Beauty and the Bounty Hunter (13 page)

Alexi took a childish pleasure in stepping on the gown and bonnet as he crossed to the door. A quick glance into the hall—empty—then a few strides to the next room. When his knock went unanswered, he assumed it was empty too. A quick session with the lock picks from his bag—at least Cat had left him that—and he was soon donning new clothes.

Alexi sniffed. Well, not new, not even washed recently. He left puffs of dust behind when he moved. However, double-crossed, half-naked confidence men couldn’t be choosers, so Alexi scowled and finished dressing.

At the livery, the stable boy blinked, mouth opening and closing as he pointed at an empty stall. “But…but…ya already took yer horse.”

Alexi rubbed his forehead, the movement causing the scent of a long day’s ride to billow across his face and nearly choke him.

“You came and you paid me; then you said…” The boy’s forehead creased beneath hair the color of straw. Or
perhaps there was merely so much straw
in
his hair Alexi could not see anything else. “
Blag-da
somethin’. And
re-be
or
re-ba.
” The kid shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“
Blagodarya rebenkom
,” Alexi muttered. Basically,
Thanks, kid.
He’d said it a dozen times in a dozen different towns. And, of course, Cat had absorbed the words, the tone, the usage probably without even realizing it.

“That’s it!” The boy slapped his knee. “Real purdy. Sounded just like you. But you kept your hat pulled low. Couldn’t see your face.” The kid narrowed his gaze. “Didn’t have no broken nose. Then neither did you when you come in here afore. How was I supposed to know he weren’t you?”

“How indeed?” Alexi murmured, staring into the relentless indigo night.

As he strolled the few miles outside town alone—no point in buying another horse when Mikhail waited close by with more—he ran through a string of curses in his head that weren’t at all purdy. An hour later, Mikhail materialized from the gloom.

“Which way?” Alexi asked.

Mikhail lifted a massive hand and pointed northwest. Alexi peered in that direction but didn’t see even a puff of dust. He hadn’t expected to.

“Told me to wait for you. Said she’d meet us in Denver City.” Alexi blew a derisive bit of air between his lips. Mikhail’s big face crumpled. “She won’t?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

Alexi pulled the satchel that held his clothes from the packhorse, stripping off the offensive borrowed garments and letting them fall to the ground. He dressed in his own much-sweeter-smelling things. He kicked the discarded clothes into a pile and caught a trace of another man’s sweat.

Memories flickered, and he shoved them aside. Scents brought back the past the most vividly. Which was why Alexi made certain he was always well bathed and his clothes were clean. It was one of the best ways he’d found to keep those memories at bay. Yet still, sometimes, they insisted on coming out to dance.

“You need whiskey?” Mikhail asked. Though he remembered little of their shared past, he was familiar with the signs that indicated Alexi was close to dredging up everything.

Alexi dropped his fingers away from his temple. “No.” He forced a smile. “I’m all right.”

“Sure?” Mikhail glanced at the stolen clothes and wrinkled his nose. “Makes me think of—”

Alexi tossed a match in the center of the pile and flames began to lick upward.

Mikhail blinked, and the flicker of pain, fear, betrayal disappeared. With Mikhail it was easy. Remove what had brought forth the memory and the memory was gone. But for Alexi the memories never truly went away.

His gaze returned to the northwest. Was that how it was for Cat? The past always hovering, whispering, waiting. Something simple like a scent or a place or a phrase—
you or her
—and
bam,
you remembered again what you would do most anything to forget?

For Alexi, the only things that made the past fade were whiskey and women and a really good dodge. Becoming someone else meant who he was, who he’d been, what he’d done were no longer his problems. For the short time he lived in another’s skin he forgot his own. If he hadn’t been able to do that, he wasn’t sure he would have survived.

Cat had sworn never to go back. What good would it do? The house was gone. Even if it had been standing,
there was nothing left for her there but the memories she was trying to forget.

“Liar,” she whispered to herself. If she were truly trying to forget, she wouldn’t bring them out every time she asked:
You or her?

