Читать книгу Storming Paradise - Mary McBride - Страница 10

You wanted fancy, Amos? Here’s your goddamn fancy. Shad yanked at the silk noose around his neck and let his gaze travel around the room as he forced himself to cool off. Actually, he thought, he’d acted with considerable restraint in just relieving that snooty horse’s ass of his necktie when what he’d really wanted to do was take the man’s life for looking at little Miss Libby like she wasn’t good enough to shine his shoes. Prissy, pointy-toed French shoes, too. Good thing he—

“Mr. Jones?”

His eyes flicked back to the lady across the table. Hell, he’d been so steamed up he’d almost forgotten she was there. And what the hell was she smiling about?

“Ma’am?”

“You’re either grinning or you’re grumbling, Mr. Jones.” She cocked her head to one side, causing the silk flowers on her hat to sway. “Do you have any neutral expressions?”

Shad laughed, and he felt the heat of his temper dissipate and his whole body relax. “I guess not. I apologize, ma’am.”

“There’s no need. But thank you. I suspect it’s something you don’t do too often.” She tilted her head the other way now and the silk posies followed along while her smooth brow wrinkled and her fine eyebrows pulled together. “You remind me of my father, Mr. Jones.”

From her tone, Shad couldn’t tell if she meant that as a compliment or not. He didn’t know how to respond, so he just kept looking at her. He caught himself wondering what she’d look like without that silly garden of a hat, then dismissed the thought. What did he care anyway?

“How is my father?” she asked him now. “Is he truly dying, or was that just a ruse to draw us to Texas?”

“He’s dying.”

She winced and sucked in a quick little breath, making Shad immediately sorry he’d been so blunt. But, hell, she’d asked, hadn’t she? He sighed roughly.

“Your father’s had a good life, Miss Kingsland. A long one, too. I don’t know for a fact, but I think he’s ready to go.”

“I imagine he’s in a great deal of pain.” Her lips drew together, wavering just a bit.

“It’s tolerable,” he replied.

She nodded, letting her gaze fall to her clasped hands. Damnation! She wasn’t going to cry, was she? Shad felt a fine film of sweat glaze his skin now. Oh, hell. Don’t cry, lady. Please.

He was almost relieved when the snooty little Frenchman appeared at the table just then and distracted her by putting a menu into her hands. When she thanked him, her voice was solid and her eyes were dry. Lord! Thank you.

Along with sweet relief, Shad suddenly felt hungry enough to stick a fork right into a steer. He reminded himself he needed to keep his strength up for the night ahead, too, once he ditched Miss Libby. He opened his own menu, muttered a gruff curse when he saw that it was written in French or some prissy language, then closed it and slapped it on the table. “I’ll have whatever you’re having,” he told the lady glumly.

Her sister hadn’t been entirely wrong, Libby thought. Mr. Jones’s conversation during dinner had been largely limited to “Yes, ma’am” and “No, ma’am.” Of course, she didn’t suppose her own was any more scintillating, unaccustomed as she was to dining with men.

She had ordered two thick steaks, and when he was finished, she offered Jones what was left of her own. As they exchanged plates, their hands touched. Just a touch. It barely lasted a second, and yet it had such an immediate and potent effect on Libby that she nearly dropped the plate. She could feel the color rise in her face until her cheeks were burning. And her stomach once again began that infernal fluttering.

Touching her wrist to her forehead, she wondered if she wasn’t coming down with a fever of some sort. But her skin was cool, or relatively so considering it was summertime in Texas. Her water goblet was empty, so she took a healthy sip of the champagne she had ignored earlier.

Her dark companion winked at her now, which didn’t do a thing to dispel the butterflies inside her. “Go easy on that, Miss Kingsland. I wouldn’t want your daddy to think I’d gotten his daughter drunk.”

She had felt a little drunk even before swallowing the pale champagne, Libby thought. Shula ought to be the one sitting here, sipping the bubbly liquid. She was the one who loved fine wines and elegant settings, who conversed easily and thrived on the warm attentions of the opposite sex.

What in the world was she doing even thinking about a man’s warm attention? Her father’s foreman had paid more attention to his steak than he had to her. But that was just the way Libby wanted it. Didn’t she always dress in dowdy, dull-colored clothes specifically to avoid such attentions? And wasn’t she always secretly glad to hide in Shula’s gaudy shadow?

