’t look capable of causing the sort of commotion they’d heard. With his double-breasted frock coat and pinstriped trousers, he looked as if he’d just come from a formal ball. He wore a gray felt top hat and clutched the brass grip of a cane in his liver-spotted hand.

It wasn’t his elegant attire, but the tenderness that softened his eyes when they lit on her that made Esmerelda’s throat tighten with a curious mixture of awe and apprehension.

He propped his cane against the wardrobe and drew off his hat, turning it over in his trembling hands. “I would have known you anywhere, Esmerelda. You are the very image of your mother.”

He didn’t have snowy white hair or a bristling mustache that would tickle her cheek when he hugged her. He was as bald as a billiard ball and his square, ruddy face was clean-shaven. But the pugnacious jut of his jaw was unmistakable.

“Grandfather?” she croaked.

He beamed at her. “Ah, my sweet child, it would make this cold and unforgiving ogre ever so happy if you would consent to call him ‘Grandpapa.”“

Paralyzed with shock, Esmerelda kept a death grip on the quilt as he came limping over, folded her into his arms, and gently stroked her tousled hair just like the grandfather of her dreams.

“There, there, my darling,” he murmured. “You’ve done the very best you could for yourself, but it’s time to come home now and let Grandpapa take care of you.”

As she met Billys stricken gaze over her grandfather’s shoulder, Esmerelda would have been hard-pressed to decide which one of them looked more horrified.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Her grandfather continued to murmur endearments and stroke her hair, seemingly oblivious to the stream of people who came pouring into the attic room. Sheriff McGuire staggered in first, followed by a woman Esmerelda didn’t recognize, the rotund Miss Mellie, a flock of her half-dressed girls, and a handful of their gawking patrons.

Flushed with mortification, Esmerelda considered dragging the quilt over her head. Billy remained frozen behind the door, looking as if he’d like to sunk out the nearest window himself.

Blood trickled from a shallow wound on Sheriff McGuire’s temple. The petite, gray-haired stranger stood on tiptoe to dab it away with a lace handkerchief.

“Who is that woman?” Esmerelda whispered.

“Oh, that would be my sister. Your aunt Anne,” her grandfather explained, favoring her with a tender smile. “She’s the very soul of gentility.”

“If you’ll stand still for a minute, you overgrown oaf,” the woman snapped. “I might be able to stop the bleeding.”

McGuire sneered down his nose at her. “I wouldn’t be bleeding if you hadn’t coldcocked me with the butt of my own pistol.”

“How else was I to get the keys to my cell?”

Esmerelda gasped. “You arrested my aunt?”

McGuire turned his sullen gaze on her. “You needn’t look so shocked, lass. I did it for your own good. She and this loco brother of hers had taken it into their heads to go searching for you. I didn’t arrest them. I simply provided them with accommodations during their stay in Calamity. Free of charge, I might add.”

The woman snorted. “Even if you did allow us separate cells, your hospitality left much to be desired.”

“If you don’t like it,” Drew snarled, pointing at the man cowering behind two scantily clad young women, “you can take it up with the mayor.”

Esmerelda’s aunt spun around, clapping a hand over her heart. “Why, Mr. Stumpelmeyer!”

The mayor, banker, postmaster, and justice of the peace of Calamity was wearing nothing but a pair of spectacles and a pair of drawers. He lifted his bony shoulders in a sheepish shrug. “I’ve been a widower for nigh on two months now, Miss Hastings. I have my needs.”

Anne appeared to ponder the matter. “Perhaps that’s why your proposal was so heartfelt.”

“He proposed to you?” Esmerelda squeaked, shocked anew.

Anne lifted her chin high. “He and thirty-seven other men in the last week alone. Quite an impressive tally for an old spinster, is it not?”

“That’s why she doesn’t care for me,” Drew said. “I’m the only man in town with the good sense not to marry her.”

Anne shot him a glare that could have cut glass.

Esmerelda felt a rush of alarm as her grandfather stiffened. “Who are all these… women?” he asked, sweeping a frosty look around the room. “I thought this was a boardinghouse for young ladies of good reputation.”

