The Whippoorwill Trilogy - Sharon Sala Page 0,11

If you don’t mind, you could drop it off at my house tonight. I’d come get it myself, but I wouldn’t want people getting the wrong idea.” She flushed again. “Coming to your hotel room just wouldn’t be proper.”

Alfonso grinned. He wouldn’t care if the entire population of Lizard Flats got the wrong idea about him and Sophie Hollis.

“Of course, of course. I understand.” He looked down his nose at the wooly storekeeper who was turning redder by the minute. The point he’d scored was well worth gloating about. “I’ll be over as soon as the bank closes. I don’t have anything else to do. I’ll just drop it off and then go eat my evening meal at the boarding house… just like always.” He paused after the bait that he’d dropped, waiting to see if he got a strike.

Sophie sighed. Alfonso was not a subtle man. That was as blatant a plea for a dinner invitation as she’d ever heard. Every manner her Southern-born mother had taught her knocked at the door to her conscience like an undertaker to a wake. She pinched the bridge of her nose, looking everywhere and at everything but Matt Goslin who was now standing in the corner of the store, grinning like a shit-eating dog. Finally she sighed.

“About dinner…”

Alfonso held his breath.

“I’ll be frying a chicken and making beaten biscuits and cream gravy. If you want to join me, I’d be pleased.”

Anxious to pin down the invitation before she reconsidered, Alfonso asked, “What time?”

“I usually eat my evening meal around six. That’s when my dear-departed husband always wanted it. I seem to have kept the habit, even though Nardin is no longer with me.”

Alfonso’s head bobbed up and down in time with the Adam’s apple knocking against his throat.

Sophie tried not to stare, but so help her God, the man reminded her of one of the lizards for which Lizard Flats had been named. He was long-necked and skinny and seemed to dart rather than walk.

Matt glared and thrust a sack in between the pair.

“Here’s your bait of groceries, Miz Sophie. Would ’ja be needin’ any help with it? I could lock up and fetch ’em to your house.”

Alfonso snatched the small cloth sack from Matt’s hands. “I’ll do it. That’s why I came.”

Matt glared at the scrawny little banker.

Sophie rolled her eyes. She didn’t know which was worse—lizard necks or buffalo breath.

Resigned to her fate, Sophie led the way home with Alfonso and her groceries a step and a half behind. Just as she looked down to brush a fly off her bosom, a man staggered out of an alley and into her arms.

“Unhand me!” she screamed, and ran backward in haste, brushing at the front of her dress and certain that the grime on Eulis Potter’s body had rubbed off on her.

Being the town drunk had its moments, but this was not one of them. Eulis rolled on his heels from the unexpected motion of being responsible for his own mobility. It was instinct that made him reach out to steady himself. But his eyesight was as impaired as his judgment. He caught a handful of Sophie’s left breast instead of the side of the building. The last thing he remembered were the spots of high color on Sophie Hollis’s cheeks and a bright yellow parasol coming at him in full flight. He hit the sidewalk with a thump and rolled off into the alley in the dust.

Alfonso gasped. “Sophie dear! Are you all right?”

No thanks to you, she thought, as she dug a handkerchief out from between the mounds of her breasts and began to dab at the perspiration on her upper lip.

“The nerve of that man,” Sophie said, glaring at Eulis’s inert body as if it was something foul. “Come along, Alfonso. I’ve been out in this heat far too long as it is.”

“Certainly, my dear.”

Eulis was still reeling from the blow when the pair disappeared. He crawled to his feet and peeked out from the alley. The coast was clear. That damnable woman and her parasol were nowhere in sight. He smoothed a hand over his jacket and lifted his head as he started across the street to the White Dove Saloon, certain that he would be able to con Will the Bartender out of a drink.

Just as he was about to step inside, a flutter of white caught his eye. He turned and squinted, trying to adjust what was left of his vision to the wanted poster