You best remember just who and what you are, Libby Kingsland, she reprimanded herself sharply. Then, deciding her cheeks had cooled off sufficiently, she raised her face to meet the dark eyes of Shadrach Jones.

“What time will we be leaving for Paradise, Mr. Jones?”

“Oh, about eight o’clock.” Shad was making some quick mental calculations, beginning with the wee hour he’d finally get to sleep tonight upstairs at the Steamboat. “Best make that nine.”

She nodded. “We have a great deal of luggage. I hope that won’t be a problem.” She paused then—just long enough, Shad noticed, for her little pink tongue to make an appealing pass over her lower lip. “Also, I believe I forgot to mention that I have a child traveling with me.”

Shad blinked. She had a child? Little Miss Libby didn’t look as if she’d ever been within spitting distance of a man, let alone close enough to make a baby. He narrowed his eyes now, seeing her suddenly in a whole new light. “Yours?” he asked.

“Well, yes. In a way.”

He leaned back and crossed his arms. Hard to imagine such a prim little lady rolling in the arms of a man, he thought. And that thought nettled him for some reason. Irked the daylights out of him. “I didn’t realize you’d ever been married,” he said almost gruffly.

She looked surprised. Even the posies on her bonnet looked wide-eyed now. “Oh, no. I’ve never been married,” she said.

Now both her little hands flew up to her face like sparrows flushed from cover. “Oh, no. I didn’t mean…not that. Not ever.” Her face got about as red as a sunset. “What I mean is…”

Shad would have liked to find out exactly what it was she meant, but just then a hand gripped his shoulder and a big voice boomed, “Shadrach Jones! As I live and breathe. And this must be one of Amos’s pretty daughters. How do, honey. I’m Hoyt Backus. Just call me Hoyt.”

The man was burly as a bear. And, if bears smoked fat cigars and drank rye whiskey, Hoyt Backus smelled like one, too. A gray-haired grizzly with a roar like a wounded bull. A big arm that finished off with a meaty paw angled across the table now, scooping up Miss Libby’s little birdlike hand.

While that arm was working Miss Libby’s like a pump handle, Shad pushed his chair back and rose. “You’re a long way from Hellfire, Hoyt.” What was the old coyote up to? he wondered.

“Aw, hell. I come to Corpus to meet with my lawyers a couple times a year.” He had released Miss Libby’s hand by now, freeing his paw to clap Shad on the shoulder. “I like to keep them on their toes.”

Shad eased away from the man’s grasp. “And you just happened to do it on the same day Amos’s daughters got to town, I guess.”

“Pure coincidence,” Hoyt boomed. He threw Libby a wink. “Ain’t that something?”

“That’s something, all right,” Shad said through clenched teeth as he reached across the table and jerked Libby up and out of her chair, then brought her into the protective curve of his arm. “Too bad we’re just leaving, Hoyt. Nice seeing you though.”

“Now wait just a damn minute, Jones.” The burly man got hold of Libby’s hand again. “I’m only being neighborly here.”

Shad laughed. “That’s what a fox claims when he sneaks into the chicken coop, you old devil.” He tossed two gold coins onto the table, then tightened his arm around Libby. “Come on, Miss Kingsland. Let’s go while you still have a few feathers left to pluck.”

Outside the restaurant Libby dug her heels into the planked sidewalk. The big cowboy was sweeping her along like a broom, as if she were some inanimate object he could just push this way and that. “Stop it,” she hissed.

He stopped walking, but his arm was still wrapped around her like a boa constrictor, and he continued to curse under his breath. It seemed to be a perpetual thing with him—like a dark melody twisting through an opera.

She wriggled out of his grasp, and stood there trying to repair some of the damage he’d inflicted on her. Her hat was askew; one glove was on while the other dangled from her bare hand. Her corset felt as if it were climbing up her neck.

Worse, now she found that she was muttering, too. Words like “rude” and “insufferable.” Even a few choice curses of her own. Shadrach Jones, she decided, was definitely bringing out the worst in her.

“You know who that fella was, don’t you?” he growled at her now.

“Of course I do,” Libby snapped back. “Hoyt Backus. He and my father used to be partners until they had some kind of falling-out.” She lifted her chin to glare at him. “That’s no excuse to be rude to him. Or,” she added hotly, “to manhandle me.”

