Heart of the West (43 page)

The cleaver flashed again. He let out a snort of derision that turned into a grunt of surprise as she twisted the blade around and pressed it to her own throat.

"Stay away."

He drew in a deep, noisy breath. The oil in the lantern gurgled. A piece of burning wood collapsed with a hiss in the stove.

He took a step toward her, and she slashed with the cleaver, cutting through skin and flesh and sending a spray of bright red blood splashing through the air.

Drew Scully turned away from the bar, balancing two tin pails of beer in one hand.

He waited while a man jetted a stream of tobacco juice into a spittoon before he crossed the line of fire. He fended off the groping hands of a hurdy-gurdy girl and sidestepped around the jabbing elbow of a man shooting billiards. Jere was waiting for him at a table against the back wall, wearing a face down to his chin.

Drew said nothing when he put the pail of beer into his brother's hands. And he said nothing when Jere downed nearly all of it in one breath. They both had a bad case of the sours.

He sat down and let a groan run silently through him. He felt so dead tired and full of misery, and he had a pain so deep it was like a bruise on the bone. He wasn't one for drowning his guts in drink of an evening, because he didn't like waking up the next morning with a head that felt as big as a bushel basket. But he wished now he had gotten some whiskey while he was up at the bar, a whole bottle of it. If he didn't get stewed tonight he was going to wake up screaming.

As the nipper had screamed.

Tears pressed against the backs of Drew's eyes and he squeezed them shut. God's Teeth... He couldn't remember the last time he'd cried. The boy's death had unleashed years' worth of tears. They kept filling his eyes, clogging his throat, and he hated himself for the tears. And for his cowardice.

He had cried earlier that night when he had at last stepped off the cage into the fresh night air. Air that had the bite and tingle of fermented cider straight from a cold cellar. He breathed it deep, tasting it on his tongue and in his lungs, and that was when the tears had come.

Later, sitting in a bathtub at Luke's barber shop, they had come again, running down his cheeks like rain on a windowpane, mixing with the sweat and the steam, and his chest had shuddered with the effort it took not to sob aloud.

He shook his head now, trying to shake off thoughts of the mine and death. He looked around the Best in the West, impressed by this Wild West pleasure palace, by the flocked wallpaper and varnished wooden floors, the glittering diamond-dust mirrors and the tinsel tarts in their silk stockings and short skirts.

But the Gandy Dancer was more his kind of place. Tawdry as a ha'penny peep show, it was, with sawdust on the floor and walls so full of bullet holes it wasn't weatherproof anymore. The whiskey was so cut down there it tasted like river water with a tang to it. But excitement always quivered in the air, as if all hell was about to break loose at any moment. It was a miner's place, where a man dropped his bucket on the bar and slapped down two bits for a shot of whiskey and a free beer chaser to celebrate surviving another shift underground.

The Best in the West, now... its clientele appeared to be mostly cattle and sheep punchers. He wondered what they celebrated, what demons haunted their minds that only the booze could chase away.

He twisted the pail of beer in his hands, watching it slop over the side. He drank some of it down, feeling the night settle over him, chasing away the mulligrubs. The frantic noise at least gave the illusion of gaiety. The click of chips and the clatter of billiard balls, the slap of cards. The loose laughter of loose women and the ripple of tinny piano keys. An odd sight caught his eye, a woman as heavily veiled as a mourning widow dancing with a man who groped her buttocks with a hook in place of a hand. This country attracted strange people, he thought. The freaks and the dregs and the drifters as well as the hardy and the brave. He didn't want to think about which category he fell into.

"I shouldn't have let her go and marry him," Jere said out of nowhere.

Drew slowly turned his heavy-lidded gaze to his brother. "You still strumming on that harp? 'Tes past too late, brother. She's his now. He'll treat her proper, will Sam Woo. You know the man for a good sort."

"Aye. I shouldn't have let her marry him, Drew."

"Only because you want her for your own self."

The lovesickness was known to strike the Scully men suddenly, or so the da had been fond of saying. Just like that it had been with the da the first time he'd seen Mam, like being felled in the heart by a sledgehammer. Drew laughed to himself whenever he thought of that story, because if you got the da to drinking enough he'd also tell you that the first time he saw his future wife she was swimming bare-arsed naked in the cove. So to Drew's way of thinking, it wasn't the da's heart that was struck at all; it was his cock and bobbles.