One of the girls trilled a sultry giggle. “I got a reputation, all right, honey, but it ain’t good.”

Her grandfather rose to face her, drawing his wounded dignity around him like a mantle. “I don’t understand, Esmerelda. Perhaps you’d best explain the meaning of your presence in this establishment.”

She gazed helplessly up at him, hating to lose his affection so soon after finding it.

When she heard a telltale creak, she knew her faith had not been misplaced. Billy wasn’t the sort of man who would abandon her to face her doom alone.

Her grandfather turned as the door slowly swung toward its frame to reveal the man standing behind it. The morning sun streaming through the window gilded his bare chest, his tousled hair, the narrow V of hair-dusted belly exposed by his unbuttoned trousers. Remembering how it felt to be rocked in the golden cradle of that magnificent body, Esmerelda felt a sweet stab of desire.

Despite the obvious difficulty he was having swallowing, Billy curved his lips into an amiable grin. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, sir.” He cut his smoky eyes toward Esmerelda. “Your granddaughter’s told me so much about you.”

Billy Darling had finally ended up where he always figured he belonged—behind bars. But he’d never dreamed his accommodations would be so luxurious. The lumpy, straw-stuffed tick that used to drape the bunk in the front cell of the Calamity jail had been replaced with a fluffy feather mattress. An Oriental rug covered the most ominous of the stains on the puncheon floor. The chipped plaster ceiling boasted a coat of fresh paint. Billy eyed the corner askance, reasonably sure that when he’d left Calamity less than two weeks ago, there had been no crocheted tea cozies in the cell, no ceramic teapot for them to hug, and no tea table for the teapot to rest on.

Billy rested his elbows on the crosspiece of the door, letting his forearms dangle through the bars. “Developed a fondness for decorating while I was gone, Drew?”

Drew sat behind his desk with Miss Kitty curled up on his lap. He opened his mouth, but before he could get a word out, Esmerelda’s aunt paused in her restless pacing. “I’m not surprised you noticed the changes Sheriff McGuire initiated for my comfort, Mr. Darling. I would have expected a ruffian like you to be intimately familiar with the inside of this jail.”

“Oh, I wasn’t a prisoner last time I was here, ma’am,” Billy said, deepening his drawl just to annoy her. “I was visiting your niece.”

She resumed her pacing, her sharp “harrumph” warning him that she would savor any excuse to whack him over the head with the bone-handled parasol she handled like a loaded Winchester. Billy flexed his fingers. If she strayed any closer to the bars, he just might give her one.

Correctly reading his sinister expression, Drew propped his boots up on the desk and wagged an admonishing finger at him behind Anne’s back. The woman reminded Billy of Esmerelda at her most scathing, a trait he might have found endearing if he’d been on the other side of those bars.

Utter chaos had broken out after he’d stepped out from behind that door at Miss Mellie’s. Esmerelda’s aunt had swooned into Drew’s arms. Her grandfather had rushed at him, grabbing up his cane and brandishing it like a sword. Mellie’s girls had leapt to his defense, claws bared. It had taken Horace and two cowboys to subdue the old man.

Although Billy suspected the pompous old fellow would have been just as happy to start bellowing “Off with his head!” it had been Esmerelda’s aunt who had come to and insisted that Drew arrest him until the extent of his villainy had been determined. Plainly wanting to avoid any more mayhem, Drew had obliged her. Billy was still haunted by the helpless glance Esmerelda had cast over her shoulder at him as her grandfather ushered her from the room, wrapped in nothing but the quilt.

His heart did an unexpected belly flop when the door of the jail swung open to admit Esmerelda and her grandfather. The old man kept his arm curved protectively around her shoulders.

Garbed in one of her aunt’s claret silk walking suits, she looked sophisticated, elegant, and utterly beyond the realm of possibility for a man like him. The smudges of exhaustion beneath her eyes only added to her air of genteel fragility. As he recalled what they’d been doing last night instead of sleeping, he felt a mingled rush of guilt and desire.