“Manhandle!” He swiped his hat off and slapped it against his leg, then shouted the word once more, nearly choking on it. “Manhandle!”

Libby stiffened her spine, as much to demonstrate her outrage as to reposition her errant corset stays. Then she sniffed indignantly. “Well, your ears work, Mr. Jones.” She graced him with a tight little smile. “Now why don’t we see if your feet do as well? Would you mind escorting me back to the hotel?”

“Glad to, ma’am.” The statement might as well have been another oath, the way he swore it.

“Fine, then.”

“Fine,” he snarled, slapping his hat back on his head, gesturing down the street. “After you.”

She took off like a jackrabbit in a silly hat. Shad stalked behind her, gritting his teeth, trying not to step on the damn drag of her dress, then thinking maybe he would. That would bring her to a right quick stop. Then he could take her by the shoulders and shake a little sense into whatever lay beneath that milliner’s nightmare. Hoyt Backus hadn’t come to Corpus today to keep tabs on any lawyers, and it was no coincidence he’d just happened into them at the restaurant. The man was getting a reckoning on his competition for Paradise.

It didn’t take a lawyer to figure it out. With Amos on his deathbed, the ranch would soon belong to his daughters. And if they decided to sell the place, Hoyt intended to be first in line, his big fist stuffed with cash. If the Kingsland sisters decided to keep it…hell, who knew what that wily old fox would do then? Who cared? Shad wasn’t going to be around once Amos was dead and buried.

He’d been walking—head down and his hands jammed into his back pockets—thinking so hard about Hoyt that he didn’t notice when Libby stopped in front of the hotel. He rammed right into her. Then he blistered the air with curses as he wrapped his arms around her before she hit the sidewalk. Tiny. God, she was just a little bit of a thing under all those pleats and puffs. Well, most of her, he thought, vaguely aware that his hand was curved around a firm, fine breast.

Shad couldn’t let go fast enough. Good thing, too, because he needed both hands to deflect her flying little fists.

“Whoa now, Miss Kingsland.”

The prim little lady was suddenly a hellcat, hissing. And turning him into a howling fool when her foot slammed into his shinbone. What the hell was wrong with her? When he turned his head to see the little crowd that was gathering around them, her palm connected with his cheek. If word got back to Paradise that the foreman couldn’t control five feet two inches of female, he’d be trying to live this incident down much longer than he cared to imagine.

A little fist caught him in the rib cage now.

“That’s it, honey,” somebody cheered. “Use your knee now and give that big lug something to really remember.”

Her knee came up.

“Dammit, Miss Libby.” Shad yanked her toward him and wrapped his arms around her, crushing her against him in a defensive embrace.

She squirmed like an eel. “Let me go,” she demanded into his shirtfront.

“No, ma’am. Not till you calm down.”

“I am calm.”

“Like the eye of a hurricane,” he said through clenched teeth, then he lowered his head to whisper roughly, “There are about two dozen folks standing around us, taking great delight in watching just how calm you are, lady.”

Libby opened one eye just wide enough to glimpse a greasy smile centered in a bystander’s greasy beard.

“Atta, girl, honey,” the beard called. “You give that fella of yours what for.”

Dear God! What had she done? For a bleak moment Libby wasn’t even sure who she was. Certainly not the woman who never lost her temper, the one who used reason and good sense no matter how angry or vexed, the one who used well-chosen words to express herself rather than her fists. She’d gone from articulate lady to street brawler in the course of an evening. It had to be the champagne. Liquor was poison. She’d always known that.

But she hadn’t even felt its effects until Shadrach Jones had manhandled her. Which he was still doing now, she realized. She couldn’t move at all. It was like being bound to an enormous oak. Then the tree leaned back a fraction and scowled down at her.

“Go on. Kiss her,” somebody called out.

“Yeah. Kiss and make up, you two,” another voice urged.

The crowd took up the chant.

The tree cursed once more—rough as bark—and then a firm hand curved to Libby’s chin, lifted it, and a warm, wet mouth slanted over hers. She was vaguely aware of cheers and a sprinkling of applause at her back. Most of her senses, however, were magnetized by her first real kiss. By soft lips. By a tingling scrape of whiskers. By a faint taste of champagne and the slow, seductive touch of a tongue.