"I'm going to have her for my own."

"Aye..." Drew agreed, caught up in his thoughts, then his head jerked around. He didn't like what he saw on his brother's face. "You stood there and watched her marry Sam Woo and now you sit there cool as a frog on a stone and tell me you're going to have her."

Jere's look stayed stubborn. He lifted the bucket and swallowed off the last of his beer.

"She's a Celestial," Drew persisted. "There's probably some law against it. Not to mention the law there is against doing it with another man's wife."

"Then we'll find a place where tedn't any law."

Drew spread his hands. "Christ all-bleedin'-mighty. You're talking like she'll even have you. How d—"

"She'll have me."

Drew's hands fell to the table and made a pair of fists. He might as well converse with the head of his sledgehammer as the thick head of his brother.

Jere's chin had sunk to his chest. He was giving the bottom of his beer bucket a deep study.

A movement behind the bar caught Drew's attention—the gin-slinger had pulled open a small door and was speaking to someone beyond it. Drew craned his head, but the man's massive shoulders blocked his view. He saw the corner of a rolltop desk and a triangle of bright green skirt the color of tart spring apples.

The bartender started to pull the door closed, and Drew felt disappointment sink into him. Then the door opened wide and

Hannah Yorke stepped out into the area behind the bar, and Drew's heartbeat quickened. She was all smoke and heat and long legs that could wind around a man's waist and make him explode like a charge of giant powder.

He pulled in a deep breath and shifted in his chair.

Beside him Jere huffed a soft laugh. "And will you look at who's squirming now? You be eyeing her like she was a goose all ready for the Christmas pot."

Drew pressed his hands down flat on the table and pushed back his chair. Jere laid a hand on his arm. "And where be you off to, then, my handsome?"

"I'm thinking the lady could use a drink."

"The lady has a whole saloon full of drink should she be wanting some. And she already has herself a man to pour it for her."

The muscles tightened along Drew's jaw, but he eased his rump back down in the chair. "I know 'tes said she has a lover."

"Aye. 'Tes said."

"Well, where's he at, then? The man must be a bloody ghost for all we've seen of him."

Jere pointed with his chin. "Does he look like a ghost to you?"

Drew's gaze swept along the men standing hipshot at the bar, stopping at a cowboy in a dusty black Stetson and faded black britches tucked into worn boots. He looked roguish and rowdy and violent, though he was handsome in a hard-mouthed way. "That one? He's been leaning there on his elbows for ten minutes if it's been one. She hasn't looked his way once."

"'Tes the
way
she hasn't been looking at him."

The man wore his gun low on his hips and tied snug to his thigh, which fit with what else Drew had heard about Hannah Yorke's lover. He was a sometime rancher who disappeared for months at a time, riding shotgun for Wells Fargo, some said. Others said hunting bounty.

Whatever he did for a living, he didn't look like the sort of man to give up his woman without a fight.

"The bloody hell of it," Drew said, and pushed to his feet.

She was now in front of the bar, talking to the bartender, who was pouring them both double shots from a bottle expensive enough to have a label. Drew slowed his steps, taking her in a little at a time. The sharp curve of a cheekbone, the small bump on the end of her nose, the wide mouth that deepened at the corners. The way her dress dipped over the slopes of breasts the ivory white of summer clouds. The way it slipped off one shoulder, as if a man had just pulled it down to bare her for his mouth and eyes.

She turned her head when he came up, and her lips made a little movement that wasn't quite a smile, although it tugged at the crescents in her cheeks.

"Well, how... Mr. Scully, is it?" she said in a voice that was wispy and husky like woodsmoke. "And what makes you come slumming over here to the Best in the West?"

"You," he said.

She arched a taunting eyebrow. Her brows were a deep dark red, like cuts over her eyes. "My, my. Aren't you the one for calling a spade a shovel?"

"Down in the shafts we call it a muck stick."

Her face softened and grew wistful. "Yes, I know... My father was a miner." She was silent a moment, then lifted her shoulders in a small, careless shrug. "He was killed in a fall when I was ten."

