to wet the shiny undersides of her rosebud mouth. "Welcome home, honey?"
Dylan saw red, and not just the red velvet on the walls of the damn brothel that had been decorated like the inside of a tacky jewelry box. Maybe this unwelcome marriage wasn't going to be a problem after all, he thought, because at this rate he'd be a widower before nightfall.
To give his temper a moment to cool, he took his hands from his pockets and ran them over the hair he'd let grow as a personal protest to his involuntary vacation. Then he leaned closer to her.
"Do you realize," he said softly, in a voice that had been known to make federal prisoners quake in their leg shackles, "that I'm trained in martial arts you've never even heard of? I know over six hundred ways to do you in. One hundred and thirty-seven of them just with that god-awful ostrich feather you're wearing."
She blinked, dark, curly lashes falling slowly over those big, pseudo-sweet blue eyes, then lifting again. "One hundred and thirty-seven?" she murmured faintly. "Wouldn't that be ... overkill?"
The edges of his vision turned red again. "Number eighty-eight is my favorite," he said through his teeth. "And I'm prepared to use it, Kitty, unless you tell me how the hell this happened."
Flushing, she gave a one-shoulder shrug. The slight movement caused the inch-wide sleeve of her clinging costume to slip from the curve of her upper arm toward her elbow, revealing the strangely vulnerable-looking juncture of shoulder and breast.
She picked something off the table separating them and pushed it into his hand. "Heritage Day, of course," she said.
He jerked his gaze off that distracting cleft of bared skin to stare at the brochure between his fingers. Full-color and glossy, it proclaimed HOT WATER HERITAGE DAY ... RELIVE THE PAST. The front photograph showed a long queue of couples lined up at city hall, waiting for their Hot Water wedding. The very trap that had so neatly - and secretly - snared his ass.
Originally intended as bait to attract women to wife-hungry miners, an 1849 city ordinance allowed that on August 31 of each year, couples could marry without any preliminaries besides a hefty fee to the town fathers. The trick - inspired by the ancient tradition of handfasting and put in place to make marriage in those unstable times more attractive - was that the blushing bride had a year's time to register the wedding, and it wasn't legal until and unless she did. In times when the fortunes were fickle and in a place where the living was hard, this had given a Hot Water wife a way out if her miner husband, his mine, or just the marriage itself proved a disaster.
In this century, Hot Water used that leftover law as an end-of-summer tourist lure. Marriage certificates were handed out like flags on the Fourth of July. Visitors weren't even told of the potential legality of the wedding, because once California had become a state, the certificates were meaningless unless registered in Sacramento.
So while the elementary-age kids at Hot Water School learned the story in their fourth-grade Gold Rush unit, as far as Dylan knew, no one had taken the whole thing seriously in a hundred years. No one except the young woman standing before him.
He shook his head. Why the hell she'd done so completely baffled him, though he didn't claim to understand women. Before that last summer in Hot Water, he'd probably been too young to figure them out. After, he hadn't tried very hard - or at all - which likely explained why his last girlfriend had hissed her final goodbye, stating that the only thing he was good for was sex. The one before that had screamed pretty much the same thing, all the while using her fresh French manicure to shred the sweater she'd knitted for his birthday. But what Kitty had done made her the most incomprehensible of all.
Dylan tossed the brochure back down and looked at her again, refusing to be softened by her guileless face and yards of flawless skin. "All right. So I remember there was a six-pack and then a wedding."
But he'd never even dated her, for God's sake! Their one and only social contact had been eight years ago, on his last night in Hot Water. A fresh-out-of-high-school Kitty had found him hanging around the creek, feeling sorry for himself. She'd handed him a beer. And then another. Some beers later, they'd both