Shad was about to lift his head, thought better of it—or worse, didn’t think at all—and kept kissing her. Kept losing himself in the prim little mouth that had melted like sunstruck butter beneath his own. Kept telling himself the unexpected kiss was only to convince the crowd their “lovers’ quarrel” was over. It was just for show and he shouldn’t be feeling anything. Especially not the hammering in his chest and the hot surge of blood through every inch of him. She was a lady, for God’s sake. Ladies were poison. Sweet, warm, succulent poison. And nobody knew that better than Shadrach Jones.

He broke the kiss, literally ripped his mouth from hers, and stepped back so abruptly that Libby nearly fell. Then he was growling—at her, at the several curious spectators who remained on the sidewalk, at the world in general—as he gripped her elbow and propelled her through the hotel door and across the lobby.

At the foot of the staircase, he halted and drew himself up like that towering oak again. “Good night, Miss Kingsland. I’ll be seeing you about nine tomorrow.” Then he turned on his heel and strode toward the door.

Shad slammed through the side door of the livery stable. He wasn’t worried about waking Eb Talent; once the old salt strung up his hammock and settled in, not even the devil could wake him. He was snoring like a band saw now in a back stall. The big red-and-black coach was still parked in the center of the stable. Shad climbed in and closed the door.

He slumped back against a tufted leather cushion, then slammed a foot against the edge of the opposite seat, shifting his shoulders and rolling his neck to ease the knots of tension there. He’d stroll on down to the Steamboat, he told himself, as soon as he got his head back on straight. As soon as he had cursed himself sufficiently for losing that head a moment ago with Amos’s daughter.

What the hell had he been thinking, to kiss her like that? There had to have been a dozen other ways to settle her down and keep her from making a spectacle of herself. He could have said good-night right there on the sidewalk and walked away. He could have slung her over his shoulder and carried her inside. He probably should have just drawn his gun and shot her right then and there. The prospect of spending the next twenty years in jail didn’t strike him as half so bad as getting tangled up with a lady.

A lady! He slammed his other foot into the carriage seat and crossed his arms. Hadn’t he vowed never to get within spitting distance of one of those again? Once was enough. Hell, his once had been way too much.

No, thank you. Shad scowled into the darkness inside the big coach. It felt less like a coach than a cage now.

Well, he’d get the job done, he thought. He owed Amos that. “Here’re your daughters, Amos,” he’d say as he dropped them off at Paradise then continued on his way. Here’re your daughters, Amos. The fetching redhead and the other one. The lady. The prim, stiff-backed little priss. Sad little Libby. The one with the mouth the devil made for kissing.

He hadn’t had the dream in years, and now in the cramped interior of the coach it was rolling over him like a hot tidal wave, pulling him deeper into the bloodred dark, drowning him. Somewhere in his brain, Shad was aware that it was a dream. He kept telling himself to wake up, to get the hell away. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. Just as twenty years before—when the dream was real—he hadn’t been able to get away. From her.

She was rubbing up against him now in the dreamy, dizzy dark, the way she always did when they were alone. She was whispering—words he didn’t want to hear—words that stirred him nevertheless. Her dainty hands moved over him like feathers at first, then like flames, making his fourteen-year-old body stiffen and his tongue stammer and his heart nearly explode with desire and dread.

“Yes,” she whispered. “There. That’s right.” He knew it wasn’t right, but what he knew and what he felt bore no relation to each other. The lady made sure of that.

Shad groaned now in his sleep as he had groaned years before, with a mixture of pleasure and anguish.

Wake, he warned himself. Before she laughs. Before the door downstairs clicks open and the footsteps come. Before…wake up!

He couldn’t. Then she was pushing him away. Those dainty hands were slapping at him now. “Get off me, you clumsy little half-breed.” Laughter twisted her lips.

Wake up before the door clicks open and the footsteps echo, deafening, down the hall. Please. Before her laughter turns to a sickening scream. Wake up, goddamn you!

He did. Cold with sweat, sick, shaking uncontrollably as he stared into a dark corner of the coach. Seeing nothing. Seeing everything all over again. Remembering.

He’d made two vows that terrible night twenty years ago. The first was to get so good at loving that no woman would ever laugh at him again. By God, he’d done that. He’d done that, even though there was always that moment afterward, that single icy heartbeat when he was glazed with sweat as salty as tears, when he was gripped with fear and his chilled blood shunted to his limbs, priming him to run.

He’d made two vows that terrible night. And Shadrach Jones renewed the second one now—never, ever to touch a lady again.