Beauty and the Bounty Hunter (6 page)

“There isn’t room for all of us in there, Mikhail.”

There was. The three of them had ridden in it before and managed. Back then Mikhail had slept under the stars while she and Alexi had…

Well, she and Alexi weren’t going to anymore, so Cat required her own conveyance.

“It’s good cover,” she said. “No one will be looking for two wagons.”

Mikhail gave her a glance that very clearly said:
No one had better be looking for us at all.
But he went.

Mikhail still saw Cat as Alexi’s woman. He probably always would. Which meant he’d do what she asked. As long as Alexi didn’t tell him not to.

By the time Mikhail returned with the wagon—which she had no doubt he could find despite the hour; Mikhail could find anything—it would be far too late for Alexi to tell him not to.

She was somewhat surprised that Alexi didn’t arrive before Mikhail. How long did it take to extricate oneself from a woman? Apparently a lot longer than Cat thought because she was making her bed inside the new wagon when he murmured, “What is this?”

He was furious.

Cat wasn’t scared of Alexi—he’d never given her any reason to be—but she didn’t like it when he was angry. He was unpredictable enough when he wasn’t.

There was always something in Alexi’s voice that made folks wonder: Would he kiss you or kill you? Would you see it coming or would it be a complete surprise? Would it hurt or would you like it? Would it happen at midnight or perhaps with the dawn?

The scent of danger rose from him like smoke from a fire. With a word or a glance or a lift of one brow, he could compel anyone to believe anything, even that he might shoot you. Quite a feat for a man she’d never once seen draw his gun on another.

“Why did you waste your money?” he asked. “You could have ridden with me.”

“I’ve ridden you enough,” Cat muttered.

Silence descended, followed by a short bark of laughter, and the tension that had crept over her disappeared. There was nothing she couldn’t say to him. Which was not only liberating but a little disturbing.

“We’ll roll out at noon,” he said.

“Why not daybreak?”

Alexi swept his arm toward the east. “It’s nearly daybreak now,
mi dulce
. I need sleep.”

Easy for him to say. Whenever Alexi closed his eyes, he saw dancing girls, money, brandy, the next city, the next dodge, the next woman.

When Cat closed her eyes…

Well, she certainly didn’t see dancing girls.

“Fine,” Cat said. “Noon. Go away.”

He went. Alexi had no need to remain where he wasn’t wanted. There were plenty of places where he was.

Cat fell asleep quickly; as expected, the dancing girls did not await. Instead, there was Billy.

They met at a church picnic back home in Georgia.
Cathleen was sixteen, Billy eighteen. Just one look and they knew there would never be anyone else in the world for them but each other.

Her parents—Henry and Fiona Cartwright—had had
their doubts. The Chase family was English, the Cartwrights, Irish. Though the New World was supposed to soothe past hatreds, it hadn’t. Still, Cathleen was adamant. She would have Billy or she would have no one.

Her parents, indulgent of their only, late-in-life child, worried about the war clouds roiling on the horizon. Who would take care of their daughter if they could not? So they had relented.

Billy and Cathleen married in the spring. Billy marched off in his uniform long before the honeymoon ended. Her parents had been right to worry. Neither one survived the conflict.

Fiona died first of the bloody flux. Henry followed three weeks later of the same. Not long afterward, Sherman and his men stopped by. When they left, Cathleen wasn’t any worse off than a thousand other women in the South. She had her land—scorched as it was. Hell, she had Billy’s. What she didn’t have was money, food, horses, cattle, seeds, parents, or a husband.

Then Billy returned. The joy Cat felt upon seeing him walk down the lane was short-lived. He was thin and pale. He woke in the night screaming. He knew how to farm. They’d been well off before the war, but not so well off that they hadn’t worked their own land. However, he couldn’t produce money from nothing any more than she could. Then the letter arrived from his brother.

Ben had left home before the war. There’d been trouble with his father over the wrong friends, too much gambling. But he’d recently become a lawman in Kansas. According to him, the land was fine and a soldier could acquire the title to 160 acres just by living on it for
a year. If they sold what they had in Georgia, they’d
have enough money to get started in Kansas. So Billy and Cathleen packed up what was left, parted with everything they could, and headed for the setting sun.

