Gideon, Robin - Desire of the Phantom [Ecstasy in the Old West] (Siren Publishing Classic) (39 page)

Pamela tried on the mask, fitting it over her eyes and nose, and
then tying the ends into a knot at the back of her head. Her vision was absolutely unobstructed, and after only a
second or two, she hardly noticed the silk against her face.
Now she understood how Garrett had made love to her while wearing the mask without being distracted by it.

She turned to him. “How do I look? Like the Midnight
Phantom?”

The words made Garrett tighten up inside.
He wanted her identity concealed should any
one see them. He managed a smile, a pretense that her comment had not in any way caused him concern.

“No, you look much better than the Midnight Phantom ever did,” he joked.

Beaming, she took off the mask. Her green eyes sparkled with excitement.

“What were you going to do tonight?” she asked.

“What were
you
going to do?” he replied.

“The general store over at Tula Valley. As you know,
Darwell owns it, and he’s extending credit to every family in
the area. More credit than folks can handle. Of course, he keeps
increasing the interest charged, and now some of the peo
ple can’t even pay the interest, much less the balance. Even worse, some families are so far in debt to Darwell they’re unable to buy anything else from him.”

Her observations surprised Garrett. He’d thought he kept
up with all of Darwell’s moneymaking schemes, but he hadn’t even heard of this one. Though he prided himself on being
a man of the people and a defender of the downtrodden,
Garrett realized now just how isolated his wealth had kept him from the harsh realities of life. He’d been a protector
of people less fortunate than himself, yes. Of the common
man, but perhaps not as much as he’d thought.

Pamela didn’t know what to make of the expression on
Garrett’s face, and uncertainties she’d thought deeply buried
suddenly surfaced.

“Isn’t that a good idea? If you have a better one, I’ll do whatever you think is right.”

“What were you going to do at the general store?”

“All the records of what’s owed are kept there. Once a
month, Michael Darwell comes by and picks up the money from Billy Quinn. I thought I’d just burn the records.”

Seeing Garrett’s bright, approving smile, Pamela grinned with pleasure.

“What are we waiting for?” he asked.

When they were outside, she looked at the trailing
horse. “Why this one?” she asked. “You’re already letting
me use one horse I still haven’t paid for.”

“Yes. And your brother knows that. But what he doesn’t
know, and what no one except us knows, is that these
horses will be sold tomorrow, and will be on their way to
Fort Richmond on the day after. Should anyone spot us, it’ll be awfully difficult to trace these horses back to the Randolph Ranch. By the day after tomorrow, it’ll be impossible.”

Pamela was thoroughly impressed. “You think of every
thing, don’t you?”

“Not always, but I try. Believe me, Pamela, I try.”

Chapter Eighteen

Garrett looked at the thick gold pocket watch, angling it so he could read the hands in the moonlight.

“It’s only a little after eleven,” he said, smiling sardoni
cally. “If we break in now, the newspapers will have to
stop calling me the Midnight Phantom.”

“Don’t worry, darling, I won’t tell anyone you were an
hour early,” Pamela replied in a whisper.

She had tried to remind herself a dozen times that what
they were doing was dangerous, and that she shouldn’t be
in such buoyant spirits, but being other than joyous when
she was with Garrett was impossible. He had come to her,
complete with cape, mask, and horse, and he’d even
agreed to follow through with her plan to strike out at
Darwell.

Garrett smiled in return. What should he think when Pamela
used a word like “darling”? Though she didn’t seem to
need much reassurance, he rarely used endearments with
her. And never far from his thoughts was the sleepy sen
tence uttered by Pamela moments before she’d fallen asleep
in his arms. Those three words had played holy hell on
his peace of mind ever since. “I love you,” she had said
.

And maybe they were for Pamela, but not for Garrett. Even
when women had asked him to say them, he had always
refused.

Instinctively, he knew that real love was uncharted terri
tory, and that if he cherished the future, he would not cheapen the words by blithely using them with every
woman who shared his bed and took pleasure in his passion.

Was Pamela waiting for a declaration of love? And if he gave it, would he be telling the truth or giving in to avoid
another testy confrontation with her?

“Do you see any guards?” she whispered. “I don’t.”

Garrett brought his mind back to the problems at hand, cursing himself for letting his thoughts wander.
Kneeling in the darkness near the small group of buildings that Jonathon Darwell had erected in Tula Valley, he scanned
the shadows once more for sentries.

“I think the way is clear,” he decided. “We want to stay
as far from the saloon as possible. It sounds pretty dead
in there, but you never know when someone might stagger
out.”

Pamela looked at the buildings once more, squinting to
see the structures better in the darkness. Darwell had built a
small saloon, where the liquor served was of poor quality,
often watered down, and always overpriced. The general store in which customers paid way too much for a sack
of flour for the benefit of not having to travel all the way
into Whitetail Creek. Another shack occasionally used as a bor
dello, whenever Richard Darwell convinced some hard-up
prostitute to give him half her profits and to bestow sexual
favors upon him, a blacksmith shop usually without a smith, and a dentist’s office that doubled as a veterinar
ian’s and undertaker’s office. All three jobs were now done
by a man who’d been a fine doctor until a nose for lau
danum had dulled his intellect and his skills, causing a
woman to die needlessly in childbirth. He had made a
hasty departure from St. Louis only minutes before an
enraged mob had decided to lynch him in the town square.
Not much was expected of him anymore, and that was
the way the doctor liked it.

The saloon was the only building in which lamps
burned, and the night breeze carried the sounds
of a card game in progress.

Garrett got to his feet and started the final approach to
the general store. Pamela adjusted her mask one more time, made sure that her bandanna—she’d opted to do without
the old hat—was in place to hide her blonde hair, and then wrapped her cape around herself as she followed Garrett.