"I was twelve."

She raised startled eyes to his, and her lips parted slightly. There was a vulnerability around that mouth that didn't go with the tough way she acted. And he knew in that moment that he'd been lying to himself, trying to convince himself it was only lust. Just like the da, he'd been felled in the heart by a sledgehammer.

Oh, he knew the good folk in the town thought her wicked, and maybe by their standards she was. But if they said a good woman could make a man good, then it seemed as if it ought to work the other way about. Maybe all she needed was a man who loved her to hold her in his arms at night and touch her sweetly. She acted tough all right, but he knew she wasn't. Maybe it took a fraud like him to see the lie in her.

"Might I be buying you a drink, Mrs. Yorke?" he said.

But she had turned her head, and her gaze had drifted down the length of the bar to the cowboy in the dusty black Stetson. The man's expression didn't change. All he did was look back at her, but her face became vivid, as if a gas jet had been lit deep within her.

"The way I was taught it, Mrs. Yorke, when a gentleman asks, a lady gives him the courtesy of an answer."

She started and spun back around, the smile that hadn't been for him still lingering on her mouth. "Oh... Thank you but, no, Mr. Scully. I was just leaving for the night. Perhaps Nancy—"

He laid his hand on her arm. Her skin was soft and warm. Her scent wafted up to him, sweet and summery like the violet posies they sold for a farthing at a Michaelmas fair. "I don't want to spend time with one of your sporting girls. I want to spend it with you."

She looked pointedly at the hand that touched her. At a hand that was nicked and scarred from the times the hammer had missed the drill head. A hand with the black dirt of the mines under its nails.

He was just stubborn enough not to let her go.

She raised her gaze to his face and he looked into her eyes. Eyes that were a deep, loamy brown. Her breasts rose, and a small sound eased out of her like a sigh. But then she saw the doors of her saloon swing shut behind the disappearing back of her cowboy.

And the next thing Drew knew, he was watching her bustle bounce away from him and the doors swinging shut again. A moment later the busy doors were swinging shut behind Drew's back as well, and he was cursing himself for being driven to this.

The half-spent moon cast off little light. But the wind eased through the aspens, and it carried the cowboy's voice to Drew where he stood deep in the shadows of the saloon's log walls: "Seeing as how you're so busy tonight, I'll be riding on home."

She had caught up with her man at the end of the boardwalk. She leaned into him now, pressed the length of her long body against his. She said something to him with that woodsmoke voice—pleaded with him, maybe—and he allowed himself to be talked into giving in.

The cowboy slipped his arm around her waist, and they walked that way, hips bumping as they turned down the street that led to her house in back of the saloon. He dipped his head and nuzzled her white shoulder left bare by her dress, and she laughed. A laugh that was almost all breath, lazy and low. And just a little sad.

Erlan watched her husband undress. He took off his swallowtail coat and hung it on a wall spike. A gray brocade vest with pearl buttons followed, and a shirt with a stiff collar. Even in the shadowy light of the coal oil lamp, his chest looked as scrawny as that of a rooster fit only for a beggar's pot. He raised his head and their gazes met, then his fell to her neck and he scowled.

She touched the thick bandage that was wrapped around her throat. The cut throbbed, although it went no deeper than the width of a straw. But, oh, had it bled, and she was still trembling inside over what she had almost done. A soul had many lives, but this life was the only one she had at the moment and now suddenly she wanted to keep it as fiercely as she had sought to end it.

Still, she had brought the cleaver into the bedroom with her and laid it within reach by her pillow.

She stood now on one side of the bed, her husband on the other, and he eyed her warily, as vinegar-faced as a hired mourner. It was a terrible disgrace to cause another's suicide. If he had forced himself on her and she had killed herself because of it, he would have suffered much shame. And shame was to be feared more than tigers or dragons or evil spirits.

"I will not touch you, wife," he said. He licked his lips, and his eyes shifted away from hers. "But there is only one bed for sleeping."

"This silly girl does not mind sharing." She lowered her eyes meekly. In truth she felt giddy with relief and a heady joy to be living still and at no cost to her honor. "And she thanks her husband for his restraint."