Life got better. They had their own place. The promise of a future. Billy stopped screaming every night. He started talking more every day. They were working toward something together.

And then—

You or her?

The gunshot made Cat start up; the shriek remained trapped in her throat. She was in the wagon, outside St. Louis, not on a Kansas prairie.

Billy was still dead. Damn him.

Though the sun was up and the air around her already sultry with heat, Cat shivered. Knowing Mikhail rested lightly—nothing and no one got by him—had allowed her to fall asleep quickly after Alexi left. Unfortunately, not even Mikhail could ward off dreams. She was beginning to think nothing could.

Cat peered through the opening in the canvas and frowned at the obscenely large tent that hadn’t been there the night before. Obviously, Alexi no longer retired to the wagon when he didn’t have to.

Cat closed her eyes, but her mind whirled. As Alexi wouldn’t wake for hours, she threw on her boy’s disguise, set her finger to her lips when Mikhail’s head peeked from Alexi’s wagon as she clambered from her own, then began to walk.

Though the hour was early for those who made their livings in the dark, the rest of St. Louis had begun to stir. Shopkeepers swept the dust from their doorways, nodding when Cat tugged on the brim of her hat. Carriages and wagons rumbled; in the distance beat the steady pulse of a train.

She headed for a bakeshop owned by a war widow of her acquaintance who would be happy to sell Cat the first hot loaf from her ovens along with a cup of the best coffee north of Louisiana.

As she turned into an alley, planning to make her way between one street and the next, Cat stopped. The narrow passage wasn’t empty. A man bent over a scantily dressed woman, face buried in her décolleté. One hand captured her at the waist; the other was busy lifting her skirts.

Not wanting to interrupt, Cat inched backward. Then the woman made a soft sound—not of pleasure, not even of encouragement—and Cat paused.

A closer look revealed her struggles; she was pinned against several old barrels; there was nowhere for her to go. She could have screamed for help; she could have bit and scratched. But from the bright, tight nature of her attire—which Cat had worn often enough herself to recognize—she was a working girl, and no one would believe she didn’t have this coming.

Cat cleared her throat. The girl lifted her head; their eyes met, the younger woman’s widening first with shock, then with hope. Cat considered drawing her gun, but she didn’t want the audience a gunshot would bring. Instead she retrieved her knife from the long, thin pocket she’d sewn into the right leg of her trousers.

The man kept rooting at the girl’s bosom like a starving piglet even as his fingers crept ever upward beneath the skirts.

“Hey, mister.” Cat tilted the Arkansas toothpick so the sun flashed off the surface, making it appear shiny and new.

He lifted his mouth from the woman’s skin long enough to growl, “Go ’way.”

“No.”

That got his attention. He began to turn. Too fast—nothing good ever came of that. So Cat kicked him in the knee. He went down, the gun he’d been reaching for flying beneath a pile of Lord knows what as he sprawled. The girl scooted behind Cat.

“What the hell, boy!” the man bellowed, rolling around like a turtle flipped onto his shell, his belly so big he appeared grotesquely with child.

“I don’t think the lady welcomed your attention.” Cat glanced at the girl. “Am I right?”

She nodded, the frantic movement causing her blond curls to bob wildly. She was a lot younger than Cat had first thought; they always were. “I was going back to Sally’s. He grabbed me and—” Her voice faltered.

“She’s a whore.” The fellow managed to twist from his back to his knees, wincing as he got to his feet. “What’s the difference?”

“Consent,” Cat snapped. “You know what that means?” From the crease in his brow, he didn’t. “She agrees, you pay her. It’s a business arrangement. Forcing her in an alley…They call that rape.”

“But she’s a whore,” he repeated.

He’d never understand, and most lawmen wouldn’t either. There was no point hauling his ass into jail. Not that she’d planned to. Alexi had his rules and Cat…well, Cat had hers.

She moved closer, lifting her knife and pressing the long, sharp blade to the soft, fleshy corner of the man’s neck. “Say
you or her?
”

“Wh-what?”

“Say it!” A thin trickle of blood trailed down his fat neck. “You. Or. Her.”

“Y-y-you or her?”

Cat couldn’t be sure, not with the stutter and the high-pitched wail of fear in his voice, but she doubted
this was her quarry. He might be able to force a woman he thought no one would defend, but to ride about practicing murderous outlawry…

He was too gutless for that.