Still, the instant she’d seen that hill in a place where very few hills existed, she’d known she would have to go there. In order to do that, she needed to leave Alexi behind.

Her plan had been simple. When Alexi devised a swindle, he did so based on the laws of human nature. Folks wanted something for nothing. They were greedy. They would buy into a dodge because the idea of cheating the cheater was irresistible. While Alexi might be different in many ways from any other person she had ever met, at heart he was human. He’d agreed to her game because he wanted something from her. He’d believed he could get it with ease. When he’d won, he’d taken his prize, never suspecting that he’d been manipulated from the beginning.

Underhanded? Yes. But Cat had learned from the master. Alexi might be annoyed when he awoke and she was gone—again—but people like him knew better than to throw stones. How many women had woken in Alexi Romanov’s bed well satisfied?

And alone.

Cat approached the burned-out homestead slowly, though she could easily see in the gray light of dawn that the place was deserted. The wind whistled through the few standing boards; the chimney had collapsed; the barn was completely gone. Amazing what two years could do. Only the outhouse remained, and the door hung open to reveal an empty interior.

Cat climbed off the horse and let him graze while she moved through the ruins of the house. Grass had begun
to push up between the ashes. Was that supposed to give her hope? Proof that life went on, even in the midst of death?

Cat fell to her knees, yanking out the few green tufts and tossing them into a corner. Life didn’t go on. Not for—

She turned her head. The marker still sat on top of that hill. High up so she could see him. And so he could see her.

Cat made a derisive sound. Back then she’d still believed Billy was watching over her. Hell, back then she’d still believed she could stay on the farm and not go mad.

It was the little things that did it. Getting up in the morning, making breakfast, setting the table for two, sitting down and staring at the extra plate, the empty chair.

Hearing her name on the wind, running to the doorway, looking toward the field, seeing the headstone, and collapsing in grief—again.

Losing hours. Maybe days. Who knew? Starting up in the night—just as she had that night—believing it all a dream—it had to be—then reaching for him, encountering a cold, gaping space in the bed and remembering the truth.

When she woke atop his grave on the fourth morning in a row, Cathleen had decided: Enough. She had to do something. So she’d packed a bag, then set fire to the only thing she’d ever wanted—that home with Billy.

She headed west—didn’t everyone?—riding their horse, leading the cow, which she easily sold to the first farmer she found. She’d spoken to lawmen—hell, she’d spoken to her brother-in-law—but no one could help her. She hadn’t seen the face of the man who’d ruined her world. She’d only heard his voice. And as Ben had asked, “You gonna go around forcing every outlaw type you see
to say the words until you find the one who actually did?”

That had sounded like a damn fine idea to her. But she’d needed a strategy. Coming up with one had occupied her mind, taken her away from the memories, begun to soothe the madness. Still, it hadn’t all come together until Omaha.

Cat made her way up the hill as the sun threatened the eastern horizon. She sat in the grass and pulled away the weeds that had begun to obscure the marker.

“He was something,” she murmured.

The first time she’d seen Alexi Romanov, he’d been an ancient, hunchbacked, one-eyed Indian fighter
named Horace Redstone. He’d come to Omaha to raise funds to train an elite unit of cavalry that would protect the construction of a new arm of the Union Pacific.

As the residents of the city were familiar with the problems caused by the Indians during the original construction of the railroad, they were easily persuaded of the necessity to protect any additions. That the Union Pacific had no plans to add to their already extensive amount of track and that the Indians were occupied much farther west than Nebraska at the time did not appear to occur to anyone but Cathleen.

Alexi was too damn convincing. He knew exactly what to say to get folks to remember what had happened before. He knew what would be necessary to keep it from happening again. People handed over their money with not only a smile but a pat on his pathetically
humped shoulder. What gave him away were his hands.

He wore gloves. He wasn’t stupid. He could alter his face with makeup. He could create a hump. He could walk, talk, breathe old man. But when it came to his hands, even gloves couldn’t disguise their innate grace.