As they moved swiftly and silently through the night, Pamela sensed an unidentifiable change in herself, a change
she was almost immediately shocked when understanding hit.
By putting on the cape and mask, she was hiding her
identity, not only from those people who might recognize
her, but also from herself. Yes, behind the mask she was
no longer Pamela Bragg. The Midnight Phantom? No, that was
Garrett. But she
wasn’t
Pamela. She felt different, bolder some
how, freed by the anonymity the mask gave her.

As they crept closer and closer to the general store, a
part of her seemed to be expanding, her courage and con
fidence building with each step. She was hiding, to be
sure, but by hiding behind the mask, she was also setting
free something within herself that she’d always kept hid
den, even from herself.

They stalked past quarters built for
Darwell’s low-paid hands before arriving at the darkened rear
doors of the general store.

“Where does Billy Quinn live?” Garrett asked.

“I think upstairs,” Pamela whispered, standing close beside him and leaning against the drafty, poorly made, two-story
building. “Sometimes, after he closes the store, he goes to the saloon. If he drinks enough to pass out, then he
stays there and Darwell takes a night’s wages from his pay.”

“Wages?”

“The saloon is also a hotel, sort of. If you drink enough
to pass out, you can sleep on a cot. Darwell charges dearly for the privilege.”

With each passing minute, Garrett was discovering just
exactly how far removed he was from the real victims of
Jonathon Darwell, the people with whom he’d always felt
such an affinity. The idea of sleeping on a cot in a saloon
was so foreign to him as to be unimaginable.

The doors and windows of the store were locked and barred, and there was no exterior stairway for escape should the ramshackle building catch fire. Poor Billy Quinn, Garrett decided, in the event of a late-night fire.

“How did you plan on getting in?” Garrett asked.

Pamela grinned beneath the mask. “I hadn’t thought it through that far. I figured I’d think of something once I got here and checked it out.”

Garrett shook his head, though he couldn’t help smiling.
For most of his life he’d calculated every move, every step
necessary to achieve his goals successfully. Then along
came Pamela. With her, he was an entirely different person,
more spontaneous, quicker to smile, more inclined to live his life rather than run it like a carefully monitored busi
ness enterprise.

“Well, you’re here, so start thinking, unless you want
to wait until morning for Quinn to unlock the doors for
us.”

Pamela stepped away from Garrett and began inspecting the
doors and windows.

In the near-total silence of the night, she was thinking of ways to enter the building, and discarding every idea almost as quickly as it came to mind, when the off-key
singing of an Irish ballad drifted along on the night air,
getting slowly and steadily louder.

Pamela rushed to Garrett, and together they moved away
from the general store and into the shadows. She saw the
singing came from Billy Quinn, who was weaving and
stumbling his way down the single dusty street, holding
a whiskey bottle in his right hand. Occasionally, he paused
to swig deeply. She saw he was on the very
edge of falling into an alcoholic stupor.

“And to think we were afraid he’d see us,” Garrett
muttered in disgust after Pamela had identified Quinn. “He
couldn’t see his own shoes much less us.”

Garrett and Pamela crouched behind the horse trough, even
though it didn’t seem likely Billy Quinn would notice
them.

Quinn staggered to the rear door of the general store
then fished around in his pocket for the key. A full minute
later, he stuck the key into the lock, and after nearly an
other minute, he figured out which way to turn it. Garrett,
meanwhile, was muttering disgustedly
.

Garrett’s unflagging contempt for violence—except in
rare desperate circumstances—kept him from rushing for
ward and clubbing Quinn from behind. A hard jab to the
back of the head and the sot would be sleeping on the
floor of his store with only a lump and a headache to show
for it in the morning.

“Look at that idiot,” Garrett growled under his breath.

Quinn, in a simultaneous attempt to put his key in his
pocket, drink from his whiskey bottle, and enter the store,
dropped his key in the dirt. When he bent over to pick it
up, he hit his head against the door, staggered back several
steps, and then dropped the whiskey. Prioritizing his desires,
Quinn went immediately for the bottle, groping in the
moonlight for it. By the time he’d recovered the whiskey and had it to his lips, he’d completely forgotten about the
key.

Quinn stumbled through the door and closed it behind
him. Garrett heard confused grunting as he staggered through the store. Eventually, a lamp was lit upstairs in Quinn’s small living quarters.

“I’ll give you two to one odds he didn’t lock the door,” Garrett whispered.

“I thought you weren’t a gambling man.”

“I’m not. But I like to guess the odds against me just the same.”

Pamela got to her feet and slipped quickly through the
night to the door. Her heart was pounding as
she wrapped the cape around herself and then turned the door
knob slowly. The door, on poorly aligned hinges, creaked
but opened rather easily with little pressure.

When Garrett had joined her, he took her hand and together they entered the general store. They closed the door behind them in case someone came to check on whether Quinn had made it back or not, though that would probably never happen.

Taking Pamela by the shoulders, Garrett brought her close
to lean down and whisper in her ear. “We’d better wait a
couple minutes until we’re certain he’s sleeping it off.”

Pamela nodded, saying nothing, feeling the heady exhila
ration of once again being where she shouldn’t be. The element of risk always heightened her awareness of her surroundings and herself. It accented the heat of Garrett’s hands upon her shoulders, his nearness, his limitless al
lure. Suddenly, the separation and celibacy brought
an ache to the marrow of her bones. She felt Garrett’s nearness in her pussy, the tingling an irrefutable signal that his allure was as powerful as ever.

“As long as we’ve got time to kill,” she whispered, slip
ping her hands inside Garrett’s jacket, circling his waist.
She ran her fingertips lightly up and down his spine, lov
ingly massaging the muscles on either side, feeling them pulse as she touched him.