“Wait a minute,” he began, and Cat thumped the butt of her knife into his temple. He crumpled to the scum-strewn ground. She glanced at the girl, hoping she wouldn’t start to scream. Instead she stared at Cat with speculation.

“You can kick him if you want,” Cat said. “Sometimes it helps.”

“You’re Cat O’Banyon.”

“No, ma’am.”

The young woman shrugged. “Have it your way, but you’d best be goin’. There’s a bounty on you.”

Word certainly did get around fast.

“Everyone’s talkin’ about it,” she continued. “Reward’s so big even farmer folk are thinkin’ to hunt you down. You need to disappear.”

Cat brushed the brim of her hat and backed toward the street again. “Obliged.”

“
I’m
obliged.” Then the girl hauled back and kicked the unconscious man in the ass before lifting her chin, turning on her heel, and vanishing into the steadily increasing crowd in the other direction.

As soon as she was gone, Cat took a roundabout path to the river. She did not need anyone seeing a “boy” emerge from the alley and head directly for the Mississippi. The fool on the ground would eventually wake and raise the alarm. She probably should have slit his throat and been done with it, but she hadn’t stooped to cold-blooded murder yet and she wasn’t going to start now. If she was lucky, by the time the man woke up, they’d be too far away to bother with.

A
half hour later, Cat reached Alexi’s tent, which was large enough to serve as a Rebel hospital. Mikhail stood outside. “Hitch the horses,” Cat told him. He moved off without argument.

Cat drew aside the flap and ducked in. Alexi was sprawled on a feather tick, one arm around a blonde and another around a brunette. The women were naked and fast asleep. Alexi lay naked and wide-awake.

Cat’s gaze swept his body. Everywhere.

He smirked. “Care to join us?”

“We need to be on the road.”

His lips flattened. “What did you do?”

“Now, Alexi.”

He came to his feet, tumbling the blonde onto the ground and the brunette into the dip where his body had been. Both awoke with a jolt and a gasp.

“Leave.” He flicked one hand as if shooing a fly. The girls were obviously familiar with Alexi because they snatched their scattered clothes and fled. “Should we expect a posse or merely the sheriff?”

“Hard to say.” Depended on whom she’d knocked out—citizen or visitor—and what kind of friends he had.

“I need to know,
cara
,” Alexi said softly.

Since he did, Cat quickly told him what had happened. Alexi didn’t say she shouldn’t have gotten involved. He
knew she couldn’t turn away. He also knew she’d been right.

Alexi might have more bed partners than hairs on his head, but they were always willing. He would consider it a terrible breach of his principles to take what wasn’t given freely. Women offered their bodies; men offered coins, horses, jewels. After a few hours, sometimes even moments, with Alexi, they just couldn’t help themselves.

Alexi struck the tent—folding it over and over, then shoving it onto the floor of the wagon and placing the feather tick that had been his bed on top. Mikhail hitched the horses, the two of them performing their tasks so smoothly it was obvious they’d done so many times before. In less than an hour they left St. Louis.

They traveled five miles that day without incident, setting up camp near a thin stream of creek as the sun set. Cat was exhausted, but camp had to be made, horses watered, fed, and hobbled, fires started, food prepared.

She’d just sat down with a plate of rice and ham, along with the coffee she’d wanted so badly that morning, when Alexi strode up. The tent rose behind him, a white cloud against the ebony night. The dancing flames of her fire threw shadows across his face, making the fine bones even more pronounced. His dark blue eyes swept over her. “You have to change.”

“Don’t you like me just the way I am?”

“No time,
querida
.” Reaching down, he hauled her up by the arm. “They’re here.”

Cat didn’t bother to ask how he knew. Alexi always knew, because Mikhail, whose large ears seemed to hear better than anyone else’s, always told him.

She still wore her boy’s clothes. Driving a wagon in a skirt was always a mistake, but she should have thought ahead, realized that dressing like this—a woman in
pants—was an even bigger one after the events of that morning.

She shoved her plate and cup at Alexi. He nearly dropped them, sloshing coffee over his hand and dumping the plate onto the ground. He cursed, several languages all mixed together so that they sounded kind of pretty, then called after her, “Costume,
bébé
. You know what to do.”