“Good night, Miss Kingsland. I’ll be seeing you about nine tomorrow.” Then he turned on his heel and strode toward the door.
Shad slammed through the side door of the livery stable. He wasn’t worried about waking Eb Talent; once the old salt strung up his hammock and settled in, not even the devil could wake him. He was snoring like a band saw now in a back stall. The big red-and-black coach was still parked in the center of the stable. Shad climbed in and closed the door.
He slumped back against a tufted leather cushion, then slammed a foot against the edge of the opposite seat, shifting his shoulders and rolling his neck to ease the knots of tension there. He’d stroll on down to the Steamboat, he told himself, as soon as he got his head back on straight. As soon as he had cursed himself sufficiently for losing that head a moment ago with Amos’s daughter.
What the hell had he been thinking, to kiss her like that? There had to have been a dozen other ways to settle her down and keep her from making a spectacle of herself. He could have said good-night right there on the sidewalk and walked away. He could have slung her over his shoulder and carried her inside. He probably should have just drawn his gun and shot her right then and there. The prospect of spending the next twenty years in jail didn’t strike him as half so bad as getting tangled up with a lady.
A lady! He slammed his other foot into the carriage seat and crossed his arms. Hadn’t he vowed never to get within spitting distance of one of those again? Once was enough. Hell, his once had been way too much.
No, thank you. Shad scowled into the darkness inside the big coach. It felt less like a coach than a cage now.
Well, he’d get the job done, he thought. He owed Amos that. “Here’re your daughters, Amos,” he’d say as he dropped them off at Paradise then continued on his way. Here’re your daughters, Amos. The fetching redhead and the other one. The lady. The prim, stiff-backed little priss. Sad little Libby. The one with the mouth the devil made for kissing.
He hadn’t had the dream in years, and now in the cramped interior of the coach it was rolling over him like a hot tidal wave, pulling him deeper into the bloodred dark, drowning him. Somewhere in his brain, Shad was aware that it was a dream. He kept telling himself to wake up, to get the hell away. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. Just as twenty years before—when the dream was real—he hadn’t been able to get away. From her.
She was rubbing up against him now in the dreamy, dizzy dark, the way she always did when they were alone. She was whispering—words he didn’t want to hear—words that stirred him nevertheless. Her dainty hands moved over him like feathers at first, then like flames, making his fourteen-year-old body stiffen and his tongue stammer and his heart nearly explode with desire and dread.
“Yes,” she whispered. “There. That’s right.” He knew it wasn’t right, but what he knew and what he felt bore no relation to each other. The lady made sure of that.
Shad groaned now in his sleep as he had groaned years before, with a mixture of pleasure and anguish.
Wake, he warned himself. Before she laughs. Before the door downstairs clicks open and the footsteps come. Before…wake up!
He couldn’t. Then she was pushing him away. Those dainty hands were slapping at him now. “Get off me, you clumsy little half-breed.” Laughter twisted her lips.
Wake up before the door clicks open and the footsteps echo, deafening, down the hall. Please. Before her laughter turns to a sickening scream. Wake up, goddamn you!
He did. Cold with sweat, sick, shaking uncontrollably as he stared into a dark corner of the coach. Seeing nothing. Seeing everything all over again. Remembering.
He’d made two vows that terrible night twenty years ago. The first was to get so good at loving that no woman would ever laugh at him again. By God, he’d done that. He’d done that, even though there was always that moment afterward, that single icy heartbeat when he was glazed with sweat as salty as tears, when he was gripped with fear and his chilled blood shunted to his limbs, priming him to run.
He’d made two vows that terrible night. And Shadrach Jones renewed the second one now—never, ever to touch a lady again.
At nine o’clock the next morning Libby followed Shula, Andy, and a swaying mountain of luggage down the hotel stairs. As she descended, she was making mental notes of all the things she would not do to Shadrach Jones, including hitting, kicking and scratching. Her list of commandments was not only longer than the Lord’s mere ten, it was more specific, and it concluded with an adamant “Thou shalt not kiss him.”
As angry as Libby had been all night long—tossing and turning on the scrap of mattress Shula hadn’t claimed—she hadn’t been able to forget that kiss. Lord, how she had tried, thinking of a hundred reasons why she detested her father’s foreman. He was crude. A rude and impudent man. A bully who insisted on his own way and used his inordinate strength to get it, whether it was snatching neckties or hauling a woman out of a restaurant. He was exactly like her father during those final, violent years before her mother had taken her away from Paradise.
Worse, the big cowboy seemed to ignite some explosive part of her nature that Libby never wanted to experience again. “Thou shalt not scream or bellow like a fishwife.” “Thou shalt not slap, slug or sink your teeth into another human being.”
“Thou shalt not, shalt not, shalt not kiss him.”
She followed the luggage through the hotel door, out to the street where a big red-and-black coach was waiting. And leaning against it, like a leering footman, was Shadrach Jones. Libby’s breath hitched in her throat.
“Lord Almighty!” a voice exclaimed. “If it isn’t Miss Libby, all growed up.”
She turned to watch a wiry older man clamber down from the front of the coach, relieved to see a familiar, safe face. Suddenly she was able to breathe again.
“Eb, is that you? Oh, it’s good to see you.” Libby extended her hand.
Her father’s longtime employee spat out of the side of his mouth, grinned, then grabbed her hand and shook it with gusto. “Miss Libby. My, my. Don’t it just beat all how you’ve growed up.”
“You look the same, Eb. The years have treated you well.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” the old man said. “It’s prob’ly all the salt water I swallowed those years at sea with your pa. I’m just pickled, is all. Tickled to see you, too, Miss Libby. Now where’s that cute little redheaded sister of yours?”
“Right over there.” Libby pointed to where Shula was instructing one of the hotel porters in the proper handling of expensive luggage. Haranguing the poor boy, actually. Libby was surprised Eb Talent hadn’t noticed her first with all those red curls gleaming in the morning sunshine and her lilac dress ruffling in the gulf breeze.
When he did notice her, though, he said almost wistfully, “Ain’t she something?”
She was something, all right, Libby thought, as the old man moved toward Shula like a moth to a flame. Before Eb reached her, though, a second moth appeared. Hoyt Backus brushed past Libby with a brisk “‘Morning, Miss Kingsland,” then swooped down on her sister, and shouted, “By golly, if you’re not the prettiest thing I’ve seen in Texas since the day your mama left.”
It was no surprise when Shula went from stern luggage monitor to simpering princess in the next instant. And no surprise when she paused from basking in Hoyt Backus’s warm attention just long enough to call, “Oh, Libby, honey, as long as you’re just standing around, you’ll keep an eye on these hatboxes for me, won’t you?”
Libby sighed and added one more commandment to her growing list. “Thou