Despite her docile appearance, she didn’t shrink from his gaze, but met it boldly. Billy wanted to wink at her, to reassure her that nothing had changed. But suddenly there seemed to be more than just iron bars separating them. She was no longer a penniless orphan. She was the granddaughter of a duke, the heiress to a vast fortune and lavish lifestyle. He was a Darling, the youngest son of a Missouri dirt farmer.

When his expression remained impassive, a bewildered frown flickered across her face.

After settling Esmerelda in a straight-backed chair, the duke turned to glower at him. “Despite all evidence to the contrary, sir, my granddaughter insists you did not ravish her.”

Moving to rest her hands on her niece’s shoulders, Anne gave a ladylike snort. “Ravished. Seduced. There’s little difference, is there?”

“Ah, but there is,” Drew provided, coming around to sit on the edge of his desk. “As I’m sure you’d know, ma’am, if you’d ever experienced either.”

Billy suspected he looked nearly as dumbfounded as Anne did. Until today, he’d never before seen Drew, with his old-world gallantry and courtly charm, deliberately bait a lady.

Anne’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click. “Do spare us the particulars, won’t you?”

Drew sighed. “I was simply alluding to the fact that ravishing a woman is against the law, while seducing her is not.”

“Well, it should be,” Anne retorted, a girlish blush staining her cheeks.

Shrugging off her aunt’s possessive grip, Esmerelda jumped to her feet. “As I tried to explain to Grandfath—” The duke’s face fell. “Grandpapa,” she amended, earning a doting smile, “Mr. Darling neither ravished nor seduced me. Our assignation was simply the result of a bargain struck between the two of us.”

The duke’s horrified cry nearly drowned out Anne’s outraged gasp. Even Drew looked torn between shock and amusement.

Billy barely resisted the urge to groan out loud. If Esmerelda was trying to improve his standing with her family, she was failing miserably.

“A bargain?” her grandfather shouted, banging the brass tip of his cane on the floor with enough force to send Miss Kitty bolting from the room. “Just what manner of bargain did you strike with this devil?”

Esmerelda refused to let his tantrum ruffle her aplomb. “Mr. Darling has a reputation for being one of the best trackers in the Territory. When I found out he didn’t kill Bartholomew, I hired him to find my brother.”

The duke muttered something beneath his breath, but all Billy caught were the words “mores the pity” and “wretched boy.”

Esmerelda gave him a chiding look. “Although I had no resources of my own at the time, Billy graciously agreed to help me.”

“Help himself to you, you mean,” the duke interjected.

“And, what, pray tell,” Anne asked, shooting Billy a acerbic glance, “did you offer this knight in burnished leather in exchange for his noble services?”

“I’m afraid I spun a bit of a fable. I promised Billy that he would be richly rewarded when my loving grandfather received my letter and came rushing across the sea to my aid.” For the first time since entering the jail, Esmerelda lowered her eyes.“I must confess I believed at the time that it was nothing but a shameless lie.”

Billy finally understood the reason for her evasive answers and furtive glances, so uncharacteristic of the forthright woman he had grown to love.

The duke sank down heavily in the chair Esmerelda had vacated and buried his ruddy face in his hands. “Dear God, child, how can you ever forgive me?”

Esmerelda’s expression softened as she knelt beside his chair and rested her hand on his knee. “You mustn’t torture yourself, Grandpapa. We all have regrets we must learn to live with.”

Billy wondered if she was thinking about her parents. His own regrets were beginning to burn like acid in his throat.

While the duke wallowed in his swamp of self-pity, Anne narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying that when your grandfather failed to appear as you’d promised, this man demanded your innocence as payment for your debt?” She pounded one of her dainty fists on the desk. “Why, the scoundrel shouldn’t be jailed, sheriff. He should be hanged!”

Billy decided he’d better speak up before Drew decided to oblige the lady on that count, too. Since he’d yet to say one word in his own defense, all it took was a casual clearing of his throat to command their rapt attention.

He avoided Esmerelda’s eyes by addressing her aunt. “I swear to you, ma’am, that I never had any real intention of holding your niece to her word.”

Anne marched over to the bars. “And I swear to you, sir, that my niece is not in the habit of indulging in such scandalous behavior without a compelling reason. The stains on your bedsheets bear proof of that.”