Certainly, he shook with palsy. He’d even slathered
God knew what on his wrist to make it look as if he had a bad case of something no one wanted to catch.

“But he made one mistake.” Cat touched her fingertip to the
W
carved into the marker. Wind and rain—it was fading already. She pulled out her long, sharp knife and set to work on the letters, cutting them more deeply into the wood.

“Then again,” she continued, “maybe it was two.”

She would never have given the fellow another thought after she tossed him a coin, but as she’d walked by, the wind chased over him, then swirled past her.

He didn’t smell like ancient, dirty man. He smelled like dew at dawn, the sun at dusk, the rain just as it began to tumble down. Cathleen’s neck prickled, and she turned her head as “Captain Redstone” palmed her coin with a dexterity that should have been beyond such sadly shaking fingers.

She continued on with no indication that she’d seen anything out of the ordinary. Then she’d lurked about the rest of the day, watching him. She’d never witnessed a single other hint that he wasn’t exactly who he said he was
.

“Even when I knocked on his door”—Cat dug the sharp edge into the curve of the
C
—“I still wasn’t sure.” She paused, knife in the air, eyes on the violet sky, mind on the past.

She’d tracked him to a shed around back of the saloon. The bartender, a veteran of Sheridan’s cavalry, had offered the shack when he’d discovered the war hero sleeping on the plank boardwalk early one morning.

Cathleen had stared at the door as her plan clicked into place. She didn’t notice when it began to rain; she didn’t care that she was soaked.

The captain answered her knock still wearing his eye patch, his hump, his disgusting cavalry hat, and those
gloves. They’d considered each other as the rain trickled down her face like tears.

“I know what you are,” she said.

His eyebrow lifted; he didn’t say a word.

“You’re not old. You’re not an Indian fighter. You’re not going to teach soldiers anything.”

He contemplated her for so long Cathleen began to wonder if he might do something rash and what it would be. Eventually he lifted one shoulder—the one without the hump—the movement full of the grace she’d already witnessed in his hands. “You are telling me what I’m not. I thought you knew what I was.”

“A cheat, a liar, a confidence man.”

His lips curved, and she found herself fascinated by them. Not because they were attractive in any way. His lips were as dried up and ancient as he appeared to be.
The lower one even cracked and began to bleed in response to the upward movement. “How do you plan to prove that?”

She yanked her gaze from his mouth to his eye. “I don’t.”

He blinked. She’d surprised him, and she doubted he was surprised often. Probably one of the reasons he was still alive.

“What do you plan to do?” he asked in the same rough, fading whisper of a man who’d shouted in battle until his voice had been ruined forever. Yet below that voice, Cathleen heard another. One that made her shiver.

And not because rain had begun to slide down her back and pool at her spine, but because the voice beneath this one was the hiss of a snake in the grass—one you couldn’t quite see yet knew was not only very much there, but deadly and coming for you.

She lifted her chin. “I want to learn everything you know.
”

He peered at her with his one visible eye, and she resisted the urge to yank off the patch and stare defiantly into the other. What if it really was an empty socket?

“You want me to teach you how to fight Injuns?” he rasped.

She laughed. Again, he looked surprised, and just a little intrigued. “I want to learn how to fool people. How to make them think you’re someone else. How to be someone else.”

His gaze flicked behind her, as if he’d just realized this was not a conversation he wanted anyone in Omaha to hear. Then the captain yanked her inside and shut the door.

The place was what one might expect to find behind a sal
oon. Boxes everywhere. It appeared he was using them both for chairs and tables. Upon one lay a set of Colt Dragoons that could easily have belonged to Captain Redstone. Had he stolen them? From whom?

“What if I say
nyet?”
he murmured
.

The final word—hard and foreign—was another chink in his Captain Redstone armor. It was the first foreign word Cathleen had ever heard, but, thanks to him, it was not the last. She understood its meaning easily enough.

“I’ll visit the sheriff. Suggest he telegraph the Union Pacific and see if they’ve ever heard of you.”