Scandal at the Cahill Saloon - By Carol Arens Page 0,24
against the wall and hurried toward him. She tugged the bow at the back of her apron, straightened it. She wiped her hands on the front. “It’s good to see a friendly face.”
“What happened here?”
“Someone threw a rock through our window,” Lucinda spat. “A second sooner and it would have hit Miss Leanna.”
Cleve closed his eyes. He sucked in a clammy breath. If Leanna chose to expose herself to ridicule for no good reason that he could figure out, that was her choice.
But physical danger? That was all the more reason to take his sister’s child and get out of this town. A pretty little ranch seemed better by the moment.
Why couldn’t he banish that nagging voice in his mind? It wasn’t his fault that Leanna would be left brokenhearted in a place that reviled her.
Still, whatever decisions she’d made in her life had nothing to do with him. If those decisions put her in danger, he wasn’t her brother or her husband…hell, he wasn’t even her lover.
A man who had never even kissed a woman had no obligation to act as her protector. He had one obligation and he’d come to take care of that.
“Is there someplace we can talk privately?” He needed to settle this and in a hurry, before he got caught in the dewy blue glow of her eyes and ignored, once again, the reason he had come.
“I’ve only got a moment.” She walked before him out of the back door, then closed it behind them. “I promised Cabe we’d spend the whole day together. Maybe you’d like to come riding with us?”
That careless thinking alone was reason for him to take the boy. Where was the woman’s common sense? Riding alone after the threat she had just received?
“No, I—” All of a sudden his tongue wouldn’t work. It lay against the roof of his mouth thick as a wadded-up playing card. “It’s time to settle that business I’ve been putting off.”
“It’s high time. I’m sure it can’t possibly be as dour as the expression on your face.”
She smiled at him and his heart shot straight to his gut. She had no idea that he was about to leave her bereft.
It would be easier if he didn’t have to discuss it right here in the very spot he had first seen her weeping her heart out. He’d thought then that she looked like an angel.
It turned out that she was an angel…and a mystery.
What other woman would sacrifice her reputation to be a mother to an orphan and a friend to the fallen? He couldn’t think of a single damn one.
“What is it, Cleve?”
She looked up at him with damp ringlets sticking to her forehead and temples. Sweat moistened her upper lip and glistened on her neck. Pink lace stretched across her bosom, rising and falling with her breathing.
“I’ve been meaning to speak with you.... There’s something…I… It’s about—”
Oh, hell and damn!
He wrapped both hands around her snip of a waist and lifted her. He drew her against his chest. Her breathing, quick and fast, matched his.
He kissed her deeply, thoroughly and, he feared, with his heart.
There! Now, he had the right to protect her.
He set her down and watched her eyes slowly open. It was like the sun rising on a bright clear morning. Like an old dream dying but a new one on the rise.
“I’m a gambler. I’m good at it.” He let his hands linger on her waist because something about it felt right. “The thing I’ve been meaning to talk to you about is a job. I’d like you to hire me.”
Chapter Five
Leanna sat alone at a poker table wearing her favorite gown. This pink dress of fine silk had earned her a bucket load of tips over the past couple of years. It was seductive enough to keep a gentleman’s attention not wholly on his game while modest enough that he wasn’t fully aware why.
She shuffled a deck of cards, then shuffled them again. It would be nice to blame the fact that she had only one customer on the persistent drizzle that had been falling all day, but the establishments on the other side of the tracks were as busy as fleas on a dog.
Her one patron, the young man who had delivered her goods from the train depot, was well into his fourth beer and a deep conversation with Massie. Even if the room were alive with gaiety and music he would be too smitten to notice.
At least Hearts