Esmerelda came to her feet, blushing furiously.

It wasn’t Esmerelda’s distress or the duke’s posturing that shamed Billy, but the condemnation in her aunt’s eyes. He saw reflected in their cool gray depths the shadow of the man he had always feared he was. A man who, when given the chance, wouldn’t hesitate to steal something if he wanted it badly enough. Even the precious innocence of the woman he loved.

Esmerelda had called him fine and decent last night, but if he’d truly been either one of those things, he would have ignored her protests and dragged her before the justice of the peace to make her his wife. He would have wooed and courted her instead of taking her in a brothel like a common whore. He could return the stolen treasury gold to the U.S. government. He could wear a badge. He could even love the finest woman in all creation. But beneath his skin, where it really mattered, he was still a Darling.

Esmerelda’s lingering blush didn’t stop her from holding her head high. “He’s telling the truth, Aunt Anne. He wouldn’t have laid a finger on me if I hadn’t wanted him to.” She set her chin just as she had the night she’d defied his ma, making Billy’s heart surge with equal amounts of pride and despair. “If I hadn’t wanted him.”

Plainly hoping to avert any further confessions of such an alarming nature, the duke rose, regaining his regal bearing. “Seduced, ravished, coerced. Whatever you want to call it, the damage has been done. Our Esmerelda has been compromised. All that remains is to determine what course of action must be taken next.” He rested his hands on his granddaughter’s slender shoulders and peered intently into her face. “My heart’s desire is for you to return to London with us to claim your rightful place within the loving bosom of your family.” His patrician upper lip curled in visible distaste. “But if you want me to, my dear, I shall force the rogue to marry you.”

Hope leapt in Esmerelda’s eyes, impossible to miss. But it was shadowed by that same stubborn pride that had kept her from accepting his clumsy proposal last night. She faced the cell, holding her head even higher than before. “I shall leave that decision up to Mr. Darling. I would never stoop to forcing him into a marriage he didn’t desire.”

Billy swung around, but closing his eyes didn’t block out the sight of her. He could still see the hope brightening her eyes, the smile trembling around her lips.

She was his Duchess. She deserved to live in some fancy house with servants to wait on her hand and foot. She deserved to enjoy the adoration of the family she’d yearned for ever since she’d lost her own. She deserved a whole hell of a lot better than a bounty hunter with a price on his head and bad blood in his veins.

Billy swallowed hard before forcing himself to turn around. If he was going to be man enough to break her heart, then by God, he was going to be man enough to watch it break.

Praying he’d spent enough time in Jasper’s wretched company to do a tolerable imitation, he choked up a mocking grin. “That’s mighty generous of you, honey. Most women don’t appreciate how precious a man’s freedom is to him.”

A frown clouded her smooth brow. “Your freedom? I don’t understand.”

“Oh, don’t misunderstand me, sweetheart,” he said, dangling his arms through the bars. “We had a fine time last night, you and I, but that’s no reason to go and do something foolish like get ourselves hitched.”

Esmerelda took a step toward the bars. Her stricken expression made him feel more like a monster in a cage than a man in a cell. Her voice lowered to an agonized whisper. “Why are you doing this? You called me Mrs. Darling. You said you wanted to marry me. You said you loved me.”

“Hell, angel, a man’ll say a lot of things when he’s trying to sweet-talk a pretty girl into his bed. Right, Drew?” He winked at his friend.

If Esmerelda had turned at that moment and caught even a glimpse of Drew’s appalled expression, she would have known Billy was bluffing. But she was too busy recoiling from the bars. It was Anne who cast Drew a piercing look, Anne who put her arms around Esmerelda when her niece backed into them.

“There’s one possibility we haven’t considered,” Anne said quietly. “What if there should be a child?”

The duke purpled. Esmerelda’s hand went instinctively to her belly.

Billy hesitated, knowing his next words would forever damn him in her eyes. He sobered, no longer able to keep up even the pretense of a smile. “There won’t be. I saw to that myself.”

Esmerelda would never know that he’d deprived himself of savoring that last surge of rapture inside of her to keep from trapping her into marriage to a man she might not want come morning.

“Thank heaven for small favors.” The duke pulled a monogrammed handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket and mopped his brow, too relieved to notice his granddaughter’s alarming pallor.

Esmerelda’s eyes glittered like burning coals in her ashen face. Her lips were no longer trembling with grief, but with rage. If she’d had a gun in her hand at that moment, Billy knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he would have been a dead man.

She drew herself out of her aunt’s arms and approached the bars, bringing him a whiff of peaches so sharp and so sweet it was all he could do not to cry.

A scornful smile curved her beautiful lips. “I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I am, Mr. Darling. Spending a night in your bed wasn’t so dreadful, but the thought of enduring a lifetime of your boorish company was simply more than I could bear.”

Although her words drew blood, Billy refused to flinch. She deserved to say her piece. He owed her at least that much.

“I do hope you’ll choose to remember me fondly. Perhaps someday you can travel back to Missouri and marry one of your cousins, as men of your breeding and ilk are wont to do.” She turned her back on him, sweeping her skirts in a graceful arc. “Come, Grandpapa, Aunt Anne. We don’t owe this man another scrap of our time or our money. He’s been paid”—she cast one last bitter glance over her shoulder—“in full.”

The door slammed, ringing like a gunshot in Billy’s ears. He staggered around as if he’d been struck in the heart and sank to a sitting position with his back against the wall.

Drew waited a merciful interval before strolling over to the cell. “It ‘s not too late, lad,” he said softly. “I can still hang you if you want.”

Billy slanted him a pained smile. “Hell, Drew, we both know hanging’s too good for the likes of me.”

Drew slipped his keys into the lock and turned, letting the door swing wide open. Billy didn’t budge. He had nowhere left to go. He sat there with his eyes closed while Drew quietly let himself out of the jail. He sat there while Miss Kitty trotted into the cell and rubbed against his legs, meowing plaintively He sat there until a small, white-gloved hand reached down to give his shoulder a gentle squeeze.

“Mr. Darling?”

In the instant before he opened his eyes, he had the crazy thought that Esmerelda had come back. That, despite his best efforts, she’d refused to believe the worst of him. That she was going to throw her arms around his neck and press her sweet, soft mouth to his before giving him a stern lecture about the perils of trying to protect her from herself.

But when he opened his eyes, it was Anne Hastings who stood before him.

She met his grim gaze with a candor as unflinching as her niece’s. “I know what you did, sir. And I want to thank you. I promise that I’ll do everything in my power to see that Esmerelda gets the home and the happiness she deserves.”

Billy rose. “I’d be much obliged if you’d do that, ma’am. ”Cause if you don’t, you and that highfalutin brother of yours will answer to me.“

Without another word, he went striding out of the jail, leaving Anne staring after him in astonishment.

The day Billy Darling went riding out of Calamity for the last time, whores cried and dogs howled. He rode tall in the saddle as he always had, his gunbelt slung low around his hips, his Winchester in its scabbard.

The cowboys who’d spent their days playing poker with him down at the Tumbleweed Saloon whispered that it wasn’t another gunslinger who finally got him, but a woman. The whores at Miss Mellie’s Boardinghouse for Young Ladies of Good Reputation bawled so hard that the cowboys offered them silver dollars just to stop.

Old Granny Shively told her friend Maude that if she’d been of a mind to marry, that Darling boy would have made her a fine husband. The decent folk of Calamity pretended they were glad to be rid of such a shady character, yet more than one of them stepped out of their shops and houses to lift a hand in silent salute as he passed.

He was nothing but a shadow on the horizon when that old basset hound of his escaped from the sheriff’s office and went loping down the street. When she reached the edge of town, she sank down on her grizzled haunches, threw back her head, and let out a howl that broke nearly every heart that heard it.

Later, there would be many who would swear he’d reined in his mare and stood silhouetted against the sunset for a timeless moment. Some expected him to turn back. Others were not surprised when he spurred his horse into a canter and disappeared over that hill.

They all saw Billy Darling leave Calamity that day, but not one of them saw a lace curtain high in the window of the hotel twitch, then fall still.